Vault of Shadows (24 page)

“I already told you,” she said hollowly. “A thousand years ago there was a medicine woman of great power and knowledge. These swamps and forests were hers, and it is said that she wielded incredible powers. Her magicks ran very deep and strange.”

Shark snapped his fingers. “You mentioned her earlier, didn't you? The sweet and salty girl? Something like that?”

“The Daughter of Splinters and Salt,” corrected Evangelyne sternly. “And be careful, boy. Mock her at your peril.”

“Why? I thought she was dead.”

“She is.”

“But maybe roaming around the woods and helping us out? Doesn't sound too evil to me.”

“Evil?” Evangelyne shook her head, then shrugged. “Actually, I'm not sure. I really don't know much about her other than some old stories from the Chitimacha native peoples who my aunts were friends with. People around here feared her, I can tell you that, but they also honored her with offerings. They built a shrine to her.”

“The mushrooms?”
asked Shark, confused.

“No. The clearing itself is her shrine.”

“It doesn't look like a shrine,” said Milo. “It's just a clearing.”

“To some people,” said Evangelyne, “anything can be sacred. A hill, a tree, a mountain. You don't need to build a temple out of stone to honor the great mysteries. All that is required for a place to be holy is that people believe it to be.”

“So this clearing is a shrine,” said Shark. “Got it. Weird, but whatever. What does that have to do with a ring of mushrooms? Five minutes ago you guys were telling me about some bizarro faerie queen and Milo seeing the Huntsman. Now we have Native American witches. Should I be taking notes or something? Is there going to be a test?”

Evangelyne gave Shark a tolerant and almost apologetic smile. “Let me explain something to you boys.”

“Stop calling us boys,” said Milo tiredly.

She continued without commenting on that. “Before we met . . . no, actually before you two found the pyramid, the world of shadows was beyond you. It was always around you, and it was
all
around you. As it always is and always was, but it was hidden. Not exactly invisible, but your eyes could not see it because you were not looking for it. Your world and mine are not really the same. We Nightsiders are able to see more of the shadow world than you, just as you can probably see more of the Daylighter
world than we can. Think about the ant and the hawk.”

“Huh?” grunted both boys.

“An ant and a hawk may live in the same forest, but are they really part of the same world? They never interact. The ant lives on the ground and does what it does, living out its span without knowing or caring if the hawk exists. It may never even be aware that such a thing as a hawk exists at all, because the hawk's existence isn't any part of the ant's life. The same can be said of the hawk. It has its life, others of its kind, its enemies, its prey, its places of rest, its hunting grounds, and even though it has keen sight, it is never looking at the ant. The ant is not part of its experience.”

“Oh,” said Shark.

“Yeah,” agreed Milo. “So magical stuff's always been around but not in any way that we'd run into? Or see? Is that pretty much it?”

“Well . . . yes, I suppose,” agreed Evangelyne. “It wasn't always like this, though. The Nightsiders and Daylighters shared the world at times, even peacefully in places. But mostly both species fought and hunted each other. And killed each other. Then . . . as your kind built cities and moved away from the natural world, the Nightsiders started looking the other way. Niether side needed to see each other, and eventually both sides hardly needed to believe in each other. The Daughter of Splinters and Salt lived in these forests five hundred years before Europeans came here to conquer what they
called the New World. Perhaps the native peoples who once lived here had memories of her, but they're gone now. Gone, and with them any human memory of the shrine and of the one it was made to honor.”

“Again I ask,” said Shark, “what's this have to do with cranky faeries and the Huntsman?”

“I don't know,” confessed Evangelyne. “It can't just be a coincidence that Queen Mab grew her toadstool ring at that spot.”

“My mom says not to believe too much in coincidences,” said Milo.

“Your mother is wise,” said Evangelyne. She thought about it in silence for a while. The boys exchanged nervous looks, and the darkened forest seemed to loom huge and black and threatening around them.

Milo broke the silence. “This Daughter of Splinters and Salt was some kind of witch, right?”

“Yes.”

“Was she a good witch or a bad one?”

“I told you I don't
know.
Besides, good and evil, right and wrong, what does it matter?” mused the wolf girl. “Those concepts don't apply to everything, Milo. Why even ask?”

“Kind of for the obvious reason,” said Shark, jumping in. “If she was a bad witch, then maybe this Queen Mab weirdo is tapping into her negative mojo. If that makes any sense . . .”

“Ah,”
Evangelyne said, then shook her head. “I don't know the whole story of the Daughter, but I can't believe she would willingly help someone who wanted to destroy the world.”

“Does she even have a choice?” asked Milo. “Couldn't the
Aes Sídhe
just kind of hijack the energy of her shrine? Does it work like that?”

From the expression on Evangelyne's face, he knew that his question had hit the bull's-eye. “That's not as stupid a question as you might think,” she said.

“Thanks,” mumbled Milo. “I think.”

“Any place as important as the shrine of the Daughter of Splinters and Salt would have been drenched with magical energy. This energy would have soaked into the ground and infused everything within a certain range. Even now, even with the Heart of Darkness removed from it, the area around the pyramid has power.”

“We felt it,” said Milo, and Shark grunted agreement.

“Queen Mab may have chosen the Daughter's shrine for exactly the purpose of amplifying her own magic.”

“That makes sense, I guess,” said Milo. “If she was trying to control the Huntsman, she'd pretty much have to go nuclear with her magic.”

“More or less,” said Evangelyne, nodding.

“Okay,” Shark said, “I'm starting to see how this works. But it doesn't explain anything about what happened to Lizzie. Queen Mab tried to sacrifice Milo, too, right?”

“Possibly,”
said the wolf girl. “The more I think about it, the more I believe that she was giving him to the Huntsman as a gift of trust.”

“A what?”

“In magical bargains there is an exchange of gifts. Things of great value, but not like gold or jewels. Power items. Things that help the other person but also show that you trust them. Look at it like this: If two soldiers from different countries wanted to join up to fight an enemy they both hated, they might shares supplies or even weapons. That would show each of them that they were in it together. Do you get it?”

“I do now,” said Shark, “but it's creeping me out. Milo was a gift bag for the Huntsman?”

She gave him a blank look, clearly not understanding the reference.

“Ignore him,” Milo said to her. “But tell me this: If the Huntsman materialized inside the faerie circle, wouldn't he be trapped too?”

“No, it wasn't that kind of thing. I believe it was only his aspect you saw, not his actual physical body. It was like one of those holo-things. . . .”

“Hologram,” supplied Shark.

“Yes. They were conjuring his aspect so that the queen could share energy with him, and so that he could receive her gift. His real body is wherever he was, probably in a conjuring circle of his own. It would be in a place where he would be heavily protected. But enough of his essence
would exist within the queen's circle so that he could take possession of the gift. And, before you ask, it would be actually physical possession. If you had stepped inside the
Aes Sídhe
circle, then the magic would have sent you to the Huntsman. You would have been his.”

“Like a teleport,” said Shark.

Again, Evangelyne didn't get the reference. Milo explained and she nodded.

“Wait a sec,” said Milo. “When we first met, you made some crack about real names and how you Nightsiders could conjure with them.”

“So?” she asked. “What of it?”

“Does someone
need
a real name to do that whole conjuring thing?”

“Of course but . . . oh, I see your point.”

“I don't,” said Shark.

“If Queen Mab was trying to conjure the Huntsman, in flesh or in aspect, she would have to know his real name.”

“So?” asked Shark and Milo both.

“Well, if she had discovered it through some magical means and was conjuring him to be her slave, that would be one thing. Bad, but not the worst that could happen. The Huntsman as a slave would be less fearsome.”

“Still not following. Less fearsome than what?”

“The Huntsman as an ally,” she said. “The other alternative is that he
told
her his name, so that she could not only summon him but cast spells that would give him
powers without her turning him into a slave. It means that they would have to trust each other, and that they would be truly working together.”

“Oh,” said Shark, his face turning a sickly greenish brown. “That's not good.”

“She could give him enough power to find us and destroy us. That spell in the faerie ring might have been the queen and the Huntsman trying to recover the crystal egg. No . . . more than that. If Milo had been forced all the way into the ring, Queen Mab could have cast a spell of enslavement on him and then he would have had no choice but to tell her where the Heart of Darkness could be found.”

That was a truly terrifying thought, but it was so big, so overwhelmingly enormous, that Milo did not know how to properly think about it. He stared into the middle distance, barely seeing anything but the nightmare images conjured by his imagination.

“But what about Lizzie? Why go after her?” asked Shark, his voice weak and afraid. “I mean, she knows you have the Heart, but we haven't told her or any of the others about that egg. Far as I know it's Milo, you Nightsider guys, and me, right?”

“Right,” said Milo. “So the Huntsman couldn't have gotten that information from her. There must have been another reason to try to get her into the faerie ring.”

“Yes,” agreed Evangelyne.

“What happened to her, though? Why's she so weird?”

Evangelyne shook her head. “I—don't know. I really don't. There are only two possibilities I can think of. One is that Lizabeth never fully entered the circle, not at any point, which means the
Aes Sídhe
weren't able to sacrifice her to the Huntsman. And since you saw her lying across the edge of the toadstool ring, that seems likely. Or the ceremony was interrupted somehow and when the enchantment collapsed, so did she. Magic is very powerful, so she could be feeling some kind of aftereffect. She might shake it off after a few days.”

The boys considered this. Shark began nodding, but Milo wasn't so sure. “That doesn't explain how I saw her in the woods when she was already at the bolt-hole. And it doesn't explain that thing with her blouse. I
saw
her cut off a strip to use as a bandage, and that bandage was on Barnaby's wound. You both saw it. How'd she do that and then we all saw her with her blouse all normal? No cut, nothing.”

“Don't look at
me
, dude,” said Shark. “I gave up trying to understand this a long time ago.”

Evangelyne shook her head slowly. “There are many mysteries in this world, Milo. Maybe now it's that you can see things you couldn't before.”

“Oh, so I'm the ant who suddenly sees the hawk?”

She shrugged. Then she gave Shark a strange look. “Where is Lizabeth now?”

“She went with the others on the skimmer,” said Shark.

“You're sure.”

“I—I
think
so,” said Shark dubiously. “Everyone else left.”

“Did you actually see her get on that boat?”

“No. Not exactly. But where else would she go?”

The wolf girl suddenly tensed and looked into the forest with such intensity that Milo and Shark stared too. But all they saw were shadowy trees and hairy vines.

“Evangelyne,” whispered Milo, “what is it? What's wrong?”

Before Evangelyne could answer, there was a sudden crashing sound in the woods, and they wheeled around just in time to see Mook's head come flying like a cannonball toward them.

T
hey dove for cover as the ball of rock whipped by, trailed by a long bellow.

“MOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOK!”

The stone boy's head struck a live oak and both tree and rock exploded, showering everyone with debris. One piece struck Shark square in the center of the chest and knocked him flat. Evangelyne tried to dodge the spray, but another piece caught her on the temple. She uttered a sharp, shrill cry of pain and spun away in a clumsy pirouette, then fell hard. Milo jumped for cover and landed badly, the air whooshing from his lungs.

Immediately the brush parted and something massive and monstrous burst out at them. Milo saw what it was and screamed. Because screaming was a very appropriate response on being confronted by the thing that now stood in the clearing.

It was a
Stinger.

These monsters were nightmare creatures, feared by even the toughest soldiers. The Dissosterin scientists had taken ordinary mastiffs and wolfhounds and then rebuilt their DNA, combining it with that of
Leiurus quinquestriatus
,
the aptly named deathstalker scorpion from North Africa and the Middle East. The Stinger's body had all the mass and bulk of the fighting dogs, but it was completely covered in hard, dark arachnid armor, and above its back curled the segmented tail with its deadly barb. Even a few drops of venom could knock out a fully grown man, and a full dose would kill anyone. This twisted science had created a monster more fearsome than any creature that had lived anywhere on earth since the age of dinosaurs. With its speed, armor, and venom, it was more than a match even for a grizzly bear or Siberian tiger.