A Hero of Realms

by Bella Forrest

We traveled closer to the island, and then we began to move around it. By the time we’d reached three quarters of the way around its circumference, I’d spotted a ship in the distance. Of course, The Tavern was a hub for supernatural creatures, and large ships in these waters ought to have been an everyday occurrence. And yet…

  I pointed toward it.

  “Oh, my,” Julie said in a hushed tone. She stood up and peered out over the dark waters toward the looming vessel. “That’s it. That’s my father’s ship. I was right that he would still be in this area.” Nervousness filled Julie’s face as she tightened her grip on the reins. She gulped, her breathing growing more uneven.

  I felt bad for her being forced to return to what she’d described as a miserable and downtrodden existence, but there wasn’t anything else I could suggest. She’d made this decision herself and the only thing that I could think to do was thank her, which I’d already done a number of times.

  The ship was anchored and dark. Not a single light shone through the windows. Julie’s nerves were almost palpable as we arrived right at the base of the ship. She pulled the dolphins to a stop, and then wrapped the reins securely around the metal post in front of her seat.

  She glanced up at me, and gave me a small nod.

  “Okay,” she said in a quiet voice. “I-I’m going to board the ship… I will first attempt to get to the box without waking anyone or my father knowing, but I’m sure that will be impossible for the reasons I already described.”

  I had no idea how she was planning to convince her father to part with such a supposedly rare and valuable item, especially after she had betrayed him and run away. But she seemed confident that she could find a way to pull it off, so all I could do was trust her.

  Her gaze remained on me for a few moments before she backed away. Moving to the bow of our boat, she took a giant leap and latched onto the railing lining the deck of the tall ship. She swung her legs over and disappeared from sight.

  That left me waiting in excruciating silence. I took up the reins, worried that the dolphins might go lunging forward for some reason. My eyes traveled toward the front of Mr. Duan’s ship. Dozens of ropes hung down the front of it—reins—and submerged in the water. I wondered what sea creatures drove this huge ship forward. Hopefully not something that could aggravate the two dolphins. Thankfully, they remained quite still.

  I doubled over as an intense pain fired through my chest. The same disconcerting pain that I’d prayed was a one-off. Now I couldn’t push away the doubt that this was more than just a temporary lack of Aisha’s concentration or a slip-up. She was becoming tired, I could sense it.

  Aisha, you’ve got to hold on. I willed that she could hear me.

  “Benjamin.”

  Julie’s hushed voice called down from the deck of the ship. I looked up with both relief and surprise. I hadn’t expected her back nearly so soon. Perhaps she’d managed to get the box without her father waking up after all, or perhaps the ship was empty.

  Though it turned out that neither was the case.

  She beckoned me to jump up to her. “You can come now,” she whispered. “I’ll explain. Just leave the dolphins where they are. Don’t worry, they won’t go anywhere.”

  I double-checked that the reins were secure before leaping up to her. When I arrived on the deck, I expected it to be empty—especially from the way that Julie had been whispering to me. I certainly wasn’t expecting to see four vampires standing behind Julie in a semi-circle.

  I looked with uncertainty from one to the other. Three men and one woman. They were all young, perhaps a year or two apart in age. Their skin was whiter than Julie’s, and each possessed distinctly European features.

  I didn’t get much further into wondering who these people were exactly, as the young man standing directly in front of me whipped out a thin tubular object, placed it against his mouth, and released a breath.

  The next thing I knew, a sharp object had buried itself into my neck. A burning sensation erupted around it. My head felt light and I fell to my knees. Dizziness overtook me as the half-circle of vampires closed in around me. Hands forced my back against the floor and closed around my ankles, hands, and shoulders. I was lifted from the ground. My sight and awareness were fading fast, but I was still conscious enough to feel my limbs knock against hard edges, my body placed in some kind of narrow trunk.

  As I gazed upward through foggy vision, it was Julie who stared down at me, expressionless. Her hands moved to the lid of the container and she lowered it down slowly over me until all faded to black.

  Chapter 29: Ben

  I woke to a cool wind blowing against my face. My eyelids felt heavy as lead. I became keenly aware of the throbbing pain in my neck. My muscles felt strained and torn, as though I’d been put through a shredder. As I tried to move my legs, they knocked against hard walls either side of me.

  When I forced my eyes open, my misted vision cleared, giving way to the sight of… Aisha.

  She crouched over me. Her lips were puckered, and I realized that she’d been blowing on me. Panic gleamed in her eyes and she looked drained and exhausted.

  “Benjamin!” she whispered. “We’re trapped!”

  I tried to distance myself from the jinni, but there simply wasn’t enough room. I couldn’t sit up fully, but I sat up as much as I could, while Aisha slid down my legs, giving me some breathing space.

  “What happened?” I asked. Although my vision had cleared, my mind was still in a fog.

  “I don’t know,” she hissed. “I couldn’t stay in you any longer. The Elder sucked too much out of me. I was forced to emerge, and when I did we were both trapped in… this? What is this?” Her voice rose to soprano. “I’m a jinni. I can move through walls. Why can’t I penetrate this box?”

  This box.

  The words triggered something and slowly, the pieces began to fall into place. My head reeled as my last memory came back to me. Julie, closing the lid of this… this box.

  Her Elder trap.

  The sheer magnitude of her betrayal hit me full force. All that time… I wondered when exactly it had started. Had it been after she’d found out what I was capable of unleashing? Had she seen me as the threat that I was, just as Arron had? Unlike the Hawk, she’d gained my trust. Was her motive truly the same as Arron’s? She had been opposed to the surgery from the start, and instead had proposed her box idea. The box that held the power to trap an Elder. Apparently also capable of trapping a jinni.

  Had Julie been planning to finish me off all along? But too many things about this simply didn’t make sense. If this had been her plan, why hadn’t she teamed up with the Hawk? Why had she killed him when he had attempted to stake me? She should have just hung back and watched as he aimed the iron rod right through my chest. Why had she helped me in the dragon cave? And why hadn’t she attempted to kill me herself already, when she’d had more than enough opportunity?

  None of it made any sense. And besides these inconsistencies, she had seemed so genuine… So… helpless. I couldn’t help but wonder whether any of her story was true at all—whether she was indeed on the run from her father. But then who were those men who’d come after her, the ones I’d ended up killing? Perhaps that part of the story was true, and it was only once she’d found out that I was marked by an Elder that she’d changed her plans, deciding that getting rid of me was more important than running from her father. Her words rang in my ears. “Helping you is more important than my escape from my father.”

  Had she meant that getting rid of me was more important? But then why hadn’t she? Why lock me in this box? Why keep me alive for another moment knowing the destruction that I was capable of causing?

  “Where are we, Ben?” Aisha asked, her voice shaking. “You must know where we are.” She grabbed my hand and shook it.

  Before I could answer her, the obvious hit me.

  “Aisha,” I breathed, gaping at the jinni. “You… You’ve left me. How…” My voice trailed off. How am I st
ill myself? The twisting pain that I’d felt earlier when I’d feared that Aisha was on her way out… I could no longer feel that. Although the hunger pangs remained, I was sensing no signs of the Elder taking control.

  What is happening?

  Aisha continued to harass me with questions, but I still had too many of my own to come up with a single answer.

  Could it be that this box separates me from the influence of the Elder? That, although he has bored a connection between the two of us deep within my heart, being in this box means that his influence cannot reach me?

  If what Julie had told me was true—and it seemed true to me based on the jinni’s inability to escape—this box could contain subtle beings. Beings who weren’t of flesh and bone. And while I was inside it, these walls would serve as barriers to the Elder’s influence reaching me.

  My mind churned, my doubts swinging in another direction. What if locking me in here was Julie doing me a favor? Cutting me off from the Elder.

  But then why not make the suggestion to me herself? Why shut me in here in such a backhanded manner?

  Aisha’s desperation boiled over the edge. She clutched my throat and shook me hard. “What’s going on, Ben?”

  I had to attempt to answer her questions. Gripping her hands, I shoved them away from my neck and tried to form a coherent sentence.

  “First of all, I don’t know exactly what happened,” I said, my voice hoarse. My mind traveled back to the last time Aisha had seen the light of day—back on Breccan’s island. “After Bahir left me, we managed to get the dragon scale. Then we headed back to Uma’s island, but I couldn’t get an appointment with the witch because somehow we had lost the merflor. I suspected Arron of taking it…”

  Now my trust in Julie had been shaken, I wondered whether it could’ve been her who had removed the merflor from the sack. From the very start she had been vocal about her doubts about the surgery and made it clear that she thought we ought to find some other way.

  I tried to think how she could have taken the merflor. I recalled the night Bahir had left me and the Elder had overtaken me. Before leaping from the cliff, I’d dropped the sack. In the blur of confusion that must have followed my leap, Julie could have found a way to remove the plant, perhaps flinging it over the cliffside. The others being preoccupied, I supposed it wouldn’t have been that difficult to do it without anyone noticing.

  Even still, I couldn’t place a finger on exactly what her motive would’ve been for me to not have the surgery. If she had locked me in this box because she wanted to somehow save me from the Elder’s influence rather than destroy me as Arron had wanted, why was she so against my being cured by a different method? That surgery, if successful, would have brought me a permanent cure. I couldn’t remain in this box forever… Could I?

  Aisha shook me again. “Ben!” she hissed. “What happened after you found out that you were missing the merflor?”

  I fought to refocus my addled brain. “Then… Then Bahir left altogether,” I said. “He just took off.”

  Aisha’s eyes bulged. “What?” she gasped. “Why? How could he have just left you?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “He said something about Nuriya being in grave danger. He just said that he had to go. Using my wrist band, I tried to summon him back, or summon another jinni to me, but nobody came.”

  The jinni’s hands clamped over her mouth. “Oh, no! No! I can’t believe this could have happened.”

  “That what could have happened?” I asked.

  “I can only think of one thing that would cause Nuriya to be in such danger that Bahir would abandon you. The one thing that caused her to flee to The Oasis in the first place.”

  Now it was me who was shaking her. “Flee from what?”

  “The Drizan jinn,” Aisha breathed, her eyes wide with terror. “They must’ve found her. Found us. I can’t think how else—”

  “The Drizan jinn? Who are they?”

  She hesitated, doubt filling her face, as though wondering whether she really ought to answer my question. But she’d spilled so much already, it didn’t make sense for her not to continue.

  “What?” I urged.

  “Do you remember the first day we met… before lunch?” she asked. “I slipped up and said something that I shouldn’t have. From the look in your eyes, you noticed.”

  I nodded. I remembered. She had hinted that one of the reasons they kept themselves hidden in an atrium so low beneath the ground was that they would be the last to be reached in a raid.

  “Well,” she continued, “the Drizan are the ones who would raid us if they ever found out our location…” Her eyebrows knotted in a deep frown. “But how would they find out about us?”

  I of course had no idea. But this wasn’t the most pressing question on my mind.

  “I need to get out of here!” she shrilled. She attacked the lid of the container, but it remained unbudged. I had half a mind to help her, but this box was the only thing keeping me from dashing off the ship and plunging into the ocean on a deranged quest to reach Cruor.

  I gripped the jinni’s arms. “Wait,” I said, even though I’d realized by now she would never get out no matter how hard she tried. “We need to think.”

  Tears seeped from her amethyst eyes and rolled down her full cheeks. She brushed them aside, trying to recompose herself. “Tell me what happened after Bahir left,” she choked.

  “Arron tried to murder me,” I replied.

  Aisha gasped.

  “Julie stopped him, and killed him instead. Then…” Hortencia’s visit played in my mind. I decided to skip over that part. Again it felt like the words she spoke were meant for me and me alone. “Then Julie and I managed to find a boat, and she brought me to her father’s ship… where she and a group of other vampires locked me in this box.” From the slight rocking, I guessed that we were still on the ship.

  “Why would you follow her to her father’s ship?” Aisha asked.

  I explained in brief what Julie had told me about the box, and how I could see no other options than to take up her suggestion.

  “An Elder trap?” Aisha murmured, a mixture of horror and fascination in her eyes as she gazed around the box. “How did they even create this thing?”

  “Julie said that it was a gift from a warlock. Though she didn’t seem to know who initially created it.”

  Aisha gazed at me, her soft, youthful features marred with fear. “And what now, Benjamin? What is to become of us?’

  “I don’t know, Aisha,” I said heavily. “I don’t know.”

  Chapter 30: Ben

  Hours passed. All Aisha and I could do was wait and hope, however feebly, that somehow the situation wasn’t as bad as it seemed. That we would discover a silver lining. That Julie was not my enemy.

  The ship seemed to enter a rough patch. The to-ing and fro-ing of the vessel rocked Aisha and me from side to side in the narrow box. Perhaps we’d entered a storm. A storm that appeared to be getting worse. Soon I had to exert myself just to keep my head from banging against the hard walls.

  Then came a jolt. My forehead smashed against the roof of the box. It felt like the vessel had just come to an abrupt stop.

  I heard footsteps. It sounded like those of several people coming from above. It seemed that we were being kept on a lower deck. The footsteps drew closer and louder as they thudded down what sounded like a staircase. They reached the rim of the box and stopped.

  I held my breath, wondering if they were going to open the lid. They didn’t. Instead, the box was hoisted upward and we were carried until we reached what I guessed was a flight of stairs. The box tilted, and since I had nothing to hold on to, my feet almost went slamming into Aisha, who was curled up on the other side. Once the stairs were climbed, the box leveled again. The footsteps continued beneath us as we were carried forward. Now, the sound of waves was more pronounced. Perhaps we had arrived on the uppermost deck.

  Where are they taking us?

  I caught the
sound of a bolt being drawn, and the creaking of heavy wood followed by a dull thud. Once again the box was tilted, but this time it felt like we were being carried down a smooth ramp, rather than bumpy stairs.

  “Where are we going?” Aisha yelled through the box.

  She received no answer.

  We reached the end of the slope they were traveling down. Stones crunched beneath their feet and then the ride got bumpy again. So bumpy that I had to flatten my palms against the sides of the walls and push outward to stop my head from crashing against the lid again. It felt like they were climbing over… rocks? They sped up, making the journey only more uncomfortable.

  “What are they going to do with us?” Aisha murmured, I suspected more to herself than to me.

  Our carriers stopped abruptly. They lowered the box. The floor shuddered beneath me as we were planted down on the ground.

  I held my breath, straining my ears to catch any clues as to where we were. The waves sounded distant now, so distant that they were but a far-off whisper. None of our carriers spoke. All I could hear was the scratching of stones beneath their feet.

  Before I could realize what was happening, the wall of the box that my head rested against gave way. Strong hands slipped inside and clutched my elbows, jerking me out of the oblong container. My back scraped against rough ground. There was a snap. My eyes shot to my feet just in time to see the side door close again—a side door in the box that I hadn’t even realized existed. They’d acted so fast and unexpectedly that Aisha hadn’t had a chance to slip out.

  Five faces stared down at me, including Julie’s—directly above me. They gathered in a tight circle around me, so much so that I couldn’t see where we were. All I knew was that I was lying on a rocky surface, it was cold, and it was dim.

  I motioned to leap to my feet when one of the male vampires—the same one who’d shot a tranquilizer dart into my neck—whipped out a needle and thrust it into my right ankle.

  “No!” I hissed, kicking him aside. My foot made contact with his leg, just above his knee. The crack of bone pierced the air and he yelped, stumbling backward. But it was too late. Whatever substance he’d just injected into me was acting fast. My legs lost their feeling even as I tried desperately to stand up. They became paralyzed. Julie dipped down suddenly, pulling out a black sack from her robe.