Lindal pulled in a breath, then let it out. “Come here,” he said, keeping his voice low and free of tension. “I can’t talk to you from there. You did want to talk to me, didn’t you?”
The dryad nodded. Lindal decided it was a ‘he’. He crept closer, almost sidling like a wild creature…which he was. Lindal had never met a tree dryad before. They were creatures of Earth only. There were none on his home world because the trees there belonged to the Elves.
The dryad moved between the rough undergrowth built up around the tower, until he was three feet away, then his courage seemed to desert him. He stopped, half-turned so that one foot was pointing back toward the trees. It was a flight position. He was ready to bolt.
Lindal gave him a small smile. “You’re very brave. Something must be badly wrong if you risk exposure like this.”
The dryad nodded, his eyes on Lindal’s.
“Can you speak?”
Again, the nod.
Lindal waited.
“You are Elvish,” the dryad said, forcing Lindal to reassess her gender. Her voice was light, almost bodiless. Like the wind in the trees.
“I am Elvish.”
“I do not know any Elves.”
“You’re a first for me, too.”
“You speak as human.”
“I have lived among humans—I have lived as human—for several years.”
“You have not been discovered?”
“I have friends who protect me.”
“From the Grimoré.”
Lindal drew in a sharp breath. “Yes,” he agreed, letting it out, but his heart was running heavily. “They’re here, aren’t they?”
The dryad shifted on her toes, as if even contemplating the Grimoré was more than she could bear. “Their whelps are here.”
“The Vampeen?”
She nodded. “They grow here.”
“They’re born here?” Lindal was startled.
“They grow here. They only grow.”
The dryad could speak English, but her vocabulary was limited. “Grow like trees,” Lindal interpreted. “They thrive here?”
Again, the nod. “While their masters are elsewhere, they grow stronger and bigger.”
“The Grimoré farm them out here to feed and grow stronger,” Lindal guessed.
“Yes, feed. Feed.” She repeated the word fiercely, like it was exactly what she meant. Then distress seemed to erupt from her like radiation. Lindal could feel it and his heart lurched.
“They feed on your kind?”
“They feed…on all.” She looked at him, her expression sad. “You have the mark. You know them. You stop them.”
“You can see a mark?”
“Is here.” She touched her chest. “Here.” She patted her cheek and Lindal guessed she meant in his head. His heart and head had a mark that others could see. Others who were sensitive to their world. Well, that wasn’t a big surprise. Whatever forces had foreseen the coming of the Grimoré and orchestrated the prophecies had anticipated almost every need.
“You need my help with the vampeen that move among your trees?” he asked.
“We are faster.” She smiled in a way that seemed to be full of mischief. “Silent like trees.”
The dryads out-ran the vampeen, who probably clomped through the trees like wild boar on a scent trail, ramming down anything that got in their way.
She stepped closer, this time turning her body to face him and looked up at him. She wasn’t much shorter than him, but three of her could fit into the same space he was taking up. Her eyes were the same brown as her skin. “You. Me.” Her hand moved between them, the long fingers pointing to each of them in turn. “Together?”
Lindal puzzled it out. “Friends?”
“Together,” she repeated. Then her fingers shaped a circle. “Grove.”
Together. Grove. A group of trees. “We’re on the same side,” Lindal told her. “I will help you if you tell me what you need.”
“My friend. Go with you.”
“A dryad?”
She shook her head.
“Someone not as fast as you?”
A nod.
“Someone the vampeen can reach?”
Another nod, this one more vigorous. She held up her hand, above her head, the wrist bent so that her hand was flat, facing the sky. Then she called out something. Lindal couldn’t say for sure it was even a language. It didn’t seem to have any syllables.
Then she smiled.
A tiny creature appeared on her hand, settling onto the platform with a glitter of gossamer wings.
Lindal stayed very still in case he startled it, his mind racing. The little lady walked to the edge of the dryad’s fingers and bent over from the waist to examine Lindal with big eyes. She was a human woman in perfect miniature, except for the wings that stirred on her back. Her long loose hair lifted at the movement of the wings. So did the very fine robe she wore, the hem fluttering. She was standing perfectly still, but she seemed to be in constant motion. She was barely two and a half inches high.
“What is she?” Lindal spoke softly.
“Ailill.”
Lindal recognized the name. It was very old and very Irish. Ailill were elf-kind, except that no Irish clans had ever had contact with elves. So the word actually meant… “Pixie,” Lindal interpreted. “The vampeen hunt them? What for? They aren’t even a bite’s worth.”
The pixie gave a soft shriek and disappeared and the dryad took a step back, her arm lowering.
“What did I say?” Lindal asked. He studied the dryad. “What do they do to the pixies?”
The dryad’s eyes filled with tears. “Play,” she whispered.
Sport, Lindal interpreted. The vampeen hunted them for sport.
The dryad turned on her toes and for the first time he noticed that she wore no shoes. She pointed to her back. Then she turned to look at him and held up a hand, one long finger pointing up into the sky. With her other hand, she made a plucking motion toward her upheld finger.
Linda’s heart gave another sickening shift. The vampeen caught the pixies in some way that defeated their ability to teleport, which is what he guessed the dryad’s friend had done a moment ago. Then they plucked their wings off.
“Tell her to come back. I’ll take her with me. I’ll protect her.” He had no idea how he could do that when he lived in New York. He couldn’t walk down Fifth Avenue with a real pixie in his hand. But he would worry about it later.
The dryad looked up at the sky. Lindal looked, too.
The pixie appeared in the air just above him, her wings beating fast as she hovered. She looked at the dryad, who made some more of the odd sounds she had used to call her in the first place. Then the pixie turned in mid-air to study Lindal.
Curiosity touch him. Pleasure that he was friend to Clídna and wanted to help. But Ferr was sad because she had to leave her friends behind…
Lindal gasped. You are telepathic? He made the words form in his mind.
Happy excitement reached him. The pixie, Ferr, dropped down so that she was at eye level. Her head tilted as she looked at him with her big eyes. I like talking.
To Ferr, who didn’t speak any other way than mentally, this would be talking.
With the same breath-robbing abruptness as before, Ferr gave a soft cry and disappeared. Clídna, the dryad, took off with the suddenness of a startled deer, racing across the open ground with vision-blurring speed to disappear between the trees.
Then Lindal heard the sound that had alarmed them. It was a vehicle engine, working hard, in low gear. It revved and died off, the sound muffled by the trees, but clear enough for him to guess it was a heavy engine with six or eight cylinders. Something powerful.
There was a break in the trees almost directly opposite the bald patch in the growth around the tower. That would be what was left of the road.
Lindal considered disappearing himself. But he didn’t know if Ferr would be able to find him again if he moved. Unlike Dryads,
pixies were as much a myth to elves as to humans. He didn’t know anything about them. But their fate at the hands of the vampeen infuriated him.
Even as he was deciding, the car appeared between the trees, a plume of dust rising behind it. It was the Sheriff’s cruiser, the gold in the badge on the side of the car flashing in the morning sunlight.
That decided the matter. Lindal stayed where he was and watched the car slide and swerve as it made fresh tracks in the knee-high grasses, bumping over hidden holes and mounds in the rocky dirt. He couldn’t see through the windshield clearly because the sun was bouncing off it, but he thought there might be two people in the car.
Sheriff Wisherd had pricked his curiosity, last night. He had asked questions that made Lindal wonder if he had been able to hear his thoughts. Law enforcement types were generally not sensitive. They couldn’t afford to be. Blake, the trinities’ solitary NYPD representative, seemed to be a rare exception although he couldn’t read thoughts—not directly. He could read his trinity’s emotions through their shared bond, but not actual thoughts.
So Wisherd was a mental question mark and now here he was. At least, Lindal assumed it was Wisherd. It was unlikely to be one of his deputies.
The car came to a skidding halt on the hardpan, dust billowing in front of it. Lindal waved his hand, trying to not to breathe any of it in.
Rhys Wisherd got out of the car and came striding toward Lindal, leaving the car door open. “I need to speak to you.” His voice was harsh.
“Clearly. You’ve gone to some effort to track me down.” Now the car wasn’t sitting directly in the sun, Lindal could see through the windscreen. There was someone else there. They were in the back seat, their arm held up toward the top of the door. Cuffs? “Who did you arrest? Why did you bring them here?”
Rhys looked surprised. “He’s not arrested. But that’s part of what I want to talk to you about.”
“If he’s not arrested, then shouldn’t you turn him lose? You’re risking all sorts of human rights violations.”
Frustration touched Rhys’ face. Then he dug in his shirt pocket. “Fine. He can be part of the conversation. You can figure out what the hell he’s talking about.” He stalked back to the car with angry strides, opened the back door and reached inside to unlock the cuffs.
Then he helped the man out, a hand under his elbow. He didn’t let go of his arm, but pulled him over to where Lindal was standing in the shade cast by the tower.
Lindal studied the man and a cold sensation prickled along the base of his spine. There was nothing openly obvious that would make it stand out among humans, but the crawling uneasiness Lindal felt was undeniable. He spread his feet better and brought his hand up to rest against his waist. It was the best position from which to drop his wrist and trigger the spring-loaded holster strapped to his forearm. It would deliver the carbon-bladed knife into his hand in less than a second.
The creature was studying Lindal just as curiously. When they got close enough, it smiled. “I haven’t seen an Elf for fifty years or more. Then the rumors are true, you are back on Earth.”
Lindal was shocked. If this creature was what he thought he was, then he knew better than to speak about non-humans in front of a human. He glanced at Rhys, then back at the creature.
The creature smiled. His human fascia was very attractive. “There’s something odd happening. He’s part of it.” He nodded at Rhys, who was looking from one to the other.
“Elf?” Rhys said, sounding puzzled.
Lindal cleared his throat. “I can’t pin you down. You’ve got all the hallmarks of a demon, but you’re not one. Not exactly.”
Rhys looked at the creature. “What the fuck?”
“Sheriff,” Lindal began. “This is going to be hard to swallow—”
He was interrupted by a soft squealing alarm, right by his ear. Then a tug on his hair. The tugging shifted his hair away from his ear, then the tugging started on his ear. Frantic thoughts entered his mind. Chief among them was a mental image of teeth. Lots of elongated and pointed yellow teeth, crossing each other, leaning at angles, but wickedly sharp.
“Vampeen,” Lindal said. “They’ve tracked you here. They’re coming.” He dropped his knife into his hand while the demon looked around wildly, alarm painting his face.
Rhys held up a hand. “Just slow down, will you? Use small words.”
“We don’t have time to slow down and explain it to you,” the demon told him. “You’d better get your gun out, Sheriff. You’re going to need it.”
* * * * *
Around ten the next morning, Cora put aside the hand lathe and headed into the kitchen and pulled out all the equipment and supplies to bake bread. She found baking a pleasant activity but what she secretly enjoyed the most about it was the sounds of appreciation her neighbors made when they smelled the newly-baked loaves. The expressions on their faces when they ate them were wonderful.
Cora made the loaves ready to put into the oven. The timing was good. Her two neighbors would soon be stopping for lunch and would be able to enjoy fresh bread with their meal.
She had just put the bread into the oven when the feeling washed over her like a wave of warm, fetid air.
She looked up and around her kitchen, her senses kicking into overdrive. There was a threat, her gut was telling her. But nothing had changed in the house, except that it was broad daylight outside and the sunlight was spilling through the front windows onto the carpet. She hadn’t noticed the dawn, except in an instinctive way that had barely registered on her consciousness.
Cora got to her feet and stretched her hearing to its fullest. Nothing was moving, not even Meta, who tended to rattle around her townhouse on Sundays, cleaning with vigor.
Cora swiveled and looked at the window. Through the glass, she could hear that quintessential sound of summer—a lawn mower. It was half a block away. Then there was traffic on the street. Kids in the park across the road. Dogs in the off-leash area, about a mile away. Their barking and voices were very distinct.
But nothing was a threat. Nothing was out of the ordinary.
So why was her heart beating so hard? If she didn’t get it under control, the adrenaline would overwhelm her. She was already starting to shake.
Then another wave of the whatever-it-was swept over her. This time, she could feel the taste of coppery spit in her mouth. She was within an inch of flat out panic, the human sort of panic.
In her mind she heard a wordless, voiceless cry for help and without thinking, she leaned toward the silent call.
Sunlight coalesced around her. Trees, wide-open sky, a breeze on her face and the sharp, astringent smell of pine. She thrust out a foot to keep her balance and looked around wildly. The panic was close.
There were three other people already in the clearing and she recognized the old fire tower behind them. She was on Presque Isle. They were all looking at her with odd expressions. One of them was Rhys Wisherd. The other was the man—the creature—from last night.
“I jumped here?” she asked. She had heard of such things from older mentors, but never someone jumping blindly to a location they had never been to before, without knowing what was already in the space they were aiming for.
The tall, blond man moved toward her. He was holding a black knife down low and there was something on his shoulder. A small creature, hanging on to his ear….
“I will explain everything later,” he said. “Right now, we’re about to be attacked by vampeen. You need to take these two and jump back to where you came from. To safety.” He looked over his shoulder. “Both of you, come over here.”
“And leave you alone?” Rhys sounded offended.
“It won’t be for long,” the blond man said. “She can come back and collect me. Then I’ll know where you are.” He gave a curiously mischievous smile. “I’ve had practice dealing with these things. I’ll be fine.”
Low growling came from the trees and it was a feral sound that made the hairs on the back of
Cora’s neck stand up. She held out her arms. She had dozens of questions. Hundreds of them. But vampeen, she knew about. Despite her best efforts to not get involved, she had heard the talk. She suddenly didn’t want to see one. Questions could wait. “Come here,” she demanded. Now that the blond man had suggested she could take two of them with her, she knew she could do it. She knew what to do.
Lindal pushed the creature toward her. “Go,” he said roughly.
Rhys moved over to her side. “I have no idea what is happening here, but…” He tucked his arm around her waist and looked at the other man. “Hurry up,” he snapped.
The man stepped into the arc of her other arm and she stiffened, waiting for the touch of cold, but it didn’t come. All she felt was warm, pliable flesh beneath the leather.
She gripped both their waists and took a breath. “Hold on,” she told them and thought about her house that she had just left behind. The sun on the carpet, the sound of the mower. Then she mentally leaned forward and the air around them changed once more.
It was her kitchen. She turned to Rhys. “Give me your gun.”
He was looking around the room, like a man that who starting to put things together. Then he looked at her. “What?”
She reached for his holster and he gripped her wrist. “Hey!”
“I have to go back and get the other one. I won’t jump back there without a weapon. Give it to me.”
“Give her the gun,” the other man said quietly. “She’ll bring it back.”
Rhys let go of her wrist, so she pulled the gun out and let it hang from her fingers.
“You know how to use it?” She could almost see Rhys’ sheriff role taking over, as he started to worry about a gun in the hands of an untrained civilian.
“Yes, I know how to use it.” She mentally leaned forward again. It was already easier to do.
The clearing formed around her once more and this time, the snarling and growling was all around her. She lifted the gun as the ugly creatures turned to spot her, their jaws open, the crooked teeth gleaming from the saliva coating them. Their eyes were blood red and glowing. They looked vaguely human, but had sharply pointed ears and were bent over like dogs, their hands supporting them on the ground.
The Second Trinity Page 5