He was reaching for his flashlight, but the moment they were fully in the room they could see the nikki.
“Oh, you gotta be f**king kidding me!” Leo ejected.
It was a horse. A winged blue horse with a sparkling pink mane like some kind of overgrown My Little Pony. That was when he got hit by the stench of horse manure in the room.
“They must have phased it in through the walls,” Faith said breathlessly. “It’ll be hard, but we can walk it out the way we came or…”
“Or?” he prompted, somehow already knowing what she was going to say.
“Or I can grab hold of a Wraith, deflect its phasing ability into the walls ahead of us and, as long as we’re connected together, we should all move through just fine.”
“Are you out of your mind?”
“It’s all I can think of!”
“Great…just great,” he grumbled, trying not to feel sickened and terrified as he retrieved his weapon. “You’re going to commit suicide and I’m supposed to stand and watch? Stand and hold on to a blue horse and watch?”
The demand was soundly punctuated by a very long, very low sound of flatulence.
The horse nickered.
“Jesus, when did my life turn into a goddamn carnival?” Leo asked no one in particular. “Lead the horse through the doors. Follow my light. We’ll walk it out. I don’t want you touching another one of these Wraiths if you can at all avoid it. Now hurry.”
But just as they were about to drag it through the first door, the horse nickered again as it splayed out an impressive thirteen foot wingspan and struck a shoed foot against the tiled floor so hard sparks flew from the contact. If Leo had to interpret horse-ese, he’d say that definitely equated a desire to stay put. There was no way they were fitting the horse through any door if it kept its wings spread out.
“We’re so going to die,” Faith said weakly. She looked around the room, trying not to panic. Then her face lit up and she leapt for a burlap bag stamped with the word “apples” on it. She grabbed as many as she could and quickly held one out to the horse.
“Stands to reason there’s a bag of apples,” she said cooingly to the horse, “because you like apples. Now don’t you?”
Like a cobra, the beast shot forward and snatched the apple from Faith’s hand. It bit into it, half of it falling to the floor, the other half chomped juicily between its teeth.
“Just keep them away from me,” Faith said, as she backed out of the door, holding an apple out to the horse. The horse retracted its wings, folding them down tightly to its body, and clip-clopped through the door in pursuit of its next apple. It was going to be slow going, Leo thought with virulent fear clutching in his gut. The alarm was already raised. It made sense that Wraiths would descend on the room with the most valuable commodity in it first to check and see if all was well there. Leo took point again, turning his back on Faith, his shoulder touching hers as they walked back out the way they had come. A Wraith literally came out of nowhere. Jumping out of a wall and leaping onto Leo. Or trying to. Leo raised his weapon and put it down with a shot through its left eye.
“Keep doing brain shots,” Faith told him. She was breathless with her fear. But he could see the light of life in her eyes, even through the darkness. He knew exactly how she was feeling. Nothing made you feel more alive than when you were facing the possibility that these were the last few seconds of your life. “They’ll keep coming otherwise. If they’re like any other Nightwalker they can heal fast and have incredible stamina.”
“Incredible stamina, eh? We’ll have to test that one out after we get the hell out of here,” he said with a grin.
Leo felt something snare him around his ankle, and he went down on his knee as it tripped him up. He turned his weapon downward and could see a Wraith’s hand phased up through the floor from the basement, through his booted foot and gripping painfully tight at his ankle.
That was when he realized that Faith’s head to toe clothing was about as effective a protection as a layer of baby powder might have been on her na**d skin. These things could phase right through her, touching her from the inside out.
“Faster,” he said after raking the knife across the back of the hand holding him. It released with a muffled scream coming up through the floor. “Thank Christ we’re on the first floor.”
“We just have to make it out the door. Grey said he’d be able to get us as soon as we get out the door.”
“Let’s pray he’s a Djynn of his word.”
Faith didn’t reveal how much she thought a Djynn’s word was worth. She could only hope as much as Leo was hoping. She held out another apple as they turned another corner. Was it her, or did this place seem bigger on the inside than it was on the outside?
It probably was. Like Grey’s little gingerbread house, there was some kind of spatial distortion that allowed them to pack a lot of rooms into a small space.
Leo grabbed hold of her arm, hurrying her along after him. She had to resist in order to make sure the horse was still engaged by her lure. But she needn’t have worried. It was following eagerly along. And, apparently, apples gave the poor thing terrible gas. Even if they weren’t making a racket clomping their way out of the house, the sheer stench of the horse’s farts would have led everyone right to them.
“Back door!” Leo called out triumphantly. He jerked the door open sending a stream of bright sunshine into the hall. A series of screams made them start as the light revealed a crowd of four Wraiths coming through the walls. But the moment the sunlight hit them their bodies solidified mid phase and they were left screaming in agonizing pain, heads and torsos writhing and smacking around in a desperate flail to be free of their agonizing prison.
“Sunlight makes them solid!” Leo realized, even as he watched Faith turn from black to pale white at the touch of the sun. “They can’t phase! That’s their weakness!” For good measure he shot through the glass of two windows on either side of the door, allowing them to coax the Pegasus out into daylight in relative assurance that no more Wraiths were going to endanger their mission and, most of all, none were going to endanger Faith. The horse nickered and shied, clearly unaccustomed to the light.
“Christ, is this thing able to go into sunlight?” he thought to ask a little too late.
“We don’t have any choice!” Faith pointed out. Faith moved forward between flailing hooves to grab its mane and shush and soothe the frightened beast and Leo felt his heart lurch with fear, thinking any second she was going to be trampled to death or kicked in the head.
But after some more sweet cajoling and two more apples the horse willingly followed them onto the stony path. And true to his word, the moment they were free of the house they were teleported away, horse and all.
“My god, she’s beautiful,” Grey said with truly obvious admiration after standing a moment in awe after they had materialized in front of him. He moved forward, reaching out with a tentative hand, as though he were afraid to touch it. But then Faith remembered that it took only a touch for a Djynn to claim a nik as his own, and Grey had clearly waited a very long time for this nik…and the nik quite obviously was a source of great power.
“Hello, my love,” Grey said softly as he approached, nodding in gratitude to Faith when she handed him an apple to offer the beast in friendship. Faith was amazed by the change that came over Grey, by the incredible softness in his demeanor. “You’re safe and now you’ll be able to run free and eat all the apples your heart desires.”
They had materialized in a dark stable, no sunlight streaming into it. They could see doors that would lead out into the promise of a large corral or pastureland. Now that they were once again in darkness, the Pegasus’s wings had reappeared and she was stretching them out as wide as possible in the roomy stall. Faith had to admit she was the most beautiful horse she’d ever laid eyes on. There was something…something about a winged horse that called to the child inside of her. It told her that amazing, fantastical things were truly possible, and that she had only just begun to see the beauty in the world. There was so much more for her to see and learn, so much more than her secluded and often sheltered life in her father’s house.
She reached out to touch the horse’s wing, the powerful bony joint of it more than strong enough to lift the weight of the beast into the air. But it could only fly at night or in sunless weather, she realized. In its way, it too was a Nightwalker.
“Maybe one day you will trust me enough to show me who you really are,” Grey said to the horse, once again speaking as gently as he could. “Trust is the issue here,” he said to Faith and Leo. “She is a Mystical. Like no one you’ve ever known in your lifetime or ever will again. But she won’t show me who she is. First, she has to know she can trust me.”
“A Mystical?! I thought you said she was a nikki!” Faith cried out.
“Wait. What? What’s a Mystical?” Leo wanted to know.
“A Mystical is a Nightwalker breed, not a nikki,” Faith said darkly.
“Mysticals are both niks and Nightwalkers,” Grey explained calmly, all the while gazing lovingly at the Pegasus. “They hold tremendous amounts of power—but because there are those like the Wraiths who would trap them and use them like car batteries, a source of power to be tapped into rather than a being that craves what we all crave—to be loved—they do not often show their true selves to anyone other than fellow Mysticals. But maybe,” Grey said to the calming beast. “Maybe you will show me who you are when you learn who I am.”
He finally touched the horse on its forelock and a brilliant light bled into Grey, lighting him up under his skin from the hand he used to touch it with and slowly all the way down to his feet. Faith could see the blood vessels in his body as the light moved through him and she could feel a thump of force against her, like a static charge had been released.
“You know, any minute now I’m going to wake up with a hell of a hangover and I’m going to think to myself, ‘Dude, we are never doing that much tequila ever again,’ ” Leo said.
Faith laughed at him and he smiled at her. She realized then that there was a life and energy and all-out joy in that smile that had been missing at the beginning of their adventure. He had come a very long way in a very short amount of time. He’d had to cope with things, to see things that he had never even conceived of being real in the life he had been leading before. It was no wonder he’d had trouble adapting to all of this. This was a lot to take in even for her, and she was used to moving in supernatural circles.
The Pegasus farted again.
“Oh god, what have they been feeding this thing?” Leo asked, waving his hand in revulsion.
“She’s a her, not a thing,” Grey snapped at him. “And they’ve probably been feeding her eggs. Eggs suppress her ability to change.”
“That explains why she didn’t just change form and walk out,” Leo said. “That house was pretty wide open. But she couldn’t open doors and couldn’t simply walk out as long as she was in this form. I’m amazed she survived in there. All it would take is one touch and they would have killed her.”
“I find that intriguing myself. So little is known about the Wraiths,” Grey said. “Perhaps they can control the use of their death touch. They can decide whether or not to kill. A conscious choice.”
“Which makes them all the more evil,” Faith said bitterly. She shivered in revulsion.
“Do you know her name?” Leo asked, reaching a tentative hand out to touch the horse. “How did you even know she was their captive?”
“Are we wishing to know the answers to those questions?” Grey asked archly.
“I think not,” Leo said, holding up both hands as if touching any of them might equate a wish.
The horse nickered and moved forward, shoving Grey aside in order to head-butt Leo affectionately.
In spite of himself, Leo chuckled and went back to petting her. “You’re welcome,” he said, reaching to scrub at her forelock.
“Let’s get a decent meal into her and then…then I have a wish to carry out for you,” Grey said.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Grey, Leo, and Faith appeared in Jackson’s bedroom so suddenly that Docia, who was standing at the foot of the bed, released a shocked little cry. She had been watching Marissa as she lay curled up in the bed next to Jackson, her body wrapped around him, holding him tightly, as if by will alone she could keep him in this plane of existence with her.
Docia took one look at the trio and burst into tears. She knew very well what their arrival meant and all the strength she had been using to keep herself together suddenly abandoned her. As if they had a magic of their own, Docia’s emotions triggered Ram’s almost instantaneous appearance. He was hurrying to her side the next instant, pushing past Ahnvil and Stohn and Max and Angelina, who, for some reason, were all in the room. The reason became obvious when Ram, who had given Docia the expanse of his chest to weep against, looked up at Leo and Faith and Grey.
“Oh, you gotta be f**king kidding me!” Leo ejected.
It was a horse. A winged blue horse with a sparkling pink mane like some kind of overgrown My Little Pony. That was when he got hit by the stench of horse manure in the room.
“They must have phased it in through the walls,” Faith said breathlessly. “It’ll be hard, but we can walk it out the way we came or…”
“Or?” he prompted, somehow already knowing what she was going to say.
“Or I can grab hold of a Wraith, deflect its phasing ability into the walls ahead of us and, as long as we’re connected together, we should all move through just fine.”
“Are you out of your mind?”
“It’s all I can think of!”
“Great…just great,” he grumbled, trying not to feel sickened and terrified as he retrieved his weapon. “You’re going to commit suicide and I’m supposed to stand and watch? Stand and hold on to a blue horse and watch?”
The demand was soundly punctuated by a very long, very low sound of flatulence.
The horse nickered.
“Jesus, when did my life turn into a goddamn carnival?” Leo asked no one in particular. “Lead the horse through the doors. Follow my light. We’ll walk it out. I don’t want you touching another one of these Wraiths if you can at all avoid it. Now hurry.”
But just as they were about to drag it through the first door, the horse nickered again as it splayed out an impressive thirteen foot wingspan and struck a shoed foot against the tiled floor so hard sparks flew from the contact. If Leo had to interpret horse-ese, he’d say that definitely equated a desire to stay put. There was no way they were fitting the horse through any door if it kept its wings spread out.
“We’re so going to die,” Faith said weakly. She looked around the room, trying not to panic. Then her face lit up and she leapt for a burlap bag stamped with the word “apples” on it. She grabbed as many as she could and quickly held one out to the horse.
“Stands to reason there’s a bag of apples,” she said cooingly to the horse, “because you like apples. Now don’t you?”
Like a cobra, the beast shot forward and snatched the apple from Faith’s hand. It bit into it, half of it falling to the floor, the other half chomped juicily between its teeth.
“Just keep them away from me,” Faith said, as she backed out of the door, holding an apple out to the horse. The horse retracted its wings, folding them down tightly to its body, and clip-clopped through the door in pursuit of its next apple. It was going to be slow going, Leo thought with virulent fear clutching in his gut. The alarm was already raised. It made sense that Wraiths would descend on the room with the most valuable commodity in it first to check and see if all was well there. Leo took point again, turning his back on Faith, his shoulder touching hers as they walked back out the way they had come. A Wraith literally came out of nowhere. Jumping out of a wall and leaping onto Leo. Or trying to. Leo raised his weapon and put it down with a shot through its left eye.
“Keep doing brain shots,” Faith told him. She was breathless with her fear. But he could see the light of life in her eyes, even through the darkness. He knew exactly how she was feeling. Nothing made you feel more alive than when you were facing the possibility that these were the last few seconds of your life. “They’ll keep coming otherwise. If they’re like any other Nightwalker they can heal fast and have incredible stamina.”
“Incredible stamina, eh? We’ll have to test that one out after we get the hell out of here,” he said with a grin.
Leo felt something snare him around his ankle, and he went down on his knee as it tripped him up. He turned his weapon downward and could see a Wraith’s hand phased up through the floor from the basement, through his booted foot and gripping painfully tight at his ankle.
That was when he realized that Faith’s head to toe clothing was about as effective a protection as a layer of baby powder might have been on her na**d skin. These things could phase right through her, touching her from the inside out.
“Faster,” he said after raking the knife across the back of the hand holding him. It released with a muffled scream coming up through the floor. “Thank Christ we’re on the first floor.”
“We just have to make it out the door. Grey said he’d be able to get us as soon as we get out the door.”
“Let’s pray he’s a Djynn of his word.”
Faith didn’t reveal how much she thought a Djynn’s word was worth. She could only hope as much as Leo was hoping. She held out another apple as they turned another corner. Was it her, or did this place seem bigger on the inside than it was on the outside?
It probably was. Like Grey’s little gingerbread house, there was some kind of spatial distortion that allowed them to pack a lot of rooms into a small space.
Leo grabbed hold of her arm, hurrying her along after him. She had to resist in order to make sure the horse was still engaged by her lure. But she needn’t have worried. It was following eagerly along. And, apparently, apples gave the poor thing terrible gas. Even if they weren’t making a racket clomping their way out of the house, the sheer stench of the horse’s farts would have led everyone right to them.
“Back door!” Leo called out triumphantly. He jerked the door open sending a stream of bright sunshine into the hall. A series of screams made them start as the light revealed a crowd of four Wraiths coming through the walls. But the moment the sunlight hit them their bodies solidified mid phase and they were left screaming in agonizing pain, heads and torsos writhing and smacking around in a desperate flail to be free of their agonizing prison.
“Sunlight makes them solid!” Leo realized, even as he watched Faith turn from black to pale white at the touch of the sun. “They can’t phase! That’s their weakness!” For good measure he shot through the glass of two windows on either side of the door, allowing them to coax the Pegasus out into daylight in relative assurance that no more Wraiths were going to endanger their mission and, most of all, none were going to endanger Faith. The horse nickered and shied, clearly unaccustomed to the light.
“Christ, is this thing able to go into sunlight?” he thought to ask a little too late.
“We don’t have any choice!” Faith pointed out. Faith moved forward between flailing hooves to grab its mane and shush and soothe the frightened beast and Leo felt his heart lurch with fear, thinking any second she was going to be trampled to death or kicked in the head.
But after some more sweet cajoling and two more apples the horse willingly followed them onto the stony path. And true to his word, the moment they were free of the house they were teleported away, horse and all.
“My god, she’s beautiful,” Grey said with truly obvious admiration after standing a moment in awe after they had materialized in front of him. He moved forward, reaching out with a tentative hand, as though he were afraid to touch it. But then Faith remembered that it took only a touch for a Djynn to claim a nik as his own, and Grey had clearly waited a very long time for this nik…and the nik quite obviously was a source of great power.
“Hello, my love,” Grey said softly as he approached, nodding in gratitude to Faith when she handed him an apple to offer the beast in friendship. Faith was amazed by the change that came over Grey, by the incredible softness in his demeanor. “You’re safe and now you’ll be able to run free and eat all the apples your heart desires.”
They had materialized in a dark stable, no sunlight streaming into it. They could see doors that would lead out into the promise of a large corral or pastureland. Now that they were once again in darkness, the Pegasus’s wings had reappeared and she was stretching them out as wide as possible in the roomy stall. Faith had to admit she was the most beautiful horse she’d ever laid eyes on. There was something…something about a winged horse that called to the child inside of her. It told her that amazing, fantastical things were truly possible, and that she had only just begun to see the beauty in the world. There was so much more for her to see and learn, so much more than her secluded and often sheltered life in her father’s house.
She reached out to touch the horse’s wing, the powerful bony joint of it more than strong enough to lift the weight of the beast into the air. But it could only fly at night or in sunless weather, she realized. In its way, it too was a Nightwalker.
“Maybe one day you will trust me enough to show me who you really are,” Grey said to the horse, once again speaking as gently as he could. “Trust is the issue here,” he said to Faith and Leo. “She is a Mystical. Like no one you’ve ever known in your lifetime or ever will again. But she won’t show me who she is. First, she has to know she can trust me.”
“A Mystical?! I thought you said she was a nikki!” Faith cried out.
“Wait. What? What’s a Mystical?” Leo wanted to know.
“A Mystical is a Nightwalker breed, not a nikki,” Faith said darkly.
“Mysticals are both niks and Nightwalkers,” Grey explained calmly, all the while gazing lovingly at the Pegasus. “They hold tremendous amounts of power—but because there are those like the Wraiths who would trap them and use them like car batteries, a source of power to be tapped into rather than a being that craves what we all crave—to be loved—they do not often show their true selves to anyone other than fellow Mysticals. But maybe,” Grey said to the calming beast. “Maybe you will show me who you are when you learn who I am.”
He finally touched the horse on its forelock and a brilliant light bled into Grey, lighting him up under his skin from the hand he used to touch it with and slowly all the way down to his feet. Faith could see the blood vessels in his body as the light moved through him and she could feel a thump of force against her, like a static charge had been released.
“You know, any minute now I’m going to wake up with a hell of a hangover and I’m going to think to myself, ‘Dude, we are never doing that much tequila ever again,’ ” Leo said.
Faith laughed at him and he smiled at her. She realized then that there was a life and energy and all-out joy in that smile that had been missing at the beginning of their adventure. He had come a very long way in a very short amount of time. He’d had to cope with things, to see things that he had never even conceived of being real in the life he had been leading before. It was no wonder he’d had trouble adapting to all of this. This was a lot to take in even for her, and she was used to moving in supernatural circles.
The Pegasus farted again.
“Oh god, what have they been feeding this thing?” Leo asked, waving his hand in revulsion.
“She’s a her, not a thing,” Grey snapped at him. “And they’ve probably been feeding her eggs. Eggs suppress her ability to change.”
“That explains why she didn’t just change form and walk out,” Leo said. “That house was pretty wide open. But she couldn’t open doors and couldn’t simply walk out as long as she was in this form. I’m amazed she survived in there. All it would take is one touch and they would have killed her.”
“I find that intriguing myself. So little is known about the Wraiths,” Grey said. “Perhaps they can control the use of their death touch. They can decide whether or not to kill. A conscious choice.”
“Which makes them all the more evil,” Faith said bitterly. She shivered in revulsion.
“Do you know her name?” Leo asked, reaching a tentative hand out to touch the horse. “How did you even know she was their captive?”
“Are we wishing to know the answers to those questions?” Grey asked archly.
“I think not,” Leo said, holding up both hands as if touching any of them might equate a wish.
The horse nickered and moved forward, shoving Grey aside in order to head-butt Leo affectionately.
In spite of himself, Leo chuckled and went back to petting her. “You’re welcome,” he said, reaching to scrub at her forelock.
“Let’s get a decent meal into her and then…then I have a wish to carry out for you,” Grey said.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Grey, Leo, and Faith appeared in Jackson’s bedroom so suddenly that Docia, who was standing at the foot of the bed, released a shocked little cry. She had been watching Marissa as she lay curled up in the bed next to Jackson, her body wrapped around him, holding him tightly, as if by will alone she could keep him in this plane of existence with her.
Docia took one look at the trio and burst into tears. She knew very well what their arrival meant and all the strength she had been using to keep herself together suddenly abandoned her. As if they had a magic of their own, Docia’s emotions triggered Ram’s almost instantaneous appearance. He was hurrying to her side the next instant, pushing past Ahnvil and Stohn and Max and Angelina, who, for some reason, were all in the room. The reason became obvious when Ram, who had given Docia the expanse of his chest to weep against, looked up at Leo and Faith and Grey.
