by J L Terra
The engine revved and slammed into them again.
Amelia screamed and reached up to grasp the overhead handle. Bryn said, “What are they doing?”
“Trying to run us off the road.”
“Is it the Druid?”
The truck came at them again. It clipped the back corner. The pickup tried valiantly to hold, but they spun out. Daire fought the spin, squeezing the wheel so tightly he expected it to break off any second. They careened over the rumble strip onto uneven ground and a ditch. The pickup slammed into a tree. The hood folded like an accordion. Daire’s face hit the wheel. Amelia’s airbag exploded, cushioning the blow for her.
Steam rose from the engine. He tried to turn and see if Bryn was okay, but his seatbelt held tight. The pain across his abdomen was excruciating.
Amelia’s door was opened.
A man Daire thought was dead stuck his head in. He deflated the airbag with a knife, then cut Amelia’s seatbelt.
“Hey.” One word was all he could choke out.
The hired gunman grinned. He pulled Amelia out and then came back to shove a black object at Daire and hit a button. Two prongs lit up against his chest and lightning raced through his body.
Everything went black.
Chapter 31
Bryn blinked awake, noticing first that the breeze moved the trees around her. A shudder went through her as her brain processed whether the Druid was about to strike. The air was chilled. Her arms and cheeks were already numb from the cold. She tried to move, but her hands were bound behind her back and around the tree she was leaning against.
The Druid was nowhere that she could see, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t here. Breathing against her neck. The way that dragon had after he dragged her down the tunnel.
She could still smell his hot breath.
The sense of foreboding was too strong to ignore. Was she destined to be swallowed up by fire? It wasn’t like dragons were even real. Just a dream. Nothing more.
Fatigue weighed heavily on her. If this was all about to end, then maybe being tired was a good thing. The fight would be done, and she would be able to move on. To something. To nothing. Did it matter? She’d never thought long over what came next. Heaven? Assuming it was going to be wonderful and beautiful seemed naïve given the reality of her life so far. Oblivion actually sounded peaceful right now.
Thinking there was a power behind the veil of this world was nothing but a pipe dream. Unless she would also believe the being waiting beyond the physical was nothing but evil. Now that she could believe. After all, life was just a sadistic game.
And now she was done.
Let the dragon come.
One by one, memories trickled back in. The rush of water. The feel of Daire when he wrapped her in his arms and held her tight to him as they were swept along. The rooftop. The bite of the shingles against her skin.
The dragon. The one she had dreamed of again just now.
Ben’s reaction to Amelia’s blood.
The truck.
The crash. Those men she had seen before. Not the one who’d been swallowed by the bugs. Just the two others—his friends. She’d only seen them for a second this time, her vision swimming. Disoriented from the truck being run off the road. She could feel the bruise from her left hip to her right shoulder, where the seatbelt had held her tight.
Amelia.
Bryn looked around, trying to find her friend. Already knowing the young woman was likely gone. She struggled against what bound her hands, wanting to go after her friend. She couldn’t even stand up.
Her breath hitched in her throat and came out as a ragged moan. She kicked with her legs as much as she could and heard a groan that didn’t belong to her. “Who’s there?”
She twisted as much as she could and looked over her shoulder. Daire had been tied to a tree not far from her. His head was bowed. Blood from a wound on his temple had dried in a line down one side of his face.
“Daire, wake up.” She took a breath and called out as loud as she could, “Wake up.” As though he was drunk inside a house she was searching as an FBI agent, with a voice he would have no choice but to comply to.
His shoulders jerked, but he didn’t lift his head. Bryn gritted her teeth and tried to pull against the ties. Those men had dragged them out here and left them to be devoured by wild animals. If they didn’t starve first. Neither were options she was particularly excited to experience.
She couldn’t bring herself to believe this was how things would end. Not when Daire seemed so much better and more honorable than anyone she’d ever met. He had a mission he’d been undertaking for years now. How could it end like this? He seemed so convinced that a higher power was in control—that Providence led him to defeat the Druid.
If that was the case, she wished he never woke up and had to see the Druid win. Because that was the only outcome she could see now. It would be too painful to watch.
If he did wake up, then the last thing she would do in this world would be to help him find the Druid. The words of Erik’s song drifted through her mind. Bits and pieces of an ancient riddle that had been nothing more than a children’s song to her. A nursery rhyme. She looked around but couldn’t see the worthless, soaked book. Those men could have taken it. Or was it still in the truck? Maybe there weren’t any salvageable pages. Either way didn’t matter. It was gone.
Like Amelia. Like any way for them to contact Daire’s friends, or any help from Ben’s team.
Or any way to get out of these bindings.
She gritted her teeth and pulled so hard her shoulders screamed. She cried out, exorcising all the frustration inside her, sending it out into the atmosphere.
“Amelia?” Daire’s voice was a deep groan. A guttural sound that made her wince.
She waited for him to lift his gaze, to see where he was. And for realization over their situation to set in. She saw everything she’d been thinking now wash over his face before he closed his eyes again. Then peace came in. How did he do that? Just close his eyes, let it all go. She felt no better after screaming out her frustrations, and yet he seemed to be able to conjure up peace with no problem at all.
He opened his eyes. “Bryn?”
She just stared. What was the point in nodding? They were both here. They were both alive.
She looked away and sang the song in her head, recalling her mother’s hair. The sound of her laughter. She couldn’t have been more than three at the time, but she remembered those things. She’d never forget.
Her lips moved, but no sound came out. All the words and phrases of the song she could remember. And to the ground I reach. Up to the sky I reach. Something… something tree. She curled her lip and kicked at the ground with the heel of her boot. Why couldn’t she remember when all of their lives depended on it?
“Bryn.”
She turned to him.
“Are you okay?”
What was she supposed to say? They were just waiting here to die.
She tried to remember everything she could about the All Tree, and what it represented to the Norse people. A bridge between worlds. The thing that held everything else together.
Destroying it would tear the world apart. Assuming she believed it was actually real. The Druid seemed to think it was, or at least he had adopted that system of belief. But what made it more viable than any other? She’d even heard him say he was Odin, All-Father. Which meant, to him at least, he was basically a god.
Other belief systems also had a tree that represented all life on earth. It was even in the Bible. There were two trees in Genesis as far as she remembered—one was a tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and the other was the tree of life. She’d started reading it a while back but had been distracted by the talking snake. Given all she had seen since then, a talking snake didn’t sound exactly too far-fetched. Perhaps she should give it another try.
If she lived.
A deep pop drew her attention to Daire. Before she could realize what he’d don
e, he twisted his hand from behind the tree and brought in front of him. It hung at an odd angle. Dislocated. She sucked in a breath as he brought his other hand forward, but without the pop. Using his good arm, he rotated his dislocated one until it popped back into place.
Bile rose in her throat. He winced as he stood and wandered to her. She heard the sword slide from its sheath and froze. Too scared to move, lest he slice her somewhere important. She heard a snick, and the ties loosened. She brought her arms forward and rubbed her wrists, wincing at the tension in her shoulders and arms.
“You okay?”
Bryn pulled her feet to her bottom and stood. She hissed out a breath and rolled her shoulders.
“Have you seen Amelia? Is she close by?”
She frowned at him. “She’s gone.”
“We’ll find her.”
Bryn started walking. She didn’t know where she was going, nor did she really care. She needed to get her muscles moving and her blood pumping. She needed to think, and she needed to work out this stiffness. That wouldn’t happen standing around doing nothing.
He walked beside her. “No phones, so we can’t call anyone.”
“No truck, so we can’t go anywhere except by walking. If we’re listing all the things that are wrong right now, it’s going to take a while because there’s a lot.”
“I know.” He sighed. “What about the book?”
She shook her head, not even looking at him.
“It’s hard to swallow. Even knowing that Providence allowed this to happen. It’s hard but I can accept it.”
“It’s insane is what it is. Those men took Amelia, and they left us here to die. What’s to accept about that? It’s a mind game, convincing yourself that your life is fine when it very much is not. And now there’s a dragon dogging my steps and breathing down my neck.” She paused long enough to take a breath. “I’ll write down as much of the song that I remember, and then I’m leaving.”
“You aren’t going to help me?” He stopped.
She turned and looked at him. Saw the look on his face and had to steel herself against the guilt that ran through her. “I’m not part of your team.”
“Good. Because you wouldn’t be here if you were since they’re all elsewhere doing their own thing.”
“So by default, I’m supposed to help you?”
“You’re the only one here who knows that song.”
Bryn started to sing the words. After a few bars, the wind picked up. The earth beneath her feet started to rumble. She closed her mouth and took a step back, looking around for the Druid. He was here. He had found them because she’d sung that song.
No, that wasn’t right. Erik had given him what he wanted. The Druid was way ahead of them.
“You’re not disproving my point.” Like he hadn’t even noticed what had just happened.
“I don’t know all of it. And even if I did, I wouldn’t understand what it meant. The Druid is going to find the All Tree before you, and he’s going to destroy it.” She grabbed the hair on the sides of her face and rubbed her scalp in a brisk motion. “And the fact that I’m even considering this being real is insane.”
“It’s real.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because I’ve seen it in a dream. And my dreams are never wrong.” He studied her. “It might not be what the Druid thinks it is, but that doesn’t make it any less real. Different cultures appropriate the truth in their own way. It gets twisted. Truths disappear into myth, and others are given far too much prominence. Tradition emphasizes what it wants to emphasize and not necessarily what’s most important.”
“So everyone’s just wrong?”
Daire shook his head. “I didn’t say that. The truth is there. You just have to be prepared to look past the surface to find it.”
Bryn turned and kept walking. What did it matter what the truth was when death was so close? Whether she believed this was really happening or not wasn’t going to save her life. It wasn’t going to make the world better, or safer. It wasn’t going to magically provide a way to stop the Druid.
Once again she had to face the reality she was the reason the Druid was alive. He had chosen her, maybe even fixated on her. Her blood had brought him back to life. If he’d even been dead.
She hummed the song under her breath to try and jog her memory. She was aware of Daire right behind her, but he left her to her thoughts. And evidently didn’t disagree with the direction she was taking.
Maybe she was crazy. Crazy enough to have made up this entire thing.
Her foot clipped a rock, and she fell to her hands and knees on the dirt. She leaned back and looked up at the sky. What if she woke up in that mental institution only to be told all of this was nothing but a dream? Maybe she really had lost it on that last case, and now she was stuck in her own head. Maybe Daire was nothing but a figment of her imagination. An ancient warrior here to vanquish evil.
It certainly sounded like a fantastical tale.
“Bryn?”
She looked over at him and wondered at the power of her mind to have conjured such an image. Maybe she’d woken up in the hospital and Daire hadn’t been there at all,—just Patrick— and she had actually been back in the real world. Ben, Malachi, and Amelia had been with her, maybe as though reality and delusion had crossed over for a short time. Patrick was no doubt more convinced than ever that she’d lost it. And what if she’d been in the real world long enough to know she didn’t want to stay there, and so she had quickly journeyed back into her mind.
The idea sent a shudder through her.
Daire crouched and touched her cheek. “What is it?”
It would explain so much. All the insane things that have been happening were nothing but her imagination. Maybe she’d made up this entire thing.
“Bryn.”
She tried to speak, but all that came out was a moan. Daire wasn’t here. He wasn’t real. None of this was.
“You’re scaring me.”
She leaned into her source of comfort in this nightmare. Far enough that she knocked him back to sitting on the ground. Bryn burrowed into his body. She curled up her legs and threaded her arms under his jacket and around his back.
“You’re not real. None of this is.”
His hand on her back stopped beneath her shoulder blade. “You think you just made me up?”
“It makes more sense than believing everything that’s happened so far. I probably saw something traumatizing looking for those missing children. This is nothing but a delusion I made up in my mind because I couldn’t handle reality.”
And now she was giving in.
In a last-ditch effort to fight off the delusion, Bryn pulled away. Forced herself to stand on shaky legs.
Daire got up, his eyes soft. She couldn’t let that penetrate. Not when he was nothing but her mind’s need to create a hero for herself. Even if that hero wasn’t even going to be able to defeat the bad guy in the end. She might be crazy. But she was still a realist.
“You should go. There’s really no point staying here with me because things are only going to get worse.”
“I won’t leave you in the middle of the woods. Not after everything that’s happened. Everything you’ve been through.” He shook his head. “There’s no way.”
“We’re in my mind, Daire. Just go, okay? I gave you something to do, and maybe it would give me peace of mind if you were to go and actually do it.”
She folded her arms across her chest, wondering at the feelings of aches and pains in her body. Was the delusion so realistic she could feel even that? Maybe just because it was her mind, and she made the rules.
A grin curled the corners of his lips. “Maybe I should be flattered that you conjured me out of thin air to stay with you when you didn’t feel safe.”
“This isn’t a joke. We’re talking about my complete mental instability.” She sighed, not particularly wanting to get into this deep discussion. “I’ll sing you the song, or as much of
it as I know, and then you can go try to stop the Druid. The whole world will probably be destroyed, but I’ll likely feel better after it is. Or I’ll just lapse into some kind of catatonic state, in the mental hospital I am at this very moment confined in, aware of nothing. Pretty much a win-win.”
His eyes softened. “Okay, Bryn. Sing me the song.”
She started as close to the beginning as she could remember. The wind picked up as she sang. When the ground under her feet started to rumble, she looked at Daire. It was like he didn’t even notice anything was happening.
Because it was all in her head. Remember?
She looked up to the sky and sang about the rainbow bridge. It had sounded so majestic when she was a child.
She looked to the trees around her, their roots reaching down into the earth.
The ground rippled like an earthquake. Waves of earth lifted to break against the trees, like water against a rock.
She stepped back but kept singing. Each line returned to her memory even as the words escaped her mouth.
Mist gathered around them. Bryn saw figures walking. Not the scary creatures who had scratched them, but children. The ones she had been searching for, now wraiths wandering the earth. Looking for home.
Daire moved close to her. Wind whipped her hair around her face. He wound his arms around her waist and pulled her back against the warmth of his body in a loose hug. “I want to see what you see.”
Bryn finished the song.
The earth in front of her cracked in a jagged line and parted. Inside was a tunnel that led down, deep into the ground. Into darkness and the depths of the earth.
Below the surface, the dragon roared.
Chapter 32
Daire saw the faces in the mist. Pale skin, dark eyes. The cold stare of those who felt no longer. Ten. Twenty. Maybe as many as a hundred children circled them. Gliding through the mist.
Those screeches rang in his ears again. The ones he’d heard before, on the ship. The deadly scream of an evil that only wanted to devour. This was the power behind the Druid—evil and death. The power to corrupt so completely ruled here.