Read Never Online

Authors: K. D. Mcentire

Never (10 page)

BOOK: Never
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“Because I think maybe it's not my job to force souls to do what they don't want to do.” Why was the Lady Walker asking these questions?

The Lady Walker laughed shortly. “Oh, flesh, how you amuse me! The words that spring from your mouth dance in the air as if they were butterflies and yet…they are meaningless and dead.” She spat on the ground. “They are filth.”

“Look, creepy, all I want is to get to Nob Hill.”

The Lady Walker pursed her ruined mouth. “I see.”

“Everyone wants something, Miss…Lady.” Wendy squared her shoulders. “What do you want? What will get my friends and me out of this forest and up the hill? Jane says you want to gnaw on my bones or something, but I'm thinking that if that was your deal you'd already be chewing. So what's the plan? What do you want?”

“My greatest desire is within my grasp, scratched out of nothing with my own two hands. I want for nothing…except one thing,” the Lady Walker said, fingering the curl of fabric. She pulled it off her dress and flung it at Wendy's feet.

“What is this?” Wendy asked, kneeling down and picking up the fabric. It was a sensible gray swatch, shiny satin but durable, frayed only where some dull blade had sheared it from a larger bolt.

“Give it to your boy,” the Lady said, grinning her snaggletoothed smile. “With my compliments. Then return and hear my price for your passage.”

Flipping the foul woman off and tucking the odd fabric away, Wendy turned and realized why the Lady Walker was so amused. The spirit webs had dropped down behind the car, draping the road completely in a curtain of writhing white. There was no way to push through them, even in the car. They'd all be stripped of will and essence within seconds.

Close…so close…Wendy could hear the wet snuffle of the beast as it stalked through the weft of webs.

“That was suspiciously fast,” Jon joked as Wendy, balancing
carefully and ruing her already aching shins and calves, returned to the vehicle. “How much was the toll?”

“She gave me this.” Wendy handed off the swatch of fabric. “She wanted me to give it to Piotr and then go back.” Wendy ran her hands along her arms. “The forest…”

“Closed in behind us while you were jabbering,” Elle said, taking the swatch. “We noticed.” She examined the fabric before handing it over to Piotr. “I have no idea what this is. Do you know, flyboy?“

“Da. This is…this is Ada,” Piotr said running a thumb along the frayed threads. “A part of Ada's dress, I am certain of it.”

“Your scientist buddy? What's she got to do with it?” Chel asked.

“She is still in one piece,” Lily murmured, taking the swatch from him. “This is part of her essence; it has not faded so Ada still exists. The Lady Walker is telling us that either she has Ada, or she knows where Ada is being kept.”

“Like kidnappers sending a finger to prove the victim is still alive,” Eddie mused, sticking his tongue out and grimacing. “Twisted.”

“I will go,” Piotr said. “Wendy ne—”

“Bull
shit
, you'll go!” Wendy snapped. “We don't negotiate with crazy, Piotr. She wanted me, I'm going back out there. Not you.”

“Without weapons? Are you nuts?” Eddie demanded. “She put up with your bravado once, but if you tweak her nose again that dog'll eat you whole!”

Wendy rolled her eyes. “Please. I'm the Lightbringer—”

“Without abilities! Without Light!” Eddie crossed his arms over his chest. “Are you trying to get yourself killed? I know the way you work, Wendy. Is this a guilt thing?”

Surprisingly, Piotr took her side. “Let her go say her piece,” he said. “Wendy is competent.”

“Are you kidding me?” Eddie demanded. “You're her…sort of her boyfriend! You should be yelling the loudest! Don't you care?”

Lily laid a calming hand on his arm but Eddie flung it off. “No!
If he really loves her he shouldn't be shoving her out the door to piss on that lady's parade! Especially with Hell-Fido out and about!”

“What Wendy and I are to one another is none of your concern,” Piotr retorted pointedly. “She is the Lightbringer. She is aware of her own capabilities. And the Lady Walker will not harm Wendy. If she were going to, Wendy would be gone by now.”

“You know an awful lot about this chick,
Pete
,” Eddie snarled. “Got anything to share?”

“I knew her in life,” Piotr said, not bothering to disguise the disgust in his tone. “My lost memories are slow in returning, but when they do they come in full. The Lady Walker destroyed my family and laughed as they died. Do not claim I do not wish her terrible suffering.”

Eddie stilled. Wendy knew that he was struggling with what to say, that he was tempted to simply turn away and drop the fight but instead he humbly said, “Man…man, I'm sorry. I didn't know.” Her heart swelled with pride for him.

“How were you to know? Your body still lives and my bones are as dust.” Piotr smiled bitterly. “A word of advice: choose your flailing words wisely. You might cut yourself with them.”

“Look, guys,” Chel said, “not to break up the machismo marathon, but the webs are getting thicker. Will
someone
go out there and pee in her Cheerios already?”

Wendy patted Chel on the shoulder and pushed past Piotr and Lily, shaking off Eddie's half-hearted grab at her wrist, wordlessly sliding through the door.

“Lightbringer! Take this and be well,” Lily said, slipping through the door and hurrying after Wendy. She paused to draw a bone knife from its sheath.

“This is your favorite knife,” Wendy said as the girl pressed the handle into Wendy's hand. “I can't—”

“Bring it back in one piece. Make it taste the essence of the beast. For such honor, I shall lend you my blade.”

Wendy nodded, feeling like she and the ancient fighter were finally seeing completely eye-to-eye. “I'll do my best.”

“Do better,” Lily instructed, and stood back.

Wendy nodded and, ignoring Eddie's muffled yells from within the car, she strode into the middle of the street.

“YO! HALF-FACE! COME OUT, COME OUT, WHEREVER YOU ARE!” Wendy wiped her mouth with the back of one arm; she couldn't shake Piotr's words—he'd known this woman when he was alive. She was the reason he was dead. The Lady Walker had killed members of his family. And now Wendy was going to talk with her again, this time with the knowledge that whatever she did might affect how Ada was being treated.

Wendy couldn't help wondering if she'd lost her mind. What sane person actively sought out someone capable of not only surviving centuries of death and destruction on their own, but seemed to flourish from it?

She did, apparently.

The Lady Walker stepped from the nearest clump of webs and approached Wendy, her cloak sinuously sliding along the littered ground as she walked.

She smiled her sharp smile and Wendy felt a burning flutter in her gut, as if her Light were flaring brighter as the Lady Walker approached. “You taste…like death,” the Lady Walker whispered, leaning in. Her breath puffed out in a sickly-sweet wave.

“Well, you smell like death,” Wendy retorted. “Guess that makes us even.”

A single finger brushed down Wendy's cheek, cold and sharp as honed ice. “Proud. So proud, and yet unaware that you have done me a great favor. The Reapers would have tracked me down, and pulled up the spirit webs ages ago, but instead they waste their time on the likes of you! Elise thinks I wish to devour you, to take your strength in and make it my own. She is…a fool, girl. A foolish, stupid woman.”

The Lady Walker held out a hand that was mostly bone and sagging, blackened flesh. She took Wendy's hand in her own and Wendy fought the rising of her gorge at the feeling of the ungloved flesh sliding beneath her fingers.

“I don't want your power. You can offer nothing to me that I cannot claw out for myself, girl! You've seen what I can do. Leave this city, death-dealer. Turn your face east and do not stop. That is my price to allow you to visit the Council. When you are done I want you to run. Run fast. Run far. Leave the Reapers—leave Elise—to me. I will free my hosta—I mean, your
friend
Ada—after I am done with the Reapers.” Snickering at her fake verbal slip, she released Wendy's hand. “After Elise, your new matriarch, kneels begging at my feet, then you shall have your scientist back.”

Scrubbing her palm on her thigh, Wendy swallowed several times. Her mouth was sour with bile, her entire body ached from holding herself still until the Lady Walker leaned back, giving her space. “Why? Why let me go?”

The Lady Walker shrugged but her good eye glittered in the light. “Perhaps I see in you something of what I once was. Perhaps it is a…matter of a debt repaid. What does it matter? The Reapers are no part of you; your mother saw to that. Let me have my vengeance upon them.” She tilted her head up to the canopy of spirit webs. “Let the sky burn.”

Circumspectly, Wendy's hand dipped into her pocket. She pulled out the handsome Walker's healing necklace and, while the Lady Walker's head was still flung back, Wendy slipped the necklace over her neck and beneath her hoodie.

“No dice,” Wendy replied. “The Reapers suck, yeah, but I like my sky intact, thank you very much.”

The Lady Walker smiled. “So be it.” Then she waved a hand toward the car. “Enjoy your slow death and know you begged for it by name. I gave you a chance to flee.” She smirked and turned away, leaving Wendy alone in the mist.

A thump to the left startled Wendy into skittering right a step. There, on the pavement, lay a woman Wendy had only briefly met, but recognized immediately.

“Ada!” Wendy gasped and hurried toward the older woman, arms outstretched to help Ada to her feet. The street was growing cold and slick beneath her feet, aggravating her footing upon the already steep slope.

“No!” Ada gasped, thrusting out a hand to keep Wendy at bay. “Do not touch me! I am contaminated!”

“What?” Wendy asked, faltering. “I don't—”

Ada stumbled to her feet and Wendy's words died in her throat. “Oh…oh, Ada…oh, Ada, what…what happened?”

“This.” Ada's free hand pressed against the gash in her gut. Spirit webs snaked out of the wound, curling up around her torso and down around her thighs, pinning her voluminous skirt to her legs. One long and nasty tendril curled twice around her throat like a thin, deadly choker. The tip of the tendril flirted with her lips, curled in a spiral at the edge of her mouth and probed the corner.

“Ada believed she could play in the realm of gods,” whispered the Lady Walker's voice from the fog. “She thought she could meddle with what she didn't understand. To explain the way things had become instead of simply accepting the way things are. Foolish, idiot child.” The laughter rolled from the fog, rough and rotten and grating. Wendy fought the urge to cover her ears with her hands.

“The spirit web poison,” Ada explained. “They injected my own concoction into me.” She smiled and Wendy flinched at the sight of her shattered, jagged teeth. “It works…quite fast. Mary would have been pleased; the vials would have protected you. Even a Reaper…would be helpless.”

Wendy turned her face away, ashamed at what her mother had wrought. “Yeah. She would have been so proud.”

“Do not worry yourself,” Ada said, coughing so hard her body shuddered. “I reap what I've sown.”

“I can't access my Light,” Wendy cried. “I can't burn the growth away, I can't help you!”

“I know, I know,” Ada soothed. “Piotr managed…” She pressed a hand to her belly, leaned over, and gasped. “How he managed to hold off…the infection…the seed's growth…for so long…amazes me.”

The Lady Walker appeared behind Wendy, her hands cupping Wendy's shoulders in an icy grip. A Shade lay at her feet, drained nearly dry by clinging spirit webs. It still had the faintest will, and moved feebly beneath the webs, reaching for Wendy's ankles and moaning.

“Piotr is like me,” the Lady Walker whispered. “Unending. No mere poison could fell him—only slow him down. Drive him insane, husk him out…but not kill him. He is unending. He is eternal. Just. Like. Me.”

She sighed, her lips too near to Wendy's cheek, her awful, rotten breath gaggingly close. “Last chance, girl, I grant this to you. Your mother paved the way for my rise. Take what I offer. Leave now. Or suffer.”

“What about Ada?” Wendy demanded, shifting so the Shade couldn't clutch at her feet. She hated to be so cold but Wendy knew that she had to be reasonable; if she had to run the Shade might trip her up. “You claimed you'd free her if I did what you demanded but…you're killing her!”

“You can't kill what is already dead,” the Lady Walker said, nudging aside the skeletal Shade. “Case in point. However, I
will
free her, after the Reapers have been dealt with. You have my word.”

“Will there be any of her
left
to free?” Wendy asked. She didn't let her gaze skitter to the Shade though it was a strain not to. The Shade was so thin and wasted as to be beyond age, beyond gender. It was nearly a walking skeleton, just dusky flesh stretched tight over bones. The Shade's eyes were gone—only the gruesome thorns and buds of the spirit web's seeds remained.

“If her will is strong enough,” the Lady Walker replied carelessly, waving a hand idly as she smiled at Wendy, her remaining teeth gleaming in the pale, gross light. Her waving hand then rested, butterfly-light, on Wendy's shoulder. “She may yet survive.”

“I am so tired of this crap,” Wendy growled. “No. No, okay? No-no-no. No deals. No bargains. No bullshit. I'm done! Okay? I'm…I'm done. With you. With the Reapers. With all of this! No more!”

“If you will not kneel or run, then you leave me no choice.” The Lady Walker's hand tightened for a fraction of a second. Then, moving quickly as a scorpion striking, the Lady Walker kicked Ada's ankle; it broke with a terrible crunch. Ada crumpled to the ground.

“You bitch!” Wendy yelled, dropping to a knee beside the downed spirit. “Ada, can you walk? Hop? Anything?”

“She won't need to. If you will not deal with me then I am done with her,” the Lady Walker said, leaning down, her hands curling over the top of Wendy's shoulders roughly; one dipped down to cup Wendy's left breast, to slide over her ribcage, the other probing Wendy's hip. Where the flat of the Lady Walker's hand pressed against her chest, a flat, icy chill crept across Wendy's skin, numbing her body and sapping her strength.

“She is useless. Ada suffers and will continue to suffer…unless you kill her now. Kill her, Lightbringer. Prove to me that you are unlike your brethren. Kill her.”

“Wendy,” Ada said, shaking her head. “It's a trap. Don't. Don't…listen to her—she's trying to…distract you. Leave me. Go! RUN!”

“Yes, Lightbringer,” murmured the Lady Walker. “Run.”

“Why are you doing this?” Wendy asked, hating the begging tone creeping into her voice. “Why can't you just leave everything be?”

“Why should I? I have the Reapers in chaos, biting one another's tails.” The Lady Walker drew a shining knife from the folds of her
cloak and leaned down, casually grabbing the Shade by the hair and hacking its head from its body with three hard swipes. “Thanks to your mother, I have the Never itself at my mercy.”

“Wait, what about my mo—” Wendy began.

The spirit web dissolved like black ink in water and the battered remains of the Shade burst into a blaze of brilliant, black-threaded Light.

Above them there was a wail and a huge sensation of pressure, of sucking, like the three of them were being pulled out to sea by an insistent riptide. Wendy and Ada grabbed the torn and twisted pavement beneath them. Wendy was glad that they weren't further out in the road, where the ice was thickest and the sloping street the most severe. The Lady Walker stood firm, laughing wildly as, with a gigantic
whoomph
, the ground began buckling and seizing frantically, the soil vibrating and pounding beneath them.

The earthquake pulsed for several seconds as Ada and Wendy rode the wave, both screaming.

At long last the earth stopped spasming and the Lady Walker reached down and helped Wendy to her feet. “There are over a hundred Shades within a four block radius,” she said, smiling. “Every Shade I destroy calls another of my…pets…into this world. For every Shade that sees my blade, another terror is born. Tell me your Reapers can deal with
that
, Lightbringer.”

“Wendy…” Ada whispered. “Wendy…help…me…”

Yanking free of the Lady Walker, Wendy turned on her heel. She had taken only two rapid steps away when she heard the thick, snotty snuffle to her right. She managed a third step before the beast slid out of the closest building and dropped its head low, eye-level with Wendy. It growled, red eyes lighting, and a wave of fetid breath nearly knocked Wendy over.

Wendy turned aside, shaking, doing her best to ignore the beast though every nerve trembled at the sight and smell of it. “Stop playing with us. We're not mice.”

“In the eyes of the creatures from between,” the Lady Walker said, drawing a compact out of her cloak and flipping it open, “we're all mice.”

Wendy briefly spotted her reflection in the small mirror within before the Lady Walker, grinning, leaned down and slammed the compact across Ada's face. The compact cracked against Ada's cheekbone and the broken mirror scored her flesh, leaving a trail of seeping essence. Ada, stunned, crumpled to the ground.

“What—” Wendy began, but was cut off as the hellbeast beside her surged forward, darting for Ada's prone body. It seemed to fall apart as it drew closer to the mirror; for a moment the beast was insubstantial as smoke…and then it was gone.

“What happened?” Wendy asked before she could stop herself. She glared all around, demanding answers. “Where did it go?”

But the Lady Walker was gone. Wendy was alone with Ada.

Slowly, Wendy gathered Ada by the elbows and supported her up to her feet. Falling to the ground had knocked Ada's bun loose, and her hair lay in a messy tangle about her face. She leaned on Wendy heavily.

“What was all that about? Here,” Wendy said, glad that the Lady Walker had left without further confrontation. She pushed a hank of Ada's hair off her wounded cheekbone. “I think I have a spare scrunchie in my—”

Ada bit Wendy's hand.

Screaming in surprised pain, Wendy yanked her hand back while Ada, growling, dropped to all fours and swelled, doubling in size in seconds. Her proper dress split at the shoulders and arms, the nipped-in waist tore to shreds as Wendy, dumbfounded, watched.

“Oh hell,” Wendy whispered and staggered several steps back. She hit a patch of ice and nearly tumbled, catching herself at the last second. In the moments she spent struggling with her balance, Ada's body twisted 180 degrees, torso spinning so that her arms snapped backwards to support the convolutions. There was an awful cracking
noise as joints appeared in the middle of her biceps and calves. Ada now hung upside down, arched like a spider, and her fingers lengthened, nails digging into the street. Wendy watched in mingled horror and pity as Ada's skirt, stretched to splitting, fell aside, leaving Ada's body naked and slit apart, her skin ripped and bleeding, essence streaming off her in rivulets.

“A…Ada?” Wendy whispered, arms outstretched at her sides. “Are you…oh, ick, are you in there? Ada?”

BOOK: Never
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