by Emery Blake
Kaia shot me a look, urging caution not to press too far. Gitchee smiled at me.
“That would be some kind of power, wouldn’t it?” He stood up from the table. It was obvious he wasn’t going to answer me directly, but I could tell he was struck by the question. This strange old man had power.
Kaia stood up, one hand on her hip. “You spoke of evil. What is this evil in the forest and why do you need our help to stop it?”
“I’ve been living in this forest a long time. When I was younger, oh you should have seen me. There was nothing out there I couldn’t handle. People would come to me from all around. ‘Gitchee, come help, there is a monster stealing our food,’ ‘Gitchee, come help, a monster ate my husband.’
“And I came, and I helped. But it has been a long time since there were monsters, a long time since anyone came to me for aid. I’ve grown old, weak. I am not afraid of death, that has been coming for a long while now. But I am afraid that if I can’t find this monster, if I can’t stop it before it kills someone else, that there will be no one who can.
That’s why I am glad you came. You will help me kill this monster.” A satisfied smile settled on his face. He had a kindly appearance, but the threat was still there, just under the surface. Despite his claims of age and feebleness, I was certain he was still hale enough.
“Gitchee,” my curiosity overrode my better senses, “how old are you?”
“Old enough to have gained some wisdom, young enough to still be foolish on occasion.”
I wasn’t going to get any specifics out of him. The hermit was only going to reveal what he wanted, and on his timeline. I looked over at Kaia, she seemed to be mulling things over. She rested her chin in her hand as she gazed over at our host. He sat back and allowed himself to be examined, a light smile still on his craggy face. Finally, she spoke.
“It seems we share a goal. Whatever it is out there, we are here to stop it. If you can help us, well, we won’t turn away assistance.”
“Good, we have a pact, then. We will help each other. First things first, though. What manner of creature is it?”
“I thought you would know.”
“I do.” Gitchee looked over at me. “She does, too.”
I furrowed my brow. “No, I don’t. I didn’t even know it wasn’t a bear until Kaia told me.”
“You don’t know you know, but you know.” He laughed. “Listen to the people. The nature of the victim will reveal the nature of his killer. Tell me what we hunt, and I will join you.”
Kaia looked at me expectantly. I wracked my brain trying to find an answer, but I came up empty.
“Tell you what,” Gitchee walked to the door and opened it. “Come back when you figure it out and we will go hunting.”
He ushered us out the door. We left the valley in silence and hiked back up the hill. Once we reached the crest, the air turned chill.
Chapter Twenty-Four
We reached the trailhead in what felt like no time at all. It is strange how when you go somewhere for the first time, it can feel like it takes forever, but the journey back is swift. It is a matter of expectations. Our truck sat there, just as we’d left it. No other vehicles had arrived. It appeared that the word had gotten out that this section of forest was perilous. Sitting in the driver’s seat, I caught my breath. We had hiked quickly, and I was already feeling drained from having thrown up. I turned the key in the ignition and reversed out of the parking space.
“So, what do you think about the hermit?” I asked the Valkyrie.
She had been very quiet, pensive, on the walk back. I was in no condition for conversation at the time, so I’d let it go, but now that we were in the car, I needed to process what we had seen and heard. Kaia continued staring forward through the windshield and into the thick forest.
“Kaia?”
“Sorry,” she shook her head as if clearing thoughts from her mind. She shifted in her seat, turning her whole body to face me. “He said you know what this creature is. Why?”
“I have no idea. If I knew what it was, I would tell you. I mean, why would I keep anything like that a secret?”
“I believe you. But I also believe that Gitchee knows a lot more than he told us. I haven’t run into his kind before, but I am fairly certain he isn’t human.”
Her words landed with a thud in the pit of my stomach. I felt like there was something different, strange, about the old hermit, but for Kaia to confirm it made it more real, more disturbing. He had been in that section of forest for years, decades at least.
“I didn’t know the portals to Earth had been open for so long.”
“Oh, they haven’t been. I’m not sure he came through recently.”
“You mean he stayed here? When the portals were sealed and through the…the massacre?”
Kaia nodded sadly.
“I imagine he’s been living in the deep woods for a very, very long time. I wouldn’t underestimate him. I don’t think we’ve seen a fraction of what he is capable of.”
I turned the truck onto the highway, back towards our hotel. I wanted to take a hot shower and clean the blood and vomit from my hair and clothes.
“He told me to listen to the people. How are we going to do that when the sheriff threatened to arrest us if we kept asking questions?”
Kaia shrugged. I gave a sharp exhalation and kept driving.
The sun was directly overhead when I pulled into the motel parking lot. The lot was mostly empty. There weren’t many visitors apart from us and the ones that were here were out for the day. The quiet was unsettling. The area looked abandoned.
I got myself cleaned up and changed into a new set of clothes. I put on my jacket even though we were inside. I hadn’t been able to shake the chill I had felt in the forest. Maybe it was just the residue of having thrown up. But maybe it was something else. The cold air in the area around the attack was unnatural, wrong somehow. I shivered at the thought of it.
Kaia was sitting on the edge of her bed with a notebook in her hand. I sat down on mine and continued to towel off my hair.
“What are you thinking?”
It took her a few moments to raise her eyes from her notes. She looked over at me with a pensive expression.
“The hermit said we should listen to what the people said, right?”
“Yeah,”
“And he said that you already know what kind of creature was responsible, right?”
“Yeah, but I don’t.”
She waved her hand, dismissing my protest.
“I know. But I think he was telling us that we already have the clues we need to figure this out. I’ve been going over everything I heard about the attack, but nothing sticks out. Can you think of anything, any detail about the attack or about the victim that can give us an idea of what we are up against?”
I thought for a moment. I hadn’t taken the gossip at the hair salon seriously when I’d heard it, and even less so once I saw the scene of the attack. There was no way that was done by a human with a grudge over a bad deal. But they were clear that the victim had a habit of cheating people out of money, maybe there was something there.
“I guess, some of the people I talked to said that the victim had swindled some of the other folks in town. That he’d been involved in shady financial dealings. But they thought one of his partners or people whose money he’d lost or stolen had done it, and I can’t imagine a human being responsible for what we saw.”
Kaia rubbed her forehead.
“I can’t either. I mean, I know humans are capable of some horrific things, but I doubt anyone has the physical capacity to tear a person up like that.”
We both sat there, lost in our own thoughts, for long minutes. I knew there was something important I was missing, some angle to the information I had that I wasn’t seeing. I was frustrated, angry with myself. Was Gitchee just messing with me? He must be, because I didn’t know what killed Don Harper. I couldn’t put the pieces together. I didn’t have enough.
&
nbsp; “I think we need to go back to town, see if we can find out more information.”
Kaia slapped her thighs with the flat of her hands and stood up.
“Sounds good. Be discreet, though. We don’t want to have any trouble. We can’t catch whatever this is if we are being hassled by the local law. And we definitely can’t let them go out there and try to find this thing. They would be committing suicide.”
She grabbed her jacket and walked to the door. I followed just behind her. The mid-day sunlight blinded me as I transitioned from the dark motel room. I squinted hard and looked down at the ground to give my eyes time to adjust. I ran right into Kaia’s back. When I looked up, I saw why she had stopped.
Two sheriff’s patrol cars sat in the parking lot, lights flashing. Sheriff Cole leaned against the hood of one. Two deputies stood in front of the other vehicle, and in front of them a half-dozen large men. They were dressed in work clothes, dirty jeans, heavy boots, and long-sleeved shirts. Most were bearded, and all wore the same expression of malevolence.
“Good afternoon ladies,” the sheriff pushed himself forward from the hood. “It appears that you aren’t very good at listening. I told you to leave this alone. If you had, you might have gotten out of town and out of trouble. Now, well, now you aren’t ever going to leave.”
Kaia looked over at me. There was a glint in her eye that I had never seen before. She was readying herself for battle and telling me that I needed to as well. My heart started racing. I got scared in training, when I knew that even if I got knocked around, I would survive. Now, I was faced with a real life or death situation and I was terrified. I tried to steady myself. I thought back to the djinn. I fought him, and I won. These guys were big, but none of them were fire demons.
One of them, younger than the others, was staring right at me. There was something odd about his face. I looked hard at him, trying to identify what was wrong. And then he flickered. For a flash, it wasn’t him anymore. There was another face, a heavy, brutal face. Thick brows covered yellow, sickly eyes. His open-mouth revealed pointed teeth. And then it was gone, the young man’s face was back, but it wore an expression of surprise.
“Kaia, something’s wrong. They are not men.”
I focused my mind back on the youngest member of the group, trying to uncover that monstrous face again. He stared back at me, angry. I could see his chest heaving as he began to breathe heavily. I visualized peeling back a mask. His eyes popped open, changing from brown on white to that solid, sickly yellow.
His mask was gone. The terrifying face glowered back at me. The rest of his body was revealed as well, heavily muscled arms hanging low from his torso covered in thick, pebbled skin. Short, curved claws tipped his massive hands.
“Troll,” Kaia’s voice was soft. I could hear the tinge of rage in it.
I turned to the rest of the men. They were all staring at their companion. I tried the same visualization on the rest of them and watched as their forms shimmered and then transformed. Six large, hairy trolls now stood across the parking lot from us.
“Well, shit,” the sheriff spat onto the pavement. “Ok boys, careful of the Valkyrie. Remember, the boss wants them alive.”
My mind spun. A dozen questions whizzed around my head, but I had no time to think about them. The trolls charged. In the corner of my eye, I saw Kaia enveloped in a golden glow. Her jeans and wool coat replaced by shining armor, her long blonde braid swaying under a winged helmet. Her golden spear, the same one that had saved me from the Voidnik, what seemed like a lifetime ago, spun in her hands. Four of the trolls had stomped toward her, fanning out to get on her flanks.
That meant two were coming for me. I looked in front of me and saw them. They approached slowly, but I could feel the tremors of their footsteps through the pavement.
“Don’t resist, girl, you don’t need to get hurt.” The sheriff called out from the far side of the parking lot.
I had no intention of going down without a fight. Fear coursed through my veins, but I calmed myself. These trolls were big, but no bigger than Chiraena. And they certainly weren’t as fast or as clever. I had no weapon, but maybe I could keep them at bay long enough for Kaia to take care of her trolls. I glanced over at her. A grim smile graced her lips as she smashed the butt of her spear across the protruding jaw of one of the trolls. Before it had hit the ground, she was already charging the next one.
The two trolls were almost upon me. I backed up a few steps. I still didn’t have a good plan, I didn’t know if there was a good plan to have. In the back of my head, a voice told me to use my magic. But I had no idea how to make the magic work, or what it would do.
I must have done something to unmask these creatures, but I didn’t know how. If I tried to attack them, who knows what would happen. Probably nothing, that’s what. It was safer just to try to evade them.
My back was almost at the wall. The troll on the left, the one who had had the youngest human face, split his face with a sickening grin of pointed teeth dripping with thick saliva. He stepped closer, almost in reach with his long arms. He raised his clawed hand to grab me.
I sprang. I planted my foot against the wall and leapt forward underneath his outstretched arm and rolled forward onto the pavement, coming up onto the balls of my feet. The trolls turned and began to pursue me with a great deal more agility than I had expected. I danced out of the way of their charges, pirouetting around swipes of their claws like a bullfighter.
Unlike the centaur, these trolls didn’t bluff, didn’t feint, they just came straight at me. I kept diving, rolling, and spinning around their clumsy attacks. Fear turned to exhilaration and lent strength to my legs. One of the trolls began to pant.
I took a moment to look over at Kaia. Two trolls lay writhing on the ground, one bleeding from his gnarled head, the other missing part of his right leg. But she still faced two more.
My moment’s inattention nearly cost me as the younger troll caught my jacket with a swipe of his claws. He yanked back, almost jerking me clean off my feet. I leaned back and wrangled the jacket up an over my head and slipped away.
“Enough of this,” a voice boomed out from somewhere behind me. Before I could turn to see who it was, I felt a surge of pain, like an electrical shock. My muscles seized, I couldn’t move. The last thing I saw before my vision darkened completely was Kaia, her golden light fading, standing frozen and surrounded by tendrils of dark purple lightning. One of the remaining trolls brought its massive hand down on her head and she crumpled to the pavement. Then everything went dark.
Chapter Twenty-Five
I awoke in a blackness so deep, I could barely tell if my eyes were open. Every muscle in my body was aching, but that pain was dulled by the intense throbbing in my head. I tried to calm myself down with some focused breathing. Eventually, my heartbeat slowed down and the pain, while still present, became more manageable. I took stock of my surroundings as best I could.
I was sitting in a chair. My hands were tied to the back legs, my ankles to the front. Additional bonds were wrapped around my thighs and chest. Who did these people think I was? I wished I was as dangerous as they seemed to consider me.
Inhaling another breath through my nose, I tried to decipher something that could give me an indication of where I was. The air was damp and cool. It was musty, earthy, but not dirty. It smelled of the underground. Not a dank basement, filled with mold and other scents of decay, this room smelled more natural.
It was oppressively quiet. The kind of quiet that sounds thunderous, so quiet that the mind has to make up sound to calm its unease. It felt like my ears were stuffed up with cotton, but it was just the thick subterranean air and the silence.
A drip of water fell out of the murk and landed on my shoulder. Then another. They kept coming. I tried counting the seconds between drips, but there didn’t seem to be any pattern. For some reason, that made me upset. I laughed at the absurdity.
I didn’t know how much time passed. At one point, it oc
curred to me. I wasn’t stuck. I could veilwalk. I could just create an opening back to the Inter-realm and try to hop through with my chair. But when I tried, there was nothing there. I couldn’t feel the Veil at all.
Footsteps thudded dully overhead. There must be a wooden floor above me. So, it was a building. Then a fluorescent light flickered to life, stabbingly bright. I shut my eyes tight and felt my irises fighting to contract and shrink my pupils. I heard a door screech open, its rusted hinges protesting. Light footsteps descended a staircase and faded as they reached a packed dirt floor. They were followed by two sets of heavier steps that percussed as they approached.
I opened my eyes carefully, allowing them to adjust to the now brightly lit room. The ground in front of me was light brown dirt. A few rocks were interspersed, but not enough to mar the smooth surface. The wall across from me was natural stone held in place by too much concrete. The dull grey material glooped and overhung the rocks. A sloppy job, but then again, I doubted this room was used for entertaining. The ceiling was wooden slats supported by heavy beams, from which hung the fluorescent lights. To the left, on the other side from the stairs, another door led deeper into this artificial cave. A dingy window was set in the door at eye level, held in place by heavy bolts.
There were three figures in the cave with me. I recognized two, the trolls whom I had been evading before I blacked out. They were wearing their human masks again. I lacked the energy or desire to unmask them, so I just ignored their sick smiles and tried not to think of the pointed, needle teeth that grinned just under the illusion.
The third figure was the owner of the lighter set of footsteps. He was a tall, thin man. I couldn’t place his age anywhere between twenty-five and forty. His pale skin was smooth and free of wrinkles or blemishes. Even under the fluorescent light, the color in his face wasn’t washed out. He had thick, wavy brown hair that did little to soften the hard angles of his face. His cold, gray eyes betrayed the friendly smile he offered me as he took a seat in the chair opposite.