War Song (The Rift Chronicles Book 2)

by BR Kingsolver

  We came at the reservoir from back roads that most people didn’t even know about. Shortly after we entered Loch Raven Park, Kirsten said, “Whoa! Did you feel that?”

  “We crossed some kind of veil,” I said. “I’ll engage the shield, but keep going. If no one’s shooting at us, we’re probably okay.”

  The road took us across a bridge over a narrow part of the lake. On the other side, we encountered a ‘Road Closed’ sign, a small turn-around area, and a detour sign pointing us back the way we came. I looked past the barricade, and the road looked fine to me.

  “Park the van,” I said. “Gather your weapons and clothes. I think we’re backpacking from here.”

  “What’s going on?” Kirsten asked. “Things feel a little strange.”

  “Things feel a little elven. If they aren’t showing themselves, then we’re going to have to push the issue. But I’m not going to expose the van. Elves have no appreciation for technology, or how much things cost.”

  Kirsten snorted. “After watching you trying to get the insurance company to pay for your cycle, I can just see myself saying, ‘Honest, this root grew into the engine.’”

  I laughed. “Something like that.”

  We shouldered our backpacks and headed down the road. We’d gone about a hundred yards when Kirsten started singing an Irish ballad. Normally, I would have joined her, but I didn’t want to scare the wildlife. Her voice was sweet enough that even the Fae couldn’t bitch about it.

  Four hundred yards along, well out of sight of the van, an arrow flew across our path. It suddenly stopped and hung in the air. We walked up to it, and Kirsten reached out and grabbed it.

  “You know, Dani,” she said, loudly enough for anyone in the forest to hear, “I’ve heard all my life about what great people the elves are, but this is just plain rude. First they make us walk, then they try to play games with our heads, then they try to intimidate us. Absolutely not cool.”

  I also raised my voice to make sure I could be heard. “Instead of being assholes, you could simply check with my mother, or my grandfather, to verify whether we should be here. But this game isn’t very mature.”

  To emphasize my displeasure, I sent a lightning bolt from my magitek box at the tree where the archer hid. The small crack of lightning made Kirsten jump, and I was sure it did the same to the elves hiding in the forest.

  “C’mon, let’s go,” I said, urging my companion forward. We walked another few steps when an elf stepped out of the trees into the road in front of us.

  “Danica James and Kirsten Starr?” she asked.

  “Yes. You could have asked that half a mile ago. You know, it’s six miles to my mother’s house from here. You don’t suppose we could get our van and drive, do you?”

  The elf didn’t react, except a slight twitch of one eyebrow. We all stood there for a couple of minutes, then she said, “You may drive your vehicle to the house.”

  I took off my backpack and put out my hand. Kirsten gave me the keys, then dropped her pack and sat down on it. I turned and raced back to the van.

  Another elf came out of the trees and ran with me, easily keeping pace. Kirsten or any other full-human would never have been able to do that. I wasn’t out of breath when I reached the van, but he hadn’t even worked up a sweat.

  “Would you like a ride,” I asked, “or is it some kind of elven macho thing to prove you can keep pace with a machine?”

  I got a hint of a reaction, one corner of his mouth turning up for a second. “I’ll take a ride.”

  He was a very stereotypical elf. Exotically handsome with long silver hair past his shoulders, silver eyes, brown skin, slender build, and over seven feet tall. He carried a bow with a quiver of arrows across his back. He also had a short sword, a long knife, and a revolver hanging from his belt.

  I wondered how Kirsten was going to react to the elves. To my knowledge, she had never spent much time around them, but she had gone to school in England for two years, and elves were more common there.

  No one really knew where the Rift would move next. It was permanently open in our world, but in the other worlds it connected us to, it evidently opened and closed. When it moved into the North Atlantic islands, Scandinavia, and Northern Europe, elves came through into our world. Along the Chesapeake Bay and along the Atlantic coast of North America, we got monsters, which were also common in South America when the Rift moved there. Other parts of North America, India, and China got demons. Southern Europe, the Middle East and Central Asia got vampires and shifters. A different kind of demons came through in Africa. Basically, the whole world was screwed up.

  We drove back to where I left Kirsten, then she and I loaded our packs into the van and proceeded to Mom’s house. Evidently the word had gone out that we were acceptable, because we saw a number of elves, and several elven structures, along our way. It appeared that the illusions were no longer affecting us, because we certainly weren’t doing anything to disperse or penetrate them.

  When we pulled into the driveway to Mom’s house, we saw at least twenty trucks of different sizes parked off the road in the trees along the way. Some were armored assault vehicles. All had Findlay markings, but I doubted any of Courtney’s minions knew where they had disappeared to. I expected the elves cast an illusion on the vehicles when they left Loch Raven and drove out into the world. A few humans wandered around, and I assumed they were Findlay guardians.

  Elves love children. Possibly because they have so few, they consider them precious. And since elves didn’t mature until they were close to a hundred years old, to them I was barely more than a baby. I parked the van, got out, and was halfway across the yard when a tall elf emerged from the house and was on me in two steps. Grabbing me up, he swung me about like a child, a grin on his face.

  “So beautiful!” my grandfather said in Elvish. “Every time I see you, you’re taller and more lovely!”

  Which was a lie. I hadn’t grown an inch in twenty years, but an elf girl would continue growing until she was over eighty, so he still considered me a little girl. He hadn’t changed at all from when I first remembered him. Taller than almost any human, with golden hair and eyes, he was the personification of what humans envisioned an elf lord to be.

  We hugged each other, and then I introduced him to Kirsten.

  “Grapa, this is my brefonia, Kirsten Starr of the Starr coven in Baltimore. Kirsten, this is my Grapa, my grandfather, Joren Dilensson of Iceland,” I said, mostly in English.

  “My, she is very young,” he said, still in Elvish.

  “No, Grapa, she’s a human witch. All human. She’s a fully grown woman.”

  Kirsten was five-foot-eight, but my grandfather was seven-foot-six, and the last time I was Kirsten’s height was before I reached puberty.

  Mom came out and leaned on the door jamb with her arms folded across her chest. “Glad you made it. Any troubles?”

  “Minor problem in Pittsburgh,” Kirsten said. “But Olivia and Osiris got away, and we got away. Stopped by the cabin last night, and things are okay there.”

  “Sounds good,” Mom said. “Have you eaten?”

  “Canned stuff at the cabin and hamburgers along the way,” Kirsten said.

  She had my mother’s number. The mention of hamburgers, which Mom was convinced came through the Rift with the demons, set her off.

  “Oh, shit. Come in and eat some decent food,” Mom said, and ushered us all into the house so she could feed us and catch up on the news.

  As we walked toward the house, me leaning against my grandfather, his arm around my shoulders, Kirsten leaned close and asked, “Brefonia?”

  I had taught her a little Elvish, but relationship concepts weren’t something we had explored.

  “It means bond mate,” I said. “Nothing sexual. Like a sister—related, but not by blood. By claiming you, it places an obligation on my clan to protect you.”

  “I can live with that,” she said, wrapping her arm around my waist.

  C
hapter 23

  “You seem to have settled in,” I said to my grandfather. “How many people did you bring with you?”

  “Two hundred,” he said, “thirty of whom are what you call intelligence operatives. People who have special training to fit in with human society. With a glamour, they can go anywhere amongst your Families. Depending on how we deploy them, they can pass as either mages or witches. The rest of my people are warriors. We are very concerned about this alliance with the demons that your enemies have embraced.”

  He chuckled. “We’ve already managed to insert three operatives—two men and a woman—into Findlay House. Your Aunt Courtney hired them to take the place of people she either killed or fired.”

  My mom said, “Dani, the demon army south of Annapolis broke out of their containment. They launched an assault to the west and overwhelmed the Magi troops. Demons from the Waste joined them. The Magi troops are fighting a rearguard action as they retreat toward the airport. The last word we had was that Whittaker was flying in reinforcements.”

  “And Wilmington?” I asked. “I heard that Akiyama Hiroku set up his headquarters there.”

  “The Akiyama-Moncrieff forces hold the Findlay estate, Elk Neck, and Wilmington, while demons control the area west of Annapolis between the Waste and Baltimore,” Mom said. “The good news is that Whittaker, Novak, and Domingo have a major manpower advantage around Baltimore.”

  I thought about it, imagining a map in my mind. “Did I tell you about the deal Olivia, Mary Sue, and I worked out?”

  “The magitek factory in Wilmington? Yes, you told me. What about it?”

  “Mary Sue will be here for dinner tomorrow night. Courtney and Akiyama may think they have the upper hand, but we have a hole card they don’t know about.” I shook my head. “I can’t believe that the Akiyama and Moncrieff Families are gullible enough to ally with demons.”

  Joren gave an elven shrug, tilting his head to the side and lifting that shoulder. “People believe what they want to. Even elves do stupid things at times. I understand that this territory lacks a demon overlord.”

  He was among the people I trusted most in the world. “I have something I need to show you. In the van.”

  We put on our coats, and Kirsten and I led my mother and grandfather out to where the van was parked next to Mom’s garage. I opened the sliding door, and Kirsten muttered a spell. A box appeared behind the driver’s seat. Kirsten crawled in and lifted the wooden box, revealing the statuette I had taken from Ashvial’s office. Its red glowing eyes watched us.

  Joren sucked air through his teeth.

  “Ashvial, the demon lord, had this,” I said, “Kirsten and I warded it, and I’ve had it in my workshop since we cleared his nest of his demon followers.”

  Joren and Mom studied it.

  I told them about the drug house where the demons were slaughtered. “I couldn’t figure out what was so valuable that a powerful demon would give its life to protect it. The magik detector from our forensics unit says this statuette left the residue she felt at that house.”

  “I think we should move it to your father’s workshop,” Mom said. Even more than twenty years after Dad disappeared, she still called it Dad’s workshop and not mine.

  I slid the wooden box over the statuette and latched the box to the base the object sat on, then lifted it up. It was only two feet tall, but it weighed about eighty pounds. I carried it into the shop behind the garage, and cast a spell to unlock the door. I put the box in a secure closet, Kirsten and I reset all the spells, and then we trooped back into the house.

  “Have you ever seen or heard of such a thing?” I asked as Mom poured tea. “It almost feels as though it’s alive.”

  “It’s obviously an object of power,” Joren said. “Demons are a different kind of lifeform than humans and elves, or even vampires. Whether that thing is alive or not, I cannot say.”

  “It hasn’t done anything,” I said. “I haven’t touched it, and we always warded it before any attempts to move it.”

  “I wonder if it’s a way to communicate across the Rift,” Joren said.

  I told him of my speculation that there was a higher power to which the demon lords owed fealty.

  “We have discussed that as well,” he said. “Your reasoning is sound. Without a king or a queen, one would think the demon lords would vie for supremacy, but we’ve seen none of that. I would hate to meet the being that statue was modeled after.”

  I didn’t tell them about my dreams. I couldn’t even imagine telling my mother about the ones that included the demon and my father. But how could I dream about such a creature before I knew the statue existed?

  Mom never paid much attention to the news, although she did have a small comm terminal in her office. I, on the other hand, needed full access to the datanet when I was a student, so I had a connection and a screen in my bedroom. After we ate, Kirsten and I settled into my room, and I turned all the technology on. We sat and watched for a couple of hours, switching through to various newscasts.

  We had taken pictures of the statue, so I set a search on the datanet for a match. Joren said that in their own world, the Fae had no mythology that included demons, although dragons had crossed a rift into their world about one hundred thousand years before. I was thankful we didn’t have them to deal with.

  The news was primarily about the demons advancing on Annapolis and the suburbs south of Baltimore, but there were a few stories about murders, mage battles, and demons in the city. I connected with a newscast out of Vancouver, and it reported a major battle between two different mage forces there. The vids showed fighters in Akiyama and Findlay colors battling near the harbor.

  Kirsten and I had been driving for the most part of the previous three days, so we went to bed not long after dark. The world was crazy, but I had no problems falling asleep.

  The being the statuette was modeled after came to me in my dreams. Eight feet tall with a fertility goddess body, she was imposing. Her human body was pale pink, and her dragon face, head, and the sharp ridges running from the top of her head between her horns, and down her back to the tip of her tail were blood red. Her tail tip twitched back and forth like a cat’s. A snake-like tongue flicked in and out of her mouth. She didn’t speak, just stared at me with those red, glowing eyes. Then she reached for me, and I jumped away from her. I landed on something hard and woke up on the floor beside my bed in a cold sweat.

  We had alerted the elves and the guardians to watch for Mary Sue. She showed up at five o’clock, driving a baby blue sedan instead of her hot pink sports car, which threw people off a little.

  “Oh, my,” she said, when she crawled out of the car. “Are any of these guys single?”

  I laughed. “No idea, but elves aren’t particularly monogamous, so if you can entice any of them, have fun.”

  An elven woman walked past, six-and-a-half feet of exotic bronze beauty. Someone guaranteed to give human women a definite inferiority complex.

  “The competition is a little stiff, but there are more men than women here,” I said with a chuckle.

  Mary Sue watched the woman and licked her lips. “Well, maybe a couple of them want to try a taste of the exotic.” Turning back to me, she said, “Glad to see you’re in one piece. Things in Wilmington have been rather exciting. You know, I’ve lived a sheltered life. Never seen a full-blown mage battle before.”

  Mom welcomed her into the house and poured her a cup of tea and a shot of agavirna. Joren cruised through shortly thereafter, and I introduced them.

  After he left, Mary Sue turned to me, eyes wide, and asked, “How tall was your grandmother?”

  I knew she meant Mom’s mother. “About like Mom, I think. Six-four or thereabouts. She died before I was born. Mom says I’m built like her.” I had not inherited the slender, willowy elven body type. I had heard people describe me as ‘athletic’—not as curvy as Kirsten or Mary Sue—but I was at least thirty or forty pounds heavier than Mom.

  Mary Sue tos
sed off the shot, shuddered, then took a sip of her tea.

  “So, what’s going on with our business?” she asked. “I half-expected to see Akiyama guardians knocking down the door and taking over, but everyone seems to be ignoring our buildings in Wilmington.”

  I told her that Olivia was alive, well, and relocated to Ireland. “Remember that one share of the company stock that Olivia allocated to Kirsten? She also transferred the Wilmington properties into Kirsten’s name as well. Those buildings aren’t associated with anyone named Findlay, Dressler, or James.” I shook my head. “I hope I’m half as smart as that old lady is when I get to be a hundred.”

  I had spoken with Olivia and Tom Whittaker earlier in the day.

  “We have several potential orders,” I said. “Sounds like a few million bucks worth of magitek devices. Did you talk to your uncle about robots?”

  Her perfectly-manicured eyebrows shot up. “Yeah, I did, but we haven’t nailed down a contract yet,” she said.

  “Between Findlay and Whittaker, they want an initial order of a thousand weaponized magitek drones,” I said. “Tom Whittaker said more of their allies might be interested once they see what the drones can do.”

  “And you have plans for these things.”

  I grinned. “Originally designed by Hunter James, and refined by Lucas James. Nasty little things that did a lot of damage during the Rift War. We can take a look at the plans and current drone technology, and figure out what we can improve.”

  And that’s what we did after dinner. I also ordered the new magitek enhancer for the generator for Mom’s turbine.

  “I don’t even have a factory yet,” Mary Sue complained. “I’ve hired exactly two employees.”

  “Better get a move on, Cuz. Gotta make money while the making is good. Wars don’t last forever, ya know.”

  Kirsten snorted. “The Rift War lasted twenty-five years, and nobody really won. Let’s hope we don’t have to deal with this garbage that long. I want to sell pretty-smelling soaps and feel-good potions, not weapons of mass destruction.”