T. Rhymer

Gregory Frost and Jonathan Maberry

1

When the tall, sleek man caught Stacey’s eye, she ignored him. He was sitting alone at a table, a glass of whiskey between his palms, watching her.

Stacey turned away. She even made it clear that she was ignoring him. It was too early in the evening to throw anyone too much rope. Let him tread water for a while. If she swam past all the guppies and he turned out not to be a shark, then maybe she’d offer that rope.

Coming to this place wasn’t even her idea. The whole Edinburgh club scene was a bore; but tonight it was a necessary evil. The trip to the nightclub was an impromptu minicelebration because her roommate, Carrie, had gotten the promotion she’d been aching for. Carrie celebrated everything of value in her life with tequila, loud music, and a degree of flirtation that would shame Hugh Grant.

And, thank God, it was Friday.

As well as the night before Halloween.

More reasons for Carrie to throw caution, common sense, and—all too frequently—her clothing, to the wind.

Stacey wasn’t entirely sure if she was here as a friend sharing a moment, a wingman, a designated driver, or a chaperone. Since moving in with Carrie, Stacey had been all those things. More than once.

She sipped her drink and killed some slow minutes by looking around. Jack-o’-lanterns lit every table; warm drinks came in mugs filled from a bowl that bubbled and smoked like a tub of dry ice on the end of the bar. A lot of people pranced about in costumes, and some half out of them. At the best of times she would have avoided the lights, crammed crowds, and thumping beats of clubbing. The speakers were loud enough to create little Jurassic Park–style vibration rings in her drink. She had a favorite song by the Be Good Tanyas that observed how only crazy people went to a place that was too dark to see and too loud to hear in order to meet anyone. Whatever else she was doing, she was not looking to meet anyone.

No way, José.

Especially after the last time, with the law clerk. She should have fled early from that one. He was twenty-six and had posters thumbtacked to his bedroom walls. Not framed art—posters. Granted, they were classic movies—Casablanca, Metropolis—but it was a warning sign she’d chosen to ignore. The law clerk was cute, with a kind of Bradley Cooper vibe that somehow disabled her common sense. The first time he cried during sex Stacey thought it was special, a sharing of something genuinely deep and meaningful. By the fifth or maybe sixth time the word Flee was painted on the inside of her head. Even then, she stayed too long, and now she felt wrecked, jaded, and weary of the whole dating thing.

So this field trip was strictly for Carrie. A few drinks and then she’d go home. Otherwise she’d have worn something more stylish than a drab sweater and black jeans over her Nina slingbacks.

And yet . . .

Her attention kept returning to the man. Black jacket over black crew-neck shirt. Black hair, too, with a windswept style that looked expensive. Perfect deepwater tan. And eyes the color of hot gold.

Stacey lifted her glass to take a sip and set it down with no conscious awareness of whether she’d had any. She tried not to look at those eyes.

Tried.

He gave her the smallest of smiles. Not a come-on. Not even encouragement. Just a smile. Showing that he knew she was looking at him, just as he was looking at her. It was the first thing he’d done since sitting down. All this time he’d simply sat there, watching the crowd swirl around him, some in work clothes, some in costumes. He was in the middle of it and entirely apart from it.

Stacey thought, No thanks, buddy. Whatever you’re selling, I can’t afford it.

She thought that, but then she realized that she wasn’t sitting at her table anymore. In some dreamy and distant way she felt herself moving. Walking across the floor, weaving without thought between clusters of vampires and zombies and a few grinning Guy Fawkeses.

Then she was at his table. Standing so close that the edge of it pressed into the tops of her thighs. And he didn’t seem the least surprised when she just came to a rest right before him.

Her mind told her to leave.

To run.

Right now.

But she stood there, leaning into his table, aware on some level that if it weren’t there she’d have fallen on him.

Wake up, you stupid bitch!

Her mind kept screaming at her, but it was like the sound track of a film she was watching: happening to someone else.

The man lifted his eyes. They really did look like hot gold. As if they were lit from within. Weird contacts? No, came the answer in her mind. It isn’t the contacts that are weird.

Run. For Christ’s sake . . . run.

From across the room the man’s eyes were just eyes. From across the room his smile was friendly.

Oh, God. . .

But here . . . within reach, within touching distance, the eyes were alien, and his smile . . .

Oh, Jesus, what’s wrong with me?

But she knew—on every level—that what was wrong here was not her.

That smile seemed to somehow touch her. Without lifting a finger or saying a word, this man seemed to touch her. Everywhere. Inside her clothes. Inside her body.

Inside . . .

She could see in the gold of his eyes as he peeled each and every one of her secrets and slipped them like raw fruit between those smiling lips.

Took them.

Consumed them.

Please.

She thought she said it aloud. Maybe she did, but the music crushed it flat.

Please, she begged.

That only made his smile creep wider.

Stacey could feel herself wanting to give in. She knew that she had issues with being too submissive. Five years of therapy hadn’t fixed that. She wasn’t a total slave, not like the girls she knew who cruised the BDSM waters. But she gave up and gave in too soon.

Too soon.

Too much.

Oh, God, please.

The man’s smile seemed to coax her to share her darkest thoughts. It made her unlock the locks and pull open the doors of her mind so that he could see his image there. A dark knight about whom she’d fantasized since before puberty. The shadowy stranger who would come and sweep her off her feet.

A man of shadows. From shadows.

With burning eyes.

And he, without so much as a word, drew from the secrets he’d stolen and pasted before her the images of what he would do . . . and it was everything she wanted. Motionless, staring into his eyes, she grew wet with desire.

The man raised his glass and finished his whiskey, then he pushed his chair back and stood up. Without saying a word, he turned and left the bar.

Stacey followed him.

She felt herself do it and couldn’t believe she was doing it.

“Hey, girl!” called Carrie from across the bar, but the thumping beat all but drowned her out. It made it easy for Stacey to pretend she didn’t hear.

They left the club.

The man didn’t even once glance back to see if Stacey was following but walked on across the parking lot.

“Stacey!”

Hearing Carrie yell her name stalled her in her tracks, and Stacey turned like a sleepwalker.

Here came poor Carrie, looking both angry and concerned. “Wot are you playing at, you daft cow? You’re going to abandon me to those carnivores in there? Wot’s ’e—”

Carrie’s tirade suddenly disintegrated into a meaningless jumble of sounds. Noises.

The man stepped between her and Stacey.

“No,” he said.

Immediately Carrie stopped walking, stopped talking, and sat down right there in the middle of the parking lot. Right on the asphalt that was stained with grease and oil. Carrie’s rump thumped down, her legs splayed wide, revealing white thighs and blue knickers. Her eyes were as wide as saucers and there was absolutely no trace of anything in them.

“Carrie . . . ?” began Stacey, but the man turned around and focused his eyes on her. Stacey’s voice evaporated into a misty nothing.

“Time to go, Stacey.”

His voice was like syrup, like the most potent drink imaginable, like heroin.

She forgot about Carrie sitting splay-legged on the ground.

She forgot about her car. Her purse. Her life.

The man took her arm.

She melted into him.

Into his arms.

Into his car.

And into the night.

2

The sleek limousine drove past him, but no one inside—not the brutish driver, the smiling man, or the drowning woman—saw the figure who watched it go. He was in plain sight, but he stood so completely still that the world seemed to move around him. Nothing reacted to him—not drunks on the street, not the dog searching for scraps in the alleys.

He watched the car with eyes that had grown old and fierce and murderous. As its taillights vanished around a corner, he bared his teeth like a night-hunting cat or some darker predatory thing. Those he was hunting were in that limo: the glamoured one, and a skinwalker as a bonus.

When the street was empty, the figure turned, seeming to detach himself from the shadows. He touched his pockets and belt in a reflexive movement as natural to him as breathing. Checking that everything was where it should be.

His knives, the òrdstone, his strangle-wire. All of it.

Without haste he turned and crossed the street to where a motorcycle stood, black and gleaming. Waiting for him. The only detail on the bike was a partial handprint burned onto the engine cowling in angry red. It was not put there as a decoration. It had happened during a moment of blood, of screams and slaughter. And now the mark was burned into the metal.

The man swung his leg over the seat, keyed the ignition, and fed gas into the hungry engine.

The roar of his motorcycle split the air like a cleaver as he rode away in the same direction as the limousine.

3

The man’s limousine was long and dark and sleek, and there was plenty of room for Stacey to get naked.

She did it slowly, but in a dreamy way, not like a vamp.

Piece by piece. Snaps, hooks, sleeves, straps. The hiss of cloth down her skin.

The air inside the car was stiflingly hot. Furnace hot.

Sweat ran in crooked lines down her arms and legs and back, and despite the heat, her skin pebbled with gooseflesh, her nipples growing hard. Stacey’s breath rasped in her throat. It was less like the heaving breath of passion and more like the gasps of drowning.

Her clothes were scattered around her.

She was naked, vulnerable, unable to resist him.

The man sat on the bench seat, legs crossed, hands folded idly in his lap, eyes hooded in thoughtful appraisal.

Stacey felt her arms lift, hands reaching for him. Her mouth opened, and a low moan came from deep inside her chest.

The man did not move. He watched her, still smiled at her. His lips were red, his teeth glistening with spit.

Stacey closed her eyes and waited to be taken. To be used.

To be whatever he wanted.

No, cried a voice deep down in her soul, but it went unheeded.

The limo drove far out of town, leaving Edinburgh behind. Shadow-shrouded trees whisked by on either side.

All the time Stacey knelt there, arms raised, beckoning to him, aching with a need that no part of her mind could understand.

“Please . . . ,” she managed to say aloud.

The man looked at her for a moment longer, then he turned his head and stared out at the night-black landscape.

After a long, long time the car slowed to a stop, the tires crunching over gravel and then dried leaves. Stacey sagged back, her arms falling to her sides.

The limo door opened and the man stepped out. He did not tell her to follow, but she followed. Naked, covered in sweat. Cold air licked at her.

They were in the countryside somewhere. It looked like there were huge ruins in the distance, but they were vague shapes against the underlit clouds.

They walked some distance from the limo. Tiny lights like fireflies began to accumulate around them, dancing, flitting about until they all flew to one spot ahead, coalesced into a vertical line. Then, impossibly, the line split wider, began swelling into a bright green glow. She looked to him, bathed in that light. He was no longer there. Something transforming, inhuman, had manifested in his stead; it still looked upon her with those eyes that held all she desired.

He went ahead of her toward the green light. Around him were shadow-shapes, not the ruins she’d seen in the headlights of the limo but something else. And distance. It wasn’t merely light, it was a place. Once inside it, he turned about and held out a hand to her.

“Come,” he said.

Stacey looked from his golden eyes to the proffered hand. Her heart lurched in her chest. The fingers were wrong.

So wrong. . .

They were iron-dark, and all along the back of his hand and down his wrist the skin rose and rippled into dozens of tiny mounds, as if something was pushing from underneath. Then it tore as the needle-sharp tips of small spines thrust outward. Each barb curled out from a knot of gristle, like roses rising from malformed stems.

She watched her own arm extend to take that terrible hand.

Please . . . please . . . please. . .

She could hear her inner voice, her inner howls, but she could not act.

No . . . it wasn’t that. She had no will to act, no desire. Those howls were an enraged echo of the Stacey who used to claim ownership of this body.

Was that Stacey gone? Was she dead?

Her hand reached for his, and she took a small step forward, toward the creature who, second by second, was changing. The mottling of his skin ran up his ironlike arm, under dissolving clothes, and erupted all over his throat and cheeks and face. His smiling lips thinned, the mouth widened into an ophidian leer.

The scream she needed to scream burned in her chest.

The owner of the golden eyes chuckled, an ugly noise that was painful to hear.

He said, “Now.”

He didn’t say it to her. It wasn’t a demand for her to do anything, but her eyes widened and her mouth fell open as the night changed, and the green burned away her world.

The man—if it was ever a man—stood revealed as something entirely inhuman. Huge and bulky, with skin like that of a diseased toad stretched over muscles undulating in strange arrangements.

His eyes remained that compelling molten gold. And despite the utter horror of what he had revealed himself to be, Stacey had but to look into those eyes to know that she was still a slave. Still lost. Still haplessly willing.

The man—the thing— turned away as if dismissing her; but that only pulled her harder. He cut her one last glance over his shoulder, and then the green light took him.

He was gone.

Just . . . gone. But the light waited for her.

Finally, the scream that could not find release burst out of her.

Not from fear. Not in horror at his grotesque body or the impossibility of what was happening to her.

No, she screamed because the creature intended to destroy her and she could not help but follow.

Arms outstretched, she ran straight at the light.

“No!”

The bellow came from the shadows, and Stacey turned to see a wild figure emerge from the darkness, running at her with the speed and ferocity of a wolf. He was tall, slim as a sword blade, with glossy black hair whipping in the night breeze. One hand was empty, but in the other he held something—was it a gun? A knife?

Still screaming, he leaped at her, wrapped his arms around her, crushed her to his chest as he fell. They landed together with a bone-rattling thud, but the newcomer turned as they hit, taking the brunt of the fall, the spin of their bodies sloughing off the shock of impact. As they rolled away from the light he opened his arms and she spilled out and away from him. Then he was up cat-quick and he flung himself toward the wall of shimmering green light. He raised the thing in his hand and plunged it down as if he meant to reach into the light and smash or stab the man who’d brought her here. But instead, as the object made contact, the green light disappeared.

The stranger ripped his arm back and forth, slashing at the light, destroying more of it with each swipe.

No, she thought as a splinter of clarity jabbed through the strange muzziness in her thoughts. She cried, “Wait, what are you doing? You’re closing it!”

He dropped to one knee and with a last vicious swipe sealed the night. The shimmering green light shivered and went out, plunging the clearing into darkness.

4

Stacey sat up slowly.

It was like coming out of a dream. Or a coma. Her body felt new to her, as if it was something she’d never owned before.

The newcomer stood a few yards away, his back to her, his hands loose at his sides, the object still clutched in one fist. The limo lights splashed over him obliquely. He sighed and his shoulders sagged for a moment, then he took the object—which she could now see was a piece of smooth gray rock a bit larger than the palm of his hand—and slid it into a leather pouch on his belt. As it vanished from sight, Stacey saw that its face was covered with complex patterns of strange design.

The man had dark shaggy hair. He wore a light gray jacket over a torn army-khaki T-shirt, old jeans, and lace-up boots. He turned. She took in the thin hair above his forehead, the beard that was maybe a week old. Her mind seemed to be swirling, confused in its attempt to reconcile being here with being at the club, where she knew she must be.

Then he turned and looked past her to the limousine.

“Skinwalker,” he said in a terse, eager whisper and broke into a run. Straight at her.

Stacey screamed and flung herself backward, crossing her arms in front of her to try and ward off another of this night’s horrors. But he shot past her, heading straight for the limousine. Too late its engine turned over and started. The door she had emerged from still hung open and the man dove through it as the limo lurched forward. The door swung shut and the limousine rolled maybe ten yards before it braked to a stop again and there was a flash of red from inside. The engine kept running.

The door opened again and the man climbed out. He held something in his arms, a bundle that, as he came nearer, she saw was her clothes. Only then did she realize she was naked in the middle of a field. And it was cold. She crossed her hands over her breasts.

The man didn’t seem affected by her nudity. He held out her clothing as if holding out a gift. Her slingbacks dangled by their straps from two of his fingers.

“You should probably change in the vehicle,” he said. His voice was soft, the accent strange. Irish, but with Scottish overtones. And something else. A strange quality she couldn’t quite identify.

“I . . . ,” she began and faltered. “I don’t . . .”

“You have to hurry.” His eyes shifted past her to where the light had been. “They’ll open the portal again in a moment, and he won’t be alone this time.”

He took her by the arm and directed her back to the limo. There was none of the warmth or magnetism of the other man. In fact his grip hurt a little, enough to get her moving. She tried to pull away, but his hand was like a vise.

“You’re hurting me.”

His answer was a short, hard laugh. “What do you think they’ll do?”

He held the door to let her climb in and slammed it behind her. Her mind was still sorting out a hundred questions, but she remained too rattled to ask any of them.

Then she saw the driver. Still upright at the wheel.

Stacey began to say something to him, to plead for help or an answer, but as she bent forward she froze in absolute horror.

The driver was dead.

More than dead . . . he looked like a corpse that had been rotting for weeks, maybe months. Stacey’s mouth worked in a silent attempt to make some kind of rational sound, to react in some proper way to this, but that was impossible. She’d expected to see blood everywhere, but there was nothing—nothing to explain that strange explosion of red she’d glimpsed.

The driver’s door opened suddenly, and the stranger grabbed hold of the corpse and yanked it out. The neck made a cracking noise and the head dangled loosely. The man got in. He looked back at her. His was not an unpleasant face, but his sharp blue eyes were the saddest she’d ever seen—until they abruptly burned green. It was a moment before she realized they were reflecting a flare of light, and she glanced around.

“Damn it,” he whispered tightly.

As he’d predicted, the bright green oval had reappeared. Stacey stared at it with a mind that felt like it was fracturing. Even though she’d seen one like it only a minute ago, seeing this new one form out of nowhere was somehow worse. It promised something, some secret she knew she didn’t want to hear.

Through the tinted window of the limo, she made out strange, rough shapes moving within the light.

Moving toward her.

“Hold on,” growled the stranger as he slammed the door and put the car in gear.

Stacey stared at the green light and saw an impossible shape begin to emerge. All spikes and knobs, with massive shoulders packed with muscle.

“Oh, God! Something’s coming through!”

The man stomped down on the gas. The limo pawed at the dirt like a maddened bull, then sprang forward with a roar of tires that left a cloud of dust behind them. He kept accelerating until they reached the main road, and then the vehicle squealed onto the pavement.

The green became a tiny thing seen between trees and then was gone.

5

They drove in silence awhile, and she wasn’t prepared when the wave of shock finally slammed into her. Without realizing, she was abruptly gasping, panting, her heart racing. She thought she might be sick, rolled down the window, and stuck her head out into the cold wind. Her eyes watered and she broke into sobs. She reeled her head back in, found him watching her in the rearview mirror. He hadn’t closed the driver’s compartment panel.

The recognition of her fear exhausted her. She lay back against the seat and stared at nothing. She still hadn’t put on her clothes, and how ridiculous was it that they didn’t seem to matter? She tried to explain to herself what had happened to her, to Carrie sitting unconscious in a puddle of oil.

Her right shoulder blade itched and she scratched at it. The silence was becoming oppressive.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

He shrugged out of his jacket and it thrust it at her. “Cover yourself.”

“Where are we going?” she repeated, leaning on each word.

“Somewhere safe.”

Stacey covered herself as best she could with the jacket, shivering with cold and the terror that trembled beneath her skin. “Not back to the club then.”

“D’ye not know how far from there you are?”

“Um . . . a long way?” she ventured.

He gave a short, bitter laugh. “Not as long as it could have been.”

“My roommate’s at the club. I left her.”

“She’ll be fine. They didn’t select her. But not the club, no. Nor tae your flat.”

His accent really was odd. It wasn’t Irish at all, she decided. It sounded somehow old, unevolved, like maybe he lived out on the Orkneys or somewhere else isolated. She couldn’t place it.

“Why did you interfere?” She didn’t mean for it to sound accusatory that way. The part of her that had acknowledged her lifetime of subjugation seemed to be speaking, but he didn’t seem to notice.

“Be happy I did, lass.”

“No . . . Why? Tell me.”

At least a mile passed before he answered. “It’s a very long story. Just know for now that I’m going to keep them from taking you.”

“Why?” she asked, leaning forward. “What are you, the Lone Ranger?”

“I don’t know who that is.”

“Right. Naw, you wouldn’t.”

Another silent mile, then, “You sound angry that I didn’t let him have you.”

“I . . .” She couldn’t figure out how to answer him, but he interrupted.

“Try to understand; they’re good at hearing that in you, that sort of need. It’s not your fault, any of it.”

“What’s not my fault?” She climbed across the center table to the seats behind him, stuck her head through the open barrier. “Who in hell are you?”

“Who out of hell, not in,” he said bitterly. “The one who escaped but came back like the tide again and again.”

“Oh, great. Riddles. I’ve stepped into the Twilight Zone, and you’re feeding me riddles? What are you, Gollum?”

“Hardly.”

“Well . . . who are you, then?”

He thought about that for a moment. “Rhymer,” he replied, though she didn’t know if that was his name or some form of behavioral explanation.

“Do you know what’s going on?”

“Aye, I do.” His voice and face were sad.

“Why is this happening to me?” she asked, and her voice suddenly dwindled to something smaller, more vulnerable. “Why do these people want to hurt me? Did I do something wrong or—?”

“No,” he said firmly, “it isn’t your fault that the Yvag singled you out.”

“Yvag? Is that his name?”

“It’s what he is.”

She huddled behind the jacket, eyes huge. “I saw that, didn’t I? I mean . . . all that stuff back there, and him changing. It really happened, didn’t it?”

Rhymer nodded.

Tears broke from her eyes. “That man—”

“Wasn’t a man,” he finished.

“What was he?”

He considered the question. “They’re what you’d call elves.”

Despite her tears, a single bark of laughter escaped her. “Wait, what? I’m sorry, but did you say . . . elves?”

“Aye.”

“As in the little sods making toys for Father Christmas?”

“Hardly.” He glanced sidelong at her, the smile still in place. “Sounds so cute and cuddly, doesn’t it? Little wee elves.”

“The night before Halloween and I got picked up in a club by an elf?”

“Aye.”

“What did he slip into my drink?”

“Nothing.”

“Then I’m crazy? Is that it? I’ve gone barking mad?”

“I know it all feels a bit mad,” he admitted. “But it’s true. Like it or not, this is the real world.”

“How?”

“Like I said, there’s a long story.”

She reached to scratch her shoulder again.

“You might not want to do that,” he told her, “or it could start bleeding.”

“What could?” she asked, wide-eyed. She pushed her shoulder forward and tried to see her back. Was there something there? She glanced around for her purse, a compact. It wasn’t here. Probably back at the club. Great, her ID, credit card. Looking up then, she realized that the ceiling of the rear section of the limo was mirrored. She could guess why. There was probably a highway club that only did it in limos. She looked around till she located the bank of switches, flicked them until she’d ignited lights surrounding the mirror. Now she could see her naked self clearly, curled up on the seat, her dirty soles tucked under her. On her back there was definitely some kind of mark. It looked angry, infected maybe.

“What the hell?” she demanded.

“It’s a sigil. He marked you. Why you cannae go back tae your flat, nor anywhere close. They’re going to track you by that no matter where—”

But by then her hysteria had hit the ceiling. “Track me? What do you mean, track me? How did this happen?” Her voice quavered and tears stung her eyes. “Mister, what are you talking about?”

He sighed and gripped the wheel. “Ten centuries and you’d think I’d be better at this,” he said to himself. “Look, lass. The short version—which isn’t going to make sense tae ye—is that you’ve become the chosen teind, which translates for the Yvag as their tithe to hell.”

“Whoa . . . wait. Hell?”

“Aye.”

“As in . . . hell?”

“Aye.”

“Actual hell? Not just hell but hell hell?”

“The same.”

“I think I need to scream.”

“You might at that,” he said, either not getting her joke or not considering it one. “The Yvag have chosen you, marked you with their sigil, and that means that until they get their hands on you again, they’re going to be extremely unhappy, not to mention panicked, because if they don’t get you back for their ceremony, then that princeling who snatched you has to take your place in the ritual.”

“Good. Fuck him.”

“I couldnae agree more.”

“Wait . . . princeling?”

“Aye, he is powerful among them. He has great charisma, lass. They all have it, but few wield it with his level of power.”

“ ‘Charisma’?” she echoed.

“Aye. Tae humans that’s just a gift of attraction, something to sell cars with, but for the Yvag, it’s one of their most powerful weapons. They can make you lay bare your throat for the knife and thank them while they cut.”

She thought about all of the absurd things she had done, including stripping naked without a thought, and shivered.

Rhymer sighed. “Had I brought him down tonight it would have crushed them.”

“For good?”

“No . . . but it would weaken them for many years to come. Ah well. Meantime, I recommend you switch off those lights before we pass this articulated lorry, else you’re going tae give the driver a heart attack. You might want to put your clothes back on, too, as we’ll be pulling off the road in a minute. At least your shoes.”

“Oh, God.”

Everything that was happening was jumbled inside Stacey’s head, and she knew, on some level, that she should be reacting better than she was. She also knew with perfect clarity that she was teetering on the edge of some dangerous level of shock. There were too many bizarre and impossible things happening, and despite tears and gooseflesh, she was taking this all too calmly. Her lack of ordinary reaction to it terrified her.

Her nudity, oddly, did not. And it damn well should have. She didn’t even like wearing low-cut blouses.

Even so, she punched the switches until the rear of the limo went dark, and they passed the semi. She sorted through the heaped jeans, cami, and sweater until she found her panties.

“Can you answer a question?”

“I can try.”

“I . . . just went with that guy. That elf or whatever. I went with him. I let him touch me. I took my fucking clothes off for him. I don’t do that. A guy tries to grab my ass I kick the piss out of him. I’m not a victim, damn it, and I’m not anyone’s casual piece of ass.”

“No,” Rhymer agreed.

“Well, you seem to understand this madness, so can you tell me why I did this?”

In the rearview mirror she saw him grin again. It changed his face from one of lupine harshness to something else. When he smiled, his face was gentle. Sad . . . but gentle.

“If I tell ye that this is all glamour and magic, will you hit me in the back of the head with your shoe?”

“Why . . . is that the sort of thing you’re likely to say?”

“Well . . . elves and all . . .”

“Bollocks,” she said, but mostly to herself. An admission that they were no longer driving through a sane landscape.

She pulled on her clothes. “So, what, I have to stay hidden till after Halloween?”

“Well, that’s where we get into the long version of things. Normally, they would be hunting you for about a year.”

“A year?” She did almost whack him with her shoe then.

“It’s a question of relational temporalities. A day in Yvagddu lasts a year in our world. But they got cocky about things, figured to haul you over and dispose of you just like that, so they waited—”

“Just tell me for fuck’s sake!”

“Thirty more hours, more or less.”

She fell back against the seat. “I have to call Carrie. I need to know she got back to the flat okay.”

“Right. Here.” He handed her a cell phone. “It’s a burner. You don’t want to use your own.”

She stared from the phone to him. “Elves can track cell-phone calls?”

For the first time he gave her a genuine and open grin. “Aye, the universe is totally daft like that.”

“But . . . why the secrecy? Why not go south? We could go down to London; nobody can find anybody there.”

He shrugged. “You’re lucky you don’t have a family,” he said. “If ye had folks, children, it’d be far worse. They could substitute them on account of your blood.”

“If I had kids and a family,” she fired back, “I wouldn’t ’a been clubbing with Carrie in the first place. Pish.”

Quite suddenly, Rhymer spoke in a peculiar singsong.

No cause to trust eyes of promise,

Eyes so golden, eyes that burn, down into your darkest soul.

When you fall, and all unbinds

The last of you will scream out for the first.

Despite the words, his singing voice was beautiful. In the strangest way, the sound of his voice comforted her, removing splinters of fear from her mind.

Rhymer fell silent again and drove on as if nothing odd had occurred.

She stared at him, his face bluish like a ghost’s in the dawn light. Rhymer—what in hell kind of name was that? Like something out of an old folk song.

6

Stacey had assumed they would be pulling into, at the very least, a lay-by. They weren’t all that far from where they’d begun, maybe ten kilometers.

Instead, Rhymer turned the behemoth of a limo onto another dirt track that led into the darkness of another wood. He shut off the engine but left the headlamps glowing onto a clearing among the trees.

When she climbed out after him, she spotted the nose of a blue Fiat Punto backed in on the left. She remained where she was while he headed to the other car. He didn’t seem to realize she wasn’t following him until he had crossed the clearing.

He met her gaze over the limo. “I don’t blame you,” he said. “I’d be contemplating scarpering, too, wondering how hard it can be to lose me in the woods. I’ll save you the trouble of breaking your ankle on a root—I’ll not chase you. You go as you choose. Whatever you do, though, don’t wait here. It’ll like as not take them the whole morning, but they’ll find it.”

She took a wobbling step away from the limousine door. “Will they all be like him? Because I didn’t have any choice with him . . .” She felt her face burn as she said that. It felt like admitting something bad, something dirty.

“What, you mean his glamour? Oh, they’ll be sleekit but none of them’s cowrin or timorous beasties.”

She said, “What?”

Rhymer took a breath and continued, but Stacey noticed that he dialed down his accent. It seemed to take effort for him to speak in a normal, modern way. So weird, she thought. Rhymer said, “The glamoured ones all gleam like that. They’ll have a harder time now on account of you’re not wide open, d’ye see? So you stand a chance there; you can get away before they snare you again. It’s the skinwalkers you likely won’t see coming.”

“What are skinwalkers?”

He glanced into the darkness behind the limo. “We should have this conversation while in motion, not waiting for them to catch us up.”

“But you took their transportation.”

He shook his head. “It’s hardly the only way they travel. Even on foot I get from here to there. They won’t be on foot.” He sighed. “I had to leave a bonny little motorcycle back there, but I couldnae see driving off on that with you starkers on the back.”

“Uh . . . no.”

He nodded to the Punto. “This piece of junk will do for now. It’s faster than it looks, and it’s the kind of thing no one pays attention to.”

“Nondescript ain’t in it,” she agreed.

Suddenly something whooshed above the trees. It might have been an owl, she thought, but Rhymer immediately climbed into the Punto and started the engine. Stacey pulled off her shoes again and walked, limped, cursed her way across the clearing toward the compact Fiat. The second she was in, he took off. They swung around the limousine and back up the dark rutted track, then back onto the A68 again.

A stripe of gray dawn painted the eastern horizon. She tossed her shoes into the back, noticing as she did the curving lines of some device laid across the rear seats.

Her inner voice couldn’t seem to settle between rage and terror. The urge to yell at him compelled her, but she couldn’t identify what for. He had saved her life, and she was reacting as though she resented it. All meaningful questions went unspoken while she asked herself what in hell was wrong with her.

Finally, she prompted, “Skinwalkers . . . ?”

“Mmm.” He glanced at her sidelong. “People taken over by the Yvag. Mostly people in positions of power.”

“What, like kings?”

Rhymer’s features stiffened as if he could see something terrible on the road ahead. She couldn’t help looking. But then he sang in the same soft voice as before. It was almost spoken-word but flowed with an elusive interior melody.

Never kings, but always kingdoms.

Never thrones but always ears.

Crucial words, spoke in whispers,

from our hands put power in theirs.

“Goddamn it, what is that? You got like some fucking Tourette’s you can’t help?”

“What?” He blinked at her, perplexed. “What did I say?”

She repeated the lyrics more or less, then asked, “You don’t know when you do that?”

Rhymer took a moment answering that. “I don’t, actually, strange as that sounds. I . . . know it’s happening, but I’m lost while it happens. It’s like something is talking through me.”

“Oh, fuck me. You’re telling me you’re possessed?”

“No,” he said quickly. “It’s not that at all. I don’t know how to explain it, though.”

“But you do know what it means—what you said?”

“Aye.”

When he didn’t offer more than that, she said, “Well? How about we both know, since it’s my arse they want, not yours.”

“It’s my head they want.”

“I thought they wanted me.”

“And now I’ve interfered, you’re a pathway to me.”

“The fuck I am.”

Rhymer shrugged. “It’s complicated.”

“So’s algebra. Try me anyway.”

But he didn’t.

She ground her teeth. “Okay, then what about the other thing? Tell me about those skinwalker things. Otherwise, you’re taking me the hell back to Edinburgh right now, and sod you and your elves.”

“Right.” Rhymer rubbed his eyes. “So, the Yvag, they’re ancient, like more ancient than the earth itself.”

“How’s that possible?”

“Where they live, it’s a space between universes, ours and others. There are lots of others, I gather.”

“A multiverse?”

He cut her a sharp look. “Now how do ye know that word?”

“I have every episode of Doctor Who DVRed. Keep talking.”

Looking vaguely perplexed, Rhymer nodded. “They came from one of the others. It collapsed or something—I’m not entirely clear on the concept and it’s not like they feel as if I ought to be included. Their escape, though, tied them to or was dependent upon some other form of life.”

“Like what?”

“Like hell,” he said. “Not your scriptural one exactly, though I expect our version of hell came from them, too.”

“Hold on . . . Judeo-Christian tradition comes from elves?”

“I know how it sounds.”

“Not to a history major, you don’t.”

“All right, history major, just suppose that a lot of people with influence, advisers to the powers that be, were . . .”

“What?”

“Were not really people, d’ye see? Suppose the Yvag had colonized them?”

“Skinwalkers, that’s what you meant?”

“Yeah. They move in, take control of certain people—the ones who make laws, the ones who decide for everyone else, almost never the central person, almost always the advisers.”

“ ‘Never kings but always kingdoms,’ ” she repeated back at him.

“Exactly. If they were kings, they’d be in view. But manipulating the king? They stay in the shadows.”

“Was the driver—?”

“He was one, yeah. I know, he’s not someone in a position of power like, but they need others, too, to do simple tasks, move the glamoured ones around.”

“Minions?” she said, smiling for the first time.

“Aye,” agreed Rhymer, “minions is a good word.”

Jesus, she said to herself, I’m having a conversation in which elves, the multiverse, and minions are serious talking points. And vodka is not involved. She took a breath. “But why did that skinwalker bloke look so . . . so dead?”

“Because he was dead the instant an Yvag took him. When they move in, they rip the human soul out. Whoever that person was is destroyed. Shredded. From that moment forward, the body is dead and only the Yvag is alive. The corpse maintains the appearance of being alive as long as the Yvag is inside, but once it’s gone then the magic is broken and the body becomes what it really is—dead and rotting flesh. The longer the Yvag occupies you, the faster you turn to dust when it leaves. Understand, this magic is difficult, it requires a lot of energy and sometimes it slips. Every now and then you see a person who looks more dead than alive, and it’s probably an Yvag whose control has slipped. Which is the other reason they choose to keep to the shadows.”

“What do you mean?”

“Sunlight is nae good for dead skin. It speeds the corruption.”

“Sounds like vampires.”

He nodded. “What people call vampires are almost always Yvags.”

“Almost always?”

Rhymer gave her a crooked grin. “It’s a strange, big universe, lass.”

“Yeah, yeah, there are more things in heaven and earth . . .” Stacey shook her head, trying to make sense of this. “The driver . . . the Yvag left him?”

“You could look at it that way.”

“Which is to say you killed him.”

“The Yvag, if I’m lucky. The driver . . . wasn’t really there.”

“Why?”

Rhymer twitched, ducked his head as if she had finally hit a nerve, a place he couldn’t go or explain. In the end all he said was, “It’s what I do.”

She squinched up her face. There was something he had said—tossed off so casually it had flown right past. She rewound the conversation, listened, came to the moment when she’d freaked, and there it was. “Ten centuries. What was that about you living for ten centuries?”

“Well, give or take a decade . . .”

“Please tell me you’re at least cool enough to be a Time Lord.”

“A what?”

“Sigh,” she said aloud.

“I know it’s impossible tae believe—”

“No, see, that’s the problem, I completely believe it. I just don’t want to be a part of it!”

“I’m sorry you are.”

She chewed her lip for a moment. “The way you fought? What was that? Kung-fu? Judo?”

“Gutter fighting,” he said. “Bit of this and that.”

“Nasty.”

“It’s not supposed to be nice.”

“So . . . for a thousand years you’ve been messing it up with them, right? Interfering with this—this—”

“Tithing.”

“Tithing. How often do they have to do that, pay this tithe to hell?”

“Part of a cycle. Here, it’s every twenty-eight years.”

“And you’ve been keeping people like me from getting taken.”

He had a strangely anxious look on his face now and only nodded.

“No wonder they want your head. So in all that time, you must have saved like, what, five, six hundred people?”

He said nothing, staring hard at the road ahead.

“Rhymer, goddamn it. How many have you saved?”

“Counting you, seven.”

“Seven hundred people? Really?”

“No,” he said softly. “Just seven.”

He met her gaze then, and the misery in his look spoke for him.

Very quietly, she said, “I think I want to go home now.”

“Ye can’t,” he replied. “Not for twenty-one more hours, or you’re just handing yourself to them.”

“Oh, really? How’s that different from sticking with you?”

“Staying with me means you haven’t given up,” said Rhymer. “And when they come for you again, we’re going tae make them pay dearly.”

A moment later he added under his breath, “For a great many things.”

7

Stacey awoke with a jolt.

She hadn’t even realized that she’d fallen asleep. She sat up, brain muzzy, tongue thick, skin clammy. She had drool on her chin and wiped it away as she glanced at Rhymer. He was watching the road.

“How long was I asleep?” she asked. She rubbed at her eyes.

“About three hours. You’ve been through a lot. Magic wears a body out every bit as quickly as exertion.”

“ ‘Magic,’ ” she echoed. “Right. Not a dream. Damn.”

Outside, the sky was cloudy, and she didn’t recognize anything in the brown-and-green landscape. They had left the A68 at some point.

“Are we there yet?”

“No, we’ve still got a bit to go,” murmured Rhymer. “Sorry, but we couldn’t just keep going straight. They would have come at us from ahead, so I’ve been shifting direction, zigzagging roads to keep them from being able to predict where we’re heading.”

“Where are we heading? Do we have an actual destination, or are we just going to drive around until these Elvis thingies get bored?”

“Yvags,” he corrected.

“Whatever. Where are we going?”

“I’ve a place. But going there will only work once, and I want tae make sure they don’t have sight of the car when we turn off.”

As if to accentuate his point, a car roared up from behind to pass on the straightaway. As it came abreast it seemed to hold for a moment, and the driver gave them a hard stare before accelerating ahead.

She saw that Rhymer was watching the car, too. She gripped his forearm.

“Oh, God . . . please don’t tell me that’s one of those bleedin’ skinwalker things?”

“Can’t tell from here,” he said. “You can bet they have every available one out listening for your sigil.”

“Listening for it,” she repeated, trying to grasp the concept. Her stomach gurgled. “For fuck’s sake . . . we’re being chased by monsters and here I am starving. I didn’t eat last night. What is it, noon?”

“We’ll get some food as soon as it’s safe and—”

“I’m going to need some real shoes, too. Can we stop somewhere, some town center? Just for, like, half an hour?”

He didn’t look happy at the prospect. “What is it about women and shoes?”

“Oh, mock me for being a cliché, that’ll help.”

“Sorry.”

“I need something I can run in. We are fleeing, right?”

“Right. We’ll see about getting better shoes, but understand me, lass, we take our lives in our hands every time we stop.”

“I get that,” she said soberly. “I really do. But if we are stopped—by them I mean—I’m no good running through woods and across fields in heels or bare feet.”

“Still safer to keep moving,” he said.

“Look, you can’t seriously expect me to stay in this car for thirty hours! Besides . . . they could run us off the roadway out here and nobody would so much as notice. In a town there are lots of people. Doesn’t that make it harder for them?”

He looked at her critically. “You were surrounded by a couple of hundred people at that tavern last night.”

“Club,” she corrected. “That still doesn’t alter the fact that I can’t run through the woods barefoot.”

Rhymer seemed to weigh that. “All right,” he said, and suddenly turned left, heading, so the sign indicated, for the village of Marfield.

“Thank you. Can I try Carrie again?”

He handed her the disposable phone. The signal was lousy, but it rang, dumping her immediately to voice mail. Stacey ended the call as she had done the previous time. Carrie not answering her phone was a bad sign, and Stacey imagined that a car had struck her while she sat stupefied in the parking lot last night. Last night? Christ, it seemed like days ago.

They arrived in Marfield on Creightontown Road, first passing a small hotel and café called the Rowan, and then shortly as they crawled along the main street of the village, a shoe shop. He pulled over and parked across from it. She got out, ran barefoot across the road.

The shop seemed to specialize in Doc Martens, but she found a pair of red sneakers that fit. Rhymer paid, producing a thick wad of bills from his pocket. When he caught her staring at the money, he leaned close and said, “Picking the pocket of a skinwalker isn’t actually theft.”

“Jeez,” she said. Then her stomach grumbled again, much louder this time. “If I don’t eat soon, they won’t need that effing sigil to find me. They’ll just follow the hunger pangs.”

He rubbed his eyes and then nodded as if accepting a sentence to be flogged. “Very well,” he groused. “We’ll get some food.”

They left the car there and walked back down the road to the Rowan.

They sat by the front window, giving him a view of the street outside. He looked as if he hadn’t slept in a year.

“When we’re done here,” Stacey said, “let me drive.”

He started to protest, but his words were interrupted by a jaw-creaking yawn.

“That’s settled then,” she said.

A waitress came—the only one in the place. Stacey ordered an American-style burger and a Coke. Rhymer had the shepherd’s pie and coffee. “I’ve acquired a taste for it,” he explained, though she hadn’t asked.

“Do you think we’re safe?”

He shook his head. “No way to tell. I don’t have an elf detector.”

“Hilarious. But they have a tithe detector, don’t they?” She meant it to sound light, but it fell over them like a bucket of cold water. “How do they choose? How did they pick me over everyone else in that shite club?”

“You must have made eye contact at the right moment—from his point of view, I mean. It could as easily have been your friend if you’d switched seats.”

She chewed her burger, ate some chips, and meanwhile sorted through all that had happened to her, the beautiful monster who had snared her, this strange, slight man who seemed to be some kind of immortal in his own right. Unless, of course, he was barking mad, but then if he was, so was she. “What started you—I mean, ten bloody centuries, you were here for the Davidian Revolution for fuck’s sake. I can’t wrap my mind around it.”

“Me, either,” said Rhymer. “Davidian? I think I missed that one.”

“What made you pit yourself against them?”

He took a forkful of meat and mashed potato. “The short version is—”

“Does everything have two versions with you?”

“Everything in life does,” he said. “Though rarely only two.”

She bit her burger.

“Anyway . . . it was the Yvag who set me on this path. Everything that’s happened was because of them. Is because of them.” He ate, and his eyes slid past her, focused upon the street as if something had caught his attention. But it soon became apparent that he was looking deep into the cavern of his own memories. Gray clouds seemed to drift across his face, deepening the sadness in his eyes.

“What’s the long version?” she asked gently.

Without looking her way, he answered, “They chose unwisely.” His voice was distant, pale, and filled with ice.

She set down her burger. “That’s the long version?”

He came back to the moment, then his blue eyes closed for a moment. When he opened them, he gave her a hard, grim smile. But he didn’t answer. His reluctance was palpable. She found herself reaching across the table to close her hand over his. He twitched at her touch. Human contact was that alien to him?

“It’s fine,” she said. “You don’t have to.”

“It’s not that. I don’t know quite where to start. Tell me, have you ever heard of the ballad of Thomas the Rhymer?”

“Rhymer?” She smiled. “He a relative?”

“Have you ever heard of it?”

“Sure. We read something in school. Let me see . . . ‘True Thomas sat on Huntlie bank?’ ”

He nodded.

It took her almost twenty seconds.

“Jesus H. Christ!” she gasped.

“Shhh,” he cautioned.

“You’re going to sit there and tell me that you’re Thomas the fucking Rhymer?”

“What . . . after everything else it’s that you can’t believe?”

“No, it’s just . . . just . . . There are all those legends. And songs. I mean, Steeleye Span did a song. My mum had that album. And that band . . . Alabama 3, they did a song. That’s the damn band that did the theme song for The Sopranos. You want me to believe you’re that Thomas the Rhymer?”

He spread his hands.

Stacey tapped the tabletop. “There’s a tower in Earlston that’s supposed to be connected to him. Well, what’s left of a tower. It’s a bleedin’ tourist site.”

He gave her a lopsided grin. “I know. I took the tour once. Just to see. It’s called the Ercildun Tower. Actually, I never lived in that tower. They built it on top of my cottage a century after I’d gone.”

“And where were you?”

“In Yvagddu.” She drew her hand back doubtfully. “I told you I didn’t know where to begin.”

“You were the tithe?”

“Not the first time,” he admitted. “The first time, I spied on them carrying off their teind.”

“And . . . ?”

“And they caught me watching. They don’t like being observed.”

Suddenly his sharp eyes unfocused, and she knew he’d been pulled into another of his riddles.

The friend who is nae what you see,

The lie not told but in the being.

They close the circle who come tae ye.

His eyes cleared. He drew a sharp breath, set down his fork, and pushed his fingertips against his forehead as if massaging a headache.

“Does it hurt?” she asked.

“Not more than being kicked in the face,” he muttered. He blinked a few times and leaned back against the cushions. “All right. Tell me what I said.”

She told him. When she was done, Rhymer glanced out the window again, but with such intensity that she turned her head too. Nothing out of the ordinary caught her eye.

“We should go,” he said quietly. “If you need to use the loo, this is the time.”

She got up and walked quickly across the small hotel lobby. At the restroom door, she glanced back. He was peeling bills from his thick roll of dead people’s money.

She didn’t take long in the toilet stall, but she lingered at the sink, washing her face over and over again as if the soap and hot water would somehow sponge away the day.

No, that wasn’t it, and she had to study her own haunted eyes until she framed it the right way in her head. She wanted to wash away the reality of all this.

But she shook her head at that, too.

Not all of it.

Not Rhymer.

She wanted him to be real. He was powerful in ways she didn’t understand, and beautiful in a wolfish fashion. Whether he was truly Thomas the Rhymer in reality, or a madman with some kind of psychic powers, or something else, he was real and this was happening. He’d saved her from humiliation and degradation. That alone made him heroic and even . . . sexy, though it was hard to get all hot and bothered while monsters were hunting you down in order to sacrifice you to hell.

Hell . . .

The word smashed into her mind like a fist.

Hell. You couldn’t say the word enough times for it to lose meaning. Not today. Not after last night.

Hell.

It was no longer an abstract place in a Sunday service homily. Not a concept from a horror movie. Not a metaphor.

It was actual . . . hell.

She started to turn away from the mirror, from the belief she saw in her reflection, but her knees buckled and she crashed into the wall beside the sink. The floor pulled her with unkind gravity, demanding that she collapse into a huddled and quivering ball of tears. Maybe of screams.

“Fuck!” growled Stacey with all the ferocity of a trapped animal. She slammed the wall with her elbows, propelling herself erect. She looked at the face of the woman in the mirror—the face that was filled with fear and wanted to let the enormity of all this crush her.

“Fuck you,” she snarled.

She whirled and banged open the bathroom door.

8

She came out of the bathroom and edged past an elderly man who was heading into the men’s room. As she crossed to the table she swiveled her head to check every face. To look for . . . what? The elf thing that had nearly taken her had looked completely human at first. So what did she expect to see?

“You ready—?” she began as she slid into the booth. The question died unasked.

Stacey’s heart nearly seized in her chest.

Rhymer was gone.

Instead . . . Carrie sat in his seat.

Carrie was sitting across from her.

“Oh my Lord, Carrie. You’re okay? God,” she babbled, “did Rhymer tell you to meet us here?”

“Stacey,” said Carrie very quietly, “I need you to listen to me.”

But Stacey was so happy to see her friend. “I’ve tried to call you, to make sure you’re all right.”

“Ah,” said Carrie, “that was you. I didn’t recognize the number so I didn’t try calling back. You left your phone in your bag at the club. Here.”

Carrie pulled Stacey’s small purse up onto the table and pushed it to her.

Stacey stared at her purse but didn’t take it. “The phone’s off,” she said.

“Is it?” said Carrie. “It doesn’t matter.”

The elderly man came out of the men’s room and made his way across the lobby behind Carrie’s shoulder. He paused behind their booth and stared down at the back of Carrie’s head as if contemplating speaking to her. Instead, he turned away for the exit.

Where was Rhymer? Was he in the loo? Was he getting the car? What was taking him so long?

“Stacey, I need to tell you something and you have to listen. You have to.” Carrie leaned closer to take Stacey’s hands in hers, holding them firm and giving them small emphatic shakes as she spoke. “Listen to me, the man you’re with is a lunatic. He’s very dangerous. The police told me about him. He’s totally daft. He thinks he’s some sort of savior.”

“No, you don’t understand,” said Stacey. “The guy I left with was the loony. Rhymer saved me.”

Carrie shook her head. “No, honey, they have warrants out for him. You’re not the first girl he’s taken. The others . . . well, it’d fair turn your stomach what he’s done with them. He’s a monster. It’s all over the news, the whole country’s looking for you. For him.”

“Did you call the police?”

“Of course I did! When I came to outside the club and you weren’t there, I knew something had happened to you. I reported it right away.”

“But you don’t understand, Carrie,” insisted Stacey, “he’s not the man who kidnapped me. I got away from the other guy. Rhymer stopped him.”

Carrie smiled as if having to indulge a slow child. “You only think you got away, Stace. They’re all in it together. See? It’s a trick. They’re working some kind of mindfuck on you. I think they slipped something into your drink, so who knows what you think you saw. The police know the truth.”

“No, listen—”

“Stace, you think you’ve been rescued, which is just how he makes girls think they can trust him. Now he’s trying to take you to some secret place. He’ll lie and say that it’s a safe place, that you have to wait there with him for a while. Has he told you that?”

“I—”

“That’s where the other girls will be.”

“What other girls?”

Carrie shook her head sadly. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. He’s collecting girls. Kidnapping them, rounding them up. He’s going to take you to wherever he keeps them. You’ll see . . . they’ll be there. All of them.”

“That doesn’t make sense.”

“Sure it does. It’s a sex trade thing, Stace. That’s what they’re doing, kidnapping women for the sex market. He tells them it’s him who’s saving them from some evil cult or coven or some such bullshit, but that’s just to confuse them. It’s all about sex and money for him. Do you know how much money a good-looking white bird like you is worth to some Arab prince? Or to a brother in Dubai or someplace? All of this . . . all the elaborate steps he’s taken are just to make it work. He uses a lot of money and a lot of tricks because the payoff is huge.”

“No, Carrie, you’re wrong about him. It’s not like that at all.”

Carrie ignored her; she gave Stacey’s hands another squeeze. “Now listen, you need to come with me, okay? The police sent me in to get you away from him.”

Stacey felt like the seat was tilting under her. This made no sense at all. She hadn’t imagined the man who abducted her, who got her to strip naked, who tried to lure her into a wall of shimmering light.

She could not have imagined it.

Nor could she have imagined that Rhymer came out of the night to save her.

It had happened.

Right?

Now Carrie was telling her that all of those things were false—lies or the product of some kind of drugs, maybe mind manipulation. Did that make sense?

Or . . . which made more sense? A coven of evil elves who wanted to tithe her to hell or a manipulative bastard who wanted to sell her to the sex trade?

Neither seemed to be part of any world Stacey lived in.

Right?

She stared into Carrie’s eyes, looking for the lie, looking for something that made sense of what her friend was saying. After all, this was her flatmate, her girlfriend for the past three years, the person she trusted with secrets she would not have shared with anyone else. The boyfriends, the bad dates, the skeevy English professor who’d come on to her last year—that’s who this was, holding out a hand with chipped Chancer-red nail lacquer, ready to whisk her away to safety while the police brought down the madman who called himself Rhymer, and the whole network of sex traffickers working with him. Maybe they’d taken him already and that was why he’d vanished.

Or were the police outside waiting for Rhymer to come out of the bathroom? Were the SWAT team, the Lothian and Borders squad cars all poised to pounce?

She looked out the window, but there wasn’t anything on the street except a bronze-colored Bentley parked right outside, with two official-looking men in charcoal suits standing beside it, the people on the street glancing as if expecting a celebrity to pop out any moment. Not a policeman in sight. But from here she couldn’t see the Fiat either.

“I have to get you out of here,” Carrie insisted.

And then like an echo, Rhymer’s voice seemed to whisper in her ear. A fragment of his last riddle.

“ . . . the friend who is nae what you see . . .”

The blood in Stacey’s veins turned to cold slush.

Carrie sat there, eyes intense, mouth . . .

Smiling?

It was so small a thing. Just the tiniest upturn at the corners of Carrie’s full lips.

A smile.

Why in the wide blue fuck would Carrie smile?

And where the hell was Rhymer himself?

If this was a trap, how had it been laid? Was the hostess one of their kind? Smiling so nicely at everyone?

Smiling like Carrie.

“Will you come with me, sweetie?” asked Carrie with that smiling mouth.

A word rose to Stacey’s lips. It came slowly and reluctantly, and Stacey knew that to speak it would cost her. It would hurt her.

She said, “Skinwalker.”

For a tiniest fraction of a second, Carrie’s façade slipped, the brown eyes flickered with a degree of intelligence that had never shone in the girl Stacey knew. It was weird.

No, it was alien.

In that moment, seeing that different mind look out at her through those familiar brown eyes, Stacey knew—as surely as she knew her own name—that Carrie was dead.

The monsters had come and stolen her friend away. Stolen the light that was Carrie’s light. Stolen her laugh, her dreams, her joy of living. Stolen everything. It was worse than murder. Using her body like this was a new, foul kind of rape.

“Oh, God, Carrie . . .” Stacey said as she jerked her hands away. Tears threatened to flood her eyes. And she repeated that dreadful word. “Skinwalker. You’re part of that coven.”

Carrie’s smile blossomed into something overripe, swollen and nasty. She rose and came around the table and clamped a hand on Stacey’s biceps. The pain was immediate and intense. “You need to come with us now.”

“Why? Why didn’t they just take you or somebody else?”

Carrie abandoned all pretense of being herself as she jerked Stacey out of the booth.

“Rules,” she hissed, making that word into something hideous. “Your new boyfriend put the sigil on you. Hell has tasted you. Nobody else will do.”

Tasted. She shivered.

God almighty.

She tried to pull away, but it was hopeless. She twisted around to yell for help, but everyone in the place was already looking at her.

Every single person was smiling.

At her.

Their smiles were wrong. All so wrong.

Like Carrie’s.

Stacey sagged against Carrie. “Where’s Rhymer?”

Carrie—or the thing that had invaded her body—sneered with contempt. “Your savior ran away like the coward he is.”

“No . . .”

“He saw us and he fled.”

“He wouldn’t do that.”

Carrie laughed. “That’s exactly what he does, you silly little cow. How do you think he’s survived for so many years?”

“No!”

Carrie leaned closer. “Why do you think that so many people have died in his stead? Or hasn’t he confessed his failures? His crimes? Thomas the Rhymer is a coward who stole his immortality, and all he does—all he’s capable of doing—is bring pain to those he pretends to protect.”

“And what are you?” snapped Stacey. “You’re nothing but monsters who—”

“Who pay a tithe to hell,” finished Carrie. “Yes, we do. And why? Because appeasement is the only thing that prevents the legions of hell from waging war on all the realms of the living. In this pathetic world of yours, and across all the worlds.” She leaned close, and Stacey could smell a rotting-meat stink on her breath. “That’s the truth that Rhymer won’t tell you. He delights in the songs sung about him and the tall tales you humans tell, but his freedom is bought at what cost? He paints us as evil, tries to make us out to be the villains. But it was his own escape that nearly brought down all the infinite worlds. His arrogance is his greatest crime.”

“He saved my life!”

“Your life?” spat Carrie. “What is your life compared to a billion billion lives? To a trillion worlds? The tithe to hell is so small a price to pay, you should drop to your knees and thank all of the gods of all the worlds that you were chosen as the true savior of the universe. You—you pathetic bitch. We ‘monsters’ killed your girlfriend, but we chose you to be the sacrifice that would save everyone. She’s dead. A waste. Am I supposed to mourn for you? To feel sorry for you?”

Dazed and confused beyond speech, Stacey could find no will left to fight as Carrie dragged her outside, leading her to the Bentley. One of the bodyguards opened the rear door. Cold hands reached out, dragged her into the back.

“Here is the tithe,” said the skinwalker in Carrie. “Try not to let her tears of self-pity drown you.”

There were only two seats in the back, with a paneled elbow rest and divider between them. The other seat was occupied by a heavy older man with salt-and-pepper hair and jowls. His eyes were blue, but watery, almost colorless. She knew she’d seen him before, in the news somewhere. An MP maybe.

Kingdoms, never kings.

The two men in the front seat turned around to look at her. They were both important-looking older men.

“This is the tithe?” asked the driver with an imperious sniff. “How far we have fallen.”

“Please,” Stacey pleaded. “Just let me go.”

Carrie, still lingering in the doorway, said, “I tried to explain the truth to her, but she’s too stupid to listen.”

“It’s always the same with those the Rhymer tries to save,” said the other person in the front seat, an iron-haired man with a military bearing. A general, perhaps. “Some whimpering, simpering bitch who thinks that Prince Charming will protect her from the Big Bad Wolf.” He made a disgusted sound.

“Please, please . . . this doesn’t make sense,” pleaded Stacey. “Why would Rhymer do this?”

“Why would he try to save you?” asked the fat statesman in the backseat with her.

They all laughed. Short, bitter laughs that were entirely without humor.

“We have a word for it,” said the driver. “Actually there’s a word for it in every language throughout all the universes, but they all mean the same thing. It describes people like Rhymer.”

“Tell me,” she begged. “I have to understand.”

“Why . . . he’s a terrorist, my dear,” said the military man. “I thought that was obvious to anyone. He wants to start a war with hell.”

“It wouldn’t be a war,” said Carrie coldly. “Without the tithe . . . it would be fire and slaughter forever.”

They all looked at Stacey as she wept.

“That’s who Thomas the Rhymer is,” said the driver.

Carrie’s mouth wore her vicious, secret little smile as she slammed the door.

9

They left Marfield, turned away from the direction she and Rhymer had come, and headed somewhere else. Stacey sat in stunned silence, staring out at the road for signs. The next listed Balnuaran of Clava. She knew that site and where she was if those burial cairns were only twenty kilometers up the road. They passed the Nairn viaduct, and shortly after that they turned onto the narrow paved road past Balnuaran. A dozen or more tourists milled around between the three cairns in the crisp autumn weather, a few of them in medieval or Druid costumes; but the car rolled on past. To the left lay a farmhouse and outbuildings, and a large brown field full of baled wheels of hay or grass. Another farmhouse went by on the right. A sign read MILTON OF CLAVA, directly after which the road banked left at an acute angle. Instead of turning, the Bentley pulled off to the right, effectively blocking a narrow footpath between low wire fences. It seemed to lead straight into the afternoon sun.

The fat statesman remained where he was until her door had been opened and she’d been led out. Then he came around the nose of the Bentley and stepped in behind her to propel her along the path. The two black-suited men remained with the car, no doubt to keep anyone else from coming along after them.

Stacey knew that she could run. That she should run.

But her legs wouldn’t deviate from the path.

What if it was all true? What if her life was the price that could save so many?

Everyone she ever knew. Everyone in the world.

In . . . all the worlds, if that part was true.

Could she actually run away from that, as Rhymer obviously had? Could she be so selfish? So murderously self-centered?

And yet . . .

Why had Carrie smiled that last little smile?

Who was telling the truth?

What was the truth?

Was there any? Or was this all a two-sided game with no good guys, only bad ones? And her life as the only piece on the board.

Help me, she prayed, mouthing the words but not speaking them. Help me.

But she had no idea to whom her plea was directed.

God—if there was a God—seemed to allow this madness. Did that mean that He was complicit in so much misery?

Of course He is, she thought, scolding herself. People died in pain and misery every minute of every day. All she had to do was google the statistics of rape, child abuse, murder, genocide to know that any god of this world did not care about suffering, pain, and death, or it was part of His indescribable plan.

Was there a point to suffering? Or was it some kind of fucking entertainment?

These thoughts slowed her feet, and the fat statesman gave her arm a sharp jerk.

“Come along, you cow,” he growled.

People were already gathered ahead to the right, half a dozen in a rectangular space where an open gate led onto a path between an eight-foot-tall standing stone that seemed to mark the site and a smaller clump of boulders. On the gradual downhill slope beyond it lay a bowl-like depression in the ground next to the piled rubble of what might once have been a cairn like those back up the road at Balnuaran. A little farther on, but separated by fences, lay more stones and boulders and artificial depressions in the ground. At the low end of the fenced space stood a line of high shrubs and beyond that a stretch of woodland. She glimpsed the glisten of a stream on its far side.

Because the previous event had occurred late at night, Stacey anticipated that nothing would happen here until after dark. Instead, the six people already there spread out into a circle around the central depression—a runnel surrounding a small mound, like a miniature of a Bronze Age hill fort. No one said a word. The clarity and stillness of the afternoon, the matter-of-fact way they all took their places, made it surreal to her. Entranced, she had escaped from this fate last night. Now, fully aware, she might as well have been entranced again. She couldn’t stop it.

“Over here,” said the statesman, taking her arm again. He waddled down into the runnel and then up onto the mound. A cold wind blew across the field.

As he spoke, some of the gathered people snickered.

That seemed strange to Stacey. Even now, even with all this.

No . . . because of all this.

If she was a necessary sacrifice, then why laugh at her? If her death meant that worlds would be safe, shouldn’t these people—these skinwalkers—be weeping for her? Honoring her?

It’s what she would have done.

But their laughs were like Carrie’s secret smile. Wrong and out of place.

The fat statesman pushed her to a spot and then stopped her. “You will take off your clothes and pass naked through the doorway.”

“Why?” she demanded.

“Only a pure sacrifice will do. Clothes are impure. Plastics, metal . . . no. You will be reborn into the fire as naked as you were born into the blood of this world.”

The smiles around her grew brighter. Several of them licked their grinning lips and wrung their hands.

Stacey frowned. “N-no . . .”

“Do it,” said the fat man, “or we will do it for you, and we won’t be gentle.”

She made no move to obey. Instead she looked into his eyes. “Why are you doing this?”

“We told you . . .”

“No. Why this? Why do I need to be naked? I stopped fighting you, so why are you treating me like this? Why are you being so mean?”

His only answer was a lascivious chuckle. Then he reached into the inside breast pocket of his suit coat and drew out a black stone about the size and shape of a large box cutter. It had been polished to a high gloss and sharpened along one side to a wicked razor edge. Like the stone Rhymer had, it was covered with all sorts of markings and symbols. But Rhymer’s wasn’t knifelike, and Stacey thought of primitive knives or adzes from prehistoric sites. She was sure she’d seen such a tool in a museum display somewhere, but now it was here, not on display, and they were going to kill her with it.

“No,” she begged.

“Oh yes,” he said. “You are a cow, but you are a comely cow. Let us see the flesh that will burn. Let us delight in the breasts that will suckle monsters and the loins that will spawn the horrors of hell.”

He darted out a hand and caught her blouse. Stacey cried out in disgust and pulled away, but the man’s grip was strong and buttons flew and cloth tore.

She staggered back, her blouse torn open, her bra and bare midriff exposed to their sight. The eyes of every person in the circle burned with delight at what they saw.

“Tear the rest off,” yelled one of the women.

“Let us see the whore,” cried a hulking man.

“Cut her!” yelled the others. “Let us see the wine of her heart. Cut her . . . cut her!”

They all began to chant for the fat man to strip her. To use his knife to cut her clothes. To slash her face and breasts and limbs. They hopped up and down, punching the air with their fists, eyes ablaze, passion causing red poppies to bloom in their cheeks.

Laughing with them, the fat man advanced on her, one hand clutching as he reached for her, the other slicing the air with awful promise.

Suddenly, it was as if a cold, clean hand reached out of the darkness of her mind and slapped Stacey across the face.

A coven after all.

Just that.

All around her, hearts beating for the love of darkness.

And everything was lies.

She actually staggered back from him as if struck.

But as her foot came down it landed firmly and she crouched, fists clenched, teeth bared, deep understanding catching fire in her mind.

This was the truth. This carnal madness of the moment tore away the cobwebs in her mind.

“You bastards,” she said. “You lied to me.”

They heard her words and for a moment they stared blankly at her, and then they erupted into huge, coarse laughter that scared the birds from the trees.

“This is all a game to you, you sick fuckers.”

The woman who had yelled gave a few seconds of ironic applause. “And the trained monkey squeezes out a real thought.”

Everyone laughed at that.

Stacey spat in her face, but the woman wiped it from her skin and licked her fingers.

“So . . . all of that about Rhymer, that was—what? A joke?”

“Oh, no,” insisted the fat man, “it’s not a joke.”

Stacey hesitated. “But—”

“It’s more delicious this way,” he explained. “The last turn of the knife, so to speak. The ugly truth, the final betrayal, the realization that you came willingly when you really should have tried to run away and find your fabled savior. So nice. Like whipped cream.” He leaned close. “Oh . . . how they scream when they hear that.”

The gathered skinwalkers cackled like crows.

Stacey wheeled around, looking for a line of escape, but the people closed ranks around her.

“And how it must turn the knife even harder in Rhymer,” said the fat man. “To know that those he fails to save die either hating and damning him or calling for his help, and he is always too late.”

“Too late!” chanted the crowd.

“Year after year, century after century, too late.” The fat man squeezed his crotch as a wave of erotic joy flushed through him. “His pain is so delicious. So . . . very delicious.”

“You are monsters,” said Stacey softly. “Everything Rhymer said—all of it—was true. You are a coven of monsters.”

“Monsters, monsters, monsters,” they chanted, laughing and fondling themselves.

The fat man guffawed and held his trembling belly as he laughed. “I wish you had seen it, girl,” he said. “When he realized that we were already in that town. When he saw that we were already in the restaurant. He turned as white as a sheet and ran—actually ran—from there. Your hero. Failed once again. The last we saw of him was his back as he ran for his life, leaving you, my dear, to . . . us.”

And with that he lunged at her with the stone. For all his bulk, the man was terrifyingly fast. Stacey flung herself backward but the edge of the sacred stone drew a red line across the tops of both breasts. Beads of red blood bulged from the cuts and then spilled down, following the curves of her breasts, staining her torn blouse, falling onto the ground.

The crowd cheered wildly.

“Cut her again!” screeched a reed-thin man dressed in a postman’s uniform.

The fat man laughed and raised his stone. Stacey tried to back away, but the crowd was a solid ring and they forced her toward him.

“Cut her! Cut her!”

Stacey realized that this was it, that she was going to die. Even with all that had happened since last night she’d never quite accepted the absolute reality of her death. Or its absolute imminence.

The stone knife slashed through the air, inches away, and she saw strands of her hair flutter in the breeze. The fat man was circling her, closing the distance with each pass. Cut after cut whistled through the air and she felt lines of molten heat erupt along her back and arms. Blood ran like rivers.

“Cut her! Cut her!”

The chant filled the air.

The fat man grinned like a ghoul as he closed in. Behind him the air began to shimmer with green fairy lights.

“Cut her! Cut her!”

Stacey braced herself, shifting her weight to the balls of her feet, ready to run, ready to spring. Ready to fight. Ready to do anything but let him butcher her without at least crippling the bastard. She was determined to take his eyes with her. If she had to die, then fuck it. Let them pay for it.

“Cut her! Cut her!”

Stacey timed herself to his next swing, and then she ducked low and snatched up a rock, rose, pivoted, and hurled it with all her strength.

It struck the fat man on the shoulder as he was raising his weapon and then ricocheted off and struck the postman in the mouth. He staggered back, spitting teeth.

The crowd laughed at that, too.

With a sinking heart she realized that they were used to their victims struggling. Worse, they enjoyed it.

The wall of green light intensified, blocking out part of the circle of skinwalkers. Its presence cut down on the amount of maneuvering room she had. She was barely able to stay away from the killer as it was, but as the wall strengthened and grew, Stacey knew that sooner or later she would fall beneath the knife or be forced through that doorway.

The fat statesman slashed at her again, and she dodged, but as she did so she realized that he could have cut her. She stumbled away, confused. Surely he wasn’t showing her mercy . . .

As he stalked her, the fat man began speaking some words and phrases in a language she didn’t know, which sounded like a made-up form of Latin. With each word the shimmering light flared and grew.

He must have seen the look of realization in her eyes. He said, “That’s right, we won’t kill you here. But we will lap your blood.” His tongue waggled obscenely.

She was a tithe to hell. Not a blood sacrifice. She was going into the green light alive, not into the ground dead.

The light bathed the whole clearing, painting the faces of everyone there in shades of sickness and unreality. It was like looking at a pack of madmen through night-vision goggles. All green and black and shades of gray.

The fat man raised the blade high over his head.

He opened his mouth to say something else. Perhaps another phrase in that weird language. Maybe another taunt.

Whatever it was, though, would never be spoken.

Not in this world.

Something whipped past Stacey’s ear and for a split second she thought it was a wasp. It hummed, high and sharp.

Then she stared with slack-jawed shock at the thing sticking out from between the fat man’s teeth. Long and slender, with brown feathers quivering at the end.

An arrow.

The fat man took a slow, wandering sideways step and turned away from Stacey, revealing the barbed spear point standing out from the back of his skull, slick with blood and strands of gore.

The fat man clutched at Stacey, but his body began to shudder violently. His chest bulged outward—she could hear the wet, muffled sound of his ribs and sternum snapping, then the skin stretched and stretched until it burst open in a spray of blood. Something leaped through the bone-broken doorway, a humped and gnarled figure no larger than a child. It landed on two misshapen legs and stared around with eyes that glowed with real inner heat. Its skin looked like a map of veins and musculature, like some grotesque subject of dissection in a medical school. But it was alive and filled with hate. Intelligence burned in those hot eyes.

Stacey lunged for the fallen stone knife.

So did the creature.

But as they both reached for it—as Stacey curled her fingers around it—a second arrow snapped through the air and struck the creature. This time it hit the chest and transfixed it. If this monster, this Yvag, had a pumping heart like a human, then the broad-bladed arrow must surely have torn it in half.

The creature looked at Stacey, its burning eyes seeming to lock on her, and its inhuman mouth opened, screeching to the sky in furious terror. Then it abruptly ruptured into a gray-green mist that spattered Stacey and every shocked and now silent person in the circle. Bones and raw meat flopped to the ground.

The statesman’s body—the fat empty shell—still stood impossibly upright; but it was rotting before her eyes in swift, freakish decomposition. Skin bruised, sagged, the wide eyeballs liquefied and fell back into the skull, and the whole corpse deliquesced inside the suit, collapsing with a wet squelch to the ground. He had been in the press for years, decades she thought. Dead far longer than the driver of the limousine.

The wall of light suddenly changed from green to red. Furnace heat roared out across the clearing.

“Push her in!” screamed the woman who had applauded with such vicious irony. Her words broke the others out of their shock. The postman was closest; he made a grab at Stacey.

A third arrow came out of nowhere and punched through his chest. It stood there, the shaft thrumming from the force of impact.

The postman juddered to a stop, and he managed to croak a single last word, raised his arm and pointed.

“No . . .”

Everyone turned.

A figure stepped out from behind the border of tall shrubs below them.

Lean as a wolf, with eyes that were bottomless and dark with incalculable rage. He was dressed in jeans and a vest made of rough doeskin. Belts crossed his hips and from them hung knives of every description. In his hands, though, he held a great yew bow, and a quiver heavy with arrows hung from a strap behind his shoulder.

Stacey watched as he quickly, deftly drew another arrow, fitting it to the string without effort, as if he’d done this a hundred times. Or a thousand.

Or ten thousand.

“Rhymer,” she breathed.

10

As Thomas the Rhymer raised the bow, the crowd of skinwalkers howled at him.

They howled with seething hatred for their ancient enemy.

They howled in burning rage for this disruption of their ritual.

They howled in fear of this man.

And they howled in terror for the consequences of his attack.

Stacey heard those roars and yells and she understood them. A scream ripped its way out of her own throat.

Beside her, the postman’s stomach exploded as the red monster within tore free. It dropped into a crouch like a bloody ape, head swiveling back and forth as if seeing with new and more cunning eyes than it had used a moment ago. Those eyes came to rest on Stacey, and the thing’s lip curled back from rows of gore-streaked fangs that were bracketed by wicked tusks. Its muscles tensed for the spring.

Stacey gave it no time.

She swung the sharpened stone knife with all her strength, and the razor edge slashed through the Yvag’s throat so deeply that the stone grated on its knobbed spine. Green blood sprayed outward as the creature dropped.

The postman’s body shriveled to dusty rags in a heartbeat.

As if the collapse of the empty clothing was a signal, the elves attacked, and though the real hell waited beyond the shimmering veil of light, there was enough of it to be had in that clearing.

As one they surged forward—a dozen monsters in stolen bodies. The nearest lunged at Stacey; the rest barreled downhill toward Rhymer.

For his part, Rhymer stood his ground, firing arrow after arrow, filling the air with death—first to kill the hijacked bodies and then to slaughter the Yvag who dwelled within. His jaw was tight, his mouth curled into a sneer of disgust, but Stacey saw that his eyes blazed. With madness? Or was he enjoying this? After all these centuries, was this the only time he was truly alive?

Then she had no more time to think. A woman dressed in expensive furs and jewels tried to stab her with a diamond-crusted dagger, but Stacey bashed her arm aside and drove the tip of the sharpened stone into her chest. Over and over again, tearing through ermine and powdered flesh and tough bone. As the woman’s chest collapsed, the Yvag inside tried to burst free, thrusting its clawed hands outward to try and snatch the sacred stone from Stacey’s hand. But Stacey bellowed and hammered at the scrabbling fingers, smashing them, shattering bones, battering the emerging Yvag even as it fought through blood and ragged tissue to escape its dying frame. Sagging halfway out, the Yvag and its host collapsed onto the ground.

The man with the military bearing leaped over the fallen body and drove a savage punch at Stacey that would surely have broken her neck, but an arrow crunched through the balled fist and pinned it to his chest. Before he could react, Stacey finished him with a slash to the throat. His blood sprayed everywhere.

Bodies fell and clogged the clearing, and Rhymer used those obstacles to advance over the fence. He fired and fired. One bolt struck a skinwalker in the stomach and it fell forward. Its body heaved, then lay still, and Stacey realized that the arrow had found and killed the Yvag within as well.

Then there was a loud CRACK and Rhymer spun backward, his bow falling from his hand as red blossomed from high on his left shoulder. A figure—the driver of the Bentley—stood with braced legs, aiming a Glock nine millimeter at Rhymer. Only the wild panic of the crowd prevented him from ending it there.

“Get out of the way, damn you!” cried the driver, and when one of the skinwalkers didn’t move fast enough, he shot it in the head. Rhymer leaped the fence and dodged behind the shrubs again. The driver fired into them, but Rhymer had already bolted for the woods. Furiously, the Yvag plunged after him, bounding over the fence and into the trees.

A second man bent and rummaged inside the folds of the military man’s empty clothes and straightened with a mad grin on his face and a big .45 Navy Colt in his hand. When he turned toward her, Stacey saw that there was something strange about his eyes. They weren’t like the rest of the skinwalkers.

They were more like the eyes of the man who had abducted her from the club. They generated a strange and overwhelming attraction. She knew that this could not be the same man, the one Rhymer said was a princeling among them—he had shed his skin and gone into the green light—but the power was similar. It was so normal and natural and warm that it nearly stopped her in her tracks.

What had Rhymer said about the charisma of these elves?

To humans that’s just a gift of attraction . . . but for the Yvag it’s one of their most powerful weapons. They can make you lay bare your throat for the knife and thank them while they cut.

She could feel her hand begin to open. The sacred stone began to slip away from her even as the creature raised his pistol and pointed it at her face.

She closed her eyes, waiting for the bullet.

Almost . . . wanting it.

The shot never came. She opened her eyes to see him lower the pistol.

The creature sighed. “Alas for everyone that the tithe must be alive and able to scream.”

“I . . .” she began, but there was nowhere to go with words.

“Take her,” said the Yvag. He turned away and ran after the others into the woods to hunt for Rhymer. A few moments later there came a burst of shots and a solitary scream of agony.

Only two skinwalkers remained in the clearing, and they closed in on Stacey. They were as splattered with blood as she was.

“You will scream for a thousand years,” whispered one of them, a woman with masses of blond curls. “That’s the truth of hell, bitch.”

“You will become the whore of a hundred thousand demons,” said the other.

Stacey closed her fist around the sacred stone. The spell of the princeling had snapped as soon as he turned away.

She bared her teeth at them.

“Fuck you,” she said, and sprang from the mound. She cut them to pieces with their own stone knife.

11

There was another scream and Stacey ran downhill. As she reached the wire fence, the skinwalker with the Glock came stumbling backward through the shrubs. He hit the fence and fell on his back at Stacey’s feet. His face and throat and chest had been slashed to ribbons. The Yvag—mortally wounded—struggled to tear free from the shriveling body, but Stacey kicked it over and stomped on its head.

Within the forest, Stacey could see Rhymer moving among the skinwalkers. He held a knife in each hand and stray shafts of sunlight struck sparks from the steel as he wheeled and cut and slashed and stabbed. If the bullet had done him any damage, it was not evident. Two skinwalkers, both of them trailing blood and streamers of torn flesh, crawled out of the forest and into the clearing, making for the wall of light and, perhaps, a chance of escape.

There was a sudden howl of rage, and heat struck her back like a wave. It sent her reeling, and the stone flew from her hand. She whirled to see that the wall of light had grown brighter and bigger, filling more than half of the clearing now. It was as if the sky were being sliced apart in pursuit of her. The light seemed to expand toward her like the chest of some great dragon.

A grotesque face peered through, spotted her—a baleful eye that she remembered from last night.

The princeling, Rhymer had called it.

It strained to reach for her through the glowing opening, barbed and knobbed fingers gleaming with the sheen of cast iron. Stacey staggered back and wrenched her head away before the princeling’s charisma could conquer her.

One of the remaining skinwalkers had crawled out from the trees; they stared at each other for a second. Then he jumped for the cutting stone. Stacey kicked him in the face. The stone flew out of his grasp and blood spurted from his nose. She took a step to kick him again, but with both hands cupped over his face he skittered away from her.

Then someone called her name.

It spoke in a voice like thunder. The force of it shook the clearing and shivered the trunks of the trees. Birds fell dead from the air, as the rocky ground beneath her cracked.

Stacey screamed.

It wasn’t just her name that was called. It was her whole being in two syllables, shouted by the prince of the elves from the mouth of hell.

The power of it enfolded her again, the charismatic force as clinging as tentacles, dragging her toward the blazing light.

With everything she had, she fought to pull free, but her captured body betrayed her. As had happened at the club, her mind became compartmentalized, boxed in, trapped.

“The ritual,” she heard him broadcast to the surviving Yvag. “Bring the other two. Complete it from your side.”

Another of the skinwalkers ran out of the woods—a solid woman with red hair and dressed in a lemon-yellow tracksuit that was smeared with a bloody handprint. She scrambled over and retrieved the blood-smeared cutting stone, cringing back immediately as if expecting to be kicked, too, but Stacey could no longer work her legs. Although she was screaming inside, not a sound came out. Her eyes flooded with tears at her helplessness. They had her. She understood now how Rhymer had only managed to save a few, how tenacious, unstoppable these monsters were.

The woman clambered up beside her to push Stacey up the mound and through the opening.

And then Thomas the Rhymer stepped out from behind the tall standing stone above them.

He was covered with blood, his shirt torn halfway off his body. His limbs were crisscrossed with cuts and the vicious welts from bites and tearing fingers. But he had recovered his bow and he held it in his red, gleaming fist above which the shaft of an arrow rested.

“Rhymer . . .” whispered Stacey. With sudden horror she realized that he was pointing the arrow at her. Was that how this would end? If he couldn’t save her from hell, then he would deny the demons the living sacrifice they demanded?

His eyes were hard and merciless as he stared along the shaft at her.

Stacey wanted to curse him. To hate him for this. He had used her to find this coven, hadn’t he? To bring the princeling back into this world. Now here he was ready to sacrifice her life. She should hate him with her last breath and thought.

She said, “Do it.”

He took careful aim and his arrow fly.

Stacey closed her eyes.

The arrow whipped by so closely that she felt it pass, viscerally shared the thud of it into the breastbone of the tracksuited woman beside her. Stacey’s eyes snapped open to see the woman spin around and stumble backward—straight into the wall of light, her arm extended as if to hand the cutting stone to Stacey. At the last, her shaking, dissolving hand flung it to the ground.

Stacey’s arms were free, but she stood there for a moment, too stunned to know what to do.

“The stone!” cried Rhymer. “Now, before it’s too late!”

That was like a bucket of water in the face. Stacey snapped out of her shock and dove for the sacred stone.

“You dare not!” bellowed the Yvag prince, and Stacey spun around in horror as the monster dragged the tracksuited body aside and stepped halfway from the light, reaching for her, swiping at the air with its claws.

An arrow thudded into the princeling, but instantly glowed and caught fire, the ashes blowing away in the superheated wind.

“The stone,” Rhymer cried again.

But Stacey had it seated in her palm now, her fingers wrapped tightly around it, her body turning—not away from the Yvag prince but toward him. She slashed at him with his sacred stone. The razor-sharp edge of it drew a glowing green line from shoulder to elbow.

The Yvag’s shriek of pain came like the screech of grinding metal, like a train wreck inches from her face. It picked her up and slammed her back against the shrubs. Even where he stood, Rhymer fell, too, his arrows spilling from their quiver.

The Yvag prince thrashed in place, like a wasp caught in a spider’s web. As Stacey watched, the green lines of glowing blood spread like a vine into the red of the shimmering wall and somehow seemed to bind him there.

Or did it?

The creature threw its twisted body against these new lines of force and step by step the resistance yielded, one line then another snapped, and he emerged. He was almost all the way out now.

Stacey pushed herself up. Thunder seemed to pound through her head. She pressed a palm against one ear, found that she was bleeding from it. And from her nose. Rhymer, sprawled in the dirt, was coughing, and with each cough a bloody foam rimed his chin.

Somehow Stacey still had the stone in her hand, but the monster in the fiery gateway was reaching for it. She raised it for one last stab. Maybe she could cut a tendon or . . .

“Hell and eternal suffering await you,” whispered the prince in a voice that was so inhuman that Stacey did not know how to describe it. Words forced out of a throat that was never meant for human speech.

She jabbed at the thing’s knobbed fingers and it twitched back, careful to avoid her. They both knew who would win, but the elf did not want to suffer more damage in the midst of its victory.

“The . . . wall . . .”

Stacey heard those words distantly, from a million miles away.

“What—?”

The elf grabbed her ankle in its steely hand and began to pull her across the ground.

“Not the . . . Yvag,” croaked Rhymer as he fought to climb shakily to hands and knees. “The wall . . . close it.”

Stacey twisted back to the Yvag prince. His goblin face leered at her.

“Too late,” he mocked. “Give in to the suffering that is your destiny.”

Stacey raised the sacred stone.

“Fuck you!” she screamed, and stabbed.

Not at the monstrous hand that held her.

Not at the grinning impossibility of the black, golden-eyed skull that laughed at her pain.

She stabbed the shimmering wall of light.

There was a dazzling explosion that erupted without sound. A ring of bright green light punched out from the glowing red wall.

“Again!” cried Rhymer. He was crawling toward her, his body broken and bleeding.

“No!” howled the prince of the elves. He yanked at her foot, tearing her sneaker off.

Stacey stabbed again, then raked the stone blade from top to bottom.

Across the line she made the fiery light vanished.

She stabbed and stabbed.

Wherever the blade touched, the red wall disappeared.

The elf prince was still half in this world. One leg, one arm and shoulder, and his misshapen head. He roared at her and slashed her leg with his claws. Her blood seeded the air.

Then an arrow struck the clawing hand, pinning it to the ground for an instant before dissolving. But a second struck. And a third. Rhymer was on his knees, scooping up fallen arrows, tearing them from rotted corpses, and firing them as fast as he could nock and pull and release. They held him off for seconds, long enough for her to pull her leg out of the prince’s reach.

The wall collapsed bit by bit. Line by glowing line, shrinking in on the struggling Yvag.

Rhymer fired a final arrow, and it struck the elf in the left eye and knocked him backward through the fiery wall, out of this world and back into his own or into hell. Which it was, Stacey did not know and did not care. She swept her arm up into the remaining angry hole, and that other place vanished.

The sneaker torn from her lay on the mound like some failed sacrifice.

Overhead, clouds scudded across the sky, and birdsong echoed from the woods below. Had the fenced site not looked like an overturned cemetery, it might have been a lovely afternoon.

She heard Rhymer’s bow thud to the dirt, and as she collapsed onto the rocky ground the sacred stone slipped from her fingers, struck on its edge, and rolled away into the grass. It lay there, looking like any other polished black stone.

12

Thomas Rhymer did not call an ambulance or any other aid.

As darkness closed over Stacey, she was half aware that he was dragging her up the slope toward the parked Bentley.

When she opened her eyes for a moment, the light outside had changed. Rough bandages were wrapped around her wounds. She wasn’t bleeding, but she didn’t know if she had any blood left to lose. She lay in the plush backseat of the Bentley watching treetops flicker past the windows. She had only one red sneaker on, but her other foot was bathed in enough blood that it almost looked like a match.

She said, “Where are we?” Managed to turn her head enough to see him.

Rhymer was hunched over the wheel, his face gray, his fists white-knuckle tight on the wheel. He did not have the strength to answer.

“Oh, well, that’s fine then.” Darkness came for Stacey and took her down again.

13

The café was quiet. The waiter came and poured fresh coffee into their cups, murmured something in French, and walked away. Traffic whisked back and forth, but no one seemed to be in a hurry.

The bandages beneath her long sleeves chafed, the stitches itched. They would have to come out soon.

Stacey sipped her coffee, wincing at the pain in her lip. It had been split and was taking its own sweet time to heal. Rhymer wore sunglasses even at night. A broken nose had given him black eyes.

People walked by, some of them laughing, a few hand in hand.

“Is he gone?” she asked. It was not the first time she’d asked the question since that day. For a lot of that time Rhymer had remained silent, morose, lost in his own inner darkness.

This time he answered her. “We hurt him,” he said softly. “That’s the most you can say for certain. He’s not like most of the Yvag. He’s royalty. I’m not sure if he can die.” He paused a moment. “But either he steps into the well of the damned or someone else of his bloodline has tae. ‘You’ll scream for a thousand years’ was nae hyperbole.”

“God . . .”

“At the very least a princeling of the elves has been wounded by a mortal, a woman, and that’s only happened once before in the whole history of the world, to my knowledge.” He added sugar to his coffee, stirred as if everything depended on it.

“Will it stop them?” she asked.

He shook his head. “It’ll complicate things for them. Opening the gateway takes a lot of power. I . . . don’t know if he can accomplish it with what we did to him. Others will, though, next time. And next time they’ll come early to the party. You came dear.”

She nodded and they sat together for a quarter hour without talking. Then she said, “Rhymer . . . I was the tithe.”

“Aye.”

“Now we spoiled that.”

“Aye.”

She looked around at the square. Paris glowed with life. “The Yvag said that my life would buy the safety of the whole world. Of all the worlds. Is that remotely true? Has saving me opened everyone up to something bad?”

“They sold you a lie tae make you cooperate in your own sacrifice. Their idea of fun.”

“So . . . hell won’t take revenge?”

Rhymer smiled. “Not on us, lass,” he said. “Their bargain.”

She opened her mouth to reply, but all she said was, “God . . .”

“Some believe that the Yvag were angels once,” said Rhymer. “When certain angels revolted, God ordered that the gates of heaven and hell be shut. Any angels left in heaven became the true and sanctified angels. Those who were shut into hell became demons. But there were many who were trapped in the worlds between.”

“And they became the Yvag?”

“According to that version of things.” He nodded. “Not pure enough for heaven but not evil enough for hell.” He laughed. “More like us than they want to believe.”

“Or . . . maybe they do believe,” she suggested. “Maybe that’s why they mess with our world so much.”

He considered it, sipped his coffee awhile before speaking again. “As I said, that’s one version of it. The tithe paid is to stay free from hell. As fallen angels they belong to hell, and the tithe buys their freedom.”

“So . . . why would hell take it out on us if the tithe isn’t paid?”

“It wouldn’t. And that’s your version of them filtered through Christian theology. I know a deal more. They’re older than our religions. Older than our race, maybe our world.”

She thought about that. “Hell will go after the Yvag, then?”

“Aye. It’s a war they cannae hope tae win. But hell . . .” He looked grimly at some memory. “Hell is like nothing Christianity ever dreamed up, and vaster than worlds.”

“The well of the damned?”

His mouth twitched at her repeating his own phrase back at him. “The universe balances on a knife edge.”

“So saving me you forced an immortal creature to sacrifice itself to buy the Yvag time?”

“Which runs differently in their world between worlds. But, aye. The span until the next teind comes due.”

A cold wind seemed to blow among the tables. “Twenty-eight years, you said.”

“Your being their tithe is done now. The mark on you is no good to them anymore. Like the one on me.”

“Then I’m safe, am I?” She knew the answer but needed to hear it laid out.

Rhymer’s mouth pulled tight with sadness and weariness. “They won’t come after you as their tithe, no,” he said quietly. “But the Yvag are a bitter race. You injured their prince. Maybe slew him. They’ll ne’er forgive you. Never stop hunting you.”

Stacey felt like she wanted to cry, but she didn’t. She’d known it already.

Instead she asked, “You said only one woman has ever injured a prince of the Yvag before.”

“I did.”

“Who was it?”

He finished his coffee, then looked into the cup, head bowed. When she thought he wasn’t going to say anything, he replied, “Someone that mattered. A long, long time ago.”

“And you’ve been running from them and fighting them, what, ever since?”

“Ever since.”

“Alone?”

“It’s not a journey ye . . . Of course, alone.”

She reached across the table and took his hand. “Well, not anymore.”

He smiled at her, but there was so much sorrow in that smile that Stacey knew that behind the sunglasses his eyes weren’t participating. She turned and looked away, looked out at the passing traffic on the rue de Rivoli. Every once in a while one of the people in the passing cars would catch her eye. The looks were brief, except sometimes they went on just a second too long.

Rhymer squeezed her hand, and they sat in silence as the world turned around them.