CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Gabriel suggested we leave Lloergan with Rose. As we left Rose’s house, I noticed the front stoop of Grace’s building was still unoccupied, it being too cold and early even for her watchful eyes. We turned the corner to my street and—

Ida and Walter’s car sat in front of my house.

“Well, apparently it’s not too early for everyone,” I muttered. “We can shower at my apartment. I have clothes there, too.”

While I hadn’t been to my apartment in a month, it was still mine. Grace wasn’t going to let me out of my sublet early.

We returned to the building and climbed the stairs. I went to unlock my deadbolt and—

My key wouldn’t turn. I jiggled it, took it out, and then put it back in. After another try, I handed Gabriel the key.

He tried with the same result.

“Grace changed my locks?” I said. “Seriously?”

“At the very least, I’ll threaten to sue her. Which doesn’t help us at this moment.”

He handed back my key and took picks from his inside pocket. When he fiddled with the locks for longer than ten seconds, I knew there was a problem.

“Fae locked,” I said.

He arched his brow.

“No,” I said, “I’ve never heard of such a thing, either, but if you can’t open it, there must be a supernatural explanation.”

He tried again, but it was obvious from his expression he was making no progress.

“Okay, now I’m curious.” I looked along the hall and then pointed to the door next to mine. “That one’s definitely unoccupied.”

I suspected most of the apartments were empty, having never caught more than whispers in the hall.

I tried the handle of the neighboring door. Locked. No deadbolt, though, which should make it easy to open, but once again Gabriel’s picks failed to work their mojo.

“Fae locked,” I said. “Another apartment mystery we need to investigate.”

A couple of months earlier, Ricky had opened a door on the first floor, looking for TC, and gotten a blast of arctic air. When Grace caught him, though, the door had been locked. We hadn’t had a chance to check it out since—Grace kept it guarded, and I wasn’t of a mind to piss her off.

“We can either go talk to Ida or shower at your place,” I said.

Gabriel studied the door, and I could tell he wasn’t really listening, too intent on this challenge. He tried his picks again. As he was positioning them, he gripped the knob and…

The door creaked open.

I laughed under my breath. “How does one open a fae-locked door? With a fae-blood hand. Seems you’ve got the touch after all. We’ll see if that works with my apartment, but first, I’m curious about what’s in this one.”

I slipped through into a pitch-black hall. I could see the apartment beyond, furnished as mine had been.

The blinds were pulled, and as soon as Gabriel closed the door behind us, the apartment went dark. He reopened the door enough to find the light switch. He flicked it. Nothing happened.

A thump sounded in the hall…and the door slammed shut…without Gabriel touching it.

“Okay,” I said as I looked around the darkness. “I think that’s a sign to get out now.”

I felt my way along the wall, knowing the door should be right behind us. Except it wasn’t. The wall just kept going.

I hit the penlight button on my switchblade. The light flickered, oddly dim, and I could see only Gabriel and the wall.

No, I saw Gabriel and a wall. An unfamiliar wall with peeling and faded wallpaper. The door was ten feet behind him. A thick wooden door that didn’t belong here any more than that wallpaper.

“Do you remember I told you I stole a Dr Pepper when I was twelve?” I said.

Gabriel didn’t ask what that had to do with the current situation. I was telling him a secret. That’s how we handled my random visions—how we proved we were still us.

“That’s not the only thing I ever stole,” I said. “In high school, I liked a friend’s boyfriend. I was fifteen and stupid, and I thought if he decided he liked me better, that wasn’t my fault. We went out once, while he was still dating my friend. Afterward, I felt like shit. I’d disrespected her. Disrespected our friendship. And for what? A guy I kind of liked? It was never the same again, her and me. So that’s the worst thing I ever stole.”

“I stole fifty dollars from Rose,” Gabriel said, and then let that hang there as he tensed, waiting for my reaction. The Walshes had a rule that friends are not marks, which went double for family.

When I didn’t react, he said, “It was after Seanna left. I stayed in our apartment until the landlord realized he wasn’t getting his rent. After that I spent a couple of weeks on the street. I was fifteen, and it seemed as if I could never get enough to eat. I wasn’t sleeping, either, which meant my hands weren’t steady enough to pickpocket. I hitchhiked to Cainsville. Rose wasn’t there. I stayed the night, and she didn’t come home, and by then I’d realized I couldn’t put her in that position—having to care for a teenager. So I left. But…I took fifty dollars. I knew where she kept extra money, and I told myself I was just borrowing it. I snuck back a few months later and returned it, with an extra ten for interest. But that doesn’t matter. I stole. From family.”

“You borrowed out of necessity—”

“No, I stole.”

“She’d never have begrudged you—”

“That doesn’t matter.” His face wavered in the dim glow of the penlight. Then he ran a hand through his hair and sighed. “And that wasn’t the little secret you needed. Sorry. I’m…”

He made a face, and I knew what he meant. With Seanna’s return, he felt off-kilter. Exposed. Vulnerable.

I stepped toward him, careful, watching for his wall to fly up. When it didn’t, I put my arms around his neck and rose onto my tiptoes to hug him as tight as I could. “You need to tell Rose,” I whispered.

He stiffened, but only for a moment, and then he nodded against my shoulder and said, “I do.”

When he pulled away, I was ready to step back, but he was only breaking the embrace enough to kiss the top of my head. When something thumped again in the distance, he sighed, softly, the exhalation tickling my hair.

“Yes,” I said. “Back to the terribly inconvenient reality that we’re mysteriously trapped with a monster in the next room waiting to devour us.”

“There is never a monster.”

“True. Just bad plumbing, then.”

Another thump. Another sigh from Gabriel.

We checked the door first. That was almost incidental, as if we knew it would be pointless. It was. The door wouldn’t open, and there was no sign of a lock.

“You’re seeing this, right?” I said. “A long hallway with old wallpaper? A wooden door?”

He reached out, peeled off a strip of wallpaper, and rubbed it between his fingers. “Yes.”

“That’s not normal.” I rubbed down the hairs on my neck. “It feels…wrong.”

He tried the door again, but even wrenching with all of his not-insubstantial strength didn’t budge it.

“I’m overreacting,” I said.

“No, something isn’t right. We’ll get this over with and leave. And then, as much as I’d like that shower, I’m going to suggest we skip it. We’ll visit Pamela to see what Seanna told her, and visit Todd to warn him about her. Check on the police investigation. And then return to the cabin and turn off our phones.”

“A plan. I like it. Now let’s get past stage one.”

We started down the hall. After about twelve paces, it opened into a room with a sweeping staircase. Cobwebs festooned the wrought-iron railings. More hung from the chandelier. The stink of must filled the dead air. At a squeak, I turned to see a mouse dive between cracks in the rotted floorboards.

I looked up the stairs. “I believe Miss Havisham will be joining us for tea.”

“Hmmm.”

I glanced over to see him scanning the stairwell.

“Sensing anything?” I asked.

“I…don’t know.” He rolled his shoulders as if to shrug off the uncertainty. “There’s no clear sense of danger, but…” Another roll. “I can’t say.”

“Proceed with caution, as always.”

“Yes.”

We walked around the steps, but there was nothing to see. No other rooms or halls joined this one. I even ran my hands over the semicircular wall behind the stairs, looking for a hidden doorway.

“Serious architectural flaw,” I said lightly, but Gabriel didn’t even favor me with a nod. This impossible layout told us we weren’t in a real house, and that bothered him.

The hairs on my neck prickled again.

“Up, then?” I said.

At the top of the stairs, we reached a landing that stretched in every direction. I took three steps…and the floor disappeared, leaving us on a platform, the stairs behind us, the rest darkness.

“Go back down,” Gabriel said. “Quickly.”

He hauled me toward the stairs. We made it down one riser and then the rest vanished, the next step a drop into nothingness. Gabriel yanked me back, and his arms wrapped around me as if I’d been about to tumble over the edge. I felt his heart slamming against his ribs, as that sixth sense kicked in, and whatever it detected—

“We need to get out of here,” he said. “Now.”

I could point out the obvious—that there was no apparent exit. But his pounding heart warned that if I couldn’t say something useful, I’d best not say anything at all. When I twisted to look up at him, he was scanning the darkness, every muscle taut.

“Something is wrong,” he said. “Something is very wrong. We shouldn’t be here.”

He took my hand again, his fingers wrapping around mine tight enough to make me wince. Then he stepped carefully toward the edge, leaning, as he turned on his cell phone light.

“I don’t see any—”

The floor fell away.

No warning. No time to do more than let out a yelp before I plummeted through darkness, scrabbling for a hold, none to be found. Yet I hit the floor no harder than if I’d slipped on ice.

Darkness swirled. When it cleared, I sat on a wooden floor, staring at a wooden wall. A hand landed on my shoulder, and I jumped to see Gabriel on all fours.

“I wouldn’t have stayed,” he said. “At Evans’s house. I wouldn’t have stayed.”

It took me a moment to realize what he was talking about. Our first “case.” Trapped in the basement by a killer, Gabriel injured, telling me to just go, leave him behind, that he wouldn’t stay for me.

“That’s not much of a secret,” I said. “You told me then you wouldn’t have stayed.”

“But I meant it. I wasn’t saying it to make you leave. I would have found you a safe place and brought help, but I still would have left.”

“Okay.”

“No, you don’t understand. I would have left. I’ve told myself I wasn’t sure, maybe I was just saying that, but that’s a lie. I would have left you there.”

“The fact you’d have taken time to find me a safe place meant I was making progress. Hell, finding me a safe place and going for help would have been the smart move, the logical move. That’s how you do things. I jump in with both feet and end up…”

I looked around. We were in a small timber-framed building, with a fire in the hearth and the smell of cooked meat ingrained in the wood. Simple furniture, all wooden, with cured skins and a homespun blanket.

“A peasant’s home, maybe?” I said.

Gabriel said nothing in response, and I turned to see him on his feet. Lighting lamps. Oil lamps. He’d grabbed a stick from the fire and was lighting the lamps as if that was the most natural thing to do.

“Gabriel?”

“We need light,” he said. “Quickly.”

“Okay…”

“Leave him be,” whispered a voice, and I jumped to see a child wearing a peasant’s dress. It was the blond girl, another manifestation of Matilda, the one who’d been my early guide in this new life.

“Haven’t seen you in a while,” I murmured.

Gabriel turned. “Hmmm?”

“Nothing.” I watched as he resumed lighting the lamps.

“Gwynn is fine,” she said. “He’s not—”

“Right now he’s Gwynn. Let him do what he needs to do. Trust him.”

The scene faded into another cottage, the one in that terribly wrong forest where the rogue Huntsman had been keeping Lloergan. I’d been walking through those woods with Ricky and caught a snatch of a vision, peasants bolting up the house against the falling dark, rushing about, terrified of that darkness and the horrors it held. A primal fear of the unknown, from a time where one couldn’t simply switch on a porch light to see what lay beyond.

Something’s out there.

Darkness was falling fast. One window had a glass pane, a luxury to allow light in cold weather. The rest had only shutters, wide open, the night air blowing through, bringing a smell that made the hairs on my neck prickle again.

“Darkness is coming,” the girl murmured.

“I see that.”

“No, you feel it.”

Gabriel spun to me. “We need to close the shutters. Quickly.”

I ran for one, but he caught my shoulder. “Always start with the west. They come from…” He trailed off and blinked hard, as if waking from a trance. “What was I…?”

“The shutters,” I said. “We need to close the west shutters.”

He jogged over and pulled them shut as I latched them. One resisted when he yanked and I saw it was latched on the outside. I started to reach through, but he beat me to it. As he fumbled to undo the latch, darkness rolled through the trees.

“Sluagh,” he whispered.

“What?” I said.

“I—” He stopped and rubbed a hand over his face. “I don’t know.” Gabriel looked around. “Why are we—?”

“We need to close the shutters,” I said.

He didn’t argue. When we finished closing the shutters, I turned to him. “You said it was sluagh. What’s that?”

“I don’t know.”

“You do. It’s like me with omens. Hereditary memories. Trust them.”

“Very good,” the girl said as she began to fade. “You understand. Finally.”

“Sluagh,” Gabriel said uncertainly. “They’re sidhe. The darkness. The unforgiven. That’s all I remember. Just that we need to close the shutters and turn up the lights and—”

The roar of wind drowned him out. A wind that set the shutters clattering and the very cottage shaking. A driving, beating wind that tickled at my own memory.

I turned to the lone glass window. Dark clouds whipped past it, and I could make out forms in those clouds, shapes that my brain couldn’t latch onto before they disappeared in the maelstrom.

Gabriel’s fingers closed around my arm. “Stay back from—”

Something hit the window. Struck it with a shriek that sent me backing into Gabriel, his arms going around me.

Another thump. Another shriek. Then a dark red bird appeared, the size of a sparrow, with empty white eyes and wormlike white legs. It beat its wings against the glass and shrieked, beak opening to reveal rows of pin-sharp teeth.

The bird hammered wings and claws and beak against the glass. Then another joined it, and another, swarming the window like locusts, until all I could see was a blur of dark red feathers and white eyes and white legs and claws and teeth, battering the window and scraping the glass.

I looked up at the ceiling, hearing that wind whipping around the cottage.

Not wind. Wings. The thunder of a thousand beating wings.

“Sluagh,” I whispered.

Somewhere in the distance, a howl sounded—a cŵn’s howl—the noise swallowed by the roar of wings. The birds continued to beat at the window. A tiny crack formed in one corner, and two birds rammed into one another to get to that spot. Then they both began pecking feverishly, their wings beating like hummingbirds, too fast to see more than a blur.

“Go away,” I whispered. “Ewch i ffwrdd.”

The birds stopped their mad pecking long enough for those white eyes to find me. Tiny beaks opened, jagged teeth glistening. They let out a hiss and then resumed their pecking.

“Ewch i ffwrdd,” I said, moving toward the window.

Gabriel’s hand tightened on mine, as if to pull me back, but he only followed, his feet dragging, slowing my pace as I crossed to the window.

I pressed my hand against the glass. It was like hitting Pause. Every single bird stopped its frantic beating and hovered there. Then they went back at it, slamming their wings and beaks against the glass.

Gabriel reached out, tentatively. His figure flickered in the glow of the oil lamps, and an older man appeared, one with graying blond hair and tired blue eyes. It was Gwynn as I’d seen him before—the aging Gwynn, the weary Gwynn, the broken Gwynn.

“Ewch i ffwrdd,” Gwynn said, his voice firm, his body straightening, the exhaustion evaporating into resolve. “Fynd nawr!”

His form flickered, Gabriel reappearing and then Gwynn and then Gabriel again, fingers splayed as he pressed them to the glass.

“Fynd nawr!”

Again the birds stopped, for longer now, and then, as a body, they began to hiss and shriek as they hovered. Then they swooped away as one, disappearing into the blur of darkness beyond the cottage.

“Those are the sluagh?” I whispered.

“No, they’re the harbingers of the sluagh. The sluagh is still coming. We need to get—”

A tremendous, deafening roar, and I doubled over, hands to my ears. The sound seemed to come from everywhere. The beating of a thousand wings, amplified a thousand times, rising to a frenzy.

The cottage quaked. The shutters cracked against their latches. The door warped inward, boards groaning. And then…

Silence.

Everything stopped at once—the roar and the quaking and the groaning—and the silence was, for a moment, almost painful, like coming out of darkness into the light.

“They’re gone.” I turned to Gabriel. “You did it. You got rid—”

“No,” he whispered, his eyes widening, filling with a look that wasn’t quite Gabriel, wasn’t quite Gwynn, somewhere between the two. “No!”

He slammed into me. Hit me square in the back, taking me down so fast I didn’t have time to brace as I fell face-first to the floor with Gabriel overtop of me. Then I heard the barest whine, like a single mosquito. I lifted my head, tasting blood trickling from my lip. Gabriel’s hand went to the back of my head, ready to push me down and—

The cottage exploded.

It shattered, a million slivers of wood shooting into the night, darkness billowing in, black clouds that writhed and whipped about us.

I heard a distant bark. Frantic barking.

Lloergan.

Gabriel pushed me down, his body on mine, shielding me as the black smoke wound around us. Fingers clutched my arm. I flew to my feet, Gabriel suddenly gone, and when I turned, I saw a woman in the writhing blackness. A woman with long blond hair and flashing brown eyes.

“Out!” she snarled. “Get out now!”

I knew that voice. Knew it well. But my brain wouldn’t make the connection, and I found myself being dragged through the black smoke as I yelled, “Gabriel!” and twisted to look for him, seeing only…

Light. A blinding flash of light, and then I was in an apartment. An ordinary apartment, almost exactly like mine, with an old sofa and chairs and—

“Olivia!” Gabriel called.

A familiar voice snapped, “She’s right here,” and I saw who was holding me. It was Grace, now back in her old-crone glamour, her ugly face contorted in a scowl, one bony hand wrapped around my arm, the other around Gabriel’s, as she hauled us toward the hall.

Something bashed against the apartment door, and I stumbled back, saying, “No!” as I imagined the birds again, but Grace only muttered under her breath and released us.

She threw open the door and was nearly bowled over by Lloergan. The hound ran straight to me and then looked around wildly before seeing Gabriel and exhaling, her flanks quivering.

“Yes, they’re fine,” Grace muttered. “Now get the hell out of my—”

Lloergan spun on Grace and growled, her fur rising as she pressed against my leg.

“Don’t you growl at me, cŵn,” Grace said.

Lloergan kept rumbling but turned her attention to the room, peering about it. When I laid my hand on her head, darkness hit me, a sudden breathtaking wave of it.

I saw the birds again, that dark whirl of them, heard the roar, felt the wind from those wings battering me as terror, absolute terror, washed through me, my legs locking, the growl in my throat turning to a whimper, my tail sliding between my legs, my only thought to flee, to run, to get out.

I snapped back to myself, Lloergan still pressed against my leg, Gabriel’s fingers wrapped around my arm. “Are you all right?” he asked.

I nodded, and we passed Grace as we headed for the door.