“Oliver?” Kitsune said, studying him with obvious concern.
He smiled softly and thanked the old man.
“We have a boat waiting to take us back to the mainland, Professor,” Blue Jay said. “We ought to start back.”
“Of course, of course,” Koenig said, but the melancholy in his eyes was haunting. He looked down at Gong Gong. “I would have liked to have heard more about the troubles you are all facing. If I could be of any help, you would only have to tell me. The Borderkind have been my only contact through the Veil for decades.”
“Maybe we’ll come back, old man,” the dragon said, eyes narrowing to slits, sparks jumping from them in the shadows cast by the fire.
The professor looked at Kitsune and Blue Jay and then at Jenny. There was kindness and gratitude in his eyes as he began to speak.
The door blew open, the power of the storm tearing the dead bolt from the wood. It crashed against the wall and the snow howled in, a tumult of icy wind and blinding whiteness that seemed to suck much of the light from within the cottage, dimming the gas lamp and withering the flames in the hearth.
Frost came through the doorway as though riding the wind, fingers elongated into twelve-inch knives of ice, features lengthened and thinned as though parts of him had been carved away. Trailers of mist plumed from his eyes. He stopped, crouched as though he meant to lunge, and then thrust out one hand, twisting the storm winds so that they tugged on the door and then blew it shut, cracking the wooden frame.
“What in the name of God?” the professor cried.
The winter man spun, madness in his eyes. “The Hunters have come! How they tracked us I do not know, but they are here!”
Dark shapes moved past the windows out in the storm.
Jenny Greenteeth laughed softly. “Well, no need for the bait anymore.”
She thrust out a hand, wrapped long fingers around Professor Koenig’s throat, and twisted. The crack of bone echoed off the stones of the hearth and Jenny let the old man crumple to the wood floor, a scarecrow off his post. His arms sprawled out across the dusting of powder Frost’s arrival had spread over the floor, a grotesque snow angel.
CHAPTER 19
Oliver shouted, refusing to accept what he’d seen. He started for Jenny, but a powerful hand clamped on his shoulder and he smelled sulfur. Spinning, he let out another shout. The Black Dragon of Storms had grown, his lithe body now at least eight feet in height, massive snout drooping, long wisps of gray beard draping his chest. The lightning that sparked in his eyes brought thunder from somewhere deep inside of him.
In that moment, Oliver thought he was dead, that Gong Gong had also betrayed them.
“Unarmed, foolish friend,” the dragon snarled.
“Jen?” Kitsune said, her voice raw with pain. Her jade eyes seemed impossibly pale. “You are with them? The Hunters?”
“With them? I’m one of them, Kit. Bloody hell, listen to you! You were always a romantic. Life full of drama, right, love? Did you honestly think I’d been hunted so many times . . . that the soddin’ Manticore came after me . . . and I survived? You stupid twat. No one’s that lucky.”
Oliver saw the way her words cut Kitsune, and he winced.
Blue Jay did more than wince. He twisted round with such speed that he was nearly impossible to follow. There was a ripple in the room as though he swung something at Jenny that sliced the air, a blue-tinted wing that whipped toward her. It might have been real and physical. He was a shape-shifter. But Oliver thought perhaps it was a spell. Magic. The power of the trickster. Blue Jay spun and whatever that blue wing was, it knocked Jenny to the floor, splitting the green flesh on her arm where she’d been struck and snapping bones.
Kitsune was there beside her before Jenny Greenteeth could blink or cry out in pain. The fox-woman was only fox now, but in some animal growl she spoke, and Oliver thought he could make out a single word.
“Bitch.”
The fox tore out Jenny’s throat, and algae-green blood pumped onto the floor.
As the fox began to whine with sorrow, glass shattered and a Kirata came crashing through a window. Two more followed, and chaos erupted. The tiger-men had eyes that glowed bright orange and thick stringers of drool ran from their black lips as they opened their jaws wide in a roar. One dropped to all fours and leaped at Gong Gong. Blue Jay transformed into a bird and darted at its face, even as Frost stepped into the path of the second Kirata.
The third Hunter was a blur of orange and black, fur rippling with muscle as it careened across the cottage at Oliver. From the pool of blood around Jenny Greenteeth’s corpse, Kitsune lunged, but only caught it with one paw, barely scratching the beast.
Oliver’s hands were empty and there was no time to find a weapon. He was paralyzed by the numbing certainty of his own impending death, could practically feel its claws in him, tearing at his chest and abdomen, digging in for tender organs.
Frost shouted his name.
The Kirata bounded at him and instinct took over. Oliver took one step backward, throwing up his hands, fists closing on the tiger-man’s wrists, fingers digging into fur and flesh. The Hunter’s momentum drove him down and Oliver went with it, the damp stink of its breath a miasma in his face. He shot one boot up into its midsection and then used every bit of his strength to propel the Kirata over his head, toward the fireplace.
The tiger-man’s head struck the stone hearth and for a moment— as he twisted round and scrambled to his feet— Oliver was sure he had messed up his one chance at survival. In the instant that he’d gotten a grip on the Hunter, he’d been aware of the fire as his target, as his one hope. But the trajectory had been off. The Kirata’s head had struck the hearth a foot to the left of the fireplace.
Close was enough, however. It collapsed to the ground, back turned toward the blaze, and its fur caught. The Kirata’s eyes went wide and it roared in agony as the fire raced over the surface of its body, fur burning quickly, blackening to char. Aflame, the tiger-man staggered toward Oliver, but then its panicked gaze darted toward the window and the snow outside and it stumbled in that direction. As it passed a love seat, the fabric of the furniture caught fire. The Kirata reached out to steady itself and clutched a heavy floral drape, which went up in flames even faster than the Hunter’s fur. It fell to the ground, twitching and mewling. Dying.
The cottage began to burn.
“Frost!” Oliver shouted, thinking the winter man would bring ice to extinguish the blaze.
But when he turned he saw that more Kirata were coming in. Blue Jay, Frost, and Kitsune were fighting them. The trickster was a man again, or something nearly like a man, for he danced with such speed that he was once more a blur, a fan of blue wings battering one of the Hunters.
Oliver needed to help them— or at least to defend himself— and he remembered the sword above the fireplace. The sword of Euphrasia’s king. He ran to the hearth and reached up, snatching blade and scabbard down from their mountings.
Thunder shook the floor and rattled the walls. Oliver looked over to see that Gong Gong had continued to grow. The Black Dragon of Storms was enormous now, at least a dozen feet long and curled in upon himself. He had one taloned hand upon a Kirata, pinning the creature to the floor, and lightning struck from his eyes, incinerating the Hunter. At the same moment, a second tiger-man leaped upon his back, claws raking the dragon’s hide.
“Enough!” Gong Gong cried. “We need space! Air!”
The massive serpentine beast raced at the door, the Kirata trying to hold on, claws tearing dragon flesh. Gong Gong did not stop at the door but barged through it, shattering wood. As he passed through he swung his torso to the left and scraped the Kirata off his back. The Hunter fell to the floor, broken and bleeding but still alive, still ferocious. Snow blew in and swirled around its head.
The Black Dragon of Storms disappeared out into the storm. Oliver was about to attack the fallen Kirata, to follow Gong Gong outside, when a figure appeared, framed in the silhouette of the broken door. A massive broad-shouldered being with the head and wings of a bird, wielding a sword no man could have lifted.
The Falconer.
A shudder of fear went through Oliver. The Kirata terrified him, but this was different. The sight of the Falconer filled him with primal dread, born of the simple fact that the Hunter had nearly slain Frost once before. It had snowed that night as well.
“Frossst!” the Falconer cried.
Oliver thought that the winter man feared the Falconer. He had seen it in Frost’s eyes. But he had also been wounded then, and it had been before the conspiracy had begun to be revealed and before Yuki-Onna’s murder. When Frost heard his name he turned from the Kirata he and Blue Jay had been facing, and he saw who it was that had called to him.
There was no fear in the winter man’s eyes this time. Only hatred.
Frost raced for the door.
The Falconer let out a piercing bird’s cry and stepped back outside, making room for the battle that was about to begin.
Oliver raised the king’s sword in his right hand, clutched the scabbard in his left, and ran to help Blue Jay and Kitsune against the Kirata that remained in the house, even as the fire spread.
“This place is burning down!” he shouted. “We’ve got to get outside!”
Kitsune responded not at all. She was the fox now, quicker than the Kirata, slashing at their most vulnerable places, throats and groins and the tendons in their legs.
Blue Jay smiled at Oliver with his mad, dancing eyes. “Working on it.”
The winter man could feel the storm. Not the way he could when he had created it. No, this was nature, the churning weather of an entire world, the brutality of the skies. As Jack Frost, the harbinger of winter’s first snow, he could trigger a storm, could even create one, but nothing lasting. Nothing of the weight of the storm that brewed above Canna Island. He could not drive away a blizzard, but he could ride it, could command its power in limited fashion.
The Falconer had caught him by surprise the last time.
Not today.
Outside in the snow, along the path between the empty church and the abandoned market, Kirata surrounded the house, nearly a dozen of them in addition to those that had already made their way inside. A black shadow moved through the storm, sweeping from the sky, and talons dropped down to tear one of the tiger-men in two, head, shoulders, and arms separated from the lower torso, blood spraying the snow, steaming a crimson stain into the white. Gong Gong was in the midst of the storm and he was home. Lightning lashed down from above, melting snow and blackening the ground beneath. One of the Kirata raced into the cover of the market’s porch.
The tigers would wait. Frost had other prey in mind. He glanced around, searching the sky, and when he saw a shadow moving through the snow he thought at first it was Gong Gong again. But this was smaller than the dragon, and he knew it was his Hunter, his would-be killer.
The Falconer’s sword erupted with fire, a beacon in the snow-obscured sky. One of the Kirata growled and raced toward Frost even as the Falconer swept down toward him, crying in that ear-shredding bird voice. The Kirata lunged, claws slashing the air.
Frost slipped into the storm, his body falling away to nothing, to snow, whipping along on the wind. But now he focused, and he felt the storm all around him, and he did what he was created to do . . . he commanded the storm. Images of Yuki-Onna filled his mind, times they had danced in just this way, merging themselves together in the heart of a blizzard.
Hatred burned in his frozen heart.
The Falconer was riding the wind. Frost stole it away from him, used it against him. With the snow and ice and wind that was all a part of him, he clutched the Falconer in his grip, the grip of the storm, and spun him around. His icy wind stole the Hunter’s breath, suffocating him. Hail stabbed the Falconer’s eyes and the storm beat at him so that his wings would not hold him aloft. He could not wait to pierce the Hunter’s thick hide with his fingers and freeze the very blood in his veins.
But first there would be pain.
Frost was all around him, encompassing him, and as the Falconer struggled, the winter man summoned all of the power of the storm and pushed the Hunter toward the ground.
The Falconer shrieked as he struck the frozen earth, impact only slightly lessened by the accumulated snow. Where he lay, his flaming sword made the snow hiss and pop and little rivulets of ice water streamed away from it.
The Falconer began to rise.
With the innate ease that was his, Frost collected himself, drawing together the moisture in the air to sculpt his body once again out of ice and snow. As the Falconer stood, he staggered slightly, and one of his wings looked bent, perhaps broken.
The winter man smiled. “You are stealthy, Hunter. You wounded me before. But that triumph has made you arrogant. You will not catch me off my guard again. Not when I can remember that ensorcelled blade cutting in to the essence of me.”
The Falconer only screamed in that shrill voice and spread his wings, but he did not take flight. He stalked across the snow, raising that burning blade. A pair of Kirata came up behind the Falconer, fanning out to either side, all three of them stalking Frost.
Lightning seared the ground, blew apart the rock wall that lined the path to Koenig’s cottage, and one of the Kirata fell dead. The other searched the sky warily and backed away. The Falconer cried again, sword aloft and crackling with falling snowflakes, then ran at Frost.
The winter man fell to his knees, thrust his fingers into the snow, and raised his hate-filled gaze to stare at his enemy. He shuddered with exertion, with the flow of winter and nature that coursed through him, and then he pushed. Icicle spikes thrust upward from the ground, razor-tipped and hard as rock, impaling the Falconer through the right leg, the left side, the chest, and both wings.
With one final cry, the Falconer went limp, sword falling into the snow, its flame winking out, ice freezing over it. Blood began to stream down the icy stalagmites that had pierced his flesh, lifting him off the ground. But he still twitched; his beak still opened and closed, attempting to wail out his pain. His eyes were still alight with malevolence.