Two and Twenty Dark Tales Read Online Free Page A

the most generous offer in the world. “One time with me and you can never be his again. One time with me and this endless cycle of hunting and dying will end. I told you all as much that very first night, my sweet lapwing, hound, and deer. One time with me and then you will be free.”
    He dropped his hands and shook his head. “Yet each hunt is like the first. Arawn finds us too soon.”
    “We got away that first time.” She looked up and up at him. She was so small, and there was no silver cage between them. Another memory stirred. Of his hands fumbling with the catch on the cage, the skin burning and falling off his fingers from touching the silver. The scars on his chest… “He killed you with a silver sword.”
    “Damn him,” Matthew said without heat. “We know each other’s weaknesses too well. He can’t stay in this world for long, lest he freeze. But each time he stays long enough to kill me. And so I am reborn. And so we hunt. He from the Otherworld, me from this, until we find you again.”
    “We three are reborn, too,” she said, remembering Mrs. Davis’s words. “Over and over. Bad things cycle round and round.”
    “This time it can be different,” he said brightly, and reached for her. “If you just let me have you…”
    She stabbed him with the knife.
    Or she tried. The blade slid right off him as if his skin was made of stone.
    He tweaked it right out of her hand. “Silly bird,” he said. “Pretty lapwing, sing to me now.”
    A fist slammed into the door from the outside, startling them both.
    “Arawn!” Fury took Matthew. He threw the knife at the door. It thunked point first into the wood. “Always he comes too soon!”
    “Always you talk too much,” she said. Under the soft sole of her boot, she felt something small and hard. A quick glance down showed her Mrs. Davis’s long silver pin.
    Matthew’s blue eyes were glacier cold. “Always I must kill you.”
    The door shuddered under another blow, then another, and another. Wood cracked, and the frame around the door split from the wall.
    “Just let me go,” she said.
    “Oh no,” said he. “For if he gets you first, then he gets me too. I’ll be singing next to you in that cage, or hunting with his hounds… or fleeing them, at his pleasure.” He eyed her neck and flexed his hands. “It won’t hurt. I’m quite good at snapping your neck by now. If you just stand still. You know you don’t want to live anyway…”
    But she did. The driving need to live now flashed through her like lightning in a thunderstorm. Mrs. Davis’s death could not go un-avenged, and now she knew: there were two other girls out there, somewhere, lost like her.
    She had thought there was no one. But there was, and had been, and would be. Maybe the warmth that kindled inside her earlier hadn’t been for nothing.
    Another thunderous blow on the door shook the room. Then a fist splintered through the door, blood streaming from the knuckles.
    Matthew grabbed for her, but she had already dropped to the floor. He fumbled with the air where she had been, then looked down to see her rip the silver stickpin from his abandoned shirt.
    “Wait, no!” He tried to step back. But not fast enough, for she stabbed the pin into his foot. It slid easily through the leather of his boot and between the bones beneath.
    He cried out in pain. His foot hissed and smoked. She ignored the flying bits of wood coming from the door behind her, yanked the pin out, and stood up.
    His old blue eyes were wide with fear. “No, I’m supposed to kill you,” he said. “That’s how it’s always been.”
    “Well, it’s like this now,” she said, and pierced his blue left eye with the pin. It sank deep, up to the outstretched wings of the bird in flight, and into his brain. Flesh sizzled. Blood and viscous jelly oozed out. She wrenched the pin out, and Matthew toppled to the floor.
    The door blew inward. She turned to see a hulking figure in a long scarf and cape-like coat