“After what Ty’Lis did to you, Jules?” Collette said.
Julianna shot her a withering glance. “You can’t agree with this.”
“Agree?” Collette replied. “Hell, I’m going with him.”
Silence fell. One by one, they all looked at King Hunyadi. The big man stroked his beard. At length, he glanced at Frost and Smith.
“Your Majesty, the risk,” Smith warned.
Frost shook his head. The familiar sound of his icicle hair clinking made Oliver nostalgic for a time before resentment and deceit had come between them.
“You can’t let them both go, Majesty,” the winter man said.
“What a surprise,” Oliver mused. “One of us is expendable.”
Blue Jay glanced at Damia, who seemed to be growing impatient to join her troops. “They’re right.” He glanced at Oliver and Collette. “I’m sorry, my friends, but they’re right. You can’t both go. I’m not one of the Lost. It matters not to me if your people ever get home. But if you both die, that’s a victory for Atlantis, and it could undermine all that Euphrasia is fighting for.”
King Hunyadi raised both hands. “Agreed. And it is decided. Oliver, choose your allies. Smith, you’ll take them in and bring them back, with the prince.”
“I’m not supposed to interfere, John,” the Wayfarer said grimly from beneath the brim of his hat. His eyes were shadows.
“You aren’t. You’ll ferry them, nothing more.”
Smith didn’t argue further.
Julianna had no such compunction. “So, what?” she said, staring at Oliver. “I’m just supposed to wait for you, again, wondering if you’re dead or alive, trapped in this crazy place alone?”
Oliver glanced away. “You won’t be alone.”
“No,” Collette agreed. “I’ll be with you. They’re not going to let me go.”
Julianna glanced around the tent, fixing her eyes one by one on Frost, Smith, King Hunyadi, and Oliver.
“Fucking men.” She turned and left the tent.
Collette stared at her brother for a moment. Then she went to him, hugged him close, and looked up at his face.
“I’ll look out for her. You look out for yourself. Don’t think I’m not pissed, though. I want you coming back alive so I can kick your ass.”
Oliver kissed her forehead.
“Wouldn’t miss that for the world.”
Sara woke in the small hours of the night, the Maine wind howling outside the windows. A storm had blown up, but she couldn’t hear the patter of rain. Just that wind, rattling the windows in their frames and whistling in the eaves. Her father’s house was a relic of the past.
It surprised her to find that she’d fallen asleep. All day she had been on the phone, ordering the shutoff of the utilities, calling her friends in Atlanta and an editor she knew would give her work. Calling her mother, and crying again. Both of them weeping for a man they had never found a way to stop loving, even in the times when they had wanted to.
When she’d gone to bed, her mind had been bustling with activity, with plans and their repercussions, all the while trying to avoid the truth around which it all revolved. Her father’s house would soon be empty, and it might be that way forever. She’d tossed and turned with these thoughts, wide awake, first too warm and tossing the covers away, then freezing cold and retrieving them, burrowing underneath.
Somehow, she’d managed to drift off.
Now she stretched, head muzzy with sleep, and listened to the creak of the old house and the cries of the wind, and wondered if that was what had woken her. The clock on the wall ticked. The seconds seemed to pass too slowly, lengthening, stretching out as though hesitant to move on. Tick. A breath. Tick. Its oddness drew her. Eyes closed, she listened intently, wondering if the battery was dying. And as she strained to make sense of the sluggish passage of time on that clock, she heard another sound.
A sifting.
A shiver ran up her back. Her skin prickled with gooseflesh. The sound seemed familiar, but she knew she had never heard anything precisely like it before. The sifting, scratching noise seemed to cascade toward her, and then abruptly ceased.
“What the hell?” she said, mostly to hear herself speak.
Sara turned, rising from the pillow, and her breath caught in her throat. The thing that stood by her bed could not have been a man. Not with those fingers like knives and its long, cruel face, and the terrible lemon eyes that shone in the dark.
She screamed, letting out a torrent of words and curses and pleadings to God as she scrambled off the bed. Her right ankle tangled in the sheet, she fell to the floor with a thump and then backed into a corner. As she went, those lemon eyes followed her, the hooded thing coming over the top of the bed at her as though weightless.
Perhaps it was because she had been sleeping in her father’s house, or perhaps because all of her fear and grief were bound tightly to Ted Halliwell’s vanishing. But in that moment, Sara called for her father like she had as a little girl, waking in the dark from a nightmare.
“Daddy!”
The cruel, hooded thing froze with its knife fingers stretched out toward her. Lemon eyes went dark.
Like a statue, it had frozen solid, halfway across her bed.
Within the consciousness of the Sandman, Ted Halliwell screamed his daughter’s name. She’d called out to him. His powdered bones sifted with the sand and the dust, and he fought the horrid will of the monster. Holding him back was like stopping a bull from charging, yet he had done it. His soul felt as though the strain would tear it apart, but for the moment, the Sandman had been halted.
Grains of sand shifted. Skittered to the floor.
No, Halliwell thought. But he knew it was no use. His love for Sara had given him the strength to stop the Sandman, but he would not be able to hold the monster.
Pain clutched at the core of him, the part that would have been his heart if he still had flesh. The maelstrom that was the Sandman had slowed. It parted like curtains-like a veil-and he could feel the hatred searing him. Those terrible eyes looked inward, now, and they found Halliwell there, alone.
“I wanted my vengeance,” the Sandman said. The voice echoed around inside the maelstrom, inside the consciousness that was all that remained of Ted Halliwell save those powdered bones, scattered amidst the grains of the monster. “The fox bitch, Kitsune, and the nothing, weakling man, Bascombe. They turned my brother against me and I wanted vengeance. You denied me that vengeance, little nothing man. You infest me like pestilence, like rot, like conscience, and I will not have it.
“You must be punished. The little girl’s eyes will pop in my teeth, and I will be certain that you can taste them on my tongue, as if it were your own.”
The words/thoughts slithered inside Halliwell’s mind, and whatever trace remained of him, soul or echo, shuddered-not with fear, but with rage. The man in him might have let death and this bizarre damnation corrupt his spirit, weaken him, but his daughter called his name and now this abomination mocked her love for him and her pain. The man might be afraid, but Ted Halliwell was more than a man. The soldier in him, the detective in him, the father in him was not afraid.
His grip on the Sandman tightened.
The monster roared fury. Halliwell felt aware of every bone shard, every particle of yellowed bone and marrow that mixed with the substance of the Sandman, and he reached out into the paralyzed limbs of the child-killer and he took hold.
Fucker, he said/thought. That’s my little girl.
Awareness radiated out from Halliwell’s consciousness. His senses searched the maelstrom, knowing already what he would find. There, hiding in the midst of the soul-storm created by the merger of their spirits, their essences, he found the third consciousness locked inside this body. Peering, spying, from the maelstrom, was the Dustman. Swiftly brutal, the Dustman might be the brother of the Sandman-another aspect of the same legend-but he was also a kind of mirror. The Dustman was an English legend, proper and grim. He was a creature of order, where his brother was chaos and anarchy.