How the vehicle had bridged the distance so quickly I did not know. An elegant black coach pulled by four white horses rolled to a stop beside us. The horses had a polished sheen, like pearl. The first pair stamped, hooves striking sparks from the obsidian pavement, while the second pair waited patiently in their traces.
The coachman was a burly man wearing a perfectly ordinary wool greatcoat. He wore his short blond hair in the lime-whitened spikes traditional to Celtic warriors in the ancient days when the Romans with their land empire and the Phoenicians with their sea trade fought to a standstill, and the barbaric Celts shifted allegiance depending on what benefited them the most. Seeing me, he did not smile, but the corners of his eyes crinkled as with an inward chuckle. He tapped two fingers to his forehead in greeting.
A figure swung down from the back. I recognized the tall, broad-shouldered eru with skin the color of tar, her third eye ablaze with a sapphire brilliance, her wings a swirl of smoke. Power roiled in her like a storm about to burst free. I stepped between her and Bee as if I could fend off the brunt of the blow. My blade shone like a torch, its hilt turned to ice against my palm.
“Let it be,” said the coachman to the eru. “We are here for Tara Bell’s child, not for the other one.”
She settled back, wingtips fluttering as if a wind spun off them. I swallowed; my ears popped; the wind died.
“Greetings, Cousin,” the eru said. “The master has sent us to fetch you.”
Such a wave of despair washed through me that my strength failed. I stared at the two creatures I had first met in the guise of a humble coachman and a humble footman. Bee grasped my hand. Hers was cold.
I spoke in pleading whine I did not like but could not help. “We just want to go home.”
The splendor of her third eye sparked rays of light along the surface of the black road. “The master has summoned you.”
“Help her return to the other side, and I’ll give you no trouble,” I said desperately.
The coachman’s lips curved in a wry, weary smile.
“You will give us no trouble regardless, Cousin,” said the eru, not in anger but in sorrow. “You are bound, as we are bound. Get in the coach. Both you and the serpent. We have a long way to travel. The master is not patient.”
“Indeed, he is not,” said the coachman with a glance skyward as the crow flew. “We outraced the storm of his anger. Now it is time for you to take shelter.”
Over the hills boiled a black wrath of clouds. In the cloud’s heart, lightning writhed like so many coiling incandescent snakes. Its power hummed in my bones and my blood like a fever. The crow sped toward the storm as if to welcome it.
A horn wept from the walls as the herding eru chased down the last of their charges, and the kneeling eru broke free and fled.
My knees were turning to jelly. “Blessed Tanit. If we run, that storm will destroy us. If we go with them, you’ll be killed.”
“One thing at a time,” said Bee with astonishing calm as her hand tightened on mine. “Right now, our best chance is the coach.”
The eru opened the door and swung down the steps with the ease of practice. I sheathed my sword, climbed in, and sank onto the forward seat, into the same place I had sat when I traveled in this coach with Andevai.
Bee sat down opposite, her knees shoved against mine. “Don’t give up hope, Cat.”
The door closed. With a crack of the whip and a shout of “Ha-roo! Ha-roo!” the coachman got the horses moving. We turned in a sweep, and the coach lurched as the eru jumped on behind. We picked up speed. No coach in the mortal world ever ran so smoothly and so fast.
A blast of wind shook the coach. The shaking and shuddering pitched us off our seats. The coach bounced up, thudded down, pitched halfway over, righted itself. Like a ship caught in a typhoon, it rolled and yawed. We clung to each other as the gale roared around us with a howl so loud I saw Bee’s lips moving but could not hear a single word, nothing except the frightful mocking caws of a murder of crows flocking around us as if their flight were the wind.
Unseen claws squeezed my heart. If I did not obey, the master would crush me.
Terror, like grief, can make you numb. But when the first edge passes, as the storm gusts on and the coach settles, it can also make you angry. For who wishes to be subject to terror?
We struggled up to sit. After the battering we had taken, I was grateful the cushions were so soft. We caught our breaths.
“That puts Papa’s temper tantrums into perspective, does it not?” said Bee with a gaunt smile.
I looked at the two doors, the one to my right which we sat up against, and the other door, closed and shuttered, by which Andevai had sat on the first journey we had made together. He had warned me never to open the other door, but when he had said that, he had meant the door to my right, the one we had just used to enter the coach.
I grinned. “This coach is a passageway between the worlds. One door leads into the spirit world. But that one leads back to our world. We’ll jump out and run for it.”
I scooted over to the other door. Sliding my sword half out of its sheath, I sliced a stinging, shallow cut in my right hand. I grasped the latch, smeared blood on it, and pushed down.
The latch bit me.
I yelped, jerking back my arm. Three tiny puncture wounds in the back of my hand prickled red with my blood. The latch glowered, having acquired a dour, brassy gremlin face as wide as my hand and as thin as a finger. Incisors sparked as if tipped with diamond. A thread of a tongue licked along the brass, and my blood vanished.