“Speaking of which,” I said, confident I could ask what I needed to ask since we’d been standing there gabbing and so far absolutely nothing had happened. “We need to talk.”
“Again?” Blondie asked.
“Again,” I said, diving right into the truth. “The way you traced over that glyph… you knew what it was supposed to be, didn’t you?”
Blondie paused. “Um… I haven’t been entirely honest with you,” she began.
I interrupted her with a frustrated sigh. “That’s the second time you’ve said that,” I said, testily. “I was really starting to feel like I knew you, and now this. How can I trust you if you hide things from me? And why do I sound like I’m the love interest in a bad made-for-TV movie?”
“I know,” Blondie said. “And I’m sorry. I’m not used to working with other people.”
“It isn’t hard,” I interrupted her, huffily. “You tell us what you know about the problem, and then we all conquer it together. Rather than doling out information like dog treats. Now, what is it you didn’t tell me this time?”
“There’s not a lot. It’s just that I know the glyph.” With that she stopped, as if my curiosity would be satisfied with such a total nonanswer.
“So how do you know the glyph?” I prompted.
“It’s common?” she asked. I just stared. “It’s complicated,” Blondie said, eventually. “But I swear to you, it’s not that I’m hiding something that puts you in danger. I have a source.”
“So, who is it?” I asked.
“It’s someone I can’t talk about. Someone very old. Someone I’m not supposed to have contact with.”
I frowned. “Why? Is it like a double agent?”
After a pause, Blondie nodded. “In a way, yes. You could definitely say that… a double agent.”
I wasn’t entirely satisfied, but at the same time I kept remembering touching her tattoos. I trusted her, damn it. I felt I’d seen what she was made of. And I also really liked her.
I want to trust her, I realized. For better or worse, I want her to be a friend.
So instead of arguing, or pursuing more answers, I merely nodded.
Blondie smiled at me, clearly relieved. But I shook my finger at her.
“You had better be telling me everything. I’m sick of being one step behind you. If there’s something I need to know, I wanna know now.”
“I know,” she said. “And I’m sorry.”
I nodded my head, accepting her apology. Then, as one, we turned back toward the silent, ghostlike figures. Blondie took my hand, again, and together we stepped forward. As if we’d flipped a switch, the four figures before us started to move.
There was no sound, but there didn’t need to be. The mist behind the huge statues took shape to create a translucent, sinister landscape. Behind the figures, swirls of mist came together to become a giant beast, which looked like the love child of an angler fish and a giant squid. Tentacles and teeth and weird dangling eyes were everywhere as the monster churned in front of us, a writhing mass of fog-hued flesh.
Calmly, majestically, the translucent figures of the long-dead Alfar confronted the beast, and we watched as they bested it after what had to be a vastly abridged version of a fight. While the creature, lashing and gyrating, fought what looked like itself, the Alfar calmly dispatched spell after spell. Eventually, one of the ghosts laid down, obviously slain in the battle, but it was done in the same way one lays down to begin doing crunches at the gym. Shortly thereafter, the creature also stopped moving, as if its strings had been cut. It slowly settled to earth, but its tentacles were wrapped around a glowing sphere, as if it were dragging the sphere down with it to its grave. The Alfar tried to wrest the sphere away from the creature’s limbs, but to no avail. Eventually, they gave up and used their combined power to bury the creature and its sphere in the sea, before covering it all up with land. Upon this natural prison, they set locks… the very sigils we’d found here and beneath Gus’s house. We watched as four sigils floated up into the air above where the creature was bested, and then flew down to nestle in various places on an otherwise unreconizable landscape that appeared under them. Then the four Alfar figures turned to face us, again, raising their arms with their palms facing outward.
“No trespassing,” Blondie whispered, translating.
“Or you’re all fucked,” I added. My own little spin on the sitch.
We studied the four figures, one still fallen, standing in front of us.
“So they captured the creature and locked it away, along with its power. They tried to get the power from the creature, but it didn’t work and they gave up. I’m assuming that’s the power that can make a champion?” I asked, making sure I’d gotten everything. When Blondie nodded, I continued. “But what was it? It looks like a kraken.”
“Krakens are smaller, with more eyes,” Blondie said, and I got a weird feeling of déjà vous at her mention of eyes. Before I could explore that sensation, the Original kept talking. “But it is something very ancient. Probably the most ancient thing here besides the Earth herself. Very big, very powerful, and very prone to destruction.”
“So what happens if it wakes up?” I asked, pretty sure I didn’t want to know the answer.
“Well, first of all, we’ll lose much of what it’s sleeping under.”
“Which is?”
“A large chunk of the Eastern Seaboard.”
I gulped, staring at her. “And?”
“Isn’t that enough?”
“I meant, like, is it evil? Will it destroy even more stuff than just where it’s sleeping?”
Blondie frowned. “Evil doesn’t matter in this case. It’s just too big for this world.”
“So how do we destroy it if it wakes up?”
“I dunno. I dunno if it can be destroyed. If all that lot could do was contain it…” she said, pointing at the ghostly ancient Alfar.
“Shit,” I repeated.
“Yep. But if it makes you feel any better, we know how to unlock the actual locks,” Blondie said.
“Great, because that’s what we need. To unlock them.”
She gave me the stink eye. I sighed.
“Seriously,” I said. “Do you really think it’s the best idea to unlock the sigils?”
“If one of Phaedra’s lot does it, and gets all that power…” Blondie replied, her expression grim.
“Yes, I know,” I said. “Champion, shmampion. ‘There will be only one.’ Yadda, yadda, yadda. So how do we unlock them?”
“Finish the sigil, obviously. At the halfway point we got the handy-dandy instructional video. The full glyph must open it up for us. Ready to try it?”
“No,” I said.
“Good,” she said. “Let’s go up there and unlock us some Alfar glyph action.”
I gave her a long look.
“You sure about this?”
“Sometimes we have to confront things head-on, Jane.” The way she’d said that again made it sound like she knew more than she said she did… like she was trying to warn me of something.
I sighed. “Did your double agent tell you this?”
“Nope. Everyone knows that sometimes the bull needs to be grabbed by the horns,” Blondie said. Then she laughed, a little maniacally.
My brain wasn’t convinced still, but I could see that Blondie thought she knew what she was doing. And there was something else: Even though my brain disagreed with the present course of action, my gut felt like it was the right thing to do.
Just like your gut trusts the Original, my brain responded sourly, not at all happy at being trumped by my instincts.
“Fine. On yer head be it,” I said, in my best pirate voice, before backing up a step to give Blondie room to work. But instead of stepping up to finish the sigil, she motioned me forward.
“It has to be your hand,” she said. When I frowned, she pulled a face. “Cuz you did the first half, dork.”
I shrugged, and raised my arm. She grasped my wrist
again, right where she had before, and began tracing the other half of the sigil. It took her a while to get the knack of it again, but soon her finger was twisting over the glyph. Power flared, died, and flared again—this time illuminating the full wreath shape of the ancient Alfar lock—but still nothing happened.
“What the hell?” she said, her turn to kick the wall. “I know I’m doing it right, but it won’t work!”
“Maybe it’s a different key,” I said, soothingly. “Maybe that’s not the way it’s done.”
“Or,” she said, as the color drained from her face, “it’s already unlocked.”
I felt my own face fall. “Shit. Graeme and Fugwat.”
“The Grays said they came down here.”
“But for fifteen minutes. We’ve been down here well over an hour and we’ve just figured the thing out. How the hell could they have done it so quickly?”
“Cuz they knew, babydoll. They’ve known all along. I’ve got my own memories, and some very old friends, but they have access to Alfar knowledge that we don’t. Now put your game face on and up shields,” she said, putting her hand out toward me.
“Why?” I asked. But I raised defenses anyway, and then grabbed her fingers in mine.
“Because I think we’re about to be in the middle of a showdown.” And with that, Blondie apparated us into another dark space. Before I could get my bearings, a powerful mage ball clipped the edge of my shields, shoving me toward the Original.
“I said your game face, not your Girl Scout face,” she warned, spinning me around to face our opponent.
Phaedra didn’t look at all happy to see us.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
We were in the crystal cavern beneath where Gus’s rock had stood, but everything had changed. The crystals were cold and dead, and the mirrorlike glyph surface was static now, showing the same fully traced Celtic-knot-wreathlike pattern that we’d last seen underneath Jason’s former home. Phaedra had her full contingent with her: the two harpies, Kaya and Kaori; Graeme, her rapist incubus; and Fugwat. The spriggan was picking his slab-like teeth with a broken-off crystal.
For about five seconds, there was quiet as Phaedra and her lot stood gaping at us. When I suddenly felt her power swell to match Blondie’s, I resisted the urge to fall face first on the floor. Instead, I swiftly wove my shields through the Original’s. Her odd power signature made it more difficult than with other elementals, but it just took a little more nudging. Once our shields were set, I started surging power through them, and not a second too soon.
Blondie, that impetuous scamp, was the first to fire: a barrage of mage balls so fierce I could actually feel heat coming off them. Phaedra’s lot pulled in tight, reinforcing each other’s defenses as their leader launched her own attack.
On the one hand, watching an Alfar and an Original hammer at each other was interesting. The amount of power was breathtaking, as was the creativity of their pummeling. But on the other hand, it was just that: pummeling. And raw strength versus raw strength—while awe-inspiring at first—gets a mite boring after a while. Even though I had no doubt the Original was stronger than Phaedra, the bald little Alfar had enough of her people with her to negate most of her weakness. Numbers helped make us evenly matched, which meant witnessing this fight was a bit like watching those plastic robots box, without the promise of one of their little plastic robot heads ever popping up.
In other words, this could take forever. And I hadn’t brought any snacks.
On second thought, I realized, looking around. Phaedra and Blondie might have the stamina to make this last forever… but I don’t think the cave does.
Between the Alfar and the Original, enough force was flying about that the walls of the cave were starting to shake. I used my own power to increase the mass of the shields over our heads, so that falling crystals wouldn’t drill through our skulls.
That would be uncomfortable, I thought as a huge crystal bounced off the shields right above my forehead and hit the ground a few feet away. Probably as uncomfortable as getting completely crushed, I added, as more crystals came raining down as the cave walls shook harder.
The two fighters had noticed the effect they were having on the cavern as well. In a game of supernatural chicken, they met each other’s eyes as they forced their power toward one another. That power crashed together and then streamed upward, causing a crack to form in the ceiling of the cave. Neither one would relent, however, and the power forced that crack up and open. Daylight shone through as I used my own power, as did Phaedra’s cronies, to shore up the earth around the crack before it could collapse in on us.
I felt a rise in my belly—that familiar feeling of resentment at always using my own energies to clean up the messes made by more powerful creatures. Luckily, however, I wasn’t the only creature who had had enough.
“You’re too late!” Phaedra was shouting behind the wall of magic her people had erected in front of her. “I’ve already unlocked the second glyph, and the next two will fall shortly! I will claim the prize!”
“If you can find ’em,” Blondie grunted, forcing even more magic toward Phaedra as I pulled frantically at my own power to keep the walls around us from coming down.
“It’s only a matter of time,” Phaedra said, unwittingly admitting that she did not, indeed, know where the other two sigils were. “We have resources you cannot imagine,” the evil little Alfar cackled. “And soon you’ll know what it is to suffer.”
Been there, done that, I thought, as Blondie frowned.
“Who’s we, anyway, elf?” the Original asked, using the Alfar’s most hated term after “halfling.”
Phaedra laughed even more maniacally, as the two harpies sidled behind their group.
“Wouldn’t you like to know?” the Alfar asked, quite rhetorically.
“Yes, we would,” I muttered, keeping an eye on Kaya and Kaori.
“Um, duh?” Blondie said, loud enough for Phaedra’s ears. “We do want to know. That’s why I asked.” And with that she winged a few more mage balls at the Alfar, as if in punishment for asking stupid questions.
“All you need to know is that you should be glad Rockabill will not exist for much longer. For when our forces rise, you will all be slaves.” Phaedra’s blood-red eyes—extra large underneath her shaved pate—met mine. “Well, except for those of you we kill for being stains,” she finished.
“I like to consider myself more of a smudge,” I called back, lobbing a few mage balls of my own to punctuate my sentences. Just because I was letting the Original do her thing didn’t mean I was weak anymore. And I looked forward to teaching Phaedra that particular lesson.
“You are something to be wiped clean, and I will enjoy being that dishcloth,” Phaedra hissed at me, her posture menacing.
“What the hell are you talking about?” I asked. “You just called yourself a dishcloth, you idiot. That was the worst villainous threat I’ve ever heard.”
Blondie chortled. Phaedra fumed.
“It’s not a threat!” the Alfar shouted. “It is your fate! To be crushed!”
“And lemme guess… You’re the rolled-up newspaper that will do the crushing?” I said.
“Or the big dirty boot?” suggested Blondie. “The boot in the face? The brute, brute heart of a brute like you?”
Clearly not having read her Sylvia Plath, Phaedra could only fume.
“That’s enough,” came Graeme’s voice through the darkness. “While we’d love to stay and play,” he said, touching the edge of my shields with that dark mind, “we have things to do.” And then the incubus unleashed his thoughts: a paradoxically gentle touch of darkness that made me break out in a cold sweat.
The touch spoke more clearly than words: I can get to you anywhere.
Keeping their shields with them, Phaedra and Graeme let the two harpies launch them into the air. I watched them go, Graeme’s eyes stayed on mine as they flew through the huge crack in the cavern’s ceiling. I shuddered when I could finally look a
way.
“We need to work on your emotional shields,” Blondie said, in a distractingly conversational tone that I appreciated. “And we will, very shortly. But right now, we’ve got a playdate.”
Fugwat stared at us, stupid and abandoned, from his corner of the cavern.
It sucks to be the henchman no one cares about, I mused, wondering just what Blondie would do to him first.
“I don’t know anything!” the spriggan sobbed, for about the fortieth time. And, once again, I heard that horrible crunching sound come from underneath Blondie’s boot.
“Tell me everything you know, or I’ll break even more,” my sadistic friend shouted, raising her foot in the air menacingly above where Fugwat crouched.
When he only whimpered, she went ahead and crushed another of the beautiful crystals she’d apparated for the spriggan’s benefit.
Who knew Fugwat torture would cost the lives of so much bling? I mused, watching as Blondie melted down a cluster of sparkly bangles with a wisp of her fierce power.
The spriggan sobbed at the sight, but didn’t change his tune.
“I don’t think this canary is going to sing,” I suggested, gently. “And somewhere there’s a Claire’s whose stock is seriously being depleted.”
“Fuck,” said Blondie, kicking the wall against which the spriggan leaned. Then she turned to me. “Do you think he’s telling the truth?” she asked. I considered the question. On the one hand, Fugwat had been really shaken up after being left by his gang. He obviously hadn’t assumed he was as expendable as Phaedra thought him to be. And if Phaedra thought he was expendable, he probably didn’t know anything. On the other hand, Fugwat might not know what he knew. In other words, he might have picked up on things, or overheard things, that would make sense to us, if not him.
“I have no idea,” I said, finally. “I don’t know a lot about interrogating prisoners, to be honest. I took the elective in creative writing that semester, instead of Torture 101.”
“Shit,” she swore, again. “I really don’t want to have to go in—”
Eye of the Tempest (Jane True) Page 16