by Dean Murray
"Sorry, I didn't really come prepared and I don't want to risk catching the material on my claws ruining my clothes."
I had to clear my throat to get it to work. "There's always Kristin's clothes if nothing else."
Celeste chuckled once before shifting in a cool rush of power. When she spoke again her voice had dropped by more than an octave but it still somehow managed to sound feminine. "Borrowing another girl's clothes without asking is the kind of thing some girls never forgive. I'd like to hope that Ash picked better than that, but I'd really like to avoid pissing her off before we've even been introduced. It seems like the most…prudent route if I'm going to have any chance of Ash talking to me after all this is said and done."
"That's the first time that you've called him Ash."
"Yeah, I guess you're right. I need to get used to the fact that he's a different person than the one I remember."
"Not completely different. He hasn't forgotten where he came from. It still drives him, still pushes him to be tough enough to make sure that he doesn't have to be in someone else's power ever again."
There was sadness in her voice now. "If that's true then you're right, he hasn't changed entirely, he's still got that in common with the little brother who used to push me to take a harder stance against Onyx. That's where he and I are different. I gave up those dreams decades ago."
Celeste nodded to Set, who had turned around—along with the rest of his people—as soon as she'd shifted forms. "Let's get moving. We need to make up for lost time."
Set motioned for two of his people to pick up the body of the lamia I'd killed and then we all shook out into a loose line that had all three consorts at the front and Celeste, Ash, Kristin and me in the middle.
The trip went by more quickly than I'd feared. Neither the bags nor carrying Ash and Kristin slowed any of us down appreciably and Set led with a pace that was just enough less than a run to avoid jostling Ash and Kristin.
Our course took us over a variety of islands and across more than a dozen channels, none of which was deeper than mid-thigh for a hybrid, which I was grateful for. Not only did I have several thousand dollars' worth of electronics in my bag, I also couldn't get past the image of a two-ton shark lunging out of the water to attack us.
We didn't see any sharks, but we did see three or four more giant alligators. The alligators eyed us as we went past, and I got the feeling that if it had been just Celeste and me they might have come after us, but each of the alligators kept their distance.
Apparently the denizens of the bayou knew who occupied the top spot in the food chain. I couldn't blame them. I wouldn't have wanted to tangle with eleven lamias, not at the same time and not under circumstances where they had no compunction about using their venom. They were plenty deadly enough even without it.
Gradually—so gradually that I almost didn't notice—the islands got taller and dryer while the water-filled channels disappeared. After just over an hour of walking we came to a twenty-foot-tall rock cliff broken by a single narrow crack that was just barely wide enough for a lamia or hybrid to walk through without turning sideways.
We walked along the cave for several dozen yards in near darkness before it widened out into a circular valley with red, rock walls much, much taller than the twenty feet we'd just seen on the other side when we'd started into the cave. I turned back to Celeste, who was only half a step behind me.
"Those cliffs have to be four hundred feet tall. Are there any rock formations that tall in this area?"
"In this area, yes, but not in Louisiana within an hour's walk of the bayou. We aren't in Louisiana anymore, at least not the version you and I are familiar with."
"How is that even possible?"
"Honestly? I have no idea. My ancestors thought that the lamias were able to manipulate time and space the same way that you or I would use sand to build a sand castle. They are unique in ways that nothing else on our planet is unique."
"Are you trying to say that they aren't from our planet? Do you know how crazy that sounds?"
"Yeah, but I think it's the least scary answer."
I dropped my voice even lower so as not to offend our hosts. "What's scarier than giant snake people from another planet?"
"Giant snake people from this planet but from another dimension. If that doesn't do it for you then you could try giant snake people from the future, or maybe the past. No matter how you slice things I'm pretty sure they didn't evolve from the same gene pool as the rest of us."
"That's quite the sentiment coming from someone who changes into a giant, furry monster whenever the fancy takes her."
"Yeah, I know. It doesn't make it any less true though."
I shook my head at her. "This is like stepping into an episode of The Twilight Zone."
The valley we were standing in was like a little piece of paradise. It wasn't that big—it looked like I could run across the entire valley in less than five minutes—but the sheer amount of vegetation blocked off most of the sightlines and made it feel like it was two or three times as big as it actually was. We'd been walking through the valley, following one of the narrow, winding pathways, for ten minutes before I realized that it wasn't just the plant life that smelled different than anything else I'd ever encountered—the soil smelled odd too. There was an odd, faint blue cast to the dirt. It was the kind of thing that you didn't even notice unless you were looking closely at the ground, but it was definitely there.
I shook my head and added that fact to the list of things that I couldn't explain along with the strange, stalky plants with triangular leaves and the way that the sun looked too red. The dirt could have some kind of cobalt compound in it and the color of the sun could be due to high levels of smoke in the air, but I had a sneaking suspicion that Celeste was right. We weren't in Louisiana any more.
A couple of minutes after that we came to another opening in the sheer rock wall. Set turned to us as the other two consorts stepped into the darkness.
"You will wait here while we seek the queen's will."
Celeste looked unhappy, but I just nodded. Maybe it was a benefit in some ways that I had no idea what we were getting into. Unlike her, I had no idea what to expect next. The one thing that I knew was that we didn't have any control over our fates.
I was starting to suspect that Celeste hadn't realized yet just how fully we were at the mercy of Set and the rest of the lamias. My suspicion was confirmed when Set returned twenty minutes later.
"The queen will see you when she's ready. For now I suggest that you take refreshment in the chambers that have been prepared for you."
Unlike me, Celeste hadn't chosen to sit down while we waited for Set to return. She turned towards him with all of the fury a six-and-a-half-foot-tall hybrid could generate.
"No, we need to talk to her now. We don't have time to wait."
I was pretty sure that Celeste hadn't been planning on actually assaulting Set, but the response was instantaneous. Four of the smaller lamias moved in front of Set to shield him while two others stepped to within striking distance of Kristin and me.
Celeste was too focused on Set to notice, but the lamia holding Ash had moved too. He'd stepped several yards away from us and repositioned one of his hands so that his claws were poised above Ash's heart.
I left Kristin on the ground where I'd set her when we'd arrived and grabbed Celeste by her shoulder before she could take another step towards Set.
"Stop! Look at Ash. Are you really so stupid as to think you can force any of them to do something they don't want to do? We are completely at their mercy."
She turned on me with hot gray eyes that looked like they would welcome an excuse to rip my heart out of my chest and feed it to me.
"Get your hand off of me."
"Gladly, as soon as you're in control of yourself."
Whatever she was about to say was cut off by Set. "Your consort is only partly right. We would not kill a visiting queen regardless of the provocation, but if
you indeed prove yourself to be without honor then we will kill the men and the little queen so as to free them from the shame of your service. You would be physically removed from our enclave and deposited back in your…place. You would die in the swamp or survive to return to your people, but either way you would not be welcome back here."
Celeste tore herself free of my grip, leaving blood and skin on my claws, and then stalked off back up the path. My beast was raging. I had to close my eyes for a count of five to bring him back under control enough not to chase her down and have things out with her then and there.
Once I'd calmed myself down enough that I wasn't radiating a hissing corona of metaphysical energy, I turned back to Set.
"I'm sorry for any offense caused by my…queen."
"The offense is not yours to require apology. The ways of the queens are…unpredictable and oftentimes difficult. These two will show you the way to the quarters that have been prepared for you. I ask your leave to retire. Dealing with queens is exhausting and arrangements still need to be made for the defeated worker."
With everything else that had just happened, I'd completely forgotten about the smaller lamia, the one I'd killed, who had been carried into the valley with us. My eyes drifted over to the corpse of their own accord and I couldn't seem to make myself look away.
I'd killed before. Werewolves, vampires, even a couple of the members of the other Sanctuary pack when they'd tried to go after Jess' dad and James' mom, but this was the first time I'd killed someone who hadn't been bad, someone who hadn't been out to hurt my friends and family. This was the first time that I'd killed someone and then stuck around to talk to his friends and family.
Saying it was a weird feeling didn't even begin to do it justice. My beast didn't look at things quite the same way. For him things were a lot more black and white. If we hadn't killed the lamia then we would have been killed. Case closed, end of story. Now that I'd come down from the thrill of surviving the fight and my beast was focused on Celeste, I wasn't so sure.
It was true that we'd been fighting for our lives, but we never would have been compelled to fight if we hadn't sought the lamias out in the first place. We'd come to them knowing that the price of securing an audience with their queen was to kill at least one of her people.
It was one thing to agree to that plan when it was a matter of life and death. Back then, I'd looked at it as being a question of killing one of the lamia in order to save Kristin's life, but that wasn't the truth.
We should have pursued the possibility of tracking the Coun'hij down with the hackers before throwing in the towel and coming here. I'd been confident that my plan would work, but I'd let first Ash, and then his sister, convince me to come here and murder another sentient being.
It was a lot easier to justify that in the abstract than it was once I was staring at a corpse.
"I…I'm sorry. I wish we had tried other avenues, wish we hadn't come here and killed your friend."
Set bowed his head. "Now is not the time to discuss such things. It is not the place of one such as you or me to question the actions of our queens. The stream moves as it moves and it is for us to be the tssath…the strong raft for our queens to guide to the safe haven."
Set stepped forward and clasped me on the shoulder with a hand that could have easily ended my life with a single injection of venom. "Again, your sentiment shows much honor if little understanding of the way the world works. Go see to your queen and I will go see to mine."
Chapter 13
Isaac Nazir
The Lamia Enclave
I did eventually go to Celeste, but first I asked the workers to lead me to our quarters. We followed another winding, seemingly aimless set of paths and five minutes later I followed the workers into another cave, only calling it a cave didn't do it justice.
Two steps into the mouth of the cave the passageway took a sharp turn to the right. Directly after the bend a curtain of vines blocked off the passage so completely that they seemed to divide two different worlds. On the outside of the curtain was a dimly-lit passage that, other than being exceptionally clean, looked much like any other cave. On the inside was a series of rooms lit by organic-looking bulbs that seemed to grow into the surface of the rock.
The floor was carpeted with something that looked like an extremely short, extremely dense kind of grass. There were three stone beds that were little more than raised platforms carpeted by more of the soft green vegetation that made up the carpet.
I hesitantly set Kristin down on the large bed in one of the rooms, but I was surprised to find that the 'mattress' was soft and springy. I bent down and poked at the carpet and was amazed at the complete lack of insect life. I was able to shear the end off of one of the blades of grass, but the clear liquid that leaked out was more like water than anything else.
It was an environmentalist's fever dream. There wasn't anything artificial anywhere. There was even a bathroom that seemed to dispose of wastes by having some kind of plant absorb them. The kitchen didn't have any kind of refrigerator, but there were long vines hanging down one wall that had a variety of fruit growing off of them.
The vines were simply too small to grow the crazy amount of fruit I was seeing, so I was pretty sure that the main body of the plants must be somewhere else. Presumably that was where they got the sunlight, water, and nutrients that they needed.
After giving myself a quick tour I came back out to the main room to find that my escorts had remained exactly where I'd left them.
"Please carefully set Ash down next to Kristin. The bags can go wherever."
The lamias nodded and did as requested before returning to a kind of parade rest as if waiting for additional orders. I searched my brain trying to come up with all of the questions that I might need answered before dismissing them.
"Are we safe here, are there any threats that we need to worry about?"
A nod followed by a shake of the closest one's head, and then he walked over to the curtain and pointed to it.
"So the curtain keeps everything undesirable out?"
Another nod.
"What about outside? Do we have to worry about dangerous insects? Spiders? Snakes?"
Three more shakes.
"Can we eat the food or will it make us sick?"
Once I was satisfied that we were indeed safe and that we had food and water enough to make sure that we weren't going to starve, I dismissed the workers with my thanks for their help, and then went looking for Celeste.
I was still in hybrid form, so it was easy to pick her scent out. I didn't want to go crashing through the walls of vegetation though, so it took me a few minutes to find the correct path.
When I finally found her she was sitting on a large rock that had been carved into the shape of a bench, dangling her hybrid feet in the stream that ran through the center of the small clearing. She stood as I came into sight and then stalked over to confront me.
"What did you do, Isaac?"
"What do you mean, what did I do? I took care of Ash and Kristin. What else was I supposed to do, go off and pout like a spoiled child?"
She wanted to hit me. I could see it in her eyes, but something stopped her from taking that step. It didn't stop her from hurling insults at me though.
"No, you oaf. What did you do to ruin things with the lamias? It's never happened like this before. We were supposed to win one challenge match and then be granted access to their queen. You screwed things up somehow, offended them by asking for help deciding who to fight."
Anger had been building in a slow burn in the back of my mind for months now. First Oblivion had stolen Jess' memory, which had destroyed the life I'd struggled so hard to build with her.
Then Alec had made a ton of bad decisions that had nearly gotten us all killed, until Adri came back, at which point we were supposed to just forgive and forget months of hell. Then Alec had started freezing me out, replacing me with Ash and a bunch of pack leaders who'd never lifted a finger to hel
p us when Brandon had been half a step away from killing our dominants and absorbing the submissives.
That was all old anger that I knew all too well, but it had been joined by new anger. Anger at Ash for not turning and running sooner so that we could have worked as a team rather than him getting nearly cut in half. He'd left me alone with no help other than Celeste to try and keep him and Kristin alive, and neither of the Hunts had bothered telling me the full truth of what we were getting into by going to the lamias for help.
Even worse, they'd both acted like they had all of the answers when the truth was that they didn't know much more than they'd already told me. And now to top it all off, Celeste was blaming me for the mess that we were in.
"How many times?"
"What?"
"How many times did your ancestors come here and ask the queen for help? Twice? Three times?"
"Three times, why?"
"Because you're behaving like a child. Of course things aren't going the way that you planned. You know next to nothing about what we're dealing with. You have a bunch of lame theories passed down from ancestors who came here before humans even understood how electricity worked. We're dealing with an entirely different species here, one with its own culture, one that doesn't seem to have much, if any, cross-contamination with modern human culture. We have no idea what's going to happen next."
"What, and you're better placed to know how to get us out of here alive? Maybe I only have a handful of stories passed down over hundreds of years, but that's more than you've got. You should be grateful that I came and bailed the three of you out rather than just leaving you at the hospital to die."
"Oh, so I should just shut up and soldier? Is that it?"
"Yeah, basically. You have your role to play and I have mine. All you have to do is hit people. I have to figure out what changed this time around and get us back on track so we can get our answers and get out of here before you go up against their real fighters and get your head handed to you."