The night was cold and the moon was bright.
A girl who should have been asleep perched by the window of the attic of an old house in a little town that few knew by name. She and a boy—her cousin—looked out at a world bathed in long shadows and searched for signs of life.
"What time is it?" whispered Elias, the boy.
"It's past the witching hour," Jessamine whispered back. "Woe betide ye mortals who remain awake this eve."
"Aww," he whined, "don't say it like that. You know how I get."
"You've got nothing to worry about," she asserted. "We're awake because we want to be, not because we're too afraid to sleep. There's nothing out there in the dark that can bother us."
"What about everyone else?" he inquired.
"Don't be silly," she scolded. "They're all asleep. Have been for ages. You're the only one who could worry them tonight."
Elias laughed inconclusively. He had always been skittish, especially around talk of ghosts and goblins, which made it that much funnier to the girl that his was the town with Halloween traditions so important that her parents shipped her back here every year. Some things were worth going home for, they said, even if they'd moved so far away.
The two of them would stay up late the evening before, watching night fall over the valley. Then, in the morning, they would put on costumes and head into town, returning only after midnight had come and gone again.
"I think we should follow their lead," the girl encouraged. "We've got a long day ahead of us. Do you think the haunted house will be as scary as last year's?"
"I hope not," he groaned. "This year's is at Old Man Wexler's. It's a scary old bear of a house to begin with."
Jessamine rubbed her hands together in a showy display of delighted anticipation. She was a few years older than her cousin, a fact she frequently lorded over him, and at this point she wasn't sure which she enjoyed more: her fright or Elias's. The thrill of a good scare was better than boys. Better than most boys, anyway.
"Did you hear that?" she asked, a sudden hush coming over her.
"Don't do that," he grumbled. "I mean it."
The fire of Elias's indignation went out when he noticed his cousin's white knuckles on the windowsill.
There it came, riding the shiver down his spine. Somewhere, off in the night, hounds were baying. She beckoned him closer, but he moved away, going further and further until the back of his knees bent against the bedstead, toppling him into the comforter.
"It's a pack of wild dogs," he stammered. "Must be. We get those sometimes."
"I've never heard wild dogs sound like that," she countered.
Jessamine's breath quickened as she caught sight of a small figure, ghostly and running on all fours like an animal, going across the back yard. It was gone quick as a blink. She couldn't be quite sure she'd seen it at all, except that she was sure that she had. One of the dogs, perhaps? But there had been many howling creatures and the figure was alone.
"I'm going to go out and have a look," she said.
"The hell you are!" he swore. "I'm not going anywhere except back to my bedroom. There isn't anything out there right now you'd want to see that won't be there in the morning. You're the one who said we ought to be sleeping, so let's go to sleep."
She turned away from the window and caught sight of her cousin. The poor boy was hiding behind a threadbare pillow on the moth-eaten chaise. Pity won out over curiosity.
"All right," she sighed. "You win. Let's get some sleep so we can be bright-eyed in the morning. Get out."
Elias didn't need a second warning. He was down the ladder like a shot, closing the hatch behind him, leaving Jessamine alone in the attic, her fortress away from home.
What did she want with some wild animal, anyway? If it was something else, wouldn't it be there in the morning like he said? Unless it were the sort of thing that vanished at the crest of dawn, but that was just foolishness. Jessamine put it out of her mind and put on her pajamas.
Sleep came easily, but would not last. Gray tendrils of earliest morning tickled the attic window when Jessamine's eyes flicked open, but she could not will them closed again. That ghostly figure tugged at her.
She put on sensible trousers and a flannel overshirt, making pains to lower the ladder into the hall below without so much as a squeak. Elias was snoring loudly enough to be heard three doors away, but she still left on tiptoe, carrying her boots down the carpeted stairs.
By the time she reached the kitchen, she was free. If no one had woken yet, they would not rouse until proper morning.
Frost on the windows instructed her outer layer: wool mittens, cap, scarf, and a heavy barn coat that matched her fur-lined boots. Tonight, in costume, she would brave the cold, but this morning she would gladly stave it off by all means available. Even with such preparations, the dry air bit at her eyes when she stepped outside.
Blinking away tears, she surveyed the rolling landscape. Elias's family lived on the outskirts of town. Their back yard merged seamlessly with the vanishing hills of the surrounding country, dotted here and there with bone-white copses of winter-worn trees and, in the fading distance, blue mountains with snowy crowns. A low, half-rotted fence marked the municipal boundary of their property, but it offered no practical resistance to trespass, whether against an adult or even a reasonably-determined child.
Or, for that matter, against a pack of wild hounds.
She dismissed those concerning implications. Whatever the running figure was, it had been inside the fence when she saw it, so there was nothing to be done. There were only a few places to hide. She checked the sheds first, one full of hand tools and a timeworn workbench, one stacked with wheelbarrows, lawnmowers, and other machinery used to maintain the property. Neither was presently inhabited by anything animate, which left only the barn.
The land's original tenants had built it for animals, but the last of the cattle had died or been sold off long before the children were born. The family used it as a repository for junk and the occasional indoor-outdoor campout. Somehow, it retained its essential barn-ness, the smells of dirt and timber, its loft piled high with the remnants of old and mossy hay. The summers of her youth were filled with afternoons spent roughhousing among those stalls and rafters.
In the pale almost-dawn, that old hulk was inexplicably ominous. Her hands shook as she lifted the crossbar on the broad double doors. They creaked as she swung them open, welcoming her inside, and creaked again as she closed them behind her, shutting her in with the dark and silence. She cursed under her breath, wishing she'd brought a flashlight, but her vision would soon adjust. Besides, a little daylight already slipped in around the cracks of the shutters and it would only grow brighter.
The unknown made her toes squirm, urging her onwards, but something, some inner sense, kept her still, made her stop and listen. There it was, almost too faint to discern: the rising-falling sound of breathing. She worried her mind was playing ventriloquist, but no, her own breath was caught, turning slowly to poison in her lungs.
She scanned each stall for signs of life, but they were bare and empty. Nothing hid inside the old, broken barrels. Nothing lay beneath the overturned and wheelless wagon. Not even mice had made a home in the musty bales of long-forgotten hay, preferring less drafty climes. That left only one proverbial stone unturned: the loft.
On her way by, she opened the eastern shutters, flooding the barn with new light, but it seemed less to illuminate her surroundings and more to cast their shadows in darker relief. Whatever was up there did not obviously stir at the intrusion, so she paused at the foot of the ladder to check if she could still hear that soft sound of life. She could.
Step by steady step, she climbed up to the loft, where her ghostly figure waited. One terror replaced another as unknown became known and a terror in the night became a naked little girl. She was exceptionally pale, all white and pink but for the shaggy shock of orange hair on her head, and sprawled haphazardly among a disorderly pile of old dry grasses, chest barely moving with every short breath, limbs caked with dirt.
Jessamine dropped to her knees and clasped the girl by her shoulder. It was ice cold. She shucked off outerwear in a rush, wrapping the girl's body in her barn coat, slipping her extremities into the mittens and cap, and wrapping the scarf around her muddy feet.
The girl's eyes fluttered open. A slight smile danced across her lips.
Suddenly, everything in Jessamine's world made more sense than it had three seconds before, but she couldn't tell you why or how.
"Who are you? What are you doing here?" Jessamine whispered.
"I am she who ravaged Cadmus's city," the girl said. "I am daughter to Echidna, dyed in stone, discarded among the unreachable stars. I am here to rout the rising dark. It is my time."
Her voice was husky and rough, like some desert-dweller gone too long without water.
"You're not making any sense," Jessamine urged. "Did you run away from home? Did someone hurt you?"
"No, child," said the girl, as if Jessamine were not twice her age. "I am weak from the night, but I am how I was born and where I need to be. I need your help, Jessamine Less."
Her heart froze.
"How do you know my name?" she demanded.
The girl's eyes fluttered closed again as a shiver wracked her body.
"Hold on," Jessamine pleaded. "I'll go get my aunt and uncle."
"No!" hissed the girl through clenched lips. "They cannot know. Only your cousin."
"Ellie? How?" she stuttered.
The girl passed into true unconsciousness. There would be no reply.
The mother inside Jessamine overruled the maiden. She laid the girl among the reeds and was down the ladder and out the barn doors, quick as her feet would carry her. The sun crested the hills and submerged the land in a golden wave, but she had no time for warmth or beauty.
Elias waited for her in the kitchen, looking haggard and raccoon-eyed.
"Where've you been?" he whimpered. "I woke up and the attic was open and you were gone!"
"Just the man I needed," Jessamine said with genuine relief. "I need you to go upstairs and get some warm blankets, quickly."
"What?" he faltered. "Why do you need blankets?"
"Do you remember last night when I thought I saw something?" she questioned him.
"Jessie," he growled.
"Ellie," she growled back. "I really did see something. She needs our help."
Jessamine watched confusion overwhelm him, this latest detail pushing him fully off balance.
"Go!" she shrilly insisted.
Leaning into his animal instinct to obey when cornered sat poorly in the pit of her stomach, but she couldn't afford not to take advantage of the opportunity it provided. Thankfully, he scampered up the stairs at this last prodding, so she wouldn't have to press any harder.
"Don't wake your parents!" she added, as quietly as she could manage.
She rummaged through the cupboards until she found a box of chicken broth and set it to heating on the stove. By the time Elias returned, laden with blankets, she'd funneled the hot broth into an insulated bottle and was ready to head back out.
The sun had crossed the treetops, spreading a coal-black shadow at the foot of the barn that beckoned them inside. Elias's attention jerked across the yard, back to the house, up to the gable, and around again, but Jessamine's focus was razor sharp and she did not let him stray from her lead. She climbed into the loft first. He passed the blankets up to her, but hesitated at the foot of the ladder.
"All right if I come up?" he asked.
She did not immediately answer. Now that the initial rush of action was fading, she would be glad to have her outer garments back, but the girl's comfort and safety came first. She eased her back out of her temporary wrap and swaddled her in the blankets before she put everything but the mittens and muddy scarf back on.
"Okay," she called down.
Elias popped up over the edge of the loft.
"Who is she?" he whispered.
"I don't know," Jessamine admitted. "But I think she was what I saw last night. She took shelter in the barn. Poor thing was barely alive when I found her this morning. I don't know what would have happened if I hadn't."
She could make an educated guess, but she didn't want to say it out loud.
The girl opened her eyes.
"Jessamine Less," she husked, "your kindness is much appreciated. The hounds were fiercer than I remembered. I fear I have been made a fool."
"Hush," Jessamine cooed. "Here, drink some of this. It'll make you feel better."
She propped the bottle of broth up to the girl's lips, which parted gratefully.
"Be careful; it's hot."
The girl did not seem to mind. She tipped back her head, urging more of the liquid into her mouth, drinking it in huge, animal slurps. Jessamine thought she saw a feral glint in the girl's eyes as she glut herself, but then it was gone as quickly as the broth. Sighing contentedly, she licked her lips and began to stir beneath the blankets, loosening their grip and sitting up with her own strength.
Elias so far had done little but stare, but now he asked: "What's your name?"
"I have many," the girl answered, "but you may call me Thusia."
"Thusia," he repeated, rolling it around on his tongue. "That's a strange name. Not from around here?"
"No," she agreed, "but here is where I need to be."
"You said that before," Jessamine remarked. "What did you mean? Why do you need my help?"
"Not just yours, child," Thusia corrected. "You are not ready to carry this burden alone; I suspect I will need you both before the day is through. There is a place I must go, but without your aid I will never reach it. The hounds dog my way."
"Where do you need to go?" asked Elias.
"The White Stag," said Thusia.
Elias scratched his head.
"You mean Chalk Hill?" he suggested. "That's on the other side of the valley."
"Yes, that is what you call it," said Thusia.
"I always thought it was a horse," he said.
"A horse with antlers?" Jessamine quipped.
He ignored her.
"Why do you need to go there?" he asked.
"You will see when I arrive," she replied.
"That's rather cryptic," said Jessamine. "You can't tell us any more? And what about these hounds you keep mentioning? Are they what I heard last night?"
"I expect you did," said Thusia, "for they were hot on my trail. Had I not crossed the barrier, they might have caught me. All would have been lost before it could begin."
Surely she couldn't mean the broken-down fence.
"That old thing?" echoed Elias, out loud.
"There is power in old things," said Thusia. "Power that even the dark cannot shake. I am sorry that I cannot tell you more. Can you trust me, even so?"
"I can," said Elias, a little too quickly.
Jessamine stared into Thusia's eyes. They were an exceptionally warm brown—she might even call them orange, but that didn't make any sense. Equally strange, the pupils seemed almost to come to points at their top and bottom. She must be imagining things, seeing phantoms in the dim light of the barn. However weird and entrancing they were, she could perceive no deceit or cause for doubt within their endless depths.
"What do we need to do?" she asked.
"Take me to Chalk Hill," said Thusia. "Get me there by midnight. That is all."
"That can't be all," Jessamine observed. "What about the hounds?"
"The journey will not lack for peril," Thusia agreed.
Any further explanation she might have offered was interrupted by the thunderous rumble of a motorcycle engine outside the barn.
"Who could that possibly be at this hour?" Jessamine asked no one in particular.
"Mum'll be looking for us," said Elias. "We ought to go inside."
He was right. An unexpected visitor was more than likely bearing bad news, which would only be made worse news if she went to fetch them and found the attic empty.
"Will you be okay waiting here a little while?" she asked Thusia.
"Why not come in?" asked Elias.
"It would not be appropriate," Thusia responded before Jessamine could. "This task is to concern you and your cousin alone and not your parents, however kind they are. I will be fine here."
"All right," he conceded, glumly.
He hopped right down the ladder, but Thusia caught Jessamine by the arm before she could follow, slipping halfway out the blankets as she did, heedless of the cold air or her naked skin.
"Do not trust the rider," she warned. Her gravelly tone held none of the mirth or lightness with which she had calmed Elias. "But do not fear him. He cannot harm you."
Jessamine could only nod. It made no sense, but neither did any of this. She feared that she was going to have to get comfortable with things not making sense if they were going to get through the day.
Thusia released her with a bitter smile. She went after her cousin.
////
The visitor stood in their living room. He was a tall, gangly man with deep-set eyes and drooping jowls, off which hung a bushy black beard, struck through with a slash of gray. He wore biker's leathers head to toe and a thick fur-lined collar. Elias's father, Alan, stood with him, making conversation, while Elias's mother, Rennie, worked in the kitchen, making breakfast for Rebecca, Elias's baby sister.
"Where have you two been?" asked Aunt Rennie, preemptively exasperated. "I was just about to send out a search party; we have a guest."
"We were feeling a bit restless," Jessamine lied, "so we went for a quick walk around the yard."
If Rennie had reason to doubt her explanation, she did not show it.
"Get on through to the living room and keep your Uncle company," she commanded. "You too, Elias."
"Kids! You're up!" exclaimed Uncle Alan as they entered.
Alan was generally a bit too chipper for Jessamine's taste, especially this early in the morning, but she was too preoccupied by their uninvited company to let it bother her.
"This is Mr. Epps from the Fish and Wildlife Service," he announced.
"Lyle Epps," the man barked.
He extended a broad, gloved hand to Elias, who shook it eagerly, always happy to be included in adult formalities.
Jessamine stood too far away from the man for him to comfortably shake her hand, so he did not offer the courtesy. Fine by her. While he and Elias got acquainted, she spied out the front window of the house: a big, brutish motorcycle sat in the driveway, all sleek chrome pipes and garish gold-painted panels. If Epps had come in on that, that made him a rider, didn't it?
"What can we do for you, Mr. Epps?" she asked, barely keeping the bile out of her tone.
The fur-clad man licked his lips and cleared his throat.
"Yes, I was just getting to that," he grunted. "We've had reports of, ah, wild foxes in the area. Do you have any livestock, sir?"
"No, we don't," said Uncle Alan.
"That makes you a little, ah, safer," said Epps, "but that doesn't mean they won't cut through your property. Has anyone seen or heard anything in the last few nights?"
"We heard some wild dogs, last night," chirped Elias.
He was so helpful that she could just kick him.
Epps' dark eyes flashed as he asked: "Is that right, miss?"
"Wild dogs, yes," she confirmed through gritted teeth. "Around midnight. But they weren't foxes."
"Are you absolutely certain?" Epps persisted. "Foxes and dogs don't sound all that different."
No, she wasn't certain, but she had the sense that to say otherwise was to play into his hands. So she lied. Again. She would try not to make it a habit.
"I'm sure," she insisted. "No foxes on our property."
"What's all this about?" asked Aunt Rennie, barreling into the living room with the baby on her hip.
"Nothing to worry about, dear," said Uncle Alan. "Wild foxes in the area, apparently."
He took the baby from her. She giggled when he spun her up into the air and settled her on his shoulders.
"That's right, ma'am," said Epps. "Just following, ah, procedure. Protocol and all that."
The rider's eyes lingered overlong on Jessamine, as if he hoped to pry a different answer from her.
"I'm sorry we couldn't be of more assistance," Jessamine declared with as much finality as she could muster without broaching outright impertinence.
"That's all right, miss," he said.
She was pretty sure he didn't mean it, but he broke his prodding stare, letting his eyes fall on each of them and last on the baby.
"I'm afraid I must be going," he said. "We have a fox hunt on, after all. If you see or hear anything, please, ah, call your local office. Good day."
Epps turned on his heel and was out the door. The beastly bellow of his motorcycle marked his passing, a black rider on a chrome-plated steed, down the drive and gone.
Even Uncle Alan had been a bit unnerved by Epps's probing, but a few cheery giggles from Rebecca drove all the worries out of his mind. Aunt Rennie was more pensive, but then she always was.
"How about some breakfast for the rest of us?" she asked.
"We'll be right in," said Jessamine, taking Elias by the arm.
The minute his parents were out of the room, she punched him in that arm, hard.
"Ouch!" he squealed. "What for?"
"For telling him about the dogs!" she explained.
She'd said it as if it was the most obvious thing in the world, but Elias's face sagged from surprised and hurt to confused and hurt, so it must not have been.
"The hounds," she said, by way of further explanation.
"Hounds?" he sputtered. "What? Wait. You aren't thinking what we heard were Thusia's hounds, do you?"
"Light dawns on Marblehead," she sneered.
"But then," he said, finally connecting the dots, "you aren't thinking that Mr. Epps is connected to Thusia, are you?"
"That is exactly what I'm thinking," she exclaimed.
Elias blanched. For a second she regretted being harsh to him.
"Look," she said, "I don't think we have anything to worry about, for now. But we need to decide what to do with Thusia, just in case he comes sniffing around again."
Her cousin nodded furiously, but he seemed to have gone temporarily mute.
"How about this," she continued. "We're planning to go into town, anyway, yeah? What better way to hide someone than in a crowd of people? Let's just take her with us. We can figure out how we'll get her to Chalk Hill later, okay?"
"Okay," said Elias, almost a whisper.
"That means I need you to do something for me," she said. "Right now. Go into our costume chest and find something that will fit Thusia, along with one of my old masks. Put on your costume. Bring mine and hers out to the barn without letting your Mum and Dad see. Can you do that?"
"What about breakfast?" he said, rather wistfully.
"I'll take care of getting us some food," she reassured him. "Unless you want to sit in this warm house eating pancakes while Thusia freezes out in the barn, that is."
"No," he groused. "I don't want that. I'll get the costumes."
She grabbed him before he left, wrapping him in a tight hug—he tried to flinch away, but eventually relaxed into her embrace.
"Thank you, Ellie," she whispered.
When he dashed up the stairs, he was smiling again.
Jessamine's stomach rumbled, as if she needed a reminder.
"Aunt Rennie?" she asked sweetly, ducking into the kitchen, "would it be okay if Ellie and I skipped out on breakfast, after all? We're eager to head into town."
Her aunt halted her mixing spoon.
"Oh," she said, forlorn. "I was making pancakes. Your favorite."
"I know," Jessamine apologized. "We'll make it up to you, I promise, but, well—"
"Let the kids be," Uncle Alan helpfully interjected. "This is the first year we're letting them go in on their own. There will always be time for pancakes."
"I guess so," agreed his wife. "But you'll be so hungry!"
"We'll take some apples from the fridge," Jessamine suggested, "and there will be plenty to eat at the festival."
She hoped her aunt and uncle wouldn't notice just how many apples she was bundling into her jacket, since she was gathering enough for three hungry mouths, not two.
"Speaking of apples," said Uncle Alan, "does Mr. Burroughs still make his toffee apples?"
"He does," said Jessamine.
"Are they as good as I remember?" he asked.
"Better," she said. "You should come into town this year."
"Maybe I will," he mused. "Rebecca might be old enough to stand the crowd, this year. What do you think, honey?"
"Appo!" cheered Rebecca from her highchair.
"There you go," he said, chuckling. "Maybe we'll see you there."
She hoped they wouldn't. Thusia would be too hard to explain. Could she pass him off as a friend of Ellie's, perhaps? That would raise more questions than it answered, she feared, but she didn't have any local friends. Actually, that wasn't quite true, but she didn't want to think about that right now. She packed her idle thoughts away, as she always did, and got back to the task at hand.
"You two take care, now," fussed Aunt Rennie, leaning over from the stove and giving Jessamine a kiss on the cheek. "If we don't see you in town, we'll see you in the morning."
Thusia was bright-eyed when Jessamine returned to the loft. Not afraid, but wary. What little color she had (and she did not have much) had returned to her. The blankets were draped about her slight form with an animal grace; she was far too self-composed for a child her age.
"The rider has gone?" she inquired.
"For now, yeah," Jessamine confirmed. "But I'm worried he'll be back later. He didn't seem to quite trust me. That's why we're taking you into town with us. Ellie's gone to fetch you one of my old costumes and a mask."
"A souling mask?" asked Thusia.
"Yes," said Jessamine, half-defensively. "You know about souling?"
"It is an old custom," said Thusia, "far older than this place, but this place is old enough to remember."
The girl lifted her nose, sniffing softly.
"Apples?" she queried.
Jessamine fished one out of her jacket pockets.
"A light breakfast," she explained. "I have a few extras. There will be plenty of food in the village, too, as long as you like sweets and meat-on-a-stick."
Thusia snatched the apple from Jessamine's grip and proceeded to gobble it whole from tip to top. By the time Elias arrived and climbed into the loft, bundle of costumes under one arm, she'd gobbled no fewer than five more and was licking the juices off her fingers.
He wore a deep black brocade tabard, emblazoned with a broad white cross beneath a robustly red, faux-sable-lined cape, on which were stitched rows of golden lions. A crimson heater shield, bearing more golden lions, was strapped across his back. Heavy leather riding boots and a broad leather sword-belt, strapped jauntily across his hips and holding an elaborately carved wooden sword, completed his appearance, save one detail: he wore no crown. The crown, Elias had decided, would be carved into his mask, which was stored safely in a secret pocket inside his cape, waiting until the time was right. Somehow, he looked taller in his regal garb.
"I brought your old Red Riding Hood for Thusia," said Elias. "Hope it fits her."
"The mask, too?" she checked.
He nodded.
Thusia bounded to her feet and began shaking off her blanket coverings without warning or preamble and Elias let out a strangled yelp at the sudden exposure of broad strips of pale flesh.
"Get out of here!" bellowed Jessamine, smacking Elias around the head even as his cheeks inflamed.
He practically leapt from the loft to the floor below.
"Boys," she cursed.
Still, it was hard to sincerely scold him when Thusia apparently held so little regard for modesty. She was as quick to dress as she had been to undress: off went the blankets, on went the white stockings and bloomers, the simple white knee-length dress, and the white patent leather shoes. Last of all, as casually and confidently as if it had been made just for her, she settled the bright red hooded cloak around her petite shoulders.
Jessamine's costume took a bit more production, which subjected her uncomfortably to Thusia's appraising gaze. It felt strange to bare herself to a stranger—even one she had just seen equally unconcealed—but she did, despite the cold, with as much alacrity and poise as her suddenly shivering body would allow. She even took a moment to toss the last apple from her discarded coat to Elias down below.
First, she bound her breasts with a long strip of linen. She wrapped her feet and ankles in similar cloth—socks would have done as well, but this way felt purer. Her boots came next, half to keep her toes warm, half because it was easier to put them on with nothing in the way. Over her head went a long black kaftan, which she cinched around her waist with a strip of black silk. She tied on another sash, from shoulder to hip, onto which she hung a wickedly-curved wooden scimitar in a leather sheath. Overtop it all she clasped a breastplate of aluminum scales. The crosspiece of her conical helmet would hang across her nose and a coif of bronze rings wrapped from ear to ear and down against her shoulders. When she wore her mask, it would set up beneath the nose-guard and rim of the helmet, covering her head entirely, but it was not yet time for that.
Thusia held her small mask in front of her face in both hands, staring as if she could see another place and time through its eyeholes.
"Do you think it will fit?" asked Jessamine.
"I am sure it will," Thusia replied. "Thank you, Jessamine Less. It is not a small thing to hand over a piece of one's soul."
Jessamine laughed nervously.
Was she being funny? It was a souling mask, nothing more. Wasn't it?
To distract herself from the little girl's appreciation, she called down below: "Still there, Ellie?"
"Ain't I, though," he muttered.
It was a simple enough thing to cross the yard in the full morning light and skirt around to the shed where they kept their bicycles. Wherever Elias's parents were, they weren't likely to be gazing out any of the back-facing windows.
The cousins had been riding bikes together since they were little, sometimes down the road into the village, sometimes through the hills and forest. They had graduated, one following the other, from training wheels to big-kid cycles to the proper mountain bikes they each now rode. Each one had pegs installed on their rear wheels, not so much for pulling tricks—although Elias liked to dabble when he was feeling abnormally reckless—as for the times when they would rather share a bike than ride separately.
Those pegs came in handy now, as they situated Thusia behind Jessamine, hands on her shoulders, standing above the wheel.
Elias briefly protested that arrangement.
"I'm strong enough to carry her," he insisted.
"I know you are, but I'm still stronger," she insisted back. "Besides, you have to worry about keeping that huge cape out of your spokes."
"Thusia's wearing a cape, too," he whined.
That was true, but Thusia had taken a handful of clothespins from the shed while Jessamine wasn't looking and had neatly done up her cape and dress, exposing the better part of her bloomers but ensuring her costume's safety from the grasp of the tire treads.
Jessamine didn't even have to say anything.
"Fine," Elias sighed, not without rolling his eyes. "Let's just go."
////
The journey into town was brief and uneventful. The few cars that passed them gave wide berths. The warm sun kept back the chill of the rushing wind. As quickly as they started to enjoy the ride, it was over. They chained their frames to a rack on the outskirts of the village square and went into the crowd.
The sounds of lively bustle led the way into a world of lively food stands, prancing street performers, and a throng of costumed revelers. No one wore their masks here, in the square—this was a party, not a ceremony. Elias waved to familiar passers-by and blushed and bowed at compliments on his finery. Jessamine maintained her elder-cousin stoicism and smiled placidly at faces she recognized but did not know by name. Thusia trailed close behind the pair in happy silence, she knowing no one and no one knowing her.
"What do y'want to do, first?" Elias asked, once they found some space amid the bustle. "We've plenty of time to get to Chalk Hill, don't we? How about some food? That apple wasn't enough breakfast."
The rich smells that wafted through the square made his suggestion all the more potent. Jessamine was about to agree when she spied a nightmare figure across the common. Black leathers and fur, bushy beard, drooping jowl: Lyle Epps, the rider. There were no wild foxes here in the square, but he swam through the mob just the same, casting his black eyes in search of his quarry.
"We can't stay here," said Jessamine.
She pulled Thusia's hood down over her brow. It had been made long, so it did well to hide her face from view.
"Why not?" Elias whined. "I'm hungry."
Jessamine cut him short with a nod across the courtyard.
He had to stand on tip-toe, but he changed his tune as soon as he caught sight of the leather-clad figure.
"Right," he croaked, defeated and suddenly more afraid than hungry. "Where do we go?"
"What about Old Man Wexler's?" she offered.
Elias made a face that suggested he thought the rider might be preferable to her alternative.
"He's not likely to go looking for us inside, is he?" she insisted.
"I guess not," Elias agreed, reluctantly. "Let's go, then, before I lose my nerve."
Wexler's mansion was down Second Street, only a block away from the village center. Townsfolk milled about its facade, stark and foreboding despite its clean white paint and perfect upkeep—the place had been chosen for the haunt because it was huge and ancient, not because it was run-down or neglected. A few kids Elias's age and younger hotly debated whether they dared enter, while a few more Jessamine's age and older had decided they most certainly did not dare. The three of them, with little other option, walked straight up the path and onto the porch.
A Grim Reaper stood guard at the door, scythe in hand, face obscured by his black cowl.
"Halt, mortals," the Reaper boomed as they approached. "No sane soul may enter this house of horrors."
The dire warning was somewhat undermined by the fact that his voice held no rasp of the dead, nor blood-curdling chill. It was, if anything, quite soft and pleasant, entirely easy on the ears.
"Will?" Jessamine giggled. "Is that you?"
Death's avatar laughed and pulled back his hood, exposing the bright face of a local boy a year or two Jessamine's senior. This was not their first meeting. Her mind went immediately to hot afternoons by the bayside, trading punches for kisses and skinny dipping for razor clams. She wouldn't call Will her friend, but only because she wanted him to be so much more than that.
"Jess Less," he addressed her, "the girl who always wanted more."
A cautionary inner voice told her that she ought to be embarrassed by this appellation—and further suggested that she should curse her parents for giving her a rhyming name, but she wasn't and she didn't. How could she be ashamed of something that was true?
"I didn't know you'd be in town," she remarked, losing all track of her intended purpose in this place. "Will you be here through the weekend? Maybe we can hang out?"
The boy grinned.
"I'd like that very much," he suggested. "That is if Elias can spare you for a few hours."
Elias eyed the older boy with a particular look of distrust in his eye. Thusia, too, looked him up and down with a penetrating gaze, wild and full of judgment.
"I don't mind," Elias grunted.
"It's a date, then," Will confirmed. "I'll swing by your place on Saturday afternoon. Now, would you like to go inside?"
Jessamine ignored the fluttering in her stomach and her impertinent desire to stay right here, outside the house, with him. It wouldn't be right. She had a purpose, an obligation, a duty. Thusia needed her and she could not bear to let her down.
"We enter the realm of the dark," Thusia announced, "though its keeper be light's man."
"Do we have a choice?" Jessamine asked.
Thusia shook her head.
"We're going in, then," Jessamine told the winsome porter.
"I will not bar your passage," said Will, "for surely you are mad."
He opened the heavy front door of the old house and waved them in.
"See you later," she whispered into Will's ear as she passed by, favoring him with a fleeting smile.
He fumbled slightly with the door, but still he carried out his task, sealing off the way back to the land of the living and trapping them amongst the dead and the dim.
Old Man Wexler's foyer was more eerie than frightening. The walls seemed to lean inwards and leapt with unnatural shadows. A gaunt grandfather clock ticked away the seconds with a heavy beat. There were no cobwebs or bloody ghouls or other accoutrements of kitschy terror, only the lingering presence of no presence, the tangible pall of lifelessness.
Two candles lit the way forward and the three children followed their light into the cavernous hall ahead. They passed another pair of candles a little way ahead and then another pair further beyond that.
"Shouldn't a haunted house be scarier than this?" Elias asked as they neared the fourth set of candles.
A wretched scream emerged from the shadows in reply, culled from the mouth of a greasepaint ghoul who had leapt from some hidden nook in the hall behind them. Elias, predictably, jumped and spun. Even Jessamine shivered and scanned the darkness for the source of the startling sound. But then, quick as it had begun, the scream was silenced, caught out of the air like it had never been uttered. The ghoul, too, had vanished in a flicker of the candlelight.
"Um," whispered Elias, "did you see that?"
Jessamine had, if only out of the corner of her eye. The poor ghoul had not left their presence through any normal passage—darkness had swallowed it up, like a giant's hand plucking hens for its supper, lost to the depths of a hallway where no candles flickered.
"No," she lied. "Let's keep moving."
Elias muttered something resembling a curse under his breath.
Thusia said nothing but followed on after them.
On they went, into deeper darkness, as the candles that guided them grew dimmer, the light from each pair more anemic than the last. Disconcertingly, the hall began to twist from its straight path, cutting through a parlor—its velvet without luster, its woodwork parched—and then a great dining hall—its silver tarnished, its crystal scorched—and then a somber kitchen—its stores spoiled, its great fire gone out. Hollow emptiness pressed in on them, squeezing more tightly with every step forward. The air hung so heavily in Jessamine's lungs that she'd lost the strength to speak. Elias must have felt the same, because even his mewling had died out, though his lip still quavered and his eyes vibrated from wall to corner to wall.
Thusia broke the silence in the music room.
"They have found me," she said, sorrowful but unafraid.
"Who?" gasped Jessamine.
"The hounds," said the other.
The lone candle that lit the space went out, snuffed by phantom breath, pulling them into total darkness. If not for the grim light that glistered on its fur, they might never have seen the black beast that leapt at them from out of the nothing. Thusia darted from the path of its unearthly maw, fangs like knife-points and tongue thorn-barbed. The beast crashed into a grand piano, splintering its iron frame, and they fled to the inharmonious melody of snapping steel strings.
"This way!" urged Thusia.
She pointed to a broad staircase that would carry them up to the mansion's second story, where some hint of light still lingered. The children followed her lead, diving up the carpeted steps as another black dog bounded forth from the shadows. They scrambled on all fours, climbing the stairs like a ladder, Thusia's fluttering red cape their lantern in the ever-deepening dark. Three monsters now gave chase, paws tearing the carpet from its tacks. Jessamine could feel the noxious heat of their breath on the bare thighs beneath her kaftan.
There was no winding path at the top of the stairs, only a long, straight hall, with a rectangle of blinding light at its end, half-covered by the silhouette of a frantically beckoning figure. It seemed to be shouting something, but Jessamine could not hear its words above the deafening chorus of baying creatures. When had they grown so loud?
She ran and ran, the figure growing ever closer, Thusia and Elias at either side.
And then she ran alone.
Thusia fell back first, her cape snagged by raking teeth. It tore away roughly, setting her free, but she lost her footing and stumbled, her splaying limbs catching the flagging Elias and taking him down with her in a fumbling heap. Jessamine spun dizzily. She could no longer count the things in the hall. Were there four or fourteen or forty? They seemed to multiply in the shadows. They advanced slowly now, their pace a merciless saunter, secure in the knowledge that their prey had faltered, drawing out the sweet inevitability of the catch.
Come on, Jessamine shouted, but she made no sound. Get up, Ellie. Help Thusia. Run.
Elias did not get up. He did not even move, frozen in fright of the writhing mass of fur and bloodstained teeth. Thusia, undaunted, struggled to rise, but was trapped beneath him.
Jessamine's hands moved faster than her mind. She grasped the scimitar at her side and tore it from its scabbard. It was heavier than she remembered. Bellowing a mute battlecry, she leapt over her companions and swung the sword at their marauders. To her astonishment, the blade found its mark, ripping through the heads of the beasts at the front, drawing no blood but splaying their ghostly flesh into gooey bits.
The tide of fangs ebbed only for a moment, but it was long enough for Thusia to extricate herself from Elias and haul the stricken boy to his feet. Jessamine did not stop swinging. She beat a slow retreat, one steady backwards step after the last, keeping the beasts at bay until a strong hand grabbed her by the shoulder and pulled her into the light, slamming a heavy door behind her.
The strong hand belong to a robust, weather-beaten fellow with unruly white eyebrows that did not match his otherwise well-groomed appearance. Jessamine considered her surroundings. They were in a study of some kind, its walls hung with faded pictures and odd paintings, its shelves piled high with books engraved with titles in languages she could not comprehend, an oil lamp burning brightly on the span of a roll-top desk.
"You're Old Man Wexler," Jessamine deduced. "This is your house."
"I am," he said. "It is."
Jessamine looked down at the scimitar in her hands. It was made of carved wood again. Had she imagined the glint of burnished steel in the darkness outside this cozy chamber?
Elias looked fit to retch, so maybe not.
Thusia looked only slightly harried by the experience and she beamed at Wexler like he was, inexplicably, an old companion. Responding in kind, he sank to one knee in supplication before the little girl in the tattered cape and rumpled dress.
"It is an honor to be in your presence, my lady," he said, eyes downcast.
"It is no more honor than my own to be saved by a gentleman who keeps the light," said Thusia in return.
She placed one slight hand against his gnarled knuckles and bid him rise.
"Are we safe in here?" Jessamine inquired, choosing not to comment on that odd display.
Wexler grimaced.
"For now," he said. "The rest of my house has been taken by the dark, but this room remains open to the light. They cannot penetrate its walls, but they can surround us. You must move quickly."
Then, just barely, his lips turned up at the corners.
"For all my life, I never thought I would see the hounds," he mused.
Jessamine realized it was a hollow smile, the kind worn by those who have witnessed atrocity and survived to recall it—or perhaps by those who were not yet sure whether they would live to tell their tale.
"When you said hounds, I couldn't have imagined those," said Jessamine. "That's what's been chasing you?"
"The very same," said Thusia. "That they run in the day is a sign of the coming hour."
Jessamine hefted the wooden sword in her hand. She struggled to find the words to ask the question on her mind without sounding like she'd lost it. Maybe it wasn't even the right question. She knew what she had seen in the dark of the house, knew the truth of it, but somehow that truth felt more unreal than anything.
Wexler spoke before she could articulate her swirling thoughts.
"You have no time to learn the things you must know," he fretted, "so you will have to act on instinct. It has seen you come this far, it will see you through. The light believes in you. Believe in the light."
Was that it? The power of belief? It was an old thing, she supposed. Maybe even the oldest thing. There must be power in it.
"Now you must be on your way," Wexler continued, "and quickly."
He gestured to an open window perched above the writing desk.
"Come on," she said to Elias, but he did not move.
She took him by the arm and climbed up onto the desk, careful not to disturb the burning lamp. A rope ladder was anchored to the window's inner sill, offering safe passage to the street below.
"You go first," she insisted.
It took a not-so-gentle push, but he went.
Thusia followed after him without a word, but not before she leaned up and laid a gentle kiss on Wexler's cheek. The old man smiled like a schoolboy as she disappeared over the edge.
Jessamine had so many questions, but he cut her off before she could open any line of inquiry.
"Go swiftly, Jessamine Less," the old man warned, "and do not fail."
By the time she thought to ask how he might've known her name, he'd already slammed the window shut behind her, sealing away the old house, giving it over to the darkness within that the light might persist without. With nowhere left to go but down, down she went.
////
Second Street was bathed in mid-afternoon glow.
Jessamine stared at the sun through pursed fingers. They couldn't have been inside the haunted house for more than fifteen or twenty minutes—thirty at the very most.
"Thus the dark entraps us," said Thusia. "They steal away the sun while we wade through shadow."
It should have been too much. Hours gone in the span of minutes. Ghost hounds and magic swords. Old men that knelt to lost little girls. These weren't things that happened in the real world. Nothing about this was okay.
And yet, Jessamine's heart pounded not in fear but in boundless desire. Their encounters with the deadly and unfathomable only made her want to run faster and harder, eager to court the next fright. She wanted the strange. She wanted to be wild.
"We should get going, then," Jessamine chipped in. "Worst case scenario we have to pass a few hours on Chalk Hill, right? What do you say, Ellie?"
When he did not reply, she called his name again.
At the third calling, he answered.
"We ought to go home," he said, soft and small.
"What?" Jessamine snapped.
"We ought to go home," he repeated, "and take Thusia with us."
"Why would we do that?" she stammered.
"Our bikes are only a few streets over," he suggested.
"You can't be serious," she spat.
"Mom or Pop can take Thusia back to Chalk Hill by car when it's a little closer to midnight," he reasoned. "Much safer that way."
Elias spoke in a near monotone. His eyes stared off at nothing in particular, somewhere just shy of oblivion. His words were coherent enough and his arguments would be sound in saner circumstances, but Jessamine fought the urge to shake him.
"Rennie and Alan can't help us," said Jessamine. "Thusia already told us that. And what if the rider comes back and finds us all there?"
"So what if he does?" Elias scoffed. "What about all the things she hasn't told us? We don't know who Mr. Epps is. We don't know why he's after her. Maybe he has a good reason. Maybe it's better than getting our throats ripped out by monsters in the dark."
"She warned us there would be peril," she reminded him. "You wanted to help."
"I was stupid," he shot back. "When's the last time 'peril' meant immediate and mortal danger, anyway?"
"I'm pretty sure that's the literal definition of peril," Jessamine snarked.
"Go to hell," Elias swore, the worst curse he would allow himself. "You may be crazy, but I'm not. I'm done following you around. I'm not going to die—not for her."
Thusia had gone so still that she could've been mistaken for a statue while they sparred, but now she broke her silence. She seemed to rise up as she did so, to grow a little taller—in presence if not in stature. The air itself grew a little warmer in the space where she stood, the fading sunlight a little brighter. Jessamine saw it in her, then: the thing that lay beneath the thing she claimed to be, but it was more than she could comprehend. It was not fearsome, but it was fiercely beautiful and impossibly vast.
Jessamine wasn't sure what Elias saw, but his breath caught the same as hers.
"You will not die for me," said Thusia. "When your time comes, it shall be on your own terms, in your own way, not at the hand of any other."
Elias's lip curled and he all but collapsed atop the little girl, who appeared to have no trouble supporting him with her slight frame. As her arms wrapped around him in a gentle embrace, he began to fully sob, tears running down his cheeks and into the curtain of red at her shoulders.
"I was so scared," he cried, "I couldn't do anything. I couldn't even move. I'm still scared. The sun is out and I'm scared of the dark. What am I going to do when the sun goes down?"
"You'll be brave," said Jessamine.
He looked up at her, awe and apology clouding his eyes.
"How?" he asked.
"Because you have to be," she replied.
Eventually, he pulled away from Thusia's embrace. Her eyes scanned the horizon, carefully avoiding Elias as he wiped away the snot and salt. Eventually, she settled on Jessamine, favoring her with a meaningful glance, wordlessly conveying a wealth of sentiments which Jessamine would only parse out in the days and years to come. There and then, she just felt warm—and also somehow cold, at the same time. And maybe a little bit hungry.
"Are you hungry, Ellie?" Jessamine asked.
He nodded ruefully.
"That makes our destination pretty clear, then," she said. "We can't go back to the square, now, so we go forward. You didn't lose your mask?"
He shook his head.
Thusia patted the sewn-in pocket in the folds of her cloak. She hadn't lost hers, either.
"We still have time?" Jessamine asked.
"We must," said Thusia, ambiguously.
"Right," said Jessamine. "Let's go a-souling."
Thusia's mask was apple red, its lacquer aged but still gleaming, its contours ridged with simple patterns, the product of talented but unlearned hands. Jessamine's mask, by contrast, was deep and formless black, etched with a complex silver filigree, each hair-thin band weaving to resemble sparkling stars and moons and swords and flowers in a chaotic, shapely mass. Elias's mask made up for its relative simplicity with stark design, a plain gloss white but for the crown of golden branches that sprouted from its apex, bitterly bearing neither fruit nor leaves.
The masks were a kind of toll that earned them passage into the rites of the day. If you knocked on someone's door without a souling mask, they might invite you in for tea and crackers, if you were a friend, but you would never see a crumb of their soul cakes—and if not for soul cakes, what was the point of souling?
They were a poor disguise—the Less family had long harbored a reputation for their craftwork—but they did grant a limited anonymity: it was sacrosanct in a town that had no other traditions that when the sons and daughters of the village donned their masks, they became their apparitions. Thus, Jessamine and Elias looked on passersby with regal disdain, whether they were monsters or heroes or vague concepts granted temporary shape, and were granted from each a response in kind. Thus, they moved freely, all worries hidden behind their masks.
The walk to the humble house of the Widow Parish was not long, nor did she take long to answer her bell. She did not wear a mask, as it was rare to both welcome soulers and go a-souling, but she greeted them with warmth and distinction.
"Your reputation precedes you, Brave King and Noble Sultan," she addressed the pair. "You are expected and welcome in my home. But you, Young Traveler, are something out of place and time. That, and you appear to have already met your wolf. Tell me: how did you escape its belly?"
Her words, however innocent on their surface, sent a shiver down Jessamine's spine.
"The road was winding, true," Thusia told the Widow Parish, all grace and guile, "but we have found a way through tooth and claw. Now I am tired and hungered from the track. May I, too, come inside?"
The Widow Parish hesitated a beat too long for Jessamine's comfort. She'd come to this house every year for as many as she could count, but something was different this time. Something had changed. Or maybe she had changed. She hoped it was that.
"You may," said the Widow Parish, finally. "Step into the parlor. I'll rustle up some cakes."
They stepped beneath the lintel and moved through to a comfortable drawing room. It was cozy and ornate, full of cushioned chairs, elaborate tapestries, and a miniature china ballerina that pirouetted as its music box played a lilting tune. Elias immediately sank into his favorite seat, a throne-like wing chair that was particularly plush.
The Widow Parish took an alternate route that passed through the kitchen and returned with a tray piled high with three steaming soul cakes and a pitcher of cold milk.
"Here we have the prize," said the Widow, placing the tray on a low coffee table, "but first let's hear the clink of your coin."
Jessamine stepped forward, smiling beneath her mask in spite of the rigors of the day. Some soulers offered short plays or comedy routines, but the cousins had always offered a song. She was a lush alto and Elias, somewhat hampered by his liminal age, was a shaky tenor, but they had practiced half the summer for this night. Together, their sound was clear and strong, like windchimes on a winter's morning.
Elias was slow to rise to his feet. In fact, he wasn't trying to rise at all. He sat, legs locked, eyes distant, until Jessamine leaned down and clapped him on the shoulder.
"The song, Ellie," she whispered, as intensely as she could manage without sounding alarmed. "You can do this."
Reluctantly, he stood and took his place beside her.
They sang, in wistful duet, of England's green and pleasant land, girded by pastures and mountains, of holy feet in ancient times, walking among those clouded hills, of bows of burning gold and chariots of fire, brandished before the end times. The song was beautiful, no doubt, but the images it conjured of war and conquest, of the wickedness and divinity, of construction and collapse, were perhaps too potent. Jessamine couldn't help but think of their mad chase in the dark house, and had she not been so practiced, had the words and notes not come as easily as breathing, she might well have lost her way.
The Widow Parish applauded when they made it to the end.
"A fine choice," she remarked, looking over their costumes with renewed appreciation. "But what about your little red companion? Is she not to eat, tonight?"
Jessamine hadn't considered that their song might prove insufficient payment for three cakes. They could split two between them, if the Widow Parish would give them their cakes for the road, but she liked to keep company as her buskers ate.
Thusia surprised them all, then, loosing a crystalline soprano. Her words were strange—in English, yes, but somehow strained at the edges, like they had been snatched far out of time and place—but the story was clear and simple. She sang of a greyhound and a fox, the one chasing, always just behind, the other eluding, always just out of reach. Once again, Jessamine's memory stirred darkly, but there was no sense of fear or danger in Thusia's words, only a sense of desperate sadness and endless longing: the fox could not escape the hound any more than the hound could catch the fox.
The Widow Parish did not applaud when Thusia ceased, a last high note seeming to still hang around them like a snare.
"That was Ovid?" she asked.
"An excerpt from his Metamorphoses," Thusia confirmed.
"You look so young," the Widow Parish mused. "But you sing as if you knew the tale first-hand."
Another voice broke into the conversation from just outside the room.
"That's, ah, one way of putting it," it said, rough and low.
The intruder entered from behind the Widow Parish. In his leather, furs, and untamed beard, he seemed to fill up the room, sinking one whole corner into shadow. Two black hounds, the doubles of those in the mansion, leapt forth from that shadow, shining and snarling and slavering. Elias yelped at this sudden intrusion, but to Jessamine, they weren't the most terrifying thing in the room: that distinction was reserved for the look on the Widow Parish's face. She wasn't frightened. Hell, she wasn't even bewildered. She was merely resigned, ready to accept a sour fate.
The Widow Parish had welcomed the rider into her home.
"Laelaps," spat Thusia.
Elias tugged desperately at Jessamine's sleeve, urging her backwards towards the only unblocked door, back the way they'd entered.
"We have to go," he whimpered. "We'll be trapped."
"Come with us, Mrs. Parish," begged Jessamine, stubbornly holding her ground. "It's not too late."
She drew her sword to punctuate her request. Again it was heavy in her hands. Soul cakes and china ballerinas were forgotten—the weight of steel was all she knew.
The man of the dark guffawed, jowls flapping as he tilted back his head.
The hounds yelped, sharing in his mirth.
"You are too young, child," he howled, "and too brazen."
He snapped his fingers and a hound swallowed the Widow Parish whole.
Thusia took Jessamine by the wrist—twisting the sword from her grip, which clattered and chimed as it collided with the tray of soul cakes—and moved, dragging them out the front door and around the back, the rider's laughter ringing in their ears. They crossed the yard and beyond, over cart tracks and through briar patches, moving as fast as they could in any direction but the one they'd came from, running until the children, coughing and wheezing, could run no more.
Jessamine stripped off her mask to cooler her face and discovered that the sun had fallen and the moon was on the horizon. The dark was already all around them, save a faint glow in the western sky.
"Which way to Chalk Hill?" asked Thusia.
Her eyes glowed in the moonlight—an illusion, surely, Jessamine reasoned, brought on by fear and exertion.
"That way," coughed Elias, pointing towards the south. "I think. I'm not sure. I'm all turned around."
"I trust you," Thusia insisted. "Let us move."
"But it's already night!" he moaned. "How can we get you there in time?"
"We will go forward," said the little girl, "and we will find a way."
////
The force of Thusia's will carried them like an ox might carry them on its broad back. The last light vanished and dark clouds covered the moon, but they continued, never slowing for so long that Thusia could not urge them onward, never stumbling so hard that Thusia could not lift them to their feet. As hounds bayed on every horizon and somewhere in the middle distance a motorcycle engine roared, Jessamine realized that Thusia was now more their guide than they were hers—and perhaps had always been—but the thought slipped away as they mounted another hill and faced another mile to climb.
Salvation, of a sort, appeared at the crest of one such mound. There, across a terrible but finite span, was the white stag of Chalk Hill. Their destination was in sight. More thrilling still was what they spied a short way below: a straw-filled wagon, drawn by horses, a black-cloaked driver at the reins.
"Hay rides!" crowed Elias.
"Is that Will?" gasped Jessamine. Without waiting for confirmation, she dashed down the hill, shouting: "Will! Will, stop! Will!"
By some good fortune, the driver heard her cries and halted the carriage. Will—for it was indeed him—pushed back his cowl and looked to the figure shouting and tumbling in his direction.
"Jessamine?" he exclaimed. "What's wrong? What happened to you? What are you doing out here?"
"No time," Jessamine managed between heaves. "I need to take the wagon."
"What?" he asked, incredulously. "You can't take the wagon. Why would you—besides, Wexler told me to bring it back to the barn. Said there was something wrong with the axel."
Bless that beautiful old man.
"I know this sounds crazy," she apologized, "and I don't know why you would trust me, but Wexler sent this wagon for us. The axel is fine, isn't it?"
Will screwed up his face.
"I mean," he pondered, "I didn't notice anything wrong with it, but I figured Wexler wouldn't say that for no reason."
"And he didn't!" Jessamine practically shouted.
Thusia and Elias reached the bottom of the hill, her looking composed and serene as ever, him looking more of a mess than she'd feared.
"He'll be safe from the hounds, won't he?" Jessamine asked Thusia.
"If he does not accompany us, yes," she confirmed. "The hounds have no care for aught but their quarry."
"There you go," announced Jessamine, as if Thusia held all the authority that Will needed to hear. "You'll be safe, but you need to let us take the wagon, now."
In a way, Jessamine was right. There was something about Thusia that was unassailably trustworthy, and she seemed to have that effect on Will as much as on the two of them. He looked over their party, scraped and battered, spattered with mud and pricked with briars. Under other circumstances, Jessamine might have blushed beneath Will's rapt attention, but that wasn't what she needed from him right now.
Just as she opened her mouth to bully him further, he spoke.
"All right," he said. "Take it. For you, I'll make the walk back to town."
She leapt up beside him in the driver's seat and kissed him full on the mouth. Then, she pushed him out of the wagon and put him as fully out of her mind as she could manage. Thusia climbed up onto the hay and lifted Elias into the wagon beside her, even as Jessamine cracked the reins with a mighty "Hyah!" and they were off again, at greater speed.
The hounds were not far behind.
They sprouted from the shadows like a bubbling spring. Lyle Epps rode at the tip of their phalanx atop a great golden horse that belched smoke from its flaring lips and bled green fire from its eyes. When he spoke, his words were the choir of the hounds.
RUN PRETTY SPIRIT
YOU CAN NEVER RUN SO FAST I CANNOT CATCH YOU
YOU CAN NEVER GO SO FAR I CANNOT FIND YOU
YOU CAN NEVER HIDE SO DEEP I CANNOT DIG YOU UP
"Um, Jess?" Elias shouted above the noise. "They're getting closer!"
Jessamine spared a moment to look over her shoulder. As fast as Chalk Hill grew nearer, the hounds gained faster, springing forward in little packs. She whipped the horses, cringing at the mad look in their eyes and the foam at their mouths, but they were galloping as hard as their mortal hooves would carry them.
"Ellie!" she shouted back. "You have to protect Thusia until we reach the hill!"
"I can't!" he whined.
NO STONE CAN HOLD ME
NO BULWARK CAN STOP ME
CHASE YOU TO THE STARS AND BACK
"You're the only one who can!" Jessamine retorted. "I lost my sword at the Widow Parish's, but you still have yours! Use it! Believe in it! Believe in yourself!"
It seemed as though the whole world grew still and silent as she waited for his affirmation.
Elias landed next to her in the driver's seat with a soft thump.
"No," he whispered. "You were always the fighter, not me. Take my sword and give me the reins. I'll drive."
She held his gaze as the world screamed around them. It was like he'd gotten drunk on terror and come out the other side cold sober. Or maybe he'd just broken. Whatever the cause, there was something different in her cousin, something clear and straight and true. She didn't quite know why, but she envied him.
Handing over the strips of leather, she grasped the hilt of the sword in his belt and drew it out in one long pull. It, too, was clear and straight and true, a steel cross that gleamed even without the moon to shine upon its blade.
"Hyah, hyah!" Elias cried.
Jessamine lifted herself into the back of the wagon, sword held high.
She forced herself to look straight at the little girl who crouched amid the hay. Her eyes were magnificent, orange rings in black orbs, split top to bottom by thin vertical slits, all pretense of humanity abandoned at this late hour. They flashed with unearthly light in the dark, not so different from the gleam on the hounds, but in all ways good whereas theirs was in all ways bad. She saw it again, that fiercely beautiful and impossibly vast thing that gathered just below Thusia's pale skin, like an ocean beneath a sheet of ice, and she realized to her delight and horror that she had been mistaken.
Thusia wasn't a mask; she was a window.
Something hot uncoiled within Jessamine and she turned to face the horde, gripping the sword in both hands and raising it above her head, ready to strike.
TEAR YOUR FLESH
CHEW YOUR BONES
DRINK YOUR BLOOD
When the first hound bounded towards the back of the wagon, she struck with deadly precision, cleaving its head from its body. The next, she stabbed through the heart. Its black mass burned with green fire from the inside out. Again they pounced and again she struck them down, but the hounds were innumerable and she was an untrained adolescent. Her arms began to tire, no matter the strength of her convictions, and soon for every hound she killed, two more she merely pushed back, slapping them with the flat of the sword.
Eventually, one was bound to break through. Eventually, one did.
To Jessamine's dismay, the hound's quarry was not herself, but the wagon. Its fangs latched onto a wheel and stripped the spokes from the axel, sending the still-spinning rim careening off into the dark.
The wagon veered far too sharply for Elias to control. Even as he tried to straighten their track, the strain of the suddenly unbalanced cart was too much on the horses. When they began to trip and drag their hooves, the hounds were immediately on them, tearing out their throats in a rush of gore. Before Jessamine could fight them off, she was out of the hay and into the air, launched by the upending wagon.
For a brief infinity, the world was a whirlwind. And then it wasn't.
Mud caked her bruised head, clouding her vision. Adrenaline pumped through her body, strangling her focus. She ignored the pain, ignored the anger, and desperately searched for her companions. Elias lay half-buried by the cart, a broken wheel spinning inches from his head. Thusia had suffered the graver fate: a hound mounted her, ripping bloody hunks from her breast.
"No!" Jessamine screamed.
She clawed forth, snatching up her cousin's longsword from the where it lay half-buried in the mud and grass and driving through the beast in a lunging tackle. It screamed in pain and disappointment and she kicked it with all her strength, sending it rolling down the hill, her weapon still stuck inside its burning bulk. It didn't matter: her whole world had been reduced to the bloodied little girl in her arms.
"Thusia!" she shrieked, but she did not reply.
"Now you see," snarled Lyle Epps, "this could only end one way."
He and his golden horse idled at the base of the hill, the gathered legions of all the dark's hounds at his back, swelling and swaying in an ocean of black and ghostly green.
Jessamine lifted Thusia and backed away slowly, as if putting space between them and the hounds could deny the inevitable.
"Give her to me," he commanded, "and I will let you and your cousin go free."
Not like this, Jessamine swore. Not while she still breathed.
She took another step backwards into the rough grass.
"My quarrel is with her, not you," barked the rider.
She could feel his anger boiling, but he made no move to pursue her.
"If you resist me," he snarled, "I will find everyone you love and kill them."
Not while she could carry Thusia, who had stained her white dress deep violet. Not while she had the strength to take another step back.
"No, not kill them," he shrieked. "Bleed them! Break them! Rape them! Ruin them!"
One more step.
Her heel sank into something firmer than soil, something dry and dusty. Chalk.
A soundless sound rang out, like all the glassy sky had shattered. The dark lifted and moonlight shone through the clouds. The hounds were gone as if they had never been. Where horse and rider reared, now squatted a gaunt black mutt, alone, its drooping muzzle shot through with a streak of gray. Presently, silently, it turned away and limped into the night.
"You have done well, Jessamine Less," Thusia hissed in gurgling fits and starts.
"Thusia!" she cried, looking down at her orange eyes. "I am so sorry. I've failed. I couldn't save you."
"Be at peace, child," the spirit soothed. "This is how it was meant to be. I am your sacrifice. Blood on the White Stag to stem the tide of the dark. The crimson smear of light at dawn."
She coughed, but it filled her throat with more blood than it cleared.
"Please," she managed, "set me amid the grass at the center of the stag."
Jessamine did as she was told, despite her shaking limbs, and knelt beside the little girl, trying not to stare as blood stained the grass around her eviscerated form. Thusia raised one pale and trembling hand to wipe the tears from her guardian's cheek. Her last words were barely audible, but Jessamine heard them just the same.
"You are a child of the light," she whispered. "Be proud. Be glad."
Jessamine's vision blurred. On the grass there was no longer a girl, but a little red fox, stone still but for the slow seeping of her savage wounds. Bright flames began to dance along her fine, pale fur. They grew brighter and taller until there was nothing left to burn and Thusia was gone.
She might have sat there a while longer, transfixed by the ashes, but she remembered her cousin and struggled to her feet.
His eyes sprung open when she touched his cheek.
"It isn't as bad as it looks," he mumbled. "Is Thusia with you?"
Jessamine shook her head. Maybe it was her imagination, but that seemed to cause him more pain than the weight that pinned him. She lifted the corner of the overturned wagon, just barely high enough for him to wriggle out from underneath.
He rubbed at his crushed ankle. It had to be painful, but he stoically kept all but a mild grimace from shadowing his face.
"I think it's broken," he said. "I can't walk back on it."
"I don't think you'll have to," she said. "Look."
Something stirred among the fallen horses. By some stroke of providence, one of them had escaped the fate of its team. It sprung up with a lively step once Jessamine loosed its bindings. She led it over to her cousin and helped him onto its back before climbing up and settling herself behind him.
Jessamine kicked in her heels and the horse obediently set off at a trot. She had a feeling it would take them back to the village. They could figure out the rest from there. Alan and Rennie would pick them up if they knew Elias had a broken ankle. The hills were bathed in moonlight and the route was clear. It wouldn't be a comfortable ride, but it would get them home. The danger had passed. The race was won.
Unable to fight his exhaustion any longer, Elias relaxed into the crook of his cousin's chest. He was so small and he had been so brave. She did not mind the imposition. Soon, his breathing slowed.
When Jessamine, too, closed her eyes, trusting the horse to find its way without her untrained guidance, orange eyes stared back at her, feral and gleaming. She looked back out at the sky, up at the moon, casting its long shadows. What did it mean to be a child of the light? It had only been a single day—a terrifying, exhilarating, impossible day—but she knew somehow that she had been changed forever, that this one day would guide the course of all her days to come.
She didn't feel proud, though. She didn't feel glad.
She felt tired and lonely. She missed the little girl with fox eyes more than she had known it was possible to miss someone that you barely knew.
Jessamine closed her eyes, again.
"It's past the witching hour," she whispered.
When Elias, fast asleep, said nothing in return, she let herself cry.