by S T Branton
We attempted to work our way around, assuming the strange forest was finite, but it extended in all directions as far as my eyes could see. The other side granted us the same view.
“I’m telling you we should just go,” Brax urged. “There’s no point in standing around doing recon if there’s nothing to see. It’s obviously some fucked-up, mythical god shit, right? What else do we need to know?”
“Wait.” I held up a hand to stop him. The faintest trace of a voice had caught my ear. “I hear something.”
“If you say it’s me bitching—” Brax began.
“No.” I waved at him to stop talking. “It’s people, I think.” Following the voice, I moved down the path, which arced around to the right and crossed a more substantial, street-like road. From there, the voices were multiple and more distinct. I peeked from the cover of the trees. “There!”
The road we stood on led into the deepest, thickest section of this new forest, but the entrance was blocked by a patrolling contingent of guards. They didn’t look particularly dangerous—at least, not more so than any standard human. But I knew from Frank and Maya that looks could be deceiving.
Brax eyed me. “Let me guess. You’re not gonna let me kill them?”
“It’s not because I think it’s necessarily a bad idea, okay?” I said. “But we don’t know what this place is, why they’re here, or how many more of them there are. I don’t want to run in there with our dicks out and give away our position until I have some idea of what’s happening here.”
“Fair enough.” The demon smirked. “You don’t have a dick, though.”
I gave him a look. “If I did, it’d be real fucking big, and both of you know it.” I pressed the button on my radio. “Luis, you there?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I just did a head count. We’re all good.”
“Here’s what’ll happen.” I paused and looked at Brax and Deacon for signs of last-minute objections. Receiving none, I pressed on. “We found a way into this creepy forest thing. We’ll get in there, see what’s up, and I’ll get in touch and let you know what the next step is. Cool?”
“You’re going in?” Luis sounded skeptical. “Are you sure that’s, like, the best idea? This place feels…off.”
“Do you want to trade places?” I asked.
“No, ma’am,” he said quickly. “You go ahead. I’ll wait for your signal all damn day.”
“I thought so.” I smiled. “In the meantime, see if you can find us more vehicles. We might need you to move fast.”
“Roger that,” he said. “Find vehicles, I can do. No problem.”
“Thanks, Luis.” I smiled. “Catch you on the flip side.”
By the time I ended my exchange with the teenager, Brax had moved ahead toward the patrol post. He glanced back and beckoned me forward. He held a clump of half-dry groundcover in his hand, which he promptly lit with a swift flick of his hammer. His movement steady, he drew his hand back and launched the flaming ball off to the side of the patrolmen. In a matter of seconds, a small fire sprang up. It was quickly snuffed by ambient moisture, but the smoke it produced was thick and pungent.
The guards caught a whiff of it. They turned toward the source of the fire and moved that way as they followed their noses and muttered to one another.
“Now!” Brax hissed. We broke into the quietest run we could manage and aimed directly for the middle of the black hole between the trees.
Chapter Fifteen
The voices of the guards faded behind us as we passed through to the interior of the strange woods. I’d expected almost total darkness, but beyond the initial border, the trees were pierced with shafts of light. We didn’t have the luxury to stop until our eyes adjusted, so we pressed on through the gloom, packed tightly together and our other senses on high alert. Brax was the first to make a comment, which surprised me until I remembered he was also the one with the best low-light vision.
“Those are some trees,” was all he said. Deacon and I automatically turned to look closer, and I felt goosebumps rise on my arms.
“Those are trees?” I asked out loud. Logically, I knew that was what they had to be, but the twisted, thorny formations rising from the forest floor weren’t like anything I had ever seen. Their roots tangled in huge, snaking masses around the base of the trunks and spread like tentacles. The ground pitched to accommodate the place where the roots broke the soil.
“Watch your step,” Deacon warned. “I have a feeling this is not a place where you want to fall.”
As we passed beneath the gnarled boughs, I actually held my breath. My vision had acclimated, and now I could see the way the trees towered in uneven groups and allowed light to filter in. It wasn’t a pattern I recognized from other woods I knew. The trees clumped together, then spread out, then staggered along the rutted path. I was about to wonder what might cause them to grow so randomly when I spotted evidence of a possible answer. It matched some of what we had already seen in the more normal sections of the national forest.
“Look at that,” I breathed and pointed. Both Deacon and Brax’s steps slowed in response. A few dozen yards before us, nestled snugly in a copse of the thorny monster trees, stood the remains of a two-story house, burnt black and moldering. Only the thickest, strongest beams were left and, really, only fractions of those. The rest of the structure lay in crumbled cinders all around its foundation.
“Somebody lived in here,” Deacon whispered. A mix of awe and knowing sadness colored the words. It didn’t take an ace detective to deduce what probably happened in that blackened glade.
But why? And how?
Brax shook his head. “Not somebody,” he remarked. “A lot of people.”
He gestured in the same direction, and I sucked in a gasp as the dilapidated shapes of civilization became clear to my eye. This house was one of many which stood at the edge of an overgrown, disintegrating curb. Heavy vines thicker than my forearm wound their way through the shattered windows of dead cars that stood where they had been abandoned in the forsaken street. A corner in the distance was marked by a rotting pole.
Deacon stopped and searched the surroundings. “I’ll be damned,” he murmured. “It’s all around us. Where the hell are we?” He turned in a circle.
I fished out the mapping device. The signal was weak inside the dense forest’s perimeter, but it managed to eke out enough to display the visual I needed. According to the screen, we stood at the edge of a whole town. The neat spread of squares, each signifying a home, store, or business, was so incongruous compared to the ravaged scene before me that I had trouble believing it was real. I dropped the GPS unit to my side and stared numbly at the ruins. “We have to find out what the fuck happened here,” I said.
“I know what happened,” Brax replied. As usual, he forged ahead, fearless and impatient. “It’s him.”
“Marcus?” I asked. “What do you think?”
The centurion sighed. Though it pains me to make such an admission, Abraxzael’s identification must be correct. There is no one else who could have this type of effect on so large an area. He paused. Yet it is odd to me—
“It’s weird.” Brax’s voice overlapped Marcus’s. “I don’t get what’s going on here.” For the first time, he stopped briefly in his tracks and gazed far down the ghost of the street. “He was never like this back in the old days.”
Once again, the demon is correct, Marcus allowed. My memories of Oxylem are inoffensive, even pleasant. He brought a spark of merriment to everyone he encountered. I believed him to be well-liked among his peers. His tone suggested that he would have frowned if he could. I suppose it could all have been a carefully constructed façade.
“He had an island,” Brax said in continuation of his first thought. “Before the war. I guess it was sorta like his own little utopia. As far as I know, he was happy to stay there and have beach parties with his shiny happy people, or what the fuck ever. Hell, I bet he’d have taken my sorry ass in if I asked nicely enough.”
Brax scoffed. “Of course not. They were a bunch of hedonistic drunks.”
His analysis is crude, as always, said Marcus distastefully. Oxylem and his followers emphasized a free-spirited philosophy, which included wholehearted devotion to peace. I struggle to fathom the circumstances under which his view has been altered to this degree.
“He might be crazy,” I said. “Or, at least, not himself. Noted.” I trailed after Brax through the knotted trees and kept my guard up. “Does this guy have any weaknesses I should know about? Anything that’ll make our lives easier if he decides he wants to trap us in here for all eternity?”
“Hm.” Brax rubbed the top of his head. “Normally, I’d say fire—because of all the trees and shit, you know? But he’s either already burned to a crisp somewhere, or he’s made peace with that particular element, which is troubling. Fire was never his thing.”
It is quite true that neither Oxylem nor his Apprenti dealt in the art of fire mastery—or anything remotely malevolent, for that matter.
“He’s formed alliances,” said Deacon grimly. “That’s a bad sign.”
“Maybe someone forced the issue,” Brax suggested. “I don’t think it’d be hard to convince him to do your bidding if the alternative was being cooked alive.” He reached the closest side of the house’s foundation and stepped across the stones. Then, he straightened and sucked in a lungful of air. “It still smells like smoke. I’m not sure if it’s from this place specifically or merely in the air.”
As if on cue, the wind picked up and rushed past us with a plaintive howl. It cut through the winter layers I still wore from the start of our trip, and when it died down, the howl remained.
“Shit!” Deacon shouted. “The trees are moving!”
“That’s what happens when it’s windy.” The words stuck in my throat as I glanced around and saw exactly what he meant. On all sides, the misshapen silhouettes swayed in the aftermath of the gust. The high, keening wails enveloped us. They were the source of the haunting sound, not the wind.
Oxylem, what have you done?
Suddenly, a hand reached out and grabbed my wrist. I lashed out against it instinctively, only to see that it belonged to Deacon. “Let’s move!” he shouted. “You couldn’t pay me to stay here right now.”
It was hard to argue, what with the freaky, screaming trees. The two of us charged after Brax, but we couldn’t seem to get ahead of the noise. Every single tree in the forest had picked up the cry until my head threatened to explode. I gritted my teeth and focused all my energy on pushing forward. The shapes of tree trunks writhed in place, caught by my peripheral vision.
I suddenly stopped abruptly. I came within an inch of crashing into Brax’s back. “Dude, what the hell?”
He motioned for me to shut up and nodded farther along the faint path. An eerie glow issued from the front yard of another gutted house. I took an involuntary step back.
The glow came from figures that stood in a perfect circle in earnest conversation. The one thing they all had in common was the red hair that raged against the backdrop of dusky shadows.
Chapter Sixteen
Brax glanced over his shoulder at me and held a finger to his lips. He stole forward, and his black coat skirted the ashy ground. I looked at Deacon, and we dropped into stealth mode too. The gap closed slowly and painstakingly. The more I saw of this new group, the less I liked them.
The smell hit me first—a distinctive, vaguely rotten scent that I didn’t attach to the figures themselves until I saw the charred skin. They’d literally been cooked, and when they moved, I thought I saw thin tendrils of smoke curl from the peeling cracks on their bodies. Each hardened face seemed fixed in a permanent glower, even during what appeared to be a normal discussion.
The demon tucked himself behind a fallen log. I eased in beside him with Deacon. We peered over the top of the soft wood at the gathering, now less than fifty feet away. At this distance, it was easy to pick out the leader, a tall, broad brute with a stone-like slab of a face. A wiry, badly singed beard sheathed his jaw and curled over a necklace of bleached white bone. Unlike the others, his ugly mug was contorted into a braying guffaw of laughter aimed toward the ramshackle house.
“Come out, piggies!” he yelled. The tone in his voice grated on my ears, and he ejected each word with such force that flecks of spit sailed from the corners of his mouth. “The gods have arrived!” He spread his muscled arms wide and continued. “You can either emerge and submit yourselves—which, I must say, I recommend—or I’ll simply burn this hovel down around your filthy little heads.” The brute grabbed a large rock and hurled it at the front door, where it tore through the wood. “Don’t worry. It will go quickly, like all the others. Perhaps you will suffer for three minutes, or five. But soon, it will all be over.”
The next thing I heard was uncannily familiar—the heavy racking of a shotgun from inside the run-down house. The shot rang out through the hole the bearded man had made in the door, but I could tell it missed. The brute’s eyes widened. His jaw dropped open in a fit of cruel hysterics. Over his laughter, a baby cried. That, too, came from inside the house.
The leader of the creepy group wiped tears of amusement from his eyes. He turned to his companions. Like him, they were burnt and reeked of flame-scoured flesh. Undisguised malice flared in their eyes. They all grinned and raised their hands. Wild spheres of fire, barely controlled, burst into being in their palms. As one, they threw the fireballs at the broken door.
This time, the screams from the house were different, now infused with fear and panic. The fire-wielders stood ready to attack. I opened my mouth to make the call.
Brax beat me to it. He charged from cover with a mighty bellow and leapt the massive log as if it were nothing more than a twig. The hammer swung from its sheath and crashed into a few of the standing bodies. They scattered before his sheer power. Instead of beating them down or snapping them in half, the demon ran directly for the threshold which was awash with licking flames.
“That crazy jackass,” I said in wonder. “We have to back his ass up.”
“On it.” Deacon maneuvered to the best position behind the log and took pot shots at the attackers. The bullets split their cooked skin wide and exposed a coal-like layer that smoldered underneath. The wounds ejected trails of flame instead of blood, which I had to dodge on my way into the fight.
“What the hell is this shit?” I shouted as I swung my sword at the first target. “I know I’ve got a badass sword, but I feel like you guys are cheating!”
In lieu of an answer, something hot seared across my cheek. The skin over my cheekbone immediately blistered, and I heard the crackling impact of a fireball somewhere behind me. “Oh, yeah?” I smirked despite the pain that flared in the burn. “You think you’re the only one here who can throw? Watch this!”
The Gladius Solis launched out of my hand javelin-style and pierced my adversary through the center of his chest. As he buckled, the blade embedded itself in an ax-brandishing woman behind him.
“Ta-da!” I said.
She stopped mid-stride, and her weapon faltered at the top of its swing. A bright glob of fire fell from her lips and seared a smoking ring into the ground. On its way back to my hand, the Gladius Solis cut clean through her. She hit the ashy dirt in two halves.
“Do you ever get tired of that kind of thing?” Deacon asked. He nailed two more in the head and dropped them neatly.
“Nope,” I said cheerfully. “It’s good for teaching these jackoffs a lesson.” I held the sword one-handed, spun, and lopped off one of the intensely-red heads. Smoke and fire poured from the neck stump, and the body staggered for a moment or two. I turned my attention to the leader. “But we’ve done enough screwing around, haven’t we? Let’s take care of this problem once and for all.”
He stared at me, his lips pulled back into an almost gleeful smile. “Ha!” he exclaimed and threw his head back. “It has been to
o long since I received a proper challenge. My only regret is that it comes from a weakling like you.”
The man reached for his weapon and brought forth a two-handed hammer, its head mercilessly alight. The sight of it threw me for a loop—I’d seen one exactly like it very, very recently.
That split second of hesitation was all the bearded warrior needed. He brought that thing down with all his strength and clearly expected to finish me off in one shot. I blocked his strike narrowly with the flat of my blade. We pushed hard against each other, and our feet dug into the dirt. The cracks in his skin surged and glowed with the fire-blood that roiled beneath the surface. Drops of sweat formed and instantly vaporized off his face.
“Foolish girl,” he growled as he bore down even harder. “Do you think you can alter the will of the gods?”
“No,” I retorted. “I intend to crush it. And I’ll…start…with you!” A war cry erupted from my throat, and I surged upward and knocked him onto his back foot. The hammer lifted as his bulky arms pinwheeled for balance. I struck out with my blade.
The redheaded behemoth was light on his feet. He hopped out of my reach and escaped with little more than a scalded abdomen. His whole face darkened into a mask of rage. I squared up and waited for his counterattack.
Instead of re-engaging, however, he simply spat at me and fled with his hammer in hand. My first instinct was to follow his cowardly ass into the woods to see if I could finish him off, but the inferno engulfed the house with Brax still in it. I turned to face the roaring heat.
It was suffocating, overwhelming. I had a tough time even inching toward the flames.
Victoria, do not! Marcus exclaimed. My feud with Abraxzael notwithstanding, you could not survive that environment on your own.
The last of the roof caved in and sent a plume of flame higher still. I shielded my eyes as best I could from the unrelenting force of the fire and squinted toward where I’d seen the demon disappear. The door was all but gone, engulfed in a writhing maw of flame.
