“I saw movement but couldn’t sense an aura that matched it,” another voice said firmly. Immediately, I realized this voice was in charge. “Have you seen any vampires around? There’s a rumor that they’ve been sighted near here.” This speaker was closer to us. I couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman. There was a strange pull to the voice. If I closed my eyes, the thrall of the voice seemed to wrap around me. It enchanted me. It must be an Immortal.
“No,” came the rocky voice simply.
“Are you sure?” the Immortal asked, some irresistible and cruelly cold note in the question. “I’ve heard another rumor that wildlings are helping vampires in this area.”
A wildling? I glanced at Laini, but she merely listened with a tense face. Kane carefully maneuvered the dirt off his head, then looked at it as if he didn’t know what to do with it.
“No. I haven’t heard or seen anything,” the gravelly subordinate replied. It had to be the wildling. Its voice was slightly strained, as if it were unable to stop itself from talking. “My patch of forest has seen no vampires.”
“You should think again,” the hunter said, beckoning with a soft voice. It softened and rolled out of the hunter’s mouth in a perfect manner. A woman. I was sure of it now. “You can and should tell me anything.” The demand echoed out into the air.
“I have seen nothing,” the wildling answered easily. “Nothing at all.” It sounded tired all of a sudden.
The ground above us abruptly shook as the hunter, I assumed, beat her foot into the ground. “Useless,” she hissed angrily. “Why do you lot even exist?”
The wildling let out a cry of desperation. I briefly saw a flash of teal outside through the moss. The air filled with a low, growling scream of absolute agony. A sound of flesh being punctured reverberated through the air and created a bone-chilling scraping noise that ended in sudden silence.
A shiver ran down my back as I held in my strangled breathing. Something heavy fell to the ground above us. I suspected the wildling would never give another answer again.
“Ugly beast,” the Immortal said with disgust and thumped across the ground. Wings flapped again after she had mounted whatever beast she brought with her. My pulse staggered as we waited. The moss shivered as a sharp breeze spread out over the area. The beating wings faded away. I dropped my hand and pulled in a shallow breath.
Dorian lifted a hand for us to wait. Kane snarled silently as he stared ahead, glaring blankly. Laini’s lips twitched, livid. The Immortal’s merciless nature submersed us into a pool of fury and outrage. Dorian dropped his hand, and we dispersed, fleeing from the claustrophobic hiding place.
“That wretched—” Kane grunted and ended in a low whisper, saying something much nastier. The air tasted metallic, as if blood hung in it.
“Let’s check to see if the poor thing is alive,” Laini cut in and scrambled up the cliffside with Dorian. I rushed after them, horrified to see a dark shape lying lifeless in the dry grass. A pool of inky blood formed beneath the wildling, who looked like a lump of shaggy fur. She had been a tall creature with horns and bushy hair, now bleeding out from a blade to the throat.
“What the hell just happened?” Roxy asked. Bryce scanned the area around us as we circled around the wildling’s twitching body.
“A hunter happened,” Kane said sourly. “A rotten, wasteful use of space.”
“We should’ve ambushed her when we had a chance,” Arlonne said with a snarl, glaring at Dorian.
He shook his head. “No. There was no way we could’ve known the situation would turn to violence. She was cooperating, answering the questions.”
“She’s still alive,” Laini said somberly as she crouched beside the creature. The wildling shivered, her body stiffening as she groaned in pain. Laini closed her eyes and took hold of the knife stuck in the creature’s throat. “I’m sorry. This is the only way I can help you.” She waited for the creature’s nod, then dealt the finishing blow to put her out of her misery. The wildling gave a jerk and let out a pained sigh, sounding almost relieved. As I watched, a small, pale soul rose from her chest and floated away, like dandelion fluff. There would be no more agony where she was going. I sucked in a sharp breath as Laini stood, blinking back tears.
“Needless violence,” she muttered, shaking her head. “She wasn’t even dark. The poor thing. She was doing her job.”
I tore my eyes away from the sickening pool of wildling blood. The murder was another cold injustice of the vampire hunters, more proof that the Immortals wielded immense power against anyone they deemed beneath them.
And everyone, it seemed, was beneath them.
Chapter Seventeen
“We’ve got to keep moving,” Dorian said. I tore myself away from the wildling’s fallen body. Kane snatched up the knife from its throat. Roxy gave him a disgusted look, and he huffed.
“She can’t use it,” he argued. “And we need it. Who knows what this world is going to throw at us next?”
With that chilling notion, we started walking again, and I tried to think over Dorian’s plan from before our horrific detour. Every snap and crunch beneath our shoes made my nerves surge on high alert. It was as if my body expected to hear that terribly hypnotic voice call out from the woods again. We made our way back through the trees without a problem, but Bryce sometimes stopped to stare up into the tops of the trees before Kane shoved him gently to keep going.
We went back to our original path.
“Keep close to the trees in case we need to hide again,” Dorian said. I hoped we wouldn’t have to. We would head next for the lake and then the strange city of Immortals. A place filled with cruel beings who wielded horrific power.
I couldn’t picture Itzarriol, the Immortal capital city. Would it be a living version of the vampire city? I somehow doubted it. My daydreams conjured marble temples that looked a lot like the ones from my high school history textbook, from the chapter about Rome. From the ruler’s voice and actions, I suspected the architecture would reflect a culture of beauty and cruelty combined. I tried to ignore my aching feet. From the tear to here, it could easily be ten or fifteen miles, I guessed, but it was hard to estimate distance in this world.
After what felt like twenty more minutes of walking, Dorian stopped our group again. “Let’s make camp somewhere around here,” he suggested. “Keep an eye out for places while we walk.”
The edge of the forest offered few options. We could go deeper into the trees, but I wanted nothing to do with the hissing branches. Still, it might be preferable to sleeping out in the open, vulnerable, with rulers hunting us. It was difficult to think about sleep when “night” was so bright. It felt like morning, but my internal clock yelled that it was time to rest. Weird. I rubbed my eyes.
The sound of agonized sobbing drifted from somewhere in the distance. I kept walking but strained to listen. It came again: a high-pitched wail of distress. I looked around at our group. Nobody was crying. I worried about my sanity leaving me. I must be really tired.
“Did you hear that?” I quietly asked Roxy, who was walking closest to me. I didn’t want to alert the others if I’d only imagined it. “The cry?”
The vampires should’ve heard it too, but they said nothing. I wiggled my ear, wondering if somehow the elevation of this world had plugged up my hearing.
Roxy shook her head. “No, all I hear is that weird groaning.”
I didn’t hear any groaning. In fact, the cry had turned to mocking laughter and pained shrieks.
I studied the surrounding trees uneasily. “Dorian warned us we shouldn’t follow voices in the Immortal Plane. I guess it’s a trick of the distance, or the wind, or something.”
Roxy flinched, and I wondered what she had heard. “I hope so.”
We fell back into stride and silence with one another. Occasionally, the cry came back to me, but I desperately tried to ignore it. Dorian, Kane, Laini, Arlonne, and Sike gathered together in the front of our group. They appeared calm and steady in th
eir movements, unbothered by the voices in the trees.
Bryce took up the rear of the party behind Roxy and me. I wondered if he’d heard things, too.
Before I could ask, Bryce stopped dead and sucked in a sharp breath, causing us all to turn and face him. “The girls,” he cried, his eyes bulging. “We need to help them. Now!”
He took off into the trees and slid down a slope before we could react, disappearing into the forest. My panicked heart slammed against my chest. Bryce was fast when he wanted to be.
“Follow him,” Dorian snapped. “What the hell is he doing?”
The vampires sprinted after Bryce, but they were slower than usual, not wanting to lose me and Roxy. Laini kept glancing back over her shoulder to make sure they hadn’t lost us. We followed them as fast as we could.
Was this about the voices? Had Bryce heard them too?
“Don’t let him out of your sight,” Dorian shouted to us. I veered around a thick tree toward the left, while the vampires went right. Kane and Roxy ran with me, her heavy breathing right behind me, his lithe form tearing through the forest just ahead. Dorian and the others ran far ahead.
Kane groaned. “I got stuck with you slow losers.”
I ignored him and pumped my arms, trying to catch the darting shapes of Dorian’s cloak ahead of us. Bryce had a head start. He was a fast runner, but geez, never this fast. Maybe he was in a magical trance that increased his pace. Somewhere deeper in the forest, Bryce shouted something incomprehensible. What had happened to my ex-captain? I just prayed this little detour wouldn’t draw the wrong kind of attention.
The forest emptied into a clearing, where a massive tree with red bark grew. Bryce rushed around the base of the giant tree in circles. I slid down a small slope to reach Dorian and the rest, joining them by the tree.
“Where are they?” Bryce demanded. “I heard them crying. They’re hurt!”
Laini grabbed him by the shoulders. “Bryce, it’s not real! It’s in your head. These redwood trees pull up a lot of pain and distress from the dark soul energy in the soil. It’s just an echo of things that have already happened.”
“Those don’t look like the kinds of redwoods we know,” Roxy said accusingly between panting breaths.
Kane shrugged. “There are lots of things here that might share a name with something in the Mortal Plane but nothing else.”
“Why would it do that?” I asked, shaken. Betrayals by rulers were bad enough without the greenery adding to it. “It’s a tree.”
“It isn’t trying to do it,” Dorian explained. “It naturally reflects the pain and darkness it feeds on. It can disorient you if you pay attention to it. We learned to deal with these things as kids. This was my fault, for not warning you clearly enough. I hadn’t noticed any young redwood trees.” He scowled, angry at himself.
This was a young tree? I marveled at the towering height.
“But I heard them,” Bryce snapped. “Listen, they’re calling again!” He looked around for the source of the sound, frantic.
Laini slapped him hard across the face. I gasped at the suddenness of it. Laini was the last person I expected to slap anyone. Bryce reeled to the side and pressed a hand to his startled face. The clarity came back to his eyes in an instant.
“You hit me!”
Kane let out a peal of laughter.
“Sorry,” Laini said with a guilty look. “That’s what my grandmother told me to do when I was a kid.”
Noted: Laini has a killer slap game.
“Don’t run off like that,” Kane grumbled, his mirth short lived. “The rules aren’t jokes.” It seemed that Halla’s lecturing nature had rubbed off on her son.
Bryce nodded solemnly. “I know. I’m sorry.”
Dorian looked thoughtfully up at the smooth-skinned bark of the tree. What was he thinking? Up close, I realized the red skewed more to a rust color, the texture closer to leather. Nothing like our redwoods at home.
“Follow me,” he said simply. We continued down another slope, which led to a cliff that looked out onto a valley below, choked with the enormous redwood trees. The scale of the massive trees made the landscape look like a surrealist painting, where everything was the wrong size. The treetops in the valley were nearly level with our group as we stood on the cliff. The tips of their branches had to be several stories from the ground. The foliage, dense clumps of thick green needles, looked menacingly sharp. I whistled in awe. This was a good place for us humans to go crazy in.
Dorian gave a satisfied smile. “We can use the thorn canopy as cover to fly safely. It can provide shelter, too.”
Arlonne let out a short, sharp laugh, startling me. Sometimes, she was so quiet I forgot about her presence.
“Your side trip turned out to be useful, after all,” she said, slinging a grin at Bryce.
Bryce proudly pressed a hand against his chest. “I meant to do it all along,” he announced.
I studied the incredible forest before us. We would pass our first night in this untrustworthy dimension in a monstrous forest that transmitted the pain and suffering of dark souls trapped in the ground.
I suspected it wouldn’t be the most restful night of sleep.
Chapter Eighteen
Ensconced high in the redwoods, transported up by the redbills, we camped in a large hole carved into the dense trunks of purplish black thorns. Before we bedded down, a few of the vampires had gathered the redbills and taken them for a short trip up into the trees to check for any hidden creatures that could do us harm. The redbills naturally sought out this area, drawn to it like a magnet, and moved through and around the hostile trees with ease. Numerous tunnels wound outward from our little cavern, and Laini explained that wild redbills had carved this area earlier, which our birds could sense. From the direction of the new growth, the thorns pointing every which way, the old flock appeared to have moved on some time ago.
The thorns—each around the length of the two daggers I had sheathed in my boots—overlapped from tree to tree, blocking out any light that might have crept in from below. It created a curiously springy yet solid surface upon which to spread our mats and sleeping bags. When anyone moved, the woven floor creaked enough that I was concerned we would fall to our deaths while we slept, but it held steady beneath our weight. Although gear bags and clothing snagged on the needles in a few places, it was oddly comfortable to sleep on, since it distributed our weight evenly. It was like a charming bed of nails. Throughout the night, however, the redwoods had whispered to me. I imagined they whispered to Roxy and Bryce too—a constant low chatter of pained voices speaking of deep grief and lost chances in life.
When I woke up after an unknown amount of time, the sky was once again dark outside our strange camp. Part of my brain wanted to suggest this was morning, but in reality I had no concept of what time it was. I stared out the narrow opening of the nest from my sturdy sleeping pad, studying the gloom outside, my eyes now accustomed to the lack of light. There was little to see except more of the redwoods stretching away. I knew if I crawled to the doorway I might see the jagged peaks of the mountain range lit by whatever souls were caught in the sky right now. But it was wiser to not make myself a target for creatures with far better eyesight who might be looking for food or a prisoner.
On the far side of the nest, Dorian rested beside Sike. I felt a pang of disappointment, missing his touch. It would continue like this for the rest of our journey, especially after he fed. I shook myself to dispel my low mood. The voices didn’t just mess with your head by calling to you—it seemed as though they had crawled into my psyche, leaving me unsettled and sad. This was a mission, and I needed to concentrate… for everyone’s sake. I rubbed my hands, reminding myself that I was alive and well and would learn to ignore the voices. We had survived our first night in the Immortal Plane. That was what mattered.
Roxy and Bryce stirred beside me, slowly coming to consciousness. Roxy flicked on a lighter, the solitary flame letting us see a fraction more of one anot
her and the space around us. In the orange glow, Bryce’s eyebrows scrunched together as he examined the unforgiving trees.
“It feels like there are eyes on us all the time,” he said, keeping his voice low.
My spine tingled with an unnerving sensation. “I know what you mean.”
Roxy peered through the foliage to the shadowy sky, still kneeling on her sleeping pad. “It's all shadows,” she muttered after a moment. “There’s no light to focus on.”
Bryce nodded.
The vampires began to move around and gather their packs, their forms little more than sound in the dim light.
“Let’s get ready to go,” Dorian said. “We’re going to be spending most of the day flying through these tunnels, so make sure everything is strapped down tight and won’t get caught on thorns.”
The air in the nest moved as Drigar gently flapped his wings. The flame from Roxy’s lighter caught the proud glint in his eye. Reuniting with Dorian had made him happy.
“The redbills created the routes we’ll be taking over a lengthy period of time. Thousands of years, maybe,” Sike relayed to us as we packed up our beds. We humans nibbled on some dry rations.
“They’ll spread throughout the entirety of this tangle,” Kane said. “It’s a concealed route, but it’s not the fastest. The redbills will have to fly slower because of the space constraint.”
“It’s the safest way to travel,” Dorian said with an air of assurance. “Even if it’s not the shortest.”
The forest was massive, but it was a better bet than facing threats on land or in the air. As odd as these tunnels felt, I was glad the thorns hid us so well. It would be harder for the hunters to find us.
“You never know where the tunnels will take us, though,” Laini told me with a low chuckle. “Unfortunately, sometimes their tunnels veer off into dead ends or lead to bizarre places. The redbills have minds of their own.”
Darklight 3: Darkworld Page 18
