Shadow's Bane

by Karen Chance

  “What happened?” he demanded.

  “A child,” the redhead said, her voice catching. “He wanted me to—he was going to take a child—”

  The bruiser sighed. “It’s a damned vampire, not a child. That thing is probably older than you—than all of us! And would kill you, given half a chance—”

  “You don’t know that!” She glared at him. “You don’t know what he is—what any of them are! And I won’t—”

  Mircea couldn’t see her anymore, as she’d moved out of his limited range of vision. But the sound of another slap was unmistakable. As were her renewed screams afterward. Like before, they sounded as much of fury as of pain.

  “Cut it out!” the bruiser said.

  “Why?” It was the scrawny man’s voice. “If she won’t work, she’s no good t’us.”

  “Oh, she’ll work. And we need her pretty.”

  “I won’t, I tell you!” It was the woman again. “I can’t—”

  “You can and you will. If we have t’train another, it’s going to hold things up, and we haven’t time for that.”

  “I don’t care!” A sudden gasp. “Let go of me!”

  “Why? If you don’t get back to it, you’ll be servicing worse than us soon. Or have you forgotten what that’s like?”

  “Stop it! Let me go!”

  “I’ll stop it when you come t’yer senses.” He laughed. “Or maybe when I’m finished.”

  “You’ll stop it now.”

  The voice came from neither of the three humans. But from someone else who had slipped through the portal while everyone was distracted. And dropped to the ground, silent and unnoticed, which wasn’t surprising. Even now, looking right at him, Mircea couldn’t really see him. Just a vague, human-shaped shadow, slightly darker than the rest, but which could have been a trick of the light flickering in a nearby lantern.

  “We were just—” the bruiser began, before a brief gesture cut him off.

  “On deck.” The voice was a hoarse rasp. “Prepare for docking.”

  The bruiser looked like he was about to argue, but for once, the gaunt sailor was smarter. “Come on.” He tugged at his companion’s arm.

  They went back upstairs.

  The vampire looked at the redhead. She’d moved back into view, holding her cheek. The shadow pushed her hand away, and ignored the shudder that went through her. “My apologies,” he murmured, healing the reddened flesh with a touch.

  “I won’t do it,” she told him, her voice shaking. “I can’t—”

  “Shh.” He dragged a finger down the side of her face. From a human, it would have been an affectionate or possibly sensual gesture. In this case . . . it reminded Mircea of nothing so much as a horseman soothing a startled filly. It reeked of possession.

  But it seemed to work.

  The redhead’s eyelids fluttered, and she sank down beside the wall, her head already lolling.

  “Sleep.” He told her. “Forget.”

  And then she was out.

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  “Hey. Hey, wake up.”

  I grumbled and turned over. Or I tried. But my knee hit something, and a loud horn blasted my eardrum, and I sat up abruptly.

  And hit my head.

  “Take it easy!”

  My eyes focused on Fin, who was peering in the car door down by my feet.

  “So, you want the cherry slushie or—” He stopped, and squinted at something neon blue in an oversized cup. “Whatever the hell this is?”

  I blinked at him, slowly realizing that I’d been sleeping in my car.

  He pushed the cups at me again.

  “They didn’t have cola?” I croaked.

  “Like I know. I don’t got a charm with me, so whaddya think’s gonna happen if I go in the store like this?”

  I took a cup from him. It was cold. “Then who did?”

  He looked at something over my shoulder, and I twisted around. To see a massive silhouette against a glittering skyline, a bunch of dark water, and a half-sunk boat. And a little wild-haired woman standing on a rock dabbing at a hulk’s shoulder.

  “Wha’ happened?” I asked blearily.

  “We started to take on water. Don’t you remember?”

  Vaguely.

  “Ah, you were high as a kite, on all those disorienting charms. Whaddya do? Take one full in the face?”

  “A crate full.” And now I had the hangover from hell.

  “Yeah, and who knows what else was in there. Why didn’t you just run out the door, like the rest of us?”

  I glared at him around the side of the ICEE I was holding to my throbbing head. “Gee. Why didn’t I think of that?”

  “Ah, sarcasm. Good. Means you’re okay.”

  “Wait.” I’d slumped down and now I sat up. And hit my head again. Son of a bitch! “How’d I get the car?” I called after Fin, who had started walking back toward the gas station we were parked beside.

  And was almost hit by a truck barreling into bay number two.

  “Hey, I’m walkin’ here!”

  He made a rude gesture at the driver.

  “Fin!”

  He turned around. “You ran back for it. Then drove back here to meet us and collapsed.”

  He walked off before I could ask anything else, slurping on the cherry ICEE, while the truck driver and I stared at him. I got tired of it first and climbed out of the car. It took a lot longer than normal.

  And a lot more effort.

  I leaned against the hood, panting and drinking neon blue stuff for a while, because at least it was cold. The night wasn’t, and after the jog I didn’t remember, my sweats were living up to their name.

  The gas station was up a hill from the waterfront, with some apartments on one side and a storage facility on the other. A scraggly tree grew down near the rocks, which were covered in graffiti, like the ones by the warehouse. New graffiti, because it was super bright and seemed to move in my peripheral vision whenever I looked away from it.

  Squiggle.

  Look.

  Squiggle.

  Look.

  Trippy.

  Especially with Dorina’s memories, or whatever the hell they were, still sloshing about my cranium.

  Sometimes it felt like she was trying to tell me something, like when she gave me that mental slap for thinking I’d had it worse than her. But sometimes it felt like I’d just plugged into random bits of her memories—or Mircea’s, because she seemed to have riffled through his brain a lot, taking whatever she wanted. I wondered if the great mentalist had known that he was being spied on, and by his baby daughter, at that.

  Or one of them.

  A spike of pain tore through my temples, and I went down to my haunches, holding my head. I wanted to go home and crawl into bed. I wanted the stiff drink I hadn’t gotten at Fin’s. I wanted the landscape to stop slinging around every time I freaking moved!

  After a while, it did, staying mostly steady when I looked up. But I decided there was a slight chance I wasn’t in any shape to drive right now. I drank some more of big blue, and then I decided that I might as well go and meet the other one—formally, this time.

  I got up and walked across the road.

  The big guy was down the incline, slumped under the tree, trying to get as low as possible, so his diminutive assistant could treat his wounds. He had a lot of them. Cuts and gouges, some deep, which I guess had been the result of flying shrapnel. What looked like a potion burn on the side of his face, which had barely missed an eye. And something I’d seen before: a chest that was almost black, eclipsing the copper highlights that gleamed on his shoulders in the distant gas station lights, and which I now knew meant bleeding under the skin.

  He’d gotten himself a gargantuan bruise, I guess from where the mages’ combined spell had hit. It looke
d painful, but the fact that it hadn’t torn through his chest was nothing short of miraculous. A combined spell was a bitch.

  I offered him the rest of my ICEE, and to my surprise, he took it. And seemed to like the flavor.

  Or maybe he was just thirsty. He drank it in about five seconds, before I could warn him about brain freeze, but I guess that wasn’t a thing for trolls. Because he immediately looked around for more.

  “I’ll get you another,” I offered, because I had a certain amount of fellow feeling. And because I’d just remembered that convenience stores carry beer. “You want something?” I asked Granny, who shook her head.

  “Got it covered,” she told me, and pulled a hip flask out of a pocket. “But some more Bactine would be good. And some of that tape they use for bandages.”

  “Okay.”

  I wandered back to the store, loaded up, and came outside again, to find Fin dragging a U-Haul trailer past the front door. Or part of one. It was the little half kind.

  “Where are you going with that?” I asked him.

  “I’m gonna—puff, puff—attach it—puff, puff—to your car.”

  “Okay, no.”

  He paused. “Whaddya mean, no? And what’s with the food?”

  “Thought they might be hungry.”

  “So you’re giving them that? Where’s the fish?”

  “What fish? It’s a convenience store. They have Slim Jims and ICEEs.”

  “Well—puff, puff—we’re gonna need—puff, puff—some fish.”

  “Why do we need fish? And stop walking!”

  “I gotta get this hooked to the car.”

  “You’re not going to hook it to the car.”

  “And why not?”

  “I don’t have a hitch.”

  Thereafter followed a long string of out-of-breath cussing. Followed by: “WHAT DO YOU MEAN, YOU DON’T HAVE A HITCH?”

  “Why would I have a hitch?”

  “Everybody has a hitch! What do you do when you need to haul stuff?”

  “I rent a truck.” And shit. I’d forgotten Stan’s truck again. He was going to skin me. And that was assuming I could find the thing, since it hadn’t been at the house.

  Where the hell had I left it?

  “What kind of truck?” Fin said, looking around.

  “What?”

  “You said we need a truck. What kind?”

  “I didn’t say that. And you realize we’re having this convo in front of the store, right? Where everybody can see you?”

  “There’s nobody around.”

  “There’s that guy.” I pointed with the ICEE at the guy who’d stared at Fin earlier. He’d gotten his gas and what looked like a couple hot dogs and one of the nachos-of-death things these places always try to pawn off on you, like that cheese hasn’t been in the crock for two weeks.

  But he wasn’t eating any of it, and not because it was nasty.

  But because he was staring at Fin.

  “Hey. That guy’s got a truck,” Fin said speculatively.

  And then, before I could stop him, he dropped the mini-haul and went charging across the gas station, toward the guy. Whose eyes blew wide and whose food went everywhere when he threw the truck into gear and screeched out of the lot, like all the demons of hell were after him.

  Or one big-nosed forest troll.

  Who stood there, shouting something for a minute, before stomping back over. “Well, what the hell do we do now?”

  “You can’t just steal a truck!”

  “I wasn’t gonna steal it. I was gonna borrow it.”

  “And you can’t go around talking to norms without a charm. You’re going to get picked up.”

  Fin rolled his eyes so hard he almost fell over. “Yeah, sure. That’s what’s gonna get me picked up.”

  “Look, just take that back where you got it from! If Blue and his lady friend want a ride, we’ll fit ’em in the car somehow.”

  Thank God it was a convertible.

  “And what about the others?”

  I felt my stomach drop. “What others?”

  Small hands found small hips. “Well, who do you think, Dory?”

  Five minutes later, we were down by the water again, having towed the mini-haul over by the car simply to get it out of the way. And I was staring at—damn, I didn’t even know. Eight, nine, maybe ten selkies, all crowded up against the colorful rocks, in the shallows.

  And not looking good.

  I guess because they’d had to swim after the boat, although I didn’t see why they’d bothered. They were in the ocean! That was their thing, right? Why not swim away?

  Only they weren’t looking like they felt like swimming right now. Some were gasping for breath; others were using their flippers to weakly stroke their companions, some of whom had their eyes closed and, honestly, looked like they might never open them again. Well, damn.

  “We need to get them to a healer.”

  “That’s what I said,” Fin told me, pawing through the bags of assorted stuff I’d bought. “But they’re afraid whoever it is will rat them out. They say they’ll be okay with some rest and food.” He looked up. “Are you sure there’s no salmon or anything?”

  “It’s a convenience store!”

  “Well, it seems like a poorly stocked one.” He opened some jerky and waved it around, but nobody seemed interested.

  “They’d probably eat it in their human form,” he said. “But transformed, it’s like the animal mind gets a veto, you know?”

  No, not really. But that didn’t matter right now. “I could go get something,” I offered, handing over the medical supplies. And some cigs, because the witch, or whatever she was, had looked like she was running low.

  “Hey, thanks!” She hiked up her skirts and tucked the packet in the top of her stocking.

  “No way,” Fin told me. “You’re gonna stay here till you don’t zigzag when you walk.”

  “I don’t do that.”

  “You just did that all the way down the hill!”

  “You’re imagining things.”

  “Yeah. Not imagining shit.” He held out a hand.

  “What?”

  “The keys.”

  It took me a moment. “You’re not driving my car!”

  “I’m not. I can’t reach the pedals. She is.” He pointed at Granny.

  “I’m pretty sober,” she assured me. “It probably won’t end up like last time.”

  I blinked. “Last time?”

  “The truck. Man, that was something, wasn’t it?”

  “What truck?”

  “Dory! I need the damned keys.” That was Fin.

  “What truck?” I persisted, getting a really bad feeling about this.

  “That big one,” she told me cheerfully. “Hoo boy, that was fun to drive.”

  “Wait. You drove the big truck?” She nodded. “Like, the six-wheeled truck?” More nodding. “And something happened to it?”

  “Would you stop that?” Fin was looking pissed. “We got sick people here, and I gotta get something to hold that thing onto the back of your car, ’cause we’re never gonna fit ’em all inside otherwise, and you’re doing what? Oh, yeah. Bitching!”

  “I don’t bitch!”

  “Gimme the damned keys!”

  “Here!” I was impressed I didn’t throw them at him, but placed them in his tiny little asshole palm.

  “Finally.” He looked at Granny. “You done?”

  “As much as I could. You oughta take a few days off,” she told Blue, who grunted at her. And then she and Fin left in a squeal of tires.

  I stared after them.

  She didn’t even slow down for the stop sign.

  After a minute, I decided I might as well get comfortable, and pulled a six-pack of longnecks out of o
ne of the bags. I handed Blue one, took one for myself, and discovered the heretofore unknown fact that seals like beer. Well, selkies, anyway.

  I poured some down the throats of the interested parties, and then Blue and I sat and drank for a while.

  The city lights on the water were nice. The place smelled like gasoline, brackish water, and a fish rotting somewhere nearby, but I’d smelled worse. And, slowly, the graffiti was calming down, so I didn’t get dizzy from staring at it anymore.

  Blue drank his beer and ate everything in sight. Including two loaves of bread, a package of baloney, two boxes of PowerBars, a quart of orange juice, a bag of Cheetos, eight candy bars, four apples—the only fruit the store had—a dozen doughnuts, six hot dogs, another blue ICEE, and sixteen Slim Jims. Which was fine but made me feel like maybe I should have gotten more.

  “You want anything else?”

  “No.”

  The voice was deep and rumbling, as if a mountain could talk. It fit him. And it kind of surprised me, although I didn’t know why. He’d been looking like he was following well enough; if he could understand English, of course he could probably speak it, too.

  “You want something for the pain?”

  He shook his head. And then looked skyward; I wasn’t sure why. It was too cloudy to see the moon right now.

  I wanted to question him, but this didn’t seem the time. I wanted to help him, but wasn’t sure how, or even what would be acceptable. I knew Olga, Fin, and the twins, but I didn’t think they were necessarily representative of troll culture in general. Olga and Fin had been here for years, and the twins were young and impressionable. They’d become a weird amalgam of human teenage weirdness and Dark Fey habits and anyway, I was used to them.

  I wasn’t used to him.

  But I wanted to do something. “You want anything at all?” I asked, and waited.

  This was a troll, after all.

  But the answer came more quickly than I’d expected.

  “Four and five.”

  I waited some more. “What?”

  “Six and seven.”

  Okay.

  Confused now.

  But then the giant head bent down, and the tiny eyes were serious. And angry, but not at me. I stared into their depths, and saw a banked fury, a quiet outrage that was somehow more compelling than any physical thing I’d seen him do.