King of the Mountains

by Elizabeth Frost

Groggy, Morgan tried to open her eyes. Her head pounded. Her lungs sucked in air, but she didn’t remember what had happened. Why did she feel as though she’d been in battle?

  Eyelids lifting, she stared through the shadows into the room beyond.

  She was in a small fishing cabin. Fishing rods and lures hung on the wall in front of her. She laid on a bundle of loose rope. The rough hemp dug into her bare back where the dirty dress gaped open. Her left leg was asleep and both her arms were tied behind her back.

  Tugging on the rope proved she was tied quite well, although it also brought all her memories back. They might be stupid little boys attacking a witch, but they knew how to tie someone up.

  She tried to move quietly so they wouldn’t realize she was awake. Not yet, at least. She wanted to have a few more moments to survey her surroundings.

  There was only one door into the cabin, and it appeared only two windows. She didn’t turn her head just yet, but that was her escape plan. She’d walk out those doors in about two seconds.

  The boys just didn’t know it yet.

  Keeping a witch in one place was a tough task, reserved for the best assassins. Usually, if a coven wanted to attack another witch, they sent someone who was the complete opposite in magic.

  These three fools didn’t know what she was capable of. They’d seen a bit of her magic, but they knew nothing about witches. They only thought they’d caught one.

  She whispered out a minor spell and felt the rope at her wrists fray, then release.

  She didn’t pull her arms forward, not yet. The boys still had a lesson to learn. First, she would gut them. Then, once they had fainted from pain, she would drink their souls and enjoy their lives for another three hundred years.

  She wondered if they’d taste the same. A bit of boyhood was still left in them, that always tasted like pond scum. A bit of man in them, that was more earthy and wood-like. Then there was always the guilt, the feeling that they deserved what they got, that tasted like bile.

  She’d gagged after eating their friends. They hadn’t tasted good, and she hadn’t eaten a human in a very long time. The two didn’t mix all that well.

  “I think she’s awake,” one boy muttered.

  “Nah, she’s just shifting in her sleep.”

  “Sleep?” She heard the rough sound of palm over hair. This one must be the redhead who had struck her. “I don’t know man, I hit her hard.”

  There was the guilt. That one would be particularly acidic. Oh well, she’d keep him down and the taste in her mouth would dull once she ate actual food.

  “Good! She admitted to killing Tommy and the other boys. You know the entire town spent days looking for them and all we had to do was go into the woods?” That must be the short one. He seemed like the ring leader.

  The first boy who had spoken, the blonde she assumed, replied. “Why do we even have her here? We should give her to the police. She admitted everything to us, like you said. That’s gotta be enough to put her in jail.”

  Yes, that was a lovely idea. No human jail could hold her. She’d show up at their windows in the middle of the night, scratching at the glass so they knew she wasn’t finished with them yet.

  “Because the police won’t do anything! She’s just going to lie to them and then we’ll be in the same place as Tommy and the boys.” The short one was correct. Maybe he was smarter than she gave him credit for.

  They would keep arguing if she let them, and she was tired of sitting on the rope.

  Morgan shifted more obviously and let out a theatrical groan.

  All the boys stopped talking. They even held their breath if her hearing was correct, before one of them stood up. Considering the heavy steps, she had to guess it was the redhead. His footsteps were unfamiliar. He’d run too fast for her to guess what the sound of his movements were like.

  He knelt in front of her. A thousand freckles dotted his nose. She would have thought him cute if she didn’t know the darkness lying in his soul. “We’ve got you all tied up, witch. There’s nowhere for you to run.”

  “You’re such a sweet, innocent boy,” she whispered, lies flowing from her tongue like wine from a bottle. “Why are you doing to this to me?”

  He cleared his throat. “Look, lady. I don’t want to hurt you. None of us do. Why did you have to go and kill our friends?”

  “Is that what this is?” Morgan wanted to poke a bit. For curiosity’s sake. “You want revenge?”

  The redhead wasn’t like the other two. The short one wanted to hurt people, she could see that in his eyes. His tall, handsome friend was merely a follower. But this one, he had a mind of his own.

  If she pulled at his soul just a bit more, he’d reveal so much more.

  Morgan released a tendril of magic through the floor. It wrapped around his ankle and underneath his clothing. The tiny spark of light would wiggle into his heart and soon he’d tell her all the things he didn’t want her to know.

  She asked again, “Do you really want to do this?”

  The boy shook his head, eyes glazing over with green magic. “No ma’am. I don’t want to hurt anybody and I feel awful bad I hit you on the head like I did.”

  “Hey!” A shout echoed behind her. “What are you doing to him?”

  “Nothing,” she murmured. “I just want to know if I should kill him.”

  The redhead shook his head, trying to clear the magic from his mind. “I don’t want to hurt anybody, Tony! I want to bring her to the cops, like Craig said.”

  “Shut up, you idiot! We’re not bringing her anywhere. We’re ending things now.”

  Morgan reached forward and touched a hand to the redhead’s face. She cupped his cheek and watched as he curved into the heat of her palm.

  Flashes of his life filled her mind. He was a respectful boy who lived alone with his mother. She worked too much, so he tried to do the man’s role in his family. But he was just a child, and he didn’t know what he was doing.

  Being around these two made him feel more like a man. They were puffed up with ill begotten pride. Every action they took made him feel more and more uncomfortable, but now he’d told them too much. They knew his mother liked to inhale white powder and that sometimes she hit him when he disappointed her. This made him less of a man. A woman overpowering him made him nothing more than a little boy. Didn’t it?

  “Sleep,” she murmured.

  He dropped to the floor like a stone. She let him fall. A few bruises would remind him not to mess with witches in the forest.

  She stood and turned to the boys at the back of the cabin. They both stood next to two chairs and an empty fireplace. No lights were on in the cabin, but that was better for her.

  The blonde looked at the door, then back at her. She snapped her fingers and pointed. “Don’t move, Craig.”

  “H-How do you know my name?” he stammered.

  Well, no one said they were bright. They had just heard their friend say their names, hadn’t they?

  She could scare the boys into wetting their pants, or she could take her own revenge. Morgan wasn’t sure which one seemed more attractive to her at the moment. The screams of her dying green children still echoed in her mind.

  Tony, the short squat one with a black soul, picked up a metal baseball bat that had been leaning against a chair. “Fine. We’ll finish this now.”

  “What do you think you’re doing with a bat?” she chuckled. “I’m a witch, sweetheart. That won’t do anything to me.”

  He reached up with his free hand and pulled out a necklace. A cross swung from the end of the chain. Gold and glimmering in the dim moonlight, it cast light beams all over the room. “You can’t touch me. I have God on my side.”

  She grinned. “That’s very cute. But God and I don’t talk much. We sorta have a deal. He turns a blind eye to magical creatures and we don’t tell you how many things live in the shadows.”

  Craig turned pale. “You mean, there’s more of you?”

  Time to frighten the
boys, she supposed. They were foolish and dumb, but perhaps they could be turned away from being so dangerous. Her revenge would be sweeter if it lasted throughout their lives, and besides, she still had four hundred years to live herself.

  “Everything you’ve always feared, they’re real. Witches. Vampires. Werewolves. All the stories humans tell are from truth. I’m sure your parents don’t believe in any magic, but I can assure you. It’s very real.”

  Tony scoffed and tightened his grip on the bat. “Sure, lady. Whatever story you want to tell to scare us, you can try. But we’ll still get revenge for our friends.”

  She let some of her power melt into the room. It chilled the air until every exhale fogged. They might not even feel the cold just yet, but it was an effect she was going for. They should think she was terrifying and shiver down to their bones with the knowledge they’d come across something impossible.

  “You can try to hold something like a shield, Tony. It won’t help.” Morgan flicked her fingers, and the bat went flying.

  It struck the wall with a clatter and fell to the floor. The boys stared at it with wide eyes.

  A part of her felt guilty. They were just children who thought they were doing the right thing. It made sense, in a twisted way.

  Their friends were dead. They’d caught the killer and had been raised on stories where children could kill villains. Harry Potter, Artemis Fowl, even Percy Jackson. All children who bested the bad guy.

  But that didn’t happen in real life. Sometimes children were caught in the web of an evil person.

  Morgan took a single step toward them and grinned as they retreated. “What were you going to do to me?”

  She sent tendrils of power out and wrapped them around Tony’s throat. They sank into his vocal cords and forced him to tell the truth. “I was going to convince them I wanted to kill you, but first I was going to finish what Tommy started.”

  “Which was?”

  “I wanted to make you scream,” he growled. “I don’t care how. If that meant doing what Tommy wanted to do, then I was going to do it.”

  He couldn’t even say the word rape. She dug into his mind and found the word itself was so vile to him, he didn’t even want to think about it. So he justified actions by pretending they were a punishment for evil people instead.

  “Get out of my head.” Tony’s eyes were wide and wild. “Why can I feel you in my head?”

  “It’s an unnerving feeling, isn’t it? To have someone else inside you without permission.”

  “This isn’t the same thing.” His words were frantic, but his body couldn’t move. She wasn’t letting him. Not yet.

  Craig moved to the corner of the room, pressing his back against the wall and shaking in fear. “Please, lady. Let us go.”

  “Were you going to let me go?” she asked, turning her gaze to him. “Or were you going to watch me bleed out because your friends are dead?”

  “You said you killed them,” he whispered, his voice shaking. “What else were we supposed to do?”

  Listen to her? Understand she had no choice but to protect herself, and sometimes safety ended in blood? Humans were fragile. They were so easy to break.

  She’d always tried to be kind to them. To understand that humans lived in a unique world, surrounded by a protective bubble that shielded them from creatures of the night. She stayed out of their way. She didn’t want them anywhere near her powers or her person.

  Morgan tightened her control over Tony, who struggled to get free. She pushed deeper into his mind and found out he’d been bullied as a child. This had made him mean because if he was stronger than the bullies then they’d leave him alone.

  But that darkness had sunken into his soul. Now, he enjoyed hurting people. Too much.

  “You never meant to hurt that girl,” she whispered. Power flooded her vision in a veil of white. “You could taste the blood on her tongue after you hit her. But you hit her too many times, didn’t you? And your father covered it up because he’s important in town. The mayor, is it?”

  “What are you talking about?” Tony growled.

  “You knocked out three of her teeth because she made you angry. Your father paid for surgery and her parents are absent, so they didn’t care. But you liked it. You’d do it again.” Morgan could feel her own teeth loosening as she relived the tragic moments. “That’s why you wanted to hurt me. You want to see if still feels good to make women scream.”

  “Get out of my head.”

  Craig shifted further away from them both, closer to the door. “Tony, what’s she saying man? I thought Angie fell?”

  “She did,” he growled. “This bitch is lying.”

  Morgan stood so close their noses almost touched. “Witch. Get it right, Tony.”

  Craig bolted out the door and into the night. That was all right. He’d tell people of a witch, but she couldn’t go home, anyway. He was just a kid.

  This one... He wasn’t a child at all. Not anymore.

  “There’s a darkness in you,” she told him. “I can feel it. It’s spreading through your body like a cancer.”

  “Get away from me.”

  “No,” she muttered. “I don’t think I will.”

  Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a shadow over the window. Morgan thought maybe the blonde had returned, so she diverted her attention away from the man with the wicked soul.

  It wasn’t a person standing outside the window. Vines shattered the glass and crawled through the window moments before the entire room exploded with green magic.

  18

  Liam desperately tried to see through the haze of emerald coating his vision. The green magic inside him boiled so hot his skin felt as though it might peel off. He didn’t know what was underneath if the magic finally succeeded.

  He’d tracked her all the way to this fishing village full of disgusting humans. How, he wasn’t sure. Something inside her called out to him. Something familiar to him.

  He could feel her deep inside his chest. His own magic didn’t call to him, but her magic did. It bubbled like liquid silver, deep in his belly. He’d touched it with his mind as he traveled, rolling it like a worry stone.

  The thought of her leaving him for someone else enraged him. The elemental wanted to rip out of his physical form and devour their souls. How dare they touch her? How dare they think a human was worthy of her love?

  The dingy window hid many details from his sight, but not all of them. Someone had touched her. He could smell the blood in her hair and could see the rope burns on her wrist through the glass.

  He let them talk; he listened to their words and even stepped out of the way as the blonde man ran past him. He’d get the boy later. A burr had stuck to the boy’s pant leg, and he’d find it was impossible to remove.

  If the Mountain King wanted to find a human, he would do so.

  But then he’d heard the words the other one said. The one who threatened Liam’s witch. The boy who wasn’t a boy at all, but a young man coming into an adult life full of hatred and anger.

  He heard the threat on the man’s tongue. How he had intended to hear Morgan scream and the Mountain King finally agreed with the elemental magic within him.

  Humans were filth. They had destroyed the human realm and now they wished to destroy the woman who he valued more than anything.

  If this boy thought destruction was his power, then he was about to meet a faerie who could do so much more.

  Green magic flowed off him like a deer shedding its antlers. Vines crept in through the glass windows, shattering them and absorbing the sharp shards. Thorns grew all along their lengths.

  The boy gave a frightened scream. Good. He should feel fear when he witnessed genuine power.

  More vines grew out of the ground and twisted down through the chimney. They reached for the boy whose death would be too swift. With one final pulse of magic, Liam released the elemental to do whatever damage it wished.

  He only vaguely heard Morgan’s frightene
d scream. Didn’t she know the magic wouldn’t hurt her? It wouldn’t touch a single hair on her head. Both he and the elemental agreed.

  She was precious to them.

  Eventually, the magic drained. The elemental was appeased and retreated into the safety of Liam’s mind. It wouldn’t return for a while, now that it had finally feasted. He hadn’t allowed the creature out for a very long time. Even in his own realm, it had only the briefest hints of freedom.

  He’d let the elemental do whatever it wanted. He feared what destruction he would find in the shack.

  Liam couldn’t see through the windows anymore. Vines and roots tangled in place of the glass. Knotted and gnarled, they glistened with red blood.

  He picked his way over the land that rolled with more plants than a forest, all in a single space. He made his way to where the door once stood and waved a hand. The roots released their locked position and allowed him into the shack.

  The boyish man was frozen in the back of the room. Roots and vines impaled his body, at least thirty in just his torso. Thousands of tiny spikes poked through his arms and neck. He was barely alive, just enough to gurgle in fear as Liam strode toward him.

  He stood before the man and shook his head. “There are worse things in the world than a witch. You shouldn’t have touched her.”

  He turned away from the sight, disappointed in humanity all over again.

  Memories flickered to life in his head like lightning bugs coming out at dusk. He’d left this place in disappointment of what humanity had become. They destroyed, they maimed, they hacked away at the world. They didn’t appreciate it.

  Liam had felt the burn of hatred in his heart. All those years ago, nearly a thousand now, and he still felt the same way. He was still so disappointed in the creatures who had the ability to do so much and instead, they just ruined everything they touched.

  Far away from him, Morgan knelt on the floor. She covered something with her own body.

  He approached and realized she’d created a cage of vines, protecting something from his magic. Glittering sparks surrounded whatever she’d kept in the cage.

  Shockingly, the elemental awoke. He waved a hand with its overwhelming magic, and the roots released their hold. Beneath them, one of the boys laid asleep. His stark red hair glowed in the moonlight.