The Lethe Stone (The Fae War Chronicles Book 4)

by Jocelyn Fox

  “You picked it,” she said unrelentingly. “And now you better start telling me the best explanation ever concocted on God’s green earth about why in hell you disappeared for eight months and I thought you were dead and now you show up in the middle of nowhere at a goddamn gas station.” Her voice, rather than increase in volume, lowered and increased in intensity until she was almost hissing the words, her eyes still hot with anger and unshed tears.

  Duke cleared his throat. “Okay. I’ll tell you. But just promise me…promise me that you won’t call the cops or anything.”

  Her face hardened fractionally. “I’m not promising shit, Noah.”

  He rubbed the back of his neck and gave a quick sigh. “Fair enough. I just don’t want you to think I’ve lost my marbles. Anyway, here goes.” And he told her the most condensed version of the story that he could manage, sticking to the major points. It sounded crazy to his own ears. He watched her expression change from angry to disbelieving and suspicious, settling into something like sadness when he finished with being thrown through the portal at the Dark Keep.

  “You were injured, weren’t you?” she asked softly, a crease appearing between her brows. “And you dreamed all this in a coma. Or you’re still hallucinating.”

  He swore under his breath. “I wish it were that simple sometimes.”

  Ross bit her lip and she pressed her palms against her thighs. It was one of her tells, one of the signs that she was uncertain or anxious. Duke took a tentative step toward her. “Look,” he said, hands raised slightly in an unconscious calming gesture, “I’m not trying to freak you out. I’m not trying to pressure you. But it’s not just me, Ross. I’ve got two guys depending on me.”

  She narrowed her eyes and half-turned away from him. “Two guys?”

  “I wasn’t the only one pulled through the portal. There are two other guys, and I need to find a safe place where I can really check them over. Transiting between worlds is kinda rough.” He smiled slightly at his attempt at humor. Ross didn’t smile, eyeing him warily. “They’re good guys, guys that I fought alongside.” He paused. “I don’t really know what else I could say to convince you. But you were the first one – the only one – that I called.” He shook his head. “I know I just turned your world upside down, Ross, and I’m sorry, but I didn’t know who else to call.” He spread his hands in front of him, hoping that she’d believe him.

  Ross took a deep breath and gave him a long look, her dark eyes boring into his soul with searing sharpness. Apparently whatever she saw when she flayed him open satisfied her. She shoved her thumbs into her pockets and spread her fingers over her hips. “All right. Let’s go pick up these guys. I’m assuming that you’ve hidden them somewhere while you came to the meet.”

  Duke smiled. “You know me too well.”

  She sidestepped his reaching hand. “I…Noah, I’m going to need some time. You’re right, you just turned my world upside down. Inside out, I guess.” A gut wrenching sorrow filled her face for just an instant. “I thought you were dead. I planned your funeral. It’s going to take me a little while to sort things through.” And then the sorrow was gone, replaced with a practical air. “But you said you have buddies who need someplace safe, and even if you’re crazy, I can’t leave you or them out here in the heat.” She lifted one eyebrow. “I couldn’t even do that to a stray dog.”

  Duke chuckled. “You’re such a humanitarian.”

  “No,” she replied, “I don’t like most people.” She gave him one last considering look before turning toward the truck. “But I love you, so that tilts most things in your favor.”

  He thought his heart would stop right then and there when she admitted that she still loved him, and his smile turned into a grin as he followed her toward the truck.

  “You can wipe that shit eating grin off your face,” she said as he climbed into the passenger’s seat, giving him a mock scowl. “I’m still pissed at you for disappearing for eight months and making me think you were dead.” The engine rumbled to life and she adjusted the air conditioning. Duke leaned back in the seat and sighed as the cool air flowed over him.

  “I never thought I’d feel air conditioning again,” he said with a groan of pleasure, closing his eyes.

  “Try not to get too excited about it,” she replied acerbically. “All right, where are these other two wing nuts that you’re bringing along for the ride?”

  “Make a right outta the parking lot. One of ‘em likes to climb trees to keep overwatch so I put him in that little stand near the river.”

  As Ross maneuvered the truck out of the parking lot, she almost told him that the doublewide a few miles out from this gas station had been unoccupied for nearly a year, and they could hole up there. But she pressed her lips together. What kind of person would that make her?

  “You’re thinkin’ of telling me to kick rocks and go set up in that trailer out there, huh?” Duke said without opening his eyes. He adjusted one of the air vents slightly.

  “Yes,” Ross replied honestly. She sighed. “But you know I can’t do that.”

  “Because you love me.” He said it almost in a whisper, and she glanced at him to find him looking at her coyly through lowered lashes.

  She snorted. “Yes. Because I love you.”

  “Because I’m your special kinda crazy idiot.” He fluttered his eyelashes.

  “Yes,” she said dryly, “and that story you told brings a new meaning to that.” But she couldn’t help the smile spreading across her lips. “God, I missed you.” She swallowed hard, the amusement nosediving into gut clawing sorrow, an echo of the loss and abandonment that she’d felt when she’d finally accepted that he wasn’t coming back.

  “I missed you too, Ross,” Duke said, now serious. “I thought of you every single day. If there was a way I could have let you know what happened, I would have.”

  Ross cleared her throat. “All right. Enough with the emotional talk.” She pulled the truck onto the narrow gravel shoulder. “Let’s go get your friends.” By the end of her sentence, she’d already killed the engine and had her door open.

  “Ross,” said Duke, pulling her attention back into the cab of the truck. He smiled, and she saw the tiredness written across his face. “I love you, too.”

  She managed a small smile. “I know.”

  They closed the doors of the truck and headed toward the trees, Duke still wearing his smile even though he was exhausted down to his bones. He’d had a lot of crazy days in his life, but being thrown into another world, fighting an ancient deity and then being tossed back into southern Louisiana ranked among the more improbable of his adventures. He frowned and motioned for Ross to pause behind him. He and Merrick had agreed that Merrick would call out with a bird whistle when he saw Duke approaching, and with a vantage point in the tree, Merrick should have seen them by now, but no bird whistle had split the thick, humid air. Long grasses swayed in the slight breeze. The tree’s low limbs and the Spanish moss created a dappled thicket, perfect for concealment but also not ideal to jump into without any idea what had happened.

  “What’s wrong?” Ross murmured, already instinctually crouched into her ready stance. One of her hands drifted toward her cargo pocket, where Duke had no doubt she carried a knife. She always carried a knife. One of the many reasons why he loved her.

  “No call and response,” he replied in a low voice. His mind raced. Had they been followed through the portal? Had a local stumbled upon this remote place in the short time he’d been gone? He wet his lips and trilled a short whistle, breathing a sigh of relief when the response call sounded from somewhere in the grasses. Duke ran forward, picking his way over the gnarled roots of the trees, Ross following closely behind him. He almost tripped over Merrick, the Sidhe was that silent and well hidden, but one look told him why Merrick wasn’t up in the tree.

  “He had a shaking fit,” the navigator said, kneeling beside an unconscious Luca, “and I thought it better to keep watch over him.”

&nbs
p; “You did the right thing,” said Duke, evaluating the big ulfdrengr visually.

  “How long did the seizures – the shaking fit – how long did it last?” Ross asked, sliding past Duke to kneel beside Luca. She quickly checked his vitals. “Rapid, shallow pulse. Clammy skin.” She looked up at Duke. “He’s in shock, I’d bet on that, but I don’t know about the seizures. Let’s get him in the car.”

  Merrick had leaned protectively over Luca when Ross had dropped to her knees, watching her with wary gray eyes, but he settled back as he watched her work.

  “We just can’t catch a break,” said Duke in frustration, running his hand through his hair. In the back of his mind, he noticed how his heart swelled with pride in his girl: someone in trouble and she was right there, no matter what. “All right. Merrick, this is Ross. Ross, this is Merrick and the big guy is Luca.”

  Ross gave Merrick a curt nod but remained focused on counting Luca’s pulse, two fingers pressed against the artery in his neck.

  “Merrick, help me carry him,” said Duke, positioning himself at Luca’s head. The ulfdrengr was bone-pale, his skin alarmingly cool to the touch.

  “I’ll get the truck ready,” said Ross, bounding off through the long grass.

  It was one thing to drag Luca out of the creek with the aid of adrenaline. It was another thing entirely to carry the ulfdrengr the hundred yards to the truck. But between Duke’s stubbornness and Merrick’s Sidhe strength, they managed it, and Ross had the back seat of the cab ready with a blanket and pillow.

  “I’ll ride in the back with him,” Duke told her, and she nodded in agreement. Luca was so big that Duke ended up putting the ulfdrengr’s head and most of his shoulders across his lap, using the pillow to make sure Luca’s head wouldn’t hit the door if they hit a bump in the road.

  “We should be going to a hospital,” Ross said as she jumped into the front seat. Without skipping a beat, she fastened Merrick’s seatbelt for him. The Sidhe navigator ran his long fingers over the straps of the restraint, a considering look in his eyes. He grimaced slightly and took a deep breath; Ross hoped he wouldn’t be sick in her truck.

  “No hospitals,” said Duke. In less than an hour, Luca had gone from walking and talking with them, though not without some discomfort, to comatose. Every instinct directed him to find the nearest Emergency Room and let a doctor handle it. But he shook his head. “He’s not human, Ross. I don’t know what would work for him and what would kill him.”

  “Northerners are much like Sidhe,” said Merrick from the front seat. “You can test anything you need to use on him on me first.”

  As soon as Duke had said “not human,” Ross looked more closely at the lithe young man in the front seat of her truck. His clothes were outlandish – they looked like they had gotten a flat tire on the way to the nearest Renaissance festival – and he wore a sword at his hip. There were several other sheaths holding daggers. She saw one at the top of his boot, another on his forearm, and she was sure there were more weapons she couldn’t see. They were all encrusted with the remnants of grime and gore; she wrinkled her nose as she suddenly acknowledged the smell of unwashed men and blood filling the enclosed space. But more than that, there was something inhuman about Merrick in the alabaster perfection of his skin, the strange masculine beauty of his face, the gleam of his dark hair. He caught her eyes and tucked his hair behind one ear, offering more evidence of his otherworldly appearance: the tips of his ears were delicately pointed.

  It crossed her mind to laugh and commend him for a great costume, but that thought died as she really looked at him. Her skin prickled in goose bumps as her instincts recognized the otherness of him, the alien power flickering in the air around him. She swallowed hard and tore her eyes away from Merrick, twisting to look into the back seat. Duke looked up from examining Luca and caught her eyes. “You weren’t…you didn’t make this up,” she whispered.

  “No,” he replied steadily. “I didn’t. We need to get somewhere safe, Ross. Somewhere we can help him.”

  She nodded jerkily and turned around, swallowing hard.

  “For what it’s worth,” Merrick said quietly, “I may not be human, but I am not your enemy. I will defend you along with my sword brothers, in this world and my own.”

  Ross blinked at the sincerity in his voice. “Thanks.” Her voice came out hoarse, and she focused on starting the truck. As she pulled away from the little copse of trees with her newly resurrected fiancé, an unconscious man who could have come from the world of Conan the Barbarian, and an alien-elf in her front seat, Ross almost laughed at the thought that when she’d gotten up this morning, her biggest worry had been what to wear to her interview at the firehouse.

  Luca shuddered and Duke adjusted his grip on the ulfdrengr. “Drive as fast as you feel comfortable, Ross.” A low urgency undercut his calm words.

  “Got it,” she said, and she didn’t miss the little yelp of surprise that came from Merrick as she jammed her foot down on the gas and the truck leapt forward, roaring down the road through the deepening dusk of the southern night.

  As the pale dust settled onto the still warm asphalt, a shadow detached itself from near the dumpster at the side of the gas station. It was as though an oil slick had been draped over a man. Thick darkness oozed around the figure, absorbing the fading rays of the sunset. The man shaped slice of darkness slid toward the wall of the convenience store and melted into it.

  At the register, the grizzled clerk looked up from his magazine. The grainy black and white footage that showed the security camera’s view of the pumps and the back two corners of the store flickered. He reached up and tapped the side of the old pendulous monitor, but rather than fixing the problem, the picture disappeared entirely with a faint pop and a little burst of acrid smoke. He sighed and cursed under his breath. One more thing for him to fix.

  One of the lights in the back of the store flickered. The clerk looked up, squinted, saw the figure gliding toward him when a moment before his shop had been empty. He reached for the pistol in the concealed holster beneath the counter, but then the light over the register exploded, shards of glass showering him like deadly raindrops. He ducked, covering his face with his hands, and when he looked up again, a faceless black figure stood before the register. The thing reached out something that was almost an arm, and the clerk’s blood ran cold. He fumbled for the pistol, but then the thing touched him, and the world went black.

  Chapter 7

  Tess stood next to the kitchen table in her childhood home and rubbed her fingers lightly over the grain of the wood. Her father read the newspaper at the table, the ancient coffee maker that he refused to replace rattling as it heated up water in preparation to brew. Lila sprawled in a patch of sun in the adjacent dining room, eyes closed in canine bliss.

  The sound of a scream, a voice stretched thin with agony, rippled through the house. Tess turned toward the sound.

  “Just ignore it,” her father said in an unconcerned voice, turning the page of the newspaper.

  Why would he tell her just to ignore it? The scream came again and the voice plucked a chord of memory. She couldn’t recall the name but deep down she knew the person to whom the voice belonged. Tess walked quickly through the dining room, past Lila, who raised her golden head and gave half a wag of her tail, and opened the front door, stepping out onto the porch that her parents had built themselves, sanding and staining the planks with painstaking care. The scream echoed again. A jogger continued down the street, undisturbed, giving Tess a friendly wave. She listened, straining to place the scream, racing down the front steps when it came again from someplace to her left.

  Her vision went black and the world whirled sickeningly around her. When the darkness receded, she stood once more next to the kitchen table. The scream came again, and then another. One man, one woman, both sounding as though they were being tortured.

  “I told you to ignore it,” said her father.

  “I have to find them,” Tess said. “I have
to…I have to stop whatever it is that’s hurting them.” Another voice joined the chorus of agony, and then another. Tess felt sick as the cacophony rose in volume, surrounding her with a sensation bordering on tangible.

  “Their pain will end soon enough.” Her father folded the paper neatly and laid it on the kitchen table, making a motion of dismissal with one hand.

  She began to pick out words in the screaming. And she remembered their names. She could hear Calliea and Merrick, Sage and Finnead, Robin and Moira, all of them crying out to her to rescue them, to save them from their torment at the hands of Dark creatures. She ran out the front door again, only to have the world dissolve and reform around her, placing her neatly back at the kitchen table.

  “You thought you’d saved them, but I will still claim them,” said her father, standing up from the kitchen table. His face changed, shifting with a horrible liquidity into the coldly beautiful face she recognized as Malravenar. Darkness pooled beneath him, tentacles reaching out from the blackness to slide over the objects of the room, transforming everything it touched into that dark, glimmering substance from which the Dark Throne had been made.

  The chorus of torture intensified, the screams whirling around Tess like bats. Panic rose up within her. She couldn’t escape. She couldn’t defeat him, not this time, and everyone she knew and loved would pay the price.

  “Tess!” Robin’s voice sounded distant, but it was different than the screams and cries of pain.

  The room around her was completely black, glittering with Malravenar’s power. He looked at her, drinking in her distress as though sipping fine wine, and then he laughed.

  Tess jerked awake, Malravenar’s laugh echoing in her ears, a cold sweat soaking the blanket that had tangled around her legs in her fitful sleep. Robin sat back as she took a few measured breaths and pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes.

  “Nightmare?” he asked quietly.