Shadowlands Read online

  “Well, now. You are not what I expected, Moonward one,” came a voice out of the darkness at the end of the blade. “Tell me why I should not cut your throat.”

  “I am—”

  A skittering sound from above them, a moving shadow, and the sword left Wolf’s face as a Sunward Rider who could only be Nighthawk leaped away from him into the next patch of light, allowing a winged lizard with the head of a dog to land heavily between them. Wolf’s belly clenched in recognition, icy cold, as he saw the dog’s wings wither and shrink, its legs lengthen and grow talons even while its tail sprouted barbs.

  “Stump!” he called, but the Hound did not acknowledge him. Was this the explanation of the elusive smells? The tail swung toward him and without further thought the umbrella in Wolf’s hand became a gra’if sword, and he pulled his gra’if dagger from the scabbard under his left sleeve. Like it or not, with the other Rider here, he would have to kill it. “Do not look it in the eyes,” he called out as he shifted to avoid the swinging tail.

  Nighthawk grinned at Wolf’s advice and, ducking under the monster’s reaching talons, thrust at its breast with his own sword. It reared backward, giving Wolf a chance to slice its left hamstring with his dagger as he cut its flank with the sword. Nothing to do now but kill it. The beast hissed at the pain, and morphed into a leathery wyvern with two clawed feet and wings covered with patches of leather, fur, and feathers. It staggered. The cut hamstring had morphed along with it.

  The alley was not wide enough to allow the beast to turn easily—or so Wolf thought until he saw that Nighthawk had been knocked to the ground. Wolf sheathed his dagger and leaped forward, grasping the thing’s tail above the barbs, and with his sword hacked repeatedly at the base of the monster’s spine. The skin under his hand became scaled, the beast flickered into a monstrous snake, turning its horselike head toward him and wrapping its tail around one of Wolf’s legs. The slit-pupiled eyes narrowed, seeming to search his features.

  Wolf tightened his grip on the sword and shifted to keep his other leg free. If only he could keep it from biting him, he might yet be able to damage it enough that it would at least release him, and perhaps take another form. The head moved closer, and Wolf gritted his teeth against the sudden pain in his leg as the thing constricted. The creature moved in two impossible directions at once, falling to the ground in pieces. Wolf staggered back, sword still poised. Beyond the two writhing halves of the snake he saw Nighthawk, blood dripping from his blade, scrambling out of the way of the beast’s death throes.

  The snake sprouted sudden wings, became wyvern, flickered into leathery griffin, flickered again into the claw-footed dog. Wolf, leaning against the wall, his chest heaving and the sweat dripping into his eyes, turned his head away before he saw the final change. When the noises had stopped, he looked again, and found the cobblestones bare. He shivered.

  “What was it you said?”

  Wolf shook his head at Nighthawk. He couldn’t tell whether he felt triumph or horror. I had no choice. It would have killed him.

  “When it attacked,” Nighthawk coughed. “I thought…you called out something.”

  Wolf took a deep breath, trying to slow the pounding of his heart. What had he said? “Jump,” he said finally. “I told you to jump.”

  “You are not…a creature of the Basilisk Prince…I take it.” Nighthawk’s breathing was only now slowing. “Else you would not have aided me against that.” He gestured at the empty space between them. “I knew I was being followed…I thought you were with the Hound.” He looked down at the blood evaporating off his sword and frowned. “Don’t look so gobsmacked, boy. It’s dead and we’re not, and that’s as it should be.” Another deep breath. “Who are you, then?”

  Wolf’s heart had stopped racing, and his own breath was steady enough for him to speak. “I am Stormwolf. My mother was Rain at Sunset. The Chimera guides me. I am the…the emissary of the Dragonborn Prince.” Wolf stumbled over the words. It was the first time he’d said them.

  “The Dragonborn Prince, you say?” The other Rider took a step closer, his brow furrowed. “And who might the Dragonborn Prince be?”

  “You are Nighthawk? Once Warden of the Exile?” Though by now Wolf knew perfectly well who the other Rider was. “Known here in the Shadowlands as Diego Rascón?”

  “I am. My mother was Flies by Moonlight, and the Dragon guides me.”

  Wolf drew himself to formal attention, saw the other Rider’s eyes narrow, the tip of his sword lifting. “Then my mission is to you. You have mentioned the Basilisk Prince. The Rider who gave himself that title is Faded, and his dra’aj returned to the Lands. The Exile, known here in the Shadowlands as Max Ravenhill, has resumed his rightful place as Guardian of the Talismans. Those Talismans have spoken, and a High Prince has been named.”

  “Evidently someone who is Guided by a Dragon.” The tone was dry enough that Wolf compressed his lips before speaking.

  “She is the one named Truthsheart, once your fellow Warden. Here she was called Cassandra Kennaby.”

  For a moment there was total silence. Nighthawk’s gra’if blade lowered. “And you have some proof of these assertions?”

  In answer, Wolf undid the collar and top three buttons of his shirt, pulling the garment open. There, in the center of his chest, just below the hollow of his throat, was a black-and-silver-and-dark-red dragon, the Seal of the High Prince.

  Nighthawk stepped closer, his gra’if blade now hanging loosely at his side as he reached out with his free hand. Wolf gritted his teeth as the Sunward Rider placed cold fingertips on his skin. Hawk blinked and took an abrupt step away, though his smile was wide. Wolf rebuttoned his shirt, wondering what the other had seen.

  “It is hers,” Hawk said. “And she sent you here? To tell me this news?” The Rider’s smile was dancing in his eyes.

  “To tell you first. After you, I am to go to the one called Graycloud at Moonrise, who may point me to others of the People.”

  Suddenly Nighthawk was in front of him, clasping his shoulders and kissing him on both cheeks. Wolf stiffened, but managed not to pull away. “Well, now, this calls for a drink.”

  But Wolf looked carefully around him as he followed Nighthawk back to his home. Where there had been one Hound, there were usually more.

  Perhaps even the one he was looking for.

  Alejandro was in the back garden when I got home, his head tilted to one side, apparently staring intently at a honeybee crawling into a deep pink flower. He stood with his hands open, his arms lifted slightly from his arched torso. You could almost feel the sunshine of the bullring. I was suddenly reminded of the first time I’d seen him.

  The man standing in the salon of the Collector’s apartment in Prague didn’t look like a retired matador in his mid-eighties. He was way too young, with a ruddy complexion, and strawberry-blond hair just showing some gray. But the way he stood looking out the window, head on an angle, fist on one hip, sure, you could see him in a corrida.

  “Mr. Martin?” I said.

  “Marteen,” he corrected, putting the emphasis on the second syllable. Then he turned and smiled at me. “I know, you expected someone older. I’m sure your…?” He raised his brows and looked expectant.

  “Uncle,” I supplied. That’s what I called him, the man who’d taken me from my parents.

  “Of course. Your uncle can explain my transformation should he find it necessary.”

  “Of course,” I agreed. “Pleased to meet you.” Even though I’d been told not to—it wasn’t him I was supposed to read, but something he brought with him—there was something so intriguing about this younger-than-expected man that I went right up to him with my hand out. His was warm, and smooth, and strong and suddenly I was overwhelmed with images, with colors and sounds and faces and places, the sound of trickling water and the smell of green leaves and sunsets and underneath it all the way his mind—more his being, really—was feeling out the space around him, locating himself in relation to the salon
, to the building, the street, the rest of the city, the Vitava River—the planet for all I could tell, shouting I AM HERE, in a way that just wasn’t human at all.

  The next thing I knew, I was on my knees. Then he was helping me to my feet, and I could still feel the buzz of his psyche and I knew what he could do, what made him the thing he called a Rider. I knew how much he’d loved his human wife, and his human children, and how he’d stopped being a soldier when all the honor had left the profession, and finally, finally, here was someone who could help me, someone who could get me away before my “uncle” killed me for knowing too much about him. If only he would—

  “Will you get me out of here?” I said. “He’s going to kill me—not this minute, but soon. Can you—will you, with that thing you do?”

  “That thing I do?” He might have been asking me if I took sugar.

  “You know, ‘move’ me, relocate me. Please.”

  He searched my face with his brown eyes. “I must find a missing child; he was to help me.”

  Now I knew why I was in the room. “You have something of hers? Can I touch it?” I put out my hands.

  His eyes widened as he, too, began to understand why I was in the room. He pulled a ring off his pinkie finger and laid it into my palm.

  “Her mother’s stepbrother has her. A farm in the Extramadura,” I said. “Just outside of Campanario. Old, no one uses it anymore, but the name’s Hellín.” I opened my eyes. “He thought he didn’t get enough in the will.”

  “She lives?”

  I nodded. He took me by the shoulders, and there was a rush of air, and my ears POPPED! and the light was coming in a totally different window from a totally different angle.

  And I was free.

  I could feel his hands on my shoulders again. “Querida, what is it? What has happened?”

  Maybe it was because of what I’d seen in Elaine, maybe it was because my triumph of the morning now seemed so distant and so unimportant, maybe it was the memory of the day my life changed, but suddenly I started to cry.

  There was a light SNAP! of displaced air as Alejandro Moved us from the patio right into the living room. He sat me down, and had an afghan around my shoulders and a hot mug of green tea in my hands while the tears were still drying on my face. I could hear him moving around the kitchen with that peculiar inhuman speed and grace that he showed only when we were alone.

  Alejandro is a Rider, one of what we humans call “Faerie.” Specifically, he’s what we’d call Trouping Faerie, the kind that, according to legends, dash around in groups riding beautiful horses, wearing bright armor, and making humans fall in love with them. It didn’t work out that way for Alejandro, though. Long ago he fell in love with a human woman, and stayed here in what they call the Shadowlands for her sake, and the sake of the children they had together. He’s never gone back. I don’t know how long ago it really was, but parts of his story sound an awful lot like some of the fairy tales and ballads I’ve read about demon lovers.

  He says he can’t go back now. There’s been some sort of civil war in the place he calls the Lands, and the Portals between our two worlds have been shut ever since. The Prince who lost the war got banished to this world, which I guess is why the Portals had to be closed, so he couldn’t just go home.

  According to Alejandro, there are other Riders hiding here, along with Solitaries like Trolls and Ogres, and Naturals like Water and Tree Sprites. All of which make up what he calls the “People.” Some had reasons like Alejandro’s not to go home, some just didn’t like the idea of living under the rule of the Prince who won the war. Most keep a low profile here, as human technology catches up with magical abilities, but I’ve met the Water Sprite named Shower of Stars, who lives in the fountain of Cibeles in Madrid. One night, when it was pouring rain, she came out on a bar crawl with us. She liked the mejillones a la vinagreta the best.

  Then there are the people like me, humans touched with the blood of the People, who have inhuman, or supernatural skills. All the most famous mages in history—Merlin, Cagliostro, Rasputin, David Blaine—have some Rider blood. The greatest of these now living is the man I call the Collector.

  “Tell me,” Alejandro said now, coming back into the sitting room with a teapot on a tray. “I cannot read your soul as you do mine,” he said when I didn’t answer right away. “So you must tell me.”

  I inhaled deeply, taking in the steam from my tea, before looking up at him. “Alejandro, could the man I saw on the subway have been one of the Wild Hunt?”

  He straightened abruptly. “Were you bitten?”

  “No, I wasn’t, but—”

  A wave of cold passed through Alejandro where he stood, and tears sprang back into my eyes. He was afraid. He’d never been afraid before. I stood to go to him, the afghan slipping from my shoulders to the floor, but even as I moved I felt warmer, and he shook his head, holding up his hand.

  “It is well. Sit.”

  He seemed sure, so I sat down again. Alejandro’s complexion had regained its natural ruddiness. His coloring—a dark strawberry blond—was a little unusual for a Spaniard, but then, he wasn’t really a Spaniard, was he? He wrapped his long square fingers around his own large mug of green tea as if he still felt a chill.

  “You told me they didn’t hunt humans.”

  Alejandro propped himself on the arm of the couch, eyes narrowed in thought. “The Hunt feeds upon dra’aj, and while humans have it, the quantity is so small that I would not have thought it would tempt a Hound.”

  Okay. I relaxed against the back of the couch. That explained everything. Dra’aj, roughly speaking, is the life force, the magical essence that makes the People what they are—Alejandro says that they don’t do magic, they are magic. Dra’aj informs everything about them, and the Lands as well. Like he said, humans also have dra’aj– some of us enough to give us a talent that certainly looks like magic—but the amount we have is negligible, just a shadow of what the People have.

  Oh. Shadowlands. Now I get it. But Alejandro was talking again.

  “You have already learned that what humans know of the People is based on scanty information, most of it at best skewed, and at worst plainly wrong. How we see ourselves…” Alejandro gestured to himself. “How we are in reality, it is not at all how humans see us.”

  I nodded. “You said we only know the People through these sporadic visits, before the Exile,” I said. “That it was like understanding another culture through tourism. Like not all Spaniards dance flamenco, or not all Japanese know karate.” I knew about that kind of thing; I’d been watching television and movies in the last couple of years. “But humans use this kind of shorthand when they think about each other, so they did that with your people as well.”

  Alejandro took a sip of his tea. “And, of course, human tales are human-centric, are they not? So when your stories tell of the Hunt, they usually describe them as preying on humans whereas, in reality, even when they have been here in the Shadowlands, they were brought to hunt People, Riders in particular.”

  “I think that’s changed.” Suddenly a group of images I’d had for a while fell into place. “You met one when you were in Granada last year, didn’t you? One of these Hounds.” I remembered that weekend clearly. It was the first time I had ever been left alone. No guards, no minders. I’d been so nervous I’d almost begged to go with him, but I thought that if I once started doing that, I would never stop. Now I felt I understood something that hadn’t been clear at the time. Like I said, I can see the images and not know what they mean, exactly, if I have no context for them.

  “No, not a Hound, but one of the followers of the Basilisk Prince.” Alejandro studied the surface of his tea, as if there was something else in the cup. “I was passing through the Albaycin.”

  I knew what Alejandro had really been doing. Walking around, basking in the familiarity of a place that—at four in the morning at least, when there’d be few lights on, and fewer cars—hasn’t really changed for hundreds of years
. He’d done that more than once since we’d found each other. Now, for the first time, I wondered what he was going to do for ancient walking routes here in the new world, and whether he’d ever been here before.

  “I heard the sound of fighting,” he was saying. “Not fists, that I would have ignored. I heard the sound of blades. When I tracked it to its source, I found two Riders, a Sunward like myself, and a Starward. The Starward still had the smell of the Lands upon him, and so I went to help the Sunward, thinking him a hidden one like myself. Together, we killed the other Rider.”

  I waved at him to continue, carefully so as not to slosh my tea. “How did you know he wasn’t a Hound?”

  Alejandro shook his head. “The Hunt are a different kind of being entirely—you must understand that not many meet with a Hound and live to tell of it. They can take the shape of certain animals, but most often they change their form constantly, shifting from one grotesque shape to another, as if shape is no longer in their control. In Granada,” his gesture was dismissive, “the Rider we killed threatened us with the Hunt as we confronted him.” Alejandro lifted his mug to his lips and took a swallow, his eyes narrowing as he thought. “From this we concluded, Nighthawk and I, that the Basilisk Prince has found a way to make the Hunt obey him, perhaps even the Horn itself. Another reason, if we had none already, to avoid him.”

  “The guy on the subway wasn’t like an animal, and he didn’t change his shape,” I said, nodding as the pieces fell into place. “He was just a regular-looking guy. Well, except that he had his face squashed up against the glass. But there was a dog later, with the same chill and smell. And the guy who helped me, he called it a Hound.”