“No, we have to go!” I snapped at him. We did, although I still had to figure out how to get us both out of the ditch. Although we hadn’t noticed the ditch’s walls as we approached, they now appeared never ending.
This place was such a mind trip, I literally couldn’t grasp what the hell was going on with the landscape. But one challenge at a time. Still dragging Pete back by his tail, I got us to the wall of the ditch.
“Look out!” Wally yelled from above. I swung sideways, and by virtue of my farm muscles, swung Pete up as a kind of honey badger weapon.
He snarled as I turned, his claws outstretched for the troll’s very wide eyes. He would have gotten them, too, except that big maw had also opened. I pulled Pete back just as the troll’s teeth snapped shut, but I kept swinging, throwing Pete, sending him up and over the edge of the ditch.
There was a yelp from one of the others and then another body tumbled into the ditch with me.
It was like we were in some sort of deadly comedy. I was just waiting for a pie in the face to mark the end of the scene.
A flash of dirty blond hair, and then Ethan hit the water beside me. The troll didn’t so much as turn toward him. Not even a glance.
“Go on, go after him a minute. He’s an ass. Nobody likes him.” I made a quick shooing motion, like I would have done with a badly-behaved cow.
The troll tipped his head and squinted an eye at Ethan before turning back to me with a wide grin. “Not allowed. That one has protection on him. You, little duck, do not. And you have seriously pissed me off.”
“What the hell?” I yelled. Ethan stood as if nothing had happened, took his wand from his pouch and made a lazy swirling motion with it. The wall of the ditch shifted, changing into a set of stairs that led up and out of the water.
“You dirty son of a bitch, you could have helped all along!” I snarled.
But I got no more than that because I’d been stupid. I’d taken my attention off the troll, which was the only opening he needed to wrap his remaining fingers on one hand around my neck.
“Got ya,” he whispered.
Chapter 4
From above me, stuck in the ditch with a troll’s one good hand wrapped around my neck, Ethan hollered to the others. “Let’s go. We’re down a Shade, but we don’t need him now that we finished his house trial.”
He was just going to leave me here?
Anger burned in my gut—not at the troll, but at Ethan—strong enough to shatter whatever remaining hold the troll had on me. Well, minus the hand around my neck.
He squeezed my neck as he grinned. “Imma pop you like a daisy.”
I lifted my hand, still holding my knife, and laid the razor-sharp blade against the back of his remaining knuckles. I breathed out—or should say I tried to—and let all the anger swell in me, let it bleed into my eyes until there was nothing there but the urge to finish the troll off. I’d fight like a rabid wolf if he forced my hand. Maybe I’d die, but I’d take him with me.
For a split second, his magic rose around us, dark green and misty, and I…breathed it in? Was that right? No, maybe I absorbed it somehow. It soaked through my skin, and I owned it. I held it tightly for a beat before it flowed out through my eyes.
The world around us flickered and changed, but this time it wasn’t a misty image or a disorienting overlay on our world. It seemed entirely real.
The troll was drawn and quartered, tied under the bridge by his feet like a cow carcass hung to tenderize, the pink blood dripping slowly into the water below, dead eyes glazed with a white film. All ten fingers missing.
“No.” The troll let me go, turned and touched his own image. The flesh moved and he howled, and bolted away from me at top speed. I went to my knees as the troll raced away down river, his body jiggling like a bowl of jelly. But I couldn’t laugh. I could barely breathe and I’ll admit a large part of that was straight up fear catching me.
That troll meant to kill me, and I didn’t see any teacher showing up to stop him, no supervisor of the Culling Trials making sure I didn’t indeed have my head popped off like a daisy.
“Let me go!” Gregory yelled, and then the little goblin was running down the stairs that Ethan had cut into the side of the ditch. He looked at me on my knees in the water and then at the retreating figure of the troll. He said nothing but hurried to my side and helped me to my feet.
“You okay, Wild?”
I swallowed hard, coughed a few times, and finally nodded. “Thanks for the advice. Helped.”
“You…handled him well.” We slowly made our way up the stairs. At the top, Pete was still in honey badger form, being held by Wally as though he were a fat house cat and not a snarling twisting maniac of a badger.
Ethan raised his eyebrows.
“Boots,” Orin said, thrusting my boots at me. I bent and yanked them back on, lacing them up quickly. Behind us was the next group of kids. I could just hear their voices, and I knew we had to get going. Being passed was bad. Even if my heart was still racing, even if I wasn’t entirely sure just what had happened here.
Because part of my brain said I’d somehow sucked in the troll’s magic and spat it back at him, using his own gift against him.
I swallowed hard. “So, we’re done now, right?”
Wally shook her head slowly. “Three challenges for each house. We have two more. The final one will be where the gold is, assuming we chose the paths correctly.”
I rubbed my head. That couldn’t be the full story. There was something missing. There was no way that a place like this used the exact pattern for each trial. The trial for the House of Shade had been all about strength, speed, and predicting your enemy’s moves. Made sense if they were badass assassins. But the House of Unmentionables was not the House of Shade.
If my childhood fairy tales had taught me anything, trolls and goblins hoarded things.
Ethan was already partway down the path, eyeing up his piece of paper. Out of earshot. Still, I bent and spoke quietly into the goblin’s ear.
“Gregory, do trolls have any sort of talisman?”
His eyebrows rose and he slowly nodded. “Usually they bury something close to where they haunt. A trinket they love.”
I ran down the stairs into the ditch and did a slow circle through the muddy water, ignoring the sloshing inside my boots. “Would it be precious metal or something else?” I couldn’t explain what was driving me other than this challenge’s lack of complexity. Getting past a troll had been physically hard for me, not having done it before, but for Ethan, it would’ve been a cakewalk. There had to be something more.
Gregory hurried down the stairs and took a big snort of air, his eyelids fluttering. “A ruby. There’s a ruby buried in the creek.”
With Gregory helping as a magical treasure detector, we pinpointed a slight depression in the ground in under a minute. I started clearing away the wet rocks and mud.
“Stop messing around and get out of there!” Ethan snapped from the top of the stairs, then disappeared again. Thankfully, he wasn’t the suspicious type, just impatient.
My fingers slid over a smooth surface, different in look and texture than the rocks around it. In fact, it was a perfect square, strange to exist out in nature. I pulled it out and rinsed it in the water. Vivid red. I’d found a gemstone. A ruby.
I handed it to Gregory. “Hang on to it.”
“Why me?”
“I don’t know, just hang on to it. And keep it from Wonder Bread.”
He snorted. “No problem.”
We ran up the stairs and reached the top just as voices filtered to us from the opposite bank.
I looked over my shoulder at the approaching kids. “We’d better move. That troll isn’t coming back anytime soon to slow down the next group.”
Ethan looked past me and waved his wand with a sharp stabbing motion. A circular bubble shot out of the tip, wrapped around the stone bridge and vibrated.
“What—”
The bridge erupted, ston
es flinging every which way, the noise cutting through the air and making my ears ring.
“That will slow them down.” Ethan snorted.
Pete snarled and lunged out of Wally’s arms, going straight for Ethan.
“No, Pete. Leave him.” Much as I wanted to see the honey badger take a piece out of Ethan, I knew in my gut we still needed him.
Why, I wasn’t sure, but I was a pro at listening to my instincts, and I wasn’t about to stop now just because Ethan was a giant douche canoe who deserved to have his head bashed in.
Ethan waved a hand for us to follow him, and I fell in behind him even though I was struggling with what all had just happened. Gregory dropped back beside me, Pete and Wally stayed to the middle, and Orin was off to the side.
Gregory was the first to speak. “We can’t trust him, Wild. He would have let you die in there. If Pete hadn’t shoved him in, he would never have created those stairs.”
“I know,” I said. But if Ethan hadn’t fallen—or been pushed—in, I wouldn’t have been caught in an inescapable situation, and whatever…thing I’d done wouldn’t have happened, either. I was pretty sure I needed to figure out that piece of the puzzle. Maybe they’d given me the wrong designation?
“Then why follow him?”
“Can a person be in more than one house?” I asked.
Gregory looked up at me. “What?” I’d given him conversational whiplash.
“Can you be in more than one house?” I repeated slower. “Like, say your mom was magical like Ethan and your dad was a shifter like Pete. Could you be in more than one house?”
Wally dropped back to walk with us. “Yes and no.”
Gregory started. “What?”
She shrugged. “There are very rare cases where an individual carries the genetics of multiple gifts. One gift will always be dominant, but you could have secondary traits. Say you favor shifting but can still manage a wand to some degree. Less than one in a hundred have this magical quirk. And usually it is trained out of them in the academy. The trait that is considered of higher quality is cultivated, and the lesser talent is ignored and ultimately unused and considered dormant.”
“I didn’t know that,” Gregory said softly, touching the tips of his ears.
Wally turned her head to look at me, long black eyelashes fluttering a little. “Why do you ask, Wild?”
Her explanation, funnily enough, didn’t make me feel any better. Did that mean I wasn’t a Shade? Weird that I could be bothered by the thought of not being trained as an assassin so quickly after learning it was a possibility. I was cracked.
I frowned and rubbed at my head, worry prickling at me. “It’s just that—” Hell, I didn’t even know how to explain to them what had happened back there because I didn’t understand it myself.
And I didn’t get a chance to say more than that.
“Look sharp!” Ethan snapped. “We’re at the second challenge.”
“Not it,” I responded just as sharply. “You first, Wonder Bread. I’m tired of being the one to test the waters.”
Something bumped against my leg and I looked down. Pete looked up at me, still a honey badger.
I sighed. “Sorry, we forgot to bring extra pants.”
He shrugged and chattered his teeth, and I could almost hear him say, Pants-shmants, this way I can pretend I don’t understand all of you.
“That’s cheating, Freckles,” I said softly.
His head whipped around and he stared at me, slack jawed. I stared back, my own jaw dropping wide.
“What is happening?” I whispered. I was not hearing a honey badger talk, was I? I was not like Pete. I was no shifter.
“What’s happening is we have to get our asses up that tower,” Ethan said. The dubious quality to his voice snapped my focus back to the moment.
I tilted my head, looking up at a massive tower that appeared out of nowhere, reaching a good hundred feet into the sky, flat on top. Large blocks, nearly my height, made up a few rows along the base, but above that, the wall seemed to even out, nothing but divots and small ledges to the top. There weren’t even windows or doors—it was basically a massive climbing rock.
“Where the hell did that come from?” I asked, daunted.
“Looks easy, but there are bound to be nasty surprises,” Ethan said softly.
I huffed out a laugh. “Climbing that looks easy?”
“Goblin, you go first, seeing as this is your house,” Ethan barked.
“This tower will be protected by gargoyles,” Gregory said, analyzing it. “They’re as dumb as the rocks they’re made from, but they are vicious. They’ll try to pick us off as we climb. See them there, at the top?”
I squinted, as though that would help my vision. It didn’t, of course, but I still saw what he’d spotted. Three oversized stone gargoyles perched at the top. One of them had wings, two were without. All resembled mishmashes of creatures—lions, dragons, crocodiles—the bits and pieces jammed together to make horrible stone beasts.
One of them moved—the dragon-headed one with the set of wings peered down the back side of the tower. Another chill of warning made my breathing shallow, and my body flooded with adrenaline, prepped for anything. Sort of.
Figures gathered at the bottom of the tower caught my gaze. I didn’t know how a team had gotten ahead of us, but clearly one had. Maybe the troll bridge they’d crossed was easier. Maybe they hadn’t faced a troll at all. Regardless, this was an opportunity that we hadn’t had yet, to see how another team fared at a challenge.
Ethan and Gregory made to pass in front of me and I grabbed them both, one in each hand. “Watch.”
Ethan and Gregory both went still as the scene played out in front of us.
There was a moment of silence as the kids started to climb the tower. They’d made it twenty feet up when a sudden movement caught my notice. A creature—a gargoyle—I hadn’t seen, stretched to life, much smaller than those perched higher and nearly matching the color of the stone under its feet. It shot down, moving like a spider on a wall, heading straight for the kids.
“It’ll be like this all the way around,” Ethan said, stepping to the side as if that would get him a better look.
A sudden high-pitched scream cut the air, and a winged gargoyle flew straight into the air behind the tower. As it rose, it circled closer to us, clutching a student in its talons. The kid’s legs kicked in panic.
I grabbed Ethan’s shoulder. “Save him!”
Ethan huffed. He didn’t move a muscle.
“Ethan, save—” The screaming kid’s flailing body disappeared from the sky.
“If they killed everyone, there would be no one left for the academy,” Ethan said dryly. I caught a whiff of you’re an idiot in his tone.
“No time like the present.” Ethan shoved Gregory in front of him. “Go.”
“You’re a real class act, Wonder Bread. A real stand-up guy,” I said, stepping forward with Gregory.
“And you’re white trash,” he replied, following behind us. “Just be glad you’re not also useless.”
Any other time, he’d be flat on his back with a split lip. This time, though, I figured we needed his wand. Assuming, of course, he’d actually use it.
I directed the others. “Gregory, stick close to me. Orin and Wally, you take the rear. These suckers move fast—yell out if they get in behind us.”
I was at the base of the tower and Pete was still beside me.
“You, my fat little friend, are getting a boost.”
He chattered his sharp teeth. Can’t climb. I could hook my claws in, but I can’t—
I grabbed him around the belly and tossed him against the wall as high as I could. “Then hook in, buddy. I have a feeling we’re going to need some honey badger badassery.”
He screeched until he hit the wall and his claws dug in. He glanced down at me, teeth chattering rapidly.
“Rude, so rude.” I grinned up at him. “Now, move your furry little butt. We have a tower to cl
imb.”
And another token to find. I was sure there’d be treasure here, just like the ruby we’d found at the troll’s bridge. Call it intuition, or maybe just plain logic, but each challenge would have a talisman.
He curled his lips up and snapped his teeth once more, but then he did start climbing, contrary to what he’d said about his capabilities. Given that his claws were scraping against stone, and the divots had been designed for hands, I was mighty impressed.
Magic.
I took a deep breath. I’d need to get used to this new reality that defied the logic with which I’d lived my life, and soon.
I jumped up, catching a handhold just above my head, and hung there a moment while I searched for another. “Come on, everybody, this will be easy. Ethan said so.”
“Any idiot can climb a wall,” Ethan said as he started up to my right.
“You’ll be proof,” I bit out with a grin.
“Incoming!” Wally shouted, and I looked up as one of the wingless gargoyles skittered down the wall at us like a lizard.
It blinked rapidly a few times, swaying from side to side, a long tongue flicking out to taste the air.
“It can’t see,” Gregory whispered. “But it can feel us move.”
I lifted a foot and dug it into another hold, a few rocks falling.
I grimaced and looked up as the gargoyle came straight at me.
Chapter 5
“Crap stains on white jeans,” I spat out, my heart rate ramping up. “How the hell am I supposed to fight a freaking nightmare?”
The gargoyle was coming straight for me as I hung by my fingers and toes on the side of a stone block tower. This did not bode well.
I scanned the immediate area for all available divots and handholds, lodging them into my brain. I needed a strategy. If these suckers were made of stone, jabbing them with a knife wouldn’t do me a whole lotta good.
“You better react, or you’ll go flying,” Ethan warned.
“Very helpful,” I grunted.
The gargoyle closed the distance with lightning speed, shimmying down the flat surface as though its feet had suction cups on them. Rather than strike out, I let the stone creature keep its momentum. When it was just two feet away, I threw myself sideways, heart in my throat, and grabbed a new handhold with my right hand.
Shadowspell Academy: The Culling Trials, Book 2 Page 3