Silence - eARC

by Mercedes Lackey

  “Okay. But how? There’s so many of them, and only two of us. What about the other elves, the ones you were talking about?”

  “Not an option,” Dylan said, biting his lip. “The time it would take me to convince them that this is just a beginning, and that the same thing will be showing up on their doorstep soon enough…well, it’d be too late by then. We’re on our own in Silence.” He sat down, looking tired but determined; the healing he had done on her must have taken a lot out of him. “The Gate is the key. Without that, they won’t have access to much of their power in Underhill. If we can take out the Gate, they won’t be able to pull off the final version of that spell.”

  “But there’s still the Blackthornes. They won’t just let us waltz up to the Gate and take it out. How do we handle them?”

  Dylan was silent for a moment, thinking. “Your friends. You mentioned at one point that one of them knew things were up with the town. Do you think you could convince the rest of them to help out?”

  She stared at him, horrified. “Are you out of your mind? I can’t handle their guard dogs with magic! What would they have? Hit them with Monster Manuals?”

  “No. But steel or iron weapons and armor are pretty effective against elves; it disrupts magic, weakens us. It’s kind of like a life-threatening allergy.” He made a face. “To use the terribly battered cliché, ‘It’s our one weakness,’ and it’s a doozy. Actually getting wounded with an iron or steel weapon is like—well—one of you mortals getting hit with something coated in curare. It’s one of the reasons why we disappeared from human history once the Iron Age started, and are only coming back now, when you’ve got so many substitutes.”

  “And just where are we supposed to get armor and weapons?” she asked, pointedly. “I mean…seriously. This isn’t medieval times. We don’t have armor in the hall.”

  “Leave that up to me. If we have your friends helping us out, we might be able to pull this off. Humans coming after them with steel and iron weapons will probably panic more than a few of them: cultural memory and whatnot of bad things in the past. That’ll give us an opportunity to get in there, and get to the Gate. So…do you think you can convince them to help us?”

  She sighed. “I can try. God, this is insane. ‘Hey guys, you know the Blackthornes? They’re elves bent on killing the town with a horrible plague. Want to grab a pitchfork and some torches so we can storm the castle and burn down a gazebo?’”

  “You may want to phrase it a little better than that, but yeah, that’s the gist of it.” He mock-punched her shoulder. “We’re almost done with this. Just got to go the last mile here with me, okay?”

  “I’ll ask them, but I am sure as hell not going to try to convince them,” she snapped, frowning fiercely at him. “If I have my way, I won’t convince them to play cannon fodder, I’ll convince them to find a ride and get the hell out of here and not come back until it’s over!”

  Oh my God. I sound like Tim.…And was that…so bad?

  Dylan checked himself. “No, you’re right. Sorry; I’ve just been doing this solo for so long, that I sometimes forget that not everyone is…invested the way that I am. This isn’t their fight, and—”

  “It’s not that it isn’t their fight, moron!” she snapped. “We’re kids, for godsake! The only reason I’m doing this is because I don’t have anyplace else to go! At least they have families that…that…that aren’t worthless and didn’t throw them to the wolves!”

  “You’ve had a rough hand dealt to you, Staci. I don’t think anyone could deny that. Did you ever stop to think how much of that might be due to Silence? Due to the Blackthornes? Was your mother always the way that she is now? How many other families are being destroyed by dark elven influence? How long until your friends’ families end up the same way?” He shook his head, standing up. “We need all the help we can get. If you don’t think we should ask your friends, then we won’t. It’s as simple as that. But either way, their asses are on the line, whether they know it or not. If it was me, I’d want a fighting chance, instead of having something nasty come from out of the blue and sink my whole town.”

  “Or at least enough warning to get out,” she sighed. “All right. I’ll lay it out for them. I have no idea if they are going to believe me or not. And I am going to let them make up their own minds.” She grimaced. “Too bad you can’t handle some of that iron and steel. But I can. Maybe that’ll make a difference.” Maybe if we just mess up their plans a little, they’ll back off anyway. At least their old ways didn’t kill too many people at once. She never thought she’d be thinking anything like that.…

  “We’ll see. Let’s get you home; it’ll be safer than out in the open, and you need to rest some after the day you’ve had so far.” He regarded her bike for a moment. “Tell you what, this time I’ll ride escort for you, keep both of us under the Blackthorne radar. I’ll come back for the husks later.”

  * * *

  “Okay,” Seth said after a very long moment of silence. “You have on a Very Serious Person face. And you didn’t bring your game stuff. What the heck, Staci? Is this like, ‘I just broke up with Sean so no more parties,’ or is this like ‘I’m moving back to New York,’ or is this like ‘I have to tell you the Zombie Apocalypse is next week’? Because I am totally down for the last one.”

  Kind of a mix between the first one and the last one, actually. Staci had made sure that she was the first one at the bookshop. She had breezed by Tim, only offering a half-hearted greeting before she camped out in the back, out of sight. This was going to be hard enough to do without Tim thinking something was up and interrupting her. The group arrived together not much later than she had, talking about the usual subjects. Wanda was the only one that seemed to immediately realize that something was up, and it was only after she quieted the group that the others noticed.

  “What’s going on, Staci?” Wanda had probably thought it was something like Sean being abusive physically, or something to do with her mother. If only it had been a simple, everyday problem like that. One without magic, or elves, or dead kids.

  “This…is going to sound insane. And if I hadn’t been living through it, I wouldn’t believe it either,” she said. “Just…don’t interrupt me. And when I’m done, we’ll slip out into the alley for a couple minutes and I’ll show you something to prove I’m not in need of a padded room and an ‘I love me’ jacket. Okay?”

  “Okaaay,” Riley said, edging forward on her seat. “No interruptions. Especially from Seth,” she finished, elbowing him lightly.

  Okay. Here goes. Staci started, well, logically. From the beginning. So that it all unfolded for them the way it had for her. That took a while, obviously, but she knew if she blurted the important part out first, she’d never convince them even to come out to the alley with her. Wanda narrowed her eyes when she got to the part about seeing the kid from town in the maze, and bit her lip. The others, well…she was having trouble reading them.

  Finally she got to the part in the warehouse. And the Blackthorne plans for Silence and beyond. She had to stop and sip water several times to keep from throwing up; even the memory of what had happened to those poor hitchhiking kids made her sick.

  Seth was the first to speak. “Elves and magic are real. The Blackthornes are evil, and planning on killing the town. You’re working with that biker guy to stop them, and a bunch of other monsters. Does all of that sound right?”

  “Yes, that’s about the sum of it.”

  “Right. Well…I mean, are you coming up with your own RP setting? Because if so, I like it. But, you know, it’s all just a game, Staci. It’s not really real.” Seth looked extremely uneasy. Jake was already brushing it off as nothing, even though Riley still looked concerned. Wanda spoke next.

  “Staci is right. There is something bad going on with the Blackthornes.” A little hope, there; with Wanda on her side, she might be able to convince the others. “But…magic? Like real fantasy stuff, not Wiccan spells with candles and athames and whatno
t?” She felt that little bit of hope die. Even Wanda was still skeptical. Maybe she thought that Staci had lost it, that Sean or Dylan had messed her head up. And why shouldn’t she? Staci felt so turned around sometimes by this entire godawful mess, she wondered if she really was going insane.

  There was one thing left to do.

  “Follow me outside. I told you I could show you some stuff that would convince you.” She narrowed her eyes. “Unless you’re scared to be convinced.”

  “C’mon, guys. I want to see what she’s going to do.” Jake stood up, gesturing towards the door. “Lead the way.”

  She got up and took the door into the back. The restroom was also back there, so with luck Tim would just think the coffee hit them all at the same moment. From there, she went into the alley, making sure the door was unlocked before letting it close behind them.

  “Okay,” she said, clutching the cell phone charm, as the others watched her with varying degrees of skepticism. “Here we go.” She made her mental preparations—which, admittedly, were a whole lot easier since there were just her friends here and not two giant half-corpses discussing how they were going to turn her into a “make a wish” treat, and muttered the word that brought up the shield. The dome-shaped one, which was a little bigger than she had planned—maybe because she was nervous, and actually shoved Seth and Riley into the bookstore wall.

  Both of them screamed.

  Jake stood there, his mouth open, eyes fixed on the shield.

  Wanda was the first one to speak. “Holy shit. You’re using magic right now. For real, no playing around, magic.” She walked forward; Staci had backed the shield off from Seth and Riley. Riley was definitely scared, while Seth was transfixed much the same way as Jake. Reaching out gingerly, Wanda touched the shield. Then she knocked on it. “You have got to teach me how to do that.”

  “Everything you said…it’s all real, isn’t it? Elves, the Blackthornes, what’s going to happen to the town…” Riley looked as if she was about to break down crying. Staci felt for her.

  “I wish it wasn’t. Let’s get back inside,” she said, shutting off the shield. Jake and Seth both nodded their heads, with Jake putting his arm absently around Riley’s shoulders. Wanda opened the door for everyone, and they all followed Staci back into the bookshop.

  Now comes the really hard part. Figuring out what to do…

  Chapter Twenty-One

  “There’s a lot of heavy packages for you in the living room, Staci,” her mom called as she left out the back door where her latest boyfriend was waiting to pick her up. For work, maybe, but whatever it was for, Staci was just glad she was going to be gone for this. “I’ll be late, don’t worry if you hear the door at 5 A.M.”

  Staci was just back from a food run, with five pizza boxes in the cart behind her bicycle on top of a bunch of two-liter bottles of soda. She didn’t even bother to take them as far as the kitchen; the gang would be here any minute, and she was pretty sure they would all need fuel. After the “revelations” from earlier, she gave them all a little time to digest the information, and told them to meet at her house to talk more. Everyone seemed grateful for the chance to think a little, save for Wanda; she had wanted to stay with Staci and follow her home, but Seth and the others were able to convince her otherwise.

  Dylan would be arriving soon as well, probably. So some of the soda was ginger ale. He’d explained, when she called him, that caffeine was also a poison for elves. Which explained why there was never any coffee or cola up at the Blackthorne Estate. She was wondering now if that could somehow be weaponized. Maybe Jake or Seth could come up with an idea.

  Weaponized cola. There was a time I would have never even thought of the same words in a sentence. So much has changed.

  Mom was right. There was a stack of boxes in the living room. They weren’t big, but they were plenty heavy. And they all had overnight shipping labels on them. Guess Dylan went ahead and got the weapons and armor; when you can magic up gold, express shipping costs must seem like nothing. Amusingly, they were all from the same source. I guess you can get everything online from there. The return address, in teeny little type that Mom probably hadn’t even bothered to squint at, was “Greenwood Armory; ‘For All of Your Hack and Slash Needs.’” So at least some poor grunts in an overheated warehouse hadn’t been forced to schlep the stuff at minimum wage.

  She got a knife from the kitchen, and the pizza slicer and paper plates. She figured she was going to have to open the boxes if elves were so allergic to steel.

  Staci checked her answering machine; the number of missed calls from Sean had piled up. It was a good thing Sean assumed her cell didn’t work…well, it didn’t except for Dylan’s “elf tower” or however he worked it. Sean had no way of knowing whether or not she’d even picked up the answering machine messages yet. At least she hoped so; nothing much was certain when magic was involved. She decided not to listen to any of them. Not now. Maybe not ever.

  Instead she went to work opening the packages, and sorting out what was in them. Five chainmail shirts. Five sort of hoods made of chainmail. Five round steel things that looked like hubcaps but which turned out to be shields. Five short swords. Twenty knives that…kind of looked as if they had been made out of railroad spikes. Five heavy leather belts and five scabbards for the swords. Twenty scabbards for the knives.

  I guess if you can make gold, it doesn’t matter whether or not you think you can get people to actually use this stuff…

  Then again, what did he have to lose? If the gang signed on, well, the stuff was here. If they didn’t, oh well, there was something for her to wear anyway. Better to have it and not use it than need it and not have it, I guess.

  And the heaviest box of all. What looked like hundreds of jacks—the little six-pointed things from kids’ ball-and-jacks game—all made out of iron, with wickedly sharpened points. What the hell? What are we going to use these things for? She didn’t have time to ponder the question; there was a knock at her door, and she could see it was the gang through one of the side windows at the front of the house. She ran to unlock the door and let them in.

  “Whoa, ’za!” said Seth, immediately zeroing in on the stack of pizza boxes on the table in front of the couch. “I’m starving!”

  “You would be,” snarked Wanda, whose attention was drawn to those other boxes. She didn’t say anything else, but her eyes narrowed as she examined Dylan’s purchases.

  Jake and Riley were less enthusiastic. Staci herded them towards the food and drinks; it’d be better if everyone was fed before they started talking more. They might lose their appetite when the discussion got down to the details of what was going to happen at the Blackthorne Estate. There was hardly any talking while everyone ate; none of the usual banter about games or movies, just an awkward silence until Seth belched. They all laughed at the break in the tension, but it was forced and short-lived. Wanda, ever the one to be impatient with formality, was the first one to speak once everyone finished eating.

  “We’re all here, Staci. Your turn: what’s in the boxes?”

  She wiped her hands on a napkin. “I’ll get to that in a minute. First, I wanted to say I was sorry.”

  “Sorry? Why are you sorry?” Riley asked, and the rest looked just as puzzled.

  “Because of what I told you. I kind of wish I had never found out, myself. It’s a really big bomb to drop on someone. Well, a lot of big bombs, now that I think about it. Magic, elves, monsters, what the Blackthornes are doing to Silence…and what they’re going to do…” Her voice trailed off. What else was there to say, really? She was sorry, and yet…she wasn’t sorry, because at least she had warned them.

  “Don’t apologize,” said Wanda. She threw a hard look at Staci. “I wish you had told us sooner. Everything you and I talked about, about how there was something bad going on in town, the weird feeling I had about everything…it’s right that you told us. But you should have done it sooner; we’re not in danger any less now than we were before
. At least now we know about it.” She paused a moment. “And at least now I know that I had a good reason to be the paranoid one around here.”

  “Then I’m sorry for that,” Staci replied, a little bit annoyed. Wanda had a point, though. They were her friends, and she hadn’t trusted them enough to tell them the truth. “Even knowing what I know, I still have a hard time believing it. I know what you mean, though. And that’s why I asked all of you to come here. You know about this stuff now. And that does put you in more danger. The sort of things out there that are involved in this…they don’t like normal people knowing about them. And with what’s going to happen soon…I don’t know. I don’t think you guys should be here when it all goes down.” She bit her lip. “Can you guys like…make up something to get you and your families out of town? A camping trip or something?”

  There was a chorus of protests and questions, everyone talking at once. It took a minute before Staci was able to quiet everyone enough so that she could even hear herself think.

  Again, it was Wanda that spoke first. “You want us to leave? What makes you think we even could? If the Blackthornes are going to pull off what you’re talking about, and soon, who’s to say that they already haven’t sealed off the town? And, even if we get out, it might not be much better; what monsters are out there, waiting? Like you said, there are a lot of them in Silence.”

  “Plus,” added Jake, “how would we? Just tell our folks, ‘Hey, we’re all leaving for whatever for a week’? Even if they would let us go, it’s not like we could just leave them; they’d be facing all that bad shit on their own, and they wouldn’t even know what it really was. There’s no way they’d believe us if we tried to warn them, unless you’re willing to put on another magic show for, like, twenty people. Even then, we’d all be more likely to get committed than anything.”