“Where is who?”
The huldra stirred, and I felt a tingling creep up my spine.
“The brunette. Tall thin lady. I imagine by now she’s used bad language, and has probably made numerous suggestions as to what you can do with your mask and your swords.”
Father Foon began to gobble out a denial, but the huldra whispered to me, and I parted the ranks of soldiers with a single quiet Word and brought my Darla, kicking and trying to scream around the gag in her mouth, up through the floor in a burst of warped, wet planks.
“Hello, darling,” I said, as I drew her to my side. “Have these persons been less than polite to you?”
Father Foon was pale. Pale as he watched Darla float and glide, pale as he saw the huldra in my hand, paler still as I let him see the light beginning to burn in my eyes.
“I threatened you with damnation earlier.” His voice was suddenly quiet. “I did not expect to see it take you so soon.”
I laughed and made the gag fall away from Darla’s mouth, made the ropes at her wrists loosen and drop. She touched me, wrapping her arms around my waist, but then she drew them back, as if stung.
“You did indeed,” I said. “Not so very long before you went forth intent on committing murder.”
“This was not murder. We exterminated a nest of vampires.”
“You exterminated the wrong nest.” I met Darla’s gaze, and she frowned. “The main party was downtown. Practically in the shadow of your steeple. How long have you known, Father? Was it just not worth getting your hands dirty until Hisvin got involved?”
“We knew nothing until yesterday.”
“Nothing? Nothing at all? Why, Father, isn’t lying one of the sins you and your masked ilk are always babbling on about?”
“Believe what you will,” snapped the Father. “We would not have borne such an abomination to continue, had we known of it. They used the sacraments of the Church, they will pay, rest assured they will pay.”
I smiled. “Oh, they have paid. Priests and halfdead alike. By my hand, Father. By my hand.”
Father Foon rocked on his feet, exchanged looks with a soldier, swallowed.
“And what of her?” I asked, motioning to Darla, who stood close but refused to touch me. “Why was she not released from her bonds, after her captors were slain? Seems an odd way to rescue someone, leaving them tied and gagged. Unless, of course, you decided the best way to ensure her blessed and eternal silence was with a few swift blows from a churchman’s sword?”
Father Foon blustered. The huldra whispered, showing me things, and I chuckled at the image of all his soldiers boiling in their armor.
Darla caught my arm.
“Markhat,” she said. “Look at me.”
She pulled me close, wincing, as though my touch caused her pain. Later she would tell me it had, that my skin burned and moved under her hands, that as long as she touched me she heard strange echoes and snatches of odd words and long, lingering screams.
“You fool,” she said, and she reached up and stroked my cheek. “Oh, you fool, what have you done?”
“What I had to do.” My throat grew tight. “Had to make them pay.”
“Pay?”
“You were dead,” I said. “They killed you. Hurt you. I had to make them hurt.”
Darla regarded me with confusion for a long moment. Father Foon looked on, uncertain, and I could see him weigh the worth of having his soldiers strike us down where we stood.
I heard a shout, from outside. A shout and a flash of dim light.
Then there were torches. Torches, and voices, and Evis, and his men, all his men, quiet halfdead and panting, soaked humans alike.
“I am not dead,” said Darla. She spoke slowly and carefully. “They did not hurt me.” Evis moved to stand at her side, and then I heard Mama wheezing and slogging through the mud, heard her cry out Darla’s name.
“They took me. Held me here. But I am alive, Markhat. Whatever that thing is in your hand, whatever you thought you had to have-you don’t need it anymore. I’m alive. You’re alive. It’s over. We can go home now.”
I knew what she was saying. I understood it. But I also knew she had died, I remembered that too, remembered that her blood still flecked my desk, remembered telling the huldra my name, my secret birth name, that no one save my dead mother ever knew.
“Boy,” said Mama. She had my missing boot, wrested from the mud, and I remember thinking what an odd thing it was for her to have. She was bawling, hair slicked with rain, tiny Hog eyes sparkling and red in Evis’s torchlight. “Boy, listen to her, she ain’t dead, never was.”
The huldra spoke again. It showed me again my grief, my anger, my need to take the world by the throat and throttle it until every last bit of life fled it, my need to raise up a wall of flames and burn all that I hated to powder and ash.
Two worlds. Darla dead, Darla alive. One was a lie. But I could see both, feel both, experience both-and the huldra, it knew my name.
I looked, and I saw Mama and my boot, Evis and his men, and Father Foon backed into a corner. But there was no Darla.
I felt myself begin to change again, felt myself begin to rise into the night, to join the shadows in that high cold place where words flocked and fled.
Darla stood on tip-toe, I am told, and took my face in her hands and despite the pain of my lips on hers, she kissed me.
She kissed me, and there was no lie in it. And in an instant all the dark magics and the rage and the lust for vengeance cowered, overshadowed by a much older magic that smelled of perfume and was warm and yielding in my arms.
I do remember crushing the huldra. I do remember hearing it scream.
And then both worlds broke apart, truth and lies swept apart in a loud and rushing flood, and I tumbled along with both as the darkness closed swiftly over my head.
Chapter Fourteen
And now, it is summer.
Flowers bloom out of cracks in the sidewalks. Mama’s window box is a wild green shower of straggly looking herbs. It rains all the damned time, the days are hot and my back has been aching ever since that night I walked with the huldra.
I sat at my desk, nursing another cup of Mama’s foul black tea. I would pour the stuff out, back in the alley, but I must admit it does help with the dreams. If I skip a day of Mama’s tea, I walk Rannit in my dreams all that night. I walk with my head just below the clouds and a dry rustling voice whispering nonsense words singsong in the back of my mind.
Maybe the tea does other things too. For the longest time, Three-leg Cat arched his back and hissed when I came in the room. Now he’ll sit on my desk, purr and let me scratch his battle-scarred head, just like the old days.
A loaf of bread steamed on my desk, another gift from the grateful Hoobins. Bread and a pair of clean white long-sleeved shirts with fancy pearl buttons up the front and the button-down collar that Martha herself created. Elegance, as Martha named the dress-shop, was doing well. The pair of shirts she’d given me would cost fifty half- crowns, at any haberdasher’s on Bathways.
Martha had even smiled at me, for the very first time, when they’d dropped the bundles off earlier that day. Smiled, and said hello, and hadn’t rushed out of the room like I’d sprouted bright yellow fangs and big black bat wings.
