Shadowlands (63 page)

“I don’t need that,” Fox said. “You won’t kill me. You’re still a Hound.” From his tone you would think we were all sitting in the lounge, having a nice conversation as we waited for our train. “That’s your only value to them, and they’re using it,
and
you. How does it feel to be the thing of no account? The unimportant one?”

“I am of the High Prince’s
fara’ip
.”

“Oh, sure, along with every bird in the sky, every fish in the water, every mouse and every rabbit—every
vegetable
. Everyone and everything in the Lands belongs to the High Prince, and the High Prince belongs to each and every one of them.” Fox took a breath, spreading out his hands like he was welcoming Wolf in. “And not a single one of them is ever going to let you forget that you once ran with the Hunt. Come back to us, Wolf. Come back where you belong. I’ll let you be second to me. That’s got to be better than what you are now. They all see you as tainted, and you’ll
never
be one of them.”

Wolf’s face had been calm, assured, waiting for his moment to speak, right up until Fox said the word “tainted.” Then I saw Wolf’s face change, and I knew that Fox’s words spoke to him in a way maybe no one but me would understand. And not only because I’d felt this in him, this fear that there
was
a taint in him, never to come clean. That was the real chink in his armor, not just his love for his brother—you can kill the thing you love, if you really need to—and not just the guilt Fox made him feel.

It was the fear that he might never belong anywhere else but the Hunt. That’s what was stopping Wolf from speaking. The fear that Fox was right.

“You don’t need to be one of them,” I managed to gasp through my bruised throat. “This isn’t the only choice you’ve got—either Ride with the Riders, or Hunt with the Hunt. There’s another option.”

“Oh, really? Now dinner has an opinion?” Fox was letting me speak because he didn’t believe anything I could say would influence Wolf more than he could himself. But Fox didn’t realize that I knew Wolf better than he knew him. I knew Wolf better than he knew himself.

“You can wolf with the wolves,” I said. He needed to belong—something I understood all too well. Would he be brave enough to stop looking to belong to someone else, and start asking people to belong to him? I shifted until I was sitting up, hissing at the stab in my side, sharper now than the dull ache of my maimed hand. “You don’t need to be one of them, either a Rider or a Hound. You can be one of yourself. Hell, start a new Pack, a
fara’ip
of your own. So you have a talent that other people value and use, and maybe without it you would have been left to yourself, living an uneventful life, and
that makes it hard for you to accept it.” Again, I knew that I was speaking for more than Wolf now. I was also speaking about myself, and about the life I might have had if I hadn’t been Collected.

“But your talent also made you important to people, kept you alive and safe when circumstances might have overwhelmed you.” Still talking about myself. “Sure, other people use the talent, but don’t you see?
You
can use it, too. It’s yours. It’s valuable to
you
. You can make it work for
you
.”

Wolf was looking at me now, and his face changed again, as I had hoped it would, and it seemed that my pain faded away as his gray eyes grew warm and his lips began to smile. But I wasn’t the only one who saw the change, and knew for certain what it meant. With a howl of the darkest rage and despair, Fox struck.

Nik had gone down to one knee, and Alejandro found himself almost leaning against the boy’s shoulder, unsure which of them was propping the other one up.
How many bullets can he have remaining?
Alejandro thought. As he parried yet another slash, he became aware of the numbness down the right side of his body, the burning in the muscles of his arms, and the growing weight of his sword. The end was here. Now. Help would not arrive in time.

The noise of the other gunshots, the falling of the rocks, was already fading away. The number of the Hunt around them increased, notwithstanding the ones he had killed. Some of these—in Rider shape—had gone up into the higher sections of the arena, attacking the Outsiders. There would be empty humans now, emptied again.

Alejandro gripped Nik’s shoulder just as a monumental CLAP! of air rocked them both, followed by an astonishing brightness, brighter by far than the beams of sunlight that had earlier illuminated the darkness. The space around where Alejandro and Nik stood gripping each other in a failing attempt to remain upright, was suddenly filled with figures in black, in greens and reds and purples, and with bright, swift
gra’if
. Alejandro sank to his knees, and Nik went down with him, barely softening his fall until he was lying on the cement floor.

“Healer!” He thought he had bellowed the word, bellowed it in the voice he would have used in the bullring. The voice he had many
times used to call “medic!” in other battlefields. He looked around and thought he saw Moon running toward him. Nik, the gun still in his hand, was saying something, but Alejandro could not hear him.

“Bring them,” he told the boy. “Bring your friends. I have
dra’aj
. Let them take it.”

He smiled and saluted the cheering crowds. He would get both ears today, and perhaps the tail.

I should have been terrified, but I think all my terror circuits were burned out. Either I was just too tired, and too hurt, or too many things had frightened me too recently for me to feel very much more. Like Wolf said, whatever was going to happen, was going to happen.
Que será, será. That’s
what the song meant. I’d wondered. I rubbed at my forehead with my uninjured hand, as if that would make my thoughts more orderly. I knew I should be feeling more, but every time I tried to take a deep breath, my side stabbed at me.

There wasn’t a lot of room in the Lounge, and they were circling each other in a narrow aisle, Fox with a chair he had grabbed up, and Wolf with his
gra’if
blade poised, left hand raised for balance. I looked around me for a weapon, something I could use to help, but Wolf and Fox moved so fast that they were mostly a blur, with every now and then something coming suddenly clear, like watching bad stop-motion.

—the chair was on the floor and Wolf slashed at a unicorn covered with sores and scraps of scales, its horn broken off.

—Wolf ducked under the belly of a dragon with hairy wings, cutting upward as it tried to grab at him.

—a bank of chairs exploded into shards of metal, bits of wood, and upholstery smeared with blood and ichor.

—they stood chest to chest, Wolf’s sword arm trapped under Fox’s arm, each gripping the other in a fierce hug, Fox’s teeth growing out to bite Wolf in the throat.

Wolf was trying
not
to kill him, I realized. Did he still think that somehow he could force his brother to be cured?

—Wolf, bleeding from a wound in his shoulder, with a thick green snake looped around his body, left hand holding its head away with a grip on its throat, right hand with blazing sword raised.

—a table shattered as Wolf staggered away from a towering kraken, slashing off a tentacle at its root.

—Wolf stood with his foot on his brother’s throat, Fox limp, eyes rolled up, bleeding from the stump of his right arm.

I staggered to my feet, gasping as the sharp pain of my broken ribs stabbed freshly, trying to breathe shallowly. Using the backs of a couple of the chairs that still stood upright and in one piece, I managed to make it around to where Wolf could see me without having to move his head. I touched him.

“Go ahead,” I said.

“If I kill him here, his
dra’aj
will be lost forever. All the
dra’aj
that he has taken in all his time.” He shut his eyes tight. “Nighthawk.”

I shook my head. Fox didn’t have Nighthawk’s
dra’aj
, but I couldn’t take the time to explain that now.

“Go ahead,” I said again. I already knew what he was planning. “Go. I’m okay here. Someone will come and help me.”

And they were gone.

I looked around me and swallowed. There would be water and who knew, maybe even food in the fridge.

Though it would take more than the cleaning crew to fix up what had happened to Union Station’s Panorama Lounge.

“A
RE YOU READY?” Wolf raised his hands as if to place them on my shoulders, but lowered them when I flinched. Everybody was being very careful not to touch me, and normally I would have really appreciated that. But just now it reminded me of how alone I was. I managed to nod.

“Ready as I’ll ever be.” I was hoping I’d imagined the flatness in my voice, but I doubted it. I sighed. I’d been doing that a lot lately.

“You don’t have to do this,” Nik said. He and Wolf exchanged glances. They’d been doing
that
a lot lately.

“Yeah, I do. You know I do.” It’s not that I’d been putting it off, but a part of me had definitely been relieved at the week or so it had taken to set this up.

Wolf undid the buttons of his shirt, exposing the dragon tattoo. The colors were so rich that they made the furniture in my living room drab. Wolf nodded at Nik, and the two of them clasped each other’s wrists. Nik had argued hard that another human should go with me, and even though Wolf had maintained that, first, it wasn’t necessary and, second, Nik wasn’t a regular human, he’d given in.

I swallowed and placed my hand flat on the center of the dragon.
At first, all I felt was the warmth of Wolf’s skin, and then I heard Ice Tor’s chuckle, and Wolf’s warmth became the heat from the forge, but before I could become afraid of the fall of the hatchet, the room around us dropped away and was replaced by one about half again as big. Soft light came from all directions, even the floor, diffused through what looked like the silk walls of a tent.

Cassandra, the High Prince of the Lands, was standing to one side of a table set with four armed chairs, plates, goblets, and platters of food.

“Where are we?” I said as both Nik and Wolf backed away.

“I’m not sure, exactly.” Cassandra was examining my face, her eyes huge and gray. “It’s a space Ice Tor arranged for me, when I explained that I could not go to you, and that you could not come to me.”

“I…” Suddenly my lips were trembling and my tongue wouldn’t work. Cassandra made a “tsk” sound and then I was in her arms. I stiffened, but instead of a cascade of smothering images I got nothing. Exactly nothing, except the strength and warmth of her arms around me, her hand patting me on the back, and the smell of saffron as I buried my face in the crook of her neck. I’d been unable to take this comfort from anyone else, afraid of what I’d read when I touched them. I wrapped my arms around her so tightly that I could feel the tiny scales on the mail she was wearing under the fine cloth of her shirt.

All of a sudden I was weeping. These were the tears that hadn’t come when they’d told me what had happened to Alejandro. I hadn’t even been able to say good-bye; he’d Faded while I was still waiting for help in the Panorama Lounge. His
dra’aj
was spread through most of the Outsiders who’d been in the Gardens that day, but it hurt me to touch them. The arms around me tightened.