We Will All Go Down Together (52 page)

He strode back to the van, clambering inside. Bemused, Carra followed, only to find him digging around in the back.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

Sy didn’t look up. “If I’m wrong about this, I’m sorry, but I have to ask—you don’t have much of a plan here, am I right?”

She hesitated. “Not really, no; I usually don’t. Intuition, and all that.”

Sy nodded, pulling out a trade-paperback-sized, blue Chapters-Indigo tote bag. “Good thing I brought these along, then,” he said.

He handed her a tangle of string and fabric that—once unsnarled—proved to be four silk pouches, each tied on their own necklace of twine string, all packed with something that felt like grit or sand. A musty, spicy smell rose from them.

“Charms,” said Carra, understanding. “Rowan wood?”

“Rowan, breadcrumbs, St. John’s wort, iron filings, red thread . . . everything that’s supposed to ward off faeries, except for holy water and church bells. I found them in one of the Freihoeven’s storage chests.” He slipped one over Carra’s head, letting it fall against her breastbone. “Don’t know if they’ll do any good or not, but—”

Carra looked up at him, meaning to either joke about hoping she wasn’t witch enough the thread and the rowan laid her out, or at least say
thank you
, whichever her brain supplied first. What came out instead, however, was: “You’re amazing.”

“Oh, I don’t think. . . .”

She shook her head, put up one hand to stop his lips, projecting:
Shush, enough. You good, uncomplicated, entirely human man.

“Doesn’t matter,” she told him. “I do.”

—and leaned forward, not letting herself think about it, to press her mouth to his. His hands slid up to grip her shoulders, pulling her closer; her arms went around his neck, and Sy spilled over into her, redoubled the blood-din, confirming what she hadn’t known she knew.

This
is
going to happen. Not now. But—it will.

I’ll
make
it happen, and he’ll let me.

He
wants
me to.

Carra only broke the embrace with a wrench, resetting her glasses, as he hitched a laugh and did the same. He was breathing fast, visibly poleaxed, taking a moment to scrub at his face, as though slapping himself awake—man, she hoped she didn’t look like that. The bags, where were the bags?

“Ah-
hem
,” said Jude from somewhere behind them.

“You guys need any help?” Kim asked.

Sy and Carra looked at each other. “No,” Sy called, finally, “we’re all done over here, basically. . . .”

(
for now
)

Right, right, and right, yet again. Dourvale’s denuded main through-road led down to an equally empty shoreline, gravel with stretches of sand; against it, the black Lake rippled, glittering under a chalk-white rising moon. To either side, things ran out until vanishing into the treeline, which was dense and black and jagged.

No lights that Carra could see, but the pull she felt had only intensified—
this way,
it said,
keep on coming, don’t want to be late.
Reluctantly, she began trudging, shoes slipping muckily, with Sy, Josh, and Jude trailing close behind.

Lake-noise—soughing air and rippling water, leaf-scrape and needle-fall, insectile drone, the creak of ancient trees shifting under their own weight—pressed up hard against them, a solid wall, vast and deep and alien. Willful malevolence she could handle, and had; human or inhuman, it made no never-mind. But this place’s utter
indifference
was terrifying too, in an altogether new way. It made her skin crawl.

Then Sy’s fingers met hers in the dark, fitting together smoothly without either of them even having to look. Foliage and underbrush closed around them, too thick for colour; if she’d been navigating with only the faint reflections off the Lake to guide her, they would have been lost in moments. What drew her on, however, had a compass-pull all its own—a divining-rod quiver seeping up through her heels, telling the soles of her feet where best to place themselves.

This way, this way. This.

Without warning, the whole tangle gave way onto grass more flattened than mown: a rectangular lot sloping down to the once-more-visible Lake, on which sat a two-storey stone and timber cottage. It had been built into the slope, sliding glass doors on the bottom floor spilling faint illumination—a slick, strange, blue-green light, so dim it took Carra a second to realize what was making her gut clench, just to look at it.

The light was
pulsing
. Waxing and waning, slowly, near invisibly. And human beings did not make light like that, not in any dwelling meant to be a home.

As she and Sy stood there, still hand in hand, Jude emerged from the woods, pulling Kim along by his sleeve. When they saw the light, both of them stopped short as well.

“Ah,
wei
,” murmured Jude, “that’s not creepy at
all.
Blair Witch
re-enactment due to commence in three, two, one. . . .”

As if cued, the light went out. Carra’s hand spasmed, gripping Sy’s painfully. Beside her, Jude folded his arms.

“So,” he said. “They know we’re here, obviously.”

“Yep.”

“Mmm-hmm. Stay out or go in?” Carra forced herself to shrug. “Not much of an answer.”

“It wasn’t much of a question, honestly.”

“Well, there’s that,” Jude agreed and strode forward, snapping his fingers to summon an arc-weld haze of protection. Disengaging, Carra loped after, not checking to see how fast Sy would follow—mainly because, even without touching his mind, she already knew he would.

Palms pressed to the doors’ glass, Jude peered in, conjuring just enough pale purple light to see by. Pulse-lit gloom peeled back, revealing a party-sized romper-room left over from some 70s porno shoot, veneered in classic recreational décor’s luxury ephemera: wood-panelled walls, a bar with built-in stereo, two long leather couches and a beanbag chair (Christ alone knew what lived in
there
), all bracketing a thick dusty shag carpet. In the doubly unnatural light, every surface seemed heavily stained, glowing bright as Luminol.

Carra reached past to grasp the nearest door handle and pulled. The air that puffed out when it rolled smoothly open smelled no worse than any other long-shuttered house’s: stale, faintly tinged with mould and the memory of tobacco and hash smoke.

Nothing moved at the sound. Josh whispered a Korean swear-word.

They stepped in together, more or less—first Carra and Jude, then Sy and Kim, with Jude’s shadow tagging along in the rear, a step or two behind where anyone watching would have expected it to be.

“Up here, places like this, some people keep rifles,” Kim whispered, sidelong. “For hunting. Or trespassers.”

“Uh huh.”

“So what I’m saying is—I
really
hope you got the right house.”

“You did,” a new voice answered, to their left.

At the sound, Jude whipped ’round, casting a shimmering, circular wall of power between it and them; the room’s violet light turned actinic, harsh and blazing, with fresh copies of Jude’s shadow spiking out in every direction like guards jumping to attrention. Carra felt her hair crackle and start to lift, her own power rousing in response, pressure between feet and floor gone abruptly tenuous; both Sy and Kim half-stumbled back, as though shoved.

Concealment spell,
Jude was thinking, eyes furiously a-roam, searching out targets and not finding any. To which Carra projected back:
No. Nothing so . . . traditional.

This is glamour.

“Correct,” the voice agreed. “Glamour, ironically enough, is
exactly
the right word for it.”

With a wrench, somebody sat up from one of the couches, as though emerging wholesale out of its fabric: an old man, flesh fallen far enough away to leave the framework visible; dirty grey hair, dirty grey beard. Handsome bones. And—

—those same eyes, but paler, the way Gala’s had always been. A diluted imitation of the true Druir peacock-feather, carrion-fly blue.

“Mister Sidderstane,” Carra named him, prompting a truncated little bow, or as much of one as arthritis would allow for.

“Call me Gaheris,” he replied.

Then they were all sitting, somehow; Sy and Kim on the other couch, Carra on the beanbag with Jude leaning back against her knees, hands dialled down, but eyes still trained on Gaheris Sidderstane’s ancient face. The old man was talking, possibly had been for some time. A mere blink, more glamour, not effortless so much as—uncontrollable, perhaps. Like it exuded through his pores. Like he simply couldn’t bother trying to restrain it any more, with such a very tiny bit of time left in which to do so.

Here and there, beneath his skin, Carra glimpsed the cloudy jellyfish shapes of several competing forms of cancer. She wondered how many different pain meds he had to be on in order to organize his words this beautifully, rolling them from his tongue in a rasping Jeremy Irons drawl.

“. . . saw you coming, of course. Though when I say ‘we,’ it’s really my sister I mean; she’s the scryer in the family. You’ll have to wait to meet her, slightly later on, I expect, for she’s rather shy in company, these days . . . a symptom of her transition, poor dear. But then, we all have our crosses to bear.”

Kim shook his head, sharply, as if shaking himself awake. “’Scuse me,” he managed, eventually. “Uh . . . why are we here?”

Gaheris blinked. “Because Miss Devize brought you, I expect. Do you play some particular part in this errand?”

“Well—I’m the one who came to
her
, so. . . .”

“Ah, so
you’re
the injured party. Very sorry, young man. Our aunt can be quite the hazard.”

“She took my
girlfriend
,” Kim blurted out, before amending: “Ex-girlfriend, I mean.”

“Ah yes, she does that,” Gaheris agreed, unsurprised. “
Droit du seigneur
. The others don’t exercise it, in the main, but Enzemblance does still take the occasional girl, or man . . . sturdy fellows such as yourself who can last a long time, down there in the dark. And children, too. Children most of all.”

“Why children, though?” Sylvester chimed in, polite but curious, ever the good interviewer.

“Because Torrance Sidderstane—our great-grandfather—didn’t understand what she was when he made the deal with Lady Glauce. Enzemblance was supposed to inspire him, but the poetry he wrote didn’t sell, and he blamed her for it. So he cut her throat and drowned her in the Lake outside. Enzemblance being as she is, however, the only one who died was their daughter—still inside her, unborn. She’s been trying to get her back, ever since.”

“Where’d that son of hers come from, then—Saracen?”

“Oh, she came back to Torrance after he was put away, once the TB got bad enough; held him down and had her fill of him, then left him to die in his own blood. That’s where Saracen
comes
from, and he’s all hers—son of a
leanan-sidhe
, a true faerie love-talker, the way Ganconer only pretends to be.” There was a strange relief in Gaheris’s voice, as if finally telling the truth eased some intolerable pressure. “But she wants more, always; a girl preferably, a boy most. Which is why she
will
kill Galit Michaels’s child rather than let him free, if she can at all help it.”

“So how do we stop her?” Kim demanded.

“I have something you can use to open the door to the
brugh
—the high road, not the low. Given their druthers, my cousins prefer to hide, not fight; they can wait for you to get old, then come for you through the walls, when you least expect it. Yet if you can force the issue, they
must
emerge or forfeit what they consider their honour. It’s entirely your business how you choose to proceed against them, after that.”

Carra nodded, poised to ask him to elaborate further. But here, another voice interposed from nowhere in particular, similarly proper, saying: “Gaheris, wait. No.”

“It needs to be done, Ygerna.”

“Not by you.”

“Or
you,
apparently. While they, on the other hand, seem to have volunteered.”

Soft: “That’s not fair. . . .”

Gaheris sighed, weary.

“None of this has ever been
fair,
sister mine. It’s life, only that—
our
life. Unfair by its very definition.”

From behind him, the sigh met its match, low and liquid, a mournful, breathless keening. And the pulsing light pulled itself together, knitting solid form from what Carra had previously thought a mere blur across her glasses’ lenses: dust and dried tears, the eyes’ exhalation. Became a woman whose drowned countenance, lit by its own sick yet sensual glow, shared most superficial points of similarity with Gaheris’s own, save that it was eternally young, eternally beautiful, and terrifying in the extreme.

She leaned in over the back of the couch, bonelessly, and draped both her arms around his crepey neck, hands twining to form a sort of loose pectoral—a gesture both comforting and off-putting, when you saw how her knuckles bent like tentacles.

“If you give them the sigil,” Ygerna Sidderstane murmured, “then you’ll be defenceless. Against . . . everything.”

Gaheris didn’t stir, though. Not even when her next earlobe-lick drew blood.

“That’s as may be,” he said. “Will you try to stop me?”

“Not I, brother.”

“Thought as much.”

With that, he rummaged inside his jacket and drew out what seemed to be a plain-made, age-blackened iron horseshoe. Ygerna, more Fae than not, at this point, flinched back from its cold, antithetical halo, letting her grip slip—a circumstance Gaheris exploited by leaning forward himself, swifter than Carra would have given him credit for, and slipping it into Jude’s outstretched fingers.

“Give that to Miss Devize, please,” he told him. “It’s a key of sorts—a bit of a battering ram, when used correctly. If she’s human enough to hold it, I believe it’ll fit her purposes.”

Jude shrugged and offered it to Carra. For just one split second, she found herself shakily unable to recall the last time she’d touched anything
pure
iron . . . but reached out, nonetheless, braced for pain. Not until she felt it fit her hand, hard and cool and heavy, did she truly relax.