Lost Ones-Veil 3 by Christopher Golden Read Free Book Online Page B

stared at Oliver. He wished he could just tear away the grate, break down the door, only to touch her.
    “If you try to escape again, I will kill her. The High Council wants you and your sister left alive, for now. But this one…there is no need for her to live. I could strip her flesh and shatter every bone. I could bathe in her blood and they would not care. I could give her to the guards or, better yet, to one of my giants. I keep her alive only for leverage.”
    The sorcerer tossed Julianna aside. She crumbled to the ground like a rag doll, gasping for air. Two Atlantean guards dragged Julianna into the cell with Collette and left her there. As they departed, she sprang up and charged at them, mad hopelessness in her eyes.
    They slammed the door in her face, expressionless.
    Ty’Lis moved his face to within inches of the grated window in Oliver’s door. Oliver wanted to thrust his hands out, to tear at the sorcerer’s eyes or throat, but he did not dare.
    “Behave,” the monster whispered, that stench wafting into the cell from his nearness, making Oliver gag.
             
    Ted Halliwell tried to tell himself he wasn’t dead.
    He could see and hear, though both only dimly and distantly, as though he was submerged in shallow water. At times it seemed he broke the surface and those two senses became sharper.
    For the most part, those were his only senses. Yet there was a third—the tactile—that troubled him. Perhaps it would be more accurate to call it a sensation. He could see hands reach out—long fingers with sharp talons—but he could neither control their movements nor feel what they touched.
    In the dark, he approached a small military encampment. Horses grazed nearby, and they whinnied as he passed, a shiver running up their flanks. They snorted, spooked as hell, and the terror in their eyes was wild. But he passed by and the sounds of their skittishness faded.
    Tent flaps danced in the breeze, as did the banners flying the colors of King Hunyadi. Halliwell had met the king, once, and had felt an immediate loyalty to the man. He had been strong, yet fair and wise—a man Halliwell himself would be willing to follow into war. In another world. In another era.
    Now he couldn’t follow anyone.
    He could only drift along behind the eyes of another. What troubled him most, however, wasn’t what he couldn’t feel, but what he
could.
There was no weight to him, none of the burden of flesh he’d felt all his life. But he still felt as though he had substance, and within that substance, he could feel sand, shifting. It eroded his bones, sifting against his insides.
    Impossible, of course.
    Ted Halliwell couldn’t be the Sandman.
    But he felt as though he existed only behind the monster’s putrid lemon eyes. Somewhere within the creature’s mind, he could feel a third presence. He knew that it could only be the Dustman.
    Halliwell had come upon the brothers while they were attempting to destroy one another. Like a fool, he had interfered.
    Now he slid through the night toward the military encampment. Sentries marched the perimeter but did not see him. If they heard anything, it was a whisper on the breeze. Through the Sandman’s eyes, Halliwell saw a sentry yawn, widely, and he wondered if this was the presence of the monster or mere coincidence. For this was no storybook Sandman, gently easing children off to sleep. It was the savage fiend of older stories who punished little ones by plucking out their eyes and eating them.
    Halliwell tried to tell himself that he was alive.
    He was aware. From that bit of information, he deduced that he couldn’t possibly be dead. In the ordinary world—before crossing the Veil in pursuit of the answers he’d thought Oliver Bascombe could give him about a series of murders and disappearances—he’d been a sheriff’s detective. Now his old life had been erased and he wished that he had not needed those answers so desperately. Trapped beyond the Veil, Halliwell