Shadowlands (37 page)

“And if he is not there?” Alejandro knew I meant to go to the Royal York.

I shrugged. “I’ll figure out some way to leave him a message.”

“Take your mobile.”

I grabbed my bag and headed out the door before either of them could think of more to discuss. I was letting myself out the back gate when Alejandro appeared next to me. Before I could say yes or no, there was a CRACK!, a moment of vertigo, and we were in a deserted back corridor of Union Station.

“You are flushed, and your pulse is rapid. Are you well?” Without actually touching me, Alejandro tucked away a lock of hair that had escaped from my ponytail.

He was right. I made myself slow down and take a couple of deep breaths. What was I so excited about? I was looking forward to seeing Wolf—and I admit that realization sobered me. Sure, I knew more about him than a regular girl in my situation would have known about a regular guy—but neither of us were exactly regular people.

“Querida.”
Alejandro kissed me on the forehead. “Be most careful. No one knows better than I the allure that can arise between human and Rider. But you are neither of you merely those things. And this is a very difficult time for us all.”

“So
you’re
psychic now?” I don’t know how successful my smile was.

“No. But neither am I blind.”

We’d reached the exit doors, and I turned to face him fully. “Alejandro.” I hugged him. “Thanks. Thanks for letting me do this my way.”

“We are
fara’ip
.”

I watched him walk back into the shadows and went on with a lighter heart.

I decided to go up to the street rather than through the underground mall to the hotel. For one thing, it was a brilliant summer day, not the dead of winter. And it wasn’t hot enough yet to need the air-conditioning of the lower levels of the city.

As usual, Front Street was busy with taxis stopping and picking up passengers from the train station, so I walked down to the lights at the corner. I could cross more safely there, and it would also put me closer to the hotel entrance I wanted. I was dressed okay, a little wrinkled maybe, but as Alejandro always said, “My dear one, that is how you know it is linen.”

As I stepped off the curb, the old man next to me stumbled, and without thinking I caught him by the forearm. [The hunger, the need; the prey; a beast, single-horned and cloven-hooved, acid dripping from the tip of a horn that melted away and renewed itself over and over; patchy skin, scaly hooves; a Hippogriff that caught at my heart, making me think of Alejandro; the prey; a snake with wings; a thin Asian boy, eyes wide open, pupils pinpoints; a Chimera; my brother; three more, lesser than he, all three watching; the chase, this world; one following; where’s Wolf? The girl’s touch should be
doing something, what? Where’s my brother? The prey, the chase, the hunt. Our world. The
Hunt.
]

It felt like my heart stopped beating, though I don’t think my expression changed. My early training saw to that. Or maybe this Hound didn’t know enough about human expression to read it. There were a couple of other people around us by then, all reaching out to help, so I was able to turn and walk away, face front, just as quickly as my high-heeled shoes would let me. Still not looking behind me, I reached the other side of the street and went directly under the portico, avoiding a black stretch limo with a chauffeur waiting by the passenger door, and walking through the doors into the Royal York.

I walked stiff-legged across the short lobby up the wide brass-edged steps, gripped the brass handrails with numb fingers. When I reached the top, I shied away from a white alabaster Chinese lion, sitting on top of a beautiful display table with a top made of green marble three inches thick. For a moment the lion had looked like one of the shapes I had seen when the Hound touched me.

And that made me stop, put my hand down on the cold marble of the tabletop, and lean on it, waiting for my lungs to stop shuddering as I drew in a breath, and my knees to bend without dumping me to the ground. The floor was made up of intricate tiles, laid to look like a black-and-white lattice on a soft orange background. Beautiful. Maybe granite, maybe marble, it was hard to tell when they kept moving back and forth, approaching and receding.

I reached into my bag and took out my mobile. Still leaning on the table, I waited while Alejandro’s number rang, willing him to pick up. This wasn’t something I wanted to leave on voice mail. Finally I heard the sound of the connection, and his voice, a little anxious, “Yes?”

“Un perro de caza,”
I whispered.
“Delante del hotel.”
I took a deep breath, but my heart was still pounding. “It was looking for me,” I continued, still in Spanish. “Waiting for
me
.”

“Bah! I knew I should not have left you. Are you injured?” I could imagine Alejandro waving his free hand to shush Hawk. Just hearing his voice made the vise around my chest loosen.

“No. I touched it, but it seemed very careful
not
to—to feed.” Something for which I was thoroughly grateful. “Something about
a young Outsider, something he said to it. They left him, drained but alive.” A few more seconds and I might even have been able to say where, and what had happened to him, but the contact had been broken. I was grateful for that as well. I didn’t want to know if I was strong enough to go on touching that thing, even if it meant I could help someone else. I didn’t want to find out that I wasn’t that brave.

“Where are you now?”

I told him, and answered the question he was about to ask. “So far as I know, the Hound’s still outside.”

“Do not come home alone. Stay there until I can come for you.”

As if I needed to be told that.

As I put my mobile away, I became aware that a woman was looking at me with concern on her face, and I straightened up and smiled at her.

“Warmer than I thought,” I said. The last thing I needed was for anyone else to touch me just now. Relieved that I seemed to be okay, the woman nodded and descended the staircase behind me, heading for the door and the street. The sweat on my forehead had dried, the trembling had stopped, and the latticed tiles had stopped moving. I tucked my bag more firmly under my arm and turned toward the broad alcove, twelve feet away, where I could see the brass doors of the three elevators.
Whoever designed this hotel really liked brass,
was the useless thought that floated through my mind.
Must be a bugger to keep polished.

There was another woman standing in front of the bank of elevators. She was taller than me, and much slimmer, but without being one of
las flacas
. She had very fair coloring. She was wearing a pair of narrow black slacks, strappy silver sandals, and a tapered blood-red blouse with cap sleeves. I was intrigued because I couldn’t actually tell what the materials were. I began to have a bad feeling.

She shot me a glance and looked forward again so abruptly that I actually looked behind me to see what had unnerved her. The corridor that stretched out from this side of the elevator lobby was empty. Then I saw that her eyes were flicking from corner to corner, as if she were trying to see everywhere at once.
Agoraphobic?
I wondered. Or just paranoid? It was then I noticed she hadn’t pushed the button for the elevator, so I leaned forward and did it myself, careful not to get any closer to her. I could smell the scent she was wearing,
something floral but very light and airy. She looked from me to the button and back again.

“This operates the mechanism,” she said, as though it were a statement and not a question.

I nodded, as if this was the kind of thing adults in the twenty-first century said in front of elevators all the time. That vise was starting to squeeze my chest again. She was tall, beautiful, with impossibly flawless skin and coloring, and dressed in materials I’d never seen before. There was one fairly obvious conclusion, but I thought a supermodel would likely know an elevator when she saw one.

I figured I didn’t have to touch the woman to know she wasn’t one—a woman that is. The real question was, Rider or Hound? And if Rider, good guy or bad? Either way, we were probably headed for the same place. And that meant I had to know.

I gritted my teeth and brushed her with my fingertips on the bare arm, just above her elbow, bracing myself for the expected wave of images. [Manticore; three Riders Singing, one from each Ward; gray-eyed Dragon with honey-gold hair; a Moonward Phoenix; a man in a window seat, staring at the clouds; a room that disappeared; a terrible loss, a Griffin, gone and took her heart with it; a child, growing inside her, wrapped with a ribbon of
dra’aj
;
Manticore.
] Oh. [She had once horribly betrayed her sister, and been forgiven; she was very curious about books and reading, since Riders had neither; she’d had a dog named Hilt when she was a child.] She was excited about being in the Shadowlands, and she was looking for the Horn [a tiny flute, made of bone, Dragon or maybe Griffin] this was her chance to really show what she could do [she had a jeweled pin someone named Lightborn had given her tucked on the inside of her collar] She preferred her sister’s colors to those of the Basilisk Prince.

She was no danger to Wolf; she just needed to tell him something the three Singers had told her. I could feel my pulse slowing down again.

I pointed at the buttons. “This one if you want to go up,” I said, indicating the one I’d pushed. “And the other if you want to go down.” I kept my tone as neutral as my still tight throat would let me.

“So, not the direction the mechanism needs to travel to reach me?”

“Well, no.” I hadn’t even thought of that. “You’re not likely to be sure where the, uh, the elevator is.”

The elevator came at that moment, and I entered the car to show her how it was done. She came in after me, looking around her now with curiosity more than anything else. I touched the floor button and looked up at her. “Which floor?”

She had been watching me, and had seen how the button I’d touched had lit up. She reached out and touched the “8,” pulling her hand back sharply when it, too, lit up. That seemed to disprove my theory.

“You wanted the eighth floor?”

“No,” she said. “I wished to see whether the light would appear for me or only for…” she licked her lips and fell silent.

“Only for humans,” I finished for her.

This time she looked at me closely, studying my face. Again, there was no fear, no worry in her eyes, just curiosity. I was reminded of a friend Alejandro used to play chess with in the Plaza Mayor in Madrid, on summer evenings. Alberto would study the chessboard, calculating the possible moves, in just the dispassionate way the Rider was studying me.

“I’m Valory Martin,” I said. “I’m the
fara’ip
of Graycloud at Moonrise. The High Prince of the People has named me a friend.”

A light went on in her face as she smiled. “You know my sister? She has mentioned you to me, a Truthreader. I am Walks Under the Moon, my mother was Clear of Light, and the Manticore guides me.”

Now that I knew, I thought I could see a resemblance. Walks Under the Moon’s face was a little less oval than her sister’s, more heart-shaped, and her coloring was a different shade, though she was still clearly Starward. Their eyes, though, were identically gray.

“You’re looking for Stormwolf?”

“You also?” She gave me a look then that it took me a minute to recognize. She was smiling, and looked me up and down as though she’d known me my whole life. My eyebrows shot up when I realized what she was doing. She thought I was interested in Wolf, and was checking me out—not like his wife or girlfriend would, more like a sister. I wondered what my sudden blush was telling her.

“You may call me Moon,” she finally said. Evidently I had passed some test. “Wolf is my
fara’ip
.”

The elevator finally came to a halt on the top floor, and I gestured for her to leave first. “The person nearest the door should get out
first, though you’ll find some older men will let you precede them, even though they’re closer.” It seemed strange to be passing along the same bits of instruction Alejandro had been giving to me not so long before.

Moon went directly to Wolf’s door and placed her hand on it. “He is within,” she said, and used the dragon-shaped knocker while I had my hand half outstretched to stop her. Suddenly I wasn’t as sure I wanted to speak to him as I had been back in my dining room. Was it the encounter with the Hound that had me second-guessing, or was it the presence of his
fara’ip
?

For half a minute I thought Moon must be wrong, but then the door opened. Wolf looked straight at me, as if there was no one else there, and I swallowed, feeling a sudden warmth blossoming in my chest. But it was very quickly followed by a chill, as something I’d read from the Hound on the street fell into place. I immediately pushed past him into the suite, without waiting to see how he and Moon would greet each other. I went all the way into the sitting room, and to the far wall, but then found I was too nervous to stand by the windows. I crossed my arms, hugging myself, and came back far enough to stand with my back to the fireplace. Cold now, but somehow comforting in its solidity.

At least, it was comforting until I thought about what could come down the chimney. I sidled away. I looked up to find both Wolf and Moon watching me, the identical quizzical expression on their faces. If it wasn’t for the differences in coloring, they might at that moment have been real siblings.

“Did you get my message?” Wolf asked. He held his hand up to his face as if he was holding a phone. “We left you one, Nik Polihronidis and I. He is a very brave man.”

Nik and Wolf together?
I started to reach into my bag, but stopped. Not much point in checking messages now.

“Your brother is looking for you,” I said before I could consider whether or not I should.

Wolf was naturally pale, like any Moonward Rider I would guess, but now his almond skin went so white the faint scars around his eye stood out. Moon took a step to one side and looked at him, brows drawn together, mouth twisted in a frown. Clearly this was news to her, and I wondered whether I should have kept quiet. The shock of
the realization had just been too much. Not only had Wolf been a Hound himself, but his brother had been part of his Pack—was
still
part of it.