The flashlight took that moment to blink off; I raised my sword. “Back away from the hole.”
I heard O’Shea shuffle back in the darkness, Alex stayed all but glued to my side.
Licking my lips, the foul air coated my tongue. “We have a big bad coming out of that hole, and we can’t fight it in the dark. We have to get back to the shop, now.”
“Alex sees.”
“You lead the way, buddy,” I said. But I made the call too late—our luck wasn’t going to hold. A blast of air erupted from the hole, sending us tumbling backwards into the framing of the building.
My right leg smashed across a piece of a two-by-four, I’m guessing by the feel, stopping my flight through the air and slamming me to the ground.
A slobber-filled voice called out to us. “So, you’ve come for the boy? I’ve wanted to meet you for a long time, Tracker. You have quite the reputation. It’s too late, the boy is dead.”
The thing was, I could feel him, feel the pulse of his heart as if it were my own, so I knew the Lighteater was lying. “Liar, liar, pants on fire,” I said, using the framework to pull myself to my feet. My leg wasn’t broken, but I had a serious Charlie horse, the muscles cramping hard enough to keep me from putting any weight on it.
The Lighteater laughed, its breath filling the air with the rot of swamps, a manure pile that had dead things buried in it.
I didn’t want to hit O’Shea or Alex, the darkness making us as deadly to each other as to anything we might try and fight.
“Come here, Tracker, I want to see if you are as . . . delicious . . . as reputed.”
“Why don’t you just get on with it then,” I said, half-hopping to one side, keeping one hand out to feel for the framing of the house, the other hand holding my sword at the ready.
“I like to play games. Don’t you? Playing with your food is so much more fun than just eating it.” The Lighteater purred, and then smacked its lips, the click of teeth like nails on a chalkboard.
“Adamson?” O’Shea called out.
“Stay there! And stay down. He wants me, so he’s going to get me.” The thing was, in a tight, dark space like this, I could end up killing O’Shea or Alex if I wasn’t careful, and I had no doubt the Lighteater would be all over that possibility.
There was only one thing I could do. I Tracked O’Shea and Alex, holding the threads of their lives inside my head. While I couldn’t see them, I could feel where they were. The double rush of emotions dropped me to my knees, and I struggled to get a hold on them. I’d never tried Tracking multiple people in this close of a proximity all at the same time, and I was about to add a third. I reached for the Lighteater’s life threads, grabbing hold of them with a vengeance. Now I could ‘see’ him too.
Gotcha, ya stupid bastard.
I slid sideways. “Stay down, O’Shea. I’ve got this one.”
“Make it quick, Adamson.”
Yup, that was the plan.
The Lighteater laughed, and I closed my eyes. I couldn’t see anyway. I backed away from the Troll, the hole where other Trolls likely waited, and my partners.
Feeling my way, I hobbled backwards, doing my best not to stumble. The Lighteater followed me, the pulse of his energy getting incrementally closer. A piece of frame seemed to reach up and yank my feet out from under me, landing me hard on my back, the wind knocked out of me.
Ah, fuck, here he comes.
The Lighteater rushed me and I swung upward with my sword. I could feel his surprise, felt a sudden burst of fear.
“Oooh, you didn’t know I could do that, did ya?” I gloated, rolling to my knees. He hung back, the pulse of his life thumping steady and strong. I was about to change that.
I swung hard and fast, anticipating the thump of flesh and bone, the reverberation up through my blade and into my arm. Reverberation, yes, flesh and bone, not so much.
My blade bit deep into a piece of the building’s framework, nearly severing it.
“FUCK!” I yanked hard, pulling the blade free, just in time to get slammed to the ground by the Lighteater, his mouth, teeth and rotting breath mere inches from my face. I flung my body to the side, throwing us both into more wooden framing, the crack and groan of the structure more than a little alarming, but that wasn’t what was going to eat me.
“Stupid bitch, you’ll bring the place down on us,” he snarled, clawed hands digging into my shoulders as he slammed my upper body into the ground. Several times.
I grit my teeth and jammed my left leg between us, shoving him up enough to loosen his grip on my shoulders. He snarled and snot—or maybe it was drool, I couldn’t tell the difference in the dark—plopped onto my face, slid down my neck. It smelled of vomit.
We rolled again, and I reached for my backup sword, swinging it out and around. The Lighteater raised his hand to me and a bar of light sprung out of his fingertips, a spell to fry me to a cinder. The brilliant white bar lit the darkness up and gave me my first glimpse of the Troll, a split second of black and grey skin that looked to be sloughing off, huge cat’s eyes wide with glee. Then the spell hit my sword, raced down the blade and fizzled as it touched my skin, leaving us once more in the dark.
“You are an Immune?” He gurgled, his fear heavy in the back of my head.
“Surprise!” I brought my sword down, straight through his heart. There was no last cry for mercy, no cry for help.
But I hadn’t let go of his life force, and this close, his death hit me like a runaway train. I tumbled backwards, felt his memories and desires wash over me. There was light and dark in him, mostly dark, but the light . . . it was the memories of pain and a lost love that had gone before him that struck me down, of being cast out from the other Trolls, being alone and wishing for a friend. Those emotions faded, slowly dissipated, and finally I was alone in my head with Alex and O’Shea, both of whom I let go of, so I could get a hold of my own feelings.
“Adamson?”
“I’m here. Try your flashlight. It should work now that he’s dead.” I sat there, shaking. Trolls, no one had ever said they had much to offer the world, and yet in the Lighteater’s death, I’d seen how much he’d wanted to do, though he’d known it would never be. Heavy, it was too heavy for me to deal with right now. I didn’t have any desire to feel bad for a supernatural that kidnapped children, raped women, and in general was a destructive form of chaos for nothing other than its own pleasure.
Trembling, I got to my feet as O’Shea flicked on the flashlight. Shading my eyes, I limped my way over to him and Alex, picking my feet up carefully as I traversed the broken framework.
Leaping toward me, Alex wrapped himself around my legs, almost taking me down to the floor again. I patted him on the head, “Okay, let’s get going.”
“You think there are more Trolls?” O’Shea asked.
“At least our friend we left behind, but probably not too many more. They don’t do well in large numbers for long periods of time; they can turn cannibalistic at the drop of a hat,” I said as I tried to get the worst of the—drool, snot, whatever it was—off me.
O’Shea said nothing, just flicked the light over the hole. “I can see a ladder, and a rough wall. You think it’s safe to go down now?”
I shrugged and leaned over the hole. “Safe as it’s ever going to be, I think.”
In the end, we left Alex to guard the topside. Not only could he give us a heads up if someone else was coming our way, he could see in the dark.
The ladder we climbed down was rickety, the wood creaking under our weight. How the hell had the Trolls used it without crushing it?
O’Shea asked that very question, giving me the opportunity to look smart. Or maybe, not so much.
“I don’t know.” Clever girl, he’s sure to be impressed! I ignored my inner snark, and checked out the area we were standing in. “Probably this wasn’t a Troll hole to begin with. They are good jumpers and climbers, probably didn’t ever use the ladder. Likely is, they put it up just for us.”
&n
bsp; “So we could be dealing with another kind of supernatural too, whatever created this place first?”
Gods help us, I hoped not. “Probably not, the Trolls would have cleaned out the area before settling in.”
I pushed some dirt with my boot, reached for Ricky and froze. His heartbeat was gone. It wasn’t like with the Lighteater where I felt him die, he was just . . . gone. Snuffed out like a candle.
“Oh, shit!” Was the kid’s life somehow tied to the Lighteaters?
Latching onto what was left of Ricky’s still threads, I ran toward him, O’Shea right with me.
“The kid?”
“Yes.”
Thank the gods he was not a man who needed every freaking detail explained to him.
We ran through the dark, dirt tunnel, flashlight bobbing hard. Downward we ran, the angle of the ground getting steeper and steeper until it suddenly flattened out and we could see again. We were standing in what looked like a replica of the tattoo shop up above.
Sitting in a client’s chair, the Troll we should have killed on the last salvage lounged, a long lanky child crumpled at his feet. The Troll’s mottled skin drooped heavily, and his singular eye glared at us behind what looked like a glass covering to protect it. The shine of metal strapping the glass to his head showed a patched together piece of equipment that would, to a degree, keep his eye safe. Orange and yellow flapping skin seemed to wave at us as he moved, and he let out a long wet fart splattering the back of his chair. Fucking disgusting. He smiled, lips drooping, broken and crooked teeth glittering at me.
“Well, it looks as if you were too late to save the brat. Stupid, Tracker. You didn’t really think I’d let you get close enough to kill me and save the kid, did you?”
I wanted to rush him, slice him up and serve him to the fishes in small, bite-sized pieces, and if I had my way, before the day was done, that’s exactly what was going to happen.
“Stupid. The Lighteater gave the brat a fake heart beat. And you fell for it.”
Ricky was gone, his threads to this world cut before I could get to him, a perfect bait to draw me in. And the Troll’s plan had worked. Maybe I’d been underestimating Trolls; maybe they were smarter than I’d been giving them credit for.
He stood, his two-pronged dick starting to get a hard on, stretched and flipped me off. “Come get me, if you dare.”
Challenging the Tracker you’d just told you’d fooled, egging her on to come at you? Nope, still dumb as dirt.
O’Shea circled to the left and I circled to the right.
The Troll backed up a step. “That’s not fair; you can’t go two at a time.”
“I’m not interested in fair,” I said, my anger raging to the surface. As with every case I took on, it felt, in a way, like Berget’s case all over again. It was my fault this kid was snatched, my fault he was dead. Guilt flamed the anger into a boiling rage that exploded in a flurry of movement. I closed on the Troll, blade singing through the air. He backed up and right into O’Shea, who took the Troll’s right arm off with a single downward slice.
Screaming, he fell to his knees, sobbing and pleading, his one arm flopping on the ground like a fish out of water, the stump where it had been scabbing over in less than a second. I stepped forward to finish him off when he launched from the ground, teeth snapping at my face, claws digging into my shoulder. My hand went numb and I dropped my sword. With his powerful hand he could easily snap my arm, even rip it off and leave me to bleed out.
I shoved my free hand under the glass and metal cage covering his remaining eye, my fingers digging in around the soft orb. Voice as calm as I could make it under the circumstances, I said, “Let me go, or I’ll take this one too.”
The Troll froze, his teeth digging through several layers of skin.
“I’ll let you go, if you take your hands off me. Otherwise, you’ll lose the eye, you bastard,” I said.
O’Shea stood just back from us, sword raised and pointed at the base of the Troll’s neck. “Don’t,” I said. “I will make the deal with him. Just trust me.”
The agent’s jaw twitched and he slowly lowered his sword.
“Let go of my arm, and then I’ll let go of your eye. Deal?”
He grunted, which I took for a yes. As he removed his claws from around my shoulder, we stood up together, my fingers still dug in around his eye.
“Let it go now; you promised,” he whined, his free hand resting against my arm. There was no way he’d push me, even he wasn’t that much of a dumbass.
I squeezed the orb and yanked, ripping it from its socket. “I lied, you piece of shit.”
The Troll wailed and writhed, flailing about, his screams echoing off the walls of the ‘shop.’
When I moved to finish him, O’Shea blocked me. “Wait, I want to ask him a question.”
Snorting, I backed up a step, waving for the agent to go ahead. Either way, the Troll was going to die. Ricky was gone; there was no other amends I could make, except to kill his killer.
So what punishment will you receive, for taking so long, for being a party to the kid’s death? Guilt rolled in me, making me weak with its truth.
“Why did you really take the kid?”
I made a move as if to answer. We already knew this.
“Fuck you, human,” the Troll screamed, a mixture of clear liquid and orange blood dripping from between his fingers.
Again, O’Shea pressed him. “No, this is more than just you going after the Tracker.”
Whimpering, the Troll crouched on the ground, his sniffles pitiful. “I can’t tell you.”
My jaw dropped. What the hell?
“You are going to die, either way,” O’Shea said, running the tip of his sword across the Trolls remaining arm. The stump of his other arm vibrated with each pump of his seven-valve heart, faster with each swipe of O’Shea’s blade.
“Tell me,” the agent said. “And I’ll make it clean.” Wrong thing to say to a Troll, but O’Shea couldn’t know that.
With a roar, the Troll threw himself at O’Shea, taking the agent’s sword deep into his chest, but not through his heart. They tumbled to the ground, O’Shea underneath; the Troll rearing his head back for a strike that would sever O’Shea’s head.
I didn’t even think about whether or not what I was doing was wrong. My sword flashed in the dim light as I whipped it forward, taking the Troll’s head, silencing him permanently. With a thump, his floppy-skinned head hit the floor, tongue hanging out, sightless holes staring up into nothing.
O’Shea lay on his back for another second. “Thanks.”
“Yeah, anytime.” The image of O’Shea under the Troll unsettled me.
“I’m okay.”
I stared at him. “I know.”
“Then why do you look like you’re going to cry?” His own eyes had a soft glimmer to them, as if he was affected by how I was feeling. Which it couldn’t be, because although we’d slept together, I wasn’t altogether sure he felt anything but lust for me. Whereas I knew I was falling hard for the bloody agent. Damn, I was no good at this.
I turned away from him, unsettled by seeing my own emotions reflected on his face. I made my way to Ricky’s side, dropped to my knees beside him, and put my hands on his chest. In a last ditch effort, hoping my ability to Track had failed me, I pressed hard, whispered a prayer to anyone who would listen. He was already cold, but I’d known he would be before I ever put a hand to him. The threads of his life had been cut and there was no coming back for Ricky.
Nothing, there was nothing.
I leaned back on my heels and tipped my head back.
O’Shea stepped up beside me then crouched down, his shoulder brushing against mine. “Even you can’t save them all.”
“He died because I made a mistake. Died because I couldn’t get to him in time, because I put myself first.” I shoved the agent, sending him sprawling on the ground. Standing up, I looked around for something to wrap the kid in, something to pack him out in.
&nb
sp; “It isn’t your fault, Adamson. They faked it; the kid wasn’t even alive.”
I went to shove him again, anger and pain all wrapped up inside me, desperate for release. The tinkle of rocks under foot stopped me. I held a finger up and touched my ear. O’Shea went silent and we listened.
There was nothing else, or at least, I couldn’t hear anything.
“More Trolls,” O’Shea said with a confidence that surprised me.
“I didn’t hear—”
He grabbed my arm. “Trust me,” he said, his face grim as he pulled me along. “There’s more Trolls, and they’re hungry.”
19
I couldn’t leave without Ricky. It was the least I could do, returning him to his mother. He was light, maybe a hundred pounds, but it was a dead weight. O’Shea slung him over his shoulder like it was nothing, surprising me, and we ran for the ladder.
Behind us, the noises grew louder, and then a roar of angry voices permeated the air. The scent of Troll shit and fermenting meat grew stronger. It didn’t matter which end of a Troll you had to deal with, it was vile.
I hoped they’d stop for a snack on their buddy. Maybe they would decide to eat him before coming after us. Gruesome, but it would give us the time we needed.
Pushing O’Shea ahead of me, I guarded the bottom of the ladder while the agent climbed with his awkward load. “I’m up.” He called down, and I started up the ladder, feet and hands scrabbling at the rungs.
Hot breath swirled around me and I dared a look down. Four Trolls below me, staring up with their beady, somewhat sagging eyes. “Light!” O’Shea flashed the beam down. Swearing and cursing floated up around me along with their nasty breath, and I rushed up the last few rungs. “Go, go, go!”
Alex bolted ahead of us, and O’Shea’s light bobbed crazily, but we made it out of the shop to the SUV without any problem.
Immune: A Sexy Urban Fantasy Mystery (Rylee Adamson # 2) Page 16