"Does this help?" she said, and her jeans and blouse disappeared, and she stood there in her bra and panties. Dried blood smeared one bare thigh where I could make out part of a symbol carved into her flesh. Another symbol decorated her stomach above her panties, this one in blue paint, pierced by a twig. Blue woad. A mistletoe twig.
"Stacey Pasolini," I said.
"Very good. A shame you needed me to humiliate myself with that visual reminder." The clothing reappeared. "That's how it goes, isn't it? People remember the killers, not the victims."
"Except you were both," I said. "The world just doesn't know about the first part yet. Don't worry--they will soon, and I'm sure you'll get a fresh batch of news coverage."
She lunged, the edges of her body dissolving into black smoke, reconstituting when she stopped, looming above me. As she glowered, the blue seeped from her eyes and they went as white as the melltithiwyd's, and when she snarled, her teeth were razor-sharp.
I got to my feet. "Let me guess. You're one of the melltithiwyd now, and you're a little pissy about the whole thing. Can't say I blame you. It doesn't look like a lot of fun. Although I suppose there's always that option." I glanced at scattered feathers on the floor.
"Do you think it's really that easy?" she said. "Do you think that doesn't happen to at least one of us every day? It happens again and again, and we are reborn, again and again. Devoured and reborn, and constantly surrounded by those who cannot wait to do the devouring."
"Sounds like you have a group dynamics issue. I'd suggest team-building exercises."
She flew at me--literally flew--her arms becoming wings, her edges turning to smoke again, teeth bared, blank eyes fixed on mine, her face coming so close all I could see were those eyes.
"Our sluagh is right," she said. "You do think you are clever. You don't need to worry about becoming one of us, Miss Larsen. You have no soul to give. You are as empty as the bitch who whelped you."
"Right, yeah, because I don't feel sorry for you. Is that what this is supposed to be? A tableau to make me feel guilty about what my mother did?" I snorted and headed into the hall.
"Don't you walk away on me."
"You want to chat? Keep up. I have some escaping to do. As for making me feel bad, don't bother. First, I'm not my mother. Second, my soul is just fine because, third, I really don't give a shit about the terrible fate that befell someone who decided it'd be fun to slaughter innocent people with her boyfriend. That's not my idea of date night."
"You have it all figured out, haven't you? You know exactly what happened, just like your mother did. You don't care to dig deeper because then, if you decide I didn't deserve to die, well, that's a little bit uncomfortable. Much easier to tell yourself I deserved it."
I paused near the hole in the floor, considered edging around it, and then decided to take another route. As I walked, I said, "I'm sure you've convinced yourself--"
"I thought it was a performance. A game. A staged performance. That's what Eddie told me, and I was young and stupid and in love. Crazy in love with this guy who showed me a whole new world. A world where I didn't need to be the good girl anymore. Where I could be bad. And by bad, I mean having fun with dark-magic rituals. Don't pretend not to understand what I mean. The good girl from the rich family, running around abandoned schools with a switchblade and a biker."
"I definitely understand the power of a good adrenaline rush. I also understand that morals and ethics are luxuries we can't always afford. But this?" I waggled my switchblade. "This has never killed anyone. I could, in self-defense. What you did, though, was cold murder, and to call it a game only makes it even more loathsome."
"You are so smug, Eden Larsen. You aren't even listening to me, are you? I said I thought it was a performance. That's what they did to me--Eddie and Marty and Lisa and that bitch who brought us together, who promised us the moon if we did as she said. They told me we had to pretend to kill that boy in the fun house. But it wasn't real. They swore it wasn't real."
I stopped at the end of the hall, considered my options, and turned left. "Uh-huh. So you're telling me you were so drugged up--"
"I was naive--I wasn't stupid. After the fun house, I asked questions. I doubted. So when we had to make our kills, Eddie pumped me full of drugs. When I still said I didn't want to go, he beat the shit out of me. Knocked me out, and the next thing I know, I'm waking up in a forest beside the dead bodies of two street kids. Eddie's holding my hand and forcing me to make the cuts. We had to do it together. That's what the bitch said. Do it together, or it wouldn't work. I threw up. So he hit me, knocked me out again. That was my level of participation in those murders, Miss Larsen. A drugged-out, beat-up, half-conscious 'partner' who held a knife while her lover moved her hand to cut up the kids he'd killed."
"And what would you like me to do about that?"
Stacey swung in front of me, her eyes going from blue to blank white. "My God, there's nothing in there, is there? When I said you didn't have a soul, I--"
"You were goading me. Which is what you're doing now. You want me to feel bad for you. Maybe your story's true. Maybe it's not. Maybe you aren't even Stacey Pasolini, but a phantom conjured to wring a few pangs of sympathy from me."
I locked my gaze on hers. "I know there are innocents in that swarm of melltithiwyd. But unless you're here to tell me how I can help them, I don't see the point. If you didn't take a more active role in those murders, then you don't deserve this fate. But you aren't the only one. There are others more wronged than you in there. The only thing that tells me is that the sluagh don't deserve a moment of my consideration. The Cwn Annwn might be a little bloodthirsty, overzealous in their pursuit of justice. The Tylwyth Teg might be conniving and amoral and completely self-absorbed. But the real monsters? That's the sluagh, and your story only confirms it."
She flew at me again, flew at me in a full rage, half woman, half bird, pecking and pounding and beating. I stabbed at her with the switchblade, but it was as if my knife passed through thin air.
I dodged past her and ran, and I was still running full out when someone shouted, "Olivia! Stop!"
Had it been anyone else, I wouldn't have listened. Even then, as soon as I put on the brakes, I cursed, certain I was hearing another mimicry. But I still skidded to a halt. My foot dropped, as if through the floor itself. Then there was a snap, and I was back in the original hall, inches from falling down that damned hole again. Gabriel stood on the other side, his hands out.
"Thai for lunch," he said. "Bacon and eggs for breakfast. The scratches on my back are not from the melltithiwyd."
I sputtered a laugh. "You're quick."
"I'm learning."
"You're also not supposed to be here."
"Yes, well, I am."
"Gabriel..."
"I'm not doubting you could have handled it. I'm not suggesting you require my assistance. But they aren't going to kill me, Olivia. I'm too valuable as a tool to control you."
"Ricky--"
"I may have incapacitated him. I may have left him in Patrick's care. He is not going to be pleased with me when I return, but I will return. The sluagh won't kill me. I could not guarantee the same for him." He looked behind me. "You were running. Was something chasing you?"
I glanced back to see the empty hall. "Stacey Pasolini manifested. She's one of the melltithiwyd now. She claimed she didn't kill anyone and then didn't like it when I failed to express the proper degree of sympathy."
"Whatever her situation, there's nothing you can do about it."
"That's what I said. I think she expected more." I squinted down the hall. "But I thought I was running along a different hall. Seems I'm caught in one of those mental mazes, like at the asylum and the villa."
"Hmm." He crouched and eyed the hole. Then he reached out to touch it, nodding when he discovered it was really there.
"Maybe I can..." I eased my foot along the six-inch strip of floor remaining between the wall and the hole. It crumbled on contac
t. "Nope. So, I wonder how my long jump is these days?"
"No, please. Go back down the hall and look for another way. I'll ask you to not go out of sight. And tell me what you see."
I walked down the corridor. "I see hall." I looked both ways. "Yep, hall."
"Are you sure?"
"Well, that's a little tough to answer when I haven't figured out how to see through a vision."
"No, but your foot felt the hole before you saw it. Do you see those windows?"
"Uh, right. Conveniently located first-floor windows, which I completely missed as an escape option. Duh."
"Perhaps not. They appear broken and boarded from here. Yes?"
I nodded. "This one's cleared of glass, though, and I bet I could break the boards." I went to put my hand out...and hit a solid wall. The illusion flickered and I saw the wall.
"No window," Gabriel said. "Now, take three steps forward, staying within my sight."
I did, and when he called, "Stop there," I did...and his voice came from in front of me.
"All right," he said. "You're back in this hall. You don't see me, do you?"
"No, but I hear you in front of me. Hold on."
I closed my eyes and ran my hand along the window, picturing wood instead. When I opened my eyes, that's what I saw--the original hallway, with the hole and Gabriel on the other side.
I returned to him. "Okay, so I'm caught in a vision maze. You're not."
"I have an idea," he said.
"Excellent." I grabbed the side of the hole and swung down into it.
He gave an alarmed, "Olivia!"
I dropped and then looked up. "Yes."
He sighed. "That was not my idea."
"Nope, it's mine. Now I just need to re-pile this stuff and come up on your side."
"Just climb what's there and reach."
I did, and he grabbed my wrists. We locked together, and he said, "On the count of--" and disappeared, me tumbling back as his hold vanished.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
"Gabriel?" I peered through the hole to the dark first floor, no sign of him. "Well, that was too easy," I muttered, and started piling the debris. I was adding another piece when Gabriel appeared--the bottom half of him, at least, and then the rest as he jumped down into the hole with me.
"I don't think that helps," I said.
"Given the choice, I would rather be lost in the vision maze with you than stuck alone on the other side."
"That's really kind of sweet."
"It's practical."
"Also sweet. Own it. I won't tell anyone. Okay, so we'll both climb up on the other side and..."
He kept walking, heading for the exit door.
"That still doesn't open," I said.
He took hold of the knob and murmured something in Welsh. And it opened.
"Huh," I said. "So that's like an 'open sesame' for sluagh-locks?"
"Hmm."
I didn't ask how he thought of it--I suspected he didn't know, either, only that the urge sprang from deep in his Gwynn-memory bank.
Not surprisingly, the door led into another basement room. We continued past a furnace, shining the light this way and that until...
"Stairs," I said. "Which will lead right back to the hole again."
"Don't even say that."
We picked our way through basement crap until we reached the stairs. Halfway up them, the hairs on my neck rose, five seconds in advance of the damned voice that teased at my memory.
"Going somewhere, Eden?"
"You made your point," I called. "You're a badass. We need to take you seriously. We do. But keeping me locked in this building isn't actually going to accomplish anything. If you want to talk, let's talk. Otherwise, we really need to go."
"In a hurry, are you? For what, exactly? There's no fire to put out, Eden."
Those words snagged on a memory, the one that insisted I knew who this was, that I'd met her before.
Same voice. Different tenor. Different inflections.
There's no fire to put out.
No.
Hell, no. That wasn't possible. It just wasn't...
I took a deep breath and turned to Gabriel.
"Fire." That's all I said, seeing if he'd make the connection. In a heartbeat, he did, his lips forming a name.
I saw that name on his lips, and I tumbled through memory, images flashing. A house, nestled between two tall buildings. A woman, fleeing to a parking garage. Middle-aged with girlish barrettes and a girlish voice. A woman easily dismissed. A woman we had dismissed.
The young woman in the park who'd given Todd the file and set him on Greg Kirkman's path. I'd recognized her voice there, too, but couldn't connect it to the fragile whisper of the middle-aged woman with the silly pink barrettes.
There's one more connection that my mind makes as it tumbles through memories.
The fifth figure in the fun house. The person in charge, the one I couldn't see, couldn't even hear.
Just moments ago, Stacey Pasolini talked about "that bitch" who showed them what to do, made them promises for what the killings would bring them.
The same woman.
All the same woman.
Imogen Seale. The "witness" we'd been chasing for six months. An answer we'd been chasing for so much longer, though we never realized it.
Imogen Seale. A powerful sluagh in manifested form. The one the elders had admitted to Cainsville. The woman who'd given Todd a victim to get the Cwn Annwn involved. When the Cwn Annwn sought a deal with their "higher powers," she had answered and given Ioan the names of four killers. Killers she'd counseled to commit the crimes for which they would be executed.
Why so many levels of complication?
I knew.
The Tysons and Eddie Hilton each murdered a couple in the manner the sluagh prescribed. That allowed the sluagh to tell Ioan that my parents must kill in the exact same manner, to make the deaths seem like an extension of the original killings, supposedly done in some random and meaningless ritualistic manner.
Except it wasn't random. Wasn't meaningless.
It was a trick.
The ritual that Pamela conducted on her victims had bound me to the sluagh.
As Gabriel mouthed that name, the woman herself appeared. Imogen Seale.
"Do you know the problem with children who think they're terribly clever?" she said. "They're very quick to decide others are not. As you were with poor Imogen. A silly woman, unworthy of your time. That's how one sneaks past two like you. Stay beneath your notice."
She was right. We'd dismissed Imogen as a pitiful creature, clinging to her youth and her memories of Marty Tyson, her supposed lover. That's what the police had believed--that Imogen was his mistress. They'd found something in his belongings--a phone number, rendezvous times--and jumped to that conclusion. Then we tracked Imogen down with her "mother" and she "accidentally" revealed that Marty and Lisa were killers. She played us, and when we proved tiresome in our efforts to track her human identity, she staged the fire, victims and all.
"It's the ritual," I said. "The one my mother supposedly copied. You fed it to the Tysons."
"It binds Olivia in some way," Gabriel said. "But it does not mark her as yours. What exactly is the nature of her obligation to you?"
"Ah, the lawyer appears. Looking for a contract to weasel out of, counselor? You will need to wait until the papers are served, the obligation due."
"Bullshit," I said.
"Excuse me?" Imogen said.
"I call bullshit. You won't name the obligation because you want me to fear the worst. It's like telling a man you've cursed him, and then watching him fall into ruin because of his own superstitious fear. I'm not marked, as Gabriel said, so I'm not doomed to serve you. Nor am I forced to choose you over the Tylwyth Teg and Cwn Annwn. If I was, you wouldn't bother trying to frighten me into choosing the sluagh. You invented a ritual so you can convince me that I'm bound to you. I'm not."
"Care to test that, Eden?"
/> "Olivia..." Gabriel moved up behind me.
"Listen to your lover, girl. He counsels caution."
I turned to Gabriel. "I'm a client, and I'm asking your professional advice. Do I call her on it?"
His lips compressed. The question wasn't fair because I knew the answer was yes, just as I knew there was no way in hell he could give me that advice.
"I'm calling your bluff," I said to Imogen.
"Are you certain?" she said, advancing on me. "Quite certain?"
Gabriel had gone quiet, and I took that to mean he was biting his tongue. When I started to speak, he shot forward, grabbing me from behind, his hand clapping over my mouth.
And Imogen--the sluagh--laughed. Laughed so hard the building trembled.
"I know the answer," Gabriel whispered in my ear. "Do not do it. Please, do not do it."
"Oh, but let her, Gwynn. Let her learn a lesson about brash arrogance. Go on, Eden. Call my bluff. Please."
As she said the words, her hand rose, a casual gesture. Pain ripped through my back and my knees gave way, and I fell back onto Gabriel so hard he stumbled. He caught me and held me as I gasped in pain.
"She said nothing," he snarled at the sluagh. "Undo it. Now."
"Is that an order, Gwynn?"
"Fynd nawr."
"Oh, no, you don't want to banish me right at this moment. If you do, I can't reverse what I've done."
I struggled to make sense of her words as I gasped in agony. I was only dimly aware of Gabriel's arms around me, his grip supporting me.
I couldn't feel my legs. No, that's a lie. I felt the dead weight of them, memories of those early years flying back.
"Undo it!" Gabriel roared. "Now!"
"But I am. I'm undoing what I did. That's what your lover figured out, Eden. The question isn't what we can do, but what can we undo."
She lifted her hand again, that casual gesture, and I could sense my legs dangling as Gabriel held me aloft.
"Is that the threat, then?" I said, still wincing against the ebbing pain. "You'll undo the cure? Rob me of the use of my legs?"
"Oh, it's not just your legs, Olivia. Your condition was more severe than the doctors could bring themselves to tell your parents. By this age, you would have been in a wheelchair, unable to move the lower half of your body, unable to regulate your bladder and bowels. You would have lung issues. Loss of skin sensation. The list goes on."
"All right."