The thing writhed again, trying to rise, the thick shell of bone on its corkscrewed back scraping the roof. Robin turned away. Full night was falling.
I must find a place to hide.
SOON ENOUGH
48
He was weak from the poison, but he still dragged himself out behind the trailer, onto the trashwood slope. The lance filled his hands, and Jeremiah dropped his second-best backpack. He turned, and listened.
Dusk had folded her robe about her and left the sky, shutting the door of day. From the other side, full night rose in her own indigo splendor, the hard points of stars peeping through racing clouds. The wind was uncertain, flirting, promising rain, and thunder rumbled in the distance. What part of the sound was actual thunder, and what part the approaching battles, he couldn’t say.
Nearer, there was a crackling and a rushing. A glitter through the windows, not noticeable from the front yet.
Down at the bottom of the hill there was a stand of young birches, and from there he’d strike out east. Two shackles circled his neck. The locket, its chain too short for his throat, twitched against the notch between his collarbones.
Keep it as weregilt.
Well, maybe he would. But he’d also find her. Sooner or later, she’d listen to him.
The other chain was Unwinter’s Horn. He let out a long breath, examining the lance. Solid silver, its leaf-shaped tip, humming expectantly.
Gallow rested the lance-end on the ground, leaned against it. His legs were still a little shaky. Only time would tell if Robin had managed to draw all the poison out. If she hadn’t, well.
He didn’t have to wait long. Smoke began to billow, and the flames sucked greedily through the windows he’d thoughtfully left open on the back side of the house. Soon after that the entire structure was involved, and the carport buckled, melting. Shouts and running feet, sirens in the distance.
The mortal world already believed him dead. This was simply tidying up loose ends. Weregilt of another kind, perhaps.
Daisy’s clothes would be burning already; he’d laid the fire chantment thickest in the bedroom. She was sleeping soundly; there was nothing more to be done.
When the trucks arrived and the mortals began spraying water on the sidhe-fed blaze, he picked up the backpack and shrugged into it. The lance quivered and itched, but it would drink blood soon enough. He might well lead Unwinter to Robin, if he was unlucky.
He didn’t care. Selfish, just like a sidhe.
Jeremiah Gallow turned away from his mortal life, again, and vanished into the pale birch trees.
In the distance, the thin threads of silver huntwhistles rose.
All through that long day, the thing on the rooftop smoked and rocked back and forth on its bony shell. Its flaccid limbs flopped uselessly, and the cloudy spring sunshine striped it with steaming weals. It made tiny piping sounds, lost in the noise of traffic below. Horns blared, engines gunned, the murmur of crowds enfolded it. The sun was cruel, for all it was weak, and the thing’s eyes were runnels of black tar pouring down its wasted cheeks. Once proud and capering, it was now a Twisted wreck, its wounds still seeping. She had been thorough, the avenging attacker.
As thorough as he would be, soon. But first he had to survive the assault of the mortal sun. Twisted, iron-poisoned, and wounded as he was, it burned as if he was one of Unwinter’s dark-creeping legions. The heavy-misting rain was no balm, full of poisonous exhaust and the stinking effluvia of the metal the foolish salt-sweet mortals used to scar every piece of free soil they found.
Had it been full summer, their sun might have finished the work the daughter had begun.
Below, the Savoigh Limited throbbed. Once its stone facade and plaster walls, ornate fixtures and heavy-framed mirrors had been new, then oudated, then seedy, and now refurbished. The winds of urban gentrification blew erratic but inexorable, and the Savoigh, with its uniformed doormen and its high-rent offices, its tiny cold-water studios for the bohemians and its ancient, growling boiler in the basement, had become that most terrible of things: a fashionable heap.
Rocking steadily, the rhythm of the thing’s shell grinding as it threatened to topple. Its piping sounds became more intense, tiny malformed cries of effort. They soaked through the rooftop’s rough surface, burrowing down.
Afterward, if the residents of the Savoigh Limited remembered that chill spring day at all, they remembered