Again, nothing. No sobbing or yelling.
No chirping, either. Elf-space had suddenly gone silent.
This is bad, I thought. I had no idea why. Did Arne cause the silence? Or even more gut-clenching, did my brother?
I peered into the trees. Were the shadows darker? Were they moving? But the sun shone bright in the sky above and we were inside the glamour. Nothing should be able to get in here. Nothing.
The silence released and the forest around me flooded with skittering, chirping, and the lovely, sweet scent of wildflowers.
“Maura!” I called again. A few feet ahead, a large limb had fallen from one of the oaks. I snapped off a thick stick, one slightly longer than my arm, and smacked it against the limb. A loud crack echoed, but the stick held. The broken end had a bit of a point, and the blunt end a good knot.
I set it against my shoulder just in case, and headed down the path toward The Gate and The Hall.
A wild turkey tom stepped onto the path. He lifted his head, gobbled in my general direction, and made his way to the other side.
I stopped and watched him scratch at the dirt. Something was wrong. Not with the turkey per se, or the silence, or the lack of Maura and Akeyla separately. But the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. My vision clarified also, the way focus and adrenaline make colors brighter and edges sharper.
Part of me wished I hadn’t listened to Dag. Part of me wished I’d brought that wood dagger with me.
“Arne?” I said. Arne could very well still be pissed enough to have added an extra anti-Frank enchantment to the glamour, and if his behavior with Maura was any indication, petty enough to do it.
Nothing but a rabbit on the trail and a huge yellow-and-black swallowtail butterfly drifting through the sunshine.
A soft, barely perceptible click echoed off the trees behind me.
I whipped around.
“The interesting thing about elf glamours,” my brother said, “is that they change sunlight.” He swung a right hook at my head.
How had he gotten so close? He was right on top of me. I ducked but his fist glanced off my ear.
I rammed the pointed end of the stick into his gut.
It went in deep, all the way to his spine. My brother growled and laughed, and swung at my head again.
I jumped back but swung for the club end of the stick, hoping to catch and brace, and hold him far enough away that he couldn’t connect another jab.
He vanished. The stick swung with my grab and I rotated too fast, stumbled, and almost fell over. Somewhere out in the trees, the bastard laughed.
“Run, you lumbering fool,” he called. Then he was right next to my side again. Right there. “Run!” he yelled in my ear.
I shifted my weight, tightened my shoulder, and hit the side of his head with my big oak stick.
My brother teetered. He gagged and stumbled, but righted himself. Slowly, he wiped blood off his ear. He showed me his hand. “We don’t have that hot metallic tang mundane have.”
He unsurprisingly sucked the blood off his finger.
“Should I threaten you?” He stood up straight and cracked his neck. He still wore his ash-made black suit, and his ash-made black shirt and tie. He had, somehow, culled lighter ash from his cloak and fashioned himself a pair of gray cufflinks. “Growl and huff like a monster.”
He winked.
I held the stick between us. “Why are you attacking Alfheim?”
He flicked the point. “I was bored. Elves are a challenge.” He grinned. “You are imperfect. I am not. I’m doing Dad a favor.”
Of course he was doing our father a favor. “Such a simple mind you have,” I said. “So coarse and obvious. So utterly constrained by the bits from which Victor Frankenstein fashioned you.”
His smugness evaporated into narrow eyes and bared fangs.
“You are as ugly as I am under that vampire glamour, aren’t you?” I said. “Sallow and corpse-like? Or hunched and pathetic, like Ivan? You have no will, only your demon hunger. You are a carrion beetle.”
The ash lifted off his body. It swirled and stiffened in much the same way as Dag’s magic had when it formed its armor-like shell. Sigils formed. Lines and angles doubled, then tripled. Proportions oriented.
My brother’s ash magic was no armor.
It was a portal—a portal Arne missed because my brother carried it on his body.
My brother, when he came through, had fashioned the portal itself into his cloak. Not the ash. The ash just filled it, the way it backfilled the mirage of Rose’s cottage.
He grabbed the stick and yanked me into himself.
Chapter 25
“Do you know yourself?” my brother asked. “Do you understand from whom you are fashioned?”
Did I care? I wasn’t sure that I did. It was hard to care when floating in The Land of the Dead. I’d lost my need to rip my brother’s semi-beating heart from his chest.
Holding on to any desire to move forward—to change—seemed in itself a monumental feat.
There’s an orientation to The Land of the Dead, a sense of direction, but not much else. The Land of the Dead was the end of the cul-de-sac—the empty lot at the end of a long, shadowed, dirt road. There was nothing here, no reason to be here, no purpose whatsoever beyond that this place happened to be where you ended up.
Everyone ended up here in some form or another.
No breeze moved the stale air. No dust lifted off the dry, grayish ground. Nothing grew. The sun didn’t care enough to bother rising, nor did the moon. Entropy didn’t care either, so nothing changed. No decay. No life working to build. No roads, paths, rocks, or landmarks of any kind. Only a dry dirt and an equally uncaring, dry, gray sky.
Yet we were not alone. One can never be alone in The Land of the Dead.
“Why does it matter?” I asked. “The dead do not care how their mortal forms are used. The men who became me are long gone.” I was all that was left of most of them.
My brother squared his shoulders. “Do you know what demons are?”
He was full of questions, here in The Land of the Dead, which seemed odd. “Demons are naked hunger.” Demons happened when the desire to move toward one need overcame every moderating force. “The original vampire demon had been a man, a bloodthirsty ruler, and he had carried his needs for destruction and domination into The Land of the Dead.”
He’d cared enough to tighten his tornado of rage into a singular thread of energy. And that thread wove itself into the first vampiric demon.
“Hunger, yes,” my brother said. “It is difficult to be hungry here, which is why we vampires leave.”
He spoke his words in such a matter-of-fact way that it sucked the urgency right out of the concepts of which we spoke, as if he did not understand the magnitude of the hunger needed to make a demon.
Or The Land of the Dead’s overriding lack of caring also affected my demonic brother.
He grinned and his fangs expanded downward into ridiculous sabers. My science-built brother grinned at me like a saber-toothed cat. “Allow me to ask you this question: What do you think a demon carries with it when it leaves The Land of the Dead?”
“Hunger, rage, the need to make more of itself.” The basic needs of any parasite.
“Have you ever wondered why our father’s experiments worked? Why it was that an Eighteenth Century man of letters was able to reanimate your body when modern science cannot accomplish any such similar task?”
“No,” I said. I’d long suspected that my father had stumbled into some sort of magic. In all honesty, I never wanted to know. I didn’t want the elves to know, or the vampires, or anyone else. I only wanted to be thankful for the life I managed to make of my bits and parts.
“All it takes is one tiny touch. One part from a corpse that died because of an infection.” My brother leaned toward me. “One poor fool bitten by a carrier of a hungry demon.”
Nothing changed about The Land of the Dead around us. My brother did not call up
images of the men who became me, nor did he do the same for himself.
But I felt them. They were here, drawn to what used to be them: A terrified slave full of a blinding need to survive and protect his own. A Scottish farmer who had stopped English soldiers as they raped and pillaged his people. A Norwegian sailor who would have done anything to keep his wife and young son safe. Three soldiers, all from different armies, all doing a job they hated. A poet who would have given anything for his words to live on forever. Another man who gave his life to save an unrequited love.
They were all me and they did not quite fit together. And one of them had been infected.
What was I?
“Father understood with me,” my brother said. “He did not believe in demons. He thought it a disease.” He rubbed his hands together. “When he returned from the Arctic, he realized what must have happened, so he purposefully looked for infected corpses.”
And the easiest demonic infection to find and isolate was vampire.
“He’s here, somewhere,” my brother said. “Our father. I drained him dry before ripping off his head.” He shrugged. “I had not yet gained enough control to consider the joys torturing him would have brought.”
My brother seemed more content with having given our father a quick death than I suspected he would have been if we had stayed in The Land of the Living.
Not even a vampire was immune to the effects of The Dead.
He scowled as if reading my mind, then grabbed my arm. “Come.”
Ash burst from his torso like the tentacles of a squid and sucked me back into the portal that was him.
I hit the standing stone of The Great Hall’s Gate. All breath left my lungs. All bones in my body shuddered. Every cell screamed.
My shoulder popped out of its socket.
I howled, but managed to land on my feet.
Brother laughed and vanished into a swirl of ash only to reappear sitting on a stout limb of one of the nearby oaks. “Looks painful,” he called.
He was a good twenty feet away and ten feet up in the tree. The trunk groaned, and the limb dipped under his bulk, but he stayed up there, a giant gorilla of vampiric disdain.
I leaned against The Gate’s massive granite side. Pain throbbed outward from the dislocation as a smothering bubble of suffocating agony. Breathing hurt. My perception contracted and pulsed with each throb. Another injury to my leg also throbbed, but I couldn’t pinpoint it, not with my shoulder masking my senses.
He’d brought us back inside the elves’ glamour.
Brother could move wherever he wanted. He could do whatever he pleased, to whomever he dared.
He jumped to crouching on the limb like a massive raven. “When I woke, I did not understand any more than you did,” he said. “But I understood the hunger. I understood the need to control.” A small plume of ash rose off his hand. “Father paid first.” He pointed at me. “And now that you have let me in, I will control you. I will control these elves and their magic.” He licked his lips. “The blood of an elf is… magical.” He snickered at his own joke.
What could I do? How could I stop this creature?
Lure him to the dagger, or lure him back into The Land of the Dead and somehow make his stay permanent?
“Oh!” He twirled his finger through the air. “You’re considering ways to hold me in The Land of the Dead! You would not make a good poker player, my brother.”
I leaned my head against the stone and scowled up at the tree.
He laughed again. “I’ve walked this Earth as me almost as long as you have walked as you. Do you honestly think ridding your world of me will be—”
The head of a magical arrow pierced his heart and breastbone, and appeared as a shimmering silver point in the center of his chest.
Brother coughed. He looked down at the arrow, then vanished.
The arrow and its shaft clinked off the tree limb and bounced to the ground.
“Stay hidden!” I yelled. The archer might not be Dag. Several other elves were skilled enough to take on my vampiric brother. Another elf, though, would be in much greater danger than the Queen of Alfheim.
Brother appeared directly in front of me and landed a right jab into my face.
He vanished again.
Another arrow flew by my arm.
Brother reappeared to my side and plucked the arrow from the air. He twisted.
The arrow drove into the deltoid of my damaged shoulder. I howled again and dropped to my knees.
Brother raised his arms. “I will kill all of you!” he yelled. “One by one. I will not stop. I will not pause. I will cleanse this town of elves and wolves.” He kicked my side. “And pathetic first draft—”
The battle axe almost did its job. It almost took off his head, but he vanished again.
“Get up,” Maura said. She groaned and hoisted the huge, silver axe onto her shoulder.
The object was covered with sigils and runes, many of which glowed with magic. The shaft also glimmered as if made from a branch of a magical tree.
The axe had obviously been made for someone much larger than Maura. “Give me that.” I held out my good arm. “I can swing it faster.”
“Elf made. Elf wielded,” she said. “With two good arms.”
I needed a weapon. “You need to run,” I said. “Take whoever is shooting arrows and get to The Hall.” I extended my hand again. “Please.”
Magic streamed off Maura’s eyes. It jumped and danced through her hair, but it had not condensed around her the way her mother’s had condensed into armor.
Maura was vulnerable.
“You’re wounded. You need us,” she said. “I will not allow that thing to—”
Brother punched Maura in the face, then vanished again.
She gulped, her hand coming up to her now-broken nose, and stumbled into the granite of The Gate.
Brother appeared again, this time out of hand-to-hand distance. “The tastiest elves? The littlest ones.”
He vanished again.
All the color drained from Maura’s face and magic. She gulped again.
Another punch sent her head ricocheting off the granite.
He appeared between us. “I will rip that child into pieces. Then I will rip apart her wolf-born proto-mate.” He walked two of his fingers across his palm. “And then the elves can build themselves a mini version of you and me.”
My brother vanished one final time.
Chapter 26
“Akeyla!” Maura wheezed. She buckled forward. “What did he do to me?”
Her magic crackled. It fractured much like it had when she and Akeyla returned from Hawaii—bruised patches appeared.
I slammed my shoulder against the rock and popped it back into its socket. The agony lapped itself in my cycle of pain and turned into screeching, screaming, white-hot needles. Nausea welled up, but I somehow managed to hold it in check.
I needed to kill my brother.
“Where’s Akeyla?” I asked. “Please tell me she’s with Arne.”
Arne could hold his own against any vampire. Or so I hoped.
Maura nodded. “Dad took her when he left.” She held her hand against her nose and muttered more Icelandic swear words. “We saw that monster take you,” she gasped. “Mom and I.” She looked up at me and waved her free hand. “Dad had to go to the wolves. He needed to make sure they knew what was happening. It’s moonrise.”
Moonrise? “It’s mid-morning.”
Maura shook her head. “You’ve been gone for hours, Frank. It’s night.” She coughed again. “At least Dad realized that tossing us onto that damned plane was not a smart choice right now.”
My brother had me in The Land of the Dead for hours? “It had only been moments,” I said.
“Why am I not healing?” She pressed on her nose again.
The elves healed quickly. Maura had healed from the fire at Lara’s Café within a day or two. A broken nose would take as long, but she should have stopped bleeding by now.
/> My shoulder screamed when I reached for her. I wasn’t healing, either.
Dag staggered out of the trees holding her arm unnaturally against her side. Her shattered bow hung from her belt.
Her magic was just as bruised as her daughter’s—and someone had broken her elbow.
“Mom!” Maura stumbled to her mother.
A bolt of power jolted up my arm the moment I tried to pick up Maura’s axe—a bolt much like the one I’d felt when I picked up the dagger. “You two need medical attention.” I pulled back my hand. “Whatever he’s doing, it’s affecting your magic.”
Dag leaned against the rock and nodded, but didn’t speak.
I tried to pick up the axe again, and again, it zapped me. “Why can’t I pick up the axe?”
“Elf made,” Maura said again. “Elf wielded.”
Dag closed her eyes and lifted her undamaged hand off her broken elbow. She drew a circle in the air, then lines. A sigil formed. “Place your hands inside the ring,” she said.
I stuck both my hands through the magic.
I felt nothing unusual. No tingling or numbness. But the magic collapsed around my hands like a pair of gloves.
“The axe will now think you’re an elf,” Dag said. “It won’t last long so use it wisely.”
“How long?” I asked. Won’t last long could mean half an hour or half a year, with elves.
Dag slid down the side of the rock. “Morning.”
Either myself or my brother would be dead by sunrise, then. “Is there anything I need to know?” I asked. “The axe isn’t going to turn into a cloud of pixies if I take it out into the moonlight, is it?”
Dag closed her eyes and leaned against the rock. “Its purpose is to damage, Frank, not entertain.”
“Good.” I swung it with my good arm, to get a feel for its weight. I could definitely take off my brother’s head with this particular weapon.
“I need the keys to the SUV and a phone,” I said. “Arne better talk to me.”
“He will.” Dag’s voice suggested there’d been an argument. Maura’s expression confirmed my suspicion. “The keys and my phone are in my quiver.”
Monster Born (Northern Creatures Book 1) Page 15