Ring of ruin, p.29
Ring of Ruin, page 29
part #1 of BOOK THREE Series
“I take it you were given special compensation from the government?”
Rogan snorted. “The government erased the whole situation from practical memory. This place doesn’t exist. For all intents and purposes, neither do Alan nor I.”
I glanced around at the man behind me. “Does that mean you’re the teenager they found unconscious?”
“Yes. And my parents were never found and didn’t even get the benefit of a tombstone. Many here didn’t.”
The anger absent from Rogan’s voice vibrated through Alan’s. And again, I couldn’t help feel a sliver of sympathy.
“Why bring me here, Rogan? If you just wanted me for insurance against anything Lugh might do, you could have tied me up and left me in the car.”
“Given your propensity to escape, that would have been unwise.” He cast a glance over his shoulder, and there was something in his eyes—a disconnect or dispassion that I’d never seen before—that chilled me to the bone. “And who said your presence had anything to do with Lugh?”
That chill got stronger. I swallowed heavily and somehow said, “I don’t understand.”
“Now that,” he said, almost jovially, “is a lie.”
And it was. I fought back the rising tide of fear and said, “You don’t need me as bait, Rogan. Seryn can open the door for you.”
“I don’t need her to open the door. It’s already open—has been since that fuckwit tried to use his so-called auditory prowess to permanently lock the thing.”
“Then what the fuck do you want with me?”
“Perhaps Lugh got both the brains and the brawn in the family.” He shook his head. “As you have already noted, the Annwfyn will attack the minute I step through that gateway. So, a distraction will be needed, and you will provide that very nicely indeed.”
“If you think I’m going anywhere near that gateway—”
“You won’t have any choice. The drug we gave you has not only severed your connection to the wind but will also make you compliant to our will.”
So, I’d been right—the wall between me and the storm was a drug. Question was, would it leave my system in time, or would I be forced to fight this battle without my biggest weapon?
“Did you kill Vincentia?”
He sighed. “Regrettably, yes. It is never wise to threaten someone when you don’t hold the appropriate cards and prove incapable of even retrieving them.”
Meaning the Codex, no doubt.
“And the singing bowl? Why frame Lugh like that when you needed us to keep researching the Claws?”
“That was not my doing, Bethany. As you said, it was not in my best interest, and I was as annoyed as you when the council called a halt to the Claws search. Luckily, your brother has a pleasing tendency to disobey such rulings.”
Overhead, thunder rumbled again, a deeper, angrier sound. I filled my lungs with the storm’s sharpness, and her energy, her power, rolled through me, making my skin and muscles tingle, and my heartbeat abnormally loud. Then it went deeper, blazing through my veins, chasing fire, easing pain. I hoped it would be enough. Hoped it would allow me to use my broken arm and grip my knife...
Then the wind snapped around me and brought with it a familiar voice. The storm’s force will burn the drug from your system, but it will take a little time. You must stop him regardless. He cannot be allowed to take the Claws into Annwfyn.
I cautiously wrapped my fingers around the Eye. If you and your fellow gods didn’t want the fucking Claws in the hands of the Annwfyn—or anyone else, for that matter—you should have destroyed the damn things long ago.
Some of us tried came her response. But there are two sides to every game, and our opposition currently has the upper hand. It falls to you to stop it.
And if I don’t?
There is no don’t. There is only do.
I was tempted to point out it was unfair to expect me to succeed where a bevy of gods had failed, but I suspected she’d simply ignore that.
The wind fell away again. I had no doubt she was keeping an eye on the situation and couldn’t help but wonder if she’d provide any assistance if the situation went ass up.
We reached the mine’s entrance. It was in reasonably good condition considering just how much of the countryside around these mountains had actually slipped.
Rogan stopped, held up a warning finger, and then began to spell. Or at least, that’s what I presumed he was doing with all the finger movements and whisper-soft murmurings.
He made a casting motion into the mine and then, after a moment, nodded sharply. “Right, there’s a secondary noise barrier in place over the gate, but if they linger nearby, they will see your body heat, so keep out of the direct line of sight. Seryn, I’ll need you to monitor the ground and tell me if there’s any movement. Alan, when I give the word, toss our bait.”
Said bait wasn’t going to go quietly, but I didn’t say anything. Better they think I remained incapable of doing anything more than what I was told. Which might well be the truth, given I hadn’t yet tried to do anything else.
Rogan turned and walked into the mine. Seryn followed. When I didn’t move, Alan pushed me forward. Thankfully, we didn’t have to go very far to find the gate. Its frame was large and ornately carved with symbols and what looked like glyphs, and it dominated the far wall of the manmade cavern. There was no actual door though, just a weirdly viscous blackness sitting within the frame. It was a void that led to hell itself—if hell was a realm where humans were treated like cattle.
The sword and the crown lay on the ground in front of the gate. Rogan stopped in front of them and rather reverently drew the serpent ring from his pocket, placing it beside the other two Claws.
Seryn walked past him to the left side of the gate, pressing one hand against the ornately carved stone and the other on the cavern wall. She closed her eyes and, after a moment, nodded.
Alan pulled me to a halt and remained close behind me. Bad move, I thought, but resisted the immediate temptation to kick him in the nuts. If I acted too soon, they would knock me out. If I moved too late, I would die.
Trouble was, lightning still burned through my veins, which suggested the drug remained active. And I couldn’t risk calling my knives to me until Rogan had begun the ritual or spell or whatever the fuck he had to do to claim the Claws.
I flexed my fingers again, my left hand less responsive than the right, and tried to calm the growing sense of doom. Patience; I just needed patience.
But the gate’s viscous center now stirred in a sluggish circle, and I couldn’t escape the sudden notion that the Annwfyn were coming.
Rogan began his spell. The crown rose, lifted by invisible fingers, and was placed upon his head. The spell’s power ratcheted up; dark purple fire ran down the fuller of the black sword in response. As it was lifted from the ground, I closed my eyes and reached for the knives. The Eye pulsed and a heartbeat later, the heavy weight of steel landed in my hands.
It hurt.
I didn’t fucking care.
The sword lay in Rogan’s hand and the ring was rising toward his waiting finger.
Time was up.
I dropped to my knees, spun around, and thrust a knife through Alan’s knee, twisting it sideways and slicing away a good chunk of his kneecap in the process. He screamed and fell, but somehow gathered air and cast it at me, throwing me across the cavern. I hit the wall with a grunt, and felt the earth moving at my back as Seryn tried to encase me. I rolled away, a scream tearing up my throat as my weight rested briefly on my broken arm. Caught a brief glimpse of the ring sliding over Rogan’s hand and knew time was up. I surged to my feet and ran straight at him, knife raised, ready to strike.
Air hit me again, lifting me up, moving me forward. Toward the gate, toward the Annwfyn gathering on the other side.
I screamed in denial and reached for the lightning that burned through my system. It erupted from my skin, a blanket of brightness that flung itself at the bleeding man behind me, covering him, binding him, burning him. He opened his mouth, but no sound came out, the flesh at his throat sloughing away, taking with it all ability to speak. His leash of air disintegrated, dropping me hard. I landed on my hands and knees and white-hot pain erupted, flashing up my broken arm and rolling through the rest of me, momentarily threatening to steal consciousness.
I sucked in air, fighting the blackness, fighting the bile that rose up my throat. Air whispered a warning, and I looked up. A massive boulder was coming straight at me.
I flung up a hand, made a fist of air, and knocked the boulder to one side. It crashed against the cavern wall and exploded, sending razor-sharp shards flying through the air. I caught them and flung them back at Seryn.
She slapped the wall, and a river of stone wrapped around her, protecting her from most of the projectiles. Then that wall exploded, and the projectiles were heading back toward me. I cast a shield of air in front of me, forcing them to either side.
Movement, light, caught my eye. I twisted around, but not quickly enough. Lightning hit me, burned me, even as air grabbed me and tossed me forward. Past Rogan, past Seryn, toward the gate.
I screamed another denial and, as my feet and legs slipped into viscous blackness, stabbed wildly at the wall with the knife. It slid into stone as easily as it did flesh, and I stopped with a suddenness that just about yanked my arm out of its socket. On the far side of the soupy blackness, hands grabbed my legs—clawed hands, greedy hands, trying to pull me all the way in even as the heat of lightning arced toward me again. I raised the other knife, let the lightning hit its tip. Let it rip through the blade and into me, then turned it around and flung it back at the storm mage. It incinerated him in an instant.
My grip on the knife hilt slipped against the pressure the Annwfyn were asserting. I twisted around and pointed the other knife at the doorway and unleashed another bolt of lightning. It hit the wall and broke apart. Flesh could get through but nothing else, it seemed.
Then the stone around my anchor began to melt. Seryn. Fury hit, as deep and as dangerous as the storm that rumbled outside. I called to the air, grabbed Seryn, and tossed her into the blackness behind me, aiming her at whoever—whatever—had my legs.
It worked. The minute I was released, I jerked my feet free, yanked the knife from the stone, then dropped to the ground and rolled away from the gate. And for too many seconds, couldn’t do anything more than simply suck in air and fight the blackness that threatened to consume me.
Everything hurt. Everything ached. Burned.
The lightning. It was once again trapped within my flesh.
The answer, the master of all storms had said, will lie in using a conductor to both call down and disperse the storms.
The knives... I thrust one into the ground and imagined all the heat, all the fury, that boiled through me leeching down into it. The knife began to glow a bloody hue as the heat was channeled from my flesh into the soil, making it uncomfortably warm.
The burning stopped, but it wasn’t over yet.
I forced my head up. Saw a blur of light. Unnatural light. Light that burned with the force of the sun.
Rogan, running for the gate.
I thrust up and threw myself at him in a last-ditch effort to trip him up and stop him entering the gate.
I failed.
He simply leapt over the top of me and plunged into the blackness. I thrust to my feet but didn’t move. I simply stood there, weaving like a drunkard, bound to the spot by the morbid desire to see what happened next.
For several minutes, nothing did. Then an invisible fist of power hit me, lifting me up and casting me backward. I had a brief glimpse of shredded black flags, of an impossibly airy tunnel, the bloody remains of a woman, and finally a ball of fierce white light in the middle of which stood a man. A skeletal man who wore a glowing crown and who gripped a black sword lodged deep into the earth and who screamed, endlessly screamed, while a golden serpent with glowing green eyes flowed around him, consuming the burning figures that threw themselves at the united Claws in a desperate attempt to smother and stop...
I hit the ground and rolled down the hill, deep into the forest, deep into the new growth. Heard the songs of the trees and felt soft layers of leaves and limbs wrap around me, cocooning me, protecting me.
I was safe.
I could let go.
Unconsciousness swamped me, and I knew no more.
Epilogue
I woke to a soft, rhythmic beating. I listened for a very long time, comforted by its presence and the fact that I still had a heart and pulse to beat.
That I hadn’t ended up as nothing more than bits of chewed-up meat in some Annwfyn’s stomach was a miracle in itself... Then the memories of those last few desperate minutes rose, along with one inescapable fact.
I’d failed.
Rogan hadn’t.
He’d taken the Claws into Annwfyn and unleashed their power. I had no idea if it would indeed stop them or even destroy them... was it even possible to destroy a world that was a shadow of our own without affecting our own?
Only time—and maybe the gods themselves—could answer that question.
I opened my eyes. Lugh was asleep in a chair next to the hospital bed, his big feet propped on the end, his arms crossed and head tilted back. I had no idea how he could sleep soundly enough to snore in that sort of position, but as he’d no doubt say, he’d probably slept in worse.
If he’d been injured in the rollover, there was no sign of it. But given I was in hospital, it was more than likely that even if he had been battered and bruised, he would have been healed by now.
But he wasn’t the only one in the room. Darby stood on the other side, checking and recording my vital signs.
“Hey,” I said softly.
“Hey,” she replied. “Glad to see you’re finally awake.”
I raised an eyebrow. “How long have I been out?”
“A couple of days. We fixed all the breaks easy enough, but it’s taken longer to replenish fluids and nutrients. Whatever you did up there basically caused your body to waste away.”
“I used the lightning.”
“Didn’t Beira warn you against that?”
“Yep. But it was either that or become an Annwfyn’s lunch. How did I get here?”
“How do you think?” Darby motioned toward Lugh with her chin. “That big lug found you and brought you here.”
“The big lug resents being called a big lug,” he grumbled. He opened his eyes and studied me. “Well, at least you look less like a skeleton and more like your regular self. You had me worried for a while there.”
I smiled and lightly placed my hand over his. “I’m going to be around to give you hell for centuries yet, I promise you that.”
“I’ll hold you to that promise, dear sister.”
“Now that Lugh’s awake, I best get back to my other patients.” Darby squeezed my arm lightly. “I’ll check on you again later, okay?”
She blew Lugh a kiss and then headed out the door. He watched until she’d disappeared and then returned his attention to me.
“As to how we found you…” He smiled. “Rogan got rid of his phone so we couldn’t trace him but he forgot the GPS in his car. Sgott tracked it to Pynwffynnon, and we all converged on the place.”
“All?” I said, raising an eyebrow.
“Sgott and about a dozen of his people, Cynwrig and as many of his people he could gather from the immediate area, and of course me and Mathi. We came prepared for a fight and instead we found a goddamn disaster zone.”
I frowned. “What do you mean?”
“The gate is gone, all that remains of the mountain is a crater, and Pynwffynnon is a smoking ruin. It’s almost as if the place was hit by some sort of heat bomb.”
I remembered the heat wave that had tossed me from the cavern. “Rogan got through the gate and used the Claws. It sent a blast of heat through both worlds.”
“Ah,” he said softly. “When we found you, you were wrapped in the limbs of multiple trees, and they were singing to you. I suspect it was their energy that kept you alive.”
“I remember their song,” I said. “They were determined death would not touch them again.”
“And it didn’t,” he said. “I don’t know how or why, but the forest wasn’t affected by the heat that destroyed everything else. Mathi reckons the trees that survived or grew out of the destruction caused by Aubrey’s Key have developed a resistance to heat and magic.”
More than a resistance, I suspected, given the way they’d enclosed me. “Speaking of Cynwrig and Mathi, where are they?”
“They were both called to a council meeting. Apparently, there’s been a development with the missing hoard.”
“They’ve found it?”
“I have no idea.” He grimaced and levered his feet off the bed. “There has, however, been a secondary development, one that affects us directly.”
I studied his expression and didn’t for one second like the seriousness there. “They’ve found Aunt Riayn’s body?”
“No.” He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a small red envelope. “It’s this.”
“Oh, fuck.”
“Yeah,” he said grimly. “The pixie council has reached a decision regarding your punishment.”
“And they asked you to deliver it? Bastards.”
“We haven’t many living relatives left, so I guess they had no other choice. At least it’s not a knife.”
“I don’t find that at all comforting.”
“You should, because that option was probably on the table, even if not for as many years as Aunt Riayn.”
He held the envelope out. I didn’t take it.
“You haven’t read it?”
“It’s sealed with pixie magic. Only you can open it.”
Which meant he had tried. I took a deep breath and then gingerly took the damn thing. Gold dust was pooled around the pointed section of the seal. I hesitated, then pressed my finger against it. The dust disappeared, and the rectangular flap opened. Inside was a folded piece of red paper.
