rose. A knife that she had not even seen was suddenly in his hand, glinting in the firelight. A moment later a bizarre, lumpy shape came swinging down the hillside, sometimes upright, sometimes going on all fours. Before she could do more than take a frightened breath, the weird thing came to a sudden halt at the edge of the clearing and split into two pieces, one of which fell to the ground.
Mr. Walkwell straightened and prodded with his hoof at the bundle he had just dumped. He rolled it over, revealing a pale face and slack, open mouth. He looked up from the motionless man at his feet and cocked an eyebrow at Lucinda, who had shrunk back into Ragnar’s shadow.
“What is the child doing here?” He seemed more irritated than embarrassed to be standing in front of her naked, although he was so shaggy he might as well have been wearing trousers. Lucinda could not help staring. Even trousers would not have hidden the fact he had hooves instead of feet, and it was almost stranger to see him without his hat than without pants. Where his hair had blown back from his forehead in matted, sweaty curls she could see pale, circular marks-the place where his goat horns grew, she realized, although he had cut them off or filed them down. With his scraggly beard and the fire reflecting red in his eyes, he looked like the devil himself. Lucinda should have been terrified, but the face was still Mr. Walkwell’s, the man who hated cars and carved wooden toys for children.
“Don’t blame Ragnar. It’s… it’s my fault,” she said. “I was out looking for Tyler. I got lost, and then… I saw the fire… ”
Ragnar crouched beside the man Mr. Walkwell had dumped on the ground. The stranger was wearing dark clothes and a dark stocking cap. “Where did you find him?” Ragnar asked.
“Beside the Junction Road fence,” said Mr. Walkwell. “He only got a few steps past it. I came down on him from behind. He did not have time to see me.”
The old man had just run out to Junction Road, then run back carrying a large man on his back, all in a quarter of an hour or less, Lucinda realized. Here was another thing Tyler had been right about all along-Mr. Walkwell wasn’t just inhumanly strong, he wasn’t human at all.
“Is… is he dead?” Lucinda asked.
Ragnar shook his head. “Simos has only stunned him. We want these people to know they are not welcome, and for that they must live to tell those who have hired them.” He had finished going through the man’s pockets. “Empty, of course. But I will wager that if you find his car, you may also find a telephone with the number for that greedy man, Stillman.” Ragnar sighed heavily. “He is digging to see what he can find, or perhaps just reminding us he is out there. This is a problem that is not going away.”
“I don’t understand,” Lucinda asked. “Who is Stillman?”
“A bad man. A rich man too. He is a descendant of the Tinker family and he wants this farm. Anything else, Gideon will have to tell you himself.”
“If I find the telephone, I will bring it back. I do not understand those things and I do not want to,” Mr. Walkwell said. He looked sternly at Lucinda, as though she might have been about to peddle him a cell phone herself. “It makes my head itch even listening to people talking into one.”
“They hardly work here, anyhow,” Ragnar said. He had pulled off the unconscious man’s clothes, leaving him in only his underpants, socks, and undershirt. He didn’t look very dangerous now. “He is ready, Simos.”
Mr. Walkwell leaned down and scooped the man up like a bag of groceries, then slung him across his shoulder. “I will take him back. He and his master will have something to think about when he wakes up.”
A moment later he had bounded off, so quickly that Lucinda had completely missed the point between going and gone. She could smell him, though, a tang that was not unpleasant, but still made her nostrils twitch.
“As for you, we take you back to the house,” Ragnar said. “You have had enough questions answered for one night, yes?”
Lucinda nodded. Tyler would be safe. How could anything bad happen to him with a magical creature like Mr. Walkwell guarding the farm?
Chapter 20
Last One
T yler wasn’t falling anymore. Now he seemed to be floating in darkness, but floating didn’t come close to describing how uncomfortable he was. He was so dizzy that ordinarily he would have felt sick to his stomach-but he couldn’t find his stomach. It didn’t even seem like he had a body. It seemed as though he was only a brain floating in some jar of dark liquid, eyeless, voiceless, helpless.
But he was still cold-shockingly, shiveringly cold. No body, but still freezing-how unfair could things get?
Tyler tried to move and found he could feel his body a little, but it seemed impossibly distant, as though his head was a kite and the rest of him was a mile below him holding the string. He began to wonder if something really bad had happened to him. Was he unconscious? Crippled? Worse, was he dead?
A kind of angry strength surged through him at the thought. Whatever was going on, he wasn’t just going to accept it. Tyler Jenkins didn’t just let things happen to him-he made things happen. He exerted all the strength of his thoughts to push the darkness away, to go somewhere, to wake up, to do something.
Nothing happened.
He tried again and again. He thought of heroic things. He thought of terrible things and then told himself only he could stop them from happening. He thought of the people he loved-his mom, his dad, even Lucinda (yes, he supposed he really did love her, as much of a pain as she was sometimes)-but none of these thoughts did anything to change the terrible facts. There was nothing to push against. There was nothing to get away from. He was lost in complete emptiness, floating in unending black like a bubble in a tar pit.
Tyler cried, then, or at least he thought he did. It was hard to tell.
He didn’t know how long he’d been drifting helplessly when he realized for the first time that although he still could not tell up from down or left from right, the blackness no longer seemed like a single uniform thing. He could feel little differences that, if he had been in water, would have been changes in pressure, or colder or warmer currents. Some bits of the darkness seemed to be flowing over him, others to be flowing away. Some seemed more inviting, some less. But did it mean anything?
When he felt that warmer current again (he could just as accurately have called it “clearer” or “gentler” or even just “safer”) he first tried to follow it, but after considering for a moment he changed his direction, doing his best to reach out in the direction from which this new feeling came-better to be moving toward whatever caused that feeling of greater safety, he thought, than away from it. To his relief, he thought he could actually feel himself beginning to move, although not in any normal way.
Things were changing. He felt it-he was certain. As the currents of black washed over and through him, the different sensations began to seem so strong that he almost felt he could name them, although the words that floated up in his thoughts were obviously nonsense, things like greenward and whenwise, and once he even heard a voice in his head saying, “A half-turn toward yes, but on the nextward-facing side.” Still, he didn’t have to understand how it worked to use it-it was a bit like typing class. After you got the hang of how to do it, you didn’t even have to look down at your fingers on the keyboard anymore, you just watched the words appear on the screen in front of you. He was learning-that was what he was doing. He just didn’t know what exactly was being learned.
After a timeless time, Tyler began to see the changes he had at first only felt. Light was growing around him-not a single glow, but streaks and sparks, as though reality itself was starting up again, like a video game that had been stuck. Something drew him toward one of the smears of light, then a moment later the glare was all around him-and then he fell through.
Cold, was his first thought. He could feel ground under his feet, hear wind in his ears. But it’s still so cold!
His second thought was, Christmas. Because everything around him was white, white, white-the whole world was covered in snow. Trees, rocks, the side of a hill, all banked and drowned in white. A winter wilderness. The bitter wind even brought snow swirling up from the drifts on the ground, like puffs of smoke. Tyler wasn’t wearing anything but his ordinary clothes, nothing warmer than a sweatshirt to keep out this icy chill. His lost
