Julianna took a small step forward, drawing the guards’ attention. “His name is Oliver Bascombe. I’m going to guess it sounds familiar to you, since the king’s put a price on his head. But if we’re right, he came here today looking for some mercy. All we want to know is if he found any, and if he’s still here.”
From the guards’ reaction, it was obvious they knew precisely what she was talking about. Julianna allowed herself a tiny bit of hope, but the guards were clearly troubled by her words, and so that tiny bit was all she could muster.
But Kara glanced back at her and smiled, and that comforted her.
The Viking studied the trio at the castle gates and then glanced up to the archers above them on the wall. “Tage, go and get Captain Beck and return immediately.”
The nearest of the archers—apparently this Tage—lowered his bow and nodded, disappearing below the battlements. Kara raised her hands.
“Gentlemen, what is the trouble? Our request has been put forth as politely as possible. As subjects of His Highness, we desire some response.”
The handsome guard narrowed his eyes. “Oh, you’ll have it.” Then he drew his sword.
Halliwell went for his gun, eyes flashing with violence, as though he had been waiting for just such a moment.
“No!” Julianna snapped, grabbing his hand, preventing him from drawing the weapon.
Both guards drew their blades with a chime of metal. Kara froze, hands still in the air. She lowered them slowly, palms forward.
“Calm down, my friends. There is no need for drama.”
Julianna held on to Halliwell’s wrist. His chest rose and fell and he glared at her. His jaw clenched and unclenched, and she could see that he did not want the moment to pass. He invited conflict, bloodshed—even death—as just another distraction, and a way to vent the despair and fury that was eating him up inside.
“Ted—” she began, warily.
“This was not the world’s most cunning plan,” he rasped. “Just walking up and telling them what we want, knowing how much trouble your fiancé is in…”
“We don’t have time for secrets, Ted. We’re not spies. I’d rather die for the truth than a lie.”
Halliwell relaxed his hands, let them fall to his sides, and Julianna released his wrist. Together they turned to watch the two guards who stood with their swords drawn. The tableau of these hulking men with their blades gleaming in the moonlight, standing there in the dark as though defending themselves from a pretty little girl, was unsettling as hell. The line of archers on the wall, ready to pin them all to the ground, only made it that much worse.
“If it’s all the same to you,” Halliwell muttered, “I’d rather not die at all.”
Julianna nodded. “Yeah. Well, at the end of your days, when the Reaper comes to collect, that’s what you should tell him. Let me know how that goes, will you?”
With a groaning creak of hinges, the gates of the castle’s outer wall swung inward. Chains rattled, and they watched the portcullis grate rise upward. A small cadre of leather-armored soldiers of varying race and gender—Julianna counted nine—emerged along with a tall, formidable woman whose ebony skin was the deepest black Julianna had ever seen. Her cloak, tunic, and heavy trousers were all black as well, which only served to make her skin seem all the darker. She carried herself with the grace and dignity of a goddess, and with such power that the sword that hung at her side seemed an afterthought.
Kara went down on one knee before her.
Julianna and Halliwell glanced at one another, wondering if they ought to do the same.
“I am Captain Damia Beck,” she declared. “Primary advisor to His Highness, John Hunyadi. I’d have your names, travelers.”
“I am Ngworekara,” Kara began.
Captain Beck arched an eyebrow and gazed down at her. “So I’m told. Curious and a bit troublesome, that is. How many parents would give their child such a mischievous name?”
Julianna frowned. What was the woman talking about? She might have asked, but then Captain Beck turned her formidable gaze upon her.
“And you?”
“Julianna Whitney.”
Halliwell crossed his arms. “Detective Theodore Halliwell.”
Beck’s placid features rippled with curiosity. “Detective? Interesting. Yes, we get one of you from time to time. Always looking in the places no one else bothers to see, so they stumble through. But you’re not a detective here, you do know that, Mister Halliwell? You’re in the Kingdom of Euphrasia now, the realm of Hunyadi.”
“So I’m told,” Halliwell replied.
Captain Beck smiled. “Excellent. Then you won’t mind handing over your gun.”
Halliwell flinched. He looked at her more closely. “I’d rather hang on to it, if it’s all the same to you.”
One of the archers above barked an order and they all leaned over the wall, bowstrings humming as they were drawn taut. Julianna held her breath.
But Beck waved a hand and they all relaxed. Her face lit up with a knowing smile. Her hands disappeared inside her robe in the single blink of an eye and she produced a pair of gleaming silver revolvers. They glittered in the moonlight.
“Guns are crude,” Captain Beck said. “We do not like them here. In fact, very few are allowed to carry them. They’re a product of the human world and never manufactured here.”
She gestured with one of her pistols. “Well, almost never. Now, please, let’s not make any trouble. You want to speak with the king about Oliver Bascombe. I may be able to arrange that. But not while you have a gun. I’m sure you understand.”
Halliwell glared at her. Julianna could see the doubt in his eyes, see him weighing the odds of them getting out alive if he refused. Pure stubbornness. The odds were a billion to one and it shouldn’t have taken a millisecond to consider them.
“I suspect Miss Whitney and your guide could meet the king without you, Detective,” Captain Beck added, cocking both pistols and aiming them at Halliwell’s head.
A humorless smile touched his lips. Halliwell pulled his gun slowly and held it out, butt first. Captain Beck nodded, and the guard who looked like a Viking came over and took it from him. He handled the thing as though it were a dead rat he’d just found in his basement.
“This way, please,” Damia Beck said.
She holstered her pistols in the darkness within her cloak and turned on her heel, striding through the gates. Julianna blinked, surprised it could be so simple. But the soldiers split into two groups, making room to let them pass. The archers withdrew from the walls above.
The Viking tossed Halliwell’s gun to the ground just beside the gate. “It’ll be here when you come out. If you come out.”
Halliwell ignored him and started after Captain Beck. Kara and Julianna followed as well. With no other escort—as though they represented no threat at all—they were allowed to pass through the gates and across the courtyard to the castle itself.
Inside the stone corridors, lit by torches and lamps, Damia Beck looked both more beautiful and more formidable. Her cloak swirled around her as she walked.
“Excuse me, Captain,” Kara ventured.
Beck glanced back at her. “Yes?”
“It’s just…I’d heard that the monarchs of the Two Kingdoms always had Atlantean advisors. You hardly look Atlantean.”
Captain Beck sniffed dryly. “People are often not what they seem. But you’re correct that I am not Atlantean. That…policy…is currently being reconsidered. My elevation to primary advisor is fairly recent. It has been a difficult day, here at Otranto. Your arrival is ill-timed. But we shall see what His Highness wishes. What the future will hold, no one may know.”
Julianna trudged along behind Kara and the captain. She glanced back several times at Halliwell. His gaze had turned cold again, and his expression was grim. He moved as though they walked to the gallows, the spark of hope gone. She wanted to tell him not to lose faith, that he would see his daughter again. But Julianna knew how hollow that would sound.
Captain Beck was right. No one could know the future. And, at the moment, theirs was very much in doubt.
Oliver Bascombe had done many foolish things in his life, but he did not consider himself a fool. Others might, perhaps, but even those who would happily recall his least admirable moments would never have called him stupid.
He had driven the stolen rental car—though since he had given the clerk his credit card number, he didn’t think it could technically be considered stolen—through the winding streets of Vienna until he had found a bank with an ATM machine. With his card, he withdrew the daily limit on his account, and then took a cash advance on his credit card as well. If someone had flagged his card and the police were looking for him, they might well trace him to Vienna and even to this bank, but that was as far as they would get.
Kitsune had stayed in the rental car until he signaled her, and then she had abandoned it on the curb and joined him on the sidewalk. They had walked a dozen blocks or so. The night was astonishingly beautiful. A light snow fell, bringing with it a kind of winter hush that muffled the sounds of the cars and the grind of the city. Somewhere a chorus was singing Christmas songs. A rainbow of lights gleamed all through the streets from decorations on buildings and in shop windows and strung from lampposts. People laughed together and couples held hands as they passed. In the cobblestoned square in front of a great cathedral, a solitary couple waltzed alone.
How Oliver had envied them.
They had walked a distance from the abandoned rental car before hailing a cab, wanting to make it as difficult as possible for anyone who might track them—no matter what side of the Veil their pursuers might come from.
Now Oliver sat in an uncomfortable chair in a hotel room in a neighborhood that did not have any gleaming Christmas decorations, a place where no voices were raised in song. In college he had backpacked with Bob Dorsey from Amsterdam to Prague, traveling by train and staying in grimy youth hostels filled with cockroaches. It had been his own money—cash Oliver had earned tutoring—and it felt good to do something that wasn’t reliant on his father’s money. The filth had been amusing to him back then.
Now it was just filth.
This place was not nearly as bad as the worst of those hostels, but it was decidedly unpleasant. The stuffing in the chair had worn thin, the fabric faded and ragged. The carpet was no better, neither the curtains. But here, at least, no one tried to arrest him or have him killed. For the moment, he could not ask for more. A rest and a shower, that would do.
Until the hour arrived to put Kitsune’s plan into action. At that point, it would begin all over again. Yet there was no other way. Or, at least, no way that would not have taken days longer. It was hard to stomach even this short delay, knowing that Collette lingered in the custody of the monster who’d murdered their father and torn out his eyes.
The drive into Vienna had given him time to plan: find the ATM, get some distance from the abandoned car, take a cab, locate a hotel shitty enough to have a room they could use on Christmas Eve and for which they could pay cash. That explained all of the hookers going in and out of the lobby.
If the police were searching for him, there were only two possibilities he could think of. Either they wanted him in connection with the events on Canna Island—the murder of Professor Koenig and the fire that burned his home—or Oliver was a suspect in his father’s murder.
It never occurred to him that they might want to question him on both matters, and that there might be more—that there might be worse. In fact, it never occurred to him that there could be anything worse than being a suspect in the murder of your own father and the disappearance of your sister.
So they had checked into the hotel and taken turns showering, and now Kitsune lay on the bed, curled up beneath the comforter, having left plenty of room for Oliver. But he forced himself to stay in that uncomfortable, worn and faded chair and watched CNN, trying to avoid the bright jade eyes that would drift from the television screen every so often to cast him a glance full of equal parts curiosity, desire, and disappointment. He did his best to focus on the telling nature of CNN’s international newscast, which truly did provide news from around the world; at home, the news was weighted a hundred to one in favor of American coverage.
When the story began, he did not realize it was what he had been waiting for, and yet he was riveted with horror by the story of the murder of twenty-seven children at a German orphanage. Even the word “mutilated” did not register except to make him shudder with revulsion and wonder what sort of monster would do such a thing.
Then the report began to link other cases to that German atrocity. Prague. Toronto. Paris. New Orleans. San Francisco. In those cases, only one or two children had been killed, but all of the murders had been in the last few weeks, and according to local authorities as well as U.S. and European officials, the mutilations in each case were similar enough to make them believe some kind of cult was involved.
There did also seem to be a connection to another series of murders and mysterious disappearances, however.
Oliver’s mouth opened slowly, his eyes widening. His father’s face appeared on the screen. The murder of Maximilian Bascombe shared disturbing similarities to those of the dead children, as did that of Alice St. John, a little girl from Cottingsley, Maine. Both of Bascombe’s children had vanished…
“But authorities on two continents are searching for this man, Oliver Bascombe, son of the late Maximilian Bascombe, for questioning in regard to this international string of heinous crimes and also concerning the murder of a retired college professor, David Koenig, in Scotland. Yet the mystery only deepens. Confirmed sightings of Oliver Bascombe in London and Scotland prompted independent investigators Ted Halliwell and Julianna Whitney to travel from Maine to the United Kingdom to seek him out, only to vanish themselves on the night of David Koenig’s murder. If you have seen this man—”