“We understood you to be a princess without friends?”
Aurora cocked her head to one side, puzzled over how the monks could know such things, then responded, “I now have many.”
“It feels good, does it not?”
“It feels very good.”
“I hate to cut in, but was there not more of you the last time I saw you.”
“Yes, Jean.”
“And…”
“And, they have split up,” Aurora interjected. The man who I took to be the Sunyins' newly adopted head brother nodded once in agreement.
“Then they are in grave danger and so are you. We must all hurry.”
The words had barely left my mouth when the unmistakable scent of lavender washed over the clearing. Aurora's brothers swept from the forest in an avalanche of white. All four were there, they eyed us.
“Aurora, I want you to lead the monks away,” I growled, turning to the girl who looked an even whiter shade of dead.
“I cannot leave you, Jean.”
“You will leave me!” I commanded in my most uncompromising voice. A quick look to Sunyin and an acknowledged lowering of his head was all the confirmation I required. The little monk glanced to his brothers who melted away into the night. He, in turn, took Aurora's hand in his own.
“Jean is correct. Your brothers cannot defeat him. He has a greater destiny.”
Aurora looked disconsolate. I thought she might burst into tears at any given moment. Her eyes took me in, bluer than the polished gems they resembled, overflowing with grief, the hand that touched my face trembling with the same. “I'm sorry, Jean,” her only words. But she did not argue just allowed herself to be led away.
I turned back to the four snow-white princes; they had not moved an inch. They had no need to chase after their sister, she was already theirs, and they knew it. It was Grella, resplendent in his glowing attire, despite its rather more ragged appearance than normal, that took the lead, as was his birthright. It was Grella who spoke first.
“My apologies, Jean, but it is your time to die.”
Chapter Seventeen
-
Black
“Have to is such an uncompromising declaration, it leaves no room for bargaining. There are so many other options to consider: might; should; possibly; could, they would have at least presented some flicker of hope.”
“An incorrect one,” Ragnar growled from his older brother's side.
Grella gave him the briefest glacial glance that chilled even my lost soul. It was with a look of gentle reservation that he set his gaze back upon me. “I have no wish to kill you, Jean, despite what you may think. However, taking Aurora from us was a mistake, an unforgivable mistake.”
“What makes you think I took her?”
“The fact that you now defend her, the cold reality of her having left and everything in between.”
“I see. Almost a whole week of reasons, then.”
“There or thereabouts,” Grella spoke in measured tones as if to a child.
“Is there anything I can say that might prevent my imminent demise?”
“I doubt it, Jean. Regardless of whether you can, or cannot, our mother has decreed it and thus it must be.”
“Serena sent you?” Caught off guard, I allowed my thoughts to show.
“Enough!” Ragnar roared. “Let us have his head and be done with it.”
“You will do nothing until I command it,” Grella returned, the embodiment of calm authority.
“Ouch, what a put-down. Does it burn, Ragnar, that you must do as you're told? If a Nordic can be burned that is?” I added, scratching at my chin. “I'm sure someone as powerful as you must take great offence to such things.”
“You have a fast mouth, vagabond prince.”
“That's the second time one of your kind has called me that. It's not that I'm ungrateful, don't get me wrong, it's nice to be recognised, but you really should just call me Jean. I am no prince and would not wish to be if it meant acting like you.”
“I'll call you it whilst I rip your head from your shoulders,” Ragnar rumbled.
I thought the very mountains about to cast themselves upon me in an avalanche of rage such was his demeanour, but I was not about to let him know it. “You can try. It didn't do the twins much good, though, did it, boys?” The two skulked in the shade of their elder brothers. I thought an additional long, slow wink to each a particularly nice touch in my efforts to irritate.
“I am not they,” Ragnar continued under the withering glare of both the twins and Grella.
“Thank goodness you're not. Twins are bad enough, but triplets! Doesn't bear thinking about. Having to sully my hands once instead of thrice would be a bonus, though. Come to think of it, I didn't sully my hands, did I, boys?” The twins looked fit to explode, their brilliant white visages touched by a hint of rose. The advantage was mine. “Dem bones, and all that, eh,” I sniffed. The button pressed, I awaited a reaction.
The twins knew their place; Ragnar did not. He was not about to let my words go unpunished.
I braced myself, my taunting having achieved its purpose in driving them to strike without care or consideration. More pertinent to my cause, to act as individuals and not a group.
Ragnar was a blur of sparkling snowflakes, a maelstrom in the making; Grella was faster. He caught his brother by the arm before he'd closed half the distance between us, and thrown him to the ground with devastating ease. The impact was earth-shattering. An explosion of debris, soil and rock flew into the air to rain back down as a rebuilt landscape. All that remained to show Ragnar had even stood there was a crater of epic proportions. The whole episode carried my mind back to Vladivar's bombing of Rudolph's palace, the parallels in sheer power almost beyond comprehension. The fact I bore witness to mere strength of arm and not technology almost drew a shiver.
My mouth hung agape as I struggled against the urge to step back. I knew not to show fear, weakness in the face of the Nordic princes, but the thought preyed on my mind.
“You will not touch him,” Grella growled into the pit of his own creation.
Personally, I didn't know why he bothered, as nobody could have retained consciousness after such a blow. I was wrong.
A white hand on the end of a massive, muscular arm rose from the hole like a great, albino spider. Fingers thick as tree branches clawed at the ground for purchase. Ragnar's digits drove into the rock with piledriver power dragging his fearsome frame out once implanted. The largest prince spoiled for a fight. He shook his head twice, bashed at his right ear, then closed on his sibling, a look of such rage plastered across his features I felt Grella must cower before it.
“You've just made a big mistake, brother!” he boomed.
“The mistake is yours, Ragnar. Your lack of respect is inexcusable and I shall not stand for it.”
“I do not care. I'm sick of this dying planet, sick of this life, and most of all, Grella, I'm sick of you.”
The titan fumed, his fist raised to attack, towering over Grella like a frost giant of legend. The would-be king didn't bat an eye. It was Ragnar's first and last controlled movement. For in Grella, a far slighter man, I saw a master in the art of war. He was upon Ragnar in an instant, the bigger man a lamb to the slaughter. Grella took him by the throat with one hand, bent him over toward the ground, then squeezed and crushed and contorted. Ragnar's arms flailed as though willow tendrils in a breeze, but Grella's form moved like candlelight flicking from one position to the next in a blur of phosphorescence. Ragnar never got close.
In that instant of brother on brother infighting, I had my one chance to strike and took it.
The twins never knew what hit them. I snatched a branch from the forest floor and smashed it over the first then struck an uppercut to the gobsmacked second, which sent him flying into the trees. Faster than drawing blood from an innocent's neck, I'd laid both out senseless. So swift was my attack, I thought none could have reacted to it. But, as I rolled from one act
ion to the next in fluid motion, Grella was already behind me. I was at his mercy. There was nothing I could have done and knew it. He did not strike?
“You claim you did not encourage Aurora to leave. That is not what my mother said.” Grella spoke as though nothing untoward had occurred.
“If I said your mother lied would you believe me?” I spun to see the puzzled eyes of the one true prince of the Nordics.
“I… I might,” he stuttered.
Grella struggled with his inner demons, almost as much as me.
“Prince Grella,” I said standing tall and proud. “I am many things, and have been many more, but a liar is not one of them. I am not proud of my life, that is to say quite ashamed of most of it, yet I possess honour. Whether you are aware of my past, I am uncertain, but I can assure you, I have never been partial to untruths, and never shall be. If I said I knew nothing of Aurora's departure, I did not.”
I watched the fissures in Grella's polar visage ease a little. The fjords of the prince's troubled face widened until expanding to a sea of serenity.
“I believe you.”
“Good. But make no mistake, Grella, I will not allow you to return her against her will.”
“You have no choice,” he replied.
“I have the choice of a free man, a man without restraints. I do not succumb to the commands of others. Not even you, Prince Grella. I mean what I say, you shall have to kill me to get to her.”
“I do not wish to kill you, but I cannot disobey our mother.”
“You can do whatever you wish, my friend.”
“I cannot.”
Grella's fists clenched and unclenched, his brows furrowed. The man's albinism had never looked more acute than at that moment thrust as he was into an alien environment. He tried to subdue the power he held, quell it beneath his pallid exterior, but he was losing the battle.
“Has Serena so much sway over her children, they cannot perceive when she wrongs them? Can you not blame Aurora, a princess of your people, for wishing to leave? I barely know the girl, yet it is blatantly obvious she is unloved.”
I did not see his strike, only felt it. By the time I sat up rubbing at my jaw, I was at the opposite side of the clearing. Grella stood twenty yards away, impassive, still as a midnight shadow, brooding.
“Did I hit a sore spot?” I asked not wishing to look weak, nor in any particular hurry to return his strike.
“She is loved,” Grella whispered.
“What?” I asked straining to hear him.
“Aurora is my sister and I would do anything for her if she but asked. It is not I that see her as an outcast, yet I am powerless to do anything about it.”
He stood there close to tears that mightiest of men. I truly believed Grella would have wept if not for the slight stirrings of one of the two twins. He whipped around to regard either Serstra or Verstra, for I could never tell the two apart, with such venom, I thought he might set upon him. He didn't though, his self-control returned.
The apparition that was Grella stared back across the distance between us, ghostlike, barely there. Those few yards couldn't have felt greater even if he'd stood at the North Pole itself.
I said nothing, only returned his look and pondered on the icicle which built at the corner of his eye. The thing lengthened like a stalactite with centuries of growth crammed into moments. Then the strangest thing happened. The tiny icicle quivered, vibrated, then shattered its minuscule mass across Grella's snow-white cheek. I thought myself dreaming, that I had witnessed the impossible, but the tremors that had affected it also struck me. The ground beneath my feet shook with some unseen yet mighty force. Branches from nearby trees cracked under the strain and snapped like twigs from their trunks crashing to the ground in twisted piles of destroyed life.
Grella appeared even more surprised than I. He looked this way and that in utter bemusement as the shakes took a hold of his legs, then torso, then right up to his long hair, which quivered like a white, shaken sheet.
The world trembled as I had read it did in the long distant past. The ground cracked and lifted. Rocks plunged both up and down, the trees wrenched from their anchored mornings, weightless, before crashing back to the ground. Through all the upheaval Grella moved as though in his own personal nightmare. The Nordic heaved the twins from the floor, each flung over a shoulder. He then whirled between the destruction like one of the waltzers of Europa's ballrooms until he reached Ragnar. With the loyalty only family can produce, Grella gathered his brother in his arms like firewood. With all three safe, he turned to watch me leave. I saw it all over my shoulder as he charted my flight through stern eyes. He looked so confused, a man who bore the weight of the world rather than that of his siblings. He stood there motionless as the ground beneath his feet surged upwards and my own collapsed down. The last thing I saw as we went our separate ways was a profound sadness in his eyes, then they, too, vanished in a rain of broken forest.
There was no time to dwell on the Nordics' fates, my own of more imperative importance. I leapt from one point to another, my feet dancing across the crumbling scenery avoiding one gaping hole after another. It felt as though ancient giants manipulated the landscape. In a way, I supposed they did. There was no mistaking the great earth-moving abilities of humanities' machines. Those earth shakers worked at fullest capacity, the planet creaking in protest. But that should not have been? No lesser person than my father had once told me the great landscape changers of mankind, those of such vastness as to manipulate the earth's tectonic structure could not operate whilst the living, or even non-living, such as ourselves, still moved upon them: safeguards, or some such mumbo-jumbo. What occurred should have been impossible, but that did not change the fact it did.
I stopped looking up to the hundreds of feet of new cliff that had separated me from the Nordics, instead, turned and ran. I ran as if my non-life depended on it, which it sort of did. I ran with a speed I never knew myself capable of as that disfigured forest crashed around me. I ran towards a looming chasm of total blackness, an intersection between two fractured landscapes. Like a hurricane given human form, I swept towards the vastness and launched myself into the air with all the might at my disposal. It was not enough. I landed on the cusp of the far bank clawing at the turf for dear life. Thank God I'd taken Aurora's advice. If I'd not soaked my hands in blood as instructed, I should have died. But, my talons, regrown, although not at their sharpest, dug into the earth, rock and whatever else they could gain purchase on and secured me. I clung in desperation as I shot into the air, no more than a speck of dust in a storm, but did not let go. Higher and higher, the shelf rose upwards. I thought it should never stop. When it did, it was with such a jolt it hurled me up and over the ledge to land on my back with a sickening thud.
I lay that way, chest heaving in protest, unable to believe what had happened for longer than I should. When at last I rolled onto my front to look whence I'd came, I found myself on one side of the deepest, darkest canyons I'd ever seen. A vertigo-inducing glance over the edge showed nought but littered rubble on the distant floor, a floor I'd almost partaken of. I'd risen so high that a sanguine dawn simmered on the horizon; the old desire to flee before the sun felt as strong as ever. Somewhere out there, Chantelle and her party would have sought shelter, but where was another thing altogether.
It was the howling of distant wolves that snapped me back into the real world. I wondered if they pined for lost masters, or in joy at their renewed pairing. Such things were hard to be sure of.
With only a passing glance at the broken distance, I set about continuing north with the hope the Sunyins and Aurora had fared better than I.
Chapter Eighteen
-
Snowflake
I smelled the blood in the air, an alluring intoxicant. That odour of a forgotten past drew me to the chaos that was the monks long before I saw them. When I walked into the clearing they occupied it was as if a war had taken place. The Sunyins had lost more of their kind
in the violence, too many. I felt their pain like walking into a wall, an almost tangible solidity in the rising dawn. Those that remained bore the blooded signs of struggle; lacerations and worse covered each of them. Their leaking life essences overpowered my senses, the beast within straining at its leash.
The monks were not alone in their suffering. The mangled carcasses of half a dozen great, grey wolves lay in various states of contorted death. Those beasts had died badly.
Aurora sat on a rock some distance from the others scratching behind the ear of one gigantic canine, her coat a perfect snowflake white. The wolf whimpered into her left palm, as it lay sprawled across her thighs. If she shared any of the ancestral vampire urges to sate I did, her calm demeanour showed no signs of it. Perhaps, she had other things on her mind? The crystal tears that pooled at the corner of her sapphire eyes alluded so.
One monk shuffled over head bowed. If it was the one who'd appeared to be their leader earlier, I could not be sure, identical as they were, but I did not have the heart to ask.
“It is good to see you again, Jean. We feared you lost or worse. Are you hurt, my friend?”
“I think it is I who should ask that question. I see your brothers have lessened since we parted. There are no words at my disposal to express my bitter regret at that saddening fact, so I shall not even try.”
“These things are a test of our faith, and our faith is strong.”
“You take such news better than I.”
“We all have our ways, Jean. We should have lost far more if not for your beautiful companion. Aurora saved us from the wolves you see scattered all around. We would have wished for no deaths, but they left her no choice.” Sunyin brushed the scene with saddened eyes.
“Needs must,” I replied.
“I gather the Nordics' hairy contingent made it across the new divide before their masters.”
“I know only what you see before you. However, I must excuse myself whilst I aid those who require it.” The little monk bowed, I returned the gesture, then he shuffled his way back over to the closest of his brothers who dabbed at a deep gash on his arm.
Hunter Hunted (The Eternals Book 2) Page 16