She screamed, letting out a torrent of words and curses and pleadings to God as she scrambled off the bed. Her right ankle tangled in the sheet, she fell to the floor with a thump and then backed into a corner. As she went, those lemon eyes followed her, the hooded thing coming over the top of the bed at her as though weightless.
Perhaps it was because she had been sleeping in her father’s house, or perhaps because all of her fear and grief were bound tightly to Ted Halliwell’s vanishing. But in that moment, Sara called for her father like she had as a little girl, waking in the dark from a nightmare.
“Daddy!”
The cruel, hooded thing froze with its knife fingers stretched out toward her. Lemon eyes went dark.
Like a statue, it had frozen solid, halfway across her bed.
Within the consciousness of the Sandman, Ted Halliwell screamed his daughter’s name. She’d called out to him. His powdered bones sifted with the sand and the dust, and he fought the horrid will of the monster. Holding him back was like stopping a bull from charging, yet he had done it. His soul felt as though the strain would tear it apart, but for the moment, the Sandman had been halted.
Grains of sand shifted. Skittered to the floor.
No, Halliwell thought. But he knew it was no use. His love for Sara had given him the strength to stop the Sandman, but he would not be able to hold the monster.
Pain clutched at the core of him, the part that would have been his heart if he still had flesh. The maelstrom that was the Sandman had slowed. It parted like curtains—like a veil—and he could feel the hatred searing him. Those terrible eyes looked inward, now, and they found Halliwell there, alone.
“I wanted my vengeance,” the Sandman said. The voice echoed around inside the maelstrom, inside the consciousness that was all that remained of Ted Halliwell save those powdered bones, scattered amidst the grains of the monster. “The fox bitch, Kitsune, and the nothing, weakling man, Bascombe. They turned my brother against me and I wanted vengeance. You denied me that vengeance, little nothing man. You infest me like pestilence, like rot, like conscience, and I will not have it.
“You must be punished. The little girl’s eyes will pop in my teeth, and I will be certain that you can taste them on my tongue, as if it were your own.”
The words/thoughts slithered inside Halliwell’s mind, and whatever trace remained of him, soul or echo, shuddered—not with fear, but with rage. The man in him might have let death and this bizarre damnation corrupt his spirit, weaken him, but his daughter called his name and now this abomination mocked her love for him and her pain. The man might be afraid, but Ted Halliwell was more than a man. The soldier in him, the detective in him, the father in him was not afraid.
His grip on the Sandman tightened.
The monster roared fury. Halliwell felt aware of every bone shard, every particle of yellowed bone and marrow that mixed with the substance of the Sandman, and he reached out into the paralyzed limbs of the child-killer and he took hold.
Fucker, he said/thought. That’s my little girl.
Awareness radiated out from Halliwell’s consciousness. His senses searched the maelstrom, knowing already what he would find. There, hiding in the midst of the soul-storm created by the merger of their spirits, their essences, he found the third consciousness locked inside this body. Peering, spying, from the maelstrom, was the Dustman. Swiftly brutal, the Dustman might be the brother of the Sandman—another aspect of the same legend—but he was also a kind of mirror. The Dustman was an English legend, proper and grim. He was a creature of order, where his brother was chaos and anarchy.
Help me, damn you! The blood’s on all of our hands, now. You can’t just hide, or he’ll erode you away to nothing!
Still the Dustman did not stir.
The Sandman remained paralyzed, but Halliwell’s grip began to slip. Somewhere beyond the tiny universe that existed within the maelstrom, he heard his daughter’s voice again. She muttered prayers to God. By now she’d be rising from that corner, trying to get past the monster to reach for the phone to call the police, or maybe she’d just run.
God, Halliwell hoped she would run.
“He’s a coward,” the voice of the Sandman sifted through the churning gloom around Halliwell. “He dared to stand against me, to betray his brother, and now he’ll be nothing, no more than you.”
Listen to me, Halliwell hissed at the Dustman. All of those children you visited, the ones who couldn’t sleep or didn’t want to…you were gentle with them. You cast your dust in their eyes and they slept in peace and dreamed the way children should. I’ve felt your mind, I’ve seen it all in your thoughts. We’re all part of each other, now. Is this what you want? To terrify those kids, to murder them in their beds, to mutilate their—
“It’s exactly what he wants,” the Sandman said.
Halliwell’s soul—whatever remained of it—froze at those words. Could that be true? Was that what the Dustman had always wanted? Was that why his brother was ascendant, now, because he didn’t want to fight?
“You lie!” the Dustman roared.
He stepped from the maelstrom, closer to Halliwell now than he had been since the two of them were merged with the Sandman, spirits trapped within. In his greatcoat and bowler hat and with that mustache, he might have seemed almost absurd were it not for the hatred in his gleaming, golden eyes.
I thought I could do nothing, the Dustman said, but now the voice did not echo in the maelstrom. It was right beside Halliwell, in his own mind, thought to thought. I’m only a facet of the legend. A shard. That’s what you’ve become yourself, Detective. A facet.
But that’s all he is, Halliwell replied. One facet.
Yes.
Halliwell held out his hand for the Dustman to shake, to seal the deal.
The maelstrom calmed. Halliwell felt the Sandman try to break free of his grip and the form he had given himself in this nothing place, this spirit cage inside the prison of the Sandman, was thrown down.
“Go to hell,” Halliwell snarled, and he stood, reaching out once again to shake the Dustman’s hand. There was power in a vow. An oath. And that was what they were about to enter into.
Then the Sandman was there. Somehow he was their cage, but he was also there inside the mindscape with them. Those dreadful yellow eyes peered out from beneath his hood.
“I will not allow it,” he said, almost a sigh, a skittering of words and sand.
Halliwell smiled. The bastard was too late. He and the Dustman clasped hands…
Sara ran around the bed, colliding with the closet door and pushing off. She lunged for the phone on the nightstand, snatched it off the cradle, and even as she did, she turned to look at the bizarre statue—rough like concrete—on the bed.
It said her name. The whispering voice did not sound cruel or mocking. Instead, it sounded familiar.
She froze.
No longer a statue, the thing began to shift and flow as though reality were ocean waves rolling in and reshaping it. The hood went away. The figure slid to the end of the bed, away from her, stood facing her. Its cloak had become a long coat, collar turned up high around its neck. A derby sat upon its head, made of the same material as the coat and the monster’s hands, its flesh.
Sand.
It looked up at her and she caught her breath. Lemon eyes had turned golden. It had a thick drooping mustache, but all of the same shade, the same gray brown of sand.
But the face…she knew the face.
“Daddy?” she whispered.
The strength went out of her legs and she staggered back, catching herself against the doorjamb, barely staying on her feet.
The thing looked unsure a moment, but then a smile spread across its face, lifting that mustache. Her father’s smile. All of the things that Robiquet had told her—about the Veil and the creatures of legend, about the Borderkind—came back to her now.