Queen of the Dark Things (45 page)

She stood up from the couch, emboldened, unyielding. “I can handle myself.”

“I know. But I only want you here if you want to be here.”

“I've nowhere else I'd rather be.”

Colby pulled a folded sheet of paper from his pocket, handing it to her. “Memorize these. They have to be perfect, down to the last detail.”

Austin unfolded it, eyeing it suspiciously. She frowned a little. “Are these what I think they are?”

“Yes.”

“How were you planning to—”

“I wasn't.”

“You knew,” she said, cocking an eyebrow.

“I guessed.”

“You
guessed
.”

“When we were kids I watched Kaycee wade into a billabong as a bunyip crawled out. It came after her, tried to kill her. She jumped on its back, laughing, riding it around like she was breaking a bronco. When I think of her, that's what I remember most.”

“What does that even have to do with—”

“She's marching around in the dark with an army of kutji. She's gotten herself the ring of Solomon and enslaved five of the most powerful assholes ever to walk the earth. What, do you imagine, she fears? Anything?”

“No.”

“You're powerful, Austin. But she isn't afraid of you. And you're smart. It wasn't going to take you long to realize that she wasn't going to stop. I figured you might come around.”

Austin glared at Colby as the pieces fell together. “You sent me out there.”

“No, I told you
not
to go out there.”

“Because you knew I would.”

Colby smirked, nodding a little.

“You son of a—”

Colby moved in; he didn't have much time. He ran his hand through her blond tresses, his fingers tickling the top of her ear, then back around to her neck. Pulling her close he kissed her hard. His whole body went wobbly, his stomach flipping, toes curling. Every molecule in his body tingled like he was about to pass out. Austin pushed him back.

“What the hell are you doing?” she asked, her eyes hard, nose wrinkled.

“I didn't want to die not having done that.”

“No,” she said. “I suppose not.”

Then she grabbed him by the collar of his shirt with both hands, pulled his chest to hers, and kissed him back. For a moment there was nothing else in the world. Just two pairs of lips, eyes closed tight, noses brushing. She tasted like the city smelled in the spring, hints of jasmine, mountain laurel. He wrapped his arms around her, pulled her tighter, her own grip on his shirt refusing to yield. They kissed as if nothing else mattered, and for a moment, it didn't.

They relaxed, eased away from each other, eyes locked, hearts thundering beneath the thin fabric of their T-shirts. Their breath short, shallow. “What the hell, Colby?” she whispered.

“It's about damn time,” said Yashar. “I was tired of watching you two fumble around like fucking schoolkids.”

Colby turned bright red, ran his fingers through his hair nervously, looking away. Austin grabbed his chin with a single hand, pulled his face toward hers. “We will do that again.”

Colby swallowed hard. “Even if I live through tonight, you may not want to.”

“You will make it through tonight.”

“If I do, you buy the beer.”

“Deal.”

“So now that we've got that out of the way,” said Yashar, “what do you need me to do?”

Colby looked over at him, still trying to catch his breath, slow his racing heart. “I need you to get me a gun.”

C
HAPTER
58

H
IGH
M
OON

T
he Barton Creek Greenbelt is a stretch of land over seven miles long running through the southern tip of Austin proper. By day it is a series of hiking and biking trails chiseled out of limestone cliffs and crags, covered with dense trees and scrub, filled with folks of all sorts, trying, for an afternoon, to imagine they don't live in one of the country's largest cities. But at night it shuts down, clears out, and becomes a playground for fairies. At least it used to, before Colby came along.

Now it had emptied for good, leaving the night to loneliness. There were rumors that some fairies had taken to sneaking back in, to dance through the trails and chase the moon across the sky. But those came to an end when Colby happened upon a redcap who had crossed over into the city limits. That's when everyone knew he was serious and that Austin, for a time, was no longer theirs.

It was night and Colby stood wearing a ragged hoodie and an old pair of jeans, shovel in hand, in the middle of a large swath of open ground, a path through which the rainwaters ran when the thunderstorms found their way into the city. After a hard rain, the spot where he stood could be as deep as six feet underwater. Now it was a patch of rock and sand, carved out between two limestone shores. It had been threatening to rain for weeks, but nothing had come of it, Austin slowly browning without it, the land growing dusty, dry.

The sun had set slowly behind him twenty minutes ago and the pinks had turned to violets and soon would turn to black. The shadows crept long over the greenbelt, patches of wood already fully in their grip, dark and ominous. Soon the only light would be that spilled by the rising moon. He needed to finish his hole. It was shallow, six inches deep already. Beside him a mound, hidden beneath an old sheet, rested, waiting for the right moment, a single bowl sitting atop it.

Apart from that, he was alone.

He heard the flapping first, the flutter of wings deep in the woods flanking both sides of him. Then he saw the dark shapes against the fading sky. Soon he'd hear the caws. He knew it. They wouldn't be able to help themselves. She was coming, just over the ridge in front of him, no doubt with her royal court of dukes in tow.

Then she appeared, first as a massive shadow on the ridge, the details filling in with the remaining light as she approached. She was smaller than he remembered, still clad in her purple pajamas with the bright yellow stars, mammoth bunyip beneath her, carrying her toward him with a careful trot. At once Colby recognized the same little girl he'd known without a single detail out of place. The only difference was the look on her face. It was colder now, hateful, unrelenting. Her eyes, when he could finally make them out, held nothing but contempt and confidence.

Behind her strode the five dukes in a V formation, each looking ready for a fight. Just behind them hobbled her emaciated body, so tired and weak that it looked as if it would topple over at any moment. The trees on both sides of the floodplain had lined with crows, the last of them perching as the Queen of the Dark Things came to a stop some twenty feet from him. The bunyip growled, its fur bristling, its head rearing back. She tugged on its fur, shushing it quietly.

Colby spiked the shovel into the dirt, the crisp, shrill sound of metal against dry earth barking into the night. He leaned into the handle, pulling up a healthy clump of earth, dumping it just to the side of the hole.

“You bring that to dig your own grave?” asked the Queen of the Dark Things.

“Nope,” said Colby, unconcerned with the threat. “I'm digging yours.”

“I doubt that. If you wanted to kill me—the way you do it—there'd be nothing left to bury.”

“Oh, I can't do it that way. You're too strong for that and you know it. There's not a creature alive—or dead for that matter—that can best you will against will. No, if I want to kill you, I'm going to have to do it with this hole right here. And a gun. But we'll get to that later.”

“You're going to kill me with a hole?”

Colby pointed to the sheet-covered mound beside him. “And this. And a gun.” He knelt beside the hole, picking up a handful of earth, smelling it deeply. “This'll do. You should come over and take a whiff.”

“Like hell.”

“Oh, so it's true. The Queen of the Dark Things is scared of me after all. Me and my hole.”

The Queen's bunyip took a contemptuous step toward Colby. Colby wagged a disapproving finger, tsking, then stood back up. The bunyip took a single, anxious step backward.

The Queen gripped the bunyip's fur, spurring it on with her heels.

“I wouldn't,” said Colby.

The Queen whistled and her body shuffled forward, struggling over the uneven ground. “This ends tonight.”

Colby shook his head. “It's already over. It ended the moment you came over that ridge.”

“So you are digging your own grave.”

“No, I'm just waiting for the rain to fill the billabong.”

“What does that even mean?”

“It's something Mandu said.”

“Fuck that old man,” she spat.

“I wouldn't be too hasty to condemn him. He liked you.”

“He had a funny way of showing it.”

“He did. I didn't understand it myself until just a little while ago. But then I saw it.”

“Saw what?” she asked, growing impatient.

“The empty billabong waiting for the rain.”

“He taught you how to speak in riddles. Cute.”

“Destiny. The empty billabong is our destiny. It was dug out by the spirits a long time ago. They were just waiting for someone to bring the rain. And the moment you came over the ridge, here, to find me, you did just that.”

“I brought the rain.”

“You did,” he said.

She looked around, exaggerating her own surprise. “I don't see any rain.”

Colby pointed at the kutji and then the demons and then the bunyip beneath her. “And I see nothing but rain.”

The kutji grew restless in the trees, pacing to and fro on their branches, cawing angrily into the coming night.

“I'm tired of this,” she said. “I'm tired of your riddles. You know what I want, don't you?”

“I do.”

“So do it.”

“You know I can't. So why don't you just release those demons and give back the ring?”

“Same reason as you, I reckon. They'll tear me apart otherwise.”

“They've really got us up against it, don't they?”

She nodded. “One of us has to die.”

“And the other has to be damned.”

“No way around it,” said the Queen.

“None,” said Colby.

“I'm sorry it has to end this way.”

Colby cocked his head. “You know, I'm really not. It bothered me for a while, really tore me up. But we've had this coming for a long time, you and I. Tonight we pay up. I'm good with that.”

“I like the poetry of that,” she said. “Especially since you're going to die the way you left me to.” She pointed around at the kutji. “At their hands.” The kutji went wild, the greenbelt swelling with the cacophony of birdcalls.

Colby smiled. “But you didn't die.”

“Only because I wouldn't let them kill me.”

“I figure I'll do the same.”

“We'll see. Dark things! Kill him!”

The crows took to the air, the thrash of their wings like a thousand drums beating out of sync.

Colby reacted, grabbing the bowl off the top of the mound, casting it aside, yanking the sheet off with a single tug, revealing what was beneath. It was a basket. A simple, wicker, woven basket, nearly four hundred years old. Inside were the shriveled, shadowy remains of several dozen hands.

He picked up the basket and flung its contents out over the ground, scattering the hands in a wide arc well past the hole.

The kutji shifted forms in midair, their stumpy, malformed bodies flailing as they fell, screaming in unison, “OUR HANDS!” They hit the ground running, tearing across the broken earth, no longer interested in Colby. They lunged, each scrambling for the hand landing nearest him, pouncing to the ground like cats on rodents, clumsily shoving the severed end onto their dull nubs. Few of them actually found their own hands, but that fact didn't stop a one of them from putting them on. Some ended up oversize, almost too big for their bodies, while others ended up too small, their hand looking withered, shrunken, a bit of extra wrist poking out on each side. A few even ended up sideways or upside down, grasping upward, resting out away from the body.

And as the pack hooted, celebrating, making themselves mostly whole, Colby calmly picked up the discarded bowl, dropped it upside down in the hole, and covered it up by sliding the small mound of dirt back in place with his foot. He gave the dirt a few quick stamps to tamp it down, then stepped back with a proud, smarmy smirk.

“Shit,” muttered Dantalion, at once recognizing what was happening. He looked around fretfully, terrified of the very ground around him. He motioned to the other demons who were equally disquieted.

“You were saying?” asked Colby.

The kutji looked up from admiring their hands, spying Colby, unafraid of them, no more than twenty feet away.

“Kill him!” yelled the Queen.

They nodded and lunged once more, running on all fours before slamming headlong into an invisible wall. They stopped in place, stunned, confused. Then they clawed at the wall in front of them, screeching in mortal terror.

“You ever hear of an incantation bowl?” asked Colby of the Queen.

“What?”

“Incantation bowls. Otherwise known by their lesser known name—Babylonian Demon Traps.”

“What the hell did you do?”

Colby took a few casual steps backward, putting his hands behind him as if lecturing to a symposium. He looked down, taking one more step, nodding, and stopped. “The Babylonians didn't care much for demons. This was back before the veil fell, of course, so they knew very well that demons were real. They could see them.”

“Skip the history lesson.”

“I don't think I will. You see, the Babylonians figured out the power of belief. At some point, some genius invented these bowls. They'd mold them, carve symbols into them—often with the names of angels or their god—then bury them in the ground, upside down. Usually at the four corners of the foundation of their house. Spirits can't touch the things. And once there are at least four of them,” he said, pointing to the filled-in hole and three more like it around it, “no spirit can cross the unbroken line between them.”