FOUR

WINTER NIGHT

Veronica tried to pull her hand away when the boy took her wrist, but he was strong. Too strong.

“If I cut off a finger,” he wondered, “Will it grow back?”

“What’s your name, sugar?” Veronica asked him, trying to get him to look her in the eyes, rather than studying things to sever.

“That’s not important,” the boy said.

“That’s a funny name,” Veronica said. “I like it.”

His gaze flicked up, then, and she caught it and held it. Beneath her skin, she felt a deep, powerful stir.

The boy felt it, too. His pupils grew wider and darker, and he came even nearer.

“What are you about?” he asked.

“Don’t be afraid of me, honey-pot,” she said.

“I’m not . . .” He didn’t finish. He grabbed her behind the head and started kissing her. It was violent and awful and she knew it so well. But that was okay. Because as he kissed her, she began to feed. He struggled for half a second, then sighed and gave in.

They always gave in.

She’d forgotten how good it was. Like an ice-cold Coke on a hot summer day. Like pressing a splinter from an abscess and seeing the puss spurt out. Like crushing the life out of a tick.

It made her tingle all over. It made her feel big.

“Hey,” the girl said. “What are you doing? Stop it!”

She wasn’t finished with the boy, but she didn’t have time, not with the girl coming at her like that.

She pulled back.

“She’s trying to keep us apart,” Veronica told the boy. “She wants me for herself.”

The girl had grabbed him by the shoulder, which only helped make Veronica’s case. The boy growled like an animal and spun on his companion. He slammed his knife hand into her and she shrieked, falling to the floor and scrambling backward as he followed. They both vanished from view—her crawling, him walking with cold purpose.

A moment later, the boy was back, a dreadful grimace on his face. He kissed her again, and she finished him, taking all he had until his lips tasted of dust and marrow.

She didn’t feel at all bad about it.

But she was still chained. She couldn’t reach the boy’s knife, and even though she felt stronger—much stronger—it wasn’t enough to snap her bonds. She knew there were guards not far away, she didn’t have much time.

She felt suddenly very cold. Moisture beaded on her face like sweat—or more like the condensation on a glass of iced tea.

She spotted one of the guards at the door, his sword drawn. His skin had a distinct blue shade to it, and he looked surprised.

Then he toppled forward, landing on the boy with the knife.

Behind him stood the Brume, staring at Veronica with big eyes.

“You’ve been naughty,” the Brume said.

“So naughty,” Veronica agreed. “But then so have you. Where are Haydevil and Mistral?”

“Why don’t we find out?” the Brume said. She lifted her hand, and Veronica saw she held a ring of keys.

She heard shouting as the Brume unchained her. Echoing in the tunnels, it was hard to say how far away.

“Is there a way out?” Veronica asked.

“For us there is,” the girl replied.

Veronica followed the Brume through the twisting corridors, trending generally in a downward direction. She felt the water, tantalizingly near, but never quite close enough to touch.

From the sounds of things, her escape had been discovered. The Brume had probably frozen every guard on the way to her, as she had once frozen Billy and Errol. But from what she’d seen, Nocturn had plenty more soldiers to send.

Veronica was starting to worry the Brume was lost, when they finally entered a room that sloped down to a small pool of water.

“This comes out somewhere?” Veronica said.

“Somewhere,” the Brume confirmed.

“You first, then,” Veronica said.

“I like water,” the Brume said.

“Me too,” Veronica said. The hammering of boots on stone was quite close, now.

“But I can’t swim,” the girl said.

“Oh, for—” she grabbed the Brume by the wrist and pulled her into the water.

She kicked hard, pulling the girl down with her. Veronica felt the Brume struggle for breath, then her pulse began to slow, and the blood in her veins came nearly to a stop. Her hand became quite cold.

The water, too, quickly grew chilly. Veronica didn’t mind. Her eyesight was almost useless, but every other sense was so alive it didn’t matter.

The tunnel was tight at first, but then it widened and turned so they were no longer going straight down, but out, away from the Mountain of the Winds. The water was almost still, but not quite, as if she was in the veins of a sleeping titan, whose heart beat in time with years instead of seconds. To say the water had purpose was probably overstating things, but it was going somewhere, as all water did. Even glaciers moved, even the stagnant water of a salt lake rose into the air to find clouds.

The Brume tugged at her, suggesting she had a more pressing direction in mind. Veronica, beginning to lose herself in the vast underwater labyrinth, tried to concentrate on those cues, to keep herself in her own present, her own mission, rather than succumbing to the ancient resolve of the netherflood.

All too soon, her sense of time became more acute as, somewhere above, the sun rose and her lungs suddenly felt the need for air. She began to kick more frantically, trying to sense some place where air might be—just a pocket of it, enough for a single breath. She squeezed frantically at the Brume’s hand, trying to somehow signal her of the danger.

She swam blindly upward, hoping against hope that there was a surface she could not feel, but now the Brume tugged even harder at her hand, down.

In a panic, she tried to let go, but realized their hands were frozen together. Worse, she felt cold creeping up her arm, obliterating all feeling. Then it reached her lungs, and they froze, still aching for air.

Everything slowed and she didn’t feel much at all. Together, she and the Brume drifted down, very gently.

She remembered her last day as a normal, mortal girl, strands of sun falling through the leaves of the forest, dappling the waters below the falls. She remembered the man. She remembered dying.

She remembered kissing Errol beneath the stars.

She remembered being buried head-first in the earth, and many other things.

She remembered it all without fear or anger or passion of any sort, as if she was watching the movie of someone else’s life. She wanted nothing, needed nothing.

It was a good place to end.

But it did not end. After a long time, the darkness gave way to light—not bright like the sun, but tiny, diffuse sparks, like a Christmas tree seen through tears. Fuzzy.

Then the lights sharpened into pinpoints, and she realized her face was no longer in the water. The lights were stars accompanied by a tremendous full moon. White forms drifted in the water all around her, which she gradually came to comprehend were chunks of ice, bobbing in the water like she and the Brume were, still half frozen themselves.

As her awareness sharpened, she realized they were drifting down a river edged by dark, evergreen forest. When she thawed enough to move her limbs, she lethargically stroked toward the water’s edge. Eventually, they were on the bank.

To her delight, the forest floor was covered in a few inches of snow. She barely remembered snow—it didn’t fall often where she was from, and when it did there usually wasn’t much and it didn’t stay long. But once, when she was about six or seven, it had snowed for two days. Her dad had made snow ice cream by mixing it with milk and sugar. She’d thought it was the best thing she had ever tasted. Then her whole family had gone out front to make a snow man. The next day everything started to melt, but the snow man hung in there, long after the slush on the ground was gone, shrinking, becoming more and more pitiful, until she wished they’d never made him at all, so he wouldn’t have to suffer.

Make her sad.

Once or twice the stream she shared with the Creek Man had frozen over. She had bumped against the ice, and once found a man looking through it at her. Then he had cracked the ice with his fist, and the real fun began . . .

She clenched her fingers in the white powder, trying to make a snowball, to remember more about the ice cream and less about the man in the creek.

She knew what she’d done to the boy with the knife. She hadn’t had a choice. Errol would understand that.

But she had also enjoyed it, which he would probably not understand. She didn’t want to understand it either. Or think about it.

She realized this place felt all too familiar. Like the in-between, like they were almost out of the Kingdoms again.

She also felt like someone was watching her.

“Come on Brume,” she said. “We should get going.”

But the girl didn’t respond. Veronica wondered if she was dead, then she saw she was breathing. Most likely, she was just worn out.

Veronica didn’t know where she was going, but she wasn’t going to wait for the girl to come around. She felt like something was about to bite her or fall on her head, but she couldn’t see it, and wouldn’t see it until it was too late.

She was feeling strong. It was night here, and she had . . . fed, recently. Carrying the girl wouldn’t be difficult.

She lifted the Brume over one shoulder. She closed her eyes and slowly turned until everything felt the brightest, and started walking that way.

The snow was as fine as dust and lifted up like little clouds around her feet as she walked along. The ground underneath felt hard, very hard. The trees were tall, and all were covered in dark green needles. Not pines, maybe fir trees, or spruce. Nothing that grew where she was from, so they must be far from there. If she found the Pale and went through, where would she be? Alaska? Siberia?

But she didn’t want to go through the Pale, she wanted to go back into the Kingdoms.

It wasn’t long before she came to a bend of the river which had formed a kidney-shaped pond. It was frozen solid. She was dithering about whether to walk on the icy surface or go around it when she noticed something from the corner of her eye.

It was a girl, a little younger than her. She had long black hair and almond-shaped eyes. She wasn’t wearing anything, and her skin appeared almost to glow in the moonlight.

“Hello, sister,” the girl said.

“I’m not your sister,” Veronica said, although she knew exactly what the girl meant. Because it wasn’t a girl. Not anymore.

“You’re like me,” the girl said.

“I was like you,” Veronica said. “What’s your name?”

“I don’t remember. I’ve been here a long time. I have treasures.”

“I know you do,” Veronica said.

Again, she remembered her snowman, shrunken and sad in the sunlight.

“I wish I could help you,” she said. “I can’t.”

“I don’t want your help,” the girl—the nov—said. “But stay here. Talk to me.”

“Why?”

Then she knew. The treetops were bending, although she felt no wind. Owls called alarms in the distance.

“Who is that?” she asked. “Who is coming? A Creek Man?” She tried to remember Aster’s word for it.

“A vadras?”

The nov laughed, a lovely sound, like chimes.

Veronica started to run. She slipped to one knee on the ice, and slowed to a walk, but once on the other side of the small lake, with the earth supporting her, she went as fast as she could. Behind her, she heard the nov, still laughing.

Now there was a wind moaning in the trees. She ran harder still, trying to get as far away from the water as possible.

She’d been held in thrall by a vadras for decades. They were old, and they were cruel, and like novs they lived on the death of others—but they were not pretty. A desperate man wading through a stream might catch his ankle on a snag or be pulled under in a flood or be struck by a water moccasin or collapse of fever on the bank. But a vadras could never entice a man to simply walk into the water and inhale.

A nov could. So Creek Men liked to have novs around.

She wasn’t doing that again. Whatever she did, she wasn’t going to be anyone’s slave.

She scrambled up a low hill and to her relief found that the land continued to rise ahead. The river and its marsh were behind her now, and so was he. If he caught her, she would fight. She was different now. She wasn’t sure what she was, but she knew she wasn’t a nov anymore.

She scrambled up the next rise, where the trees thinned out into a white meadow. For the next few steps she heard only the crunch of snow beneath her shoes.

Her head was down, so she saw his boots first. Dark, oiled leather, laced in front. Black leggings stuffed into them.

She looked up.

It wasn’t a Creek Man. It never had been.

His shirt was also black, and a heavy cloak of grey wool hung from one shoulder. A broad-brimmed hat was pulled so it covered part of his face. Not enough. Not those eyes, the same blue as the Sterno flame her mom used to warm her chafing dish.

“Sheriff,” she said, involuntarily taking a step back.

“Hello, Veronica,” he said.

The Sheriff had chased her and the others across the Kingdoms, when last they had been here. He had caught her and buried her alive—in the desert with no water to give her strength, no ponds, rivers, or streams to call to for help. The best she had been able to do was summon dragonflies from a tiny wash, far away.

It had been enough, but only because Errol had come after her, and had the persistence to find her. To see dragonflies where they ought not to be. Otherwise she would still be there.

She wanted to run, but her feet seemed frozen to the snow.

The Sheriff smiled—which looked wrong—then he laughed, which was even less in character from what she remembered of him. She felt a deeper chill in her already almost-frozen blood.

“Oh, it is so good to see you,” he said. “Few escape me, when I lay my mind to them. Even fewer escape me twice.”

She was shivering now, not from the cold. She didn’t know what he meant. The Sheriff had only held her captive once . . .

He took the four steps between them and laid his hand on her cheek.

“The first time I saw you, you couldn’t have been more than four or five,” he said. “Your little arms were so thin. You were missing two teeth. But I recognized the light in you, so pretty and bright. But I knew that wasn’t the time. I can be patient. I knew the light would grow as you did, become brighter as your body began bending into a woman’s shape. I also knew that almost immediately after that it would start to fade. The life would drain out of your eyes, and you would abandon yourself to some savage who could never understand what he was desecrating. You would drain yourself into five or six brats, diminishing all the while, so that by the time you finally died you would hardly even notice. I was only trying to save you from that. And I did, at least for a time.”

She knew him then.

“You aren’t the Sheriff anymore,” she said.

“Part of him is here, still. His power. His knowledge. I remember more about his life than he did. But what remains of him serves me now.”

“I killed you,” she said. But even as she said it, she knew it wasn’t true. She had killed the body—the teacher, David Watkins. But the thing inside of him—that hadn’t stayed down.

“You did me a favor,” he said. “Usually when the meat I’m staying in dies, I must wait to be born again and spend years helpless, unable to do what I must. But you dug me out of David, and the Sheriff was there, broken but still alive, waiting for me. Now I can repay you.”

“That’s okay,” she said, finally finding the power to back up. “That’s fine.”

“You are already mine,” he said. “I was cheated for years, but no longer. I will keep you as you should be: perfect, ageless, never to fade like a flower past its time.”

Veronica’s fear was starting to dwindle. She had killed his other body. She could kill this one. Drag him back down to the water, beneath the frozen surface . . .

“No,” he said.

It wasn’t merely a word. It stabbed into her brain, and her limbs seized up. She stumbled back as her arms lost feeling. The Brume shifted on her back, put her off balance, and she fell onto the snowy ground.

From down there, he looked very tall. Impossibly tall.

He stooped toward her. His grin reminded her of a skull.