“I bet your father wouldn’t like knowing you spied on me.” She strode to her horse. “Don’t do it again. I’ll know.” She swung onto Grace. “And don’t shoot arrows at the owl or the apple. It’s not the right way. It’s not fair.”
She looked down at him, as regally as she could manage after knowing he’d seen her naked. “We appreciate the tribute, so thank you, your father, and whoever else. Now go sneak around somewhere else.”
She nudged Grace into a trot.
“Are you coming back tomorrow?” he called out.
She sighed, thought, Boys, and declined to answer.
As she approached the edge of the clearing, she heard the whoosh of wings. She reined in Grace, looked up. Her eyes widened in awe as Taibhse swooped overhead, the stem of the apple in his beak.
Some instinct—Mallick would have termed it a call to her blood—had her lifting an arm. And still it stunned her when the owl glided down, landing on it as if on a branch.
She felt his weight—considerable—but not any bite from his talons. His gold eyes stared into hers, and she felt a connection forged.
Mallick stepped out of the cottage, watched her ride toward him, one hand on the reins, the magnificent owl on her other arm.
Hadn’t he dreamed that? Hadn’t he seen it? The owl, the ghost god, the hunter, would be hers now. As bound to her, Mallick thought, as he was himself.
“I found the apple. I didn’t hurt the owl. He’s Taibhse.”
“Yes, I know.”
“I didn’t climb the tree. I don’t want to take the apple from him. It’s like stealing. But you see I found it, and he can take it back. I want the bathroom, Mallick, but I’m not going to steal to get it.”
“You’ve fulfilled the first quest. The apple is another symbol, Fallon. There are many who would be blinded by the gold and not see the true prize. You’ve won the loyalty of Taibhse, hunter, guardian, wise spirit. He’s yours now as you are his.”
“I … I can keep him?”
“Girl, he’s not to be kept or owned. You belong, one to the other. Lift your arm to release him. He won’t go far.”
When she lifted her arm, Taibhse soared up, settled on a high branch. When he set the apple down, the stem attached as if the golden fruit had grown there.
“He’s beautiful, and brave. What’s the second quest?”
“We’ll discuss it over dinner. Tend to your horse.”
“Don’t you want to hear how I got the apple?”
“I do, yes. Over dinner.”
That night, she unpacked and hung Colin’s wind chime in her window. On the sill she placed a little jar and set the stem of Ethan’s flower in it along with her birth father’s book, and the photo of her with her family.
Looking out through the dark, through the dance of faerie lights, she saw the white flash of the great owl on the hunt.
Tomorrow, she thought, she’d hunt, too. After the chores, after the lessons and the practice and the studies, she and Grace would ride the woods on the second quest Mallick had given her. She would find the gold collar, and the wolf who wore it.
While she dreamed, others hunted. Their fingers probing through the dark scratched at the surface of her dreams. She was the prey, had been since before her birth.
She tossed in sleep, fear urging her to turn away from the images, the voices just beyond reach. Run from them, hide, survive.
What she was pushed to see and hear was blurred and indistinct. To know what to fight.
The circling crows, a gleeful murder heralding death. The flashes of lightning, black for death, red for burning. A circle of stones swimming in fog, and a man wading through it to stand and stare at the scorched and broken earth within the old dance.
The hilt of the sword he carried glinted in a single beam from the moon. Suddenly, his gaze cut away from the stone, and darkly, fiercely green broke through the borders of dreams.
Here the first of seven shields, destroyed by treachery and dark magicks. Here the blood of a son of the gods shed, and here the blood of our blood poisoned. So raged the plague.
Now, Fallon Swift, I wait. We wait. It waits.
He lifted his sword. Lightning struck the lethal point, erupted so he held a blade of white, flashing flame.
Will you take up the sword and the shield of The One? Will you answer the call? Will you come? Will you be?
When he plunged the tip of the sword into the ground, the fog burned. In the stone circle something bubbled and churned.
Choose.
While she dreamed, while others hunted, still others prepared for blood sacrifice.
In what had been, before the Doom, a wealthy suburb in Virginia, a band of Purity Warriors established a base camp. There nearly a hundred men, women, and the children they made, captured, or indoctrinated lived in grand houses and held weekly public executions.
Some, true believers, followed the tenets of Jeremiah White, the cult’s founder and self-proclaimed commander. All Uncannys, any who had magickal abilities—or those who sympathized with them—were from hell. Demons and those who trucked with them must be destroyed.
Others joined, bore the symbol of the cult, because they enjoyed the freedom to rape, torture, kill, and a religious fervor baked in blood and bigotry offered the opportunity.
White himself had visited the base. He’d spent two days in one of the grand houses, had given rousing sermons on his twisted god’s vengeance, and there presided over the hanging of three prisoners.
An elf, barely twenty, wounded in battle in the outskirts of D.C. A woman, a healer past seventy, who’d tended the wounds of the elf and others—even those who cursed her for a demon. And a man, simply a man, accused of witchcraft for the crime of trying to protect a child of ten from a beating.
Torture preceded the hanging. White called the screams of the damned trumpet calls to the righteous, and those who followed him cheered in a black wave of hate that rolled like a killing sea.
White traveled with an entourage of bodyguards, strategists, sycophants, and soldiers. And some—if reckless enough or drunk enough—whispered some of that entourage were of the Dark Uncanny.
But White rewarded his faithful with food, slaves, those rousing sermons, and a promise of eternal life when the demon threat was eradicated. So most kept silent.
Sundays, the Sabbath, began with worship. Reverend Charles Booker, formerly a grifter who specialized, with mixed success, in bilking the elderly on home repair and security, led the congregation in prayer and verses from the Old Testament to a god thirsty for blood. Announcements followed the service, given by Kurt Rove, appointed chancellor by White as a reward for his part in the New Hope Massacre. While he ran the base with an iron fist and basked in his position, on Sundays Rove reveled.
Rove might announce changes in laws, often arbitrary. He would read dispatches from White, reports from other bases, from battles, listing numbers killed and captured—this to cheers that celebrated spilled blood.
He would end reading the names of prisoners, and those selected—by committee—for that Sunday’s execution.
Attendance to worship, announcements, and Sunday executions was mandatory. Only those assigned guard details were granted dispensation. Illness only served as an excuse for absence if the base doctor, who’d had his medical license revoked before the world ended, issued a waiver.
Those who failed to attend risked, if reported, twenty-four hours in the stocks erected outside the three-car detached garage that served as the prison.
Since Rove’s appointment, executions took place at precisely midnight. Not a minute before, not a minute after. “Escorts” selected by lottery led the prisoners from the garage to the public green and the scaffold. Each prisoner bore the brand of a pentagram on their forehead—a Rove flourish White had decreed into Purity Warrior policy. Their hair, roughly shorn, often showed bloody scalps. They were allowed no shoes, only a rough garment of burlap fashioned by slaves.