Wings of Fire, page 7
“Try me,” she said
“How long have you been in this country?”
“I came with Mark, seven years ago. What’s that got to do with anything?”
“Much,” he said. “You were brought here.”
“Oh, really, now.”
“I told you that you wouldn’t believe me,” he said, with infuriating calm.
Sabrina tugged at her pendant. “This thing,” she said. “What is it? That creature on the boat... The man... He wanted me dead because of it. He wanted to know who gave it to me. He said I couldn’t cross, not with this on. Why?”
“I didn’t think he would kill,” Uncle Bob said.
“So you knew he was there?” Sabrina pounced on the words. “And you still gave me this and sent me out to him?”
“You said, creatures,” said Uncle Bob, sidetracking her. “Would you care to tell me what really happened? I know about the taniwha, but what else was out there?”
Sabrina had to consciously shut her mouth. “The taniwha? That was what it was? They actually exist?”
“Who else?” Uncle Bob prompted.
“Another,” said Sabrina. “She tried to kill me. Shura. She sank the ferry. Sharp teeth, white hair. These great cold hungry blue eyes. She was out there in the lake...” Sabrina shuddered, dropping her eyes. She was lost in the horror of the memory—all of it was replaying in her mind, and she was almost talking to herself, unaware that she had an audience. “My friend Fiana was out there, too. Fiana tried to drown her…”
She missed Uncle Bob’s reaction at the name and the description of Shura—he’d recoiled as though the words had been a whip. He would have spoken, with some urgency, but Sabrina had continued talking, over his impulse, and by the time she stumbled to a halt he had regained control.
“If she is what I’m afraid she is,” Uncle Bob murmured, “she can’t be drowned.”
“And then he saved me. First he tried to kill me, and then he saved me...”
“What?”
Sabrina lifted her eyes. “He saved me—he brought me the life jacket, he showed me the shore... And then he went back for Fiana.”
“The taniwha saved your life?”
“But he tried to kill me first....”
Anything Uncle Bob might have riposted to that was pre-empted by an explosive oath from the door of the drawing room, and both its occupants leapt to their feet, turning towards the voice. Sabrina’s teacup went flying off the saucer and shattered on the hearth.
The man who stood in the doorway, his face drawn with shock, was the man she had seen on the bank above the lake when she had struggled ashore—or at least he was wearing the same Swanndri shirt. He’d discarded the hat, and revealed himself to possess a thatch of sandy brown hair with a wiry wave to it and strands of white streaking it at the temples. His eyes were dark grey, the colour of a storm cloud, but his flat cheekbones and a warm glow to his skin hinted at Polynesian genes.
“Jesus Christ!” the man said, staring around him. “What the hell is going on? What have you done with my station?”
Uncle Bob coughed delicately. “As you claim it, do come in,” he said. “We were just having a cup of tea.”
Sabrina couldn’t help a half-hysterical giggle; the man’s face was so much like what her own must have looked like when she had been brought into this preposterous place. And there was Uncle Bob offering tea as though they had all met at the local supermarket and dropped in for an afternoon cuppa instead of being faced with an improbable book-lined drawing room in what should have been a bare cavern of a chamber humming with raw electricity. But the laughter died when she glanced at Uncle Bob and saw the intent hooded stare he had skewered the visitor with. If it had been her and she’d been greeted with a look like that, she would have run for the hills. The visitor, on the other hand, took another step inside, staring at the fireplace, at the books.
“Where did all this come from?” he demanded. “And just who in the name of God are you?”
“You can call me Uncle Bob, everyone does,” said Uncle Bob serenely. “This is Sabrina. Excuse me, I think we could do with a fresh pot of tea.”
And with that he went, just left them, and Sabrina and the new arrival found themselves staring at one another across the back of Uncle Bob’s rocking chair.
“I saw you; you were out in the woods earlier.”
“Yes, but...saw me where?”
“On the bank, down by the lake.”
He frowned. “Wasn’t me. I’ve only just come down from the hills up beyond the dam road. I haven’t been anywhere near the lake today.”
“But I saw you—that shirt, you were wearing that shirt, you were there when I swam ashore...”
“Swam ashore?”
“The ferry—there was... an accident.”
“Good God,” he said, halfway between concern and complete confusion. “What happened?”
For a brief wild moment Sabrina considered telling him, everything, and then took pity on him. Finding this house instead of ‘his’ station seemed to have upset him enough already.
Besides, here was Uncle Bob back with the samovar, keeping a keen eye on their guest who seemed sufficiently flabbergasted by the whole thing to sit down meekly and accept a cup of tea in a delicate china cup which seemed fragile and incongruous in his big brown hands.
There was another cup to replace Sabrina’s accident, too, and the shards seemed to have vanished when she wasn’t looking. It was that kind of house.
She actually drifted after that, staring into the fire with the teacup in her hands, pieces of the mystery forming half-familiar shapes and then coming apart again in her head. She kept on tripping up on the fact that she had been both almost killed and then saved by a taniwha. Marco had told her about those, right at the beginning, when he had set about making her love his country. He had told her about its peoples, about its myths, even as he showed her its physical beauty. The taniwha was a creature she had believed confined to Maori legend, but he was out there now, the creature who claimed the improbable name of Jack, interfering in her life. Him, and the other two.
She’s not one of us.
If she is what I’m afraid she is, she can’t be drowned...
I can’t swim—not in that...
“Sabrina?”
She jumped. Uncle Bob was leaning over her. His hair was out of its ponytail, and drifted around his head like a white halo. “Do you think you can sleep? There’s work to be done in the morning.”
A moment before she had been more than ready to collapse from utter fatigue, the after-effects of her encounter in the lake, and shock. But now, even as he spoke, Sabrina realised that she had been feeling vaguely uncomfortable for some time in an oddly familiar kind of way, and now she suddenly realised what it was. Her hands flew to the stone at her throat—cold now as it had been once before, icy, burning with the freezing touch of it. Sabrina looked up, wild-eyed.
“They’re in trouble,” she said.
Uncle Bob dropped into a squat by her chair. “What?” he said “Who’s in trouble?”
“Jack... Fiana.... They’re out there, and they’re in trouble. They need help! We’ve got to go help them!”
“Hey, wait a minute!”
But Sabrina was on her feet. “I’ve got to help them,” she said in a low voice. “I owe them my life, both of them...”
“She doesn’t sleep!”
“What?”
Uncle Bob rose to his feet. “That thing you met in the lake, the thing that drowned the ferry and tried to drown you... she doesn’t sleep, she strengthens at night, you would merely be another life for her to drink!”
“I don’t mean to interrupt,” said the man in the Swanndri as he rose from his seat by the fireside, delicately balancing his cup in one hand, “but if it isn’t too much to ask, perhaps one of you might explain who’s in trouble? You said there was an accident on the ferry?”
“Well,” said Uncle Bob with a twisted grin, “you might say that these are two survivors. You might also call them other things.”
“Who is this she?”
“Yes,” Sabrina said unexpectedly, siding with the stranger, “who is this she?”
Uncle Bob’s eyes narrowed at this sudden alliance and he looked at them both closely, his eyes dancing from the one face to the other. Then he sighed, looking away into the fire.
“If your description of the creature and her actions and her name was remotely correct, then what we may be dealing with here is a rusalka,” he said.
“A rusalka?” echoed Sabrina, incredulous. “In New Zealand?”
“What,” said the visitor, still politely but with what was an iron control, “is a rusalka?”
Sabrina closed her eyes briefly, swaying. “Ohh, God, it hurts. Let’s go, for God’s sake. Let’s go, now. They need me.”
Uncle Bob was still frowning, looking puzzled. “How would you know?”
“The stone! You gave it to me, and you ask me how?”
“That stone has nothing at all to do with the creature out of that lake.”
“It does now,” said Sabrina flatly. “So? Are you coming? Or am I on my own?”
It was almost bravado, and they all knew it—to the extent that the man in the Swanndri actually smiled at the challenge she had flung. It was flimsy—a lady’s silk glove instead of the traditional gauntlet. But Uncle Bob knew that she would do it—that the ferry incident had been enough to now make her fly in the face of sense and wisdom, perhaps to her own death if by it she could pay the debt she saw herself as owing to the two that were out there.
“You can’t face a rusalka alone and unarmed! Not in her own domain!” Uncle Bob said sharply.
“Well, arm me, then!” Sabrina flashed back. “You were quick enough off the mark when you gave me this! Now give me means to respond to it when it calls!”
They glared at one another for a moment, and then Uncle Bob appeared to capitulate very suddenly.
“Right, then,” he said. “I’ll get the axe.”
“Who,” said their visitor, and this time his voice had taken on an icy determination, “is in trouble? And who or what is this… rusalka?”
“The rusalka is who sank the ferry,” said Uncle Bob. “And if Sabrina’s right, then she is now after the two that saved her life.”
The man frowned. “I gathered that much,” he said dryly. “Do I also take it that the ferry wasn’t… pushed… by an entirely human hand?”
“A rusalka is supposed to be – ”
“She’s a Russian spirit that is – ”
Uncle Bob and Sabrina had both started speaking at once; their words tangled, and they stopped, looking at each other. Then Sabrina winced. “If we don’t go... if we don’t go now...”
“There’s a pair of rubber boots by the door, you’d better put them on before we go anywhere,” Uncle Bob said, as though he was having the most natural conversation in the world, and then added, turning to his other guest, “You coming?”
“They saved my life,” murmured Sabrina.
The younger man put down his cup. “All right, then,” he said. “Show me this rusalka.”
Uncle Bob’s mouth quirked in a smile he was not quite able to hide. “If we cross her path tonight,” he said, “you may live to regret saying that. By the way, young sir, you have been introduced to us—what name might you go by?”
“Paul Conner,” said the other, striding past the two of
them to the door. “Shall we?”
“You probably won’t need that,” said Uncle Bob as Paul grabbed at a hunting rifle which had been leaning against the wall in the corridor outside.
“I’ll be the judge of that,” said Paul. “If you think an axe will make a better weapon, by all means take one.”
“The axe,” said Uncle Bob, “is not quite meant for the rusalka herself... Sabrina, hold on for half a minute! I need to get that axe. Without it we may as well go and bare our throats to her without a struggle—and by this stage, if they have met her, another moment of delay won’t make any difference one way or another.”
Sabrina waited, fretting, while Uncle Bob ducked into a closet and came out with his hands wrapped around a hefty woodsman’s axe whose edge gleamed with a hungry sharpness in the dim light of the corridor. When he nodded to her she turned and fled into the darkness of the woods, with such speed and purpose that the other two had to practically run to keep up with her. Uncle Bob’s face, hidden by the night from all the others, wore an almost comical expression of astonishment warring with the occasional thunderous frown. He, like no other, knew the state Sabrina had been in when he had taken her into the cottage, barely hours before—and now she was making two grown and extremely physically fit men almost pant in an effort to keep up with her in what should have been thoroughly unfamiliar territory. Something was awry, but he could not quite point to what. This particular night chase had not figured prominently in his plans.
It was inky out in the woods; the night was chilly, the sky veiled with cloud, and what little light there was found it almost impossible to penetrate the canopy of the rainforest. Unobserved by any of the other two Uncle Bob appeared to have brought a lantern as well as his axe, and it was by this faint light that they stumbled through the trees.
“Sabrina!” Uncle Bob hissed after almost fifteen minutes of this headlong rush into danger. “Slow down! I hear water—if she is anywhere, she is around running water.”
“They’re here,” Sabrina said, almost in the same instant. “They’re here, somewhere. Very close.”
The sharp crack with which Paul cocked his rifle echoed loud in the night silence, and Uncle Bob’s head snapped around, his eyes glittering in the lantern-light.
“I told you that you wouldn’t need that.”
“You stick with your axe,” Paul said.
The trees ended abruptly, circling a clearing whose only two inhabitants, ancient birches draped with hanging moss and lichen, leaned precariously towards each other, not quite touching, across a small stream. Under the tree on the far side of the stream something—two somethings?—appeared to be lying in untidy heaps beside the water. It was hard to make out exactly what they were looking at, but Sabrina didn’t need lantern-light to know.
“Oh God...” she whispered, one hand going to her throat in shock. Her fingers brushed the pendant. It was still there, still cold; she suddenly roused. “They’re still alive,” she said. “Come on.”
“Wait!” said Uncle Bob, flinging out a hand to stop her, but he was too late. She was out of the shadows and into the clearing. There was just enough light to show her standing there, alone, the night wind whipping the long dark hair she had not taken the time to clip back before she’d charged out of the house to pay back the ones who had bought her life back in the lake. The image was elemental; there was something in it, a sense of mad courage in the face of the odds, that roused Paul’s protective instincts, and before he quite knew what he was doing he found himself stepping out into the clearing beside her. Uncle Bob followed, warily, the light of the lantern flickering as it swayed from one hand; the other clutched the axe.
“Her tree; that birch...” he began, pointing with his axe, and then Sabrina screamed, flinging her hands across her face. Uncle Bob, for all his bulk, seemed to be almost lifted off his feet and thrown backwards under the assault of what seemed to be thin air to Paul’s eyes. Paul brought up the rifle, instinctively, and tracked... nothing. There was nothing there. Nothing but darkness. The lantern Uncle Bob had dropped glimmered wanly in the undergrowth.
Something brushed past Paul nevertheless, something cold and clammy that left a wave of weakness in its wake. His arms dropped to his side as he swayed with it, and then he felt human hands shaking him.
“The axe!” Sabrina cried. “Get the axe! Get that tree down!”
“What?
“Just do it! Come on! There’s no time!”
Paul dropped the useless rifle, snatched the axe from where it had fallen, and raced over to the stream, clearing it with one bound.
“Hurry!” Sabrina sobbed. “She’ll kill him! She’ll kill them all!”
But Paul had paused at the first of the mounds underneath the doomed birch, and had been frozen by what he thought he could see there—a black shape which seemed to flicker between a human youth and something else, something... other, half-familiar to Paul through tales of his childhood.
“Paul!”
Paul started, looked back; he could not see Uncle Bob at all. And this rusalka, this hungry spirit from a foreign land, had dared to raise her hand against the native spirits of Paul’s own country...
He hefted the axe. “Right,” he said softly. “Die, then.”
The first thud of the axe into the trunk of the birch split the night like a thunderclap. A thin banshee wail came from the far side of the clearing, and Paul paused instinctively, axe raised for a second strike. He caught a glimpse of what looked like a battle—Uncle Bob, struggling against something invisible, and Sabrina, fragile yet immutable, standing squarely in its way if it should choose to wing its way back to the tree.
Her voice came to him, soft as though she was standing beside him.
“Don’t stop.”
The axe thudded into the birch again, and again; the malaise came over him once more, that shiver of wet cold that had touched him earlier in the clearing.
“Don’t stop.”
The air screamed around him; the cold darkness wrapped itself around his face and he half dropped the axe, gasping for air, clawing at his eyes with one hand.
“Don’t stop....”
Something was batting at Paul, something powerful and, yes, hungry—they had described the spirit well back in the cottage. But so long as he kept on hacking at the tree... she weakened every time the axe bit deeper, he could sense this, and it gave him strength. He no longer needed Sabrina’s invocation. This was an evil ghost who had strayed into his heartland, a ghost who drank life out of the taniwha of the lake. Paul was no longer quite certain that this was what he had seen, but the glimmer had been enough, the idea that had been planted in his head and his heart. He was defending something irreplaceable against something intent on nothing but harm.
