Lethal Red Riding Hood (Dark Goddess Chronicles Book 1)

by Leonard Wilson

  “It’s called manners, dear,” Ophelia answered under her breath as she pasted on a cheerful smile and gave Keely one last wave from the stable door. “She’s not going to last the week.”

  “Now it’s time for your disappearing act,” Jake said, turning back to Keely and tossing a dusty old cloak at her. “Way too many people know you were in the tavern last night, and you can bet your sweet little bottom more than one of them is already running to turn you in. If they find you here, we’re all in trouble.”

  “You hear that, Jenny?” Keely asked even as she hopped to her feet and pulled the cloak around her shoulders. “He thinks my bottom’s sweet.”

  “Keely!” Elissa gaped. “Wait…Did you just call me Jenny?”

  “Come on, come on,” Keely grinned as she waved Elissa toward her own cloak. “You’re on the lam now, too. Start taking this a little seriously.”

  Elissa buried her head in her hand for a moment and took a deep breath before reaching for her cloak. “Whatever I’m doing penance for, please let it be over soon.”

  “And you…” Keely said, grabbing the big man by the collar and hitting him with a kiss that could have fogged windows at twenty paces, “…are pretty darn sweet, yourself. Thanks, Jake. I really owe you one.” She scooped up the little pack she’d slept with, tucked her hair up under the hood of the cloak, and hit the floor of the stable while the bouncer was still shaking his head, trying to clear it. A moment later, she was out the door, with Elissa close behind.

  The crystalline spires of Icehall Opera House soared above their corner of the city, shimmering with light and youthful energy as the early morning sun played across them. It stood quite literally as a symbol of a grand new era of wealth, power, and prosperity, erected in anticipation of the second empire about to dawn. The larger-than-life lioness perched dramatically above the front entrance had been carved with such exquisite care and detail that anyone staring too long might imagine they could see its muscles tense in preparation for the pounce.

  The broad marble staircase leading to the doors swept upward in such grandeur that one could practically feel it pulling one’s feet with it in defiance of gravity, and the light refracting through the free-hanging crystal prisms along the top of the front arcade showered the space below with chaotic swirls of color.

  With all that splendor going on out front, the little white cat that was Keely had no trouble at all slipping in through an open back window and opening a door for Elissa to join her in the big, dark storage space beneath the stage—as well as to return Keely’s clothes to her.

  “So are you ever going to tell me what this big ‘master plan’ of yours is?” Elissa asked as Keely strolled like a shopper among the astounding assortment of props and costumes, pausing to examine a dress here or run her fingers through a wig there.

  “I thought I said,” Keely replied distractedly. “We’re going to find the Grimm Truth.”

  “And which of the overwhelming problems with that plan did you want me to point out first?”

  “Oh, amuse yourself, Jenny. Whichever one strikes your fancy.” Keely stopped in front of a full-length mirror to try on a curly brown wig and ponder her reflection. She wrinkled her nose, shook her head, and returned the wig to where she’d found it.

  “Okay. What if it doesn’t even exist?” Elissa asked impatiently. “Miraculata Cosima seems pretty convinced it doesn’t.”

  “Non-issue. Next objection?”

  “In what conceivable world is this a non-issue?!”

  Keely gave Elissa an exasperated look. “The one in which I don’t give a fig what’s in it. Don’t let her baby face fool you. That miraculata of yours is a shrewd one—a serious politician. She knows how the game works.”

  “And how does the game work?” Elissa asked tersely.

  “Like this,” Keely said, pulling a set of three tin cups down from a shelf and laying them out upside down on a dusty tabletop. With a flourish, she produced a small ball, which she held up briefly before sliding it under one of the cups, then she began shuffling the cups quickly back and forth. “Now, which cup is the ball under?” she asked when she’d stopped.

  “None of them,” Elissa answered levelly.

  “None of them?” Keely asked, cocking an eyebrow.

  “You palmed the ball before you started. I saw it in your hand.”

  “Really? I could have sworn it was under the middle one.”

  “It’s not.” Elissa confidently lifted the middle cup and did a double take. Her brow furrowed as she lifted the other cups. “Okay, it was. But that proves…what?”

  “It proves,” Keely said, producing a twin for the ball on the table, “that you thought I was a cheat, so you treated me like a cheat.”

  “Well, you gave me reason to.”

  “And…?” Keely shrugged expansively. “The point is, it wasn’t truth you reacted to, it was what you believed was true. That’s what people do. Day in, day out, minute by minute, we make our best guesses about what’s true, and we act on them. None of us can ever see the whole truth at once, so in the end, the only thing that makes one truth better than another is how much reality it can hold before it breaks. If a whole lot of us believe the same lie—if an entire kingdom believes the same lie—and the lie is solid enough, that lie can move mountains. So I don’t care whether or not the Grimm Truth exists. I just want to drop a mountain on Jane Carver.

  “Aha!” Keely suddenly shouted, a broad grin lighting up her face.

  “What?!” Elissa asked, nearly tripping over herself to get out of the way as Keely danced past to grab something from the table behind her.

  Keely spun triumphantly about, clutching the wig to her chest. “Today I’m going to be a red-head.”

  “I still think you’re crazy, you know,” Elissa said, holding the dress Keely had picked out for her folded close to her chest as she carefully picked her way along the steppingstones.

  “It’s a safe opinion to hold onto,” Keely agreed, reaching dry ground on the far side of the little stream that wound its way through Rose Glenn, the public gardens behind the opera house. Among its many virtues, Rose Glenn offered an abundance of foliage to discretely mask the presence of those in its less-traveled corners from the rest of the city. “But back to business. Where will we find this wondrous tome?”

  “That would be another one of those overwhelming problems I mentioned.” Elissa sighed. “No matter what some little cuckoo told Carver, the journal doesn’t actually spell it out. If we pretend that the miraculata is wrong, and the journal is genuine, I can tell you a few landmarks that are somewhere close to where the Grimm Truth was last seen—but even if I could get more exact, that last sighting was over a hundred years ago. It could be anywhere by now.”

  “Let me rephrase,” Keely said patiently. “If you were Jane Carver, and you’d had only an hour or two to skim the journal, where would you go to start hunting for someone you were afraid had read it all carefully and was out to recover the Grimm Truth?”

  “Oh,” Elissa said, pausing to make the final hop to join Keely on the bank of the stream. “That’s easy enough: The Wolf’s Tooth.”

  “Oh? Where’s that? What’s that?”

  Elissa sat down on a rock and rummaged through the small pack of belongings she’d salvaged from the abbey until she’d produced the journal. “That’s the last place Amberford mentioned visiting,” she said, cracking the book open and thumbing through its pages. “It also happens to be the place Miraculata Grimm said she was headed in that letter he discovered. Torresangrienta—the site of the first emperor’s final battle—later came to be known as the Wolf’s Tooth. It’s a lone spire of rock at the edge of the Crimson Forest. It says here that…”

  Elissa’s eyes suddenly crossed as a large, bright-blue butterfly flitted just in front of her face.

  “Oh, wow,” Keely said. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen…Elissa, why are you hyperventilating?”

  “I…I…” Elissa stammered, recoiling
slowly away from the colorful insect.

  “They don’t have stingers, you know.” Keely sighed as she reached to gently shoo the butterfly away from Elissa’s face. “It’s just…” The journal Elissa had been browsing suddenly slammed shut, narrowly missing Keely’s fingers.

  “You killed a butterfly?!” Keely gasped in disbelief.

  “It was going to bite me!” Elissa snapped defensively.

  “They don’t bite people!”

  “How do you know?!” Elissa demanded.

  “Never in the history of the world has there ever been a recorded incident of a butterfly bite! I don’t think they even have teeth!”

  “I don’t like butterflies, okay?”

  “Now that I’ll believe.” Keely shook her head. “And you call me crazy.”

  “Are there any more?” Elissa asked, looking around nervously.

  “Let’s see…Garden? Flowers? Yeah, I’m afraid we’ve still got lots of butterflies. I seem to recall seeing some back at the abbey, too.”

  “I know. They’re everywhere.” Elissa scowled, but she seemed satisfied at last that no others were coming to intrude on her space.

  “All right: we’re headed toward the Crimson Forest. Big target, right? I can work with that. Even as fast as the Inquisition is moving, I don’t think we’ll have any trouble slipping out of the city, but I’m sure they’ve already got people headed that direction. Do you fancy skulking through undergrowth like a fugitive for a couple hundred miles, hoping the Inquisition doesn’t spot us?”

  “Do I have a choice?” Elissa asked.

  “Only if you want to split up, because that’s not how I plan on doing it,” Keely said. “If you want to do this the easy way, I’ll need you to follow my lead.”

  “I can try,” Elissa said.

  “Good. Now are you a liar?”

  “What? No!” Elissa answered crossly.

  “Excellent!” Keely smiled. “Just the right tone of indignation. For a moment there you almost had me believing it. I think you’ve got the gift.”

  “I am not a liar!”

  “Now don’t ham it up,” Keely cautioned her. “You need to keep the act understated if you want to pull it off for long. Just convince yourself that it’s true, and the rest will flow from there.”

  Elissa let out a growl of frustration as she cradled her head in her hands.

  “Look,” Keely said, “there’s a time and a place for playing nice. This is not it. If Jane gave a fig for the truth, you’d be home in your library cataloging books right now, right?”

  “Yeah,” Elissa conceded.

  “She started this; she’s one of the most powerful women in the world; and she fights dirty. Check your scruples at the door, or we’ve already lost. This is a no-holds-barred, take-no-prisoners, unapologetic fight for our lives. Can you get your head around that?”

  “I…yeah.” Elissa nodded slowly. “Yes. You’re right. If there was ever a time to stop playing by the rules, this is it.”

  “There’s my girl.” Keely grinned proudly. “But we’ll try to let you ease into this. Now, think…think…think…” Keely furrowed her brow in concentration. “Of course!” she laughed. “You’re ‘Lady A’!”

  “I am not!…Wait, what? Who in the Blessed Isles is Lady A?” Elissa demanded.

  “She’s the woman who hired us to find this book—a whole set of books, actually,” Keely said. “I never met her myself, but…”

  “And now you think I paid you that pretty ransom to come ruin my life?” Elissa asked incredulously.

  “Silly goose,” Keely snorted. “You’re going to pretend to be Lady A.”

  “Why can’t I be ‘Lady E’?”

  “Because Lady A’s already a player in this game. She’s left tracks we can make point to you.”

  “That still makes no sense!” Elissa moaned. “What happens when the real Lady A shows up?”

  “We stuff her in a sack and feed her nothing but cold turnips until she tells us everything she knows about this stupid book. Now here’s what I need you to do…”

  “You know, I don’t even recognize this book,” Tobias said, furrowing his brow as he flipped slowly through the pages of the journal. “Are you quite sure you got it from my library?”

  “Well, technically…” Elissa began, then gave a bit of a jump as the little white cat in her lap nipped at the hand that was stroking its ears. “Yes. Yes, it’s from your library.

  “Behave, Bookend,” Elissa scowled at the cat, shaking out her sore hand. She leaned out the window of the carriage as it rattled away down the road, taking a long last look at the retreating grandeur of Serylia’s gleaming walls and towering monuments against the backdrop of the snow-capped Daneth mountains. Wherever life might be taking her now, this would be a hard act to follow.

  “How did you even know it was there when I didn’t?” Tobias asked, finally closing the book.

  Elissa took a moment to glare down at the cat, as if daring it to play rough again, before pasting on a smile and looking back up at Tobias. “If I went around revealing my informants, I wouldn’t have them anymore, but trust me: that journal wasn’t easy to track down.”

  “And you’re sure it’s authentic?”

  “Only one way to find out, really, but that witch is sure taking it seriously.”

  “You mean the one who, uh…” His pointed gaze finally forced Elissa’s own to turn to the elephant in the carriage: a truly spectacular ruby gown draped upon a dressmaker’s dummy. Half the bench Elissa was sitting on had been torn out to make room for it.

  “Yes,” Elissa agreed slowly. “The one who, uh.”

  “Are you sure your friend’s all right?”

  “Oh, yeah. Yes. I mean…Well, she should be. I think.” Elissa spent a few seconds studying the neat, green hedgerow passing by outside the window. “She’s fine. Just had to lead the witch away while I made off with the book. She’ll be there waiting at Denecia.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Not really. You ask that a lot, don’t you?”

  “Hmmm…Guess so. Sorry. I’m still not sure why you’d even show me a book you stole from me that I’d never have missed—especially one so potentially valuable. I mean, if the Grimm Truth really does exist, that could change everything.”

  “We were never after the book,” Elissa said. “We were after the witch, but keeping the book from her was the best we could manage that night. Whatever happens, we can’t let her have the Grimm Truth. Even if it was some crazy old uncle that stuck it in your library, this book is rightfully yours, and you’d be better able to keep it safe than we can. If you want it, keep it. If you’re worried about the witch coming back for it, we can find another noble family to trust it to.”

  “I think I can manage,” Tobias said with a wry little chuckle. “But if you’re willing to trust me with this, can’t we just drop the cloak-and-dagger stuff? You can’t really expect me to go around calling you ‘Lady A’.”

  “Would a different letter help?” Elissa asked without any hint of sarcasm. “A’s not my favorite letter.”

  “I think I’ll just let it drop,” Tobias said, “before I fall any further behind, thanks.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  Ghost Story

  What the smallish city of Denecia lacked on Serylia’s grandeur, it made up for with a warm, lived-in feeling. Nearly as old, nearly as clean, but far less metropolitan, her residents had expended much less effort on building tall monuments and more on that subtle sort of landscaping that blends in with the natural terrain and leaves a community feeling like its got some elbow room.

  Nestled into a valley on the shores of Nareyach Lake, Denecia’s low, rustic buildings climbed up the surrounding slopes like the tiers of some giant’s amphitheater looking down on the city harbor.

  “You know, your accent’s very good,” Tobias said as the carriage crested a pass leading into the bowl of the valley, coming into sight of Denecia. A light, friendly rain outside the carriage
window had taken the edge off what had threatened to become one of the last hot days of the dwindling summer.

  “Accent?” Elissa asked, biting her lip as she looked up from the book she’d been reading.

  “Almost didn’t catch it. Thought you were a local at first.”

  “Who says I’m not?” she answered defensively.

  Tobias cocked his head at an odd angle to get his best look at the cover of the book. “A Pilgrim’s Guide to Serylia? Even if she needed it, a local girl would know that Marget’s work is two hundred years out of date. Serylia’s a whole different world these days.”

  “Oh.” Elissa hid her face behind the still-open book, peering at him over the cover. “I thought we were done talking about this.”

  “Are you a cousin of the Brookshires?”

  “Who?” she asked blankly.

  “Are you even going to tell me what you and your friend are doing so far from home, chasing witches?”

  “I don’t think so,” Elissa said earnestly.

  During a break in the rain, the carriage finally stopped in the courtyard of the one edifice in Denecia that could, without room for argument or contradiction, be called “prominent”. Palatial by comparison to its surroundings, the large stone building still somehow managed to pull off the vine-covered-cottage version of palatial.

  “Jakob, you old scoundrel!” Tobias came bounding out of the carriage to greet the older nobleman who’d come to meet them, nearly knocking over the footman who’d opened the door for him in the process. “Do tell me you’re still up to no good.”

  “Of course, Toby. Of course.” Jakob chuckled. A little gray, a little soft, a little balding, he boasted the same friendly, comfortably worn-in look as the city around him.

  “So good to see you again, Tobias.” The youngish matron beside Jakob gave Tobias a familiar hug and a welcoming peck on the cheek. “To what do we owe the pleasure?”

  “Well…” Tobias began, then suddenly ducked to avoid the red-clad dressmaker’s dummy being swung out of the door behind him. “That, sort of. Watch it, Conrad. And mind you don’t drag that in the mud!”