Elsa Crane's Arc

Chapter 6 of 66

Elsa held the stone open. Cold poured up the steps like water. She looked at her own hand on the block. Round and soft, ringed with age. Her wool robes were made for hearth rooms, not for chasing a killer through a tunnel that breathed like a grave. "I won't last a hundred paces down there," she said. "He knows it." Nora waited on the step above with the shovel. "Then we send someone who will." Elsa closed her eyes. She had put this off for weeks. She opened them and said the thing she had sworn not to say. "The one under the fortress. The horned one." Nora's jaw set. "Elder." "He can walk cold. He can run it." Elsa touched the small shape sewn inside her collar, the blue-jeweled silver blade she had carried since the first frost. "And I have the stake. He steps wrong, he ends." They went. The ghost drifted with them, a thin blue smear at Elsa's shoulder, thinner in daylight. It had known Jonas's path. It might know this one too. "You'll come as far as the gate?" Elsa asked it. "To the door," the ghost breathed. "No further. He doesn't like me inside." The granite fortress squatted at the pine line, iron shutters bolted, the red door bright as a cut. Elsa climbed the porch. Her chest hurt from the walk. She knocked twice. The door opened on its own weight. He filled the frame before she saw him move. Tall, horned, blood dripped down the curl of one horn onto the stone. His eyes were two green lamps in a bone-white face. He looked at her collar first, at the shape beneath it, and smiled with teeth. "Elder," he said. "You never call." "Jonas Everett has taken a boy under the village," Elsa said. "I can't follow. You can. Bring the boy back alive. Do what you like with the baker." He tipped his head. "Payment." "One warm body when I'm done choosing. Not before. Not a child." He considered. His tongue touched a tooth. "Show me the blade." She drew it an inch. Sapphires caught the porch light and threw it back into his eyes. He flinched, small, honest. Good. He believed her. "Done," he said. "Wait here, Elder. I don't carry passengers." He was past her before she felt the wind of it. Down the steps, into the pines, gone toward the abandoned house and the passage under it. Nora let out a breath Elsa hadn't heard her hold. Elsa sat on the porch bench. Her hands shook now, both of them. She had traded a hunter for a hunter. The village would owe a life she had not yet named. The ghost hovered at the rail. "He runs fast," it whispered. "He is already under." "Then we wait," Elsa said, "and count what comes back."