She turned to face him. The idea of fighting John, when she hadn’t trained in a year and a half, was almost laughable. Even so, she drew her whipsword and cracked it out. Maybe because she was thinking of Shinobu, she chose the shape of a katana, a Japanese samurai sword. As she swung it up above her head, it felt like Shinobu was behind her, encouraging her. She would be no one’s pawn.
“You’re out of practice, and I’m not,” John said from the other end of the roof, his whipsword still curled at his side. Almost gently, he added, “I don’t think you can beat me, Quin.”
“You’re a good person, John. Despite what you’ve done so far. If I give you the athame, you won’t be, and neither will I.”
“The athame doesn’t make us bad. It only gives us the freedom to choose. That’s all.”
She shook her head, gripping her whipsword more tightly. “Really? Think about what you’ve done already, trying to get it. You shot me, you shot at Shinobu, you cut my mother’s throat! You cut her, John!”
“I tried very hard not to hurt any of you! Why don’t you see that, Quin? And why do you only care what I’ve done?” His face was changing. She could see him trying to fight his anger, but he was losing. “What about your father?” he asked, the words full of malice as he moved carefully across the roof toward her. “What’s he done to get the athame? What have those others done?” John’s whipsword was in his hand now, like it had a mind of its own.
She knew she was not yet in full possession of her mind. And yet, there was something more here—she sensed he was saying something more than she had ever known. He was about to tell her things she didn’t want to learn.
“That’s the point,” she answered, checking her footing, bracing herself. “Whatever he’s done, I don’t want you to be like Briac.”
“I am not a torturer,” he told her, the words bursting from him as though he had no control. “I am not a beast!” John’s whipsword cracked out, and he struck at her, his temper taking over. “I’m not like Briac!”
Quin’s muscles reacted automatically, blocking. She might be a year out of practice, but her body had not forgotten. She threw his whipsword off with her own, sending both of them stumbling on the steep roof.
“You’re not like Briac,” she agreed, righting herself. “And I hope you’ll stay as you are.”
“You hope I’ll stay as I am?” The words seemed to make him angrier. “You like me helpless, is that it? Beaten by Briac! My mother murdered, everyone murdered. My house in ruins!” He slashed at her, and she blocked him again. She didn’t know what he was talking about. What had happened to John’s mother? What had Briac done? “They’ve been deciding my family’s fate for centuries. Centuries. But my house will rise again. Do you understand? It’s time.”
“Do you want a house of killers, John?”
“Are you a killer, Quin?”
At that moment, she saw a flash in the corner of her vision. It was the Young Dread at the edge of the woods, approaching the barn, but Quin didn’t dare turn her head.
John struck at her harder. Just barely, she managed to throw off the blow, and as she did, she could see that he was favoring his left arm.
“You were going to kill Briac,” he said. “I saw you.” His sword landed another heavy strike against hers. Her left shoulder, the one with the old wound, was aching.
“Will you help me?” Quin called to the Dread, who was silently getting closer.
“You’re passing judgment on me, Quin. But what about the things you’ve done?” John asked. He continued to swing at her, moving her backward.
How did he know what she’d done? How did he know when she didn’t know herself, didn’t want to know? He was pushing her toward the end of the roof. And in her mind, he was pushing her to another sort of cliff, one that separated the Quin of now from the Quin of a year and a half ago.
With two more steps, he drove her to the edge. There was nowhere for her to go.
“Please!” Quin called to the Dread. The girl was standing below them, motionless.
John raised his sword, but did not strike. “Tell me, Quin. What did you and Briac do?”
All at once, she knew the answer. The last curtain of gray was gone from her mind, and she could clearly see the events she had most wanted to forget.
She had done the things she was accusing John of wanting to do. She’d done those things with her own hands. The weight of them hit her like a physical force, and she almost fell to her knees. Of course she had forgotten. Of course she’d started her life over. Ignorance had been wonderful.
“We killed them,” she whispered, letting the words hang in the air. She struck at John weakly, trying to step away from the edge. “If Briac’s a beast, so am I.”
“Who did you kill?” he asked, retreating a pace, giving her room.
“Lots of people, John, lots of times.” Now that she was admitting it, she could not stop the words from tumbling out. There was a relief in saying them aloud. Finally. “Those children—I tried to run away. He stopped me. He said I had to. We’d already done so much. Their parents, the nurse … There was no escape …” She could see Briac as he was that night, at the base of the big staircase in the manor house. The children were hiding behind her. “I told them it would be all right, and I brought them back to Briac.”
“He forced you,” he said, his voice softer now, as though she could be forgiven for what she’d done. As though he understood and didn’t blame her. “It wasn’t your choice. Those deaths don’t make you a killer.”
“They thought I was helping them, John! I dream about those children. I tried to get away with them, but Briac caught me. He kicked the gun from my hands when he saw me faltering. And then he …” She couldn’t say the words. Briac had taken those children and done what they did to everyone on those late-night assignments. Even if she hadn’t … finished things with the children herself, there were all those others her own whipsword had cut and killed. On later assignments with Briac, there’d been no children involved, and this had been such a relief that she … she hadn’t needed quite as much pressure to do what her father demanded. I’m already damned, she’d thought. What does it matter now?
“Briac’s a monster,” he told her. “He could have picked easier assignments, something more fair. He was trying to break you, hurt you.”
“I wanted to be a Seeker—”
“Quin—you aren’t the first Seeker to kill to survive. Where do you think my grandfather’s wealth comes from? Where does your estate come from?”
“That’s what Briac said!”
“But it’s not what Briac did!” John yelled. “Killing for money, restoring your fortunes—that’s surviving. Every house must do it from time to time. My mother did, when she had to. She picked assignments she could live with, killed … as fairly as she could, people who deserved what she did. But your father, those others—they kill anyone. And they killed us. Do you understand? Whole families of Seekers. Children, mothers, fathers. For no reason but jealousy, they’ve tried to stamp my house to nothing. And for that … can’t you see I have to make that right?”
They were not striking each other anymore. They had both allowed their swords to fall to their sides, and they were both breathing hard. She didn’t know the history John seemed to know. Briac had shared none of it with her.
“So … it’s all right to kill?” she asked him, hearing the disbelief in her own voice. “As long as you select an acceptable victim? Or as long as you’re killing for revenge? It’s all right if the swords aren’t turned against you?”
“I—I didn’t choose this life, Quin. It was chosen for me. I will make the best decisions I can. I will try to be fair. But I’ve promised—”
“John, do you hear yourself? Do you think you can kill people and it won’t change you? You think you can pick someone who deserves to die and that will make it all right? It doesn’t work like that.”
“I know our lives are harsh—”
“I wanted t
o do something good,” she said, cutting him off. She was exhausted. “It was so simple when I was a little girl.”
“You can do something good. The athame lets us decide—where we go, what we do. It is good.”
The sun was behind John, casting him into shadow, but for the first time, Quin was seeing him clearly. She had been training with her father in the hope of doing something honorable with her life. It was all she’d wanted, even if the hope had been false. John thought he wanted the same thing—a noble purpose, justice—but he’d already seen Briac’s path, and he was willing to set his feet upon it. He was like a sword that had been bent at the moment it was forged. Such a blade will always be bent, as John’s heart was bent by the life and the death of the mother he’d never wanted to speak about. At this moment, he was still the John she had known, but he wouldn’t stay that way if she helped him now.
“No,” she told him, shaking her head. “It’s not good.”
Using the last of her strength, Quin struck at him suddenly with her whipsword, aiming for his injured side. He was caught by surprise and blocked the blow poorly, his left arm weak. She pressed her advantage, grabbing both ends of her sword and pushing at his blade. John lost his balance for a moment, and on reflex, Quin hooked one of his feet with her own and sent him sprawling. He slid down the roof toward its edge, dislodging a huge sheet of slate as he went. By the time he got a solid hold on the roof and stopped his descent, half his body hung out over the cliff.
Quin moved to grab him, worried he would fall, but she saw his grip on the roof was firm, and he was already pulling himself up.
Quin!
She turned in time to see an object arcing through the air. It was the lightning rod, the one John had taken from her. The Young Dread was throwing her the lightning rod. Only after Quin caught it did she realize the Young had not actually called her name aloud. It had been shouted directly into her head, and she had heard it.
She drew her athame from her waistband. She now recognized all of the symbols on the haft, and she made a quick adjustment to the dials.
Below her, John was clawing his way to a safer part of the roof, away from the cliff. In a moment, he’d be back on his feet.
She struck the athame and lightning rod together, and a vibration washed over her. She ran to the edge, just above the cliff, and looked all the way to the river below. Then she reached down with the athame and drew a circle in the air. The dagger cut an opening, hovering below her, the black-and-white fabric of its edges pulsing and growing solid as she watched.
John was pulling himself to the peak of the roof as Quin leapt off the far end of the building. Her stomach lurched as she began to fall, her hair whipped by the cold breeze coming up the cliff. Far below her, she could see the swiftly flowing river pressed up against the steep rock face. Her body told her she had just jumped to her death. But she was falling into the anomaly, and a moment later, she had crossed its threshold and was not falling at all.
She turned. Above her was the opening she’d cut in space, and through it she could see the barn roof against the sky. At the edge of that roof stood John, looking devastated. He moved a few steps back, preparing to leap, but the circle was already starting to unravel, the threads hissing back together. John stopped himself at the edge, as the doorway closed above Quin, plunging her into darkness.
CHAPTER 47
JOHN
It was too late to jump. The yawning hole hovering in midair below the barn roof was collapsing. John watched as its edges lost shape. Like threads sticking out of torn cloth, thin arms of black and white were growing across the center, vibrating with energy as they stitched themselves back together. After a few moments the hole was gone.
Quin had left him again, just as she had that night on the estate, when she’d taken Yellen through another dark doorway. She’d looked back at John then, but she’d been calling for Shinobu, not him. It might be she would never choose him. This realization sat heavily in his chest as he stared down the cliff to the river.
His mind went through her last moments on the roof, before she’d jumped. She had hit the athame against that other blade. It was clearly the athame’s mate, equally important for traveling There. Why had his mother never mentioned that second object to him? The answer was simple: She’d been bleeding to death in the middle of the living room. There had been no time for details.
John walked away from the roof’s edge, bringing the Young Dread into sight on the ground below.
“You helped her. I thought you would help me.”
The girl had been watching Quin’s escape, but now she turned her eyes to meet his own. She said nothing.
“Where is the justice of the Dreads?” he asked her, his anger rising again. “You could have killed me in the woods, but you didn’t. You know I’m in the right, and yet you let her take the athame that should be mine. Why?”
There was a look of uncertainty on the Young Dread’s face, but still she didn’t speak. She was staring up at him as if deciding her next move.
From its hiding place inside his jacket, he pulled out the other athame, the one he’d removed from the cloak of the Big Dread. This dagger was different than the one Quin had taken. It was smaller, for one thing, perhaps ten inches long, and looked delicate in comparison. There was something dissimilar about the dials as well, wasn’t there? There seemed to be more of them, each slender and interlocking perfectly with the others. And at the very base of the dagger, instead of a carving of an animal, there was a pattern of three ovals.
John moved the dials in turn, tracing the outline of the symbols carved upon each face. Each symbol was a place, perhaps, or a possibility, and together the possibilities were nearly infinite.
The sound of twigs snapping jolted him from his reverie. Two figures were walking among the trees, just now emerging into the clearing. The first was the Big Dread. He moved with long, awkward strides, a hitch at the beginning and end of each, as though the joints of his body might grind to a halt at any moment.
The second figure was the old man, who must, John thought, be a third Dread, the Old Dread. As John watched, this man took a very slow step, the entire motion occurring at glacial speed, then this was followed by several steps so rapid that he momentarily outpaced the other Dread. Then the process repeated, and he fell behind again as he took another slow step.
Together the two men gave the impression of a cinema reel running at inconsistent speeds. Once they had cleared the trees and seen John on the roof, however, they shifted simultaneously to a new and almost blinding pace and were, all at once, right beneath the barn.
“No nearer,” John called down to them, holding their athame in clear view. “Or I will break it.”
The Old Dread was closest to him, examining John with eyes that seemed to look straight through him at the distant clouds beyond.
There was a long pause as the man gathered his voice. Then the words came out of him in a steady stream, like a chant: “That would be bad for everyone.”
“Mostly it would be bad for you,” John said. “Please back away.”
The Dreads did not move.
The Young Dread spoke up now. “An athame is difficult to destroy,” she told him.
“It’s stone, isn’t it?” He looked around, moving nearer to the roof edge overhanging the drop to the river below. “Even stone will break if thrown far enough.”
John now noticed the Big Dread had a wound across his chest that was dripping blood, but the man was ignoring it. The Big Dread’s face, as he stared up at John, looked like a statue carved to illustrate the emotion of hatred.
“Perhaps,” the Old Dread agreed. “Or perhaps not. You would be foolish to try. The object you hold is the only one of its kind.”
John waved the athame above the drop. “Not the only. Quin has another one.”
“No,” the Old Dread said. “Similar, but not the same. The one you hold is special.”
As John looked again at the stone dagger in his hand,
he noticed a separate piece, a long, slender blade of stone. Cleverly designed, it was fitted along the athame’s blade so perfectly they seemed at first glance to be one. Yet when he pressed downward on it with his thumb, the slender piece slid free.
The Middle Dread made a jerking motion, and all at once, there was a knife in his hand. Even in his half-woken and injured state, the man, John understood, could kill him quite easily. Yet the Old Dread signaled the Middle to stop.
“Do you value your life?” the Young Dread asked him.
“Do you value my life?” he asked her. “First you help me, and then you work against me. Aren’t you allowed to make up your own mind?”
“If you value your life,” she said, ignoring his words, “you will not use the tools in your hands. Without training, they will end you quickly, and when they do, you will lose the athame and lightning rod somewhere under the ocean or in the fiery heart of a mountain. We will never recover them.”
John tapped the athame and the other object—the lightning rod, she’d called it—together gently, still holding them both above the drop to the river. Immediately, a low vibration began. He could feel it running through his lungs and heart, altering his breathing and heartbeat. It was in his ears as well, distorting other sounds. He pulled the athame and rod apart and waited for the vibration to die out. It took nearly a minute to do so, unsettling him the whole while. And this was from a gentle tap. What was it like when you struck them together for real?
The Young Dread was right—even with an athame in his hands, he could do nothing without training.
Quin had refused him. She didn’t want to help, and he didn’t want to force her. And yet there were only a few people in the world who could show him how to use the tools of a Seeker. Briac Kincaid was one, but he would die before helping John. The Young Dread should help him, but she had just shown that she would not. So, Quin. It always came back to Quin.
Carefully he slid the lightning rod back into its slot on the athame’s blade until he heard it click into place. Then he drew his whipsword and cracked it out into solid form.