Lethal Red Riding Hood (Dark Goddess Chronicles Book 1)

by Leonard Wilson

  With a defiant roar, Tobias charged back at the closing deadling. Thorns ripped a fresh line of blood across his bare shoulder, but by then he had closed with the thing, catching the skull with a two-handed swing that smashed it up against the trunk of a tree with bone-shattering force. What fragments remained of the skull bounced and rolled away. The vines fell limp.

  Then Tobias was forced to counter the lash of the next deadling with a desperate defensive stroke that allowed it to twine a vine around the sword. He barely managed to wrench the blade around and bring it to bear, severing the vine before it could yank the newly recovered weapon out of his hand. The next lash he countered with more grace, and he lured its owner into grabbing his gauntleted wrist again. He swung the skull about with such force that it completely circled the trunk of the tree he still stood beside.

  Before it could orient itself, he’d pinned it there and shattered the skull with the pommel of his sword. That eliminated the closest threats, buying the others some time to get further away and himself the luxury of turning his back to flee after them once more.

  Addie had started stumbling along beside Elissa again under her own power, while Keely trotted just ahead of them, scouting the way with her sharpened senses and moving fast enough that she could pause now and again to make sure no one had been left behind.

  “Here,” Tobias said, pressing his dagger into Elissa’s hand. She would surely be carrying a knife on her for its pure utility, but the larger blade honed for combat might buy her a precious second or two if she had to cut herself—or the girl—free of their pursuers. Then he scooped up Addie again and urged the others to move faster. Even burdened by the girl, he had no trouble keeping up with Elissa’s best speed.

  “We can stay ahead of these things for a bit,” Tobias said, “but I’m sure they’ll run us down eventually, and I’m betting we can’t outrun Scarlet at all once she’s finished putting herself back together. I might be able to take on the witch by herself, and I can handle a couple of deadlings at a time, but we can’t let ourselves get swarmed. We have to get out of the forest and away from the trees.”

  Keely paused directly in front of him and gave a sharp nod, raising one paw in the air, then she turned away again, beckoning him on with a jerk of her head. They’d become disoriented in the fog, she didn’t know the forest, and there was no way for them to even keep to a straight line while navigating the maze of rocks, gullies, and massive roots and tree trunks.

  For all that, Keely knew exactly how to find the edge of the forest: the world beyond the hedge reeked thoroughly of ash.

  They pushed hard for the next couple of minutes, focusing on lengthening their lead while Keely veered their course steadily toward the source of the ashen smell. Then they eased up from the mad dash and tried to set the best steady pace that could be kept up by a small cat, a sedentary scholar, and a burdened swashbuckler, who’d all already seen more than their share of exertions in the past few days. It was no remarkable speed, but at least it seemed to be one that would buy them several more minutes.

  Beyond those minutes, their future remained anyone’s guess. The ghastly baying of the deadlings constantly reassured them that the pursuit hadn’t broken off, but the erratic and echoing nature of it left little clue to the relative speed of their pursuers.

  “There!” Elissa cried as they found themselves skirting along the top of a rocky outcrop, looking for a way down. Through a break in the trees and a thinning of the fog, they could make out the distant-but-distinct silhouette of the Wolf’s Tooth. Keely wavered for a moment between deliberately leading them straight for it and deliberately leading them wide of the Tooth.

  By the time she hit the muddy ground at the base of the rock, she’d made up her mind, and angled their course to the right, toward Castle Haywood. Yes, that would be leading these things straight to where the others should emerge from the forest, but it was at an exit currently held by the Inquisition—and as page seventeen clearly said, “When in doubt, unleash chaos.”

  Landing directly beside Keely and still carrying the unresisting Addie, Tobias slipped in the mud and went down along with his burden. He managed to roll to take the brunt of the impact himself and let out a mangled curse as his elbow connected solidly with a jutting stone. He skidded nearly two body lengths before coming to a stop.

  Addie had recovered enough of her senses during the flight that she reached for Elissa’s proffered hand and scrabbled to her feet so Tobias could gnaw, unimpeded, at the wrist of his gauntlet while the initial rush of pain passed. “Anything broken?” Elissa asked.

  “Don’t think so,” Tobias finally managed to hiss; then he leaned on the arm to push himself up. The ground beneath him collapsed, and the three humans found themselves swept away in a sudden avalanche of mud.

  Only Keely, with her light frame and feline reflexes, managed to leap to solid ground on the rock face behind them before everything else collapsed. What remained was only a gaping hole in the ground, filled with a darkness that even cat eyes couldn’t penetrate from their vantage in the relative brightness above.

  Hero? Keely yowled plaintively. Jenny? Nothing stirred in the darkness, and the only sound to be heard above the cacophony of the approaching deadlings was the echoing roar of rushing water. Icy dread fell over Keely, and she suddenly felt more alone and helpless than she could ever recall feeling since those first days after Hart Cove. She gave a mewl that sounded pathetic even in her own ears.

  If she ran for it now, straight for the edge of the forest, she had no doubt she could make it out alive. The others were probably dead already, anyway. It was now or never. Cut and run to save her own skin. She’d done it before—abandoned them for dead. Or…no. It had been Jenny who’d…Jenny who’d…

  It didn’t matter now. The point was they’d all pulled through, and she’d long-since forgiven Jenny. It wasn’t Jenny’s fault she was a pathetic little coward, useless in a fight. You had to accept your friends for who they were, or they weren’t your friends.

  Truth to tell, Keely had only survived that night because Jenny had needed her to—because Jenny never would have had it in her to soldier on on her own. Of the two of them, Keely was the clever one, the resourceful one, the survivor. Jenny had never been anything more than, well…Jenny.

  Only now, Jenny was…and Hero was…back at the castle! Keely sighed as best a cat could and rolled her eyes. Typical for her to be left with the dirty work of leading the monsters astray. Well, she’d held up her end of the plan and bought them some time. All she could say is they’d better actually be waiting at the rendezvous this time, or she’d give them a proper piece of her mind when she did catch up with them.

  With a last look at the gaping hole she’d so narrowly escaped, Keely shook the fog from her brain and took a series of hops across the rock face to solid ground, then darted away toward the edge of the forest and the rendezvous with her friends.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  Oobly Yech

  Tobias hadn’t been aware he’d stopped breathing until he woke suddenly, gasping desperately for air. It must have taken ten or fifteen seconds with him aware of nothing but the panicked need to fill his lungs before the pain crept in. It came slowly at first, then in a rush that threatened to make him black out again as nerves all over his body began fighting with each other to make their complaints heard.

  “Hush! Hush! Hush!” Elissa hissed, urging him to choke off the scream he hadn’t even been aware of starting, while she continued to work at clearing the mud away from his face. He was only peripherally aware of her skyward glance, but it did just manage to focus his attention enough to hear the laughter of the deadlings as its echoes grew steadily louder from that direction.

  “Is he…?” Addie began tentatively.

  “He’ll live,” Elissa said dismissively.

  Tobias himself didn’t feel nearly so certain at that moment, but either the young priestess was well-convinced or she was a damn-good liar. Through the haze of
pain, he took a mental head count. “Keely?”

  Elissa just shook her head. Her face remained impassive, but another tear joined the few that had forged trails down her cheeks.

  “I think your cat’s buried under the mud,” Addie said. “I’m really sorry. I could tell she was special.”

  Somewhere in Tobias’s head, a gate slammed shut, and a cold wind howled through the castle of his mind. There was no way he could possibly process the import of those words right now on top of everything else. Locking them away was the only option. Finish the fight first, then assess the cost. “Dig me out,” he said flatly. “I have to…”

  “You have to nothing,” Elissa said in a voice of cold steel. “You’re done, Your Highness. I only said you’d live. I’m not promising anything else. And unless a miraculata happens to stroll by, not dying is the only thing of consequence you’ll be fit to do for weeks. If you’re feeling like passing back out, don’t fight it. I’ve got a handle on things here.”

  “You do?” Tobias asked.

  “Absolutely.” She tugged his gauntlets off, one at a time, causing currently misplaced bits of bone in his arms to shift in unintended ways. By the time she was done, he had passed out again.

  “Then why are you shaking?” Addie asked.

  “Because we’re in a cave,” Elissa said, pulling the over-sized leather gauntlets onto her own hands. “And it’s bloody cold. Keep digging him out, but try not to jostle anything. I need to look around.”

  “This is the Oobly Yech’s cave,” Addie said, peering miserably at the light far overhead. “There’s no way out.” It wasn’t that the walls of the cave were sheer. It was that they leaned inward as they rose.

  “Nonsense,” Elissa said. “You’re not going to get eaten by a slimy monster, and there’s always a way out.”

  “Don’t treat me like a baby. How can you say the Oobly Yech doesn’t exist when we’re being chased by Bloody Scarlet?” Addie demanded angrily.

  “I never claimed it doesn’t exist.” Elissa sighed, picking her way down the heap of mud and stone they’d landed in. “I said it’s not going to eat you. Do you have faith in Seriena?”

  “I…She didn’t save Sister Petra,” Addie said. “And the Inquisition…”

  “You don’t believe for a moment that the Inquisition actually has her blessing, do you?” Elissa said without looking back. “And as to Sister Petra, she was a woman grown, fully responsible for her own life and her own choices. Plus, I seriously doubt she spent her last moments praying. You’re more devout than that. Leave off digging long enough to make sure Seriena knows exactly where things stand. She’s not going to let a pious little girl get eaten by monsters.”

  “Really?” Addie asked tremulously.

  “Absolutely,” Elissa said. She was moving with a serious limp after the fall, but her voice remained unwavering. “There’s a pool down here that’ll pass for a mirror if you want to come say your prayers at it.”

  This was no cramped little cave they were in, but broad and twisting, with a ridge of fallen stone down the center where the ceiling had given way to leave a crevice in the forest floor some thirty feet above. The new collapse they’d rode in on had extended the existing crevice by at least fifteen feet in the process of depositing them here. Most of the floor not mounded with rubble lay submerged beneath a muddy stream, swollen and roiling with runoff from the recent downpour.

  While Addie knelt and said her prayers, Elissa walked downstream along the banks, disappearing around a curve of the cavern for what felt to Addie like an eternity, but realistically must have been only a couple of minutes. Even so, by the time Elissa did return, the laughter of the deadlings seemed to be coming from directly overhead. Addie remained kneeling until she found Elissa standing over her, offering a hand up.

  “You believe.” This time there was no question in Elissa’s voice. It was a simple statement of fact.

  Five minutes before or five hours before or five days before, Addie couldn’t have honestly told herself what she believed. But here and now, with the world collapsing around them, the unvarnished conviction in the voice of the only woman standing between her and a nightmarish end filled up the doubts.

  “You know she will stand with us,” Elissa said, keeping Addie’s eyes locked on her own steady gaze. “And you know she will deliver us.”

  Addie just nodded as the racing of her heart began to ease—not completely, of course, but substantially.

  “Now dig,” Elissa said, nodding her head back toward Tobias. “The next time you hear my voice, if I’m not telling you the danger’s past, hide yourself and Prince Tobias under your cloak as best you can and be still. Understood?”

  Addie nodded again and scrambled away back up the debris to where she’d left Tobias. She was still scooping mud away from around him when the insane laughter overhead abruptly ceased.

  Without thinking about it, Addie stopped digging and froze, her eyes wandering back and forth between the ribbon of light overhead and Elissa, who had started exploring upstream along the cavern when Addie had returned to digging. When the deafening silence fell, Elissa sat down calmly on the nearest rock, pulled out the dagger Tobias had given her, and started using it to clean mud from under her fingernails.

  An interminable minute passed before the shadow appeared at the hole in the ceiling, then Bloody Scarlet came gliding serenely down on the thorny vine of a deadling like she was an acrobat descending from the wires. At first, Elissa’s only reaction to Scarlet’s appearance was to stop cleaning her nails. Then as Addie watched, the young priestess rolled up her sleeve, gritted her teeth, and very deliberately cut a long gash down the inside of her left arm, most of the way from elbow to wrist, and simply allowed it to bleed as she rinsed the blade off in the stream.

  “And you complained about us taking our time,” Elissa said as the crimson-cloaked figure neared the floor. Obediently, Addie quickly ducked down and hid under her cloak—but not so thoroughly down or hidden that she didn’t leave herself a gap to watch the proceedings.

  “In my defense, you did indeed take your sweet time,” Scarlet sighed, stepping lightly to the floor. Gone was the broken creature that had clawed its way up the tree toward them, replaced now with a wholesome, rosy-cheeked woman who’d have had an easier time at convincing passersby she’d never been ill a day in her life than she’d have had at convincing them she was a day over twenty. Even her long, lustrous red hair peeked coquettishly out from under the pristine hood of her cloak.

  “I’ve got to say, I never imagined you’d be the one standing to face me. Sitting. Whatever. What happened to prince charming? I was looking forward to snuffing out a final, gallant display of chivalry.”

  “He’s buried under about five tons of rock and mud, I expect.” Elissa shrugged, giving a nod toward the new mound on the cavern floor. “Just me left, and I’m not even scared of you. Sorry to disappoint.”

  Scarlet half-stifled a chuckle of amused disbelief. “City girl, you’re terrified. I could smell the fear rolling off of you even if you hadn’t wet yourself.”

  “Oh, yeah, I’m terrified,” Elissa agreed, her voice still clear and level. “But I believe that what I said, is that I wasn’t afraid of you. I know a thing or three about monsters. And as monsters go, you’re a rank amateur.”

  “So…what?” Scarlet asked, unperturbed. “You’re trying to goad me into going all, ‘How dare you?’ so I’ll leave myself vulnerable for prince charming to get a free shot? Like it matters. I’ve put myself back together more times than you’ve even bathed,” Scarlet said, beginning to amble in Elissa’s direction. “Get it through your wispy little head, girl: I…don’t…die.”

  “Eh.” Elissa shrugged. “But you do get bored, don’t you? All that time on your hands, and you don’t even know how to spend it? You’re not even really angry with me, and you sure don’t think I can inconvenience you. You just decided you’d kill me to give yourself something to do, never for a moment thinking about the
rollicking good time you’re throwing away.”

  “Don’t tell me you’re into girls.” Scarlet smirked even as she flared out her cloak in a frivolous little pirouette that showed off a figure custom made for being shown off in frivolous little pirouettes—perhaps literally custom made, given what the woman sporting it seemed capable of. “Been there. Done that. Not looking for another pet.”

  Elissa shook her head. “I’m into hunting monsters.”

  “You?” Scarlet snorted.

  “Big time.” Elissa nodded. “Real monsters. I had a plan going with a friend of mine, but as we seem to be sitting in her mausoleum, I’m going to need a new partner. Feel like taking down the Inquisition? Permanently?”

  “Oooh.” Scarlet stopped. “Now I’m surprised. Not amused yet, but I’m surprised. One of the upstart’s own offering to help me sunder her sword and shield? Aren’t you afraid of what I’ll do to your precious church without them?”

  “Not really,” Elissa said with a dismissive shrug. “Theologically speaking, the Inquisition serves no purpose. They’ll tell you themselves that their power and wisdom pales before that of the divine, so what good are they—especially weighed against all the damage they do? They’re no one’s sword or shield except their own.

  “That’s what this whole book thing has been about, you know,” Elissa went on, seizing on the grain of interest from Scarlet. “The Inquisition is running scared because they know what it has to say can finish them once and for all. I don’t have the muscle to take advantage of that myself, and you’re never going to find someone else who can read it and understand what she’s seeing as well as I can—not someone who’s actually eager to help you use it against the Inquisition.

  “Plus I know full well you don’t even have the morals of cat. Just as soon as I’m done being of use to you, you’ll kill me anyway. At this point I just don’t care. My friends are gone. My family’s gone. My future was well and truly out the window before we met. All I want is to take the Inquisition down with me.”