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I’m not cut out for this.
We burst through the kitchen door and strike for the tree line. Ducking behind the widest trunk, Sion peeks around to make sure we weren’t followed. I’m panting so hard my chest aches and it’s not easing up. How much fear can a heart take before it splits?
I give a tiny shriek when Pwyll materializes, separating Sion and me.
“A wee lad spoke the name. Proof. Matthew Kennedy is here. Can you now find him?”
Pwyll doesn’t nod or disappear. He floats in the open space between trees and castle, humming.
Sion snatches my hand. “Come on, then.”
What choice do I have but to follow a thousand-year-old druid and a two-hundred-year-old Veil guide? I can’t knock on the castle door and ask for directions to the twenty-first century on the night a room full of soldiers is set to be poisoned instead of paid. Or any night, for that matter.
Pwyll leads us to the corner of the castle. We scrabble backward in time to keep from plunging over the edge of the cliff the castle perches on. Below us, a countryside dusted in moonlight spreads to the edge of sight. The peaceful lowing of a cow drifts up the hillside, a disconnect from the bloody history about to be made inside the walls of Leap Castle.
Pwyll turns and weaves, leaning with his coffin from side to side, drawing an invisible path in the air. At least invisible to me. He goes one way and then backtracks, curving, twining. I gulp a mouthful of air when he glides straight through the stone wall of the castle and then back out. It’s mad. How will we ever get to Matthew in time if we’re supposed to follow this Elemental’s maze?
I shake Sion’s sleeve and jerk my chin at the castle. “If we go out in the open, they’ll see us?”
“Whisht!” He lays a finger against my kiss-swollen lips. “It’s nearly finished.”
“What?”
Sion strokes a finger through the air. “He’s spiral walking. Pwyll’s drawing a Triskele. It’s a Celtic spiral pattern for the three-layered nature of the human soul. Where it ends will point to young Matthew.”
Sure enough, a pattern glows so faintly, it looks like brush strokes of moon beam and shadow. Suddenly, the commotion from above changes timbre. Instead of cheers and singing, hideous strangling noises and cries of pain run down the castle walls. Clanking of metal on metal punctuates unbearable sounds of torment. The dirge of the soulfall was the worst nightmare soundtrack I’d ever experienced until now. This is hell’s symphony.
Sion and I hold one another, heads bowed onto each other’s shoulders until silence replaces the death rattle of a hundred spirits. Pwyll moans, stretching his design back around to the front of the castle where he inclines the top point of his coffin to the right of the wooden front door.
“Steal my soul,” says Sion. “The oubliette.”
Rhythmic thuds come from the other side of the wall where the tip of Pwyll’s spiral leads us. Muffled shrieks of pain reverberate through my skin.
Sion follows the fading glow of the Triskele toward the main door. Before we reach it, he points to a cart near the corner of Leap Castle. “Hide there. I won’t be but a minute.”
I wrap both arms around one of his. He can’t leave me alone. “Where are you going? You can’t go in. They’ll take you.”
The door is open a crack. Nobody stands near it. There’s no sound from the main floor. Faint firelight is all that filters through the slit between wood and stone. Sion peels my hands off his arm, leaning in to whisper, “In the corner of this room, on the other side of the wall, is the oubliette.”
He reads the horror in my expression and continues. “You know of the hidden shafts for putting things you don’t want anyone else to find.” Sion lays his palm gently on the side of my face. “You don’t want to be seeing what’s there now. Stay out of sight.”
Without warning, there’s a wisp of mist and Sion seems to collapse. A fox trots to the wooden door, nosing it aside enough to squeeze through. Okay, Sion’s fox morphing business can come in handy. Down the path from the castle, the low conversation of guards rolls through the trees. I’m not staying put to slam into any more drunken, ham-handed rapists.
Careful to hug walls and shadow, I make my way to peek through the door inside the darkened room holding Leap Castle’s chamber of secrets. The space is deserted save the dwindling light of a neglected fire and the rumble of men’s voices spilling down the stairs. My stomach knots, imagining the bastards above me clinking tankards and congratulating themselves on mass murder.
As I slide into the room, I find the stuff of madness. Pwyll hovers near the corner to the right of the door where plaster and stone shift between transparent and opaque. Either the druid or Sion eroded the substance of the wall to reveal a macabre sculpture of bodies. A tower of limbs overextends and twists. Heads face backward, dolls put together wrong.
I lift a hunk of skirt and shove it into my mouth to muffle a scream as a new body drops from the Bloody Chapel above onto the heap. The metallic stench of blood, Pwyll’s decay, and general foulness nearly overwhelm me. I breathe into my apron to dilute what I can.
Sion’s strained voice reaches me through the darkness. “Is there anything I can say to your ma so she knows I’ve found you? A song she sung? A story?”
Stuttering moans answer. Through the fading wall, I find Sion wedged in beside the carnage.
“Come on, lad. It’s for your ma. Give me something.”
My fingers tremble with an urge to slap Sion’s insensitive face.
He’s found Matthew Kennedy.
