Niki could see by the look on his face that he knew darned well the answer to that question, and he also knew exactly what he’d been interrupting. She thanked her lucky stars that her skin was so dark, if it hadn’t been her blush would have been a red flag for all to witness.
“Niki this is Edge, and you already know Emily.”
Niki nodded, getting over her embarrassment enough to notice the familiar woman at his side. “Hello again, Emily.”
“Hello yourself,” Emily grinned.
Niki’s blush intensified. Damn it. “I thought you were taking Jada to school?”
“It’s been done. It’s amazing how quickly things move when a lot of money is involved,” Emily chuckled. “I left her with Desondra to get settled in.”
“Who’s Desondra?”
“My aunt.” A lithe man with short, white-blond hair entered the room, with an incredibly cute, violet-haired woman at his side. “Don’t worry, Niki, Desondra will take very good care of your daughter,” he told her easily.
“She’s going to stay the first week with Jada, just to make sure she’s comfortable with her new surroundings,” Emily elaborated.
Tryton sighed heavily.
Cady marched into the room, her dark, fat braid of hair swinging about her hips. “I think Desondra’s more worried about Zim discovering her secret than anything else.”
“What secret?” Edge frowned.
Cady’s eyes flared a second before she regained control of her expression. “Secret? What secret?” she recovered quickly.
But not quickly enough. “What are you hiding from me, woman?” An even taller man stepped through the door now, his ebony black hair hanging like a waterfall of silk to his bottom. “In fact, what is going on here lately? All the secrets, all the intrigue, it is giving me a pain of the head.”
“You don’t get headaches honey, you’re not a human,” Cady gibed.
Niki reeled. So many volatile personalities here, in one room, were making her head spin. Or maybe it was the lingering effects of Tryton’s seduction—she could still feel the press of his tongue between her legs…oh hell. Her legs nearly buckled.
“Niki, this is Cinder, Steffy, Obsidian, and Cady. These, along with Grimm—whom you’ve also met—are the members of my personal team of warriors. They are the best of the best outside of the Council, the most powerful fighters ever produced amongst our people.”
Warriors? Fighters? What the heck was this, some kind of commando camp? “Hello,” Niki managed weakly. Just what had she gotten herself into here?
“Sit, everyone, please.” Tryton motioned towards the comfortable chairs and couches that were gathered about the enormous fireplace set into the earthen, rock wall. “We have much to discuss.”
“You are damn right we do.” Steffy marched up to him with pursed lips. “Grimm says you can explain this. I’d like that explanation now.” She shoved a handful of material at him.
Niki strained to look at the bundle and was not a little confused when she caught a glimpse of some sort of badge nestled within the scraps of muddied cloth.
Tryton’s hand closed about it, clenching into a fist that threatened to crush it, but he didn’t bother looking at it.
“Please have a seat everyone. We’ll start as soon as Grimm arrives.”
“I want to start now,” Cady flared.
“Be silent,” Obsidian told her impatiently, only just softening the command with a warm and loving look. “We’ve waited this long. Now we will all await The Traveler and begin the meeting properly.”
“Let’s be honest, Grimm already knows more than we do—a lot more—so why should we wait?” Emily pointed out. Edge seemed to be pushing her towards the couch, trying his best to quell her without saying a word.
Luckily, Grimm chose that moment—right before the volatile tempers of the women erupted completely—to appear in their midst.
Tryton took a deep breath. “Can we all agree to hold council together now, honorably and respectfully, as we have in the past?” He waited for their agreement before he continued. He even included Niki, as if she were already an accepted member of their group.
“I know you have many questions that need answers. You already suspect some of those answers, else you would not be so demanding and suspicious, but I thank you for coming to me before you speculate amongst yourselves.”
“Just answer me this,” Obsidian said quietly. “Have you had these answers all this time? Were you knowingly withholding information from us?”
Tryton was quiet for a long time. He led Niki over to a divan and sat with her there, his hand taking hers and holding it as if for support. Niki knew better than to be fooled—Tryton needed the support of no one. He was a law unto himself—that was more than clear. But it was nice to hold his hand all the same. She entwined her fingers with his, and was pleased when he gave her a reassuring squeeze.
After a long searching look at Obsidian, he answered. “I have always let you know what you must. True, there are some secrets I have always known and kept, but there are some that have only just been made clear to me.” He gave Niki a glance out of the corner of his eye. “As is true in times of war with any people, I have kept my own council, but never have I sent you out into battle with less intelligence than what you needed to survive and triumph.”
“You son of a bitch,” Emily muttered.
“We have all known to some extent, Elder, that you possess knowledge which we do not,” Cinder said formally. “But I cannot help but feel that you know far, far more than we suspected.”
“Oh, he’s always known more,” Steffy told them all. “I’ve seen it in his eyes and in his heart. But he’s never meant us any harm. For two thousand years he’s led the Shikars into battle against the Horde. He’s the most powerful man on the Council. He has our best interests at heart, but do not doubt for a second that he also has his own private agenda.”
Niki reeled. Two thousand years? How was such a thing possible? Tryton’s hand tightened around hers, nearly bruising her, as if he sensed her surprise and warned her not to withdraw.
“I would never see any of you harmed. I have brought you warriors together from childhood, to make of you my personal aides-de-camp. Cady, Steffy and Emily were perfect for our team from the first, and I admit to a little matchmaking on my part. I knew that together, all of you would help to change the very foundations upon which the Shikar Alliance stood, and you have. You will, I have every faith of that.”
“You planned all of this from the first moment? Cady and Steffy and me, I mean?” Emily gritted her teeth, eyes blazing.
“Not all of it,” Tryton admitted. “You, for instance, were a complete surprise for reasons you already know. I would have accepted you into our ranks without your being a Shikar, I’ve told you that. It was…unexpected that you become one of us.”
Niki sighed heavily. “I’m completely lost here.”
“All in due time,” Tryton murmured, pressing a kiss to her forehead.
“Are you going to tell her before you change her, or are you just going to do it without worrying about how she might feel about it?”
“Cady, that’s enough,” Obsidian admonished.
“What are you talking about?” Niki frowned.
“Hasn’t he told you yet?” Cady sneered.
Obsidian caught at his wife’s hand. “Stop it.”
“Why? He’s always played around with our lives, why can’t we return the favor?”
With every word from the woman, Tryton flinched. No one would have seen it, no matter how hard they looked, but Niki could feel it in him and it made her wild with protective anger.
“From the way it looks to me, you’re all acting like spoiled children. If, as you say, Tryton is such an incredible leader, you should at least wait to hear what he has to say before you rail at him. In fact, you should all be grateful that he’s willing to explain anything to you at all. It’s his right as a leader to keep information from his subordinates.
Especially if they’re going to act as irrationally as you all are now, whenever he offers a little candid discussion.”
There was a long stretch of stunned silence in the wake of her outburst.
“She’s right,” Edge murmured. “We are all overzealous. We must be patient.”
“It always takes a fresh eye to see and point out the full extent of our foolishness,” Cinder added. “Thank you for that, Niki.”
“I’m sorry, Tryton,” Cady subsided. “I’m just a little stressed out. The thought of so many secrets… I admit, I’ve been waiting for the other shoe to drop for years now. I shouldn’t be so eager to disrupt everything we’ve worked for.”
Apologies echoed around the room.
“Thank you, Niki,” Grimm’s voice surprised her. He’d been silent through all of it thus far.
“I will answer all of your questions before this is through. But first, Niki must tell you her story—” Tryton held her hand firmly when she would have pulled away in protest, “and we must make our move to save someone very dear to us. Someone who needs our immediate help, far more than you need answers.”
“What is it?” Emily frowned, but there was a deep shadow dwelling in her eyes, as if she had some suspicions of what Niki might have to say.
“Begin at the beginning, my goddess,” Tryton said softly for her ears alone.
“I don’t want to,” she said.
“Sharing will help you heal. But above all, your story will help my people save the world.”
Everyone leaned forward and, with a huge breath of air to shore up her courage, Niki told them all she could.
Chapter Ten
Outside of Boston
Almost five years earlier…
“How long ‘til we get there?” Niki called from the back of the speeding ambulance as she prepared the gurney for another patient. “This storm is getting out of control.”
“A few minutes,” Mitch, the driver, hollered back at her as he raced through a stop sign on the winding backcountry road.
“What have we got?” she asked, as they approached the grisly scene ahead.
“Car wreck, looks from here like it flipped. Only one vehicle involved. Some passersby called it in, I think. There’s an injury, but I don’t know how bad.”
The ambulance hadn’t even fully stopped when Niki jumped out of the back, medical bag in hand. Her eyes took in the scene with practiced exactitude. No detail escaped her, despite the cold, hard bite of the snowstorm.
A trail of debris was strewn from one side of the road to the other. The wreckage lead like a trail of bread crumbs to a mass of metal and glass that might once have been an economy-sized car, resting with deathly silence in a steep ravine off the shoulder of the road.
Niki wasted no time, uncaring of the cold powder soaking through her jeans. Inches of snow had already accumulated on the frozen winter ground, but not enough to cover the slight trail of blood she immediately noticed leading away from the car.
Mitch raced after her, yelling her name loudly to be heard over the screaming din of the wind. But Niki ignored him. She was focused solely on the droplets of blood that looked like bright red, juicy berries staining the white powder at her feet. She followed the sporadic traces of crimson, wondering in the back of her mind how there could be a blood trail but no footprints in the snow to accompany it. The meandering line of blood led into a dark copse of trees and Niki followed it, unafraid.
At first.
The tree line swallowed her up and the snow blew like an ice-cream cold tornado beyond it, whistling and howling, swallowing Mitch’s calls. In the trees there was an odd sort of silence, an unexpected island of peace amidst the increasing violence of the storm. Niki strained her eyes, still following the blood, still intent on finding their injured patient wherever he or she may be.
Niki walked for a long time. Later, she would be astonished at just how far she’d traveled beyond the roadside, deep and distant into the woods. The cold bit at her, but was incidental in the face of her mission. She would not rest until she’d exhausted all possibility of finding a survivor. The blood trail grew heavier, a much darker and steadier line upon the powder-covered ground, and she knew she was at last drawing close to her quarry.
It never occurred to her just how someone losing so much blood had managed to pull themselves so far away from the accident scene. It didn’t really matter. What mattered was that this person not die from blood loss or shock or exposure—or all three. What mattered was that Niki find them and fast.
She heard a strange noise up ahead.
Her heart pounded with some instinctive fear and she didn’t know why.
Until she saw them…not fifteen feet away from her, moving like shadows amidst the gathering of trees and brush.
Large hulking brutes, they were. Disgusting and terrifying, with eyes like the brimstone and flames of hell, these monsters were growling and snarling. But not at her. Thank god, they hadn’t seen her or she might have died then. Because they did not see her, because they were so intent on their task, Niki was afforded a healthy glimpse of them and the captive held within their midst.
They were dragging a woman, bruised and bloodied, to a gaping hole in the ground not too far ahead of them. Their lair, like pitch-black madness, mawed and seemed to beckon them. The monsters were tall, tall enough that the limp woman’s legs dangled helplessly above the ground—and she was no petite bundle. The beasts themselves, though clumsy and ghastly, barely disturbed the bracken, snow and earth beneath their graceless steps. It was as though they were not part of the world around them in all ways, like spirits or ghouls.
That’s why Niki had seen no tracks in the snow. They left none.
The woman, not long ago a girl in age, had long, tangled blonde hair. A wound on her head bled sluggishly, as did a cut on her cheek. But it was the jagged gash, the long crimson line from forearm to wrist, which bled most alarmingly. Fat, steady droplets fell, to sink into the snow, a pounding rivulet that only grew faster with each passing second, with each pumping heartbeat. It was this wound which had led Niki here.
If she didn’t get the woman away from them, get her some help right away; she’d surely bleed to death.
But how could she save her patient from…monsters?
Suddenly the woman’s eyes snapped open. Cornflower blue was all Niki could think. So blue, so clear, so deep. The color swallowed her world and burned her mind.
Run.
It wasn’t Niki’s voice, but the woman’s, that shouted the word in her mind. An exotic scent, the perfume of wild jasmine and vanilla blossoms, ginger and rose, assailed her senses, making her dizzy.
Niki tried to scream, but no sound came forth from her cold-numbed lips.
She took a step forward, but something—some force or unnamed energy—held her back like a restraining hand upon her chest. The woman’s eyes drifted closed, her face going slack.
Get away, run away, while you still can.
The words came with a jolt this time, an electrical pulse that shocked her muscles and her bones and made her hair stand on end. Niki felt and saw the ground rise up to meet her, and only managed to scream minutes later, when she woke up in Mitch’s arms.
* * * * *
“No one believed me when I told them what I’d seen. No one would listen. There was a search party, just some good Samaritans who volunteered to look for her once the snow had died down. But of course no one found her. Those monsters—the Daemons as you call them—dragged her down into that hole with them. And wherever they took her, she couldn’t have lasted long after that. She was bleeding pretty bad.
“I found out a little about her later, but not as much as I would have liked. I wasn’t a cop or anything and once I’d told my tale about monsters in the woods nobody was really willing to share much information with me. But I knew enough to realize that this woman changed me. Somehow she marked me, touched me psychically. I was never the same after that.
“I took leave
from work. Just a few days. It was a week after I returned to work that I had my first accident. We were picking up an elderly—a heart attack patient, nothing out of the ordinary really. I was settling the woman onto the gurney when I felt this…I don’t know, it’s so hard to explain…”
“Try,” Emily encouraged softly. Everyone in the room hung upon her words. The anticipation in the room could have been cut with a knife.
“I just felt this overwhelming warmth. All through me like a fever. With it came the smell of that strange perfume I’d scented around the woman and the monsters. My hands felt like they were on fire and when I looked at them they were bathed in light! The patient beneath my hands started choking. Her skin started to blister. Then she died. And it was all my fault.
“It happened again the next day, with another patient. A similar episode. And I knew then that I was different. Beyond different. I couldn’t tell anyone about it. No one suspected a thing, thank god. Death was something we EMT’s took in stride, it wasn’t entirely abnormal that a patient die on the way to the hospital. But I knew. I knew it was me, and I got the hell out of there.
“I took my daughter and I moved back to Savannah, my hometown, to find some time to think. Unfortunately, I didn’t get much time before the full extent of my danger became clear to me.”
Niki fell silent, pensive, carefully choosing her next words. Would her revelation scare away these people, whom she so desperately wanted for her allies? Would it make her seem more the freak, more of a risk to them? She was afraid to go on.
Cinder leaned forward, perching expectantly on the edge of his seat. “So? What happened?”
Tryton squeezed her hand, urging her to continue. Though Tryton had accepted her story and assured her none of it was her fault, that none of it mattered, she felt sure the others would not feel the same as he. Tryton was an exceptional man. Niki could not expect such a reaction from his team. She took a deep breath and laid it all out as best she could, hoping she could accept their censure when it came. Niki felt sure it inevitably would.
Lord of the Deep Page 9
