by Jeff Gunhus
The boy reached to the breastplate of his armor where a stone was mounted in the center surrounded by a design of metal flames depicting a sunburst. “But I will not give you mine. Not while I’m still alive.”
Eva and I exchanged a quick look, the boy’s words settling in on us. He saw our confusion and ended it.
“Yes,” the boy said. “I am Kaeden, the Lord of the Werewolves. You are on my land. And now you both will die.”
Chapter 22
On Kaeden’s last words, everything moved with blinding speed.
With a fierce kick, I broke through the last threads of my bindings and rolled free. I threw the plastic Easter egg T-Rex had given me at the door on the far end of the cage. Covering my head with my arms, I flew back as the entire end of the steel cage blew out. The explosion knocked the whole thing off the wagon.
The forest whirled past as I bounced around inside the cage. As fast as I could, I climbed out through the tangled mass of hot metal. A raging battle greeted me.
The wolves had fallen onto the Creach from all sides, but they were well trained and putting up a fight.
I searched for Eva in the mix and saw her matching swords with Kaeden himself. In only a few strokes, he had her on the defensive, backing her up on uneven ground. A fallen goblin lay right in her path.
“Eva!” I shouted.
Too late. She hit the obstacle with her heel as she retreated and still adjusted perfectly. Against probably any other opponent, the quarter-second hesitation would have meant nothing. For the Lord of the Werewolves, it was the only opening he needed. He stabbed her in the leg first and then slammed her head with the hilt of his sword, knocking her out.
Skyal pounced on him with a terrifying shriek, backed by two ogres wielding spiked metal balls on the end of chains. Kaeden engaged them, leaving Eva where she fell.
An arm grabbed me, and I spun around with T-Rex’s tiny knife. Daniel and Will stood there, worried looks on their faces. Will threw me my sword.
“Eva,” Will said.
I nodded. “I saw. Come on.”
The three of us sprinted through the battle raging between the Lesser Creach and the werewolves. An ogre with a werewolf clawing his back ran between us, and we had to shove the battling creatures out of the way. I slid on the ground next to Eva. Lifting her head, I had a terrible flashback of holding her in the same way in the catacombs in Paris. For a second, the sounds of the battle raging around us faded, and I was just there with Eva.
Only this time, her eyes bolted open. It took her a beat to get her bearings, but once she did, she frowned at me.
“Let me go,” she snarled. She pushed me away and stood up, her injury already healed. Grabbing her sword, she sliced it through the air.
Daniel and Will stood guard over our position, facing out. Their backs were exposed to Eva’s blade. “Watch out, guys,” I yelled. “Eva’s with them.”
“Don’t be an idiot,” Daniel said. “How do you think we tracked you here?”
I stared at Eva, dumbfounded.
“You?” I asked, my head spinning. “So you’re not… you never were…”
“Come on, you can wallow in your guilt later. The Lord of the Werewolves is out in the open. The Jerusalem Stone is right there,” Eva said. “This is our chance. Guard me.”
She launched herself forward, moving so fast it was hard to tell whether she even touched the ground.
“Come on, guys,” I yelled as I charged after her, right toward where Kaeden fought two ogres and three goblins simultaneously.
Eva reached the battle first, jumping onto the back of one of the ogres who was bent over, using the creature to catapult herself into the air high above Kaeden. With a cry, she swung her sword with her right hand while her left hand sliced low with a dagger.
Kaeden rolled to the side, ducking the onslaught. In the time it took him to roll, he transformed into a werewolf. The beast crouched down and jumped at the three goblins, wiping them out with one swipe. The sound of bones snapping didn’t even slow him..
Eva gave chase, and I swung out wide to the other side so we would attack from two different angles. We had executed this maneuver a hundred times before, but never with her new powers. And never against anyone like Kaeden.
I spotted a troll’s shield on the ground and scooped it up on a full sprint. Lucky I did because Kaeden swatted at my head, and I lifted the shield just in time to take the impact. The power behind it was incredible. It tore me from my feet and sent me flying until I slammed into a tree trunk and sagged to the ground. When I staggered back up, I saw that the shield was nearly folded in half from the blow.
Kaeden transformed again, not losing a step at he ran toward me. Daniel and Will surged forward to block the werewolf’s path. Barehanded, Kaeden took them on.
In the first second, Kaeden ripped Will’s sword from his hands. In the next second, he swept Daniel off his feet to land sprawled on the forest floor. Then he spun in time to catch Eva’s attack. She managed three thrusts, but he was too fast – she hit nothing but air. Finally, he knocked her sword away and she was left with her dagger.
Kaeden shook his head. “Really? And how do you think that’s going to turn out for you?”
Eva hurled the knife with unbelievable speed. Kaeden dodged right and back, but not fast enough. The knife sliced across the top of his shoulder, slicing it open and then sinking in the chest of a goblin standing behind him.
Kaeden snarled at the wound, his hand coming away bloody.
There was a lull in the battle, and I thought his werewolves might circle around their lord. Even though it was no more than a scratch, the dagger had been a few inches away from us winning the day.
But that wasn’t the reason for the slow-down in the fight.
The real reason was that all of the Lesser Creach were either dead or had surrendered. Bodies covered the forest floor. A few werewolves appeared injured, but I couldn’t see any fatalities. It hadn’t been a fight – it’d been a slaughter. I searched for Skyal among the bodies but didn’t see her. The demon had gotten away and taken my truthsayer with her. Something told me I might see them both again someday.
The wolves gathered around us in a circle, one by one converting to human form. They were of all ages, the youngest appearing to be in his early teens, all the way up to old men with grey beards and wise eyes. They looked back and forth between Eva and the blood on Kaeden’s shoulder, not quite believing what they saw.
The four of us stood back-to-back, but it was hopeless. There were too many of them. We might take a few with us, but no way were we going to win.
Eva was on my right shoulder. I spoke that direction without taking my eyes off the men in front of me.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked. “You let me believe you were a traitor.”
“I knew they would use the truthsayer on you,” she said. “If I told you the plan, you wouldn’t have passed.”
“The things I said to you. About your family… I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, well, none of that’s about to matter, is it?” she said.
Kaeden accepted a golden sword from one of his men. Intricate lettering covered the blade, and the hilt was encrusted with rubies, sapphires and diamonds.
“No vampire is allowed on my land,” Kaeden said, speaking more to his men than to us. “And no boy is going to take the Jerusalem Stone that is mine alone by right.”
He approached us, his face twisted with anger and filled with murderous intention.
This was one of the paths the Oracle had foreseen. If that dream was real, I should know what I had to do. I just couldn’t remember her words..
I had to stall. “Kaeden,” I yelled. “Stop.”
To my surprise, he actually stopped.
I strained to remember what the Oracle told me. Kaeden growled and lifted his golden blade. At that moment, a narrow shaft of sunlight shone through the dense trees and lit a ruby on the sword’s hilt. The reflection hit me square in the eye
s. That did it. The Oracle’s words shot back into my mind.
Now that I knew, I didn’t want to repeat her words. They were a death sentence.
Kaeden lunged, snarling.
I jumped aside, but the sword took a piece of my sleeve. I had to talk fast. “As ones who drew your blood in battle, we demand a trial of honor.” At least the Oracle’s words would delay my death. .
A murmur rose among the men, several of them nodding their heads in agreement. Kaeden stared me down, shaking with suppressed anger. “What do you know of our ways?” he asked.
“I know that this request must be fulfilled. That all in our group must be held together and tried together,” I said.
“You mean condemned together,” he spat. “And you others, do you ask for the same? Do you ask for a trial of honor?”
Knowing that whatever it was, the trial was better than the certain death we faced in the forest, the others agreed.
“Yes,” Daniel said.
“Sure, you bet,” Will added.
Eva didn’t respond. I turned to her. “It’s our only chance,” I said. “You drew his blood so you have to agree.”
Eva finally looked up at me. “Do you know what this means? Do you know what we have to do?”
I nodded. “It’ll buy us time,” I whispered. “Give us a chance to find another way. Xavier and T-Rex are still out there somewhere. They can help us.”
“There’s no way we survive the trial,” Eva said. “My vampire blood, it gives me memories of past lives. I can see what we will face.”
“But there’s no way we survive these werewolves right now,” I said. “I don’t see another way out.”
“What’s your decision?” Kaeden asked.
“Come on, Eva,” I said. “It’s the only way.”
She nodded. “I also demand a trial of honor.”
Kaeden turned and strode away. “Put them in the cage. They come with us.”
The men closed in, took our weapons, and shoved us toward the cage.
“What did we just get ourselves into?” Daniel asked.
I hesitated to tell him, but I knew I had to. “It’s a trial by battle.”
“Who do we battle?” Will asked. “Kaeden?”
“No,” I said. “Something a little harder than that.”
“Who could be harder than that?” Will asked.
“The Oracle told me about it and how the werewolves of the Black Forest are tied to it,” I said.
“What are you talking about?” Daniel nearly shouted.
“Oy, shuddup,” one of the men growled.
Our escorts threw us roughly into the cage, and we ended up in a tangle of bodies. After we separated ourselves and each took our own space in the cage, I looked at them in turn.
“Sorry, guys, but it was the only way out I could see,” I said.
“You’re not talking about what I think you’re talking about, are you?” Daniel said. “Because if you are, it’s… well… impossible.”
Will looked completely confused. “If you don’t tell me what’s going on, I’m going to punch someone in the nose.”
With a lurch, the wagon started forward, bumping over the body parts of the goblins slain by the werewolves.
“Jack agreed to have us face one of most powerful creatures in the world,” Eva said. “If we want to get out of here alive, we’re going to fight and defeat the Boros.”
Chapter 23
“I thought you said the Boros didn’t really exist,” Will said, looking at Daniel for confirmation.
“It doesn’t,” Daniel said. “I mean, it can’t really, right?”
“Oh, it exists,” Eva said with a confidence that made us all turn her direction.
“You know something, don’t you?” Daniel asked.
Eva shrugged. “One of the benefits,” she said, making the word sound like a curse, “of being injected with the blood of an ancient vampire, is that it comes with a certain amount of knowledge.”
“Then what do you know about it?” Will asked.
A werewolf jumped at the cage, teeth bared and snarling. “Silence!” it growled. The wolf face contorted in ways I didn’t think possible as it formed words and spoke as a human. “Next one who speaks, I chew off someone’s leg. And I’m hungry. Understand?”
Will opened his mouth to answer, but I kicked him hard. He shut his mouth and drew his legs up toward him.
The wolf took up a loping stride right next to our cage, eyeing us with uncomfortably ravenous looks. We rode the next few hours in silence.
Over time, the open pines gave way to an old growth forest of gnarled oaks and tall, creaking birch. Although the sun had peaked only an hour or two before, the woods here were dark and ominous, overgrown with vines and briar bushes. Our werewolf escorts moved silently through the thick underbrush, making me think there must be secret passages and links throughout. Eventually, the wagon stopped when it came to a twenty-foot-high wall of thorny bushes. We were ordered out and each paired up with a werewolf. Walking single file, we entered the thicket through an opening barely wide enough to allow the wolves to pass.
I watched Daniel carefully, knowing how agitated he was to be around the same Creach who’d killed his father and brothers. He was tense, but then again we all were. Most important, he seemed in control. I think without his experience with Tiberon at the Academy, he wouldn’t have been able to hold back. We would have found ourselves in a brutal battle to the death with these werewolves, right in the middle of the thorn bushes. And it wouldn’t have ended well.
As we walked farther along, I realized the bramble patch didn’t just seem like a maze, but most definitely was one. It twisted and turned. Offshoots headed off in different directions, some overgrown with weeds, others well worn. I had an idea that the well-worn trails were just as likely to lead to dead-ends as those covered with weeds. If an adventurous hiker decided to try to navigate the maze, he would likely find himself lost forever.
In answer to this thought, we passed by a human skeleton lying on the side of the path, curled up in a ball. I shivered as we passed, imagining T-Rex or Xavier getting lost in the maze if they tried to follow us. I was glad I’d been carefully digging my heel into the ground at each turn to leave a mark. I didn’t know if it would be enough, but at least it was something.
I heard Will gasp ahead of me, so I craned my neck to one side to see what was going on. The maze opened onto a clearing in front of a sheer rock face of dark granite. Between the shadows, the creeper vines, and the scrub brush that clung to the rock, it looked like just plain rock at first. But as I looked closer, I could see why Will had gasped.
An entire castle was cut directly into the solid rock. High walls, parapets, arched windows, stations for archers; it had everything a regular castle would have. Only this had some of its features still locked into solid stone with only an outline carved into the rock to fool the eye. The entire thing made my brain hurt as it tried to understand what it was seeing. If I didn’t know better, I’d think the castle had frozen into the rock the way a stone might freeze in ice, half in and half out, locked up and unmovable without first thawing or crushing the ice. Nothing was going to thaw or crush this mountain though, so it truly was stuck there for eternity.
The werewolves headed for the main gate. As we drew closer, I noticed the mountain above leaned out over the face of the castle, creating a lip. A fortunate result of the work done eons ago to create the place, it served as a perfect protection against modern day surveillance monitors like aircraft and satellites. A bored fifth grader looking at Google Earth in the Black Forest would see a mountain face and nothing more. Between that and the natural barrier of the bramble maze, it was easy to see why Kaeden had been able to keep his hideout a secret. It also proved that Eva’s risky plan to use me as bait to lure Kaeden out had been the only way we would have ever gotten close to him.
But she hadn’t known that when she first turned me over to the Creach. For all she knew, they might have
killed me on sight.
Still, it was hard to be angry with her, especially after the horrible things I’d said to her about leaving her family behind. I knew that particular wound was still open, and me lashing out at her was just about the worst thing I could have done to hurt her. And that’s what I’d been trying to do – hurt her as much as I could because I thought she’d betrayed me. I kept learning Aquinas’s truth over and over. We tended to hurt most those we loved. I resolved to make it up to Eva somehow or at least try to earn her forgiveness before this was all over. The challenge of getting her friendship back made the upcoming battle with the Boros seem easy by comparison.
We passed through the main gate. It reminded me of the gate that led to the Cave of Trials back at the Academy. The one I’d finally used to crush the dragons in the goblin battle. But while the walls there had been fortified with spikes and counter-measures, this place looked like a ruin, crumbling in places, the iron clasps in the stone rusted through. If someone were to stumble across this place, they would only think they’d found an amazing relic of the past. Then again, if they stumbled across this place, they didn’t stand a chance of getting back out into the world to share the news.
But if enough humans came, using their modern machines to cut through the brambles and their flying aircraft to get better images of the castle, there would be no way to kill them all to keep it a secret. The fact that Kaeden allowed his keep to appear this way said a lot about him. He was unwilling to relocate somewhere more remote, but he was a realist. It appeared that he knew discovery was a real possibility living in the middle of Western Europe in the twenty-first century.
My eye caught on the interior of the battlements where newer stone mixed with the old. Here, the iron was well oiled and weapons stood at the ready. The image of the castle as an old ruin was for show. The werewolves wouldn’t give up their keep easily if an army of other Creach arrived at their outer walls.
We passed through a cavernous hall lined with columns every bit as impressive as the inside of Notre Dame Cathedral. The air was stale and lifeless. Creeper vines covered the walls, covering murals of faded colors, twisting around the columns like angry fingers trying to tear them down. There were gouges in the rock walls, and some of the pillars had large cracks running through them. This hall had seen its share of battles.