Shadowlands (6 page)

Alejandro was in the back garden when I got home, his head tilted to one side, apparently staring intently at a honeybee crawling into a deep pink flower. He stood with his hands open, his arms lifted slightly from his arched torso. You could almost feel the sunshine of the bullring. I was suddenly reminded of the first time I’d seen him.

The man standing in the salon of the Collector’s apartment in Prague didn’t look like a retired matador in his mid-eighties. He was way too young, with a ruddy complexion, and strawberry-blond hair just showing some gray. But the way he stood looking out the window, head on an angle, fist on one hip, sure, you could see him in a
corrida
.

“Mr. Martin?” I said.

“Mar
teen
,” he corrected, putting the emphasis on the second syllable. Then he turned and smiled at me. “I know, you expected someone older. I’m sure your…?” He raised his brows and looked expectant.

“Uncle,” I supplied. That’s what I called him, the man who’d taken me from my parents.

“Of course. Your uncle can explain my transformation should he find it necessary.”

“Of course,” I agreed. “Pleased to meet you.” Even though I’d been told not to—it wasn’t him I was supposed to read, but something he brought with him—there was something so intriguing about this younger-than-expected man that I went right up to him with my hand out. His was warm, and smooth, and strong and suddenly I was overwhelmed with images, with colors and sounds and
faces and places, the sound of trickling water and the smell of green leaves and sunsets and underneath it all the way his mind—more his
being
, really—was feeling out the space around him, locating himself in relation to the salon, to the building, the street, the rest of the city, the Vitava River—the planet for all I could tell, shouting I AM
HERE
, in a way that just wasn’t human at all.

The next thing I knew, I was on my knees. Then he was helping me to my feet, and I could still feel the buzz of his psyche and I knew what he could do, what made him the thing he called a Rider. I knew how much he’d loved his human wife, and his human children, and how he’d stopped being a soldier when all the honor had left the profession, and finally, finally, here was someone who could help me, someone who could get me away before my “uncle” killed me for knowing too much about him. If only he would—

“Will you get me out of here?” I said. “He’s going to kill me—not this minute, but soon. Can you—will you, with that thing you do?”

“That thing I do?” He might have been asking me if I took sugar.

“You know, ‘move’ me, relocate me. Please.”

He searched my face with his brown eyes. “I must find a missing child; he was to help me.”

Now I knew why I was in the room. “You have something of hers? Can I touch it?” I put out my hands.

His eyes widened as he, too, began to understand why I was in the room. He pulled a ring off his pinkie finger and laid it into my palm.

“Her mother’s stepbrother has her. A farm in the Extramadura,” I said. “Just outside of Campanario. Old, no one uses it anymore, but the name’s Hellín.” I opened my eyes. “He thought he didn’t get enough in the will.”

“She lives?”

I nodded. He took me by the shoulders, and there was a rush of air, and my ears POPPED! and the light was coming in a totally different window from a totally different angle.

And I was free.

I could feel his hands on my shoulders again. “
Querida
, what is it? What has happened?”

Maybe it was because of what I’d seen in Elaine, maybe it was because my triumph of the morning now seemed so distant and so
unimportant, maybe it was the memory of the day my life changed, but suddenly I started to cry.

There was a light SNAP! of displaced air as Alejandro Moved us from the patio right into the living room. He sat me down, and had an afghan around my shoulders and a hot mug of green tea in my hands while the tears were still drying on my face. I could hear him moving around the kitchen with that peculiar inhuman speed and grace that he showed only when we were alone.

Alejandro is a Rider, one of what we humans call “Faerie.” Specifically, he’s what we’d call Trouping Faerie, the kind that, according to legends, dash around in groups riding beautiful horses, wearing bright armor, and making humans fall in love with them. It didn’t work out that way for Alejandro, though. Long ago he fell in love with a human woman, and stayed here in what they call the Shadowlands for her sake, and the sake of the children they had together. He’s never gone back. I don’t know how long ago it really was, but parts of his story sound an awful lot like some of the fairy tales and ballads I’ve read about demon lovers.

He says he can’t go back now. There’s been some sort of civil war in the place he calls the Lands, and the Portals between our two worlds have been shut ever since. The Prince who lost the war got banished to this world, which I guess is why the Portals had to be closed, so he couldn’t just go home.

According to Alejandro, there are other Riders hiding here, along with Solitaries like Trolls and Ogres, and Naturals like Water and Tree Sprites. All of which make up what he calls the “People.” Some had reasons like Alejandro’s not to go home, some just didn’t like the idea of living under the rule of the Prince who won the war. Most keep a low profile here, as human technology catches up with magical abilities, but I’ve met the Water Sprite named Shower of Stars, who lives in the fountain of Cibeles in Madrid. One night, when it was pouring rain, she came out on a bar crawl with us. She liked the
mejillones a la vinagreta
the best.

Then there are the people like me, humans touched with the blood of the People, who have inhuman, or supernatural skills. All the most famous mages in history—Merlin, Cagliostro, Rasputin, David Blaine—have some Rider blood. The greatest of these now living is the man I call the Collector.

“Tell me,” Alejandro said now, coming back into the sitting room with a teapot on a tray. “I cannot read your soul as you do mine,” he said when I didn’t answer right away. “So you must tell me.”

I inhaled deeply, taking in the steam from my tea, before looking up at him. “Alejandro, could the man I saw on the subway have been one of the Wild Hunt?”

He straightened abruptly. “Were you bitten?”

“No, I wasn’t, but—”

A wave of cold passed through Alejandro where he stood, and tears sprang back into my eyes. He was afraid. He’d never been afraid before. I stood to go to him, the afghan slipping from my shoulders to the floor, but even as I moved I felt warmer, and he shook his head, holding up his hand.

“It is well. Sit.”

He seemed sure, so I sat down again. Alejandro’s complexion had regained its natural ruddiness. His coloring—a dark strawberry blond—was a little unusual for a Spaniard, but then, he wasn’t really a Spaniard, was he? He wrapped his long square fingers around his own large mug of green tea as if he still felt a chill.

“You told me they didn’t hunt humans.”

Alejandro propped himself on the arm of the couch, eyes narrowed in thought. “The Hunt feeds upon
dra’aj
, and while humans have it, the quantity is so small that I would not have thought it would tempt a Hound.”

Okay. I relaxed against the back of the couch. That explained everything.
Dra’aj
, roughly speaking, is the life force, the magical essence that makes the People what they are—Alejandro says that they don’t
do
magic, they
are
magic.
Dra’aj
informs everything about them, and the Lands as well. Like he said, humans also have
dra’aj
– some of us enough to give us a talent that certainly looks like magic—but the amount we have is negligible, just a shadow of what the People have.

Oh. Shadowlands. Now I get it
. But Alejandro was talking again.

“You have already learned that what humans know of the People is based on scanty information, most of it at best skewed, and at worst plainly wrong. How we see ourselves…” Alejandro gestured to himself. “How we are in reality, it is not at all how humans see us.”

I nodded. “You said we only know the People through these sporadic
visits, before the Exile,” I said. “That it was like understanding another culture through tourism. Like not all Spaniards dance flamenco, or not all Japanese know karate.” I knew about that kind of thing; I’d been watching television and movies in the last couple of years. “But humans use this kind of shorthand when they think about each other, so they did that with your people as well.”

Alejandro took a sip of his tea. “And, of course, human tales are human-centric, are they not? So when your stories tell of the Hunt, they usually describe them as preying on humans whereas, in reality, even when they have been here in the Shadowlands, they were brought to hunt People, Riders in particular.”

“I think that’s changed.” Suddenly a group of images I’d had for a while fell into place. “You met one when you were in Granada last year, didn’t you? One of these Hounds.” I remembered that weekend clearly. It was the first time I had ever been left alone. No guards, no minders. I’d been so nervous I’d almost begged to go with him, but I thought that if I once started doing that, I would never stop.
Now
I felt I understood something that hadn’t been clear at the time. Like I said, I can see the images and not know what they mean, exactly, if I have no context for them.

“No, not a Hound, but one of the followers of the Basilisk Prince.” Alejandro studied the surface of his tea, as if there was something else in the cup. “I was passing through the Albaycin.”

I knew what Alejandro had really been doing. Walking around, basking in the familiarity of a place that—at four in the morning at least, when there’d be few lights on, and fewer cars—hasn’t really changed for hundreds of years. He’d done that more than once since we’d found each other. Now, for the first time, I wondered what he was going to do for ancient walking routes here in the new world, and whether he’d ever been here before.

“I heard the sound of fighting,” he was saying. “Not fists,
that
I would have ignored. I heard the sound of blades. When I tracked it to its source, I found two Riders, a Sunward like myself, and a Starward. The Starward still had the smell of the Lands upon him, and so I went to help the Sunward, thinking him a hidden one like myself. Together, we killed the other Rider.”

I waved at him to continue, carefully so as not to slosh my tea. “How did you know he wasn’t a Hound?”

Alejandro shook his head. “The Hunt are a different kind of being entirely—you must understand that not many meet with a Hound and live to tell of it. They can take the shape of certain animals, but most often they change their form constantly, shifting from one grotesque shape to another, as if shape is no longer in their control. In Granada,” his gesture was dismissive, “the Rider we killed threatened us with the Hunt as we confronted him.” Alejandro lifted his mug to his lips and took a swallow, his eyes narrowing as he thought. “From this we concluded, Nighthawk and I, that the Basilisk Prince has found a way to make the Hunt obey him, perhaps even the Horn itself. Another reason, if we had none already, to avoid him.”

“The guy on the subway wasn’t like an animal, and he didn’t change his shape,” I said, nodding as the pieces fell into place. “He was just a regular-looking guy. Well, except that he had his face squashed up against the glass. But there was a dog later, with the same chill and smell. And the guy who helped me, he called it a Hound.”

Alejandro’s eyes narrowed still further and this time they were aimed at me. “The first man could have been a Rider, I suppose, leading the Hunt. But your ‘helper,’ he was human?”

“Sure.” I hesitated, and Alejandro waited. He was nothing if not patient. “Well, maybe it’s not that simple.” I shivered. It was all just too creepy. “His name is Nikos Polihronidis, and he’s definitely human, but he
has
been bitten by the Hunt.” I didn’t want to say the word
eaten
, though that’s what stuck in my mind. “They took his
dra’aj
and it fragmented him somehow.”

Alejandro lowered himself onto the couch next to me. “It did not kill him?”

“No, but it…it emptied him, broke him into pieces like, well, like a jigsaw puzzle.”

“And that is what you saw when you touched him?”

“Yes, partly.” I screwed up my face, reaching for the words that would explain everything and coming up short. “He has
dra’aj
, he’s been put back together, but it’s not his own
dra’aj
.”

“He has taken it from someone else?” Alejandro’s face had gone like stone.
“Vampiros.”

I waved my hands. “No, no! You’ve got it wrong. Nik hasn’t sucked the life force out of anyone, he’s not some human version of
the Hunt.” I thought about how to explain it. “He—
they—
they get their replacement
dra’aj
from people who are dying anyway.” I made a motion with my hands like a flower opening. “They capture it as it’s released. Their emptiness draws it in.”

Alejandro’s face had relaxed, but he really hadn’t liked what he’d heard. “I am relieved to learn that it is still only the Hunt who can take
dra’aj
by force.”

“Nik says it’s been happening to humans for years, but usually in isolated incidents of a few people here and there. Lately it’s been happening more and more, and to larger groups. All these news reports about people wandering around, lost and confused? Like the people in High Park? Nik says that’s the Hunt.”

Alejandro looked off into the distance, his brow furrowed. “Perhaps in the absence of their usual prey, they have had to turn to humans.”

Somehow I didn’t feel sorry for them. I chewed on my lower lip for a second, but I couldn’t see any way other than to just say it. “Nik wants you to help him. He says Riders brought the Hunt here, and you have to do something about it now.”

“Offer ourselves to be fed upon, you mean?”

I looked down at my teacup. Alejandro’s sarcasm was a little unexpected. “I know not everyone is part of your
fara’ip
…” I stopped when Alejandro lifted his hand.