Wasteland King

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Once more, to L.I.

Peace, the charm's wound up.

Love all comes down to revenge, sweetheart.

—N
ICHOLAS
D
E
A
NGELO

T
he assassin and the redhaired girl burst onto the shuttered, dark fairway, and Crenn almost thought they had a shot at escaping unseen—until the shadows at the far end, under the Ferris wheel's spidery bulk, birthed a cold gleam and clawed silvershod hoofbeats rang on packed dirt. The rider, a black paper cutout, smoked with wrongness, and Robin's despairing, mewling little cry ignited something in Crenn's bones.

“That way!” he said, and pushed her. The dog took over, hauling her up a rickety ramp, bursting through a chain into a dark passageway beyond. A gigantic clown was painted above, its gaping mouth the entryway, its rubber-red lips leering in the low lamplight.
FUNHOUSE FUNHOUSE FUNHOUSE
, the painted boards cried, and below,
IT'S A SCREAM
!

No doubt Gallow would do something stupid, like charging the rider with his lance out. Crenn's hands moved, the curve of wood strapped to his back yanked free, and a word of chantment snapped the bow out, its arms gracefully bending into tension as his fingers felt along fletchings and found the one he wanted.

He nocked and drew back to his ear, a subtle breath-humming becoming an invisible string, the silver whistle-blast of Unwinter's hunters becoming a high keening of
prey found, prey found!
The dogs would be along any moment now.

Still, he took his time, the world becoming a still, small point as if he balanced on a bough in the Marrowdowne, waiting to send a flint-needle arrow through a sparrow's eye. This bolt was fletched heavily, and its head was cold iron; the hoop in Crenn's ear burned as chantment woke, humming.

He loosed.

The nightmare mount's steady jog turned to an uncertain, pawing walk as the rider stiffened, a grotesque choking audible down the fairway. The rider slumped, the arrow a flagpole poking from the jousting helm's eye-bar. Crenn didn't wait to see him hit the ground, just spun and plunged after Robin and the dog.

Complete darkness. Choked cries, shattering glass. A whining bark, and he blundered into a hallway lined with mirrors, faint light from the end reflected over and over. Robin, trying to scream, reeled drunkenly from side to side, her reflections distorted-dancing; he ran into her with an
oof!
that might have been amusing if he hadn't heard more urgent silver whistles filtering in from outside.

“Don't look!” he snapped, and grabbed at her, earning himself a flurry of blows as she kicked. Maddened with fear, she even bit him as he hauled her through the hallway, and the flooring underneath shifted treacherously, groaning under Pepperbuckle's weight. They pressed forward in a tangle, and he realized he was cursing, swallowed half an anatomical term a woman should never hear, and got his hand over her eyes. “Don't look, damn you! Keep moving!”

Turns in quick succession, and all of a sudden a doorway loomed, the dog leapt and carried it down in a shatter of splinters. Back on the fairway, Robin's eyes tightly closed as she ran, clinging to his hand.

Don't just move
, Jeremiah Gallow had always said.
Move and think, that's the ticket
.

As if that bastard had any other setting than just charging in with that goddamn pigsticker of his.

Crenn skidded to a stop at the end of the fairway. His ears tingled, perking. They were loud, and the hounds were belling now. The dog pressed close, whining; he calculated its size, and hers.

“Listen.” He dropped his bow, caught her face. Her eyes flew open and she stared, witless with terror, perhaps, or just numb. “Listen to me, pretty girl. The dog will take you, I'll hold them. You run, you stay alive, and I will find you. I promise.”

Her mouth worked for a moment. Her skin was so soft. What was she doing tangled up in this?

“I hate you,” she whispered under the ultrasonic thrills. Close now, the net tightening, but there was a hole in it and he was about to send her through it. The dog was fast, and one sidhe with a bow and a habit of hunting could make merry hob of a pursuit.

With a little luck, that is.

“I hate you,” she repeated, and sense flooded her dark-blue eyes. “
I remember what you did
!” Her voice was a husk of itself, broken into pieces.

He shook his hair back, stared down at her. “You can't,” he told her, “hate me any more than I hate myself, Robin Ragged.” He beckoned the hound, who pressed close, shivering and sweating: Crenn lifted her by the waist, so close he could smell the sunlight in her hair. She grabbed at fur, righted herself, and he'd be damned if the beast didn't bulk up a little, its legs thickening to carry her weight. “Now run. I'll find you later.”

“I'll kill you,” she informed him, with the utter calm of despair. “I will rip your heart out, Alastair Crenn.”

Looking forward to it, pretty girl
. He stepped aside, and the dog jetted forward, a coppergold blur.

Crenn scooped his bow up, closed his eyes, and listened.

Hoofbeats. Whistling. The pads of Unwinter's hounds, a frantic baying. The receding soft
thump-thump
of Pepperbuckle's feet. And, to top it all off, a clamor of mortal voices. The carnival folk were beginning to wake to strangeness in their midst.

“Time to hunt,” he murmured, and drew another arrow from the quiver by touch. He held it loosely nocked, and ran toward the noise.

G
ray highway ribboned over tawny hills touched with dusty green smears of sagebrush clinging to any scrap of moisture it could find, heat-haze shimmering above sandy slope and concrete alike. The morning sun was a brazen coin, hanging above a bleached horizon as if it intended to stay in that spot forever, a bright nail to hang an endless weary day upon. The chill of a desert night whisked itself away, an escaping guest.

Cars shimmered in the middle distance, announced their presence with a faint drone, and passed with a glare and blare of engine and tire-friction. Most didn't stop, even though two signs, each leaning somewhere between ten and twenty-three degrees away from true, proclaimed
LAST GAS FOR
80
MI
.

An ancient pair of gas pumps squatted under a rusting roof; they and the convenience store keeping watch over them had last been refurbished around twenty years ago. Tinny country music blatted from old loudspeakers on listing poles, the tired breeze dragged shackles made of paper cups, glittering dust, and a dry skunky whiff of weedsmoke through umber shade and gold-treacle sunshine.

A burst of static cut through the music just as the thin slice of shade on the north side of the building rippled. A single point of brilliance, lost in the glare of day, dilated, and there was a flutter of russet, of indigo, of cream and black velvet.

One moment empty, the next, full; a large dog winked into being a split second before a slim female shape appeared, clinging to the canine's back as the Veil between real and more-than-real flexed. The dog staggered, its proud head hanging low, and slumped against the building. The girl slid from its broad back—the thing was
huge
—and her hair was a coppergold gleam, firing even in the shade. Tattered black velvet clung to her, swirling as it struggled to keep up with the transition, the hood not quite covering her bright, chopped-close curls. She heaved, dryly, a cricketwhisper cough under the tinpan cowboy beat.

Robin Ragged's stomach cramped, unhappy with the seawater she'd swallowed
and
the butter she'd filched. The fuel from milkfat had already worn off, and her throat was on fire again. Her hands spread against dusty grit, there was a simmering reek from around the corner of the building that shouted
Dumpster
, and the music was a tinkling ballad about mothers not letting their children grow up to be cowboys.

Good advice, maybe. But you had to grow up to be something, even if you were a Half, mortal and sidhe in equal measure. It was her mortal part that had trouble blinking through the Veil like this. It was much better to use a proper entrance, or some place where the lands of the free sidhe overlapped, rubbing through what mortals called “real” like a needle dragged along paper. Creasing, not quite breaking, almost-visible.

Pepperbuckle made a low, unhappy noise. The dog had carried her away from the nighttime carnival, hauling her through folds and pockets, light and shade pressing against Robin's closed eyes in strobe flashes. He'd be weary. They'd run past dawn, the silver huntwhistles further and further behind them.

Like any close escape, it made for nausea.

Concentrate. Four in, four out.
The discipline of breath returned. A lifetime's worth of habit helped—if you couldn't breathe, you couldn't sing, and the song was her only defense.

She might have broken her voice, though, by screaming with shusweed juice still coating her throat. The prospect was enough to bring a cold sweat out all over her, even though it was a scorching midmorning outside the small shade where she and Pepperbuckle cowered.

Where are we?

She sniffed, gulping down mortal air full of exhaust and the dry nasal rasp of baking metal and sand. A whiff of something green and leather-tough—sagebrush? No hint of anything sidhe except her and the dog, his sides heaving under glossy, red-tipped golden fur. His fine tail drooped a bit, and he eyed her sidelong, his irises now a brighter blue and the pupils uneven ovoids. It gave his gaze an uncanny quality.

He hadn't left her behind. In for a penny, in for a pound, and all the old clichés. There was the large unsound of wind, and a drone that could have been traffic in the very far distance.

The cowboy ballad wound down, and another song started. Someone was standing by her man. A wheezing noise was an ancient air-conditioning unit on the roof.

Robin shuddered. She pushed herself upright, making her knees unbend because there was no other choice. Pepperbuckle was depending on her, and while the mortal sun was up, they were safe enough from Unwinter's hunt.

It was some faint comfort that Summer would think Robin still trapped or dead, and wouldn't be looking for her.

Don't think about that.
Her lips cracked as she parted them. She wanted to say Pepperbuckle's name, stopped herself. She had to shepherd her voice carefully. No more raving at that treacherous bastard Crenn when she had the breath to permit it, while the wind and the Veil snatched the curses from her lips as soon as she uttered them.

You can't hate me any more than I hate myself,
he'd informed her, calmly enough, before stepping back so Pepperbuckle could bear her away. Why had he bothered to save her, after he'd delivered her to Summer's not-so-tender mercies?

Had he also betrayed Gallow? It was entirely likely. Not that it mattered, Unwinter's poison had most likely finished off her dead sister's husband.

Daisy.
Shining surfaces holding broken reflections danced inside her head. Her sister's teeth broken stumps, safety glass caught in corpsetangled hair…

Don't think about that either.
Her head throbbed.

She uncurled, one arm a bar across her midriff to hold her aching belly in. The night was a whirl of impressions, everything inside her skull fracturing like broken—

Mirrors?

She shook her head, violently.
Glass
, like broken
glass
. That word wasn't as troubling as the other, the
m-
word, the terrifying idea of a reflection lurching for her while it wheezed, and choked, and cracked a leather belt in its bloody, too-big hands.

Robin's shoulder struck something solid, jolting her back into herself. She glanced around wildly, her shorn hair whipping—it stood out around her head now, a halo of coppery cowlicks. The gold hoops in her ears swung, tapping her cheeks, and she forced herself to straighten again.

She'd fetch up against the prefabricated concrete wall, either painted a dingy yellow or simply sandblasted to that color. The angle of the shade and the taste of the air said
morning
, and it was going to be a hot day. Pepperbuckle sat down, his sides heaving as he panted and his teeth gleamed bright-white. The scrubland here was full of small, empty hills, and if she peered around the corner she could see ancient cracked pavement and the two gas pumps.

A little
ding
sounded, and her breath stopped as a lean dark-haired mortal boy with a certain sullen handsomeness to his sharp face stepped out into the sun. He hunched his shoulders, lit a cigarette, and ambled for the pumps. A red polyester vest proclaimed him as an employee of H
APPY
H
ARRY'S
S
TOP 'N'
S
IP
. Harry was apparently a cartoon beaver, even though such an animal had very likely never been sighted in this part of the country, let alone one wearing a yellow hat and a wide, unsettling bucktooth grin.

Robin exhaled softly. Pumps meant a convenience store. They would have a refrigerator. Very likely, there was milk. The burning in her throat increased a notch as she contemplated this.

She glanced at Pepperbuckle, who hauled himself up wearily and followed as she edged for the back of the building.

She didn't think using the front door would be wise.