Beside him, Kitsune purred.
Once again, Oliver laughed. Her eyes sparking with that same playful glint, she joined in. They shared that moment of amusement as though the whole thing was a game between them, but they both knew that it was not. Oliver was grateful that Kitsune did not push the game to the next level. He could not help but be aroused by her, but it could never go further than that.
With a lurch, the train lumbered out of the station, picking up speed.
The door to the compartment rattled with a chill December wind that whipped through the train. The lights flickered. Eyes closed, Kitsune burrowed closer to Oliver and he did not pull away. He let her mold herself to him, but fought the temptation to put his arms around her.
Kitsune settled comfortably there, the trace of a smile at the corners of her mouth. Her eyes remained closed.
Merry Christmas, he thought to himself.
The train rattled through the darkness toward Vienna. Again, the lights flickered. There came a thump against the compartment door.
Kitsune stiffened in his arms, not sleeping at all. Her eyes snapped open. Oliver stared at the door. Had someone knocked, or just bumped against the door while walking through the car? The train rocked back and forth. Someone might easily have lost their balance and been thrown against the door.
A second thump shook the door, followed by a scratching sound, as though steel wool were being scraped along its outside.
“What the hell?” Oliver whispered.
Kitsune sat up and Oliver let her go. The two of them were very still, straining to understand the nature of the sounds outside the door. So that when the knock came—an ordinary sort of knock, three raps in quick succession—they both started in surprise.
Cautious, Kitsune rose and started toward the door.
“Yes?” Oliver called.
A voice replied in German, and then in English. “Passports, please.”
He let out a breath, only then realizing how quickly his pulse was racing. A dozen possibilities suggested themselves to explain the sounds they had heard, including something as typical as two people trying to get by one another in the narrow passageway outside the compartment. Living in constant danger had made him paranoid.
Kitsune glanced at him, jade-green eyes gleaming, her features tense. Oliver shook his head and gestured for her to step back. She went to the seat opposite the one they had been sharing and unzipped the duffel bag, reaching inside.
If it truly was the conductor outside the door, Oliver and Kitsune had already discussed the pantomime that would ensue as they searched for their suddenly misplaced passports. At worst, they would be left off the train at the next stop.
But the sounds they’d heard against the door concerned him. He glanced again at Kitsune and saw her sliding the Sword of Hunyadi from the duffel. Clearly, the sounds worried her as well. There was no telling what might be beyond that door.
“Passports, please,” the voice demanded, with another rap on the door. “Open, now.”
A ripple of unease went through him. The voice did not sound right. It was not simply the matter of a foreign accent. The words seemed muffled.
“Open it,” Kitsune whispered from behind him.
Oliver turned toward her. She sat beside the duffel, holding the sword down behind it, hidden from view.
He hated to do it, but she was right. On the chance it really was the conductor, they would be ejected from the train for certain if the crew had to force the door open.
“Coming,” Oliver called as he walked to the door.
He unlocked it, then slid it open, tensed to jump back if attacked. The first thing he saw was the conductor’s hat on the woman’s head. In the passageway, lights dimmed for nighttime travel, he could make out none of the details of the conductor’s face. But it eased his tension a little to see that hat.
“Sorry. We were napping a bit.”
“Of course,” said the conductor.
In the dim light, her grin was Cheshire Cat broad. Oliver heard a strange sound coming from her, a kind of rustling that came from beneath the long blue coat with the railway’s insignia on the shoulder and breast.
Opening the door had been a terrible mistake.
She pushed off the conductor’s coat. A terrible rasp came from her body, which was covered with hair so thick it seemed like the yarn on a rag doll’s head. But it twisted and coiled and lashed out and something jabbed Oliver’s left forearm. He cried out and staggered back, and the cablelike tendrils that covered her body thrust out toward him, each of them tipped with a curved stinger.
His arm ached where she’d stung him and began to feel hot. Some kind of venom was moving through him. Oliver wondered if it was fatal and how many stings it would take to kill him.
On instinct, he grabbed the door and slid it shut. With all of his weight behind it, he drove it home, crushing several of those tentacles in a small gap between door and frame, but the stingers did not withdraw. They thrust out at his hands as though they could see him. Oliver swore but did not pull away. One of the stingers grazed his left wrist. He opened the door a few inches and slammed it again. A tendril was cut off and fell to the floor, leaking greenish ichor.
“Help me!” Oliver said through gritted teeth.
“Step back,” Kitsune commanded, her voice deathly calm.
“Are you crazy? I’m going to lock the door!”
A bouquet of stingers erupted through the narrow opening in the door, pressed themselves against the door edge and the frame, and then the handle was torn from his grasp as the stingers forced the door open with such violence that it rattled and slammed and he heard metal tear.
“Oliver, step back!” Kitsune shouted.
In fear he threw himself away from the door, falling backward onto the duffel bag as the Hunter swept into the room, stingers stabbing at the air all around her. The tendrils curled like a basket of snakes upon her head. Somewhere in that mass of darting stingers was a face, but all he could see were clear, perfect, blue eyes and that Cheshire grin.
“So pleased to make your acquaintance,” the Hunter said, and then it laughed, the coldest sound Oliver had ever heard.
Kitsune tossed him the Sword of Hunyadi, still in its scabbard. He lay on his back on the bench seat and snatched it out of the air. He began to draw it even as Kitsune attacked the woman.
The fox-woman did not alter her form. Fur cloak rustling around her, she lunged at the Hunter. Stingers darted out, jabbing into the shadows within her cloak. Kitsune whimpered through gritted teeth, and Oliver wondered how many times she would be stung, how many it would take to kill a Borderkind. But the fox-woman was fast. She grabbed the Hunter by the throat and used her free hand to rake the creature’s abdomen with vicious claws.
Then, Oliver was in motion. He slid the scabbard fully off the sword as he stood. Without a word he moved behind Kitsune and thrust the blade past her and into the mass of angry stingers.
The Hunter hissed, but the smile remained, as though the pain was a pleasure to her. Some of the stingers wrapped themselves around the blade and Oliver felt them pulling it, trying to tear it from his grasp.
“Move her!” he snapped.
Kitsune understood. Fewer stingers were jabbing her now but already there were angry welts rising on her flesh. She gripped the Hunter by the throat and twisted her toward Oliver, who used new leverage to shove the sword deeper, to twist it. The Hunter cried out and the stingers faltered for a moment.
He caught Kitsune’s eye, saw the fox-woman glance toward the window. Oliver nodded, and together they half lifted, half pushed the Hunter across the compartment. With all of his strength, Oliver used the sword to drive the thing against the glass.
It cracked.
The stingers began to twist again, darting at his hands, at the sword, and at Kitsune’s fur and hands, at her face.
They hauled back and slammed the Hunter against the glass again, using her skull as a battering ram. The window splintered and the Hunter’s head crashed through, scattering a million tiny diamonds of safety glass out into the night and the wind as the train hurtled through the darkness. But it was made to push out in case of an emergency, and the collision pushed the whole window from the frame. With the Hunter partway through the broken window, they gave one final push as Oliver slid the sword from her body.
With a scream of hatred and pain, the creature tumbled out the window and struck the ground, rolling into a ditch alongside the tracks at a speed that must have snapped bones and torn muscles. The wind screamed into the compartment and Oliver and Kitsune stood and stared out into the night, buffeted by the speed and the wind. Her hair and cloak flew around her. He glanced down at the viscous green blood on his blade.
“What was she?”
“I have no idea.”
Oliver glanced at Kitsune.
She gave him a sharp look. “No one can know every legend.”
But he had already forgotten his question. The welts raised on her cinnamon skin were bright red. There were at least two dozen that he could see, and undoubtedly more on her chest where the stingers had jabbed through her shirt.
Kitsune swayed on her feet. “You don’t look well,” she said.
Oliver smiled. The heat of his own stings burned through him and made his face flush. He felt feverish and there was pain in his hands and arms where the Hunter had stung him, but now a kind of numbness was descending upon him.
“Do you think we’re going to die?”
Kitsune frowned. “I told you, I do not know her legend.”
Shouts came from elsewhere in the train car. Oliver blinked. They had to get out of there. Had to, in fact, get off the train at the next stop. If this Hunter had found them, others must know they were on the train. And though it was a lesser concern, the condition of their compartment would likely summon the police.
“Let’s go,” he said.
He turned and bent to pick up the scabbard. Only as he rose did he realize how slowly he was moving, how sluggish his muscles. His whole body had begun to feel frozen, as though it was fighting against him.
Oliver forced his limbs to move, put the sword back into its scabbard, and dropped it into the duffel. He did not bother to zip it, slipping its strap across his shoulder. The numbness and stiffness of his body was increasing.
Kitsune stood at the ruined door of the compartment, looking out into the hall.
“Anything?” Oliver asked, his words slurring, his mouth leaden.
“Passengers, but they’re scared. Keeping well back,” Kitsune said. Her head bobbed sleepily as she spoke, like she was drunk.
“Go.”
Slowly, Kitsune staggered into the corridor. Oliver followed. How they managed to make it into the next car, and the next beyond, without a conductor stopping them, he didn’t know. Only when he remembered the conductor’s cap and jacket that the Hunter had worn and realized that at least one of them was dead did he understand.
When they found the ruined door and the broken window, they would come looking. He only prayed that he and Kitsune would be off of the train by then. For now, though, they kept moving until the sluggishness in his muscles became too much. Then he started to knock at every compartment door they passed. When he got no answer, he tried the door. Two of them were locked, which meant someone was inside, asleep. But the third one opened.
It was empty.
They staggered into the compartment. Each fraction of a movement was like swimming in wet cement. Oliver collapsed on the floor. Had Kitsune been human, he was certain she would have fallen before him. As it was she had only enough energy to close and lock the door before spilling onto the cushioned bench.
“Paralysis,” Oliver said. Or thought he said. He was not sure his mouth had properly formed the word. It was becoming difficult to breathe.
The Hunter’s sting paralyzed her victims, presumably long enough for her to kill them. Unless the paralysis was only the first stage of the venom’s effect, and death would result momentarily.
Completely immobile, they could only wait.
Kitsune recovered more quickly than Oliver. He was only human after all. Though they needed to reach Vienna for her plan to work, Oliver insisted that they get off as quickly as possible, before any of the train personnel figured out that the compartment they were hiding in was supposed to be empty, and that they had been the ones in the ruined compartment. Neither of them was in any condition to answer questions, or any mood, and Oliver still had no passport.
As she helped him from the train, carrying the duffel bag over her shoulder, they had both been too focused on the task at hand to register the name of the station. Wherever they were, it was no Salzburg. The town had none of the quaint, picturesque charm of that city. It was a dreary place full of garages, warehouses, and old factories.
They needed a car, and a map. Oliver had said they couldn’t be more than an hour or so from Vienna. Kitsune watched the skies and the windows of darkened buildings as they left the train station, wary of further attack. None came. In the train station, Oliver had found a ticket agent who spoke enough English to tell him of the car rental operation two blocks away, but it was a small town, the man had said, and Christmas Eve, and he did not know how late they would be open. There was no airport here, after all.
Now they strode through the dirty street and a freezing rain began to fall, tiny pinpricks of ice. Oliver had something in his hand, held between his fingers like an old conjure-man’s worry stone.
“What’ve you got there?” she asked.
He opened his hand and she saw the fat seed that the Harvest gods had given him.
“Sort of a lucky charm,” he told her.
Kitsune arched an eyebrow. “Not very effective, is it?”
Oliver slid the seed back into his pocket. “We’re alive.”
“There is that.”
Oliver smiled and took the duffel from her, obviously feeling much recovered. The cold made her feel alert and helped to shake off the numbness from her. Kitsune put up her hood, her fur protecting her from the sleet, and reached out for Oliver’s hand. He flinched a bit, then cast an apologetic glance at her and slid his fingers into hers.