The Lost Ones (The Veil #3)

The Lost Ones (The Veil #3) Page 52

The winter man feared the unknown. He was afraid of what would happen to his world if the prophecy came true. Oliver saw it all in his eyes, and he understood. But this was Julianna’s life.

“If we were ever friends…” he began, but could say no more.

Frost glanced from Halliwell to Collette and back to Oliver. In the end, he reached out a hand and touched Julianna’s hair, and he nodded.

With a gesture, the winter man opened a passage. The air trembled and a kind of archway appeared, mist swirling on the other side. Through the mist, Oliver could hear the honk of car horns and the roar of engines. Somewhere children laughed, and a mother shouted at her child to stop running.

Oliver glanced at Collette as his sister reached out. She grasped the edges of that passage, invisible to the eye, but he could feel her take hold and knew that he could do the same. Perhaps they could use their power to unmake the Veil, and perhaps not.

Now wasn’t the time to find out.

“See you soon,” Oliver said.

Collette nodded.

He hefted Julianna, bent to kiss her forehead, and then stepped forward. As he moved through that tear in the Veil, trying to cross the border between worlds, he felt resistance. Julianna was one of the Lost Ones. The Veil’s magic had been woven to keep her from traveling back to the land of the ordinary. But Oliver was not Borderkind. Nor was he merely ordinary. Nor was he a Walker Between Worlds. He’d been a lawyer and an actor, a son and a lover, a brother and a friend. Though they weren’t yet married, he understood that he’d become a husband, and nothing meant more to him than the woman who would be his wife.

He was both a legend and a man.

He stepped through the Veil, forcing aside whatever magic conspired to keep Julianna from coming home with him. Oliver Bascombe did the impossible. He tore the membrane of the Veil.

And the magic began to unravel.

EPILOGUE

In late October, with the trees afire with the red and orange of autumn foliage, Damia Beck sat atop a gentle grassy hill with her legs drawn up to her chest, chin resting on top of her knees. She gazed out across the valley below. Fishermen who had been up before the sun stood on the shore of the lake, casting their lines with an easy grace. A shepherd guided his flock in a silent parade up a distant hill. Morning light silhouetted the battlements of the Castle of Otranto on the horizon.

Damia loved it here. Her world had been integrated into the ordinary, little fragments of legend and wonder scattered all over the human realm, missing pieces of history returned to their rightful places. None of the roads she had known her entire life led to familiar places anymore. Euphrasia had been broken up, pieces of it merged into the human world in North America, Europe, and Asia. The capital city of Perinthia no longer existed. King Hunyadi’s palace still stood, but in a forbidding old mining town in the north of England.

Hunyadi had always loved Otranto more. She and the king had that in common. Its appearance in the mountains not far from Innsbruck, in Austria, had been met with fascination by the locals—a far better reception than the legendary had received in some places.

She did not blame the Bascombes. Oliver had not brought the destruction of the Veil with any purpose, no matter what so many of the Lost Ones wished to think. He had unraveled its magic for the sake of love. No matter her misgivings, no matter how difficult this new world had proved, Damia understood that. She wished him well.

But she hated him a little, too.

Damia took a long breath and squeezed her legs more tightly to her chest. The irony cut deeply. The Lost Ones—both those who’d crossed over themselves and those whose ancestors had first gone through the Veil—had yearned to return to the ordinary world…to go “home.” But no matter what the legendary had called them across the Veil, Damia had never felt lost there, amongst the magical creatures and mystical places. Here, amongst ordinary people, she truly felt lost for the first time. More than anything, she wished she could go home.

But there would be no returning, now. Home, as she’d known it, no longer existed.

“I wish you were with me,” she said softly. Only the rustle of the leaves in the trees responded. “I might have learned to see this world through your eyes. At your side, it could have been a grand adventure.”

A pair of tiny birds darted from the nearest tree. Several golden leaves fell, drifting to the ground like feathers.

Damia smiled as she watched them wing their way across the sky, turning toward the lake and then the castle in the distance. Reluctantly, she glanced at the small mound of earth to her left, beneath the tree. A stone marker had been planted at the head of the mound to identify the tiny grave where the blue bird had been buried. She had briefly considered having his name engraved upon the stone, along with some declaration of her love. Awful enough that she had buried Blue Jay here, instead of in the land where his legend had originated, but she needed him close by her.

The stone had been etched with a single word. Four letters that comprised her wish for his spirit, for the wings of his soul, as well as a constant reminder to live by his example.

Soar.

Damia stood, shook fallen leaves from her cloak, and looked out at the lake and the castle once more. A soft smile touched her lips. She glanced at the small grave.

“I know what you’d say. Time to make my own adventures.”

She stared again at the four letters etched into the marker and nodded. Then she turned and started away.

On the other side of the hill, a complement of twenty members of the King’s Guard awaited her on horseback. Hunyadi himself spurred away from the others. He held the reins of her horse—its saddle as black as her own battle dress—and he brought the beast to her. Damia recognized the honor. That the king should keep hold of her horse while she spent a few minutes on farewells, instead of delegating the job to some page, was a gesture of extraordinary respect and fondness.

“I’m grateful, Your Majesty.”

“As am I, Commander, for so many things,” the king replied. “We must ride, now, though. The journey to Vienna is long.”

Damia gripped the pommel, put one foot in the stirrup and threw her other leg over. In the saddle, holding the reins, she felt her mind clearing. There was work to be done. The United Nations was holding a special session in Vienna to meet with representatives from Euphrasia, just as they had already met with the new king of Yucatazca—some cousin of Mahacuhta’s—in Rio de Janeiro. Hunyadi had made Commander Beck the Euphrasian ambassador to the UN. It meant everything to her. Many of her people were attempting to return to the nations of their births, or of their ancestors’ origins. But Damia would always be Euphrasian.

“Let’s be off, then,” she said.

Damia snapped the reins and the horse began to trot. His Majesty rode at her side and the King’s Guard fell in behind them.

As she rode, she caught sight of a pair of birds—perhaps the two she had seen moments ago—taking flight from the Castle of Otranto. They darted across the surface of the lake, flying low, chasing one another, moving as though dancing together on the air.

She watched until they soared up and over a distant hill, out of sight.

On a blustery afternoon in mid-November, the trees mostly stripped of leaves and scraping skeletal branches at the low-slung gray sky, Sara Halliwell drove along a winding road to the north of Kitteridge, Maine. The Old Post Road seemed to go nowhere, the sort of route that would make those unfamiliar with it wonder with alarming frequency whether or not they had taken a wrong turn and gotten lost. In truth, the Old Post Road did lead somewhere, but the towns to the northwest existed in a locale that could only be considered the middle of nowhere.

Sara had spent the late spring and early summer in Maine with her father, helping him to adjust to what he’d become, and the way the world had changed for all of them. There had been so many questions, government inquiries, and requests for help from friends and allies who were having an even more difficult time coming to terms with this new world.

Many still thought of her father as a monster. To their eyes, he had discovered the soulless killer who had murdered so many children, and had become that very thing. Several newspaper editorials had suggested that he stand trial for the sins and crimes of the Sandman. But that was only talk. Even if they could find a jury willing to convict him, the law would not be able to hold him.

Eventually, those voices found other things to rage about.

During those long months, Sara and her father found a new peace. The relationship would never be perfect, but Sara felt sure that things like that, like the perfect father-daughter relationship, were the real myths. She loved him, and he loved her. Whatever Ted Halliwell had endured, he had awoken to a new life in which the choices his daughter made in her life troubled him not at all. Her happiness was all that mattered to him. Sometimes they bickered, but there was a tenderness even in that.

Sara had spent the late summer and early fall in Atlanta, packing up her studio and meeting with former clients, hoping to get leads on new business in the northeast. Her new photography studio in Boston wouldn’t open until January or February, but already she had work lined up.

Yet the idea of photographing fashion models and advertising layouts again left her cold. She kept it to herself, but there were so many new beauties, so many bits of breathtaking magic in the world now, that those were the things she wanted to capture with her camera.

Still, a girl had to eat.

The road ahead curved to the right and she followed it, the car buffeted by the November wind. The weatherman had predicted rain, but so far she had not seen a drop. She glanced at her odometer, trying to figure out how far she’d gone since getting onto the Old Post Road. If the directions her father had given her were accurate, she ought to be almost there by now.

Almost as the thought occurred to her, she caught sight of the house looming up on the right. Beyond the pine trees and bare oaks, situated at the peak of a distant hill, stood a massive, sprawling Victorian. On that grim day, the lights in its many windows were warm and inviting. Smoke rose from two separate chimneys.

Sara caught her breath and put her foot on the brake, slowing to turn into the dirt path that led up through the trees. She drove carefully up the hill until she arrived at the front of the house, where she parked and climbed out of the car.

Her keys dangled from her hand as she stared up at the house.

It had been built entirely out of sand.

The front door opened and her father stepped out, wearing that long coat that he so favored but thankfully without the silly bowler hat.

“Hello, sweetheart,” said the Dustman.

Sara ran to him and threw her arms around him. She kissed his rough cheek. The sand was warm.

“Did you bring your camera?” he asked.

“Oh, right.” She went back to the car and popped the trunk, pulling out her camera bag and slinging it over her shoulder. When she returned to him, he stepped aside to let her into the house.

“What’s the big mystery, Dad?” Sara asked.

Her father smiled. “Come in.”

She went through the door. He followed and closed it behind her. Sara gazed around, mouth open in wonder. The house was vast inside. A long corridor led away on either side of the grand staircase in the midst of the foyer. The stairs split, both sides leading up to a balcony on the second floor, overlooking the entryway. The place felt a bit chilly, but she could smell the woodsmoke from the fireplaces, and the oil lamps that seemed to be everywhere gave the house the feeling of an age long gone by.

“Follow me,” he said, starting for the stairs.

“Dad?”

Ted Halliwell turned and smiled at his daughter. “Sara, follow me.”

She did, up the stairs to the second-floor balcony. The wide corridor there led deeper into the house. Both sides of the hall were lined with doors, and the corridor seemed impossibly long, as though it might go on forever.

“Magic,” she said. It wasn’t a question.

Sara turned to her father. Adjusting the strap of her camera bag over her shoulder, she stared into his eyes. “What is this? Where does it go?”

“Not ‘it.’ They. Every one of these doors opens into a different part of the world, some ordinary and some legendary. We can go anywhere in the merged world, see everything with our own eyes, or through the lens of that camera.”

She stared at him, shaking her head, speechless.

The Dustman shrugged. “You’ve got no plans for the next couple of months, until you open your new studio. You said so yourself.”

He reached out for his daughter’s hand. “So, where do you want to go first?”

Sara laughed, stared down that long corridor at all of those doors, fighting disbelief. But there was no room in the world now for disbelief.

She took his hand.

“Surprise me.”

On a cold, crisp night during the first week of December, Oliver Bascombe sat in the familiar chair in his mother’s parlor and stared into the fireplace. The logs roared and crackled with flames. He’d built himself up quite a blaze and sat, now, reading Jack London’s The Sea Wolf. The book brought him comfort. Since childhood, he’d read it many times, always in this room, in this chair. In his imagination, he had sailed aboard The Ghost with Wolf Larsen, traveling into danger and adventure.

Oliver slipped a finger into the book and reached up to rub at his eyes. The fire flickered ghostly orange on the walls. He might be getting tired, but he thought, perhaps, something else troubled him beyond the heat of the fire getting to his eyes.

The Sea Wolf had lost some of its magic. Danger and adventure no longer had the allure for him that they had when he’d been a boy.

A gentle knock came at the door, and then it swung open. Unbidden, Friedle entered the room carrying a small tray, upon which sat a steaming mug of the thick cocoa the man had been making for him ever since his mother had died. Oliver knew memory could play tricks, but it seemed to him that Friedle always got the cocoa exactly right. Nobody else had ever been able to duplicate it.