by K.N. Lee
The silence lasted long enough to bring them to the address Phoebe had indicated, the rambling mansion of a home out on a dirt road where no one but those who were invited ever really went. Phoebe looked at the house for the first time in years, letting the sight of it wash over her senses. The last time she had seen the place was the day she walked out, aware of the baby growing in her belly and deeply in love with Alion. She was determined he would never know his child, not if she could manage to keep that secret.
Connor stood to one side and cleared his throat finally.
"Shouldn't we?"
With a shake, she brought herself back to the present and the faded paint and chirping birds of the moment.
"Yes." She led the way into the house. It was blessedly quiet. Pauline and Patricia were nowhere within earshot. Relief gave her heart wings for a full second as she considered not having to discuss with them what was going on. They didn't need to know, not in her opinion.
"I really hate to impose, but you seem to know more than I do."
She continued through the house and out onto the back porch. The grass whispered against her clothes as she moved toward the first stand of trees beyond the - backyard.
"I don't know a whole lot, but what I know is that you have one of the eight rings of the Immortals and someone is trying to kill you. Probably the same one trying to kill my daughter, Melina, who wears the ring of Death. She's trying to find a way to stop them now."
"I'm sorry, rings of the Immortals? I didn't know there was such a thing." Connor stopped, staring at her back. Phoebe turned to look at him with hard eyes.
"You don't have to understand. All you have to know is your life is on the line. Everyone's life is on the line, I think." She hesitated because she didn't know the truth, but she was fairly certain. However, fairly certain wouldn't necessarily save anyone's life. It would be better to be completely certain.
Her powers had been dormant for so long that the house ward being triggered went through her head like a pistol shot making her eyes water from the pain.
"Trouble's coming," she ran the distance back to Connor and grabbed him by his sleeve, pulling him along with her into the shadows beneath the trees. The forest smelled of earth and green, the scent clinging to her clothes. On another day, when life was less frantic, she would have slowed her pace to breathe it in. Now she ran, her fingers tight around Connor's sleeve.
"What trouble?"
"Probably the same woman who just tried to kill you," Phoebe puffed and kept running, skipping over the exposed roots of the trees. Connor stumbled and nearly dragged them both down as he fell.
At the roadside, Cassandra and Canenda stopped.
"You felt it?"
Her brother nodded and spread his hands in a gesture of disinterest.
"She knows we're here, undoubtedly. I want to kill her."
A stream of smoke poured from Canenda's mouth and perfumed the air with the smell of burning rotted wood.
"My thoughts exactly, brother dear. So why don't we go do that?"
They walked down the dirt road toward the front of the house together.
The ritual circle was empty, even the leavings of the Pyre burned there for the death of the Mother long since taken away by time and the elements. The rain had bounded it into the dirt and the grass had reclaimed its sovereignty. The grass waved nearly knee high, leaving seeds and debris against the pants of Connor and Phoebe.
"We'll be somewhat safe here."
Phoebe let him go and turned to look back the way they'd come. She extended her hands to the edge of the circle, feeling for the ancient stones nearly lost in the grass at the edge. Each of them flared quietly to life at her insistence and the ring they made became an almost solid shimmer of blue-green light.
Connor simply gaped at the display.
"What are you?"
"A witch who happens to be a little out of practice."
With the ward set, she sat down, flattening the grass enough to make a small depression directly around her.
"Now we wait."
Connor didn't ask for what. Her face had turned into a mask of composure, her eyes closed, hands before her as she sat. Whatever was coming was going to come and she was going to wait for it to show up, right where she was.
Heat blackened the grass where Cassandra walked and Canenda floated along without touching much of anything. They reached the edge of the ring and stopped there, Cassandra running her fingers lightly along the shimmering wall. Her touch left marks that disappeared rapidly. She could see Phoebe sitting within, out of reach, at least for the moment.
Pressing her palm against the ward, Cassandra forced her will against it, smiling when it seemed to give even slightly under her touch. She added another hand and Canenda gave both of us, pressing more with their will than their weight.
Inside, Phoebe began to sweat but did not open her eyes.
Connor looked at the two outside of the ward and swallowed hard. He reached to touch Phoebe, then drew his hand back out of reach. Sitting back and simply watching with wide eyes.
Two things happened at precisely the same time.
The ward broken into shimmering slivers of blue green light that tumbled into the grass like falling stars and
Alion Grimm pelted Cassandra in the back of the head with a fireball the size of a golf ball.
As she turned to take in the offender, he was already running past to join Phoebe and Connor, one of whom was lying prone in the tall grass. Grimm scooped Phoebe up, holding her against him. Even if he couldn't think of her name, he had to protect her. She was that important.
"I should have killed you when I last had the chance, I think I'll take the time now." Cassandra advanced on the pair.
Connor bolted, taking to his heels across the grass as though distance would somehow save him with Phoebe screaming after him that he shouldn't leave the circle. Canenda followed, leaving his sister to deal with the two magicians.
"I don't remember your name," Grimm said hurriedly. "But I know you, I think. You'll tell me after?"
"I'll tell you anything you want after."
Then Cassandra was on them. Weak as she was from holding the ward for as long as she did against a concentrated assault, PhoebePhoebe was little help, leaving Grimm on his own. And that was his downfall. As Canenda returned, the ring of life in his grip, Cassandra shoved her hand into the base of Grimm's chest.
"I wish I could pull out your heart."
The man collapsed into Phoebe's arms.
"I was going to kill you, but I think this is better. Mourn the pathetic fool if you will and know it was him who made it possible for us to destroy your brother and your mother."
The ritual circle began to glow again, the light coming from the ground beneath their feet. The ward stones flared to sudden life and the world slowed as a portal between the realms opened.
16
The Belly of the Beast
Lester woke cold, an ache in his neck reminding him immediately he had not slept in his bed. This was further reminded by the darkness. No bedroom in a house with windows was this dark even in the dead of night on a moonless night. He raised his hand before his face and saw nothing. Around him, the world moved and groaned. Getting up, he found himself stooping to avoid the ceiling far too close to his head. He groped his way along the passage he found himself and when it suddenly opened, he stumbled falling four feet down a ledge to something warmer and wetter than everything around him.
It was also lighter.
He opened his eyes as wide as he could to see anything at all.
The vision before him swam and wavered like a mirage of color in the close darkness. He crawled back to his feet and walked toward it anyway. Where else was he to go? When he reached the edge of the boat, he put his hand on the wood and rested there, looking at it. There was a boat, intact, inside the creature. Surprise refused to rise against the tired feeling in every one of his limbs.
"Hello," he croaked, then cleared
his throat before trying again. "Hello?"
"Who's there?" A voice replied.
Now surprise sprung up and Lester's knees unhinged sending him back to the moist ground beneath him.
"Well," the voice asked. "Who's there? I'm not in the habit of answering phantoms anymore, you know."
Lester struggled to his feet and called out.
"I'm here."
"Here isn't a name, dear boy." The voice came from directly above his head. When Lester looked up, he was almost certain he was talking to a rabbit, then his vision cleared and he realized it was a man, maybe. His face was drawn forward as if his entire face wanted to be the length of his nose. As a result, his eyes were long in width and short in height, taffy pulled almonds of deep black in his face. When he opened his mouth to speak, the light sparked off his teeth. "I assume you've a name or has the creature swallowed that as well?"
"Lester."
"Oh good, you're not completely daft. Now get up out of the monster's juices or I'll be forced to revise my opinion."
The remains of a rope ladder, mostly just one rope hung with hand holds, descended from above. Lester climbed up to find himself on the deck with the strange man. The rabbity impression of him continued with his overall stature, he couldn't have been more than four feet tall, his entire body concentrated in his torso and legs. He sat with his hands on his knees, nails long like claws.
"Well, you're a tall one," the rabbit man observed. "So do tell, Lester, what brings you into the belly of yon unhappy creature?" He got up from his place and started toward what might have been a hatch once upon a time, now it simply hung askew and announced the place to descend into the darkness.
"I was on a quest to see the Melesan, but this thing attacked the boat and ate me."
"Well, I suppose that's a better tale than my own. Gracious, I've not bothered to introduce myself, have I? You might call me Cornelius, so the master did once and I suppose it’s as good an appellation as one can hope for being of my kind."
"What kind is that?"
"Well, you can't possibly be from here if you don't know a Goblin when you see one. Then again, humans have stopped believing in us. Now we're just things you talk to children about and from the look of you, you've gone away from the old nursery tales of bone eating goblins and tricksy fae."
Below was warmer than outside perhaps because of the small fire burning in a clay pot. It kept the room well heated.
"My mother didn't like to tell me goblin stories, only knights and princes in the Jameson household."
"Poor child, so she never told you about the troll under the bridge or how the fae king once took a bride of mortal make?"
Cornelius settled himself on the two legged remains of a stool set against the wall and gestured for Lester to take a seat anywhere he liked among the piles of half-rotten cushions on the floor.
"I'm not much for housekeeping even when I'm in my warren, but having been here as long as I have and with what little there is, I suppose this is a decent enough substitute. I'd offer you some blood tea, but I've drunk the last of the batch I made."
"Blood tea?"
"Yes, proper blood tea isn't made with fish blood, but one makes due. It lacks the robust flavor of a good ox bone. What I wouldn't give to have some good blood tea and a bone grit cake from the City. The master was always willing to bring me such trinkets as that. He looked after his goblins, he did."
"You keep referring to the Master."
"You don't know of the Master of Goblins?" The question agitated Cornelius who hopped down from his perch and circled around the fire to the far side. When he spoke to Lester across it, he couldn't help the small thrill of fear which ran up his spine. "The Master of Goblins. King of the Dead. Keeper of the Eternal Darkness. Death." Cornelius danced, a thudding slow legged dance around the fire and the flames responded to him by growing higher. "I was once the Keeper of the Keys, a high place among Goblins. His treasures are many and his anger great. He is the Fae King, the master of tricksters and husband to the Moon. I was sent to the Great Lady of Knowledge, the mistress of Words, with his son, the Warden, heir to the hollow throne, but those pirates, those nasty pirates," he hissed to a pause. "They tossed us overboard as we slept. Tricksy pirates." The hiss became more pronounced as he continued. "The Warden tried to save me, tried he did, but it was no hope, I couldn't swim. I would have drowned had not this monster grown hungry and swallowed me whole. Now I wait here, waiting until the Master remembers me or the beast finishes the business of eating me and without even a decent blood tea to enjoy in the meantime."
Lester leaned back on the cushions which smelled so strongly of fish he wanted to gag, but the sound caught in his throat. Cornelius returned to his former smiling self, the remembrance of his ordeal slipping away again.
"Can't you escape?"
"What good would escaping do in the middle of the great water, dear boy?" He opened a cabinet in the floor and began to root through it. "I can't swim. I'll drown. So will you, assuming something other than this great beast doesn't scent the blood and eat us first."
"Well, Cornelius, if that's how you feel, I think we should probably part company here. You've made a lovely home here but I don't intend to spend the rest of my life caught in the belly of a sea serpent. Not when I have a life to go back to."
Getting up, Lester dusted himself off and headed for the broken stairway up to the hatch. Cornelius was at the base of the stairs as he made his way through the hatch.
"How do you plan to escape?" he asked.
"I don't know yet, but I know I'm not going to sit here and get comfortable. Proper blood tea available or not."
17
On the Island
The sun rose as one expected it would. There was no reason it shouldn't, not even because Melina felt terrible with Lester gone. Sleep had come hard at the beginning but somewhere, at some point, she had awakened to the sound of Lester screaming her name and the vision of him reaching for her as he slid off the deck and into the ink black water lined with foam white so clear she expected to be wet when she woke up. She was. Her tears had drained from her eyes into the pillow beneath her head leaving her with a wet cheek. When Gergot nudged the door open with his head, she was sitting in the middle of the bed with her legs drawn up to her chest and arms around them.
"Sleep didn't come."
"It did. And bad dreams," she admitted, uncoiling one leg at a time. "He isn't dead."
"I don't think so, but things are different here. There's so much magic there is no way to be absolutely sure."
"Way to keep my spirits up."
"One thing I am not is a liar, Melina, you know that."
"I know. I just wish I knew for sure."
Her clothes smelled of rot and sweat and stuck to her body in places she didn't care for, but she put the thought out of her mind.
"So how long do you think this will take?" The salt breeze of the sea air at least carried her personal stink away. Melina wanted and desperately needed a shower. One day of sleeping half rough was enough for her.
"With the way this thing is limping now, assuming that monster doesn't try for us again tonight, we've got at least two days before we reach the island."
"No sooner."
"Not even with them bailing this thing out as fast as they can, which they are, incidentally." The gargoyle shrugged and laid down on the deck, putting his head down on the wood. "I'm rather surprised this tub hasn't sunk. Not that I want it to, gargoyles don't float."
"Animated stone is still stone, huh?"
"Exactly."
Melina spent the day watching the island as it crept slowly closer from the horizon, wishing it would move faster as if her will could bring the island springing from its place to bound toward them on invisible legs. It was the only thing which kept her from worrying about Lester and, oddly enough, Phoebe. Out from under the woman's worrying presence, Melina found herself wanting, no needing, to hear her say something, anything which would make it sound
as if she were taking the right course.
Or maybe that was just wishful thinking since she had managed to get her companion killed. Or at least eaten by a giant sea monster. The depressing cycle of her thoughts was broken by someone touching her elbow. It was one of the members of the crew. He offered her an orange.
"Food. Haven't eaten in centuries, but we still collect provisions whenever we're on the islands. After all, can't have anyone in the crew passing of scurvy now can we?"
"Thanks."
The juice was more bitter than she expected, but that could have been because of the stinging of her salt scoured lips.
They made the island after dark on the second day, the grinding sound of the ship coming up onto the shore coupled with the sudden stop enough to wake Melina up out of a sound sleep. Gergot was already on the prow when she came out. He bodily stopped her from jumping the railing.
"No. It's too dark."
"We need to hurry."
"We can hurry in the morning, Melina. Trust me. I don't want to come across anything out there in the dark, besides, look up."
The mountain in the center of the island was dominated by the lighthouse, but even from the distance, it was hard not to notice it was practically a column itself, not so much a mountain as a base for the lighthouse which threw its light out into the world from beyond a veil of clouds -.
"We're going to have to climb at least part of the way and I'm not doing that in the dark."
"We're wasting time," Melina protested, sidling around the gargoyle until she was against the railing again.
"Melina, if you get yourself killed, who is going to find Lester and make sure he gets back home?"
"That's not fair."
"I wasn't raised to be fair. I was raised to be right and logically, we can't make that climb in the dark. We need supplies and daylight, so go back to bed. I'll get you up once the sun is up."