Shards and Ashes

  “Those were her teammates,” Alex said. “They were some kind of security guards. They patrolled along a place called the Pale.”

  “What’s that?” she asked.

  “A border. They had to keep something out. I think it got in.”

  She looked at the massive volumes. “All this, and that’s all you’ve got?”

  “Most of this is written in Latin. I think. I think some is very old German.” He opened a book at random. “Here or there I found something I could read. Spells.” He looked abashed. “Imagine if you came here. Would you know what to do?”

  They shared a grim smile. “There’s nothing more about . . . us?” she asked, not sure which “us” she meant.

  “Maybe you can find something,” he said. “There is something,” he went on, reaching for another book. Bound in maroon leather, it was enormous.

  He opened it to the first page. There was a black-and-white woodblock print of a man in a three-cornered hat on a horse, with a small child clasped against his chest. The horse was cantering through the night. Clouds billowed in the background, and in the largest of them, a shadowy face smiled wickedly down at the riders.

  Alex pointed to lines of text beneath the picture. It was organized in stanzas like a poem, and he began to read aloud, in German. She listened to his voice.

  “It’s ‘Der Erlkönig,’” he said. “‘The Erl King.’ Do you know it? ‘Who rides so late, through night and wind’?” When she shook her head, he said, “I keep coming back to this picture. I keep reading the poem. I don’t know why.”

  “What is it about?”

  “The child is sick. The father is riding with him through the forest, and the Erl King wants him. The boy can see him. The father can’t. He begs his father to save him from the Erl King. But he doesn’t.”

  “Cheery,” she said.

  The despair tugged at her again, almost like someone pulling on her hand. Anger skittered ratlike up her spine, and she stepped away from the table.

  “Delaney?” he asked.

  Freaked, she looked around the room. “Is this place haunted?”

  “I don’t know.” His expression told her he had come to a decision. “The town’s deserted. We can look for a place—”

  A sharp stab of light replaced his face. She saw a circular stone stairway. Saw herself walking down it behind Alex.

  She brushed past him and went into the hall. Her thought was to go back out the front door, but instead, she turned in the opposite direction, into the pitch-blackness.

  Light flared behind her. She heard the thudding of his boots, and then he was beside her. He had a flashlight. He said something to her in German, gave his head an impatient shake.

  “English, English,” he said to himself. “What is happening?” he asked her.

  “There’s something down there,” she said, halting before a hole in the floor at the end of the hall. “I saw it. It’s a cage.”

  He was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “There are a lot of cages down there. But you wanted to leave, and I think we should. We can come back.”

  She nodded. He was right.

  But then it happened again: the flash of light. The cage.

  And the horrible, horrible despair. Cold, miserable, alone. Dying.

  Pleading.

  “I think I have to go down there,” she said hesitantly.

  “Okay, here,” he said, turning and aiming the flashlight at a curved stone wall, then downward at a circular flight of stone stairs. “I’ll go first.”

  He started down, taking the flashlight beam with him. She followed for a couple of steps, but then she froze. There was no banister, and she pushed herself against the wall, afraid she’d fall off the edge of the staircase and never stop falling. She was no Alice, and this was no Wonderland. Grief wafted up from the depths below and twisted around her, like people drowning on the Titanic. She recoiled and crossed her arms.

  She headed back up.

  Then suddenly, rage poured right in, crashing over her head.

  Just go down and kick him. Kick him hard, and he’ll fall down the stairs and break his neck. It was as if someone else inside her was whispering commands. Raging because he was the enemy, and the end of the world was his fault.

  “Alex,” she said, swallowing hard.

  Oblivious, he kept going.

  She took another step up.

  Kill him. They lied. They told us we were doing a great thing. But we were not.

  She teetered on the step and went back down. The rage ebbed. Another step down. It faded.

  Another.

  It was gone.

  “Alex, wait,” she said. “There’s something bad. Really bad.”

  He was standing at the bottom of the stairs. She got to him, and to her surprise, he put his arm around her protectively.

  “There’s something that’s angry. It told me to . . . ,” she began. And then realized that she didn’t really know this guy, and she had watched him charm his way into her home.

  “To what?” he asked.

  What the hell am I doing? she thought. She felt as if she were waking up after a long, strange dream.

  “It told me to leave,” she lied. “And I think—”

  And then she felt the sorrow and the terror. It was longing and keening and fear. She thought she heard a moan and caught her breath. Was someone down here? Someone alive?

  “I think we should hurry,” she said.

  “You’re okay, though?” he asked.

  “Does it matter?” she snapped, because she was afraid of him. “Why don’t you just zap me so I’ll do your bidding, master?”

  He knit his brows and took his arm away, exhaled, and ran his hand across his forehead. She saw how tired he was. He’d just flown halfway across the world, for God’s sake. But she hadn’t asked him to. She hadn’t asked for any of this.

  He reached out a hand toward her, then lowered it. The flashlight beam glinted off the piercing in his eyebrow. No, not the beam. There was light around him, as if he were glowing from the inside. His eyes were almost luminescent.

  “I feel like you’re supposed to be here. And ja, I pushed to make that happen. If things were different I would never have invaded you. . . .” He shrugged. “But they’re not.”

  “Invaded?” she repeated.

  He walked on. She walked behind him, staring at the back of his head, at his shoulders. She could almost see tendrils connecting her to him. She didn’t feel like she was supposed to be in the castle, but she did feel like she was supposed to be with him. Was that his doing? Was he leading her down there to do something to her?

  No, she thought, but how did she know that?

  At the bottom of the next landing, a white strip gleamed. Luminous paint. There was a sign in German. EINTRITT VERBOTEN. She knew verboten meant “forbidden.”

  The sorrow came back. A silver trickle of strange sounds, like wind chimes, breathed against her ear.

  “**––*–*–.”

  Twinkling like starlight.

  “**––*–*–.”

  And she knew it meant “Mama.”

  “Hello?” she called out.

  “Delaney?” Alex said.

  “Shh,” she ordered. She listened hard.

  “**––.”

  Mama.

  “Where are you?” she whispered.

  Silence. And . . . weeping, and then a kind of gasping, like strangling. And another voice, higher-pitched:

  “––****.”

  Help.

  She ran forward, past Alex, who tried to reach out a hand to her. Then she stood at the beginning of a double row of cubes, or boxes, that stretched far into the darkness. The sounds were all around her now, coming from the boxes. Whispers, cries for help. Help that never came.

  She ran to the closest one and stood facing it. There were bars across the front, and what appeared to be shattered glass in a semicircle on the floor. The moan again:

  “********.”

&n
bsp; She felt emotions: Loneliness, misery. Shock. They hadn’t expected this to happen to them. Something else was supposed to have happened. Someone else was supposed to be waiting for them. Whatever had been in here had been abandoned, dumped into cells.

  “It’s evil. So evil,” she said.

  Then her knees buckled. She felt her eyes roll back in her head. Light blossomed in front of her, reaching to the ceiling in ribbons of color, like the aurora borealis Alex had conjured on the ocean. Shadows appeared, then snapped into sharp silhouettes. Misshapen figures rode huge black horses whose hooves sparked as they galloped six inches above the ground. Tiny, gibbering things crouched on the saddles. Dogs, breathing fire, wove in and out between the horses’ legs as they cantered along a hill. At the head of the parade, a tall figure wearing a helmet decorated with two enormous antlers turned to look at her.

  The deepest fear she had ever felt shot through her soul.

  Then everything vanished.

  Wordlessly, Alex picked her up and carried her out of the room. Up all the flights of stairs, to the main floor of the castle; and there she felt the rage again. Kick him. Stab him. Kill him. He raced across the marble floor and through the rubble and the ash of the doorway. Out to the leveled forest, in the gray, smelly snow.

  He set her down on a rock and bent down in front of her. He took both her hands in his. They were cold.

  “Are you all right now?” he asked her.

  She blinked at him. “What was in there?” she asked him. “And what were the things with the horses?”

  “Horses?” He looked bewildered. “What did you see?”

  She told him. Then, still not sure it was the right thing to do, she told him about the rage.

  “It told you to kill me?” he repeated, the blood draining from his face. “That I was a liar?”

  She nodded.

  He made a face and muttered in German. Then he said, “I guess it’s haunted.” His shoulders rounded, and he patted her hand as he got up and plopped down beside her. He gestured to the castle. “I don’t think the answer is there.” He clicked his teeth and scratched his chin. “I thought you would find it.”

  She was quiet a moment. Then she said, “You glowed. When I looked at you, I saw light.”

  “I’m Mr. Electric,” he said. He opened his arms. Blue crackles shot from his fingertips. “We can go back to your home. I can make your refrigerator work.”

  She heard the disappointment in his voice. “But Alex, something was going on with your family. They did something bad. And maybe we’re here to fix it.”

  “You can’t go back in there,” he said.

  “I think I have to,” she replied, feeling sick to her stomach at the thought.

  “But not tonight.” He sighed. “I have a car. We can go to the village.”

  It was a Mercedes; why was she surprised? They didn’t even go back for their stuff. They drove into the deserted village. Some shops were still filled with goods; they got toothbrushes and food and changes of clothes. Sheets in packages. They broke into an inn and commandeered two rooms. She wasn’t sure which would make her feel better, to sleep in the same room or apart. She wasn’t sure of anything. She remembered how great it had felt to find that carton of batteries. It felt like that had happened to someone else. Not here, anyway.

  “What did you want out of life, before I came for you?” he asked her, as they shared a bottle of wine—she really wasn’t much of a drinker—and ate some canned baba ghanoush. They were sitting on his bed. He was wearing a pair of black drawstring pajama bottoms and a gray T-shirt. She had on an oversized T-shirt and leggings. Not very glamorous, but in a way, that was better.

  “Batteries,” she said. “Endless quantities of them.”

  He smiled crookedly. “I’m older than you. I was laying plans for my adult life. We were really rich.”

  “Did you, um, have a girlfriend?”

  “I always had a girlfriend.” He waggled his eyebrows and sipped from their bottle. “I was going to follow in my father’s footsteps, be rich, then save the rain forest.”

  “I think you added that last part to make yourself sound more noble.” She thought about the voice in the castle telling her that he was a liar. Maybe it had lied.

  He handed her the bottle, and she cradled it in her lap. “I wanted my mom not to die. And I wanted to meet my father.” Her voice dropped. “And I wanted to be safe.”

  “I think you need your own bottle of wine,” he drawled. “Because you got nothing on the list.”

  “Are you saying I’m not safe with you?” she asked. She meant to tease him, but her voice shook.

  He blew the air out of his cheeks. She wanted to take it back, but she decided to let it hang there, and see how he responded.

  “I think,” he said, “that we should go to sleep.”

  But she was too afraid to sleep. She went to her own room and lay down, but she felt too vulnerable that way. She paced, wondering if Alex was awake.

  From her window, she could see the castle, and she made a face at it, like a little kid. She never wanted to go in there again. But her purse was in there. Her clothes. She hoped Jordan remembered to take good care of her stuff. She had her mom’s jewelry, meager as it was, and some souvenirs from the days before—report cards, birthday cards, a Barbie doll, and her favorite stuffy, Clown Bear.

  Sighing, she leaned her head on the glass. Coolness pressed against her cheek and then the sky exploded into colors. Blue, pink, purple, shimmering and flaring; she stared, transfixed, as gray clouds billowed into being. The moon rose and became the face in the book Alex had shown her. Staring at her. Whispering to her, in words she didn’t understand. In a rising and falling voice, like someone reciting a poem. She put her hand on the glass and felt such a pull.

  “Alex!” she shouted.

  She heard him spring out of his bed and race across the hall. Within seconds, he was standing beside her.

  “I see it!” he cried. “That’s the Pale. I know it. I can feel it.”

  “The face is the Pale?” she asked.

  He cocked his head. “What face?”

  She pointed. It was staring at them both.

  No, it wasn’t.

  It was staring at Alex.

  She looked at him. He was bathed in moonlight, every inch of him. His skin, his hair, his eyes.

  She told him, and he held out his arms. “I don’t see it,” he said. He gazed back through the window. “Delaney, what if I’m the lost thing that you were supposed to find?”

  And she didn’t know why—maybe because he was afraid—but she put her arms around him. His body was very solid. He was staring out the window; now he gave her his attention. She rose on her tiptoes and brushed his lips with hers. Cautiously, he kissed her back. Just the one kiss, chaste, and then she unloosened her arms.

  “Just when it couldn’t get any weirder,” she said, and he chuckled. Then his smile faded.

  “I think we should drive toward those lights. Now,” he said.

  As soon as they got into the car, it began to rain. Wind blew. Alex turned on the windshield wipers as he drove back through the town, to the castle, then past it too, as the lights intensified.

  Nothing whispered to her.

  “Did I mention that you’re very pretty?” he said. “I like your dark skin.”

  The raindrops painted shadowy tattoos on his face, and she wondered if he had them in other places, too.

  “I like your tats.”

  “Danke,” he said.

  The rain came down, and she thought about her mom, and as she often did, the faceless man who had been her father.

  The lights filled the sky; it seemed that if they drove forward any farther, they would drive into them. Alex stopped the car, and she opened her door.

  He came around to her side of the car and laced his fingers through hers. As if on cue, it stopped raining. The earth rumbled beneath her feet. Shadows billowed against the colors, gauzy and diffuse. They star
ted to coalesce and thicken, taking on the shapes she had seen in the castle, by the cages.

  “Oh, God,” she whispered. He squeezed her hand. She couldn’t squeeze back. She was too terrified.

  The flares of color vanished, and a figure on a massive horse faced them. It was dressed in ebony chain mail covered with a black chest plate. Its black helmet was smooth, with no eyeholes and topped with curved antlers that flared with smoky flames; fastened at the shoulders, a cloak furled behind like the wake of an obsidian river. In its right chain-mail gauntlet, it held the reins of the horse. Its left arm was raised, and another hand in a gauntlet rested on its fist—that of a rider beside it.

  The rider beside it was smaller, dressed much like the other, except that red hair hung over its shoulders. Then it reached up its free hand and pushed back the faceplate of its helmet. It was the woman in the picture. Meg Zecherle.

  Her aunt.

  She stared at Dana, sweeping her gaze up and down. “Delaney?” she said softly. “Dana? Is that you?”

  Alex stepped in front of Dana, placing himself between her and Meg.

  “Honey, I have so much to tell you,” Meg said, ignoring him. “I was so glad when your mom found me. I was going to come for you. But then . . .” She exhaled. “Then it all happened.”

  Tears welled in Dana’s eyes and she opened her mouth, but Meg held up her hand and turned to the black figure. It inclined its head. Meg seemed to be listening to it. Then she turned her attention back to Dana.

  “I’m sorry, but we’ll have to save that for later. But we will talk. I promise.”

  “Just tell me who my father is,” Dana said.

  “He was a good man,” Meg replied. “But, honey, he passed away before you were born.”

  “Oh.” Her voice was tiny. Tears welled, and she knew right then that that was what she had wanted her life to be like, before. She’d wanted to have a dad. That would have been her magic.

  “I’m sorry,” Alex murmured.

  She nodded, a tear spilling down her cheek.

  “You’re going to have to believe a lot of things that will sound pretty crazy,” Meg said.

  Dana wiped her cheek. “I think you can skip ahead.”

  “Okay, but if you need me to slow down, just tell me.”