Lethal Red Riding Hood (Dark Goddess Chronicles Book 1)

by Leonard Wilson

  The crash of another ship being tossed sidelong into hers threw her from her feet while timbers screamed and splintered. When she looked up, Keely was there, holding out a hand, her dark hair plastered to her head by the downpour.

  “Get up, Jenny!” she demanded. “Move!” Jenilee took Keely’s hand automatically and allowed herself to be pulled to her feet. Figures in black, dripping with blood and outlined by dancing flames, had begun to pour over the side of the second ship, blades hacking indiscriminately at anyone or anything within reach. A third ship crashed into the other side just in time for Keely to make the leap over the rail to it, pulling Jenilee after her as the ship they’d been on was swallowed in waves of shadow and flame.

  Then they were running and jumping together from ship to ship to ship. Hundreds of apple-tree sailing vessels, large and small, had been caught up in the storm, spreading out endlessly into the darkness with barely ever more than a dozen paces between them even when they weren’t being smashed together.

  Flames danced across the deck and rigging of most of the ships, and battles raged across even more of them. The dead fought alongside the living, while gruesome things with tentacles and antennae tried to claw their way up out of cargo holds.

  “There!” Keely shouted suddenly above the din, pointing accusingly toward a lone figure draped in brilliant red. Stalking across the wildly tilting deck of a nearby ship, she somehow seemed to walk as effortlessly erect as if she were walking across a tavern floor. Keely pulled a pistol from her belt and leveled it at the woman.

  “This will never be over so long as that woman draws breath,” Keely hissed. She took her time in aiming. “You’re a dead woman, Jane Carver!” she yelled as she pulled the trigger. Despite the torrential rains, the powder sparked without missing a beat.

  The crack of the pistol echoed in Jenilee’s ears—then utter calm and silence fell over everything. Steel ceased to ring. Thunder ceased to rumble. The wind ceased to howl. Not one shot or scream echoed through the night. Combatants stood frozen between heartbeats, their blades half-swung. The ships had stopped rocking. The waves had frozen into glassy green hills. Raindrops hung unmoving in the air.

  Nothing moved except the woman in red, who turned and plucked up the lead ball from Keely’s pistol, where it had stopped just an arm’s length from the woman’s head.

  “Jane Carver?” The woman spoke quietly, but her voice carried perfectly through the silence. “Who in the bloody hills is Jane Carver?”

  “The butcher of Hart Cove,” Jenilee growled, finding that she was the one who stood holding the smoking pistol, even as she realized it was the woman who’d called herself Scarlet that she’d nearly shot.

  “Huh,” Scarlet said. “Never met the butcher, but I did know a few fishmongers in a casual sort of way.”

  Jenilee frowned, becoming aware of the disjointed state of her own thoughts. “This isn’t making sense,” she said. “None of this is right.”

  “Don’t blame me,” Scarlet said, casually strolling across the lack-of-ground between them. “This is your dream. I hadn’t even nudged it before you decided to point a gun at me.”

  “Wait,” Jenilee said. “You know Hart Cove?”

  “Oh, sure,” Scarlet said. “Nice enough place until it went up in flames.” Then the ships and the sea were gone, and Scarlet was walking toward Jenilee along the fire-lit streets of Hart Cove, a bloody axe clutched in her hand.

  The too-familiar nightmare had returned—they’d just jumped in at the end this time—and in a moment of lucidity, it suddenly dawned on Jenilee that although she’d never seen the face of the butcher of Hart Cove, she had seen the woman’s red hair spilling out from beneath her hood. Jane Carver’s hair was black.

  “You?” Jenilee gasped. “All this time, that was you? Why? Why would you help the Inquisition hunt down Blackwater Molly?”

  “I never!” Scarlet snarled, bridging the remaining gap between them in the literal blink of an eye, her free hand closing cruelly on Jenilee’s throat. “I never!” she screamed. Jenilee clawed uselessly at Scarlet’s hand as the woman lifted her effortlessly off the ground and tossed her like a doll. Jenilee hit a wall hard and sprawled onto the cobbles. “You pathetic little brat! How dare you!”

  Head swimming, Jenilee fought her way to her hands and knees, only to find Scarlet’s boot connecting with her nose. The cartilage gave a sickening crunch and her head slammed back against the wall again. When her eyes swam back into focus, it wasn’t Scarlet looming over her with the bloody axe, but the old storyteller, Granny Rowena.

  “I was killing inquisitors before you were born,” Rowena hissed. She swung the axe viciously so the blunted back of the head impacted the side of Jenilee’s knee, eliciting a scream of agony. “I’ve ended more of your upstart goddess’s simpering followers than you could begin to count.”

  Then Rowena was gone, and it was a little girl standing over Jenilee, wearing that same crimson cloak and holding that same bloody axe. “I let you live as long as I did because you were amusing,” the child said, glowering. From somewhere beneath her cloak, she produced a bundle and threw it at Jenilee’s feet. Elissa’s decoy book tumbled out. “This,” she said, burying the blade of the axe in the book, “is not funny.”

  Jenilee kicked out at the book with her uninjured leg, sending it skidding away and carrying the axe with it. As Scarlet glanced away, tracking the movement of the axe, Jenilee rolled over onto hands and good knee, then scrambled away around the corner as a little white cat. With her weight on three legs, she didn’t make the time she normally would have, but it went much better than trying to hop away on just one leg would have.

  “I don’t know which is more interesting,” Scarlet called as she strolled into the alley after Jenilee. “That you didn’t roll over and die, or what you decided to do about it.”

  “If you think that was interesting,” Jenilee called from out of the shadows, finding her human voice even in her feline shape and despite the broken nose. “Stick around. I heard tell somewhere that this was my dream, and I’m done letting my own dreams push me around.”

  “It was your dream,” the little girl chided as the bloody axe came whirling out of the darkness to land neatly in her outstretched hand. “Mine now. You’re just along for the ride.”

  “Now who’s insulting who?” Jenilee laughed mirthlessly. Scarlet glanced around, clearly trying to pinpoint the source of the voice, but it echoed confusingly off the walls of the alley. “Don’t even try to play me. This is only your dream if I let it be. Get of my head. Now!”

  “Here, kitty kitty,” the little girl sang undeterred as she wandered down the alley, eyes still scanning for Jenilee. On down the alley, a pile of crates toppled with a bang and a crash, and a little white blur darted away. Before it vanished, Scarlet just had time to make out that the blur was a scurrying white rat and knew it at once for the distraction it had been.

  She spun in time to raise her arms defensively at the hurtling ball of white fury descending on her from the roof behind. Scarlet shrieked as a little girl, but landed on her back as woman, the weight of the snowy leopard dropping full on her chest and stomach. The axe went flying again. Blood spattered as the leopard raked with its claws. Then the leopard was Jenilee, delivering a solid crack across Scarlet’s jaw with the side of her fist.

  “My dream!” Jenilee howled. “My head.” She reached out and plucked a well-worn journal out of the air. “My Rules.” The book clutched in both hands, she used it to slam Scarlet’s head into the cobbles. “You like books, don’t you? Let’s add a page,” Jenilee snarled, slamming the book down on Scarlet’s head over and over. “You never come into my head again!”

  Elissa laid a hand on her shoulder. “Keely!”

  “Not now!” Keely snarled at her.

  “Keely, wake up! You’re having a nightmare.”

  And there Keely was, back in the cabin, drenched in sweat, tangled up naked in the nest she’d made of her clothes when she’d cur
led up in the corner to sleep as a cat. Everyone in the cabin had come awake, staring at her with concern by the flickering light of their little fire, while Elissa bent over her.

  “It’s okay,” Elissa said soothingly. “Calm down. It was just a dream. A real doozy of a dream, from the sound of it, but just a dream.”

  Keely nodded shakily and fought to get her breathing under control. She rolled over, trying to sort out the tangle of her cloak, and shrieked as her knee landed on the floor, pain lancing through her body. Without a thought for all the eyes on her, she curled up into a ball and proceeded to whimper until the worst of it had subsided. By then she had felt the trickle of blood down her lip and over her wrist where it was pulled up close to her face.

  “Keely…?” Elissa prompted, her voice heavy with worry.

  At last Keely made another, more careful effort to roll over. “Is my nose broken?” she asked.

  “Oh, go’ss,” Elissa gasped. “I don’t know. It’s sure bloodied. What did you do? Someone get a lantern over here.”

  After several minutes of fussing and cleaning, Elissa assured Keely that the basic structure of both nose and knee seemed to be intact, but nasty bruises had already started to form. “I know you were thrashing around something awful,” she said. “Even so, banging yourself up like that took some real talent.”

  “It wasn’t me,” Keely said, sagging back into the corner with the tattered cloak pulled around her. “It was her. She got in my head.”

  “Her who?” Elissa asked, her eyes betraying the number of additional questions lurking behind the one that had actually come out.

  “Bloody Scarlet,” Keely said. “She’s here, she’s real, and she’s not happy with us.” The number of questions in Elissa’s eyes seemed to keep growing. “Oh, don’t look at me like that,” Keely scowled. “You’re sitting here talking to a woman you think turns into a cat, for go’ss sake.”

  “You bring that up a lot,” Elissa said, but nodded in concession of the point. “What happened?”

  “I was having a lovely nightmare; then she just walked into it and started hammering on me. She knows we gave her the wrong book,” Keely said.

  “You’re saying that really was the Bloody Scarlet?” Ulric asked.

  “She thinks she is,” Keely said. “She might as well be. Whatever she is, she’s what the Inquisition is supposed to be fighting. Heck, maybe there used to be things like her all over the place and the Inquisition managed to get rid of most of them, so it moved on to seeing monsters wherever it could rather than go out of business.”

  Minda frowned. “Just hours ago, you enlisted me into tricking an inquisitrix into thinking I was come back from the grave to help her on a holy mission, and now you’re trying to convince me that a nursery bogey is real.”

  “I know. I know,” Keely said, waving a hand in frustration. “I’m a liar. But a few of you should know I don’t waste my lies on practical jokes. What’s my angle here? Why should I care if you believe in a ‘nursery bogey’? Is there one person here who doesn’t already believe this forest is a dangerous place where odd things happen? All I’m saying is—”

  From outside the cabin, what started as a faint sound quickly built into a woman’s ear-splitting shriek of terror. It ended more abruptly than it had come as something hit the front of the cabin with a resounding crack that rattled the timbers and shook dust from the rafters. The room fell into silence.

  “Rifle,” Ulric said, recovering first and pointing to Minda. “Crossbow.” He pointed at Doryne. “Flank the door and be ready for if you’re needed to take a shot at anything. Everyone else who knows how to fight, be ready for close quarters. Elissa, douse the fire so we don’t make pretty targets standing in front of it in the doorway. Keely, go feline and be ready to scout. Nolan and Tobias are with me. No one else goes out until we’ve got some idea what’s happening.”

  All remained still and silent outside until the cabin went dark, and then for the thirty count after while they waited for their eyes to be ready for the deep night. Then Ulric threw open the door, or at least tried to. It bounced off of something before it had gone a quarter open. He started to give it a kick to force the issue, appeared to think better of it, and settled for opening it back just enough to slip quickly through with Nolan and Tobias on his heels.

  Moonlight illuminated the bloody, broken mess of what must have been an inquisitrix before she’d impacted the stout wall of the cabin at some terrible speed. What remained of her could mostly be identified by the robes, her actual body so mangled that she might have gone flying from a runaway carriage before being crushed beneath it—though they’d heard no such commotion and no carriage would have had room to build up that sort of speed back here, even if it could have gotten this far into the forest. Still, nothing stirred.

  “Keely,” Ulric hissed, peering into the darkness. “Cat eyes.”

  Keely trotted out the door and promptly froze, gazing in horror at the details of the grizzly scene that the night had thoughtfully muted for the others.

  “Sorry,” Ulric whispered, wincing apologetically as he realized what he’d failed to prepare her for. “Any sign of how she wound up here like this?”

  Keely scanned the forest until her gaze fell on the same little girl who’d just been stalking her in her nightmares, sitting atop an enormous coal-black destrier that made the girl look even smaller by comparison. Netting holding dozens of human skulls hung across the horse’s back like saddlebags, alongside a couple of freshly severed heads and an executioner’s axe so large it looked like it would send the girl toppling to the ground if she tried to lift it.

  Scarlet herself looked somewhat the worse for wear, with a split lip and other scratches on her face, and with her hair badly mussed, but still she wore a wicked grin of satisfaction as she watched them from at least fifty yards away at the bottom of the earthwork hill.

  The good news was she didn’t seem to know she was being watched, as her gaze never wandered down to Keely’s feline eye-level. The bad news was the way Scarlet’s gaze tracked the others. She could make them out in the moonlight as clearly as Keely could see her, despite their precaution of dousing the fire.

  “My forest!” the girl called. “My rules! See you in your dreams.” With that, she urged the horse about and rode off into the trees.

  Keely scurried back inside and crawled into her clothes, returning to her human form. “That was her,” Keely said leaning back against the wall, trying her best to sound calm and steady. She doubted it was working. “She’s leaving.”

  “Right,” Ulric said, leading the others in after her. “Whoever or whatever Bloody Scarlet may be, anyone who still thinks she’s just a con or a story or a delusion gets to go clean the priestess off the wall right now. Anyone? No? Good. She wants this forest? She gets it. Pack up. Sitting tight is no longer an option. We’re trusting to cat eyes and to Lady Minda to see us well on our way out of here before sun-up.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Get Out

  Caer Cacamwri became the final resting place of the inquisitrix who’d run into Minda’s line of fire. There would be no going deeper into the forest to cover up the incident now. With any luck, even if she was discovered at this point, she’d be taken as one more casualty of war with the witch and the Tuatha

  At Minda’s insistence, they did take time to build the woman a quick, crude cairn on the lowest tier of the old earthworks. After all, despite the woman’s line of work, she’d not had a chance to prove herself inhumanly sadistic or anything. Perhaps it had all just been a job to her, and Minda couldn’t entirely absolve herself of guilt in the woman’s death. A battlefield burial seemed the least she could offer by way of penance.

  “There are no innocents among the Inquisition,” Nolan assured Minda as he saw her staring pensively at the last stone being placed. “At best, she stood by while terrible things happened, and she just let them. She probably did worse, though. She was trusted enough to come out here operating
on her own. If you want my guess, we just buried the woman who pushed the Tuatha into declaring war.”

  Minda nodded but remained pensive. They let her.

  No one suggested that they should try to bury what was left of the other priestess. Bringing it up would have been tantamount to volunteering for the job. Instead, they just hauled everything out of the cabin past her in a single trip, and left nature to take its course, trying to think as little about the woman as possible.

  The worst effects of Keely’s nightmare-induced injuries had already begun to melt away by the time they set out, and she took a meandering path as the rest of the group made their way through the dark forest by lantern light. To keep that lantern light from killing her night vision, Keely circled it at a distance, pausing occasionally where the others could see her flick her tail in a signal of “all’s well” before disappearing back into the shadows.

  The net effect was for her to cover the ground in a sort of drunken looping pattern, but she still had no trouble keeping pace with the big, clumsy folk inching cautiously along treacherous ground almost blind, especially knowing she’d be free to recuperate after sun-up by hitching a ride on the back of the remaining pony. She had little concern for any humans she might encounter during her scouting. Even in Scarlet’s case, if they could count her as human, Keely’s small size made it likely she’d see the woman before the woman saw her.

  What Keely did worry about was stumbling into the path of a larger four-legged predator, although she was likely safe enough from them as well. No natural beast would have stuck around to get close to her while she remained within a stone’s throw of such a large and relatively noisy expedition of humans.