“The Imen should also leave,” Neha said firmly. “Otherwise, you’d all be cannon fodder for the daemons. We can handle them well between us,” she added, then grinned. “It’s been a long time since the Adlets, the Dhaxanians, and the Manticores have fought together, anyway.”
Nevis scoffed, crossing his arms. He wasn’t too happy about playing with others, it seemed—yet another trait I’d seen in Caspian during our first days on Neraka. “There’s a reason behind that.”
“Yes, yes, there’s definitely a reason. It’s the peace treaty you signed with the daemons, sending the rest of us to our doom,” Colton shot back.
“Now, now!” Neha interjected. “We can fight about past deeds later. I’ve got a list for the both of you, anyway. Let’s worry about wiping those horned bastards out, first.”
“That being said,” Wyrran replied, shaking his head, “the Imen aren’t going anywhere. We’ve rigged the tunnels with explosives, all the way down. Once the outsiders are out of range, you all need to get out of here, because we’ll blow this whole mountain to bits.”
Nevis, Colton, and Neha frowned, then exchanged glances. Neha scoffed and put her hands on her hips, her golden wrist cuffs jingling.
“You’re bringing Ragnar Peak down?” she asked, slightly incredulously.
“Why risk the lives of more of your people in a fight with the daemons, when we can just bury them all in one go?” Wyrran asked, shrugging.
“He makes a fair point,” I replied.
“Dhaxanians are generally slower in hot weather. It will take us a while to adjust and lower the temperature properly,” Nevis said. “The Iman is right. I don’t want to risk the lives of my men in long-term combat, especially since there are more armies headed our way. It’s simply not worth it.”
Neha nodded. “GASP will go through the tunnel first, then,” she said, then nodded at Pheng-Pheng. “My darling, stay with them. They need you more out there than I do here, as much as I hate to admit it.”
“Mother, no!” Pheng-Pheng replied, frowning. “I want to stay here with you and fight!”
Neha smiled and gently held her daughter’s face in her hands. “Don’t be stubborn, Pheng-Pheng. Your skills are of more value to our new friends. We have plenty of fighters here. Your sisters are out there as we speak. Please, trust my judgment.”
Pheng-Pheng exhaled, then nodded slowly. I rested a hand on her shoulder and gave her a soft smile.
“For what it’s worth, I’m more than happy that you’re sticking around,” I muttered.
“Yeah, me too. You’re kind of growing on me,” she replied, no longer able to contain her smirk.
Nevis clapped his hands once, looking bored. “Okay, ladies, hurry this up and get ready to make your exit,” he said. “The temperature will soon be perfect for my people. The battlefield is ours.”
Hooves thundered in the distance, getting significantly louder. The sound prompted us all to frown and look at each other. I turned to the southwest and used my True Sight to see beyond the fortress walls and the thick snowstorm outside. My stomach dropped. Instant heat spread through me—and not the good kind.
“Riders,” I murmured. “Hundreds of them. Over a thousand, in fact. Daemons on indigo horses,” I added, out of breath.
“Of course,” Heron groaned with exasperation. “Why the hell not? The Exiled Maras brought indigo horses here and started breeding them, anyway! Why shouldn’t the daemons get their claws on a few specimens? Ugh.”
“They’ll be here in an hour, tops,” I replied. “We need to hurry.”
The incoming hostiles were heavily armored, most likely with charmed meranium plates, and carrying crossbows and large blades. Behind them, pulled by dozens of indigo stallions per load, were more ballistae and catapults. Zane was once again being proven right. What we’d been dealing with so far was just the beginning—the first wave, to test us, to wear us out.
The real fighters were coming now. And my initial fear of losing this fight was starting to creep back up, curdling my blood and choking me up. We’d fought daemon hunters and grunts, guards and mercenaries. We’d even brought down generals, pit wolves, and Death Claws. However, the daemons coming for us next were visibly bigger and more vicious than their predecessors. They were geared up for creatures like us.
Even with Blaze, we didn’t have much of a chance. They’d probably brought swamp witch spells with them, too—as per Zane’s predictions, anyway. He’d nailed everything so far, so there was no point in doubting he’d get this wrong.
Time was no longer on our side.
Avril
Despite the cold, my blood rushed hot at the thought of daemon riders. That was a new concept I was not looking forward to experiencing.
We replenished our backpack supplies—healing potions, whatever crystals and herbs and bandages we could cram into them, plus leftover explosive satchels with fuses. We each took a crossbow and a short arrow quiver on our shoulders, then prepared to go down through the tunnel.
The final tally was encouraging, particularly when compared to our initial numbers. Alongside the GASP team, we had Caspian, Zane, Velnias, Arrah, Dion and Alles, Wyrran, and Pheng-Pheng, along with the Druid delegation, Maras and fae included. We also got Hundurr and Rover with us.
“Two pit wolves are better than one.” Scarlett smirked, then scratched both beasts’ necks as they whimpered and grumbled, their red eyes glimmering with delight.
“The others will stay here with us,” Colton said, nodding at the two dozen other rescued pit wolves still standing, as they moved around the courtyard, sniffing the air.
“I’ll have the frost loosen up a bit,” Nevis said. “We need the remaining grunts at the base to work their way up, along with the incoming riders. They need to think they can still get to you.”
“Yes, the more of them we gather on the peak, the better,” Neha replied with a nod.
It sounded all good and simple in theory, but I couldn’t help but worry about their escape before the tunnels were detonated.
“How will you get off the mountain, then?” I asked, looking at Nevis, Neha, and Colton. “It’ll have to be at the very last minute, when the place is swarming with daemons, for the explosive charges to be detonated. How will you all get out alive?”
Nevis’s gaze found mine, and he smirked. “You know, you could just say you’re worried about me,” he replied.
“Get over yourself. She’s not worried about you, specifically,” Heron shot back, prompting Nevis to scowl at him.
“I am! I care about Nevis,” I interjected firmly, drawing the outraged look of my boyfriend and the delighted grin of the Dhaxanian prince. “I care about Neha. I care about Colton. I care about every single one of these creatures sticking their necks out for us,” I added, taking a hammer to one’s childish insecurity and the other’s titanic ego. I could almost hear them both crumble.
In the end, they both got the gist and didn’t pursue the topic further.
“I was hoping I’d keep you on the edge of your seat with the grand finale of Ragnar Peak,” Nevis scoffed, “but, since you’re worried about your allies, I might as well ease your heart a little. As soon as you kids get off the mountain and reach a reasonable distance, I’ll turn the temperature to a drastic low and freeze our enemies without harming our allies. The rest of us will then escape, leaving the Imen behind to do the honors and… you know, boom.”
“Can you do that?” I replied.
“Of course,” he said, almost insulted. “I’m simply waiting for that horde of riders to come up. I’ve already blown my truce with Shaytan to hell. I might as well take as many of his fiends down as possible in the process.”
“Fair enough.” I sighed. “Okay, we’re good to go.”
Wyrran pulled the hatch door up. We lined up in front of it, with Wyrran going in first, followed by Jax, Hansa, Harper, and Caspian, then the others. Nevis came closer and gave me another one of his weird, mystical little snowflakes on a delicate s
ilver chain. This one was smaller, roughly the size of my fingernail, and glimmered pale blue.
“What’s this?” I asked.
“A gift?” he replied sarcastically. My eyeroll made him scoff. “I can find you anywhere with it. So don’t lose it. It might save your life someday.”
Heron groaned, then gave Nevis a friendly slap on the back. The Dhaxanian prince froze, flabbergasted. “You’re not a bad guy, after all,” Heron chuckled. “Just don’t use it to stalk my girlfriend. I will break you.”
He didn’t give Nevis a chance to respond, just slipped down into the tunnel. Nevis blinked several times. I guessed it had to do with physical contact. No one randomly touched the prince of Dhaxanians and lived to tell the tale. Then again, Heron wasn’t just anyone, so I chuckled.
“He means well,” I replied.
“Right,” he muttered, then frowned at me. “Don’t get yourself killed.”
“You complain about me not giving you enough credit, but I think you’re the one who needs to give me some,” I shot back with a wink, then jumped into the tunnel.
I landed on my feet and put the snowflake pendant around my neck. Half of my group was running ahead through the dark, narrow passage. I went after them, with Heron right in front of me. Behind us, the rest of our team followed, one by one.
We ran fast at a steep angle.
Based on the noises coming from above, Nevis had done what he’d said he would do—he’d tempered the frost, allowing the daemon mercenaries to move. Given how desperate they all were to capture us, along with the boost of confidence provided by over a thousand riders coming in as backup, I didn’t have a hard time imagining their resilience. A bunch of Dhaxanians, Manticores, and Adlets could not stand in their way—or so they thought. Their desperation and their fear of Shaytan’s wrath in case of failure would eventually be their undoing.
For us, it worked remarkably well. I could hear the boots rumbling on the ground. They were fighting. Harper used her True Sight as she ran and gave us occasional snippets from the ongoing battle.
“The Dhaxanians are taking a bit of a backseat for now. The Manticores and Adlets are tearing through the daemons, though,” she said.
“Nevis is probably waiting for the daemon riders,” Jax replied. “There’s only fifty of his people. Dhaxanian frost or not, they’ll still have their work cut out for them.”
“Yeah, I hope they don’t spend too much time up there,” Harper breathed.
“Wyrran, how will your people know we got out of explosion range?” I asked.
“They’re working with a relative notion of timing,” Wyrran replied. “We’ve trekked through these tunnels before, in previous years. We know how long it takes to cover two miles from the top to the edge.”
I exhaled sharply, pleased to find myself running away from Ragnar Peak. The bigger the distance between us and the fortress, the easier I could breathe. We’d put up a good fight in there, but it was time to move on. We had bigger things to deal with—while our allies helped us deliver yet another devastating blow to Shaytan’s armed forces.
A crippled enemy was bound to get sloppy. We needed him to make mistakes and rash decisions.
“You said the word spread fast about what we’ve been doing,” Harper said. “How many rebel Imen are there, Wyrran? That you know of, anyway?”
“Oh, a couple thousand in the south and the west, for sure,” Wyrran replied. “The daemon pacifists are coming out now, too. You’ve emboldened the people of Neraka to stand up and fight. My people are doing everything in their power to keep the daemons and the Exiled Maras distracted. Riots are breaking out in and around daemon cities all over the kingdom. We’re doing everything we can to help you defeat them.”
“Wow, word travels really fast around here.” I chuckled. “We can’t thank you enough.”
“You’re damn right!” Wyrran said. “We’ve got moles all over the place. We use flares and birds to communicate. We even have eyes in Azure Heights.”
“Oh, really?” Arrah chimed in.
“Yeah, you’d think that would be difficult, huh? Getting around in a city filled with creatures that could mind-bend you if they caught you.” Wyrran chuckled.
“I’m from Azure Heights,” she said. “Who do you have there?”
“Are you now? What’s your name?”
“Arrah. I worked for—”
“House Rohan. Yes, I’ve heard about you,” Wyrran replied.
“You have?” I asked, suddenly even more curious.
“Arrah is quite famous for her contacts with the rebel tribes living around the Valley of Screams. Her uncles used to smuggle explosives from Azure Heights.”
“Until they were caught,” Arrah muttered. I could almost feel the grief in her voice. “But I am curious, though. How did your Azure Heights moles keep a low profile? I’m immune to mind-bending, for example, but I’ve never met another Iman like me. Are they immune, too?”
“What? No,” Wyrran said, shaking his head as we kept running. “They just keep a low profile, avoid interacting with the Maras as best as they can. Those bloodsuckers don’t go around randomly mind-bending people, anyway. They do it for a reason, and, provided they’re not given a reason, they don’t engage. Besides, they’re not paranoid enough to immediately assume that our guys are moles. We’re smarter than that.”
The angle of our descent started to drop as we got closer to the ground level. The fighting sounded a little more distant. The daemons were working their way up to the fortress, leaving the mountain base behind.
“What have you been hearing from Azure Heights? Over the past couple of days, at least?” I asked. I was dying to know what the Lords were up to, especially since, as Wyrran had said, word spread fast. Surely, they must’ve learned about Draconis by now.
“Oh, they are flipping out up there!” Wyrran laughed wholeheartedly, as if he’d just remembered a fantastic joke. “They’re scrambling to send more scouts out to look for you. They’ve heard about Infernis, and there are rumors of the Lords already talking about Shaytan being weak and whatnot. They’re so vain and self-assured, it’s ridiculous.”
“Yeah, we know,” Caia muttered. “It’s why I’ll genuinely enjoy burning them all to a crisp.”
“Right?” Wyrran kept laughing. “They think they’re the center of the world. The daemons are the cunning brutes that unknowingly serve their purposes in exchange for some souls to feed on. That’s what they tell themselves. They’d probably die before they could admit in public that they tremble like worms whenever a daemon walks into the room.”
“So their alliance is really shaky, huh?” Jax asked.
“It was always shaky because both sides are greedy and vain. They share the addiction to souls and the access to swamp witch magic, along with the interest in seeing that both are never tapped out,” Wyrran explained. “That is pretty much the basis of their alliance. Well, that and the fact that, in their own twisted way, they have kind of a love-hate relationship. Azure Heights is well guarded against daemon attacks with swamp magic, and daemon cities are filled with fire and lava, both of which can terminate a Mara in seconds. They call it mutual appreciation.”
“Keeping their enemies close,” Hansa replied.
“Pretty much. But this delusion of grandeur started to fizzle out when you guys showed up with a dragon. I mean, up until recently, we just saw them as bloodthirsty conquerors, mindless beasts pretending to be intelligent and fashionable. Absolute frauds but, unfortunately, deadly and destructive frauds. Hope was gone for a long time. Now that we know what the outsiders can do, we understand that our bullies can, in fact, be defeated. It’s what kickstarted all the riots.”
“So, the daemon attack that we first witnessed in Azure Heights was… fake?” Jax asked.
Wyrran nodded. “They had to put on a show to convince you they were in trouble.”
That didn’t come as a surprise. I’d thought about it before. They’d gone to great lengths to fake their daem
onic misfortunes. In hindsight, it made sense.
“Have you heard your moles mention the swamp witch?” I asked.
“A few times, yes,” Wyrran said. “Though there’s nothing concrete. The Lords and the upper-level Maras know where she’s kept. Most of us didn’t even think she was still alive, but we deduced that much over the past ten years, as the Maras and daemons kept popping up with new swamp witch magic treats. You don’t get fresh milk from a dead moon-bison, now, do ya?”
“Fair enough,” I muttered. “And the—”
I lost my train of thought as a string of loud bangs erupted from far back. Explosions thundered through the underground. The tunnel shuddered, dust escaping from all its nooks and crannies. We kept running. The ground shook beneath our feet. I counted four large explosions, followed by six muffled ones.
“There we go!” Wyrran exclaimed. “Now, everybody, we need to try and go a little faster. Ragnar Peak is about to come down!”
“We’re out of range, aren’t we?” Hansa replied.
Wyrran picked up the pace, as did the rest of us, holding up a torch he’d brought with him. Technically speaking, we could’ve run faster, but Wyrran was leading. We were still extremely fast, and our allies had the benefit of simply sliding off the mountain with Nevis’s help—thus making their escape quick and easy. Assuming we’d left the mountain behind and couldn’t be crushed when it came down, there was no longer a life-or-death urgency to deal with.
“Yeah, but all that rubble will cave into the tunnels,” Wyrran said. “It’ll get dusty, fast!”
Just then, I glanced over my shoulder and saw exactly what he meant. With the earth still shaking, a thick cloud of dust and smoke was coming after us, blown through the tunnel in the aftermath of the explosions and the catastrophic collapse of Ragnar Peak.
“Wyrran, I think we need you to keep up with us now,” I said, my voice betraying my nervousness.
Fiona slipped past me, leaving Zane behind, and reached Wyrran. “Get on my back,” she ordered, both of them running side by side. Wyrran scoffed.
A Shade of Vampire 58_A Snare of Vengeance Page 8