The Borderkind (37 page)

Now Julianna stripped that all away.

She raced toward him, calling his name. Oliver sheathed the Sword of Hunyadi. His heart leapt at the sound of her voice and the joy on her face, but with every step she took on the shifting sand, he felt more keenly the horrors that the legendary had inflicted upon his life and his family. His father’s murder and Collette’s abduction, the utter destruction of his own life and reputation, it all was real. How could he ever try to return to his old life when the friends and colleagues he’d known thought him either a murderer or the accomplice of some child-killer?

Yet here was Julianna.

He started toward her, shaking with a mixture of relief and dread. His elation at seeing her was tempered by the fear that, after all that had happened, things might not be the same between them. The last time they had spoken, on the phone, the pain in her voice had been clear. He had never meant to hurt her, but he knew that he had. He wondered how that might have changed her feelings for him, and how much she understood about what had really happened to him.

Then she was there, and all such thoughts fled. None of it mattered.

An icy wind blew down from the mountains. Her features were pale in the starlight, her auburn hair almost black in the night. All of his hesitations and second thoughts became damnably insignificant in the face of his love for her. So much could have been avoided if he had only trusted the soul he saw through her eyes, just as he saw it now—this soul that
knew
him, that understood and loved him.

“Oliver,” she said, voice barely a whisper, his name quickly stolen away by the wind.

Julianna ran into his arms. He felt her body, so familiar, against his, and pressed his nose into the scent of her hair, holding her tightly.

“I’m sorry,” he said, the ache in his heart making it feel as though it weighed a thousand pounds. “Oh, Jules, I’m so sorry.”

“You’re alive,” she said, face pressed to his neck. “Jesus, you’re alive. Don’t be sorry. None of this was your fault.”

“There were…there were always things I should’ve said.”

Julianna reached up to hold his face steady and stared up at him, gaze sharp with the intelligence that had always challenged and thrilled him.

“Do you love me?” she asked, searching his eyes for the truth.

For a fraction of a moment, he couldn’t breathe. Then a pang of remorse went through him, regret for all the time he’d wasted on doubt.

“More than anything.”

“Then nothing else matters.”

Oliver stared at her, his heart racing. In her eyes, he saw fear and regret and a tiny bit of hope, and he knew that it was all just a reflection of what she must see in him.

He touched her face, then bent and kissed her. The feeling of her lips against his, rough from the wind and the sun, filled his heart with such grateful relief that he wanted to just take her hand and run. Whatever hesitations he’d once felt were gone. They ought to have had a lifetime together.

Oliver pulled back and gazed at her, brushing her hair from her face. If the myth of the Legend-Born was true and if he and Collette really were the children of Melisande, then Julianna was wrong. They might not be to blame for what the Hunters had done, but it was because of them that Julianna had been dragged into it.

Now they were together, here in this impossible place. He wanted to know how she had gotten there, to figure out what it all meant, and where they would go from here.

Behind him, Collette screamed, her voice frantic and her throat raw.

“No, you idiot! Stay away from them!”

Oliver spun, one arm still around Julianna. Collette shouted again. Beyond her, the stranger with the gun—the man Julianna had been traveling with—ran at the two brothers where they were locked in battle. He was an older guy with salt-and-pepper hair and a craggy, Clint Eastwood sort of face, fifty years old if he was a day. But he didn’t run like he was fifty. His expression was full of grim rage and he held the gun slightly raised as he hurtled toward the Sandman and the Dustman.

The soldiers called to him. One, a statuesque black woman who was obviously in command, started after him with her sword drawn. The man with the gun appeared not to hear or even remember that the soldiers were with him. He shouted something as he ran at the warring facets of the Sandman, but Oliver couldn’t make out the words.

“Hey! Hey, man, don’t…” He let the words trail off, feeling like an idiot. With the way the man was shouting and the howling wind, there was no way he was going to hear anything.

Then Collette started shouting again, and Oliver pulled away from Julianna. He turned to see his sister running after the man with the gun. Collette, a petite little woman in her torn pajamas, was trying to get in the midst of a fight between myths and one crazy asshole with a gun.

The Sword of Hunyadi felt heavy at his hip.

Whatever truth there might be in the story of the Legend-Born, and no matter how much he wanted to be home, he knew he had become a part of this world. It had changed him. All of the things he had always imagined he might be, had always wished, he was becoming. And there could be no turning back now.

He drew the sword.

In the moment before he ran after his sister, he caught sight of something moving out of the corner of his eye. He glanced over and saw Kitsune by the doors of the Sandman’s castle. He’d assumed she had hung back to watch for the sand creatures that had attacked them inside.

Her soft green eyes gleamed in the dark, her fur almost orange in the starlight. The hurt and bitterness on her face was unmistakable. Oliver caught his breath. In the exultation of saving Collette and the shock of seeing Julianna, he’d barely spared a thought for Kitsune.

He forced himself to break the moment, raised his sword, and ran after Collette.

“Wait!” he shouted. “Coll, wait!”

If she heard him, she did not listen. Oliver raced after her. He figured the Sandman was so occupied trying to stay alive that he couldn’t control the constructs inside the castle anymore, which helped. But even so, the monster’s existence endangered them all. So why weren’t these soldiers helping? Even the commander who ran after the man with the gun seemed only to be trying to stop him, to draw him back. Nobody wanted to go anywhere near the Sandman except the nutjob.

That ought to tell you something,
he thought.

But fear would not turn Oliver away. Why none of the Myth Hunters had shown up was a mystery, but he figured maybe Frost and the Borderkind were keeping them busy elsewhere, and whoever their hidden enemy really was—Ty’Lis or someone else—they assumed an ordinary brother and sister, soft and pampered humans, shouldn’t be much of a challenge for the Sandman.

Under other circumstances, they’d have been right. Oliver would have been dead many times over if not for Kitsune, and they’d both be dead if not for the Dustman. And he knew the Dustman had come at his request, but hadn’t been too difficult to persuade. They all faced the same enemy. They were all in danger.

But right now, Oliver wasn’t feeling solidarity with anyone. Not Kitsune or the Dustman or the tall woman with the sword or the soldiers who followed her. And sure as hell not the lunatic with the gun. Collette wasn’t going to fall into the Sandman’s hands again, and now that Julianna was here, he wanted nothing except to get them both away from this place.

“Coll!” he shouted, chasing her.

The sight of the sand-brothers at war sickened him. They tore one another apart, sand swirling and mixing and battering. The Dustman seemed to have weakened, and as he tried to focus himself again, to form the persona he had adopted with his greatcoat and bowler hat and mustache, he faltered. The vague shape remained the same, but the details were a blur, like an old statue with its features eroded by entropy.

After her imprisonment, Collette was in no condition to run. Oliver overtook her easily. He grabbed her arm from behind and pulled her up short. She spun on him, eyes wild.

“Stop!” he shouted. “Stay here. I didn’t come to get you just to watch you die!”

“I won’t die. We’re not helpless here. We can fight! We can hurt him.” Collette held up her hands. “I’ve done it!”

Oliver wanted to ask what she was talking about, but there just wasn’t time. A gunshot rang out, the first one in long seconds, and he turned to see the shooter aiming at the Sandman. In the midst of the churning sand, the twist and turmoil of the warring brothers, the monster turned its yellow eyes upon the man with the gun and stared murder at him.

Oliver glanced at Collette, and then they were running together.

“You’re sure about this?” he asked

She said nothing, but when he looked down at her, he saw the set of her jaw and the grim knowledge in her eyes, and he knew she had never been so certain of anything in her life.

The tall soldier caught up to the gunman and tried to pull him back. He fought her, trying to get the gun free, to shoot again, no matter how useless his bullets were.

“Who the hell is this guy?” Oliver snapped.

“Halliwell. He’s a detective. He was looking for you when you disappeared,” Collette said, huffing, trying to keep up with him.

A cold finger of dread went up Oliver’s spine. So he was responsible for this Halliwell being here as well.

They were twenty feet from the churning tornado of the screeching battle between the Dustman and the Sandman when the gunman shot an elbow into the tall soldier’s abdomen. Cloak billowing out behind her, she staggered back a step and let go of him.

Julianna stared at Halliwell and slowly brought her hands up to cover her mouth. Her fingers splayed across her eyes and she peered between them. Like a marionette whose strings have been cut, all the strength left her muscles and she went down on her knees.

She watched Collette and Oliver run toward Halliwell, but could not rise. A terrible chill enveloped her. She had watched his mood grow darker with each hour that passed, seen his eyes go numb, and his nerves become more brittle. All along, she had wanted nothing more than to keep him going until they could find Oliver, find the answers that they were looking for. Guilt consumed her now as she accepted the selfishness of that. Yet it had not been only for her. She’d wanted to give Halliwell hope, something to hold on to long enough for them to ask Oliver the all-important question: Could they go home again?

Virginia and Ovid Tsing had told them it was impossible, as had the guardians of Twillig’s Gorge, and King Hunyadi himself. But Halliwell had never let himself believe it.

Julianna knew that his denial of that fact was the only thing that kept him from falling apart completely. Without hope that he would see his daughter again, he would shatter.

Now it was happening right before her eyes.

Collette and Oliver ran toward Halliwell. Captain Damia Beck tried to get hold of him again, to keep him back. But Julianna could see, even in profile, the expression on his face, and she knew there was no point. Ted had lost all hope, and now all that was left was his anguish.

Halliwell started firing again, and he ran right into the midst of the sandstorm created by the Dustman and Sandman at war.

“No!” Oliver shouted. “What the hell are you doing?”

Too late,
Julianna thought. But, in her mind’s eye, she could see the way the kindly curmudgeon had changed when they had crossed the Veil into this world, could remember the panic and anger and cynicism that had eaten away at him, and she wondered if it had always been too late.

In the starlight, Julianna could see a difference in the hue of the sand and dust that made up the brothers, one more brown and one more gray. Striations of that sandstorm whipped in a frenzy, twisting in on each other. And when Halliwell stepped into their midst, it whipped at him as well.

He fired his gun one last time. His clothes flapped around him, driven by the force of the wind the two Borderkind were creating. Collette screamed. Oliver shouted at the man to get back, to step away, but it was too late. The sandstorm had him, the war of these two brothers had consumed him.

The churning storm must have been like sandpaper, all of that grit spinning around. It tore Halliwell’s clothes from his body and then began to scrape his flesh, stripping the skin and muscle and then scouring every bit of gristle from his bones.

Oliver staggered to a stop in horror. Beside him, Collette also halted.

Where she still sagged on her knees, a hundred feet away, Julianna let her hands slip from her face. Warm tears painted tracks in the dust on her cheeks.

“Ted,” she whispered.

As they watched, the storm abated and a figure began to form. With the winds dying, Halliwell’s bare bones fell to the ground.

Julianna wept for him, and for his daughter, Sara—a girl she had never met. All Ted Halliwell had wanted was to be with her, to tell her that he loved her and that nothing else mattered. Now he would never have that chance, not until they met again in the afterlife.

As she stared at the place across the sand where his bones lay, a terrible thought occurred to her.

Ted Halliwell had died in the world of the legendary, but his daughter lived on the other side of the Veil. If there truly was a heaven, would they be together there, one day, or separated for all eternity?

Numb, she staggered to her feet and forced the question from her mind. But, deep down, she knew it would haunt her always.

The Sandman stood before them, sickly lemon eyes glaring. His hideous, obscenely long face split in a grin. He spared a single glance for the tall soldier with the night-black skin and then ignored her, turning toward Oliver and Collette.

“Bascombes,” the Sandman said.

The soldier raised her sword and barked a command. The men and women in her command began to close in around the Sandman. Oliver knew they stood no chance. The Sandman would slaughter them.

“Come on,” he said.

The Bascombes ran toward the monster that had killed their father.

“Back away!” Oliver called to the soldiers. “Leave him to us.”