It was almost dark now, and the air was turning cool. Sabrina began to shiver violently as the evening breeze plastered the thin t-shirt she had worn under her sweater against her skin and played across her bare arms, reminding her of the clammy fingers that had tried to drag her into the black lake sinking into shadows behind her.
The bank was steep and seemingly unclimbable from where she had been cast ashore. There was a jetty on the other side of the inlet, with steps and gravel paths and all the trappings of civilisation—only a couple of hundred meters away, but it may as well have been in Brazil. On the other side of it was a flat beach. Either of those would have been easier to handle. She had known the terrain, she had seen photos, she knew where the ferryboat was supposed to have docked—but for some reason she had aimed herself past all that, and into the woods beyond. Perhaps it had been an instinct of self-preservation, seeking places to hide rather than the open beach or the pier head. But now the stratagem had turned on her—it was this steep bank, or nothing. Actually, no, not nothing. A slow dying from cold and fear, alone out here in the wilderness, in a night haunted by a handful of dangerous spirits willing to kill her—or to die for her.
Giving up would have meant wasting Jack’s gift to her, and Fiana’s; and also wasting the lives of all those poor hapless people whose only crime had been being on the same ferry that she had cursed with her presence. She drew a long shuddering breath and pushed clinging wet hair out of her eyes, leaving a wide muddy smear across her cheek. Her lower lip trembled like a child’s and she bit it violently until she could taste blood. But she was not going to sit down and bawl, although that was the only thing she seemed to have any strength or inclination to do.
It was then that she saw it, somewhere above her, in the trees. A light.
Whatever it was, wherever it was, light in this wilderness meant habitation, and warmth. Survival. Sabrina turned her head from the lake that had claimed all those innocent lives, and her thoughts from the creatures which had had a hand in the deed. She is not one of us, Fiana had said, speaking in her defence, pleading for her life. One of them—no, she was not one of them, not the hungry devourer with the pale eyes, or the quiet dark girl who had seemed willing to sacrifice herself that Sabrina might go free, or the man with the lake in his eyes. Recalling Jack, Sabrina instinctively felt for the stone around her neck, the mysterious opal pendant which seemed to have started the whole drama. It was still there, but now it was just a stone, cold with nothing more than a dousing in icy mountain water. No, she was not one of them. She was human, and in desperate need of a helping hand.
The man in the Swanndri. He had been on top of the bank. There had to be a way to get up there. Teeth chattering like castanets, Sabrina plunged into the ferns and the underbrush. Twice she was turned back by impenetrable thickets of rainforest. Long fern fronds, heavy with damp, and twisted vines that curled around the trees and along the ground reached to tangle her ankles, trip her up in the dark—she found herself on her hands and knees time and time again, her fingers digging into the rich muck of mud and fallen leaves. Sharp sticks of possum-gnawed birches poked out from trees invisible in the murk, stabbed her sides, scratched her bare arms.
The third time she set her teeth and scrambled up across an inhospitable prickly mat of vegetation, ploughing through obstacles instead of allowing them to stall her. When she finally broke through, she found herself on a sort of path. Narrow, twisting, often losing itself in the forest as she turned to follow it uphill—but a definite path. Human feet had passed this way.
By the time she finally made the top of the ridge, the night was thick around her. She was staggering with exhaustion and a steady shivering hypothermia that seemed to have chilled the marrow in her bones. She could have been faced with one of Mad King Ludwig’s Bavarian dream castles, and she would not have questioned its presence there. What she did find was, on the face of it, almost as useless to her. The light she had seen from the shore, the light she had followed like a guiding star, streamed from an electrical substation, a long, low building huddling under a coil of pylons and wires. Not a friendly house, then. No help.
Sabrina sank to her knees at the edge of the forest and sobbed, her chin sinking to her chest. She was spent, flickering, almost fainting. The feel of hands on her shoulders and a warm, blessedly dry blanket being wrapped around her felt like just another hallucination for a moment, and then she looked up and met such an unexpected pair of eyes that she came back to full consciousness with a snap. The hands that were tending her were real, indeed—and the eyes that went with them had last twinkled at her over a cup of tea in a cottage in Arrowtown.
“What kept you?” asked Uncle Bob conversationally, hoisting her up into his arms like a rag doll and walking towards the building on the hill. The tone was light, but there was a current underneath that Sabrina read as relief, and her instant reaction was rage.
“Put me down!” It was meant as a bellow, but came out as a croak, and drew only a smile.
“All in good time,” he said. “A bit of brandy in the tea, I think. And I have dry clothes in there.”
“What did you... What are you doing here...? How did you get...?”
“Tea,” he said firmly, “first.”
If she had not been feeling so thoroughly chilled and weak and miserable, Sabrina told herself desperately, she would have put up much more of a fight. As it was, it was a struggle not to give in to the cough that stuck in her throat, or to the wretched tears that she was still on the verge of. Whatever he thought he was doing, she was going to take that brandy, and the tea, and the dry clothes. By God, he owed her. He owed her all that, and more—he owed her an explanation, and it had better be a good one.
Her first glimpse of the inside of the putative substation, when Uncle Bob set her gently on her feet just inside the front door, drove everything from her mind with an impulse of pure shock.
“There’s a tracksuit on your bed, it should fit,” Uncle Bob said, as though there was nothing strange at all in the fact that the substation had somehow metamorphosed into an exact replica of his cottage in Arrowtown, complete to the book of poetry by Milton which she had not quite put back properly in her haste when she’d been caught drawing it from his bookshelf.
“But this is impossible,” she said. It came out sounding flat and childish, a denial in the face of palpable truth, however absurd it may seem.
“It is my house,” Uncle Bob said equably. “It goes where I go. Go and change, Sabrina, you’ll catch pneumonia, and that’s the last thing we need right now.”
“The last thing we – ” Sabrina gasped, and then folded over into a paroxysm of coughing that doubled her over and almost made her collapse all over again. When she straightened, eyes streaming, it was to Uncle Bob holding out a glass of amber liquid.
“On second thought,” he said, “brandy first, tea later. Come on, drink it. Take it with you. Go, get out of those wet clothes.”
Sabrina took the glass mechanically and allowed herself to be steered into the bedroom, trailing the blanket he’d wrapped around her.
The pale, mud-streaked face whose shock-wide eyes she met as she looked around the room initially startled her—until she realised that she was looking at herself reflected in a gilt-framed mirror on the far wall, and that she looked like nothing so much as a lunatic escaped from Bedlam. She drained her glass of brandy in two swallows and gasped as the fiery liquid burned its way down her throat. There was another door opening out of the room. It was ajar, and Sabrina crossed over to investigate. It led into a bathroom with a sink tiled in blue and a tiny square shower tucked into an alcove. In the space of time it took to expel her breath in a sigh she dropped the blanket and shrugged out of her soaked clothes, leaving them in a sodden little heap on the floor. The stream of warm water on her face and body brought awareness back to her mind and heart, and she found herself crying in the shower, a continuous exchange of water as her tears were sluiced away by the spray and more sprang to take their place. She cried until she was exhausted, standing with her face turned up to the shower as if the water streaming down her body could cleanse her of the pain and the responsibility for what had happened that day on the lake. When at last she stepped out and reached for the towel hanging on a hook beside the basin, she was scoured of everything except the anger. That was still there, burning steadily; and now, once she had donned the dry and blessedly warm tracksuit and combed out her towel-dried hair away from her face, she felt sufficiently buoyed by the shower and the brandy to go out and face its subject.
She found him pouring the tea in the drawing room, for all the world as if nothing was amiss.
“Honey?” he said, not turning to face her but instantly aware of her presence in the room. “You need it strong and sweet, I think.”
“Who the hell are you?”
There had been a dozen other questions vying for the honour of being first out, but that one suddenly seemed pre-eminent. That was the answer on which any and all other questions hinged.
Uncle Bob straightened.
“You would believe nothing from me tonight,” he said, “not even if I told you that lake is deep and cold and haunted, even though you have already found that out by yourself. But hear it from me, and you will probably deny your own experience of it.”
Sabrina laughed. “And this, I suppose, is a good reason for not telling me anything at all?” Her hand went to her throat, found the stone which still hung there, and then both hands were up on the chain, on the nape of her neck. But the clasp that she’d used to fasten the thing around her neck seemed to have evaporated, and all her fingers found was a length of fine chain. She tugged at it, irritated. “What is this thing that you gave me? And how do I get it off me?”
“Pull that chain hard enough,” said Uncle Bob conversationally, “and it’s your neck that will give way first. I’d leave it. It doesn’t come off, Sabrina, not until it’s over.”
“Until what’s over?” she yelped at him, driven beyond frustration.
“Come and have some tea,” he said. “Please. I do not mean you harm, I swear it.”
“You had no right,” Sabrina whispered, letting her hands drop to her sides, her eyes wide and bright and focused somewhere far beyond Uncle Bob’s homely walls. “You had no right to take me.”
“It was choice that I did not have,” he said gently, wrapping her hands around a saucer and a cup of fragrant tea, “Sit down.”
Sabrina found that it was possible to be no less angry at somebody if one was suddenly sorry for them at the same time. There had been something of an ancient and unhealed grief in Uncle Bob’s voice, and it called to her own new, raw, harsh one, which responded, incredibly, with sympathy. She had just been told that the chain that she wore round her neck was a real one which bound her to Uncle Bob’s purpose until he was ready to let go—and here she was, she was sipping his tea and feeling sorry for him.
She is not one of us.
“Who,” Sabrina said conversationally, “are those creatures who tried to kill me and/or save me out on the lake? And why does this... thing make them want me dead?”
Uncle Bob actually choked on a mouthful of tea, and had to cough himself back to coherence.
“And while you’re thinking about it,” Sabrina said, sitting straight and stiff in her chair, “you can tell me all about that choice you did not have. If I’m to live with the responsibility of knowing that all those poor lost souls on the ferry died because I was on it, I’ll have a reason why.”
“I told you,” said Uncle Bob, “that you’d not believe a word I said to you...”
“Try me,” she said
“How long have you been in this country?”
“I came with Mark, seven years ago. What’s that got to do with anything?”
“Much,” he said. “You were brought here.”
“Oh, really, now.”
“I told you that you wouldn’t believe me,” he said, with infuriating calm.
Sabrina tugged at her pendant. “This thing,” she said. “What is it? That creature on the boat... The man... He wanted me dead because of it. He wanted to know who gave it to me. He said I couldn’t cross, not with this on. Why?”
“I didn’t think he would kill,” Uncle Bob said.
“So you knew he was there?” Sabrina pounced on the words. “And you still gave me this and sent me out to him?”
“You said, creatures,” said Uncle Bob, sidetracking her. “Would you care to tell me what really happened? I know about the taniwha, but what else was out there?”
Sabrina had to consciously shut her mouth. “The taniwha? That was what it was? They actually exist?”
“Who else?” Uncle Bob prompted.
“Another,” said Sabrina. “She tried to kill me. Shura. She sank the ferry. Sharp teeth, white hair. These great cold hungry blue eyes. She was out there in the lake...” Sabrina shuddered, dropping her eyes. She was lost in the horror of the memory—all of it was replaying in her mind, and she was almost talking to herself, unaware that she had an audience. “My friend Fiana was out there, too. Fiana tried to drown her…”
She missed Uncle Bob’s reaction at the name and the description of Shura—he’d recoiled as though the words had been a whip. He would have spoken, with some urgency, but Sabrina had continued talking, over his impulse, and by the time she stumbled to a halt he had regained control.
“If she is what I’m afraid she is,” Uncle Bob murmured, “she can’t be drowned.”
“And then he saved me. First he tried to kill me, and then he saved me...”
“What?”
Sabrina lifted her eyes. “He saved me—he brought me the life jacket, he showed me the shore... And then he went back for Fiana.”
“The taniwha saved your life?”
“But he tried to kill me first....”
Anything Uncle Bob might have riposted to that was pre-empted by an explosive oath from the door of the drawing room, and both its occupants leapt to their feet, turning towards the voice. Sabrina’s teacup went flying off the saucer and shattered on the hearth.
The man who stood in the doorway, his face drawn with shock, was the man she had seen on the bank above the lake when she had struggled ashore—or at least he was wearing the same Swanndri shirt. He’d discarded the hat, and revealed himself to possess a thatch of sandy brown hair with a wiry wave to it and strands of white streaking it at the temples. His eyes were dark grey, the colour of a storm cloud, but his flat cheekbones and a warm glow to his skin hinted at Polynesian genes.
“Jesus Christ!” the man said, staring around him. “What the hell is going on? What have you done with my station?”
Uncle Bob coughed delicately. “As you claim it, do come in,” he said. “We were just having a cup of tea.”
Sabrina couldn’t help a half-hysterical giggle; the man’s face was so much like what her own must have looked like when she had been brought into this preposterous place. And there was Uncle Bob offering tea as though they had all met at the local supermarket and dropped in for an afternoon cuppa instead of being faced with an improbable book-lined drawing room in what should have been a bare cavern of a chamber humming with raw electricity. But the laughter died when she glanced at Uncle Bob and saw the intent hooded stare he had skewered the visitor with. If it had been her and she’d been greeted with a look like that, she would have run for the hills. The visitor, on the other hand, took another step inside, staring at the fireplace, at the books.
“Where did all this come from?” he demanded. “And just who in the name of God are you?”
“You can call me Uncle Bob, everyone does,” said Uncle Bob serenely. “This is Sabrina. Excuse me, I think we could do with a fresh pot of tea.”
And with that he went, just left them, and Sabrina and the new arrival found themselves staring at one another across the back of Uncle Bob’s rocking chair.
“I saw you; you were out in the woods earlier.”
“Yes, but...saw me where?”
“On the bank, down by the lake.”
He frowned. “Wasn’t me. I’ve only just come down from the hills up beyond the dam road. I haven’t been anywhere near the lake today.”
“But I saw you—that shirt, you were wearing that shirt, you were there when I swam ashore...”
“Swam ashore?”
“The ferry—there was... an accident.”
“Good God,” he said, halfway between concern and complete confusion. “What happened?”
For a brief wild moment Sabrina considered telling him, everything, and then took pity on him. Finding this house instead of ‘his’ station seemed to have upset him enough already.
Besides, here was Uncle Bob back with the samovar, keeping a keen eye on their guest who seemed sufficiently flabbergasted by the whole thing to sit down meekly and accept a cup of tea in a delicate china cup which seemed fragile and incongruous in his big brown hands.
There was another cup to replace Sabrina’s accident, too, and the shards seemed to have vanished when she wasn’t looking. It was that kind of house.
She actually drifted after that, staring into the fire with the teacup in her hands, pieces of the mystery forming half-familiar shapes and then coming apart again in her head. She kept on tripping up on the fact that she had been both almost killed and then saved by a taniwha. Marco had told her about those, right at the beginning, when he had set about making her love his country. He had told her about its peoples, about its myths, even as he showed her its physical beauty. The taniwha was a creature she had believed confined to Maori legend, but he was out there now, the creature who claimed the improbable name of Jack, interfering in her life. Him, and the other two.
She’s not one of us.
If she is what I’m afraid she is, she can’t be drowned...
I can’t swim—not in that...
“Sabrina?”
She jumped. Uncle Bob was leaning over her. His hair was out of its ponytail, and drifted around his head like a white halo. “Do you think you can sleep? There’s work to be done in the morning.”
A moment before she had been more than ready to collapse from utter fatigue, the after-effects of her encounter in the lake, and shock. But now, even as he spoke, Sabrina realised that she had been feeling vaguely uncomfortable for some time in an oddly familiar kind of way, and now she suddenly realised what it was. Her hands flew to the stone at her throat—cold now as it had been once before, icy, burning with the freezing touch of it. Sabrina looked up, wild-eyed.
“They’re in trouble,” she said.
Uncle Bob dropped into a squat by her chair. “What?” he said “Who’s in trouble?”
“Jack... Fiana.... They’re out there, and they’re in trouble. They need help! We’ve got to go help them!”
“Hey, wait a minute!”
But Sabrina was on her feet. “I’ve got to help them,” she said in a low voice. “I owe them my life, both of them...”
“She doesn’t sleep!”
“What?”
Uncle Bob rose to his feet. “That thing you met in the lake, the thing that drowned the ferry and tried to drown you... she doesn’t sleep, she strengthens at night, you would merely be another life for her to drink!”
“I don’t mean to interrupt,” said the man in the Swanndri as he rose from his seat by the fireside, delicately balancing his cup in one hand, “but if it isn’t too much to ask, perhaps one of you might explain who’s in trouble? You said there was an accident on the ferry?”
“Well,” said Uncle Bob with a twisted grin, “you might say that these are two survivors. You might also call them other things.”
“Who is this she?”
“Yes,” Sabrina said unexpectedly, siding with the stranger, “who is this she?”
Uncle Bob’s eyes narrowed at this sudden alliance and he looked at them both closely, his eyes dancing from the one face to the other. Then he sighed, looking away into the fire.
“If your description of the creature and her actions and her name was remotely correct, then what we may be dealing with here is a rusalka,” he said.
“A rusalka?” echoed Sabrina, incredulous. “In New Zealand?”
“What,” said the visitor, still politely but with what was an iron control, “is a rusalka?”
Sabrina closed her eyes briefly, swaying. “Ohh, God, it hurts. Let’s go, for God’s sake. Let’s go, now. They need me.”
Uncle Bob was still frowning, looking puzzled. “How would you know?”
“The stone! You gave it to me, and you ask me how?”
“That stone has nothing at all to do with the creature out of that lake.”
“It does now,” said Sabrina flatly. “So? Are you coming? Or am I on my own?”
It was almost bravado, and they all knew it—to the extent that the man in the Swanndri actually smiled at the challenge she had flung. It was flimsy—a lady’s silk glove instead of the traditional gauntlet. But Uncle Bob knew that she would do it—that the ferry incident had been enough to now make her fly in the face of sense and wisdom, perhaps to her own death if by it she could pay the debt she saw herself as owing to the two that were out there.
“You can’t face a rusalka alone and unarmed! Not in her own domain!” Uncle Bob said sharply.
“Well, arm me, then!” Sabrina flashed back. “You were quick enough off the mark when you gave me this! Now give me means to respond to it when it calls!”
They glared at one another for a moment, and then Uncle Bob appeared to capitulate very suddenly.
“Right, then,” he said. “I’ll get the axe.”
“Who,” said their visitor, and this time his voice had taken on an icy determination, “is in trouble? And who or what is this… rusalka?”
“The rusalka is who sank the ferry,” said Uncle Bob. “And if Sabrina’s right, then she is now after the two that saved her life.”
The man frowned. “I gathered that much,” he said dryly. “Do I also take it that the ferry wasn’t… pushed… by an entirely human hand?”
“A rusalka is supposed to be – ”
“She’s a Russian spirit that is – ”
Uncle Bob and Sabrina had both started speaking at once; their words tangled, and they stopped, looking at each other. Then Sabrina winced. “If we don’t go... if we don’t go now...”
“There’s a pair of rubber boots by the door, you’d better put them on before we go anywhere,” Uncle Bob said, as though he was having the most natural conversation in the world, and then added, turning to his other guest, “You coming?”
“They saved my life,” murmured Sabrina.
The younger man put down his cup. “All right, then,” he said. “Show me this rusalka.”
Uncle Bob’s mouth quirked in a smile he was not quite able to hide. “If we cross her path tonight,” he said, “you may live to regret saying that. By the way, young sir, you have been introduced to us—what name might you go by?”
“Paul Conner,” said the other, striding past the two of
them to the door. “Shall we?”
“You probably won’t need that,” said Uncle Bob as Paul grabbed at a hunting rifle which had been leaning against the wall in the corridor outside.
“I’ll be the judge of that,” said Paul. “If you think an axe will make a better weapon, by all means take one.”
“The axe,” said Uncle Bob, “is not quite meant for the rusalka herself... Sabrina, hold on for half a minute! I need to get that axe. Without it we may as well go and bare our throats to her without a struggle—and by this stage, if they have met her, another moment of delay won’t make any difference one way or another.”
Sabrina waited, fretting, while Uncle Bob ducked into a closet and came out with his hands wrapped around a hefty woodsman’s axe whose edge gleamed with a hungry sharpness in the dim light of the corridor. When he nodded to her she turned and fled into the darkness of the woods, with such speed and purpose that the other two had to practically run to keep up with her. Uncle Bob’s face, hidden by the night from all the others, wore an almost comical expression of astonishment warring with the occasional thunderous frown. He, like no other, knew the state Sabrina had been in when he had taken her into the cottage, barely hours before—and now she was making two grown and extremely physically fit men almost pant in an effort to keep up with her in what should have been thoroughly unfamiliar territory. Something was awry, but he could not quite point to what. This particular night chase had not figured prominently in his plans.
It was inky out in the woods; the night was chilly, the sky veiled with cloud, and what little light there was found it almost impossible to penetrate the canopy of the rainforest. Unobserved by any of the other two Uncle Bob appeared to have brought a lantern as well as his axe, and it was by this faint light that they stumbled through the trees.
“Sabrina!” Uncle Bob hissed after almost fifteen minutes of this headlong rush into danger. “Slow down! I hear water—if she is anywhere, she is around running water.”
“They’re here,” Sabrina said, almost in the same instant. “They’re here, somewhere. Very close.”
The sharp crack with which Paul cocked his rifle echoed loud in the night silence, and Uncle Bob’s head snapped around, his eyes glittering in the lantern-light.
“I told you that you wouldn’t need that.”
“You stick with your axe,” Paul said.
The trees ended abruptly, circling a clearing whose only two inhabitants, ancient birches draped with hanging moss and lichen, leaned precariously towards each other, not quite touching, across a small stream. Under the tree on the far side of the stream something—two somethings?—appeared to be lying in untidy heaps beside the water. It was hard to make out exactly what they were looking at, but Sabrina didn’t need lantern-light to know.
“Oh God...” she whispered, one hand going to her throat in shock. Her fingers brushed the pendant. It was still there, still cold; she suddenly roused. “They’re still alive,” she said. “Come on.”
“Wait!” said Uncle Bob, flinging out a hand to stop her, but he was too late. She was out of the shadows and into the clearing. There was just enough light to show her standing there, alone, the night wind whipping the long dark hair she had not taken the time to clip back before she’d charged out of the house to pay back the ones who had bought her life back in the lake. The image was elemental; there was something in it, a sense of mad courage in the face of the odds, that roused Paul’s protective instincts, and before he quite knew what he was doing he found himself stepping out into the clearing beside her. Uncle Bob followed, warily, the light of the lantern flickering as it swayed from one hand; the other clutched the axe.
“Her tree; that birch...” he began, pointing with his axe, and then Sabrina screamed, flinging her hands across her face. Uncle Bob, for all his bulk, seemed to be almost lifted off his feet and thrown backwards under the assault of what seemed to be thin air to Paul’s eyes. Paul brought up the rifle, instinctively, and tracked... nothing. There was nothing there. Nothing but darkness. The lantern Uncle Bob had dropped glimmered wanly in the undergrowth.
Something brushed past Paul nevertheless, something cold and clammy that left a wave of weakness in its wake. His arms dropped to his side as he swayed with it, and then he felt human hands shaking him.
“The axe!” Sabrina cried. “Get the axe! Get that tree down!”
“What?
“Just do it! Come on! There’s no time!”
Paul dropped the useless rifle, snatched the axe from where it had fallen, and raced over to the stream, clearing it with one bound.
“Hurry!” Sabrina sobbed. “She’ll kill him! She’ll kill them all!”
But Paul had paused at the first of the mounds underneath the doomed birch, and had been frozen by what he thought he could see there—a black shape which seemed to flicker between a human youth and something else, something... other, half-familiar to Paul through tales of his childhood.
“Paul!”
Paul started, looked back; he could not see Uncle Bob at all. And this rusalka, this hungry spirit from a foreign land, had dared to raise her hand against the native spirits of Paul’s own country...
He hefted the axe. “Right,” he said softly. “Die, then.”
The first thud of the axe into the trunk of the birch split the night like a thunderclap. A thin banshee wail came from the far side of the clearing, and Paul paused instinctively, axe raised for a second strike. He caught a glimpse of what looked like a battle—Uncle Bob, struggling against something invisible, and Sabrina, fragile yet immutable, standing squarely in its way if it should choose to wing its way back to the tree.
Her voice came to him, soft as though she was standing beside him.
“Don’t stop.”
The axe thudded into the birch again, and again; the malaise came over him once more, that shiver of wet cold that had touched him earlier in the clearing.
“Don’t stop.”
The air screamed around him; the cold darkness wrapped itself around his face and he half dropped the axe, gasping for air, clawing at his eyes with one hand.
“Don’t stop....”
Something was batting at Paul, something powerful and, yes, hungry—they had described the spirit well back in the cottage. But so long as he kept on hacking at the tree... she weakened every time the axe bit deeper, he could sense this, and it gave him strength. He no longer needed Sabrina’s invocation. This was an evil ghost who had strayed into his heartland, a ghost who drank life out of the taniwha of the lake. Paul was no longer quite certain that this was what he had seen, but the glimmer had been enough, the idea that had been planted in his head and his heart. He was defending something irreplaceable against something intent on nothing but harm.
The axe had found a rhythm. The tree creaked under the assault, shivered, listed to one side. Paul put out a hand and touched it, very lightly. Under his fingers he could feel it beginning to topple.
The force that took him then was a silent scream of agony that flew at him out of the night and stopped his own throat, making him fight for breath—he let the axe fall and dropped to his knees even as the tree he had chopped down crashed onto the ground with a shudder and a whisper of dying leaves. And the force that was holding him was gone, as swiftly as it had come—the air was just air again, cool, innocent. He sat up, gasping.
Sabrina was hurrying across the clearing towards him—moving as fast as she could while encumbered with the swinging lantern in her left hand and her right arm and shoulder providing such poor props as they could to a staggering, swaying Uncle Bob. In the lantern-light his face looked almost as white as his hair.
“Are they all right?” Sabrina called out.
Ashamed that he had not even thought to look, Paul stumbled to his feet and went over to take a closer look at the rusalka’s first pair of victims. The dark-haired girl seemed almost dead—her breathing was shallow under Paul’s questing fingers, her arm limp when he tried to lift it, falling back inertly to her side when he let go. The other...
He crept up to the other with an almost superstitious fear, but found only a youth with a human face, eyes closed, cracked lips open as he tried to gulp air.
“They’re breathing,” he said helplessly, looking up to Sabrina as she stepped across the stream and, letting Uncle Bob gently down to lean against the fallen tree, hurried over to where Paul was leaning over the two bodies.
Sabrina thumped down on her knees on the other side of the girl. Her hands were gentle as she touched the other’s face, smoothed hair away from her forehead; then she leaned over to peer at the youth, her hand clutching at the stone around her neck.
“Where is it?” Paul asked warily. “The thing... the rusalka. Where did it go?”
“Into the water.” The voice was unexpected, Uncle Bob’s. “Make sure you don’t touch the water when you cross back.”
“We need to get them home, Paul,” said Sabrina. “They
need to be away from here.”
“How?” asked Paul practically.
“We can carry them...”
“I can, sure,” said Paul. “One of them. You couldn’t carry either, and what kind of shape is Uncle Bob—or whatever his name really is—in? What was going on back there?”
“Shura went for him,” Sabrina said. “I don’t know why, but she did—she went straight for him.”
“Shura? This...thing has a name?”
Sabrina gave him an odd look. “Of course she does.”
“How are they?”
Sabrina and Paul looked up at the question. Uncle Bob had got to his feet. He was still white and drawn but he looked as if he was recovering.
“More to the point, how are you?” Sabrina said.
“Oddly enough, sufficiently hearty to stand,” Uncle Bob said. “Which, after a bout with a rusalka, translates as not too bad.”
“How come she didn’t...?”
It was an awkward question, and it stuck in Paul’s throat.
Uncle Bob laughed, and it wasn’t a pleasant laugh.
“How come she didn’t kill me?” he finished the question for Paul. “The honest answer is, I don’t know. Perhaps I still have some power left to hold her. Perhaps it was you. My thanks, by the way, to both of you. That was well done.”
“Is she dead?” Paul stood up, looking around the dark forest with a shiver of superstitious dread.
“No,” said Uncle Bob.
“We must get them...” Sabrina began desperately. Uncle Bob laid a gentle hand on her shoulder, and she subsided.
“It’s all right. We were in time. Come on, Paul; we have to carry them.”
“You, carry anybody? You look like a wraith yourself,” said Paul, tactlessly if truthfully.
“Needs must,” shrugged Uncle Bob. “I can manage the girl. You’ll have to carry the other one.”
Paul almost rebelled, the thought of touching the supernatural being whose life he had just been instrumental in saving seemed like something of a sacrilege. But then he looked down at Sabrina’s pleading eyes, and capitulated.
“All right then,” he said. “Shall we?”
“Remember...” began Uncle Bob.
“Yes, yes, the water,” Paul said. Another encounter with the rusalka was not something he wished to experience—that night, or ever again. “You two jump across, I’ll hand you these two over the water, and we can redistribute there.”
It was a long, weary journey back to Uncle Bob’s cottage. They had to stop to rest frequently. Uncle Bob was weaker than he admitted. Even Fiana’s light insubstantial form periodically proved too much of a burden and he had to stop and put her down to catch his breath. As for Paul, he discovered that what he carried was far heavier than he thought it would be, and he staggered under the weight of it. Sabrina, this time carrying the lantern and the axe, Paul’s rifle slung awkwardly over her shoulder, once more led the way through the strange woods, straight back to the house, unerring as a hunter’s arrow.