Chapter Thirty-Nine
Thirty-Nine
Duncan gaped, paralyzed in the cold wrap of sudden nightmare, the serpent hiss of rain.
Like some awful price exacted for the murder of Rachel—Nimble Shanks Annie, right there before him, close enough to touch, clutching suddenly at her throat.
Splattering of lifeblood over her frantically gripping fingers.
Her eyes clawed after his, she tilted on her feet.
Tried to say something. More blood bubbled out over her lips, she coughed it up, choked on it, staggered and fell.
It was only then he saw the arrow.
Black, somehow viscous looking along its edges, jutting a handbreadth out of her throat, the spike that stopped her hand clapping flat to the wound it had made.
As her legs tangled and folded, as she tottered and tilted and fell, he saw the rest of it, more than two feet of the same black, drip-spined greasy shaft protruding from the back of her neck.
She was dead before she hit the sodden ground, eyes staring into nothing, while Duncan, numb in nightmare, went right on gaping at what had been done.
Arthur to his credit, was faster to react.
“Archers!” In the same moment he yelled, he swung—Duncan would later realize—to face the direction the back of the shaft had pointed.
Something flitted between trees. Arthur threw up the carbine, snapped off a shot. No sooner loosed than on to the next—work the bolt, eject, combat rapid, mad-minute-drill style. The carbine barrel tracked left an inch. He fired again. Duncan thought the flitting figure maybe stumbled, but—
Standard jacketed load—lead and cupronickel, trace iron content in the jacket at best. It would punch a hole right through the Huldu, if it hit square.
And Fae flesh, steeped in Forest magic, would heal the wound back up in minutes or less.
Duncan tore the McCulloch from its sheath, pumped a shell into the chamber.
Behind him, Hardy, still on his knees, stared in transfixed horror at the shaft through the witch’s neck.
His nightmare from Mons, come calling after all those years, like the death he eluded in the trenches and must have thought put behind.
Duncan could almost feel sorry for the man.
Hardy’s voice scaled to a cry, almost ecstatic in its terror.
“Ohhh, Christ! They’re coming!”
Duncan fired into the trees and rain, three shells on general principles, roughly where the flitting shadow had gone. He’d brought no Kegg bombs, and against this foe, the Webleys were useless, even the dumdum rounds could only gouge and stagger…
“Fall back!” he bellowed. “Arthur! Get to the sheds! We’ve no chance here!”
“I hear you!” Cool, clipped, not looking round. Eyes still on the trees, carbine cuddled tight to his cheek. “That’s a lot of open ground!”
“We’ve no fucking choice!”
Another black shaft came out of the woods, slicked through the air between them. Arthur tracked it, fired back.
“Get going!” he yelled.
Duncan spared one more look for Nimble Shanks Annie, her violated throat and bloodied mouth, black in the low light, her shocked open staring eyes.
He took the fuel and fury it gave him, then he was moving, weaving, out across the brush-grown, rain-flogged open spaces of the munitions plant.
The nearest built structure was over a hundred yards off, a pair of long, low storage sheds he’d spotted when they first arrived at the fringes of the woods.
Too far off, if the archers wanted them. If the Fae wanted to make a quick end of things.
Closer in—there!—a decayed flat wagon, rusted to the tracks that led across the site, about halfway to the sheds.
Duncan clipped his course, darted for the wagon, flung himself into the scant cover it offered, twisted about to see what had happened to the others.
Hardy was only a few dozen yards behind him, but groggy and stumbling.
Arthur brought up the rear, still in cool, sharpshooter command, turning every few seconds to scan for targets.
As Duncan watched, evidently he saw one.
He dropped to one knee, the carbine snapped up.
Thin crack of the bullet on its way. Up again and moving.
“Arthur!”
The sharpshooter hooked a look, saw him, changed course. Hardy came blundering with. Last few yards…
Arthur spun and dropped again, cracked out another rapid-fire pair of shots, shoot-strip-the-bolt-shoot.
An arrow shaft came hissing out of the rain-filled gloom, went right over his head.
Punched Hardy in the back, hard enough to throw him forward to his knees, came out his chest at sternum height.
Arthur went over backward on his arse with the shock of the near miss.
Duncan tore the remaining Webley from his pocket, charged out of cover firing, emptied the gun into the tree line, threw it away.
Hardy crawled about on hands and knees, coughing blood.
Duncan darted past him, grabbed Arthur under the arms, hauled the sharpshooter backward toward cover.
They collapsed together in the lee of the flat wagon, hunkered down, shoulders to the iron bogie.
“Thanks, man!” Arthur, panting. He still had the Lee-Enfield in his right hand, had never let it go when he fell. “I owe you one.”
“On the house.” Duncan unsheathed the McCulloch from his back. Inched an eye round the cold, rain-beaded iron molding of the bogies, scanned the tree line for movement. “We’re in luck. They’re not coming out to play just yet.”
Arthur recovered a two-handed grip on the carbine, held it to his chest like a lover. “Swear I scored hits at least a couple of times.”
“Aye, you probably did. Jacketed load, no iron. You’ll stagger them, but it won’t do much more than that.”
The sharpshooter grimaced. “Good to know.”
A dozen yards out, all the while, Hardy made choking, mewling, pleading noises—from the sound of it, elf shot through the lungs, he was going to be a while dying. The two men listened to it for a minute, recall of a hundred deaths on the wire, like barbs dragging embedded in the brain.
Arthur slanted Duncan a look. Duncan hesitated. Nodded.
Arthur worked the bolt on the Lee-Enfield—fresh brass gleam of the shell as it jumped out—listened a moment with bowed head, for position. Then he swung up over the top of the flat wagon, pulled the carbine in to his cheek, and fired.
Flat crack of the single shot in the rain, across the deserted nighttime spaces of the munitions plant.
Hardy fell silent.
Arthur dropped back into cover, glanced at Duncan again, and nodded.
And there goes my best chance of finding Mimi and her mother.
Absently, he checked the load on the trench gun, caught the two shells in his cupped hand as they popped out. Fed them mechanically back in through the McCulloch’s receiver.
Assuming either of us live that long.
He could feel the tilt of the moment, the slow sinking sense of everything sliding from his grasp, falling to pieces, falling away.
He stared out across the remaining half mile of abandoned industrial plant that separated them from the gates and escape in the ambulance.
Impossible to cross that ground in one piece with the Huldu in pursuit.
One way or another, this was it.
At least you won’t die in the fucking Forest.
“How many you reckon?” the sharpshooter asked him quietly.
“Archers?” Duncan held down a shudder, frowned into memory. “Not many. Two or three, maybe? They’re not common. It’s something they learned from us, back in the Neolithic, and they haven’t handled it all that well.”
Arthur grunted. “Wasn’t my impression. They killed the witch first, for safety. They spiked Hardy and left him for bait in the open. They know what they’re doing.”
“Not what I meant.” Duncan was in no mood to explain. “Listen, the damage you can do with that carbine is limited, and they’ll heal fast from it. You reckon you can make head shots?”
The sharpshooter gave him a ragged grin. “Pale-as-fish-belly bastards like that? Ask me for something difficult.”
“Right. So you hang dark, cling to cover as much as you can, put out eyes.” Duncan patted the McCulloch. “I’ll handle the closer-in stuff.”
He let himself settle against the molded iron of the wagon bogie.
Tugged the iron chain from around his collar by inches, laid it in a coil within easy reach.
He laid out the sgian dubh next to it. Rain speckled and splattered them both.
Breathe deep, compose yourself. The jolting change of gear—killing Huldu now, not men.
He let the banked, familiar fires of his rage come on, comforting as the fireside childhood memories he’d never been given the chance to make. He held the McCulloch across his chest.
—
They didn’t have to wait long.
Across the brush they came, three pallid, hurrying figures—two Huldu scouts and the taller, more angular form of an archer behind.
Duncan snarled a silent grin. It was the old hunting party standard, a formation so ingrained and traditional among the Fae that seeing it felt almost like a reunion with some old school bully—one you now knew how to handle perfectly.
He turned his head to Arthur, whispered barely louder than the hissing of the rain. “Leave these to me. There’ll be plenty of work for you soon enough.”
The scouts wore their cloaks dulled down to something that glinted like the dark kaleidoscopic swirl of oil on water. Their fangs and talons were combat grown, anticipatory. Nothing he hadn’t seen or killed before, but the archer…