What Man Defies

by Clara Coulson

  Odette dug a pair of green dice out of her bag and held them up, tucked between her fingers, like she was about to do a fake magic trick. Then she tossed one of the die into her other hand, pinched both dice between a thumb and index finger, and positioned them on either side of the blade jutting out from Mallory’s shoulder. The sides of the dice with only one pip were facing the metal. Next, Odette muttered a spell invocation in what sounded like bastardized Latin, and the dice lit up with the glow of her magic. Twin arcs of electricity jumped between the dice and blade of the sword.

  The blade disintegrated.

  The hilt of the sword tumbled down to the forest floor and landed in the dirt, while gray wisps of dust that had once been a blade scattered into the air. To my astonishment, the gray dust kept pouring out of Mallory’s wound, like it was being magnetically drawn from her body. As the last of it exited, there was a small gush of blood, but nothing that looked immediately life threatening. Freed from the tree, Mallory tipped sideways with a relieved sigh, and I caught her in my arms.

  “You’re all right,” I said, pretending it wasn’t a platitude. “Let’s get you down.”

  Mallory mumbled something incoherent.

  “So”—Odette tucked the dice away—“was that a sweet trick or what?”

  “It was certainly something.” I situated Mallory so I could carry her down without slipping off a branch and falling twenty feet with an injured woman in my grasp. “I’m just trying to figure out why you’d have a spell like that tucked inside a pair of dice. Either you’re such an excellent planner that you knew someone was going to get impaled by a pointy object, or you need those dice for something on a regular basis. But I can’t figure out what recurring situation could require that spell.”

  Odette sat stock-still on the branch, lips puckered like a fish. “And if you ever do figure it out, I may kill you in your sleep.”

  “Ah, so it’s that kind of situation.”

  “Fuck you too, Whelan.”

  Our lighthearted banter died out as we carried Mallory through the forest and deposited her at the base of a tree obscured by several large branches that had broken from its peak. Between the two of us, Odette and I managed to scrounge up spells to keep Mallory warm, staunch the blood flow from her shoulder wound, keep her moderately alert, and act as perimeter alarms if anything came within fifteen feet of her. I armed her with the rifle again and told her to fire at anything that wasn’t us. Finally, Odette and I laid the same veils and protections we’d cast on Granger.

  Mallory sent us off with a plea: “Don’t give up on rescuing the prisoners. Please?”

  “We won’t,” I replied.

  Then we left her behind with a couple halfhearted goodbyes.

  When we reached the edge of the game board again, I asked Odette, “How fast can you run?”

  “As fast as you need me to.” She began a series of stretches to work out the sore muscles in her bruised leg. “Just keep in mind that I’ll run out of juice long before you do. I can match your top unglamoured speed for maybe two miles before I dip below fifty percent of my energy reserve. If I push myself beyond that, I won’t have enough left to power my combat spells, so if we come across the svartálfar, I’ll be a sitting duck.”

  “Based on what I saw in Weatherby’s memories, it’s about half a mile from here to the stretch of the ‘obstacle course’ where he died. And at the time of his death, they hadn’t beaten that vault lock. Assuming all the obstacles are equally challenging, and that there are more than two—and there must be, or Abarta’s crew would have bailed from the cavern already, with their prize in hand—my educated guess is that they are not more than two miles ahead. Or if they are, not by much. So if you’re up for a sprint through the vault of doom…”

  “Say no more.” She ground her heels into the dirt and took up a runner’s starting stance. A faint green aura encompassed her legs, thigh to foot. “If we do hit the two-mile mark in the middle of nowhere, no enemies in sight, I’ll be sure to let you know by punching you in the head and calling you an idiot.”

  “Noted.” I performed a quick check to make sure all my stuff was secure. Knives in place. Explosive ornaments stored deep in my pockets. And a returned pair of anti-banshee earplugs, courtesy of Mallory, tucked into my right glove for easy access. “Ready when you are.”

  She let her gaze drift toward the hole in the ground left by the lindworm, uneasy, before she dragged her attention to the path on the opposite side of the game board. “Count of three?”

  “Sure.” I bent my knees and took a deep breath.

  We were gunning for the belly of the beast, no backup, no second chances, and we had no idea what else the dark elves and the banshee might have lying in wait. More lindworms or even worse monsters. Wards that could flay us alive before we had a chance to scream. Booby traps galore, waiting for a poorly placed foot to snag a tripwire or put too much weight on a trigger.

  We could die a hundred thousand awful ways during this mad dash toward our enemies. But what other choice did we have but to try and close the distance as fast as possible? Saoirse was out there, now a captive herself, possibly injured from the elf ambush, possibly with her head on the literal chopping block. And worse, every moment longer we took to catch up to Abarta’s crew was a moment another innocent victim could die. Another moment Christie could die—if she wasn’t dead already.

  “One,” I said, firm and loud.

  “Two,” Odette continued, asserting her resolve.

  “Three!” we shouted in unison.

  And we ran.

  Chapter Thirteen

  The game board zipped past. The dark hole in the earth didn’t so much as shudder. We hit the next path at roughly forty miles per hour and sped along the winding line of coarse dirt carved into the dense patch of forest. Thousands of petrified trees melded into nothing but a looming blur of gangly shapes. Rocks kicked up by our boots shot away and bounced across the forest floor, their faint thumps the only nearby sounds beyond our pounding hearts. After what seemed like both an eternity and no time at all, we neared the next clearing, the next obstacle, the next vault lock.

  We charged out of the tree line without slowing down. Every sense alert, I scoured the expanse of rocky terrain. On the hunt for wards or traps. The subtle glint of tripwires or the faint glow of a vicious spell waiting to pounce. As we bounded down a rocky hill peppered with dangerously sharp obsidian formations, I spotted Weatherby’s body in the distance. He lay on his side, surrounded by a puddle of half-dried blood, totally disemboweled. Not fifty feet past him was another body, this one a woman.

  My heart clenched, but as we drew closer, I could tell the woman wasn’t Christie. Too petite. Too young. It was another one of the missing people from O’Shea’s board. Lisa Ackerman. Eighteen years old. The poor woman had spent her formative years living through the hell that was the collapse, and just when she thought the world was healing, that she might actually have a future, someone had come along and thrown her into a death trap. She’d been killed with an arrow through the heart.

  “Bastards,” I growled.

  Odette, keeping pace beside me, spit out a curse in Chinese. We made eye contact, and with it, a silent pact to give Abarta’s crew what they deserved. And nothing less.

  Two more bodies marred the landscape of the field, the last one mere feet from the next length of path carved through yet another swath of forest. Both were male, and one I recognized from O’Shea’s list: Nester Barton, forty-four, machine shop owner. The other was dressed in virtual rags, one of Kinsale’s many homeless, and I had a vague recollection of his face. It took me a minute to place him, and when I remembered, bile surged up my throat. It was the man Christie had been serving tea the day I returned from my stretch trip to Walter Johnson’s house, the day I was set on a collision course with Abarta.

  I knew it was a coincidence that the banshee had grabbed that man. But I still had the irrational thought that I’d somehow infected him with my shitty
luck.

  Odette and I rushed onward, cutting through the next patch of forest until we arrived at a second game board. It appeared the vault locks were an alternating combination of tasks. To beat the “games,” you needed to be smart and strategic. To win the “marathons,” you had to be agile and keen eyed. That’s why the banshee had kidnapped a large variety of people. They couldn’t throw the same sort of person at every obstacle, or they’d burn through sacrificial lambs too fast. The humans are literally objects to them. Pawns to be shoved across a chessboard until one of them topples the opposing king.

  We slowed as we picked our way through this second game board. There were no imposing statues here, with corpses in their grasp. Instead, this game looked eerily like Scrabble, with stone letter tiles laid out to spell various words. There was a paragraph of an old fae language carved into a large block at one end of the board, and I could read enough of it to determine it was a riddle of some sort. I catalogued all the words that had been played as I jogged across the board, and unscrambled them to find they made two complete sentences when arranged diagonally from the one in the top left corner to the one in the bottom right. The answer to the riddle.

  “This power not meant for mortal eyes can only be obtained by tongues that can lie,” I spoke aloud. “And for secrets to pour like falling stars from an eternal sky, five tasks must man defy.”

  Odette’s brows furrowed. “First off, that sounds extremely ominous, and I don’t like it one bit. Second, if this vault was built several hundred years ago, how come people were able to beat the game by using modern English?”

  “I can’t be a hundred percent sure,” I said with halting words, “but I’ve heard that some of the strongest faerie magic can almost act like a sentient force, like an AI basically, and rearrange its own construction to respond to different situations.”

  Odette frowned. “So it let them spell out the answer in English because it knew most of them only spoke English?”

  “That would be my assumption, yes.”

  “That’s disturbing.”

  “I agree.” I hopped over the last row of tiles and landed on the ashy ground at the opening to the next path. “But for the sake of the ‘players,’ I’m glad it worked.”

  “Not for everyone.” Odette directed my attention to the space behind the riddle block. Two eviscerated bodies were splayed out on the ground, spilled blood still red and wet. Neither was Christie, and both were too mutilated to otherwise identify.

  “Damn. We’ve lost way too many.”

  Odette shook her head. “Everybody’s lost too many people, Whelan. That’s how the end of the world works. Each body you add to the sum total nowadays changes nothing but a decimal point in the daily death rate. We’ve reached the limits of society’s capacity to morn individual tragedies. Every death is just part of a statistic now.”

  “Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to beat that death rate down a few pegs when the opportunity arises.” I strode onto the path and steadied my breathing, gearing up for another hard sprint.

  “Is that what passes for optimism these days?” Odette pulled ahead of me, the energy pockets around her legs glowing more brightly than before. “I must’ve missed the memo. But I like the beating part. So I’ll be sure to do as much of that as I can before the day is out. Or, you know, before I end up part of that damn statistic too.”

  “Oh, I have no doubt about that.” I surged forward and caught up with her. “I have the funniest feeling you’re exceptionally skilled at hitting things.”

  “Buddy,” Odette drawled, “you have no idea. I…”

  This new section of forest was much narrower than the ones that came before. So we broke through the tree line earlier than anticipated—and ended up on the rim of what I could only describe as a killing field. Squat trees with twisted branches and thick, curving trunks were scattered across the area. Some of the branches were shaped like blades and spears, and many of those weaponized appendages were coated in thick layers of fresh, dripping blood. Seven bodies hung from various trees, almost all of them impaled by the branches.

  One poor man had been struck a dozen times before the tree was done with him. His head was tilted back, eyes staring up at nothing, his entire face covered in blood from where he’d choked it up as his punctured lungs were drowning. Another man had been strung up by his leg, a branch wrapped around his ankle like a snare. The tree had then rammed a branch through his chest. A woman in a business suit, dressed for success, had been pinned against a trunk by two branches and then stabbed so many times in the abdomen you couldn’t make out the individual wounds.

  The rest of the corpses looked even worse.

  Odette skidded to a stop at the very edge of the field and slapped a hand over her mouth to hide her gagging. A repeated, muffled “fuck” squeezed through her fingers as she clenched her eyes shut and tried to retain her stomach acid. I only fared better than her because I’d spent years working crime scenes as a homicide detective. I’d seen a little bit of everything. Children who’d been raped and murdered by their own parents. Confidential informants who’d been discovered and tortured to death. People burned alive in arson fires, charred corpses reaching desperately for doors or windows.

  Even so, the heinous image of those brutalized bodies hanging from the killer trees was going to give me nightmares. Like I didn’t have enough of those already.

  “God help me,” Odette said, finally righting herself but still looking queasy, “if a single one of those trees so much as twitches, I’m setting the whole fucking lot on fire.”

  “And as much as I dislike fire,” I replied, “I will assist you.”

  Traversing the field of murder trees was like traipsing through a living hell. Everywhere I looked, I found blood spatter. Everywhere I stepped, the earth was damp. But the trees didn’t budge as I passed them, reduced to inanimate objects like the statues on the first game board. Once someone had managed to complete the trek across the field without getting butchered, the spell powering the trees had been deactivated. The trees were no longer a threat. They were merely a reminder of past sins.

  On the other side of the field, Odette and I halted again. Not because we were wary about stepping onto the path cutting through yet another group of regular trees. But because, by our count, this was the last bit of forest before the final vault lock. The answer to the riddle on the word game board had specified there were five obstacles to overcome: the board game with the statues, the rocky field filled with booby traps, the “Scrabble” board itself, the field of murder trees, and one more. The one beyond this last copse. On the other side of these trees, Abarta’s crew would be waiting.

  We can only hope Abarta himself isn’t there, I thought, my throat suddenly dry. If he is, this was all for nothing. I can’t outwit him any more now than I could last month.

  “How are you on the magic front?” I asked Odette.

  “A little above fifty.” She flexed her hands. “I’m good for a fight.”

  “Let’s take a slower pace through this stretch. The svartálfar might have sentries.”

  We proceeded at a cautious jog, Odette conserving her magic store for the battle ahead. This patch of forest was no different than the rest, but as we advanced, I found my eyes darting this way and that. Picking apart every shadow. Searching for deliberate movement. I hunted for any hints of magic, the faint residual whiff left over by the creation of a veil or the soft glow of a well-hidden ward. But although we were drawing close to our enemies, I didn’t find a single trap, much less an ambush lying in wait. The lindworm had been the only guard dog the dark elves left behind to hinder us.

  When we reached the end of the forest, I found out why.

  There was a barren field between the tree line and the entrance to the final vault lock. No game board. No obstacle course. Just a plain of hard-packed earth. On the opposite side from where Odette and I now stood was a circular barrier of thorn-laden black vines that stretched nearly forty feet into the a
ir. The vines were dense and so perfectly woven together that they created an effective wall. At the top of this wall, a thinner layer of vines branched out toward the center point, creating a roof of sorts. The whole structure was practically a fortress.

  Abarta’s crew had already broken down the door. The svartálfar now stood in place of that door. All twenty of them.

  They hadn’t bothered with sentries because they could see us coming from sixty feet away, and they’d spotted us the second we reached the end of the path. None of them moved to engage us though. Because they didn’t have to. In order to reach the entrance to the fortress of thorns, we’d have to cut through the bulk of the elves. So all they had to do was stand there until we came within striking distance, and then they would start bombarding us with deadly spells.

  “Well,” said Odette, “this is going to be a fun suicide run.”

  “We’ll have to think of a plan before—”

  A faint scream carried across the open field. From inside the thorn fortress.

  “Sounds like we don’t have time to scheme.” Odette unbuttoned her coat. “Tell you what. I’ll help you clear a path to the door, and you go on in, fight the banshee lady and whoever else is there, and rescue the prisoners. Be the big hero and all that. I’ll stay out here and stall the elves for as long as I can.”

  I didn’t know how to respond to that, so I didn’t say anything. I just stared at her, dumbstruck.

  “Oh, don’t look at me like that,” she said. “I might not have exactly volunteered for this rescue mission, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to fold when we’re so close to the finish line. I knew from the moment I saw that first game board I wasn’t getting out of here with my head on my shoulders. Hell, I thought I was done for when the lindworm grabbed me. It was nice, living a little longer than I anticipated.” She tugged her coat open, revealing a tight-fitting black shirt underneath. “Now it’s time to pay up. The real price for my wayward fight club.”