Shadowlands (60 page)

But the child.
Moon flexed her right hand. The Hounds were still talking.

“We don’t know how long this is going to take,” one of them was saying. “I know Pack Leader said sunset, but what if there’s negotiations? What if there’s bargaining?”

“He can’t mean us to starve, that’s for sure,” the one called River said.

Moon licked her lips, her hands forming fists despite her intention to relax them.

“We can’t Fade her,” River said. “That’s all. We need her as a hostage. We have to give her back when the agreement’s made.”

“What if the agreement’s not made?” The Moonward one on the right almost sounded hopeful.

“Well, then it won’t matter,” River said. “We can have her for sure then.” Her brow furrowed as she thought. “No, the thing is this, she’s so tricky, that if we’re not strong enough to hold her, she could still Move, and we’d lose her entirely. So we’ve got to stay strong and alert, to keep her.” She smiled around at her followers, who all smiled back at her. “Get it? If we damaged her a little, just a little, like you said, Hook, she’d be less likely to escape as well. So, damaged is okay, so long as we don’t Fade her. We’ll take just enough to stay alert ourselves—not even as much as a whole human.”

“Dibs!” The Starward Hound sank its teeth into Moon’s left arm. Even through the pain, Moon could feel a slight vibration, as though the beast was howling, or humming as it bit down. Almost immediately, Moon’s wrist and hand turned cold, until she could not feel her fingers. She tried to pull away, but it was like trying to move a Tree.

A different sensation made her look at her right wrist, where she saw her
gra’if
armguard glowing bright, like a flame of metal, hot, almost too hot to bear. But that heat suffused her, rushing through all her limbs, burning away the cold that had claimed her left hand, burning away even the smell of the Hound, and the feel of his teeth.

And he was not biting her any longer. He had fallen away from her as if thrown by a Troll, and even before hitting the ground he began changing, flickering through so many shapes—and so quickly—that it was too fast to follow. Once Moon thought she saw a unicorn’s horn, and once claws that could have belonged to many a Guidebeast, but nothing more. A horrible keening sound began, like the highest note of a damaged flute, and the Hound settled into its Rider shape once more, its lips burned black and peeling away, skin flaking, bones collapsing in on themselves until there was only a small pile of dog-shaped dirt on the floor, and even that Faded completely away.

Only those who bore
gra’if
could kill a Hound, Moon realized. Or at least that was what so many of the old Songs told. Moon’s heart thundered within her. She had not thought of her armguard as a weapon in that sense, she had not known
gra’if
would stop the Hunt from feeding, no Song spoke of it as a defensive weapon. Would she live long enough to tell anyone else?

Suddenly Moon realized she was free. In the confusion, her captors had released her. She closed her eyes, subtracted the floor with its oil stains, the hardness of the chair under her, the smell of dust, and dried blood and putrefaction. Added the silk and linen upholstery of Elaine’s couch, added the sea mist scent of her air freshener, added—

Searing pain in her left arm as her elbow seemed to explode. She was cheek down in the dirt of the floor, skin abraded on the concrete.

“Oh, no, you don’t,
prey
. No. You. Don’t.” River was kneeling on Moon’s shoulders, grinding her face into the concrete, her left arm with its broken elbow hauled up behind her back.

“Okay, okay. Settle down, you two!” Whimpers in the background faded almost to silence. “Get her feet, again. Now!” Moon felt long, hard fingers take hold of each ankle.

“All right. Okay. We can’t drain you. Fine. But that only buys you time, prey. And not much of it. We can still kill you, you know. We could tear your arm off.”

Maybe it was the new knowledge she had. Maybe it was the note of annoyed fear in the female’s voice. Maybe it was only hysteria. But Moon began to laugh.

I
PROBABLY WOULD HAVE FOUND the shell of Maple Leaf Gardens impressive if I hadn’t just been to the Lands, and in the halls of Ice Tor—if they really were halls. After that, even the grand scale of deconstruction inside this downtown landmark couldn’t move me much. It was cold inside the building, all that stone and concrete insulating us from the warm summer afternoon outside. It smelled of wet cement, and dust. I was careful to keep my elbows and hands tucked in, especially around the machinery. I didn’t want to be picking up on any of the workmen.

Alejandro had already gotten as far as the spot Nik had described as the cleared central space when he turned around, looking at Wolf, eyebrows raised. Wolf nodded, his head up, his nostrils spread wide. “They have indeed been denning here, though they are not here now.”

This cleared spot in the center of the construction didn’t look very large to my eye, but like I said, my perspective had become a little distorted. Alejandro walked a little farther away from us, his steps sharp and precise, chin up, left hand in a fist propped on his hip as he looked around. It took me a minute to remember where I’d
seen that particular posture before. In the bullring. That was how Alejandro Martín must have stood, many hundreds of times, looking up at the cheering crowds.

“What’s he looking at?” I hadn’t realized that Nik was standing so close to me.

“The crowds,” I said. “The crowds in the stands of the
Plaza de Toros
.”

“He was a bullfighter?”

I shook my head, my eyes still on Alejandro, and the invisible
corrida
. “A
matador
.”

“Same thing, isn’t it?”

I blinked and turned to face Nik. “No. A bullfighter is a
toreador. Matador
means killer, the one who actually kills the bull.
Un matador de toros.
A killer of bulls.
Un matador de hombres
. A killer of men.”

“He’s done both, hasn’t he?”

“Yes, he has.”

Nik was quiet for a few minutes, watching as Wolf joined Alejandro. The two Riders started pointing around them and gesturing at the small hills created out of the construction debris, and the hiding spots afforded by the equipment. Alejandro pulled out his mobile and started talking into it. I wondered if the Riders he was calling would get here in time.

Nik turned to face me, taking my right hand in his. It was late in the day, and his beard was coming in. It suddenly struck me that the Riders I’d seen were either bearded or not; none of them ever needed a shave.

Alejandro and Wolf turned their heads suddenly, looking behind us. I spun around, but Nik’s touch on my arm steadied me.

“It’s Poco,” he said. The thin man had brought along about a dozen other Outsiders, four of them carrying either shotguns or rifles, don’t ask me which. I recognized the guy I’d seen in the lobby of the Royal York, on the day I’d met Wolf. Yves, that was his name. He had a crossbow.

“Hey, Nik. You must be Val.” Poco gave each of us a nod before tilting his head back to stare at the space around us. “Sure is something, isn’t it? Didn’t look anywhere near so big when the Leafs were still playing here.” He brought his eyes back down to us. “You figured out where you want us?”

“We’ve got some ideas, yeah. Follow me.” Poco signaled the others, and Nik led them away.

Once they’d gone, I settled down on a chunk of concrete. It had been part of a stairwell at one time, but so many feet had used it over the years that it was the inanimate equivalent of the living city around me. Nothing but buzz and white noise. I was glad to be sitting down. My heart was pounding, my palms damp. I thought about Moon and her child. I hoped they were going to be safe, and I wished there was a way for me to know. The Horn would be blown. Right now, that was about all I could be sure of.

I took a deep breath and let it out slowly, watching Alejandro and Wolf. They were a study in contrasts, and not just because one was Moonward black and the other Sunward red. Alejandro looked like his normal human self—even when we’d been in the Lands, I now realized, he’d retained his Hector Vega suit. But now that he was distracted, Wolf’s clothing looked less human. His jacket was longer, the material was more silver-gray than blue, and it looked as though it was brocaded with some kind of animal. His
gra’if
glowed slightly in the dimness.

What was coming would be harder for Wolf to face than anything he’d come up against before, even his Healing. That, as he’d said several times, had been forced on him. Sure, he was happy about it now, but it wasn’t as though he’d planned it—he’d never even had the chance to say no. Now, on the other hand, he was deliberately planning to ambush his own brother, and he had plenty of time to think about it, to second-guess the plans—even to wonder if he could trust himself.

Alejandro still stood with his head up, eyes narrowed, thin lips pulled to one side in an ironic smile—just as if he was hearing, somewhere in the distance, a glory of trumpets. As if imagining the crowd on their feet, and their
“¡olés!”
echoing off the rafters far above us. Was he
feeling
it, too? The fire in the blood, the imminent danger, the possibility that, today, it would be the bull that walked away?

I’d seen a glimpse of this fiery being in the days after Alejandro had rescued me from the Collector. Maybe once or twice since, like when he’d come back from Granada that time, after killing the Basilisk Warrior. But more in the last few days. The spark, the glint in his eye, told me a part of him was enjoying this very much.

He seemed so alive, almost glowing. In that moment I wondered what would happen if we all lived through this. I wondered whether Alejandro would be able to find something to give him this zest for living again. Maybe living with me in our nice house in the Beaches would be too tame? Could he go back to the
corridas
? Turn himself into a younger man and start again from the bottom, with a new face and a new name? Or maybe he could go into the military once again.

I also wondered whether any of us
would
live through this. I knew what I had to do, but I still wasn’t sure
why
. There was so much at stake that, for the first time, it was actually hard for me to trust my ability. And there wasn’t anyone I could ask for advice.

“You are very serious.” I’d been thinking so hard I hadn’t noticed Wolf come up beside me.

“I’m thinking about what Alejandro will do when the adventure is over,” I said.

“It’s a way of distracting oneself.” I turned to him in surprise, and not only because this was the first time I’d heard him use a contraction. “To think about what one will do afterward makes the present seem less full of danger,” he added.

“People have the habit of living,” I said. “Even the Outsiders, who literally deal in the deaths of others and see it all the time, even they plan for tomorrow.”

“Riders, too,” he said.

“Ah, but then you all have so very many tomorrows.”

He turned to look at me directly, and I felt the impact of his ash-gray eyes. “None of us—Rider, Solitary, Natural, or human—is promised any tomorrow. Any of us can be killed.”

“And who kills us, unless it is we, ourselves?”

Suddenly the breath was knocked out of me, and Wolf was pushing me to stand between him and Alejandro. We hadn’t Moved, but Wolf had covered the ground at top Rider speed, bringing me along with him. I staggered, but managed to keep my feet, then turned around and looked back at where we’d just been.

There, sitting right on the chunk of cement I’d been using, was Fox.

“Did you really think I wouldn’t know if you came early?” He shook his head, upper lip ever so slightly lifted. “Did you think coming now would give you some kind of advantage?”

Alejandro, just on my right, hissed in his breath. It was only the second time, I realized, that he’d seen one of the Hunt looking like a Rider—and the first time he knew what he was looking at. Even now that he was wearing ordinary clothes—jeans, and a black T-shirt that said Red Dwarf—there was no mistaking the height, the perfect symmetry of the features, and the clarity of Fox’s coloring. He was a Moonward Rider, of course, like Wolf, and had almost exactly Wolf’s shade of color, the almond skin, the ash-gray eyes. Fox’s hair was, if anything, darker, the kind of sable black that seems almost blue in certain lights.

“I wish I knew where you fit in.” Fox focused his attention on me, and I remembered just in time that I’d been warned not to look into a Hound’s eyes. I assumed that held true even if he looked like a regular Rider. “Are you the piece that wins the game? Or are you already off the board?”

He dismissed me again, looking between the Riders, as if weighing up which one was leader. “So. Do you have an answer for me?” he said finally, looking at Alejandro. “I’m assuming you’re the one empowered to tell me, since it can’t be my brother.” Fox laughed, but I was glad to see that Wolf didn’t react to the jibe, except to grip his sword more tightly.