The bird passed just above his head, flying low, wings aflutter. He would not have given it a second look save for the uniquely brilliant blue of its feathers, but even so it took a moment to register with Oliver that Blue Jay had arrived. By the time he turned back toward the column, the shape-shifter was there. He had managed somehow to acquire clothing more appropriate for this world, and now wore black denim and thick-soled boots and a long canvas duster of the sort worn by Australian cowboys.
“Midday,” Blue Jay said. “As agreed.”
Oliver nodded. He didn’t ask where Blue Jay had gotten his clothes, mostly because he did not want to know. He himself had been too busy to find something else to wear, but he had grown fond of the gray peacoat Larch had given him and thought he might have kept it regardless.
“Where are the others?” Oliver asked.
Blue Jay raised his eyebrows. “I left Kitsune with you.” Then he grinned. “But the dragon has been here for hours.”
The trickster pointed toward Canada House. Oliver narrowed his eyes and stared at the regal structure, trying to figure out what Blue Jay was talking about, when he sensed something not quite right about the façade of the building. Something out of balance. It took him a moment to realize that a piece of statuary was missing from the roof of Canada House. There were often lions and eagles and that sort of thing built in to the architecture of such buildings. A quartet of carved lions had been placed around Nelson’s Column, in fact. But there was always a balance to such things. On Canada House, the eagle or sphinx or whatever it was that had been placed on one end of the building had no counterbalance.
Oliver blinked.
It was neither eagle nor sphinx, of course, but a dragon perched like a gargoyle on the edge of the roof of Canada House. No architectural flourish was missing. Rather, one had been added, and it was the Black Dragon of Storms.
“He’s been sitting up there all morning and no one has noticed?”
Blue Jay tapped a finger just below his left eye. “People see what they wish to see.”
Gong Gong remained where he was.
“He’s all right?” Oliver asked, wondering why he cared.
“Healing,” Blue Jay replied. “Like the rest of us.”
As he spoke his gaze shifted and Oliver turned to see Kitsune crossing the square toward them. Something shook inside him, not in fear but elation, like the ringing of a tiny bell. Though she had sworn that she would recover quickly from her wounds, and he had seen her do it with his own eyes, still he wondered how badly injured she had been.
“We’re all here now, Frost,” Oliver said, voice low, his gaze still on the approaching Kitsune.
“Excellent,” said the winter man from the ice of the fountain. He did not elaborate, did not mention the time passing beyond the Veil and the danger to his kin there, but he did not have to.
Several people passed by, pausing to take pictures but without coming very near the column. By the time they moved on Kitsune had joined Oliver and Blue Jay. He felt the urge to embrace her but fought it. A friendship had grown between them, but still Oliver saw her as the kind of woman you didn’t simply throw your arms around, any more than you would a queen. And there was another reason as well. Part of the urge to touch her did not spring from relief that she was all right. Oliver had to deny that part of what he felt.
He hoped to go home someday soon. There was no family there for him, but Julianna was there, waiting.
“You look much improved,” Oliver said.
Kitsune smiled. “I ache. But it will fade.”
He fumbled in trying to find a response to that.
Blue Jay knitted his brow in consternation at the odd moment that passed amongst them. “All right, we’re here. But we can’t stay here very long before we draw attention to ourselves. I hope one of you has an idea what to do next.”
A weight settled on Oliver’s heart. “What else can we do but move on? I have to find Collette, but I can’t do that with Hunters on my trail. We’ve come this far. I’ve got to at least talk to Koenig, find out how to get the price taken off my head.”
They were all looking at him curiously.
“What of Collette?” Frost asked.
Grief and dread and a sense of his own foolishness roiled in his heart. Of course he had not told them of his phone call with Julianna. Chaos had erupted outside the phone booth and then it had been all he could do to extricate them from that situation, to get them all moving toward the time when they could get out of London.
“She’s missing,” he said, his own voice sounding small and distant to his ears. “My dad—” No, stop that. You never thought of him as Dad when he was alive. There’s too much warmth in that. “My father’s dead. Murdered.”
Haltingly, he told them the rest, about the removal of Max Bascombe’s eyes and the disappearance of his sister and the investigation into his own vanishing.
“They probably think you killed him,” Blue Jay said lightly. “Or both of them. Or that you and your sister conspired together.”
Oliver stared at him.
Kitsune nodded sadly. “They may, Oliver. How could they come to the truth, these ordinary policemen? How could it even occur to them that the Sandman is loose upon the world?”
“The Sandman?” He stared at her stupidly.
Frost and Kitsune glanced at each other and the winter man blinked once, slowly, in assent, still only his face jutting from the ice in the fountain. “I agree. The coincidence is too great. The Sandman is freed, and soon after, Oliver’s father is murdered in that fashion? Someone must have set the monster to the task.”
Oliver scowled. “But who? And why?”
Blue Jay grunted with interest, studying Oliver as though seeing him for the first time. “Good questions,” he said, the blue feathers tied into his hair swinging in the wind.
“It is all connected,” Frost said, his voice a whisper like the wind. His eyes seemed unfocused. “Why should the Sandman be interested in Oliver, unless he has had instruction? Whoever is behind the hunting of the Borderkind, they do not want Oliver to aid us.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Oliver snapped. Realizing how loud he’d spoken, he glanced around, but none of the scattering of people passing by paid any attention to them. “My part in this was pure accident. I’m just a lawyer from Maine. What threat could I possibly pose to anyone?”
Kitsune’s jade eyes seemed to glow as she tilted her head and regarded him carefully. “Perhaps it was not an accident at all. Certainly, someone believes you are far more important than any of us knew. Important enough to kill your father to hurt you and to spirit your sister away to lay a trap for you.”
“That’s crazy!”
Blue Jay snorted. “Truly? Do you have another explanation? Anything at all?”
But he did not. “So, it’s the Sandman, then, who has my sister?”
“So it would seem,” Kitsune replied.
Oliver nodded. “Fine. As soon as I find out what I need to know from Koenig, I’m going after her.”
None of them said a word at first. What could they say? If they were correct and it was a trap, then he and Collette would both die. But she was his sister and he loved her for all that she had always been to him, for the bond they shared. What choice did he have?
The ice shifted in the fountain, cracks running all through it like a splintered mirror. “You know that we cannot go with you?” Frost asked.
Oliver hesitated. “I know I said I would help you find out who sent the Hunters after you—”
“And you will,” Kitsune interrupted. “Once you have found Collette.”
“Your sister must come first,” Frost said, and there was such sorrow in his voice. Yuki-Onna had not been his sister in the same way that Collette was Oliver’s, but his grief was no less real.
“For now, though, we stay together,” Kitsune affirmed.
Blue Jay nodded. “For now. That would be best.”
The ice ridges that made up Frost’s face jutted up from the frozen surface. “We must travel north to Scotland as swiftly as possible, but on this side of the Veil.”
Kitsune nodded. “Our destination is nearer on this side, and we have to assume there are Hunters waiting for us there.”
“We’ve been here hours,” Blue Jay said darkly. “It will have taken them a bit of time to find a border crossing, but they’ll be in the city by now, scouring the place for us.”
Throwing back her hood, silken hair dancing in the December wind, Kitsune glanced up at Canada House and the rigid figure of the dragon on the roof. She nodded slowly and returned her attention to her companions, but only then did Oliver realize that Gong Gong was up there for a reason. He was standing sentinel, watching over them, in case the Hunters should come.
He had been so driven by adrenaline and grief and so pleased with what he had accomplished this morning that he had thought little of the Hunters. The danger of discovery by ordinary Londoners or the police had been far more on his mind.
“All right. Okay. We’ll go right now. But I still don’t understand. How did they find you in the first place? The Mazikeen had hidden that place with glamours and spells.”
Once again ice crackled and this time when the winter breeze blew it was colder than before. Frost opened his mouth, jagged features thrust out from the frozen fountain, and mist steamed off his eyes.
“Treachery,” he said. “Larch was there. He had betrayed us to the Kirata.”
“They must have followed our scent to his home and his fear did the rest,” Kitsune added. “He surrendered his honor, and our destination, and they forced him to come along to make certain he was not lying. That is my theory, at least.”
Blue Jay spit on the ground.
Oliver took a long breath and then shook his head. He had trusted Larch and the betrayal saddened him.
“All right,” he said. “Let’s get going.”
Kitsune glanced around, surveying Trafalgar Square for any sign of threat. “How do you propose we do that?”
“There are drawbacks to being a child of privilege, but the benefits are enormous. People are more than happy to bend over backward to help you. I went to the American Express Travel Office and told them my passport and Travelers Cheques were stolen.
“I now have plenty of cash, a mobile phone, Travelers Cheques, and an international driver’s license for ID while I wait for my new passport. I’m supposed to go apply for a new one, but since I’m not traveling home through any normal route, there’s really no point.”
American Express Travel had helped him get the international driver’s license, providing documentation supporting his assertion that he was indeed Oliver Bascombe, and helped him arrange for a car. The rental-car lot was only a few tube stops away. All that remained was for him to pick it up.
If the police were indeed searching for him, he might as well have sent up a flare to let them know where to look.
The law firm of Bascombe & Cox had offices in Augusta, Portland, and Boston. From what Ted Halliwell had learned, the future of the firm was in those offices. The junior partners, the young sharks who were bringing in high-stakes new clients, were in the places where they were most likely to find fresh meat. The original office in Kitteridge was still there, however, and that was where the senior partners still worked, controlling their growing power from afar, brokering politics in the state capital of Augusta from two counties away.
This morning the sheriff had ducked his head into Detective Halliwell’s office and rapped softly on the door frame, an odd expression on his face. Halliwell had the feeling that he would know a great deal more about his current situation if he had only been able to read Jackson Norris’s face.
Andrew Cox, most senior partner in the firm now that Max Bascombe was dead, had apparently called the sheriff to report that the firm had learned vital information about the whereabouts of Bascombe’s son. The news sent a ripple of unease through Halliwell that he didn’t quite understand. He wanted to find both of the dead man’s children, but thus far his pursuit of Oliver Bascombe had only led to more questions and to a disturbing pattern of child murders that twisted his stomach and fogged his mind.
It was all connected, of that he felt sure. The only possible explanation he could come up with was that there was some sort of new cult operating worldwide that had so far gone undiscovered. The detectives he’d spoken to in Paris and San Francisco shared this theory. The arrival of the Internet had begun to breed such groups. There had always been perverts and freaks and lunatics, but he imagined that a lot of them never acted on their most debased impulses. On the Net, they could search in secrecy for the depravities that fascinated them, and in doing so, come into contact with others who shared their particular bent. Halliwell had no idea what kind of madness could lead to the savage murder of children, what thoughts of sacrifice or malice, but he felt certain that links would be found.
His dreams were haunted by young girls and boys with ragged holes where their eyes ought to be. They all looked like Alice St. John, except the one who looked very much like his own daughter at the age of eight or nine. The truth was, Ted Halliwell didn’t want to think about the dead kids or the Bascombe family ever again. But he had no choice. Even had it not been his job, his investigation, there was no erasing the horror from his mind. From his nightmares.
All children, save Max Bascombe. So what was the link? Could Oliver have been part of that cult? Or his sister? Both of them? If he proceeded on any of those assumptions, how then to explain the still-lingering mystery of how brother and sister left the house without anyone noticing, how Oliver departed in the middle of a blizzard with no transportation? And what of Oliver’s strange appearance up in Cottingsley, the Asian woman seen with him, and the murder of Alice St. John?