Mask of Poison (Fall of Under Book 1)

by Kathryn Ann Kingsley

  “It’s deadly,” Dtu reminded him.

  “Sometimes the most beautiful things are,” Jakob replied. “Like a colorful snake, or…a bright, spotted mushroom. I just wish…” He trailed off.

  “You wish what, mortal?” Dtu turned his head toward him, the green glowing pinprick of fire that hovered in the empty socket flickering like a candle.

  “I wish I belonged here, that’s all. That I could be special—powerful—like all of you.” Jakob reached down and scooped up a twig from the ground as they hiked along the road. He began snapping it into tinier pieces. He needed something to do with his hands. “Maybe then I could be someone useful. Like Ember the graedari.”

  “That poor girl—she’s probably dead by now.” Kamira sighed. “I wouldn’t wish to be like her, if I were you. Anyone who gets in the mix with Aon is always in for a tough time.”

  “Let alone Rxa,” Dtu agreed.

  “The old gods will protect her. She’s one of the Grandfather’s chosen children. She survived becoming a hunter. Most people die when they get the serum.” Jakob broke off another tiny piece of the twig. “I have faith she’ll survive.”

  “Your gods may be dead, Jakob,” Dtu said quietly, as if he didn’t want the other refugees from Gioll to hear. “They may have been consumed.”

  “Well, then, I’m sure your Ancients will take good care of her.” Jakob smiled reassuringly at the giant undead wolf.

  “That’s what I’m afraid of.” Dtu turned his attention to the road. “If the Ancients have their way…her suffering has only just begun.”

  Lydia settled down in a clearing, careful to place Aon gently on the grass as she landed. Changing her form back to her human one, she pushed his two halves together until they touched.

  Healing large wounds in Under was always a disgusting, messy business. But better that his two parts stitch themselves back together. Otherwise, he’d have to regrow everything from the skeleton out while the discarded portion dissolved into dust—and that process took a long, long time.

  She cringed as she remembered the week it took her arm to regrow after she lost it in a sparring match gone wrong with Evie. The new Queen of Flames was still getting used to her power and had blown Lydia’s arm clean off at the shoulder with a blast of fire. The severed arm had been unsalvageable.

  Growing back a skeleton, then nerves, then muscles and tendon, then tissue and skin…it was painful, slow, and not a process she would wish on anybody, let alone Aon. Especially seeing as he lost everything from the necktie down.

  She sat on the grass next to him and stroked his dark hair away from his mask. She heard the rustle of wings overhead and looked up to see Lyon land in the clearing beside her, reforming from his swarm of the white animals.

  She frowned. “You’re alone.”

  “Rxa is able to heal faster than we predicted. Or at least…he can function without important internal organs.” Lyon sighed and walked up to Aon, looking down at the unconscious body of the King of Shadows. “I tried to save her.”

  Lydia shut her eyes and shook her head. “Poor girl…I know what it’s like to be in her place. I know what it’s like to be mortal in a world of monsters. At least she stands a little more of a chance than I did, since she’s used to fighting those corpses.”

  “Perhaps.” Lyon crouched and opened Aon’s metal gauntlet. There, clutched in the talons, was Rxa’s heart. He picked up the organ gingerly and, with his other hand, summoned a large glass vial.

  Then he began to squeeze the heart over the open mouth of the vial. Lydia grimaced at the noise as liquid began to ooze from the organ, black and thick like molasses. “Eeewww.”

  Lyon wrinkled his nose. “Indeed. Unfortunately, it is necessary. I expect this souvenir will disappear shortly as Rxa heals.”

  Drip by thick, viscous drip, the blood landed in the vial. There was only enough to fill it two-thirds of the way to the top. “I hope that’s enough to redo the spells on the cage.” Lydia cringed. “I don’t know if we’re going to get any more before he comes after us.”

  “Perhaps it’s—what’s the word, concentrated?” Lyon put the severed heart on the grass and summoned a cork to seal the tube. “Like that tomato soup you enjoy.”

  She laughed. “You still think it’s disgusting, don’t you?”

  “I simply don’t understand why you had to hunt it down the last time we aligned with Earth. You nearly got shot because of it.”

  “Eh. What’s a few bullet wounds? I’m just pissed they don’t make it anymore. Now it’s all just those replicated cube things. Totally not the same.” She sat in the grass next to Aon and kept gently stroking his hair. He’d wake up soon, and she knew he’d be in a mood when he did.

  Lyon sat on a rock at the other side of the small clearing, tucking the vial into the inside pocket of his long, white peacoat. “You should get some rest while he heals. It’s a long journey south to your Temple of Dreams.”

  “I don’t know that I’ve actually ever flown the full distance.” She paused as she tried to remember. Sure, she was only around five hundred years old, which was a flash in the pan compared to Lyon and Aon, but things were still starting to get difficult to keep straight. “Nope. Don’t think I have. It’ll be easier to make the trip without lugging him around in pieces, though.” She chuckled. “He gets so angry about having to ride on my back, let alone being luggage.”

  “I am glad I won’t be able to hear him in all the wind.” Lyon chuckled before his mood fell. “I…will mourn the loss of Ember. She was a wise, compassionate young woman.”

  “She understood that she probably wasn’t going to survive. And she knew that if you died trying to save her, everything’d be lost. But yeah. I’m sad I didn’t get to know her better.”

  He looked up at the stars mournfully. “I can only hope her death was quick and painless.”

  She smirked sadly. “Sometimes, that’s all I think any of us can pray for.”

  Ember didn’t know which was worse.

  The creepy, eerie, and unnerving silent drengil that surrounded her as she walked through the halls of Aon’s abandoned estate looking for supplies…

  Or dragging a tied-up and unconscious Rxa behind her.

  She had him by the ankles like a wheelbarrow. His hands were tied together and then lashed to his waist with a length of thick rope she pulled from a window sash. It was shockingly strong material for what it was. To be fair, the curtain it was holding back was two stories tall and looked as though it probably weighed as much as a boulder. The rope that held it back had to be durable.

  She only hoped it was durable enough.

  The corpses that filled the rooms and hallways simply stared at them. They rotated to face Rxa, no matter where they were. She had tried screaming at them to go away. She had even stuck her spear through the heads of a few before she realized how futile it was to try to kill every one of them. It would probably take her a solid week to take them all down single-handedly.

  And she apparently had somewhere to be. With Rxa. Somehow.

  After she filled her bag with food and whatever else she could find that might be useful, she shouldered her pack and her spear and headed out the front door. She winced every time Rxa’s head bounced off the stairs as she pulled him down to the path. “Sorry.”

  He didn’t respond.

  It was then, looking at the sea of the dead that were waiting for a command, and the trees off in the distance, that she realized how hopeless her situation was.

  “I need…a wagon, or something. I can’t drag you the whole way there.” She took off the broken blast goggles from the top of her head, ran her hand through her hair, and then put the goggles back on. They were pretty useless for protection, but they were great at keeping her hair out of her face. “What happens when you wake up? I’m going to be honest, I really don’t have a plan here.” With a groan, she looked up at the sky. “What in the name of the pits am I supposed to do?”

  She heard a noise. Like ho
oves on stone. Turning, she blinked. Something was plowing through the crowd of drengil. Something big, and something angry. She could see the corpses buckling out of the way. Some went flying into the crowd. It wasn’t until the creature—whatever it was—got closer, that she could make out the shape of horns.

  A second later, and a dark purple insect horse stomped up to her. His horns were covered in blood, and there were bits of gore and clothing stuck on the plates of his carapace. She recognized the etched markings that ran down the right side of the monster horse’s face.

  “Cricket?”

  The horse puffed air angrily out of his nose and reared up his back legs. He kicked a drengil in the head, shattering the corpse’s skull with a sickening crunch.

  “You’re having a bad day too, huh?”

  The horse reached his head out and began to nibble on her coat. She smiled and rubbed her hand up and down the side of his head. “I’m so glad you’re safe.”

  He nudged her with his nose.

  “Yeah. We should go. But…um…” She looked behind her and down at the ground where Rxa was still lying there, unmoving and unconscious.

  If a horse could sigh and silently telegraph the words Are you fucking kidding me? Cricket did.

  She laughed. It was a little overwrought, and it was exasperated, and it was tired, but it was still a laugh. “Just when you thought shit couldn’t get weirder or worse, here we are. I need to take him south to the Temple of Dreams. I understand if you don’t want to help me. It’s going to be dangerous, and I don’t even know what’ll happen when he wakes up. My blood poisons him—but for how long, and how effectively, I don’t know. I can’t ask you to come with me. I’m as good as dead. And if you’re with me, so are you.”

  Cricket nudged her with his nose again, and then knelt. She watched as the cricket-horse folded his legs beneath him and sat like a cat or a dog might. She didn’t even know he could do that.

  With a smile, she patted his neck. “Thank you, friend.”

  It took her a minute to throw Rxa over Cricket’s back on his stomach. He wasn’t as skinny as she remembered him being, and he had a fair amount of heft to him. Once Cricket stood back up, she tied Rxa’s hands to his feet underneath the horse’s stomach. She made sure to keep the knots well out of the man’s reach.

  And still, through it all, the drengil just stood there and stared at them.

  Why did he tell them not to hurt me? So he could kill me himself? She rubbed the side of her neck again, feeling the two little sore spots where he had punctured her throat. It didn’t make any sense. With a sigh, she climbed onto Cricket’s back.

  None of this made any sense. But she had fallen into a place that liked to throw surprises at her at every turn, it seemed.

  For a moment, everything that was happening to her clicked into focus. Her hands shook, and she held on to one of the ridges of Cricket’s exoskeleton to keep them still. Live for every second.

  Ember had to ride south. A journey that might take weeks. She had to do it through a nightmare world where everything wanted to kill her.

  On the back of a monster horse that she had managed to befriend.

  With an insane and broken king of the dead as her prisoner.

  Cricket began to plod through the crowd of the unmoving, mindless corpses that turned to stare at them as they headed down the road toward the woods. Lighting their way was the pale yellow one that had come to Under with what was left of her world.

  There was only one word that ran through her mind. It was only four letters, but it summarized everything that had happened to her so far, and everything that was to come. For however long she survived, anyway.

  Ember sighed.

  “Fuck.”

  To Be Continued In

  Fall of Under: Book Two

  “Grave of Words”

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  Also by Kathryn Ann Kingsley

  Fall of Under:

  Mask of Poison

  Grave of Words

  Ruin of Fate

  Harrow Faire:

  The Contortionist

  The Puppeteer

  The Clown

  The Ringmaster

  The Faire

  Immortal Soul:

  Heart of Dracula

  Curse of Dracula

  The Impossible Julian Strande:

  Illusions of Grandeur

  Ghosts & Liars

  The Cardinal Winds:

  Steel Rose

  Burning Hope

  Cursed Opal

  Frozen Dawn (Coming Soon)

  The Masks of Under:

  King of Flames

  King of Shadows

  Queen of Dreams

  King of Blood

  King of None

  Queen of All

  Halfway Between:

  Shadow of Angels

  Blood of Angels

  Fall of Angels

  About the Author

  Kat has always been a storyteller.

  With ten years in script-writing for performances on both the stage and for tourism, she has always been writing in one form or another. When she isn’t penning down fiction, she works as Creative Director for a company that designs and builds large-scale interactive adventure games. There, she is the lead concept designer, handling everything from game and set design, to audio and lighting, to illustration and script writing.

  Also on her list of skills are artistic direction, scenic painting and props, special effects, and electronics. A graduate of Boston University with a BFA in Theatre Design, she has a passion for unique, creative, and unconventional experiences.