Vault of Shadows (35 page)

This was a counteroffensive. It was the kind of battle he'd dreamed of, and as he stood there and watched, Milo knew—somehow knew—that this was because of him. He'd brought the red ship to the EA, and the scientists and techs had scavenged it, reverse-engineered the tech, and used it to build a fleet.

An entire fleet of ships that were as fast and powerful as the Huntsman's craft.

Swarms of barrel-fighters clashed with the EA ships, but one by one they exploded as the resistance fighters of Earth showed them what would happen in a fair fight.

It was wonderful.

It was everything Milo had wished for.

Explosions rippled along the body of the hive ship as its internal engines ruptured.

“Enjoy your moment,” said a voice, and Milo spun to see the Huntsman behind him. The hybrid was bleeding and he leaned on a makeshift crutch fashioned from a piece of metal tubing. His pincers were broken, one eye was missing, and his body was crisscrossed with wounds that bled red or green. Even now the creature's human and alien blood refused to mingle despite flowing through the same veins. “Enjoy your victory, general.”

It took Milo a few seconds to realize that the Huntsman was indeed addressing him. But . . .
general
?

“We're going to wipe you off the planet,” Milo said, and the sound of his own voice startled him. It wasn't a kid's voice. It was an adult voice. Deep, strong, filled with confidence. “And then we're going to hunt your kind across the universe. We won't rest until we wipe you out of existence.”

The Huntsman coughed and blood ran from the corners of his mouth. “I remember when you were a boy. Such a little thing, all those years ago. I should have killed you when I had the chance.”

“You should have,” said Milo. He could feel the power in his body. He was tall, strongly built. A warrior.

A hero.

Standing with the battered and dying Huntsman beneath a sky filled with fire and death.

“It
would have been different if I had gotten the Heart,” said the monster. “You know that. You know you could never have won.”

“Then it's a good thing you didn't get it.”

There was a malicious gleam in the Huntsman's remaining eye. “Such a shame that you failed to get it repaired. Ah, such a pity. All that power lost. All those doorways shut forever.” He cocked his head. “That is what you wanted, wasn't it? Your greatest wish was to defeat the Swarm, no matter what the cost. And you have. Tell me, General Silk, was it
worth
the price you paid? Can you even remember the names of the friends you buried along the way? The werewolf girl? The fat boy and his dog? Your own parents? Any of them? Was winning this war worth shutting out all those lights?”

In the air above them the entire hive ship exploded.

Eight hundred billion tons of interstellar craft. Seventy gravity drives. Six thousand nuclear reactors. Fifty million pulse-gun power packs. All of them detonating in the same instant.

Milo saw the Huntsman throw back his head and laugh.

And then there was nothing.

  •  •  •  

Milo woke up an instant later.

He was in the woods miles from his camp. In front of him was a small pyramid made from stones and hidden
in the forest. Nearby was the debris from a crashed Bug scout ship.

Milo stood there, his skin still tingling from the heat of the nuclear explosion. He trembled as he tried to understand what was happening.

Before him was the damaged pyramid that had housed the Heart of Darkness. It was gone, and he knew that it had been taken by the Huntsman.

But this was wrong. He couldn't know that yet because this was a memory. This was a week ago, when he had first found the debris field and the pyramid. His scavenger pod was in the woods, and he knew with absolute certainty that if he turned around, he would see the face of a wolf.

He would be meeting Evangelyne for the first time. And then Oakenayl would grab him and they would demand to know what he'd done with the Heart.

“This is nuts,” he said aloud. “This is where it all started.”

Or,
he thought,
this is where it all started going wrong.

He closed his eyes.

“No,” he said. “I don't want to do this all over again.”

Except that maybe he did. If he could go back, then he could warn his camp. He could save everyone. Lizzie wouldn't be dead. Barnaby wouldn't be dying. Mom would still be with him.

Could he really go back, or was this all a dream? What was real? Milo was losing his ability to tell.

He heard a voice whisper to him from the shadows beneath the trees. Not Evangelyne's voice. Not a voice he recognized at all.

“Be careful what you wish for.”

Milo shook his head. “I just want to do the right thing.”

He closed his eyes.

  •  •  •  

When he opened them, he was in the rainy woods near Lake Pontchartrain and his dad was there. Except Milo knew now it wasn't his dad. It was a holo-man that simply
looked
like his father, using an image stolen from Milo's mind.

“Milo,” the holo-man said in the voice of his father, “give me what you stole. It's wrong to take things that don't belong to you. Just give it to me and I'll make sure to return it. Then we're going to have to have a little talk about consequences, young man.”

“You're not my dad!” Milo yelled. Lightning forked in the sky and thunder boomed loud enough to drown out his words.

“You're being rude, Milo.”

“You're not my dad,” Milo repeated, more to himself this time. Weaker. Lost. “I want my dad.”

The image of the holo-man flickered as if the tech was shorting in the heavy rain. It flashed, sparked, and then winked out, leaving only the slumped form of the dead man leaning against the tree.

Then the lightning flashed again and Milo saw, to his horror, that beneath the holographic image was the real face of his father. Actually there. Cold and dead.

He screamed himself out of the memory.

  •  •  •  

He woke up again, this time on the blackened corpse of planet Earth.

Nothing moved.

Nothing lived.

The moon was gone, blasted to a million chunks of debris. Without its gravitational pull, the tides had stopped and the oceans sat, vast and still and stagnant.

Milo walked and walked and walked through the wasteland of the world he'd tried—and
failed
—to save.

Alone.

Filled with despair.

Walking through black ash under a relentless sun.

Looking for some trace of life.

Finding absolutely nothing.

  •  •  •  

He woke up again and he was with the Earth Alliance. Older but still a kid. Orphaned, desperate. His mother was gone and now he could remember seeing her fall, watching her die, weeping as she was buried.

Her grave was next to Shark's.

Milo fought his way through the months and years, losing a little more hope every day. Fighting the gnawing
pain of knowing that he could have made a difference but hadn't tried hard enough.

He fought and fought.

And died.

  •  •  •  

And woke up.

Again and again and again and again . . .

W
hen Milo woke up again, he found that he was back in the library once more. He had no idea if he was really awake or still dreaming.

He was alone by the fireplace and he looked around, expecting to see everyone either gone or dead.

They were all there, though. Evangelyne sat on the floor across the room and there were fresh stacks of books around her. For once she looked like a normal kid. Pretty, a little shy, into her own thoughts, happy to be lost in the book that lay open on her lap. Shark was seated on the top step of a wheeled ladder, his shoulders hunched as he bent over what looked like a big book of maps. Mook was reading a
My Little Pony
graphic novel.

“O-kay,” Milo said to himself. “This is us saving the world.”

He walked through the library, wandering aimlessly up and down the aisles, finding new ones and following them, rediscovering old ones that brought him back out to the main room. He kept expecting something bad to happen, kept expecting to be shot or stabbed. Kept expecting this to be another dream.

Kept expecting it to all go wrong again.

The things he had dreamed about haunted him. His father, the Daughter of Splinters and Salt, dear little Halflight. The Huntsman. His own future selves.

His failures.

The end of everything.

It was so much to carry that it all seemed to weigh him down.

He wished the Witch of the World would say something to him.

He wished the darn Heir of this place would show up. Or materialize. Or whatever ghosts did when they were done wasting everyone's time.

The Huntsman was out there somewhere. Maybe the queen of the dark faeries was too. The Swarm certainly were.

And here they were, hanging out, eating, goofing off, reading books.

It was unreal.

So he figured it had to be another dream. But if that was the case, where was the action? What was the theme of this dream? What was supposed to happen?

That question was answered when he went down another of the seemingly endless number of aisles, rounded a corner, and found himself in a little alcove that was lit by dozens of candles. There was furniture here, but it had been pushed outward against the wall so that the center of the floor was clear.

Well, not clear. Not really.

The floorboards had been torn roughly apart to reveal black soil. Milo knew that it should have been concrete or some kind of foundation materials, but it was dirt.

And growing up through that dirt were dozens upon dozens of mushrooms with pale yellow caps and scaly stems.

A faerie ring.

Here.

Inside the Impossible Library.

And . . . worse than that.

Far worse.

Standing inside the ring was a woman. Tall and regal, with masses of flaming red hair, gleaming silver armor, and a torc of carved gold around her throat. Her eyes blazed with green fire and her red mouth smiled. The air around her shimmered as if boiling. Little arcs of electricity ran up and down her body, twisting and hissing like yellow snakes.

“Milo Silk . . . ,” said Queen Mab. “I see you've come to set me free.”

And she reached for him.

M
ilo screamed.

And this time he did not wake up.

This vision—this horror—persisted, forcing Milo to accept it as real. As something that was happening right now.

So he screamed again. Louder.

“GUYS! SHE'S HERE!”

The queen of the
Aes Sídhe
laughed at him and lunged forward with ten dagger-sharp, red-tipped fingernails. Milo stumbled backward against a shelf, lost his balance, and fell, dragging a dozen heavy cookbooks down with him. They pounded Milo to the floor and then went skittering through the dust. One struck the outside edge of the faerie ring and instantly burst into flame. Milo scrabbled at his belt for his slingshot, spilled half the ball bearings from his pouch trying to load it, and then jerked his arms up to fire.

The queen stood there, laughing as the air shimmered around her. Milo fired.

The tullinium alloy ball flew straight and true.

And it exploded in midair.

The queen laughed even harder.

“Stupid child,” said the queen, “
how can one as stupid as you be the favorite of the Witch of the World? How is that possible?”

The fire on the burning cookbook was beginning to spread, so Milo kicked the cover shut. The flames snuffed out and thin tendrils of smoke curled upward. For some strange reason they smelled like spaghetti sauce. At any other time Milo would have been both dazzled and delighted by the concept of a cookbook's smoke containing smells from the recipes inside. It disturbed him now, though. It suggested that these books were far more real than they appeared. That the knowledge in each of them was somehow alive.

That bothered him because living things can die, and that cookbook might have actually died. All around him were hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of books. If they were all alive, then they would die—just as Milo and his friends would die.

Queen Mab nodded as if able to read his thoughts. “Oh yes, Milo, that would hurt you, wouldn't it?”

“Shut up,” he said. Then he cupped one hand around his mouth and yelled for his friends. There were faint answers but they seemed impossibly far away.

The queen stood inside the faerie ring, and through his shock Milo realized that even though something had changed, the queen was still trapped. The shimmering air was like a giant force field, And it was then that he realized that Queen Mab was not alone in her prison. All
around her feet capered the tiny figures of her warriors. Candlelight glinted from their armor and from hundreds of miniature swords.

“Free our queen!”
they cried.
“Free our lady so that she may free us.”

In that split second of time, Milo understood the pattern of this thing. The pieces tumbled into place. The Huntsman, craving knowledge of magic, had sought out someone magical with whom he could make a deal. He found the
Aes Sídhe
and struck up an alliance with Queen Mab. She taught him enough about dark magic to set him on the path of becoming a necromancer. The murder of Lizabeth—and whoever else he killed—generated raw power. The Huntsman took some and shared the rest with Queen Mab. The spells holding her in the shadow dimension were weakening, but just for her. She was almost ready to step out into this world. And she would reward her champion with even greater magical knowledge.

Milo knew that if this were something healthy, it would be called a symbiotic relationship. But what was it called when two parasites helped each other? Was there even a name for it?