Dark Horse

by E. A. Copen

  We made it back to the tiny, two-bedroom house Pony D left me when he left town. His leaving wasn’t voluntary. After I’d discovered he was behind Lydia’s death, I couldn’t stand sharing the town with him. Rather than kill him, which was what everyone expected me to do, Emma helped me get together the funds to send him to the best brain cancer treatment center in America. I hadn’t heard from him since, but I hoped he was still kicking around and making inappropriate comments to his nurses.

  The house itself had been one of the few in the neighborhood to survive Katrina thanks to all the spells Pony put in place. Judging by its current condition, I didn’t think it’d survive another category five, let alone whatever was coming our way. It was run down, but it was still home.

  I unlocked the door and stepped into a kitchen in need of an update. The trash needed to go out, but at least I kept the sink empty, mostly by eating takeout. It wasn’t clean, but it wasn’t a wreck either. Besides, I had no one to impress. Remy was gone, grown and dealing with her own problems in Summer, and Emma...Well, I had worried I’d never see her again.

  At least the power was back on.

  I dropped a few bags off on the counter and took the laptops we’d purchased into the living room to get them set up so they could use them. My intention had been to get them started up and running through the dozen updates that were probably available and return to put away the groceries. Instead, Beth and Emma got busy putting things away while I got to work.

  I looked up from the laptop to see them moving around the kitchen, speaking to each other in hushed tones. It was weird seeing them doing mundane chores like putting away the groceries or grabbing stuff in a store checkout line. Over the last three months, I’d convinced myself that Beth was a lost cause, telling myself repeatedly that I’d have to kill her one day. She’d become a monster, a killer by her own admission. It was hard to imagine her hurting anyone when she was making fun of the knockoff soda I’d grabbed.

  Watching her took me back to a time when we weren’t bitter enemies, but best friends and more. I’d loved her once. Thought I’d spend the rest of my life with her. Then I went and did the single stupidest thing I could’ve and got myself tossed behind bars for the better part of a decade. While I was inside, she moved on.

  Emma walked by, pausing in the doorway to lean her spear against the side of the fridge where it’d be accessible. What we’d had was different, but still the same in a lot of ways. Emma and I came from different worlds, yet somehow found common ground. I couldn’t remember the exact moment when I knew I loved her because there wasn’t a single moment. It happened slow, over time. That love felt like tree roots in my soul. I didn’t realize how much I’d missed her until I saw her again. Then it all came rushing back and now I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

  With a sigh, I moved from the laptop I was still setting up to my personal laptop. I’d closed it the night before without shutting it down, which meant it was running slow when I opened it back up. The research from the night before was still all over the screen too. I’d been reading about memory spells and how they could be undone. I still wasn’t sure that’s what Loki had done to Emma to get her to come over to his side, especially since she said she remembered before. I’d have to dig a little. Maybe I could get to the bottom of it.

  Beth walked into the living room and looked around, frowning. “You need a maid.”

  My answer was a grunt. “What I need is a functioning air conditioner. It’ll be an oven in here once the sun comes up. We’d better hit the research before then.”

  I handed one of the secondary laptops off to Beth while I worked on mine. Emma flipped on the television and found the Weather Channel. They were covering the record high temps sweeping the nation and talking about climate change. Nothing useful, so I tucked myself into the research, pulling up everything I could on Typhon.

  What I found online lined up with the picture Beth and Loki had painted for me. Typhon was probably the most badass of the Titans, powerful enough that he held his own against Zeus. Unlike the other Titans, however, Typhon was said to have been born after the Olympian gods tossed the Titans into Tartarus. Some Greek poet named Hesiod claimed the Earth herself gave birth to Typhon out of rage at what Zeus and the others had done to the other Titans. Interesting stuff, but worthless for our purposes.

  I looked up from the screen and rubbed the bridge of my nose, trying to stave off the headache. When I lowered my hand, I spied one of Remy’s old baby toys poking out from under a basket of unfolded laundry across the room.

  My heart seized at the sight of it, a familiar ache settling in my chest. I thought I’d put all those up, not because they were in the way, but because I didn’t want to think about Remy. All the time I’d lost with her. I hadn’t figured out exactly how many birthdays I’d missed since she’d grown up in Faerie, but I figured it was somewhere around twenty. The very idea that moving her from Earth to the Summer Court in Faerie for as little as a week could let her grow up without me was still a difficult pill to swallow.

  I’d missed everything in that week as I lay unconscious, fighting for my life. First steps, first words, first days of school, first heartbreak, first everything. While I was determined to make up for all that lost time, two hours every Friday afternoon just wasn’t enough. Talking to her still felt like talking to a stranger. My little girl was gone and nothing I’d ever do would let me live through those lost moments.

  All the more reason to make every future moment count, I thought and glanced over at Emma. “Why are you working for him?”

  She shrugged without looking away from the television. “I told you back at the hospital. I’m tired of this endless cycle of pointless violence. It’s time for this to end. Time to wipe the slate clean.”

  “No.” I set my laptop aside. “No, Emma wouldn’t say that. What happened to you? The last time I saw you, you were pissed at me for what happened with Hades. I knew we were probably over, but I never thought... No, it just doesn’t make sense. The Emma I knew would’ve fought tooth and nail for the right thing, even when I couldn’t see a way forward. She was good.”

  Emma lowered the remote and looked over at me, her expression blank. Her lips parted as if she were going to say something else, but her attention snapped back to the screen suddenly. She mashed the volume button, turning it almost all the way up.

  “...Tropical depression forming over the Bahamas, as you can see.” The weatherman gestured to a splash of swirling color south of Florida. “We’re keeping an eye on it, but the sheer size is impressive, especially for this time of year. It could strengthen before it hits the Miami area, maybe becoming a tropical storm or even a category one, but the likelihood that it’ll progress beyond that is minimal.”

  “That’s it,” Beth said, and snapped her laptop closed. “It has to be him.”

  I frowned. “It’s not even a category one hurricane, and the path isn’t anywhere near here.”

  “Not yet.” Emma stood and switched off the television. “But starting that far out will give him plenty of space and time to get worked up. Katrina came in the same way. Didn’t hit category one until it made landfall, downgraded back to a tropical storm, and then picked up speed as it rushed across the Gulf.”

  I frowned at the blank screen, trying to remember. I was a teenager when Katrina hit, Pony’s ward for the last six years. At fifteen, my biggest concerns were passing algebra and getting girls to notice me. Pony and I didn’t weather the storm in New Orleans though. He put up his wards and we got out with the first set of refugees, long before the freeways clogged and they redirected people to the Superdome. We were lucky.

  Afterward, while Pony cleaned out the property, I spent that fall up in Nashville with some rich family Pony knew, the Sullivans. They didn’t care much for him, but they put up with me. Had a son about five years younger than me, and the two of us got into plenty of trouble before the Sullivans finally had enough and shipped me back.

  I missed mo
st of the storm’s devastation except what was covered by the news. By the time I arrived back in New Orleans, it was the following spring and the worst of it had been cleaned up. My only memories of that time were of how empty the city was in the months afterward, the strange sense of solidarity the people around me seemed to develop. I never got it, partly because I was too busy feeling guilty about having gotten out with no trouble.

  “Okay,” I said, shutting my laptop. “We know where he is, how he’s getting here, and what he’s going to do when it arrives. Anybody have any ideas on how to stop him?”

  Beth shook her head.

  I hadn’t had any luck either, which meant we’d have to go talk to Fenrir for more information. To do that, I’d need to find us a boat first.

  Chapter Four

  There were dozens of boat ramps, docks, and marinas in New Orleans and the surrounding area. Which one you cast off from mostly depended on where you wanted to go.

  Fenrir had apparently taken up residence in Fort Pike, one of the many ruined forts lining the shores around New Orleans. Of them all, Pike was probably the best preserved. Until a few years ago, the state used to run tours through the place a couple times a day. Not even Katrina could do enough damage to shut it down permanently. No, that honor fell to the politicians in Baton Rouge and their budget cuts. They stripped funding away from the historical site bit by bit until the last employees were laid off four years ago. Fort Pike had been closed to the public ever since.

  Fort Pike sat in the blue waters of a strait known as The Rigolets just east of Lake Pontchartrain. Used to be, you could reach it by traveling north on I-90 and taking an exit, but since all that was closed, it was only accessible by boat. Luckily there was a boat ramp nearby.

  It took a few hours for me to secure a small paddle boat, one just big enough for the three of us, and then rent a car large enough to transport it up to the ramp. By then, the sun was high, the humidity was higher, and I was baking. We got the boat to the edge of the water and I slathered myself in sunscreen while Beth and Emma loaded the last of the provisions.

  “Do we really need all this junk?” Beth grunted as she dropped another plastic grocery bag into the boat. “The fort is right there. We’ll be there and back before the sun’s even down.”

  “Says you.” I rubbed in the last of the white sunblock on my arms and smeared a thick stripe of it on my nose to rub in. “What if we get stranded? Better to be prepared, I always say.”

  “You’d be better off with a fishing pole than cheap snacks.” Emma shut the door to the SUV we’d rented and walked by, slinging a backpack on. “The fishing out here is supposed to be great.”

  She had a point, but I wasn’t just going to admit that. I had my pride to think about. “Let’s just get this over with.”

  It took both me and Emma to get the boat in the water. Once we were out from shore, I frowned up at the sun and wished I’d thought to bring a hat. Somehow, it was hotter over the water than on shore. Or maybe the sweat I was working up was just because I’d volunteered to row like an idiot.

  “Tired?” Emma quirked her lips in a small, familiar smile.

  “No,” I lied and tried to puff out my chest. “You’re kidding. I do this for fun all the time. See how much fun I’m having?”

  “Quiet.” Beth sliced a hand through the air and looked up. “Did you hear that?”

  I stopped rowing for a second and looked around. We’d made it out around the jutting piece of land that stood between the boat launch and the fort. Fort Pike itself stood off to our right, the stone walls rising in a strange curve. From above, the fort would look a lot like a baseball diamond, round on the side pointed to the water and pointed at the other end. There was nothing in the sky but sun and seagulls in the distance. “It’s just the seagulls, Beth.”

  She gripped her black staff and stood, making the boat shift. “If that’s a seagull, I’m Cleopatra.”

  “Hey!” I hooked the oars and held onto the side of the boat while it rocked. “Quit rockin’ the boat!”

  The smile faded from Emma’s face. She grabbed her spear from the bottom of the boat and stood too. “She’s right. Those aren’t seagulls.”

  I finally twisted around so I could see what they were looking at. Black shapes flapped in the distance, shapes that did look like seagulls at first. Then, as they moved closer, I realized they were too big to be regular gulls. The wing shape was all wrong too, more like the wings on an eagle than a gull. And what was up with the body? It almost looked...human.

  “Get us into the fort.” Beth turned and snarled, “Now!”

  “Why? What the hell are those things?” Even as I asked, I grabbed the oars and paddled as fast as I could which, admittedly, wasn’t that fast.

  “Just row.”

  Emma drew a knife from her hip with her other hand.

  A terrible, ear-splitting screech filled the air as the first one dove close, clawed fingertips just barely skimming the surface of the water. It had pointed, knife-like feathers, crimson on the edges as if they’d been dipped in blood. Talons large enough to grasp a human head flexed. That was where the bird-like qualities ended. The rest of the creature was human, or human-like. It had no arms and no legs, but the torso of a beautiful naked woman with blood red eyes and long, black hair.

  “Harpies?” I screeched. “You’ve got to be kidding me!”

  Another harpy swooped toward the boat. Emma jabbed at it with her spear, holding it back, but another just flew in and wrestled the spear away from her and snapped it in half with its talons. Two landed, screeching on the side of the boat, their added weight nearly turning it over. I swung an oar at one of them. It hopped onto the end, clamped its talons around it, and crushed the oar. Oops.

  Beth jabbed her staff into the one sitting on the remains of the oar. It screeched at her and charged, dragging sharp claws over her face. Emma lunged, trying to grab the harpy off Beth’s face while I swept the last remaining oar around the edge of the boat, trying to knock more of them off. It was no use. For every one I knocked off the side of the boat, two or three more would land.

  Though the water was calm, our tiny rowboat was swaying as if we were in storm waters. Water sloshed up over the side, pooling around my ankles. It was a welcome reprieve from the heat, but it also meant it wouldn’t be long before the boat went down. Two harpies spun in the air above us, soaring high and then diving back down. I raised the oar above my head to whack one of them, but they zoomed by too fast, each one punching a hole through the bottom of the boat. Lake water bubbled up, filling the boat and pulling it down.

  “Uh, guys?” I shouted. “We’ve got a problem.”

  Beth swung her staff, knocking one harpy into the water. “Swim for the fort!”

  It wasn’t far, but the swim would be hell with harpies bearing down on us. There was no way for us to defend ourselves and swim simultaneously. There was also no choice.

  I tossed aside the oar, grabbed my iron staff, took a deep breath and jumped for the water.

  At the surface, the water was nice and warm, but go down more than a few inches to where the sun couldn’t penetrate, and it was still chilly. Black, cold water pressed in on me. The screeching of the harpies carried through the water sounding like demented laughter. Salty water stung my eyes when I opened them. There was no sign of light, no way to know which way was up, and it felt like I’d somehow gotten turned around. All I could do was pick a direction, swim, and hope I was right.

  I reached out and felt the familiar warmth of the sun touch my fingers. That way. Kicking with everything I had, I propelled myself toward the light, or what I hoped was anyway. My lungs burned. Up ahead, a milky shade of green. The surface?

  I burst through with a gasp and found myself in chaos. Harpies screeched and circled above, taking turns diving to claw at Emma, Beth or me. Others grabbed bits of the boat and broke it into smaller pieces, casting them back into the water from above.

  “Lazarus!” Emma’s scream soun
ded far away, muffled. I must’ve had water in my ears.

  I turned myself around in the water so I was facing the fort walls. Three harpies had picked Emma up. Though she was struggling, they were carrying her away, out to sea. I slammed my hand down on the surface of the water and unleashed a spell. On land, it would’ve cracked open the ground, but I’d never tried that particular spell in the water.

  A huge wave rose in front of my hand and surged toward the harpies. They screeched as it slammed into them, tearing Emma from their claws. I dove into the water, swimming frantically away from the fort toward where Emma had gone down only to find she’d come up on her own. Blood leaked into the water all around her from where the harpies’ talons had torn gashes on her arms and legs. She coughed and spat water.

  “Can you make it?” I shouted once I reached her.

  The harpies had circled us above, cackling and shrieking. I eyed the fort wall. Even once we reached it, we’d have to swim around to find a way in. They’d pick us off long before we ever reached the safety of the walls.

  I grabbed Emma and pulled her closer as we treaded water. I didn’t have a plan, but I wasn’t just going to let them tear her apart, not while I could get in their way and slow them down at least.

  Just as the harpies were about to renew their attack, a haunting howl vibrated over the water’s surface. Every harpy turned her head toward the fort and bared her teeth. Wings flapped. The harpies let out a hissing squawk in unison.

  Rocks tumbled into the water from one of the large openings in the wall. There’d been cannons there once, but now something even more dangerous peered out over the blue green water: the icy blue murderous eyes of another Titan. Fenrir.

  When the harpies didn’t turn and flee immediately, the eyes disappeared and the shaggy gray wolf himself appeared where a door must’ve been before. Even on all fours, he was large enough to fill the entire space. His shoulders grazed the ceiling and he held his head low. Two huge front paws dipped into the water, but he stopped short of exiting the fort, choosing instead to let out another ear-piercing howl. Ripples raced across the water and vibrations shook the air and rattled my teeth. The harpies covered their ears.