Ivy's Dragon: Dragons of Telera (Book 7)
Page 26
Curses! The headache grew. She ordered Monster to carry the werewolf, and clambered onto the creature herself, mentally directing it to chasm surf, so she could stay out of sight from any prying eyes upon the surface.
Again, the darkness unburdened from her mind, Echo drank in the crisp cold air, and appreciated the view she endured, even if the horrors it contained would give anyone second thoughts about living in such an area.
They arrived in sight of the town a short while later, with Echo mildly irritated by her headache. She examined her werewolf as he groaned, checking out his iron gray hair, his pale, wintery skin, his strong, muscular body. A fine specimen in human form. Probably a fearsome presence in werewolf form. Echo examined the taut muscles, the high cheekbones, the rapier curve of his face to a noble chin. She wondered if she’d need to knock him out. She highly doubted the werewolf would enjoy being held by a Shadow aberrant.
Thankfully, he stayed unconscious. Her headache pounded insistently at her skull, trying to tempt her to drop Monster – but no way was she carrying that great lump of flesh by herself. Just a little further. Then I’ll be with aunty Helena.
Aunty Helena. Helena wasn’t related to her in any shape or form, but the Supreme rescue baby Echo all those years ago.
“I called you that name because you would repeat anything I said, but you’d get quieter with each iteration. It was such a weird characteristic. Well, it was either that, or Surprise Baby.”
Echo felt glad that Helena did not call her Surprise Baby.
Finally, within the town, she saw a few figures in the distance, who clearly recognized Monster, and came scampering to her.
Broth and Vallug of the underbelly greeted her, two traders of the resistance with a main focus on food supplies for the town.
“Ah! This must be one of Erlandur’s scouts,” Vallug said, helping to take the unconscious werewolf with Broth off Monster. Echo released her darkness with a sigh of relief. Monster dissolved into nothing, returning to that corner of her mind where it would slowly build up over time, overwhelming her ability to empathize.
The two black veined traders, those of the few who had managed to resist the Shadow corruption, smiled at her and draped the werewolf over their shoulders.
“Did you get the supplies, then?”
Echo nodded in response to Broth. “Yes, but we can’t use our former contact anymore. He’s been compromised. I had to spook him so he wouldn’t grass on us.”
“Blast.” Broth’s needle thin face screwed up in disgust. “Always knew Carlok was craven at heart. Probably trying to sell you out for a bite of coin.”
“He claimed the Shadows had his wife.”
“Nonsense,” Broth said, though Vallug immediately sympathized.
“Not a good day to be a citizen of the Fractured City,” he said.
“When is it ever?” Echo scoffed. She loved her home in some ways, though. Parts of the Fractured City had gone through revitalization projects, recreating flower-choked meadows in green biomes, though the energy it took to heat them up drained itself off the tax payers of the central city. The slums, the ruined and abandoned parts of the city due to neglect and the creeping fingers of the Lunar Wastes, mostly got ignored.
Sometimes, Shadows would organize little hunting parties to try and track “scum,” but for the most part, they left the bedraggled survivors of the wastelands alone.
She liked the massive underground network they had created over the years, hiding in plain sight, locked beneath the body of a rundown town. The black veined people who made their lives above ground provided a perfect buffer to avoid detection of the activity below.
Only so long they could keep it up, though, until people started opening up on their position. The upper echelons of the Fractured City sensed something on the wind, but as of yet, felt unthreatened by anything humans and werewolves could throw at them. Part of believing yourself as superior and other species as inferior tended to cultivate gross underestimation.
Which worked in the human’s favor.
Echo sighed relief as she dipped through the trapdoor concealed inside a broken building, and ended up in a warm, heated corridor, carved out by the local miners and stone masons, heated by pipelines that ran under the town.
She dropped off her fresh batch of pills to the med bay, and briefly greeted the witch known as Faith.
“How’s the hole in your stomach faring?”
“Better,” Faith responded, her dark eyes hooded. Her fingers drummed on the side of the bed, agitated and bored. “There’s a lot here to wrap my head around. I never thought the Fractured City would be so blasting huge.”
“Or that there’s an actual society in it, corrupt and messed up as it is, right?”
Faith smiled. “Well, it’s not like anyone ever returns when they come over here.”
“True. They get converted or they assimilate. And werewolves on this side of the mountain are very noticeable. If the Shadows get wind of them, they’ll eradicate them as soon as possible. They consider werewolves as a threat.”
Faith scrunched her brow, processing the info. The unconscious werewolf was placed in a bed nearby, and Faith’s attention turned to him instead. “Ah! That’s Nox. He’s the son of the Spine chieftain.”
“Son of a chieftain, eh?” Echo examined Nox in renewed interest. “Pretty risky to send him on a scouting mission.”
“He wanted to come. He’s the only one found so far…” Faith’s voice trailed off. “I’m fairly sure one of our scouts is dead. He fell unconscious in the death zone.”
Echo chewed the inside of her cheek as she regarded the round featured Faith, her plump lips. “I can offer to you and Erlandur later to look around and see if we can find anyone else. It’s not been that long. They might still be alive.”
“Good idea,” someone interrupted behind them, and Echo spun to face Helena, in all her terrifying glory. Faith narrowed her eyes distrustfully at the Supreme, with her black aura flickering about her form. “We’re going to need all the help we can get.”
Echo wondered if Faith could feel the darkness that resided inside. Not everyone identified Echo as a human Shadow, but then again, not many human Shadows had survived the process of initiation.
“You got the medicine? Ah. Excellent. We’ll need that for Faith and her wolfy friends when we find them all. Including this one.” Helena wrinkled her nose at Nox. “When he starts coming to, you and Erlandur will need to break the news to him directly. Otherwise he may not react kindly to any of our presences here.”
“Noted,” Faith said dryly. “Who are you?”
“Echo.”
“Are you a witch?”
“In a manner of speaking,” Echo replied. “I have an… ability.”
Helena smiled grimly, but said nothing. She knew Echo’s secret. Not even the black veined humans knew who Echo was, really. They just assumed she was contaminated, like them. They didn’t feel the constant, encroaching darkness like she did, where her thoughts and feelings gradually drowned out in a tide of hate and death.
When Helena and Echo stepped out of the room, Helena said, “Vallug mentioned that we were betrayed. I’d like you to brief us on this.”
“Sure.” Echo told her about the trader, and picking up the werewolf. The Supreme, one of eight that worked in the underbelly, nodded thoughtfully.
“Our numbers grow every day. But still, twelve thousand of us versus over a hundred thousand Shadows is heinous numbers. We’ll have to act soon, though. There’s only so much longer we can keep this up. We’ll need to visit the Island with Erlandur as the final stage in the operation.” Helena paused then, her eyes infinitely sad. “If my people were more peaceful… we could have worked this out.”
“Why do we hate humans so much, actually?” Echo had thought about it before, but never fully understood why Shadows held such seething disdain for other races. She just knew they hated, and they blamed humans for the destruction of the origin planet. But how?
“The story goes with our kind is that the humans wanted to utilize powerful magic. The witches found a source in the origin world. They tapped into our world, fought their little wars, not realizing that they were killing off our entire planet and bringing our people to mass extinction.” Helena walked around a corner of the underground, lit by softly glowing braziers, adding a smoky infusion into the air, which got filtered out through patches in the walls.
“So, the humans started it?”
“Yes. I believe they were ignorant, but they destroyed the origin world, so only scattered fragments of that place remain. Our method was to fight back using our magic. We staged a huge takeover, and enslaved all the humans in the Fractured City – then the biggest human civilization on this planet.”
Echo imagined the conflict now. She saw Shadows pouring out of a rift in the sky, flooding down to a busy, shining city, full of humans minding their own business, perhaps unaware of the darkness the witches manipulated. She pictured the screams, the terror, and the savage vengeance of the Shadows, as they possessed, then converted other humans around them into mindless, making them tormented slaves.
She shivered.
“We wanted to take over the world as vengeance for the damage brought upon ours. But we couldn’t spawn anywhere else but at the Fractured City. And… well. When we invaded, we decimated cities, towns and people in the northlands. Right until the thousand and one witches obliterated themselves to create the Lunar Wastes, trapping us in a blanket of cold, and mountains of ice. Crippling our movement when we stepped into the cursed wasteland.”
Helena hesitated outside her sleeping quarters. “Ever since then, the Shadows worked on forming a proper society here, subjugating the remaining humans, and seeking a way to bypass the Lunar Wastes, to complete their objective of taking everything over.”
One thing occurred to Echo, as she listened to the Supreme’s words. “How do you know all this? You sound like you were there. When… the Wastes happened. But that was a long time ago. Wasn’t it?”
Helena’s smile then turned dark and pained. “It was,” she agreed, before promptly closing the door on Echo’s face.
Rude.
Sighing, Echo went to her room, to reflect on the day’s events, on the werewolf, and on Helena’s words.
Chapter Two
“No,” Nox said. He clutched his healing ribs, scowling at Erlandur and Faith. They shared the med bay with him, explaining the fantastical tale that somehow, somehow, they had Shadows on their side. “How could you keep something like this away from us? You never said once that you were in contact with this… Supreme. You simply told us that you had made some friends. My father trusted you.”
Erlandur smiled thinly, his eyes strangely hollow. For once, he didn’t don his helmet, so his southerner features stood clear in the flickering light of the room. “What do you think will be the first reaction I’ll get if I even attempt to explain about Helena?”
Nox paused. “That doesn’t matter. You can’t hold onto something like that. It betrays the trust of those who choose to follow you. What if none of us wish to forge an alliance with such a creature? Why not let us have that choice?”
“As far as I’m aware,” Erlandur replied, his voice cool, “we’re not winning this war. They’re reaching the south in more numbers each day, even with the brave resistance of your people. And once they get through the south, there’ll be nothing to stop them devouring all the humans of the world. Also… I’d known for a while that not all Shadows were evil.”
He refused to elaborate on that, but it did nothing to quell Nox’s unease. He could just about tolerate the idea of working with a black veined witch. By the moon, he could even deal with the fact that Erlandur had the same condition, and Erlandur actually used magic to animate his undead wolves.
Nox growled. The Spine wolves were the greatest clan. They may not have the history of Lunehill, but they lived on death’s doorstep, and had built themselves up into a sizeable military force. Nothing compared to the number of citizens in the Fractured City, as Faith and Erlandur insisted on ramming the notion into his head about.
Mostly, he felt pissed off that Erlandur kept such a heavy secret. He reckoned others back in the clan headquarters would feel the same. Who wanted to follow a leader that withheld vital information? Who worked with the enemy?
“I don’t understand how they used my grandmother’s body,” Faith was saying. “I know they buried her. I’ve visited her grave before.”
“Do you want to hear an answer from me?” A voice drifted from outside the room, and Nox fixed his attention on a slight, white haired woman with dark eyes and pale, pale skin. His nostrils flared slightly, taking in the prominent veins upon her body. One of the cursed. Although… something seemed off about her. Disconcerting.
“I imagine if I don’t, you’ll tell me anyway.”
“Right,” the newcomer said, allowing a smile to lift her incredibly red lips. The contrast of color made Nox stare closer.
He vaguely remembered being carried out of the chasm, and the lull of her voice, but nothing else. Even with everything the witch and knight had said, understanding the alliance with an underground resistance dedicated on toppling the Shadow city, he didn’t fully trust them. He didn’t see what benefit a Shadow got from slaughtering their own kind.
“It’s like this.” The woman edged in, and her face took on a cold, neutral slant. “Shadows can possess bodies, if they don’t devour the flesh. Even if the body is dead, as long as a Shadow finds one, it can be taken. And, let’s face it. The Lunar Wastes can keep bodies perfectly preserved for years. Which is enough time for a Supreme to link the body to a Shadow from the origin world.”
Link? Origin world? Dead body possession? Nox shuddered, baring his teeth in distaste. Hard to wipe out his undying hatred of Shadows, and to stomach the idea of accepting one as an ally.
“Echo, that is disturbing,” Faith replied, clearly unhappy with the fact. Erlandur’s mouth wrinkled as well.
Echo smiled, though there was a dark undertone to it. For some reason, although she wasn’t exactly what you would call pretty, there was something arresting about her features. Her dark eyes pierced the room, and her face was sharp, hawk like, yet somehow attractive. Nox resisted the stirrings of primal urges in his gut in a silent huff of disgust. He didn’t have time for this.
“It’s good to see you’re recovering,” Echo said, indicating to Nox with a nod of her head. “When I found you, I honestly thought you had to be dead at first.”
“You found me?” Nox allowed one eyebrow to twitch. “Then I thank you for my life.”
“No problem. I’m going to be heading back out to search for any other members of the scout team as well. If you survived, maybe there’s others.”
“When? Now?”
Echo nodded. “The faster, the better, wouldn’t you agree?”
Something about her tone seemed off. Nox disregarded it. “I want to help.”
“No,” Echo said bluntly. “I don’t need help.”
Nox snarled. “I can’t sit here and do nothing. “You’ll need a werewolf’s sense of smell to be able to catch anyone you can’t see.”
Echo considered this for a moment. “If you do come, there’s a condition.”
“Yes. What is it?”
Echo grinned mordantly. “I get to ride on you. I get tired of having to use my magic to get around everywhere.”
Nox rolled his eyes. “Really?” He considered the witch for a moment.
“Well, that, and the fact that you’re going to have to tolerate the magic I use. And I don’t think you’ll like it.”
Nox shook his head. “I’ve not been liking Shadow magi
c since I’ve first heard about it. But I can see its use. We have a witch called Yarrow, she’s able to directly communicate to Shadows.”
Echo pursed her lips in thoughtfulness. “That’s interesting. Was she born with this power?”
Nox closed his eyes, trying to remember the Ghost Laker’s power. “No. She was a lightning witch before it affected her.”
“Huh. I’ve not heard of that before. I was born with this,” she explained, and Nox felt a momentary horror. Born with such dark gifts? He couldn’t imagine that. Holding a squirming infant in his arms with the black taint in their veins.
He examined Echo again, now with increased interest. Something about her mannerism appealed to him. The dark eyes looked attractive, with those long eyelashes, those rounded cheeks and ruby lips which appeared soft and kissable. The veins, well, he could pretend they were inked tattoos, and not a froth of corruption in her veins. A hardness existed about her, too. Something cold and heavy and dark. He sniffed the air, and caught a scent of damp rock and earth emanating from her skin.
“Are all the people in the underbelly like you? Black veined?”
Echo shook her head. “Not everyone. But we stand out the least in this city, believe me. If a Shadow catches you looking normal, they’ll devour you. When you’re tainted, they already think you’re one of them, even though that’s not always the case.” She sucked on her lip. “If you’re ready, I’ll be leaving in ten minutes. We can’t waste time looking for your friends.”
Nox nodded in full agreement. “Of course. I’ll be fine.”
“I’d come, but I’m still healing,” Faith said.
“And I think I’m not allowed to leave,” Erlandur added. Nox noticed how Erlandur’s hand strayed to Faith. Apparently those two had gotten cosy during the trip. He examined Erlandur’s dark veins in a mix of trepidation and respect. Human had sacrificed a lot in his pursuit of an end to the Shadows. Nox admired him for that. Shame he wasn’t born a werewolf, really. He’d be a fine warrior.
With a grunt, Nox rolled out of bed as Echo left, and he stared after her unusual, long white hair. An interesting individual. Something smelled different about her. Like she was dangerous.