Shadowlands Read online

  Chapter Eight

  I’D THOUGHT WE’D BE OFF to the Lands right away, but once Wolf had gone it didn’t take me long to figure out that Alejandro had no intention of having his wounds looked at.

  “Just let me put on some shoes,” I said to him. “How long do you think we’re going to be? Should we ask Barb to feed Oro?”

  But Alejandro only shook his head. “There is no need for us to go anywhere. We cannot even know if she will help me.”

  “But she’s your High Prince.” I sat down in the seat Wolf had vacated. I knew that tone, we were in for another argument. “Of course she has to help you—look, she’s sent Wolf here to let all of you know about her, hasn’t she? Why would she do that if she didn’t mean to help you?”

  “I cannot believe that you have so quickly forgotten my promise to the Outsiders.” A gesture stopped what I was about to say. “I have contacted the others I know,” he said. “Asking if they have also seen reports of occurrences similar to what is being called the High Park flu. Some have not yet replied. I am needed here, querida, I cannot go to the Lands.”

  I opened my mouth and closed it again without speaking. Obviously, there wasn’t any point in arguing that getting medical attention might actually be of some help. The wound wasn’t going to heal, but what could I say? That Alejandro wouldn’t go because it would look as though he were following Wolf’s instructions? Oh, yeah, I knew where that would get me.

  Okay, then. If the direct approach wouldn’t work…

  “How fast is this poison supposed to work? How about if we wait until your friends get back to you, and then go, if you aren’t any better?”

  That was a compromise he could agree to, but he still wasn’t ready to give in completely. “I cannot leave you alone and unprotected. The Hunt has already shown an interest in you—”

  “And that’s another reason to go, to take the news about the Hunt and these stable Hounds. The High Prince needs to be told about this.” I waited, but his face showed no change. I sighed. “Look, if you’re worried about me, I could go with you.”

  “Ay, querida, estoy entre la espada y la pared.”

  That almost made me smile. The Spanish expression for “between a rock and a hard place” was very apt, considering the number of swords there were around. “It can’t be as bad as all that.”

  He shut his eyes and shook his head. “If you stay, there is the Hunt, and if you go…”

  I exhaled through my nose, good and loud. “What’s so dangerous there?” I asked. “Isn’t the bad guy gone, and the good guys in charge? I’ve met some of the People already; I’m not likely to be spooked. Besides, I’ve got as much right to go as any other human who’s been taken to the Lands, maybe more. I should be allowed to visit the ancestral home of my forebears.”

  “Ah, but the People you have met have been long in the Shadowlands, and learned to live with humans, to value them, to form fara’ips.” Alejandro began to pace. “The People of the Lands do not live like humans, in cities. Fara’ips of Riders are based on Ward or Guidebeast or even shared philosophy, as with the Wild Riders, who rove freely, always Moving, while others, like the Griffin Lords, have strongholds. And that is only true of Riders.” He stopped pacing and faced me. “Solitaries are truly as their name describes them, living entirely apart and may go the whole of their lives without having contact with any one else. Naturals.” He shrugged. “They live as they live, how could they not?”

  I thought I knew what he meant. I’d met the Natural who lived in the fountain in Madrid. At least, that’s how I’d always spoken of her. But the truth was she didn’t live in the fountain, she was the fountain. How would someone like her, but one who had never seen a human being, react to meeting one for the very first time? Still…

  “There must be some who’ve met humans before.”

  “And there are some who believe humans are only myths,” Alejandro countered. “And others who might very well treat you as though you were merely an interesting type of animal—a pet. I would not have you exposed to such…disrespect.”

  I don’t think that’s exactly what he’d meant to say. “But that’s my lookout, I should think. I mean, if it’s safe otherwise, I’m willing to take the chance of being looked down on. And even if it isn’t,” he opened his mouth again and I interrupted him. “You’ve just admitted you don’t think it’s any safer to stay here.”

  Alejandro leaned back in his chair, crossed one leg over the other and started swinging his foot. “You are right. I must not leave you alone. Please.” He held up his hand as I opened my mouth. “That is not what I meant. Though you must be reasonable, my dear one. Surely you see that taking precautions is essential. Even small children are taught to look for cars before stepping into the street.”

  “Okay.” I nodded. “Okay. I’ll even concede that extraordinary circumstances call for extraordinary precautions. I just don’t want to be kept locked away.” My voice shook a bit on these last words, but Alejandro pretended not to notice.

  “Very well. If I go to the Lands, you shall go with me.”

  I don’t know if I could have gotten him to agree to more, but just then the doorbell rang. Once again Alejandro got to the door ahead of me, but I knew who would be standing there just the same.

  “Val.” Nik Polihronidis looked over Alejandro’s shoulder at me and smiled, making my stomach flutter. The two men followed me back through the house, but something made me offer Nik a seat in the dining room. Somehow I couldn’t sit down with him in the same place I’d been sitting with Wolf. Alejandro went through to the kitchen to make coffee.

  “Okay, so that’s one less Hound, and one who isn’t a Hound, Yves tells me.” It wasn’t a question, but Nik turned to me and raised his eyebrows.

  “That’s right,” I said.

  “So you won’t mind telling me how you know?”

  Today Nik’s suit was a tan linen, with a very faint pale blue chalk line that was picked up by his shirt. He wasn’t wearing a tie, but his question had come out just like we were in a courtroom.

  My jaw actually dropped open. Crap. I’d forgotten that he didn’t know. Alejandro put the tray with coffee cups, sugar, and heated milk on the ledge of the pass-through and came into the room himself, picking up the tray again and placing it on the table.

  “Querida,” he said. He was leaving it up to me, to handle as I wanted, and the knowledge that he believed I could gave me the courage to do so.

  “I’m psychic,” I said. When I’d told Wolf the same thing earlier that morning, he’d used a better word. “I’m a Truthreader.”

  I don’t know what I was expecting, but Nik took his coffee from Alejandro, shook his head at the milk, and accepted the sugar without shifting an eyebrow.

  “I remember in my village, a friend of my ya-ya’s was supposed to have the sight.” His voice was quiet, and he spoke with his eyes almost closed, looking back what I knew was quite a long way. He stirred his coffee, and looked at me from underneath his eyebrows. “That was a very long time ago, and I don’t remember her being very good.”

  “Valory is excellent,” Alejandro said.

  Nik began to nod with the air of someone who’d just made a discovery. “All that stuff at the Christie yesterday,” he said. “You’re not a profiler at all, that was all stuff you picked up directly.”

  “He’s a much worse man than I told you about,” I said. “But you only needed enough to turn down his application.”

  “What did you see when you touched Elaine—” he held up his hand. “No, don’t tell me.” He took a sip of his coffee and set it down with great care on the table. He turned to Alejandro. “Okay, so what’s our next move?”

  I blinked. I should have been relieved that Nik wasn’t having hysterics, and pleased that he accepted my talent so easily. So why was I annoyed? Hadn’t I always wanted to be accepted as just an ordinary girl?

  Alejandro spread his hands. “I have contacted my acquaintance among the Riders here. N
ot many of them bear gra’if, but we must hope that those who do will be inclined to help us.”

  “Why should that make a difference?”

  “I am not certain it does, but the Songs say the Hunt can only be destroyed by someone who bears gra’if—which is much the same as saying ‘by a Rider.’ Very few of the People can bear it, or will make the attempt.”

  “What is it? Can we get some?”

  In answer, Alejandro laid his walking stick on the coffee table between us. I watched Nik’s face, saw his eyes widen as the stick became a sword. The gra’if metal glittered as if under moving lights. Nik put out his hand to stroke the hilt, but was unable to touch it.

  “I have heard that it is possible for someone who bears gra’if to touch the gra’if of another,” Alejandro said. “Indeed, among the Wild Riders, who have their own tales and legends of such things, it is the custom for those who wed to exchange some piece of it. As you see, those who do not bear it cannot touch it at all.”

  Nik leaned forward, but I already knew that no matter how closely he looked, he wouldn’t be able to make out any details on the blade. “What’s it made of?”

  “Metal mined in the Glaso’ok Mountains of the North, by Trolls and Goblins. Forged using the bearer’s own blood by Solitary smiths.” Alejandro picked up the blade and set it leaning against the arm of his chair. “No one else knows how it is done.”

  “Okay. So that’s a dead end.” Nik drummed on the table with his fingers. “Look, we’ll take any help you can give us, any at all, but—and no offense meant—how much can you do? Is there any other way you could get reinforcements?”

  “Nik, what is it you’re not telling us?”

  He took in a lungful of air and let it out slowly. “Can I use your Internet?”

  Something told me Nik wanted more than a smartphone, so we took him upstairs to the spare room we’d set up as my office. Alejandro had all the latest stuff up there, and it only took Nik a minute to access the CBC News site.

  I frowned as the headlines popped up. Seven students from a private school had been found dead, an apparent suicide pact. I looked up at Nik, but he pointed back at the screen. Names were being withheld pending notification of next of kin.

  “The poor children,” Alejandro said, reading over my shoulder. “Their poor parents.”

  “The parents are going to say the kids didn’t have any reason to do this, and no one’s going to believe them.”

  Apparently, there had been a rise in suicides over the last six months, and not merely among the young.

  “They don’t mention High Park flu,” I said.

  “The CBC won’t,” Nik said. “But wait, look at this.” He went to another site and scrolled slowly though a number of pages, clicking on links for related items. Some were news articles like the one we’d already seen, from the CBC, City, and CTV, others had the look of privately exchanged links, articles, blogs, and live journals. They all recounted the same kinds of events. An increase in the number of homeless found dead—unusual in the warmer weather. A husband bringing his catatonic wife into the emergency room. High Park flu—those words came up over and over. Three children drowned swimming off Centre Island while their parents drifted away in their canoe.

  “These are all items collected by Outsiders,” Nik said. “We’ve seen this kind of thing before—most recently in 1918, the so-called Spanish flu. So far, no one else has put together what we’ve seen.”

  “They don’t know what they’re looking at,” I said. “They don’t see the connections.”

  “Rise in depression, in suicide rates, hell, in PTSDs. And you can see there’ve been incidents in other places as well, in Rome, in Beijing, in New Delhi, Cairo, New Orleans.”

  “Where there are crossroads, or a Portal to the Lands,” Alejandro said.

  “Anywhere the Hunt might have come through,” I said.

  “Exactly.” Nik nodded. “It seems to start here, in Australia.” He clicked on a series of articles which were now several months old. “It spread out, though now the incidents seem to be dropping in other places, and rising here.” He turned to face us again. “You know the dra’aj I have isn’t my own.”

  I nodded. “Not what you were born with, anyway,” I said. “But it was freely given to you. Like that old man with Elaine.”

  “Right, exactly. But it’s like I said then, there’s only so much available, and there’s too many…”

  He looked at his empty coffee cup as if seeing it for the first time. He gestured at the computer. “We can’t help everyone, and there are more every day. How many can we save? Can you see what this might lead to? There’s only so many people dying of natural causes at any given time, only so much dra’aj available, even in cities larger than Toronto. Even if we could move all the stricken ones to say, Beijing, our organization couldn’t handle the influx. Our whole system would collapse. Maybe, if there were no new ones…”

  He turned to Alejandro. “Do you see, we appreciate your help—hell, we need your help, but we’re afraid it won’t be enough.”

  It seemed like it was someone else nodding, not me. I rubbed at my mouth, but the numbness I felt was everywhere.

  I knew what he wasn’t saying. An input of dra’aj wasn’t a permanent cure. Outsiders were like cups with tiny cracks, tires with slow leaks. They needed a regular supply of dra’aj to keep themselves sane and whole. There was a limit to how much they could be expected to do for newbies.

  And what was more, Nik had given Elaine the dra’aj he’d been expecting to use himself. That’s what old Harry in the palliative care ward had meant when he’d said “Not you?”

  “You can’t kill them all by yourself, can you? Soon enough? You talked about others, but if what you say about gra’if is true…Can you get anyone else?”

  I looked at Alejandro. He was rubbing the back of his calf with his hand. He caught me watching him and looked grim. Then he sighed like a parent who was about to give in, and shrugged.

  “Perhaps I can.”

  We can trust him. Stormwolf blinked unseeing at the ceiling that was lost in the darkness of his bedroom. Valory Martin’s words pricked at him like needles, sliding cold through his skin and touching with points of pain at unexpected softness. How could she be so certain? Remembering her eyes on him, he shivered, though the room was warm. The High Prince looked at him with the same eyes, though hers were gray and not the human’s warm caramel. Both women had dragon fire in their gazes. Wolf felt he understood the High Prince, even if not completely, but this Valory, what was she?

  A psychic, she had said. A kind of Truthreader, he had guessed. Get of a Rider, she had said, and that made more sense. That explained, if nothing else, the so faint smell of the Lands that had first set him, though in error, on her trail.

  It now seemed that several times, and in several places, he had made similar errors. There had been the scent/not scent of the man in the open square in Granada, and here, in and around the train station. These were accompanied by other smells, familiar smells, but off somehow, changed. Familiar, but not familiar enough.

  Did this mean he had been smelling the Hunt all along? Changed somehow, as the Sunward Rider and Valory had suggested?

  He threw off the covers, sat up, swung his feet to the floor, ran his hands through his hair. Had he been so close to his goal all along, and not known it? He drew in a great lungful of air and tried to order his thoughts. Concentrated on recalling the precise nature of these unidentified smells.

  The encounter with Stump in Granada. He’d noticed the scent crossing that of Nighthawk, and just before his old Pack mate had appeared.

  Twice now in Toronto. Once around the area where Valory’s trail had been crossed by running water. And the other…where had the other been?

  Stump. Stump was one of Badger’s Five. So they, for certain, had been left here in the Shadowlands. Who else? Why could he not remember clearly? Wolf gripped the edge of the mattress, letting go as he felt the heavy cloth
start to tear in his hands. Badger’s was not the only Five that had taken part in the Hunt for the Exile. Some had returned to the Lands with him, at the Basilisk’s command. Some had remained. If only he had been able to question Stump before killing him.

  Wolf rubbed his face. He was afraid to think. We can trust him. How could she know?

  He had tried to set aside all thoughts of his life as a Hound ever since the High Prince cured him of being one. But when she decided to send him back to the Shadowlands, one thought had resurfaced, unbidden and unwanted. Was his brother here? Could he and the others be saved, as Wolf had been saved? Now, he needed to remember everything.

  The hunger. The need. Wolf squeezed his eyes shut. If he was going to remember, he would have to face even that. How everything smelled, how easily it could be tracked, especially the dra’aj, like a heavy perfume that lingered in the air. The tracking he could still do. It was the hunger that made the dra’aj smell so sweet. The pain of being without it, the itch that could be scratched only by the shifting, the changes. The consequent inability to be still, as the need for the dra’aj, its taste, its scent, its force overwhelming and powerful, swept into you, blotting out the world as it came—

  Wolf opened his eyes, tried to slow his breathing.

  He had wanted to forget this. Had he succeeded well enough to mistake the scent of his old Pack? Did they smell differently because of his cure? Was the change in him? Or in them? Beyond doubt they were here. What did that mean for him? He pulled his lips back from his teeth.

  “He is telling the truth. We can trust him.” The irony was so heavy he could taste it. What he had told them was indeed the truth, but certainly not all of it. Valory had spoken with the certainty of the Truthreader, of the Dragonborn. Was Valory Martin right? Could he be trusted? Could she know?

  Could he know?

  This was no part of his work, Wolf thought. The High Prince had given him a task and he should even now be about it, instead of lying here pretending to rest. But those he was to find, those who had chosen to hide themselves, they had been waiting long already; surely a short time more would not displease anyone?