The flames blazed up. I staggered back, shielding my eyes. Pryce’s human form grew taller and taller, until it reached Cysgod’s height. The two forms melted into each other, blending into a huge, hideous demon gleaming with bloody light. The demon blew me a kiss.
An explosion blasted out, hurling me backward through the air. I slammed into the Land Rover and slid to the ground, blinded by the brilliant flash and deaf to everything except the echo of demonic laughter.
29
SOMEONE WAS SHAKING MY SHOULDER. IT HURT. IT FELT LIKE all my bones, broken into inch-long fragments, were rattling around in a burlap bag.
“Miss Vicky?”
I swatted at the hand that insisted on rattling my poor bones.
“Miss Vicky! Thank God! Where’s Miss Mab and your gentleman friend?”
I peeled my eyelids back to a squint—it was the most I could manage—and saw Jenkins’s anxious face inches from my own.
“You’re alive,” I said.
“Me? ’Course I am. Soon as them crows started flying out of the mine—looked like smoke from a seven-alarm fire, they did—I hid in the Land Rover. They’re all gone now, thank God. Disappeared with that explosion.”
Gravel bit my palms as I sat up. I checked my arm—the demon mark no longer burned—and looked up. Jenkins was right; the sky was clear. A waning gibbous moon hung in the east, casting silvery light over the landscape. Across the sky, stars winked and sparkled. Somewhere, people were calling this a beautiful night. But not here. Not in Hell.
Welcome to Hell, cousin.
Jenkins shook my shoulder again. “Where’s Miss Mab? What did that Pryce mean, what he said about her?”
Jenkins’s face was taut with worry, his eyes afraid. I closed my own eyes to keep the tears from spilling over. Jenkins and Rose had been with Mab for so many years, humans who lived with and accepted the family’s strangeness—and, yes, even managed to love us. How could I tell him Mab was dead? Especially when it was because of me.
I couldn’t say the words. I couldn’t.
Closing my eyes didn’t help. The tears escaped, anyway. I buried my face in my hands and sobbed.
“Oh, dear Lord.” Jenkins’s hand tightened on my shoulder.
I had to pull myself together. Jenkins deserved to know what happened, that Mab had fought well and died bravely. And I had to go back and help Kane carry out her body.
“Jenkins …” I began, opening my eyes.
But he wasn’t looking at me. He stared at the entrance to the mine.
I turned and stared, too. Kane was coming across the yard, head bowed, carrying something across his shoulders. It wasn’t Mab; it was some sort of animal. I couldn’t make out what. Jenkins was already hurrying toward him. I jumped up and followed.
Kane carried a huge gray wolf.
“I’ll explain in a minute,” he said. “Let me set her down.”
Jenkins opened the Land Rover’s rear door, and I helped him fold down the backseat. The three of us eased the wolf into the vehicle. She lay on her side, eyes closed, tongue lolling, ribs moving quickly in shallow pants.
“It’s Miss Mab, isn’t it?” Jenkins said.
Kane nodded.
“I thought she was dead,” I said, so quietly I could barely hear my own words. “If I’d realized … I never would have left her alone in there, not even to stop Pryce.”
Kane put his arm around me and pulled me close. “You didn’t. You sent me to be with her. I thought she was dead, too, Vicky. But I decided to try a healing technique that works on my kind—I don’t know why I did. To do something, I guess. I didn’t expect it to work.”
Mab’s fur was matted with blood from her chest down to her belly, but I couldn’t see an open wound. “What did you do?”
“When a werewolf is severely injured—in wolf or human form, it doesn’t matter—sometimes even our bodies can’t heal fast enough to sustain life. But a sort of blood transfusion can help. That’s what I did. I cut my arm”—he pulled up his tattered sleeve to show the spot, but his skin was unscarred—“and let the blood run into Mab’s wound. It started to close immediately, and she gasped, like she’d been holding her breath for too long. But then she changed into a wolf. I didn’t know that would happen.”
“It’s okay. It’s good, actually. Changing form will help her heal faster. The wound closed before she shifted?”
“I think so. I was watching it, but the energy blast of her shift drove me back.”
I ran my hand over the wolf’s thick, coarse fur. She stirred, then sighed and sank back into sleep. Mab was alive. Tears—how different they felt—spilled over again. I glanced at Jenkins; he wiped his sleeve across his eyes.
“Thank you,” I said to Kane. Jenkins swallowed, like he had a big lump in his throat, and nodded.
Blood smudged Kane’s face and stained his sweatshirt in rust-colored patches. He was dirty and disheveled, his gray eyes dark with exhaustion and worry. Then something blazed in those eyes. I put my hands on his face, feeling rough stubble under my fingers, and pulled him to me. He still smelled like moonlit forest, his scent now intermingled with blood and sweat and wet rock. My lips found his—brushing them, then pressing harder. He caught his breath, and as he did my heart tumbled over itself. I pushed forward, molding my body against him. His hands touched my back, resting there lightly, then his grip tightened and he clasped me to him.
Everything I’d felt this day—fear, love, grief, hate, anger, relief—swirled together and swelled into a bigger emotion, one I couldn’t name. The feeling surged up in me, lifted me, and poured into him. Poured through my lips, my fingers. Kane drank it in and returned it. His mouth roved over my skin; his teeth grazed my flesh. Warmth filled me. There was nothing but his heat and mine, the press of our bodies. His scent. His taste. His touch.
Footsteps crunched on gravel, and the world snapped back into place. I opened my eyes to see Jenkins trying to move discreetly away. I turned toward the Land Rover, my heart still hammering, my pulse crashing to the tips of my fingers and toes. Kane’s hand rested on my hip. I’d never felt so strongly alive. I looked at Mab. Both of us, alive.
“I couldn’t carry out her sword,” Kane said, almost apologetically, his voice hoarse.
“Aw, don’t worry ’bout that,” Jenkins said, venturing back. “Miss Mab’s got plenty of swords.”
Dread grabbed me. Hellforged. Mab had tried to give me the athame, but I’d been so frantic with worry, grief, and anger. “Did you pick up a dagger?” I asked Kane. “With a bone hilt and a black stone blade?”
He shook his head. “I didn’t see anything like that. I was focused on getting her out.”
“Of course.” I hugged him to let him know how grateful I was. “But that dagger is one of a kind. And it’s the only way to stop the Morfran. I’ve got to go back and get it.”
KANE GAVE ME HIS HEADLAMP, SINCE PRYCE HAD FRAZZLED Mab’s and mine. The light played over dark walls and the debris-strewn tunnel. The going wasn’t any easier this time, but I knew my destination and how to get there, and there were no attacking imps, so the trip through the first tunnel, across the first cavern, and down the incline was quicker.
The lower cavern reeked of blood and sulfur. I turned left, toward the wall where Mab had fallen. Halfway across the cavern I began to see bits of cloth on the floor—pieces of Mab’s clothing shredded in her shift’s energy blast. I picked up a bronze dagger and stuck it in my belt. I found her sword but left it where it lay. As Jenkins said, Mab had plenty of swords. But there was only one Hellforged.
Sticky, red-brown blood marked the spot where Mab had fallen. God, there was so much of it. It didn’t seem possible to lose all that blood and live. Again I saw Mab’s blood pulsing out between my fingers as I tried to make it stop. Dried blood still coated my hand. I shuddered and pushed the vision from my mind. Mab was alive. She was healing. Kane had saved her life.
And to think I’d wanted him to wait by the car with Jenkins.
&nbs
p; Kane. By the car. That kiss … the taste of him lingered in my mouth.
I shook my head, clearing it. Priorities, Vicky. We had to get Mab home. And I had to find Hellforged, so I could stop Pryce and put the Morfran back where it belonged.
Starting where Mab had fallen, I searched in a circle, feeling in cracks, looking under pieces of slate. I followed the perimeter of the energy blast, marked by pieces of clothing. What if the athame hadn’t survived the blast? Some of these pieces of dark rock could be shards of obsidian. But until I found the bone hilt, or a fragment of it, I’d assume Hellforged was intact. It had been forged in Hellfire; it should be able to survive one little Cerddorion energy blast.
I went over every inch of the circle. No athame. Had Pryce grabbed it before he ran? Not possible. He hadn’t come near the place where Mab fell, and she’d tried to give it to me, so she had it then. Mab could control the athame when she held it, but the thing had a life of its own. Maybe it had used the energy blast as a springboard to fly across the cavern.
It would take hours to search the cavern thoroughly. I’d never find it.
And then I remembered that the athame’s blade gave off a faint silver glow. In the absolute darkness of an underground cavern, that glow might be enough light to reveal Hellforged’s hiding place.
I didn’t want to be in the dark again, alone and so far underground. Fear weighed on me like the hundreds of tons of rock overhead. I looked around, hoping Hellforged would appear to me simply because I willed it, simply because I didn’t want to turn off my light. I clenched my fists. This was ridiculous. Demon fighters aren’t afraid of the dark. But never had I been in darkness so devoid of any trace of light.
Stop it. Mab didn’t train a coward.
I switched off my headlamp.
Darkness crashed in. I fought down panic, blinking rapidly, but the eyes can’t adjust to pure, endless, unrelieved darkness. I inhaled deeply and waited for my heart to quit speed-drumming in my chest. Breathe … Breathe. I wasn’t centered, exactly, but I was calmer. I looked around the cavern.
The only way I knew I was looking around was because I turned in a circle. With no visual reference point, I couldn’t tell when I’d made it back to where I’d started. I kept moving slowly, following my right shoulder, around and around, positioning my head at different angles and hoping I wasn’t overlooking a spot.
There—maybe—something glimmered. It was hard to pick out, like a single silver thread on an acre of black velvet, but I thought there was something. I locked my gaze onto the spot and turned on my headlamp. As soon as the light streamed forth, the glimmer disappeared. Great. I’d have to find my way across the cavern in the dark. I flicked off my headlamp and the faint, silvery glimmer reappeared.
I moved slowly across the uneven, rock-strewn floor, not daring to look away. Keeping my gaze fixed to one spot did weird things to my sight—or what passed for sight down here. Wavy lines in purple and yellow danced around my peripheral vision and my eyes felt bone-dry; more than anything, I wanted to blink. But I clung to that silver thread like a lifeline. When my right foot stumbled into a hole and I crashed down, cutting my knee and wrenching my ankle, I didn’t look away. I kicked and yanked at my foot, ignoring the pain, until I’d freed it. Then I crawled forward, sweeping away debris with my hands.
It couldn’t have taken more than a few minutes to cross the cavern, but it seemed like days. Despite the damp, cold, and darkness of the mine, I felt like I was crawling and crawling across an endless expanse of desert toward an oasis I knew was a mirage. But Hellforged was no mirage. When I finally arrived at the silver glimmer, I hauled myself up onto my knees and turned on the headlamp. There it was, the obsidian athame, whole and undamaged.
I grabbed it. Hellforged flew from my hand and shot off like an arrow across the cavern, disappearing once more into the darkness beyond my headlamp. Damn it—why hadn’t I taken a few seconds to get centered? And why did the dagger have to be so damn jittery? I didn’t have time or patience for its crap right now.
I limped in the direction the athame had gone, but I’d lost sight of it. So again, I turned off my headlamp, located the glimmer a few feet ahead of me, and approached it. This time, I took several minutes to let my impatience drain away, breathing deeply and slowly and going inside myself until it didn’t matter whether I was deep in an abandoned mine or snug in my own bed. When I’d achieved that feeling of centeredness, I switched on my headlamp.
The light didn’t come on.
I tried the switch again. Still no thin beam boring through the darkness. Oh, no. Please, no. Not now.
My hand went to the flashlight on my belt. As I touched it I knew it was the one Pryce had fried earlier, but I tried anyway, flicking the switch half a dozen times like I had before. It didn’t work. What a surprise.
The panic I’d experienced before was the baby brother of what hit me now. I fought down the urge to scream, but not for long. I shrieked and howled and tore at my hair and just wanted to run. My sprained ankle saved me. As soon as I tried to take a step, pain shot up my leg and the ankle gave way. I fell sideways onto the floor, clutching my leg. My face landed in a puddle, but the shock of cold water and hard stone did nothing to snap me out of it. I kept screaming, the sound echoing like a chorus of the damned, until I drew a breath and inhaled a mouthful of water. I sputtered and pushed myself to a sitting position.
I coughed my lungs inside out, but by the time I finished I no longer felt like screaming. The cavern was silent, except for a steady drip drip drip nearby and, farther off, the muted rush of running water. Mab had mentioned an underground river. If I’d run off in a blind panic, I might have fallen in and been swept away by the icy water. Mab and Kane would never know what happened to me.
Okay. No more running, no more screaming, no more panic. I had to get out of here, so we could get Mab back to civilization. I wasn’t going to wait around for a rescue party, and I refused to enter the demon plane. If I stepped into Uffern carrying Hellforged, I might was well wrap up the athame with a pretty bow and give it to Difethwr as a birthday present. The only way out was to shift.
I’d have to be careful. It was difficult, sometimes impossible, to hang on to my human thoughts and intentions when I shifted to an animal. And the animal I had in mind was so much smaller than my human form that its tiny brain might not serve my purpose.
One thing I had going for me—the only thing, as far as I could see—was that we were just a few days into the new lunar cycle. This early in the cycle, my animal form would be weak. Maybe my human side could retain enough control to get Hellforged out of here.
I stood and placed the athame on the ground at my feet. Then I concentrated. Like a mantra, I repeated three words: “Knife. Out. Car. Knife. Out. Car.” For several minutes I said them out loud, then I drew them inside myself. Knife. Out. Car. I repeated the words until they were etched into my mind. I hoped my reshaped brain would be big enough to hold all three.
Knife. Out. Car.
I took off my boots and shivered at the clammy touch of the cold, damp floor on my bare feet. Lightly, so as not to send the athame rocketing off again, I placed my feet over Hellforged, favoring my throbbing ankle, and curled my toes around the grip. Knife. Out. Car.
I extended my hearing, sharpening it, listening for tiny sounds I wouldn’t usually notice. Knife. Out. Car. I thought of wide, leathery wings; a snub nose; beady eyes. Knife. Out. Car. I thought of hanging upside down, wings wrapped around me like a blanket. Knife. Out. Car.
I started shrinking. Big, I thought, big enough to carry a dagger. Then I resumed my mental chant: Knife. Out. Car. Pain squeezed my head as my skull compressed and my ears slid to the top of my head. My arms stretched and grew impossibly long, my fingers spreading out, webbing growing between them. My legs shortened to little more than feet and ankles; my toe-nails became sharp, strong claws. As it felt like my head was being crushed to powder, I managed to repeat my mantra one last time. Knife. Out. Car. Then
the energy blasted out, and I changed.
Water sounds. Dripping, trickling, rippling. Rock groaning. A pebble rolling. I leapt into the air, wings going fast. Cried out. Sound bounced back at me. Too many echoes. Too many sounds. Walls, floor, rock, dust—crowding in. Confused. I couldn’t hear where I was. I slammed into rock, fell. Something fell with me, clattered onto rock.
I shook myself. I stretched my wings, flapped. No hurts. I cried out again, many times, listened. Cried out, listened. Sounds came back to me, gave me the shape of the nearby wall. I cried out again, again, again, listening for shapes. I could hear my location. Into the air I went, wings carrying me. I cried out, cried out. Listened. Heard shapes, heard spaces. Moved through them. Wings beating fast, fast.
Through the sounds, a light. Small, color of the thinnest moon. Near where I fell. Knife—a shapeless sound inside my head. I wanted the silver light. I swooped, touched rock. My feet found the light, grasped it. At its touch, I wanted out. Out. Under the moon, the big moon, where air smells like grass, not rock. Out where sounds go a long way before they come back.
I called. Heard an open space that went up. Up meant out. I flew up, toward out.
Narrower here. No water sounds, just my cries, bouncing off stone. I flew fast. My ears brushed stone. The tip of one wing, the other wing, brushed stone. But no crashing. I heard the shapes. I flew through a tunnel of sounds.
Now, echoes took longer to come back. Wider space here. But rock smells, not out yet. I heard another up-slanting space, flew there. Echoes closed in. Up I flew. Other sounds now. Voices—coarse, two-legs, no-wing sounds. Wind. Grass rustling. A big water lapping its shore.
I flew toward the sounds, toward out, carrying the sliver of moonlight.
I burst out of the rocky place, into the wide air. Cold. Many sounds, but long echoes. I flew up, dipped, swooped. Cold. I listened for food. Too cold. Cold felt wrong. Felt like sleep.
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