The duelist 12, p.20
The Duelist 12, page 20
“Not one step closer,” he warned. “Or I’ll gut everyone in this room and save you for last. You can die with your wife’s blood on your hands.”
“Running scared, Kavo?” I taunted. “Not like you. Or have you finally realized you can’t hope to beat me?”
“Don’t flatter yourself,” he scoffed, but was I imagining things, or did I see the barest hint of worry in his eyes? He knew I was a real adversary, he’d said as much that I was the first real challenge he’d encountered in years. Maybe he was starting to realize just what that meant. “I have better things to do than indulge your petty grudges. We’ll have our battle, Brightwood, but this isn’t it.”
“Tell me,” I said. “What god do you pray to?”
“Gods?” Kavo asked, and he let out a laugh. “I’ve never bothered with such useless things. I am my own power. The only decider of my fate.”
“I’ll keep that in mind when I kill you, ” I said. I thought about attacking him then, but he wasn’t scared enough, not yet. I needed him desperate and distracted.
But here, now, with Amaya and Vel-Rala, I was too exposed. We all were.
“You do that,” Kavo answered before he lifted his hands, and I felt myself being physically forced back by some invisible barrier.
I wasn’t too worried about that until I felt something warm in my pocket and reached into my pants to pull out the note Kavo had left in my bedroom only a few days previously.
“Oh, shit--”
I didn’t even let myself say the entire sentence before I flung the note away from myself, and it burst into flames and took our best chance at finding Kavo with it.
“No!”
I charged toward the barrier at the same time as Sinopa, and the pair of us collided with an invisible barrier. I saw Kavo laugh from behind it, but I heard no sound, and he walked away and left Leda to trail behind him like a dog.
“Bastard!” I shouted, even though I doubted Kavo could hear me, but it made me feel better.
“Don’t be too disheartened, Alex,” Sinopa advised me. “He left without Amaya and Vel-Rala, and the fact that he left at all means he knows you’re a real threat. He’s scared of you.”
“Not scared enough,” I muttered, and I thumped the butt of my fist uselessly against the barrier. “Fuck. This barrier could be up for hours. They’ll be long gone by the time we can follow them.”
“I’m sure we’ll find them again, soon enough,” Vel-Rala said in a foreboding sort of voice, and as I turned back to face the others, I saw they were crowded around Rylan, who was huddled on the floor and shaking.
“Rylan…” I rushed to his side, and as I got closer, I realized he was shaking because he was sobbing, and he had his hands pressed to his face. Jenner stood behind him patting his shoulder gently, and Amaya stroked his back. “Rylan, buddy, are you hurt?”
“N-No,” he said tearfully. “I just-- I didn’t do anything! I couldn’t even do anything!”
He dissolved into a fresh wave of crying, and it took me a moment to figure out what he meant.
“What, Kavo?” I asked. “You weren’t supposed to do anything.”
“He attacked you!” Rylan sobbed into his hands. “And I couldn’t defend you! You’re only alive because he let us all go! Because he wants me to see how-- how useless I am!”
“Hey,” I said sternly. “You are not useless.”
“I couldn’t do anything!” Rylan insisted, and he finally looked up at me. “What if you get hurt, Dad? What if you can’t fight? I’ll just stand there and watch you die?”
“No,” I said. “No one’s going to stand and watch anyone die. We’re not alone in this, Rylan. Look around you. We have a big family, and we watch out for each other. Why do you think you have to protect me by yourself?”
“Because-- Kavo’s… he’s my demon,” Rylan sniffled. “Like Miss Sera. She-- she was tired of running. And I… I can’t seem to stop running. I don’t want to run anymore. I don’t want to be useless and scared.”
“You’re not useless,” I said again. “And there’s nothing wrong with being scared. You stood up to Kavo even though you were scared, right?”
“I’ve heard it theorized that bravery can only exist with fear,” Jenner interjected. “You can only be brave when you are scared.”
“Exactly,” I said with a nod, and I put a hand on Rylan’s shoulder. “Buddy, you don’t have to feel bad about Kavo. You’re a kid. It’s not like when he fights me. I’m stronger than you, and I don’t have… those awful memories of him like you do. It’s not your job to defeat him for me. And it’s not your job to protect me.”
“But what if you can’t do it alone?” Rylan asked. “I ruined everything!”
“You haven’t ruined anything,” I promised him. “Kavo’s just… playing with us. Trying to make us scared. But we’re not gonna fall for his games. We’re not alone in this. I have Sinopa, Nemis, and Bodin. Not to mention everyone back in Medea. And even if you can’t fight, that doesn’t make you useless. Would you say Jenner is useless?”
“No!” Rylan cried at once, and he looked horrified at the very idea.
“Exactly.” I smiled. “You were brave for standing up to Kavo. And you’re brave for not wanting to run anymore-- even though no one would blame you if you wanted to run forever.”
I couldn’t imagine what it would be like, to be haunted by a specter like Kavo for your whole life. Rylan had grown up with that sadistic bastard tainting him at every turn. Kavo had ruined Rylan’s childhood, Rylan’s mother, and much of Rylan’s adolescence, too. Being adopted by Zoie and I seemed to be the first bit of reprieve he’d ever gotten.
“Come on, everyone,” I said as I rose to my feet, and I pulled Rylan up, too. “We need to rest and figure out our next move.”
“Alex,” Amaya said softly, and she reached out to touch my arm. “Are you alright?”
“I’ll be better when everyone’s out of this place,” I said. “Kavo’s close to the Moonsblood, even if he doesn’t realize it. We need a plan of action, and we need rest.”
“Can we really afford rest right now?” Sinopa asked.
“I say we can,” I said firmly. “We’re of no use in this state. We’ve spent the whole day chasing after Leda. She can’t tell Kavo anything important, not at this point. He knows we’re after him now. Maybe the knowledge we’re breathing down his neck will throw him off. Make him act rashly.”
“Make him make mistakes,” the fox-man said with a nod. “I see. That’s rather devious.”
“We need to be devious, against someone like him,” I pointed out, and then I waved a hand to the others. “Fan out. See if he left anything we could use to track him, like the note.”
So much of the manor was boarded off or otherwise inaccessible that it didn’t take us very long, and we didn’t find anything of use. It was obvious Kavo hadn’t been using this as a base of operations, he’d just been passing through. Maybe he’d somehow figured out that the Heart of the Spell was close by, despite not having Amaya’s Knowledge or Vel-Rala’s Prophetess abilities.
I could only hope it meant he couldn’t find it properly, that without Vel-Rala, he would never find it. Or at the very least, he didn’t find it before I did.
“I’m sorry, Alex, there’s nothing,” Sinopa said at last. “Kavo can’t have been here for very long. There’s nothing in the basement but old floorboards, half of them rotted through.”
“Then I guess we’re done here,” I said, and our group filed out of the abandoned manor, back toward the main center of Mereid.
The inn was cozier this time, if a bit more cramped, but no one tried to start any fights with me this time. I set Rylan up in a room with Jenner and made sure the kid had some food before he went to sleep, and then I headed back down to where the adults were still speaking.
“Is he alright?” Jenner asked when I sat down.
“He will be,” I said. “He just needs time. Confronting the man who’s haunted your nightmares can’t be easy. Even if he wasn’t someone as dangerous as Kavo.”
“He’s a good kid,” Amaya told me comfortingly. “He’ll be alright. He’s your son, after all.”
“That he is.” Jenner nodded firmly. “Blood counts for nothing if you don’t commit to it.”
“I’m glad you think so, since I’m pretty sure he thinks of you as a grandfather or an uncle by this point,” I said to the koala-man, and he let out a chuckle.
“Grandfather, eh? I quite like the sound of that.”
“I thought you might,” I said wryly, but my smile faded a moment later. “You said you ran into a wall with the Curse stuff?”
“Ah.” Jenner’s expression turned sober. “Yes. We’ve discovered the… I suppose you could call it a failsafe. The Curse is tied to the Heart in such a way that the Curse cannot be destroyed without completely destroying the Heart. All components of the spell must be present in order for the spell to exist, since it was transferred from the Priestess who first cast it. It’s… self-perpetuating.”
“It has to be completely destroyed?” I asked. “You couldn’t… cut a bit off? Like removing a tumor?”
“I’m not entirely sure what a tumor is, but no,” the koala-man answered. “It’s not a piece of the Heart, because the spell isn’t the Heart itself. The Curse is powered by the Heart. So in order to destroy the Curse, we’d have to completely destroy the Heart-- and with it, Eng.”
“That is frustratingly circular,” I admitted. “But that can’t be it. We’ll figure out a way. We have to.”
“I hope so, but I admit hope grows fainter over time,” Jenner said, and he pushed away his empty plate with a sigh. “If you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll retire. Check in on Rylan and all that.”
“Alright,” I said. “Goodnight, Jenner.”
“Goodnight.”
“I might take my leave, too,” Bodin said then, and he stood from the table with one of his hands in Vel-Rala’s. “It’s been a long day.”
He, Vel-Rala, Nemis, and Sinopa all bade me goodnight in short order. I couldn’t tell if they really were worn out or if they all needed some private time to come to terms with what they’d seen today. Kavo Alda, the Nightmare, standing before them in the flesh.
“Alex, love,” Amaya said, and she stroked a hand down the side of my face. “Are you alright?”
“I… don’t know,” I sighed and ran a hand through my hair. “We let Kavo get away, and he has Leda, which means he’s stronger. But he doesn’t have you or Vel-Rala… I don’t know.”
“Come to bed,” she implored. I’d figured Vel-Rala would want to sleep in the same room as Bodin, so I’d offered up my bed in the first room and gotten a second room for Amaya and myself. “Sleep has a way of putting things in perspective. You could use some rest, too.”
“I will,” I promised her, and I raised her hand to my lips to kiss it softly. “I just… need a minute to think, first.”
“Alright,” the oryx-woman said, though I could see she was reluctant to leave me alone.
She kissed my forehead and then headed up the creaky stairs to the rooms, and I settled into the large armchair closest to the fireplace. Then I stared into the red-gold flames that reminded me of Shay’s wings and Mercedes Sun, as if they could provide me an answer.
What were we going to do? We couldn’t track Kavo anymore. And he didn’t have the Prophetess, but it was surely only a matter of time until he found the Heart of the Spell anyway. I stared into the fire for so long the colors began to melt together, and my vision was awash with a shifting mass of molten gold.
Kavo had asked me if I prayed to Mercedes. I didn’t, but maybe now was the time to start. I was left with precious few little options, anyway, so I clasped my hands together, rested my forehead against my fingers, and prayed.
It was a wordless thing. No questions, no demands, just the act of reaching out a hand and hoping someone would take it, that I would be led in the direction I was meant to go. I thought of Zoie, Shay, Amaya, and Nova, and how each of them had felt so simply right. I searched for that same rightness now. It was all I had left.
When I opened my eyes, I saw a shadow had come over my vision, and I blinked a few times before I realized someone was standing in front of me, between me and the fire. I looked up and saw it was a woman.
“Mercedes?” I asked in a murmur, but as I blinked a few more times and my vision cleared, I saw it wasn’t Mercedes, but Vel-Rala.
She smiled down at me with all the sad knowledge of a real goddess. Or a real Prophetess.
“Alex,” she said in a quiet voice. “I can take you to the Heart of the Spell.”
Chapter 13
“What?” I’d spent so long staring into the flickering flames that it took my head a second to catch up, and I blinked up at her through a haze of sleepiness and confusion. “Vel-Rala, you--”
“I know what I’m risking,” the Natavian woman told me in a firm voice, and she placed her hand very deliberately over her slightly swollen belly. “And I am willing to risk it. I have a husband who I adore, and who adores me in turn, and I am pregnant with his child… but how many husbands are out there? How many women are awaiting their own little ones?”
“But that’s precisely my point,” I said. “Bodin adores you, and you adore him, and you’re going to have a baby. I won’t let you risk that for me.”
“It is not your decision to say what I can or cannot risk,” Vel-Rala argued, and I saw a shade of her old haughtiness, pride, and indignation shine through as her white-feathered crest puffed up a little. “What if the world falls into the ruin that Kavo yearns for? How can I look my husband, my child, in the eye? I would have caused it, as surely as if I had handed over the Moonsblood myself.”
“Vel-Rala…” I leaned forward in my overstuffed armchair and dragged a hand down my face to try and wake myself up properly. “It’s not that. It’s not your fight. Kavo--”
“Is a dangerous man who will stop at nothing to get what he wants,” the cockatoo-woman finished for me plainly. “And I am the key to getting it. The only way we can stop him for sure is to find the Heart of the Spell before he does, to make it so he can never take it for himself.”
“I know,” I said grimly, because there was no other way. “But even if we do… what do we do with it? How do we destroy it?”
“The Heart of the Spell is not something that can be destroyed,” the cockatoo-woman told me. “It’s a shard of pure godhood, a fragment of unimaginable magical power. To possess even a fraction of the Moon’s strength… it’s too much power for a single mortal being to withstand. Which is why, if Kavo got to it, he would be forced to transform into something that could bear it, or have his very soul burn up. He would be forced to… evolve.”
“Whatever the Moonsblood does to a human, I don’t think I would call that evolution.” I pursed my lips. “Zoie said he would become the King of Nightmares. A demon more powerful than the herald demons, more powerful than even the first demons the Moon created, all those centuries ago. I don’t know if something like that is less than human, necessarily, but it’s definitely not more.”
“Which is why we need to find the Heart of the Spell, and quickly,” Vel-Rala pleaded. “We have to go, Alex, now. We have to find it before Kavo does. You know he will destroy this world and rule over the ashes, he said as much when you confronted him. You know he won’t wait. The only thing that’s stopping him right now is that he… he doesn’t have me to tell him where to go.”
She reached forward, took both my hands, and clasped them between her own. Her eyes were shining with tears, terrified tears, but I could also see determination, and her grip on my hands was strong.
“We lose that advantage if we just sit around waiting,” she said. “He will find it eventually. Magic that strong, it will be noticed. He was already in the vicinity, I could feel it. Amaya’s Touch helped me unlock my ability to sense it, because she commands great Knowledge. But Ashers and Travelers have their own magic. With skill and practice, Kavo will find the Moonsblood with or without a Prophetess. He is relentless.
“And what do you plan to tell Bodin?” I asked her. “Or, worse, what do I tell Bodin if you don’t come back? This is Kavo Alda, Vel-Rala. We know he won’t spare you just because you’re not a warrior, just because you’re pregnant. He’ll kill you if he gets the chance.”
“He’ll kill all of us,” she whispered. “Every last one. We will die in the new world he plans to create.”
“That’s my burden to bear, Vel-Rala,” I said. “I’m a Traveler, like him. I’m the one to fight him.”
“But you can’t find him without my help,” she insisted, and she squeezed my hands ever tighter. “Let me take you to the Moonsblood. Let me do that, at least. If I was put in this world to be Mercedes’ Prophetess, to be an extension of her Will made mortal, then this is My Will. I choose you to be the one to find the Moonsblood. To defend it. To defend Aventoll itself. To be the Stranger and the Savior you were Prophesied to be.”
“Vel-Rala--”
“Please, Alex,” she begged me. “Let me make sure this world will be safe for my child. For all the children.”
I swallowed hard. It felt like an impossible choice, but I knew there was only one option. There had only ever been one option. In all those stories where the hero had to choose between someone he cared about, or the whole world… there was only ever one option.
“If you die, Bodin will kill me,” I told her frankly.
The cockatoo-woman let out a small, relieved laugh. Tears were trailing down her face, but she wiped them away with a shaky smile.
“Thank you,” she said. “Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me,” I replied. “Not until we’ve seen this through. Not until we’ve stopped Kavo. We still don’t even know what we’re going to do when we find the damn thing.”
“Well, perhaps I could help,” came a voice, and both Vel-Rala and I turned to see Jenner was standing at the foot of the staircase and watching us both over the tops of his glasses with a curious expression.
