Thrall (Daniel Black Book 4)

by E. William Brown

  “Then why is she always such a prickly bitch?” Mara grumbled.

  “Because she was ashamed of herself, and embarrassed about needing help, and she’s too proud to accept anything she thinks is being offered out of pity,” I explained. “But none of that applies anymore. She’s still kind of upset with you for trying to kill me, even if you weren’t trying very hard. But I think she’s also a bit ashamed of being so cold to you before.”

  “So you think I still have a chance with her?”

  “Yes. Just don’t be surprised if she ends up wanting to debate the ethics of your family’s military tactics.”

  “Like they asked me for permission? Big sis is nice to me, but I have to admit she’s into some twisted shit. I notice you haven’t said anything about Avilla, though.”

  “Avilla has hidden depths,” I said. “She’s sympathetic to your situation, but in some ways she’s the most calculating of us. She might not say it, but she’s the one who’s going to be weighing the benefit of a powerful ally against the threat of all your enemies. Or watching how you interact with everyone, and thinking about whether your friendship is bringing us closer together or just making life harder for everyone.”

  “So she’s the head wife? Fuck. I was hoping it was Cerise, or maybe Elin. They’d be a lot easier to deal with. But why would miss perfect wife want someone like me around? I’d just screw up her perfect household with all my stupid problems, and take up time you could be spending with her.”

  I scoffed. “Mara, if my coven was just four women trying to share one man I’d be up to my eyebrows in sly little plots and manipulation schemes by now, and we’d all be pretty miserable. Cerise and Avilla were in love with each other long before they met me, and the coven bond Cerise designed is equally strong between all the participants.”

  “Wait, you mean they all… um, with each other?”

  “I mean Avilla is more likely to get annoyed with you for taking up Cerise’s time than mine,” I said. “But Tina is always eager to step up, and she’s shared a few nights with Elin too. So making room for you wouldn’t be nearly as big a problem as you’re thinking. Besides, you don’t give yourself enough credit.”

  “Maybe.” She pulled away, and shook her head. “That’s weird to think about. Elin too? I was sure she was straight. Though I guess that was stupid. She’s mostly faerie, and they don’t do straight. Hell, they think you’re hopelessly repressed if you stick to humanoids.”

  “Elin is actually really shy,” I told her. “I’m not sure if the faerie depravity is a cultural thing, or if she’s just too young to have gotten like that.”

  “Huh. It’s still weird to think about. You sure I can’t just lure you away with promises of power, and a chance to fuck a demigoddess every night?”

  “If I was the kind of guy who’d abandon his family like that, would you even want me?”

  She frowned. “Stop being so right, damn it. I’m supposed to storm off grumbling about how stubborn you are, not feel guilty for fucking a married man.”

  I opened my mouth to reply but she interrupted. “No, stop, enough of that. I get it. I’ll think about it, okay? But not right now. You can stay up all night doing wizard shit if you want, but I need sleep.”

  She turned to go, but when she opened the door there was no hallway on the other side. Instead there was only a yawning abyss of hungry darkness. A cold wind blew through the door, biting at my bare skin with teeth of ice. Something howled in the darkness, a weirdly harmonic sound like a chorus of mad pipers.

  Mara slammed the door shut.

  “What. The fuck. Was that?”

  Something heavy thumped against the other side of the door. The heavy wood creaked ominously, and I was abruptly reminded of the fact that I’d left my equipment in the bedroom.

  “I don’t know,” I said. I grabbed up the test rig, and hurriedly slotted the pieces together.

  “I thought you and Alanna warded this place?” Mara demanded.

  The whistling howl came again, from my left. The wall creaked, like something heavy was pressing against it, and there was an answering cry from the opposite direction.

  “We did,” I said. “We must have missed something.”

  I stepped to the window, and looked out. Where the training yard behind Moon Ghost hall should have been, there was only that gaping abyss of bottomless darkness.

  “Yeah, no shit you missed something.” Mara moved to stand beside me, and peered out into the darkness. “The fuck? Did they teleport the whole room or something? But that doesn’t make sense, I would have felt it.”

  There was a loud thump from below, and the floor creaked as something pressed up against it from below. I hurriedly threw an arm around Mara, and pulled her into the air.

  “Give me something to stand on,” she said. “I’ll hold them off while you figure out how to get us back.”

  “Good plan,” I agreed, and conjured a plane of force a couple of feet off the floor.

  Mara dropped onto the force field, and shifted into her two-headed fox form. A puff of flame emerged from her left head, and she growled at the floor.

  “Come on, fucker. I dare you. Let’s see how you burn.”

  I called up my mana vision to try to figure out what was happening, but what I saw didn’t make any sense. There was a confused jumble of magic permeating the walls, but it didn’t form any spells that I could recognize.

  A strange sizzling sound drew my attention to the corners of the room, where something dark and hungry that flickered like flames was eating its way in. It started to snake its way across the floor, like vines growing across a wall.

  Mara turned to look, and her eyes went wide. “Black flames? Oh shit oh shit oh shit this is bad. Get us out of here, Daniel.”

  Whatever that was couldn’t be natural, so I grabbed the rod off my workbench and threw a dispelling at it. But the magic just slid off the black flames, dissolving into a spray of broken fragments that almost looked like they were burning away. Then there was a loud creak from the ceiling, and the whole room tilted.

  Mara looked around wildly, muttering to herself. “Fuck! What’s out there? What’s as big as a dragon and makes black flames? Think, bitch, there’s got to be something you can do.”

  The right head of her fox form, which had been studying everything with narrowed eyes since her transformation, turned to me and spoke with a voice whose soft intensity was a striking contrast to Mara’s usual brash confidence.

  “Daniel, call for Alanna.”

  Was that Mara’s sister? Shit, she was right, Alanna wasn’t safe. I focused on our link, ignoring a renewed round of mad piping howls from all around the room.

  “Alanna? Alanna, are you alright?”

  Hmmm? Came her sleepy reply. Is something wrong, Daniel? You feel so distant.

  “The Lightbringers are making another try, I think. Mara and I were in the workroom, then suddenly we’re surrounded by an abyss full of monsters or something.”

  As I spoke a dark mass pressed up against the window, and the glass bent inwards like it was made of rubber. I backed away as it pushed further into the room, and Mara breathed a gout of white-hot flame that should have vaporized the glass and everything beyond. But instead the fire just melted the pseudopod of darkness into a pool of writhing liquid that glowed with an ominous violet light.

  Oh, bother, Alanna said, sounding annoyed. You’ve been pulled into a nightmare realm, Daniel.

  “A nightmare realm?” I repeated stupidly. “Great. What do we do about that?”

  Just leave this to me, my wizard.

  The black flames suddenly went out. Then a blinding light filled the darkness beyond the window. For a moment I saw a vision of brilliant sunlight and parched badlands, where a beast made of shadows howled in pain as it cowered away from the light. A thrown spear flashed down like a thunderbolt, impaling the thing’s bulbous body. In the blink of an eye the spear became a tree, its roots entangling each of the monster’s dozens of
tentacles and burrowing deep into its body.

  Then the vision was gone, and the room was normal again. No broken window, or molten glass monster. No flames or even scorch marks in the corners of the room. No nonsensical magic dancing around the edges of my vision. No sign at all that anything abnormal had happened.

  The door opened. Mara and I both spun nervously to cover the entrance, but it was only Alanna.

  “Stupid dream beasts,” she grumbled. “Not one in a thousand can feel fear, so they’re always troubling those they shouldn’t.”

  Mara gaped at her. “That was a nightmare beast? Then was all of that just a dream? How did you get rid of it?”

  “Why are you surprised? Silly girl, do you think even a well-fed nightmare can threaten a spirit who was ancient when the dreamlands were forged? Their kind holds no power over me. Now come to bed, both of you. I am weary of sleeping alone.”

  She left without waiting for a response.

  Mara reverted to human form, and stared after her. “Daniel, sometimes your familiar scares me."

  “Me too, Mara. Remind me to never piss her off.”

  Chapter 18

  You might think that the prison of the Fenris wolf would be in hidden away in some secret location, protected by endless layers of misdirection. Or maybe buried in the middle of a giant fortress full of elite soldiers, surrounded by a moat of lava under a glowing dome of mystic wards.

  Instead, the Vanir had planted a garden around it.

  Oh, there were some defenses. A structure of dark stone the size of a football stadium dominated the center of the garden, hiding the bound monster, and its only entrance was an expanse of hammered steel that looked more like a bank vault than a door. There were two guards on duty outside, a massive redheaded man who had to be one of Thor’s sons and a dark-haired fellow who was probably another demigod.

  But the park was in the middle of the city, and was apparently a favorite destination for young lovers. All we had to do was play the part, and we could wander among the carefully maintained flower gardens for as long as we liked. We spent the better part of an hour making a circuit of the park, strolling casually and pretending to look at the flowers. A small army of elven men was working in the hot sun, carefully tending the flower beds and eyeing the male visitors with poorly concealed envy.

  After catching a few of those dirty looks myself I stopped under a shady oak tree, and kissed Mara until she was breathless and squirming in my arms.

  “What was that about?” She gasped when I came up for air.

  “I just felt like it,” I said. “But if you need an excuse, we’re building our cover.”

  Behind her, a couple of gardeners who’d been shoveling fertilizer had paused to cast sulky looks my way. I reached under Mara’s short skirt to squeeze her bare ass, and met their gazes one by one. They hurriedly dropped their eyes, hunching in on themselves as they went back to work.

  Mara giggled, and swatted my shoulder.

  “Stop that, you lech. Or else I’m gonna jump you right here, and give all the elf girls an eyeful of what they’re missing out on.”

  “That would be unfair to the poor girls,” I magnanimously conceded. “Alright, let’s see what’s over there.”

  Impromptu makeout sessions were pretty common here, and several times we came across couple who were taking advantage of foliage and cleverly designed skirts to have outdoor sex without being too obvious about it. Usually it was an elven woman with a human male, although there were a fair number of lesbian couples here as well.

  Only once did we encounter a male elf on a date, and he was obviously a special case. He radiated such an aura of sensual power that he had to be a demigod, and the two elf girls with him wore leather collars that they were obviously quite proud of. They made a point of teasing the gardeners, too, while the other Vanir women just ignored them completely.

  They didn’t ignore me, though. Practically every elf we encountered in our stroll flirted with me, even though they weren’t alone. One of them was clearly trying to get the viking she was with to fight me, but he just gave her a smack on the butt to get her moving again and threw an apologetic glance my way. Some of the others were probably just trying to make their men jealous, but the first ‘lesbian’ couple we met acted like they were starving in the desert and I was a fresh steak. It took some real doing to convince them they weren’t going to seduce me, but Mara chased them off in the end.

  Even from the outside, it was hard to miss the fact that Vanir society was profoundly fucked up. What did they do to those poor guys, to make them such cringing losers? Were all Vanir men like that now, or just the ones with public service jobs? I wasn’t sure I could even call them men, when they acted like little boys afraid of getting spanked.

  Was Aphrodite really responsible? That would be pretty scary. But if her power was really bound it seemed a little far-fetched. Maybe the Vanir had already been headed into a decadent phase, and she’d given things a push here and there to encourage the worst possible outcome. That was more plausible than the idea that she could engineer a social revolution at will.

  But just the same, I made a note never to let her get involved with a group I cared about. Just in case she wasn’t lying.

  After finishing a circuit of the garden Mara and I retreated to an outdoor cafe a few blocks away, to consider our findings over lunch. The staff were all elves, and our waitress flirted with me shamelessly. The busboy looked on with the morose expression of a secret admirer getting his heart trampled for the thousandth time, when he wasn’t glaring daggers at my back.

  “What is with these Vanir women?” I said after the waitress had left with our order. I was surprised to discover that the unwanted attention was actually getting a bit annoying. Maybe I was spoiled by the quality of my own women, but I wasn’t really interested in these vain, self-absorbed tramps.

  “It’s your own fault, Daniel. Elves think magic is sexy, and you’re putting out more power than a whole circle of normal wizards. They just can’t help themselves.” She gave me a smug grin, and leaned back in her seat so she could run a bare foot up my thigh.

  “Yeah, and you’re getting off on it,” I teased. “All those hot elf women following me around with their tongues hanging out, desperate to come up with some scheme to get into my pants. But you’re the one who gets to have me tonight.”

  “Those fragile little girls couldn’t handle this beefy sausage,” she said, running her toes over my crotch. “All they could do is stare in awe while they watch you bone a real woman. Maybe play with themselves, and imagine being me.”

  I chuckled. “Alright, that’s enough of that.” I caught her foot, and tickled her. She made an alarmed squeak, and pulled away so fast she’d have fallen out of her seat if I hadn’t caught her with force magic.

  “Meanie,” she pouted.

  “Business,” I reminded her. “We can play later. What do you think?”

  I unfolded the wards I’d prepared earlier, protecting our conversation from eavesdroppers as well as I could manage. Alanna took that as her cue to do the same, although the magic she used all dealt with weird mystical bullshit involving the Dreamlands and nature. Mara saw what we were doing, and took a few moments to raise her own protections before answering.

  “That should be good enough, as long as we don’t name any names. Okay, the door might seem impressive but it’s really a piece of cake. I can open it no problem. The guards looked pretty tough, though. I don’t think I can take them at all, let alone without letting them sound an alarm.”

  “Yeah, they’re going to be a problem. I bet we could do it if we work together, but not without alerting the whole city.”

  “Can’t you just magic us past them somehow?” She asked.

  “The building is warded against all the obvious tricks,” I told her. “No turning the stone to mud, or banishing it, or stuff like that.”

  “You could read the wards? How? I tried to look at that, but they’ve got some kind of a
nti-divination thing worked into them.”

  “I’m a cheating cheater who cheats. The scryguard was hiding the wards from me too at first, but it couldn’t hide itself. So I used my mana sorcery to reverse-engineer how it works, and make an inverse filter to undo the blur effect. After that it was just a matter of figuring out what each layer does.”

  “You suck,” she grumbled. “Wizards shouldn’t be allowed to have sorcery.”

  “Said the sorceress who’s learning wizardry? Anyway, the wards are a giant maze of barriers against magical travel. Spells aren’t going to bypass them. The only option that might work is the teleportarium in the Spire, and I’m not too keen on trying it.”

  “The what now?”

  “Oh, didn’t I mention that? Apparently the Atlanteans used the Spire as a central base for their campaign to imprison all the powerful beings they could get their hands on. There’s a bunch of interesting facilities in there, even if most of them are wrecked. The teleportarium has a bunch of big platforms with an enchantment that can send people places, sort of like the Dark Portal. Only the teleport enchantment is a lot more brute-force, and not as flexible. It can’t send you to other worlds, and if it hits a serious ward you’re liable to come out with your body scrambled.”

  Mara winced. “That sounds bad. Let’s call that a last resort, ‘cause I like all my body parts where they are. What else have you got?”

  “Normally in this situation I’d go with overwhelming firepower. Build a weapon that can just blow those guys away with our first attack, and do this as a quick hit-and-run thing. But there’s no way they aren’t prepared for something like that. Best case, some emergency strike team of elite badasses drops in on us while you’re doing your thing, and the gods won’t be far behind. Worst case it’s all a trap for you, and he isn’t even in there.”