But what choice did we have? We couldn’t outrun them. We couldn’t hide. We had to stand and fight.
Well, it wasn’t like I was planning on living much longer anyway. The Dealer could come take my body once the redcaps were done tearing it to pieces.
I glanced at Lilian. She met my eyes. Nodded. We both knew what had to happen. I adjusted Rodetk on my shoulders, preparing to throw him to the ground. I couldn’t hold him and fight at the same time. Maybe, if we were lucky, one of us would live long enough to drag him out of here.
It didn’t seem very likely.
But at that moment a hissing shout rose up among the redcaps. I looked back.
The roggenwolf had turned. It blocked the corridor, its hackles raised as it snarled at the approaching redcaps. Their sprint had slowed as they readied their weapons.
One redcap tried to scamper up the wall to get past the roggenwolf. With a roar, the beast reared up on its hind legs and swiped the goblin back to the floor with its massive paw. The roggenwolf took the redcap in its teeth, bashed its head against the wall, and hurled the shattered goblin toward its fellows.
This was our chance. But as I pushed the last of my energy into my burning legs, Lilian looked back and saw what the roggenwolf was doing. She began to slow, her eyes wide.
“What are you doing?” I yelled.
“We can’t”—she took a deep breath—“leave it to die.”
She stopped, began to turn, but I grabbed her by the elbow and pulled her on. “Rodetk dies if we stop,” I panted. “We all die. Run. Run!”
I gave her a shove. Her eyes burned with fury. But she started running again. Every few seconds she cast another look behind her.
I didn’t look back. Not anymore. I just ran.
A roar rang out behind me. It shook the corridor and rattled my skull. It was followed by the sound of fighting, of redcaps dying, of steel and gunfire. Then even that faded as we continued our mad run to freedom.
We burst out onto a rocky platform overlooking the Mines’ main cavern. The sounds and smells of the underground city hit me like a splash of icy water. I staggered, disoriented for a second, then found my bearings and looked around.
“Follow me,” I said.
We slowed our mad dash to a hurried jog. My muscles were just about worn out. One look at the walkways running through the Mines showed the place was crawling with every soldier Likho could muster.
Word had spread. They were looking for us.
Goblins were being shoved off the streets, back into their homes. There were no crowds to hide in. But we were back in territory I knew now. Back in the shadows I used to haunt, the shadows that hid me from Rodetk’s guardsmen and the vengeful mobs.
I led Lilian on through the dark, staying clear of the soldiers. We didn’t speak. Unless you count Rodetk’s feverish moans, of course.
He was in a bad way. More than once I had to pull him off my shoulders and clamp my hand over his mouth while we waited for a patrol to pass.
Finally, we came to the hidden door leading to the long staircase and the forgotten mine shaft. We slipped through and began to climb.
If it had seemed a long way down, it was even longer going up. My muscles trembled with every step, threatening to throw both me and Rodetk off the edge. Lilian lit one of my candles to give us some light to see by.
As we came at last to the top of the stairs, a goblin voice called to us. “It true, what they’re saying?”
I squinted up and a light flickered to life. We stared into the faces of Tun and his two smuggler friends. The big goblin still had his gun, but at least he wasn’t pointing it at us. We paused.
“Depends,” I said. “What are they saying?”
“Some humans and the blind beast tried to gut the sorcerer in his lair.” The big goblin’s eyes flickered across Rodetk’s writhing form. “Helped by a traitorous ex-Guardsman.”
“Word travels fast in the Mines,” I said.
“What else we supposed to do besides gossip? TV reception is dog shit down here.” He cocked his head to the side. “Is it true, then?”
I eyed up the three goblins, trying to decide what they’d do to us. Would they try to turn us in for a reward? As tired as I was, I was past caring.
“More or less,” I said.
The big goblin fingered his gun and thought about it. “’Bout time someone gave it a shot, I figure. Come on, then. We’ll make sure no one follows you out.”
I just nodded my thanks, too exhausted to say anything else.
We emerged into dazzling late afternoon sunshine.
For a while there, I’d wondered if I’d ever see the sky again. You’d think, after all the time I’d spent in the Mines, I’d be used to being underground. I wasn’t.
We staggered halfway down the mountainside, then took a break in a copse of trees that sheltered us pretty well. I lowered Rodetk from my shoulders and had a better look at him.
Beneath the boils, his face had gone a pasty green-gray. His yellow eyes were wide and staring, but whatever they were seeing wasn’t of this world. The blood vessels in his eyes had gone black.
I prepared a simple concoction of the herbs I had in my bag, chewed them up, and pushed the paste into his mouth.
But I was buying time, and nothing more.
“What did the sorcerer do to him?” Lilian asked as she wiped the sweat from her face.
“I’m not sure exactly. A bewitchment curse of some sort. Early will know.”
I hoped.
“Likho,” she said. “He’s not the one responsible for everything, is he?”
I shook my head. “I don’t think so. But he’s tied in somehow. He has to be.”
He has to be. Or all this was for nothing .
Early was right. I should never have gone back to the Mines. I should never have brought Lilian and Rodetk with me. Rodetk was dying in the worst kind of way, and Lilian, well…
I looked at the hole that’d been sliced in her top by that redcap’s spear. I’d seen that spear go right through her. The hole in her top was placed dead center, just above her navel. The spear hadn’t skimmed her, like she’d claimed. But the flash of skin I could see through the tear showed no sign of damage.
I opened my mouth to ask her again what the hell had happened. But she’d sensed my gaze. She covered her torn top with her hand and picked up my bag. “We should keep moving.”
Her face left no room for argument. I shouldered Rodetk and gave her a nod. “Yes, ma’am.”
31
The boat was waiting for us where we’d left it, just outside the abandoned mining settlement. We shoved it back into the water, loaded up Rodetk, and brought the engine coughing to life.
The sun had fallen by the time we started downriver. Out here, away from the lights of the town, the stars reigned from horizon to horizon. We navigated by the light of the full moon.
As we headed back toward town I wracked my brain, trying to make sense of it all.
If Likho wasn’t working this grand curse, then who was? And why? Who had snatched Brandon Mills’ boy? Who was responsible for the hag’s disappearance, and the cruelties that’d been inflicted on the roggenwolf? Was it the hag herself, or was there another player in town?
Damn it, what the hell was going on here?
I wasn’t as good a helmsman as Rodetk, but I managed to guide the dinghy back into the boathouse without crashing into anything or running aground. We leapt out, re-energized. Rodetk made a rasping sound with every jagged breath he took. He wouldn’t last much longer.
Luckily, Lilian had driven her car to the boathouse this morning. We loaded Rodetk into the back and drove back to Early’s place in about ten seconds flat. I didn’t even have time to buckle my seatbelt.
I made a mental note to never, ever let Lilian drive me anywhere again. She was a maniac.
I kicked open Early’s front door and charged inside, Rodetk in my arms. “Early! Help, now!”
The old man appeared in the ha
llway, holding a kitchen knife and an unshucked corn cob. We’d caught him in the middle of making dinner. He took one look at Rodetk and said, “Kitchen table. Quickly.”
Lilian and I rushed into the kitchen behind Early. He swept the junk off the table and I laid out Rodetk’s writhing form.
“What happened?” Early demanded as he threw open a hidden cabinet in the back of the pantry and began pulling out vials and potions and bundles of herbs.
“Some kind of bewitchment curse. I don’t know exactly. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Early peeled back Rodetk’s eyelid, studying his pupil and the color of the flesh on the underside of his eyelid. Rodetk snapped his jaws at Early, but the old man barely seemed to notice.
“Suspension charms,” he said. “Now. We need to slow his heart before this thing spreads any further. What happened?”
Lilian lit candles for me and I started scribbling out charms while I told Early everything I could remember. He listened in silence, nodding as he stripped off Rodetk’s clothes and examined him. His face was set in a look of determined concentration.
I folded the paper charms and gestured for Lilian to bring me the candles. I sealed them with wax, then laid the first one on Rodetk’s bare chest.
At the paper’s touch, the goblin’s muscles tightened. With a noise like groaning metal, he began to thrash.
“Hold him!” Early shouted.
I threw my weight onto his arms and chest while Early took his legs and Lilian held his head. The goblin was surprisingly strong. He moaned and tried to twist out of my grasp. I held him so tight I was afraid I’d break his arms.
Slowly, the first suspension charm began to take effect, and his movements grew weaker. I took the chance to layer more charms across his shoulders and stomach.
“Good,” Early said, wiping his brow with his sleeve. He thrust a mortar and pestle into my hands. “The marsh-herb concoction I showed you. You remember it?”
I nodded.
“Prepare some and start making poultices for the boils. Lilian, hand me that blue vial.”
Nodding mutely, Lilian rolled up her sleeves and started acting as Early’s assistant. She was a little out of her depth, but she was handling herself well. She’d had plenty of experience helping Alcaraz take care of the Strangers they kept. It wasn’t like they could take them to a vet.
“What else did you find?” Early asked as he worked. “Is this goblin sorcerer the one we’re looking for?”
I hesitated, then shook my head. “I don’t think so. He’s doing some dark magic there, but nothing on the scale we’re looking at. He knew something about a curse, but he seemed to think we were responsible.” I paused, looking down at Rodetk. “You were right. I shouldn’t have gone there.”
“It was a good lead,” he said. “Rodetk thought so.”
“Really?”
Early nodded, drawing up a murky grey potion into a needle-less syringe. “That’s why he agreed to go with you. He was sure that a goblin was responsible for stealing the Mills boy. He couldn’t let that stand.”
I glanced down at Rodetk. He was so still now I could barely tell if he was breathing. “We didn’t find the boy. Maybe he was there. Maybe not. But we’ll never find out. If Likho or some other goblin was snatching children, they’ll have gone to ground by now. We made a hell of a commotion.”
Early nodded grimly as he squirted his potion into the corner of Rodetk’s mouth. “We always knew it was a slim chance. Changelings are rarely recovered.”
That didn’t make me feel any better.
“All the noise you made might convince our villain to abandon the curse,” Early suggested.
“Or maybe they’ll speed things up, now that they know we’re onto them.”
“You never were much of an optimist, were you, boy?”
“What about Lockhart’s library?” I said. “Tell me you found something there that can untangle this mess.”
“Nothing conclusive,” he said. “I spent all day searching the library, cross-referencing with the notes Alcaraz gave me. Even enlisted some of Lockhart’s swains to help. I couldn’t find a recipe for the curse itself.”
“But? Tell me there’s a but, Early.”
“But,” he said, “I found more references to similar curses. More tales like the one about that farmer’s daughter. They all seem to rely on the creation of something called a Blackheart. An extremely powerful fetish, capable of causing death and disease on a mass scale. But it’s hags’ magic. Can only be wielded by a hag.”
“And we’ve got a missing hag,” Lilian said.
Early nodded as he dripped some potion I didn’t recognize onto the tip of Rodetk’s tongue. “This is a curse of revenge. The Blackheart is grief given form. Not the kind of curse we can break easily. We need to either disrupt the casting ritual, neutralize the emotion that’s powering it, or destroy the Blackheart. Or we’re in a lot of trouble.”
“Exactly what scale of trouble are we talking about here?” Lilian asked.
“Potentially? Genocidal.”
She grimaced. “Kind of wish I hadn’t asked.”
“We have to find the hag,” I said. “And fast.”
“You think she’s behind this?” Lilian said, shaking her head. “I don’t believe it. I saw her just a couple of days before she went missing. She gave no sign she was planning anything like this.”
“She’s a hag,” I said. “If she was planning something, she’d be able to keep it a secret.”
“If she was planning something, she’d be able to do it cleanly,” Lilian countered. “She wouldn’t have worked through intermediaries like Mills. She wouldn’t have let any witnesses live.”
I chewed the inside of my cheek. She had a point. The hag could be vicious, but she wasn’t reckless. She was careful, patient.
But if it wasn’t the hag, and it wasn’t Likho, then who the hell was responsible? There weren’t that many powerful magic users in Lost Falls.
“There’s something else,” Early said. “All the stories of the Blackheart had one thing in common. It was always created beneath a full moon.”
I glanced out the window. At the full moon shining high in the sky.
“Ah, hell. Tonight, then?”
Early nodded. “Tonight.”
Well, at least my last night on Earth wouldn’t be dull.
Sighing, Early put his hands down on the table. I’d applied the marsh-herb poultices across every boil I could see on Rodetk’s body, but the goblin’s condition hadn’t changed. Early’s potions hadn’t helped either.
“He’s not improving,” Early said, looking down at Rodetk. “I can’t break the bewitchment.”
Rodetk breathed with shallow, rattling breaths. The blackness had spread from the blood vessels in his eyes to the pulsing veins and arteries of his arms and neck. They snaked beneath his skin, twitching like black worms.
Early closed his eyes and put his hands to his head, deep in thought. There were black bags under his eyes. He looked all of his years and then some.
“The bone,” he said finally. “The bone the sorcerer snapped when he cast the curse. What was it?”
Hell, he might as well have asked me what color underwear Likho was wearing. It had all happened so fast. And I’d been kind of busy trying not to get shot. I closed my eyes and tried to picture the moment in my mind.
“It was…kind of…hell, I don’t know. It was a fucking bone! Six inches long, maybe? Curved, I think.” I threw up my hands. “I don’t know what else to tell you.”
“Curved?” Lilian said. “You’re sure it was the curved bone he broke?”
“I…I think so.”
She looked at Early. “The sorcerer had a wing bone on his necklace. It was the only one that was curved. Harpy, maybe, or sirin.”
I’d never seen either creature myself, but I knew a little about them. They were both winged Strangers, foreign to these parts, who looked something like a cross between a bird and a human wom
an. Both were vicious in their own ways.
“Sirins are magical,” Early said. “They bewitch the minds and bodies of their victims. The sorcerer could’ve incorporated that power into his curse.” He shook his head. “I can’t break that kind of bewitchment here. Maybe if I could get my hands on some sirin urine—”
“Alcaraz has a sirin,” Lilian interrupted. “A live one.”
Hope surged in my chest. Urine saves the day once again.
Early looked at me. “Ozzy.”
“I got him.” I picked up Rodetk, doing my best not to disturb the suspension charms.
“We need to get him to Alcaraz’s as soon as possible,” Early said. “I don’t know how much longer we’ve got. It might already be too late.”
Early’s cell phone started ringing as we headed for the door. He tossed his car keys to Lilian.
“Put him in the car. I’ll be there in a second.”
We hurried out to Early’s car. A sharp breeze cut through the night. Lilian threw open the back door and I shoved Rodetk inside.
“Hold on, you little bastard,” I said in a low voice. “I didn’t carry you all the way down that mountain for nothing.”
Early came out a few seconds later. He said a couple more words into his phone, then hung up.
“That was Malika,” he said. At my blank look, he clarified. “The ghoul who came to the conclave. She’s been talking to the ghouls and the rest of the community, trying to pin down the hag’s last movements before she disappeared.”
“And?”
“She spoke to an ogre who might’ve been one of the last people to see her. He visited her place to get his glamour renewed. And when he was leaving, he saw someone else arriving. Two someones. It was, and I quote, ‘a sad man and a old lady wif wheels.’ That was all Malika managed to get out of him. Mean anything to you?”
The words bounced around the inside of my skull a few times before sinking in. And then I laughed. I couldn’t help it.
“That son of a bitch,” I whispered. “He fooled me. Twice.” I shook my head in amazement. “I’m so fucking stupid.”
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