Yet where was the spriggan?
The bookshelf concealed no alcoves from this side, nor anywhere else for it to have gone. Faint, colored light shone through a hole on the opposite wall, likely where the spriggan had dug through to the book’s original hiding spot. It looked too small for the creature to hide in, unless it had squeezed in and fled through the window into the pub? Austin’s arm followed his thoughts, absently turning the flashlight toward the hole.
A wail from the archway lanced the silence. “Inside-out!” A mad scratching of claws on stone punctuated the creature’s cries. “Is wrong! Is dirty!”
Austin swung the light toward the archway in time to see the creature’s neck move like a striking snake as it spat the black mist his way. Boden ordered him to dodge, but Austin was already moving. He threw himself to his right in a sideways dive that slammed his shoulder to the floor. His arm stung in shock and protest as he fumbled into his pack for the nail gun concealed within. By the time his fingers found purchase enough to pull it from the bag, the spriggan had vanished.
Austin checked the ceiling, even spun around when gripped by the idea it was behind him, but saw no sign of the creature. His heart pounded out the seconds. He aimed the nail gun along the flashlight beam, but the spriggan gave him nothing to shoot at. For a moment he cursed his decision to turn his clothes inside out, but if the thing was so repulsed, being left alone was far better than having to fight it.
Austin abandoned the impulse to call to it and flush it out, instead deciding to take the opportunity to try to get Corinna out. He knelt again, shaking her shoulder as best he could with the light and nail gun trained toward the arch. “Corinna! Wake up!”
She didn’t stir. A whine echoed from somewhere in the main room. Austin braced for another attack that didn’t come. Corinna lay still. Another few breaths brought with them the realization that he would need to carry her. In his hurry to devise a plan to deal with the spriggan, he had overlooked how to bring Corinna out. He knew the concept of a fireman’s carry, but had never actually tried one. Well, first time for everything.
Another few seconds passed with no sign of the spriggan. Austin hurriedly set the nail gun at his feet. He tugged Corinna forward by the arms, bent to haul her over his left shoulder, and finally stood. Wobbling, he shifted her weight to a better position that let the flashlight, still taped to his forearm, point ahead of them.
“Nnnnhh!”
The spriggan peered around the archway. Its coal-black eyes squinted at him, and then widened with rage. Austin readied himself to strike before it could, but he had left the nail gun on the floor! He froze, torn between grabbing for it and trying to dodge as the spriggan spat.
Too slow. It was all he could do to turn Corinna away from it and take the brunt himself. He staggered, barely catching himself from slamming his knees into the floor. Corinna’s previously manageable weight dragged him to one side. Had the side of the shelving not been there to prop her against, he would have spilled to the floor. Austin groaned. The spriggan disappeared again with a cackle.
“Corinna — wake up!”
She didn’t answer. He steeled himself, took another breath, and, remembering the nail gun this time with his free hand, heaved himself back to his feet. The effort was akin to climbing up over a ledge, and some small relief came when he managed to straighten up.
Walking with Corinna over his shoulder was another matter. Though he felt the lethargy fading, his first couple of steps threatened to drag him down again. He shuffled to one side, leaned against the wall, and, with the nail gun aimed at the archway, waited for either his strength or the spriggan to return.
The spriggan came first. Austin jerked the trigger. It fired a nail that clinked off the stone behind it, bounced off the creature’s back, and fell to the floor. The spriggan howled and spit again. Austin didn’t even try to dodge. He took the full force of the blast and fired the gun again as soon as it reloaded.
His aim had drooped from the spriggan’s breath. The nail punched through the creature’s thigh as it clung to the arch, intent on seeing the result of its own volley. An unspeakable wail tore from the spriggan’s lips. As Austin struggled with wilted muscles to prop up himself and Corinna against the wall, the spriggan dropped from the arch and pulled itself back to the main room.
“Iron . . . nails!” Austin gasped at the creature. “How do you like — ”
His taunt went unfinished, the breath needed for more vital things. Iron nails had been hard to find. Most modern nails, he had learned, were made of steel. The ones he did find were hand-made but seemed to fit the nail gun well enough. Yet could he hope to carry Corinna out and simultaneously deal with the spriggan if it continued to fight?
The creature hissed behind the archway. A thrown, extracted nail clattered against the wall ahead of him. “Now this one kills you!” it whimpered. “Not let you stay! Takes your Rhyll-morsel and gives you to vermin!”
“Corinna, please. Wake up . . .”
Austin didn’t wait for a response. With no strength to be gentle, he swung her back down to the floor along the wall and winced in sympathy. The loss of her weight gave a second wind. Austin got to his feet and shuffled forward to the archway, light ahead, weapon pointed. From just beyond came the spriggan’s hissing whimpers. Refusing to yield what speed he could muster, Austin didn’t stop to plan. He rounded the arch, nail gun aimed.
The spriggan stood shielding its thigh not five feet away, teeth bristled.
It screamed.
Austin fired.
The nail gun clanked and bucked wrongly in his grip. Jammed! In a frantic heartbeat Austin cursed his failure to inspect each nail before loading it.
The spriggan leaped.
Wounded, the leap was more a frenzied stagger, but it was enough. Pinpoint fingertips clawed at Austin’s arms and he fell back, at once trying to shield himself and somehow fix the nailgun jam. Slashes scraped his face and shoulders. They sliced through clothing to skin, forcing Austin to drop the gun to defend himself.
Leathery skin slipped against his palms. Austin struggled to gain the upper hand before the thing could spit again. The spriggan struck blindly, its eyes shut against the sight of his reversed clothing, yet it writhed and struggled like a rabid animal. It was all Austin could do to keep it at bay.
It wasn’t enough. Another blast of breath took him. He had sensed it coming, seen the spriggan draw back to spit, and so had steeled himself and focused on gripping the creature’s wrists.
They were the only thing he managed to hold onto. His eyes closed of their own accord and Austin fell back into fatigue as if sinking into deep water. Somewhere above lay the surface. He gripped the spriggan’s wrists as it struggled against him, but Austin couldn’t pull himself away, couldn’t fight back. It was only a matter of time before he lost — before he failed Corinna, Rhi, and everything they both stood for.
He tried to call out to Boden, begging for help and strength. His words lay motionless on his lips. The creature’s breath sapped his will and dragged him deeper. In his mind Boden’s voice echoed as a distant yelling, but he couldn’t make out words. Even his own thoughts grew sluggish.
Please . . .
Nothing else came.
TWENTY
Something jerked him. Austin thought his hands went numb, only to realize a second later that the spriggan had torn free of him. Would he feel it when it impaled him on those fingers? Would he know anything further after that? Perhaps he might simply sink deeper, into nothingness . . .
No pain came.
Something was different. Someone screamed.
At first Austin thought it was him, it must be him. The scream continued: a piteous, staggered wail. The spriggan? Austin couldn’t tell if was getting louder or his own awareness was just returning.
And then, instantly, it stopped. Hands touched his face.
Gently.
With rounded fingertips.
“Austin?” Corinna seemed to whisper fr
om across a chasm.
He muttered half-formed words in answer, and struggled to open his eyes.
“Come on. No more mucking about on the floor.”
“Sound . . . tired . . .” he mumbled. The sting of cuts on his arms and face began to awaken his senses. His limbs remained lead, but he could move his legs, barely.
He didn’t catch Corinna’s response. There came a vague sense of having asked what happened, and of hearing Boden saying something in his thoughts amid Corinna’s answer. He lost both in a fog. The fog only lifted with the feel of rain on his face and his muscles straining in a blind, stubborn effort to climb up through the drainage grate.
The slow ascent did, at the very least, get his blood pumping. Corinna tugged upward as he reached the top. Though her double-handed grip pulled with no more force than a light breeze, it helped to steady him. Austin clambered out and knelt, gasping, beside her in the muck. His eyes took in the daylight and the sight of her: clothes cast in mud, hair matted, green eyes bleary and red.
“What happened?”
She smiled and swallowed, out of breath. “Going to ask that one again, are you?”
“I don’t hardly remember asking before.”
“You saved them. Rhi and Corinna both.”
Austin glanced down the shaft. “Is it . . .?”
“Little blighter isn’t doing much of anything now. I found your nails,” she added after his questioning look. “Interesting idea, that nail gun.”
“It jammed.”
“And yet it still made for a splendid hammer. I snatched it up with a pair of nails and — ” She mimed whacking a nail. “Back of its head. Little gobshite.”
“Nice job.”
“Aye, well, not as fun as it sounds. Can you stand?”
“Forget about me, are you okay?”
“Okay enough to ask if you can stand.”
“I think so.” He smiled in the face of her concern. “Let’s test it.”
Together they hauled each other to their feet and, leaning together in a one-armed embrace, made their way out of the alley.
“You’d best not make me ask,” Corinna warned.
“The book’s safe. I stashed it in a locker at a TI,” he answered, speaking of one of the guidebook-listed tourist information centers scattered about the city. “It should be alright there for at least a little while.”
“Alright. But if there’s another spriggan guarding it when we gather it up, you’ll cover my escape.”
“Sounds fair.”
“Fair’s fair, on a fair day.” She hugged him tighter a moment, and Austin followed suit.
“Rhi used to say that, you know.”
“Aye, seems about right.”
The book awaited them in the locker where Austin had left it. They collected it and returned to the streets of London to shamble down the sidewalk.
Though the immediate effects of the spriggan’s breath had faded, Corinna thought shaking off the full weight of repeated exposure would take further rest. The lingering ache in Austin’s muscles and mind gave him no reason to doubt it.
A chain hotel loomed seductively in their path. They booked a room with two beds and ascended to their floor as Austin distantly considered how badly he had botched his vacation spending plan. Both agreed they could not stay there long. Neither wished to resist the need for sleep for longer than it would take to get clean and fall into bed. Austin yielded the first shower to Corinna.
He was relieved to find the cuts the spriggan had carved into him to be shallower than they felt. Though his shower stung them, they required little more than rudimentary first aid. He dressed them and stared at his own bleary-eyed reflection in the bathroom mirror. It was the first time he had felt some measure of personal safety since the previous night.
What would he have done if he hadn’t been able to save her? If she had somehow died — died again? — either in covering his original escape or upon his attempted rescue?
Though she had saved him as much as he did her, if not more so, the mere knowledge she was safe again released a flood of relief. It came without thought to shape it, pure ragged emotion: a cousin to the despair of Rhi’s death that had left him fetal on the floor a year ago, this time a near-miss of death with the desperate joy of last-moment deliverance. It called to mind the dreams that haunted him in the weeks after the accident: Rhi finding him, at his home, at college, anywhere. It had all been a stupid mistake, she would tell him. She was alive, she was safe, and they were still together.
Austin stood before the mirror, his heart warmed in what felt like an echo of those dreamed embraces. The dreams, while they had him, would grant relief greater than he had known. They were a buoy that lifted him skyward, only to let him plunge back down upon waking. He would realize the truth and feel anew the gaping hole in his life that her death had torn. Yet the relief now, though only a ripple of that buoyed feeling, was not a dream.
Neither, he told himself, was Corinna completely Rhi.
Yet, were he to wake now and find her dead . . .
Austin jerked the faucet open and splashed freezing water in his face. He rubbed it from his eyes, suddenly conscious of the crystal’s glow where it sat on the narrow sink countertop. “Still there, Boden?”
“Indeed, I am. Is there something you wished?”
Austin stared into his own eyes again. Rhi was in there, too, he reminded himself: an echo of thought in his own memory, his own mind. But echoes faded. If Rhi’s memories would fade from Corinna, too, what then?
He would lose her.
Again.
“No,” Austin answered Boden. “Just checking.”
Relaxation or fatigue cleared the way for troubles to parade themselves before him: Maeron still hunted them. Corinna hoped the book might hold the key to separating Austin from the crystal. At the moment it was only a hope. Maeron remained for them to deal with, and how much time did they have before Rhi might fade from Corinna entirely and none of it would matter?
He had no idea what they would do next.
He tried to bring back the chalkboard in his mind, to jot down problems and options, but nothing stuck. Fatigue still had its claws in him, and sleep called. Thankful he at least had the wit to recognize it, Austin pulled on his boxers, left his mud-covered clothes in their heap on the floor, and, promising himself things would look better after a few hours’ sleep, started for bed.
When he opened the bathroom door, Corinna was there.
She stood, barefoot, hair still damp from her shower. Her t-shirt had survived her ordeal mostly unsoiled beneath her other clothes. It covered her down to mid-thigh. Austin hesitated, taken with the sight of her as she stared up at him with what seemed heartfelt frustration.
“I ought to be quite cross with you.” She folded her arms across her chest and wore a frown too volatile to measure.
Austin blinked. “Cross. With me.”
“I told you to leave me there, but . . .” She turned her back on him. “Then you came anyway.”
Stung, Austin’s mouth dropped open. She was accusing him? Didn’t she understand? “And so you’re mad at me for that?” he burst. “Don’t be stupid!”
She whirled on a glare. “Stupid?”
“You’re the one yelling at me for saving your life!”
“I’m yelling at you?”
“You just said — ”
“I don’t care what I said!” She gaped. Her eyes sharpened. “You really think I’m stupid?”
“If you think I could’ve left you there, then yeah, maybe you are!” The words came on their own.
“Oh, well now I am cross! You want yelling? Fine!” She shoved his shoulder. “You should’ve bloody did what I told you! You had no right to rush back in and risk everything just for me!”
“It worked, didn’t it?”
“You got lucky, you git!” She threw her arms wide as if grasping for words. “What — what if I hadn’t woken up when I did?”
“Then I’d guess
we’d both still be in there, wouldn’t we?”
“Aye, we would!” She glared back at him as the moment stretched out in turmoil. That his answer hurt her somehow only fed his frustration.
He dropped onto the edge of the bed. There, he stared at the tan carpet until the room quieted from the shouts that echoed in his imagination.
“But we’re not,” he said.
She stepped closer until he was staring at her feet. “But, we could have been.”
Austin shook his head. Why was she doing this? Hadn’t she been happy for the rescue? Did she really want him to leave her in there?
“I thought you were glad I came!” He shot to his feet again, glaring to make sure she saw his offense even as fatigue tried to push him back down. “What the hell kind of person do you think I am? I couldn’t leave you there! Forget the fact that I don’t know what to do on my own! Forget I can’t do a damned thing against Maeron! Hell, forget I don’t even know how to read that book! I can’t lose you again! You didn’t thank me. Fine, whatever! But at least get why I did it!”
Again they dropped into silence. Corinna’s jaw tightened. Her eyes were a storm of weariness and hurt tearing at Austin’s heart until an apology lumped in his throat.
She cut him off with a raised hand before he could get it out, then turned for the bathroom. He couldn’t bring himself to stop her. She seized the knob, poised to slam the door after her. Instead, she stopped.
Corinna stood on the threshold, watching him over her shoulder, accusing and imploring at once. Austin felt like he had sprinted through a tunnel only to turn a corner and find himself teetering over a chasm. All he could do was stare back and try to regain his balance.
“I’m a jumble, Austin,” she said. Her gaze faltered, only to flick back up to grasp for his. “I miss Tragen, and Kitrina, and Kel, and Tennant. I can see them dying and I can’t let them have done so for naught, to say nothing of Rhyll! It’s important! It’s so damned important! And none of it is even mine!”
She hugged herself and turned to lean against the door frame. “I’m Rhianon, but I’m Corinna, too, and I can’t even get frustrated with having all this dumped in my lap because I know I’m the one who dumped it! Yes, it’s fascinating at first, but it’s not fair, and it’s not right, and it’s not bloody me! And at the same, time it is, and I can’t help it. And there’s — there’s nothing simple right now!”
Memory of Dragons Page 20