It was covered in alternating patches of fur and leathery skin. Its face looked like that of a dead mountain lion she had seen once—large sockets and pointed cheekbones, and only a thin sheet of flesh stretched over the top. She could see veins, pulsing with its heartbeat, beneath the surface of the monster’s nearly translucent skin.
It was looking at her. Its eyes were too small for its sockets…but it was looking at her all the same. Teeth, broken and sharp, jutted from its jaws at odd angles.
Its back was covered in strange scales that reminded her of armor. As she watched, transfixed and horrified, the creature took a deep breath. Its neck expanded like that of a toad. As it exhaled, the scales on its back flipped up, revealing rows of holes in its skin. Air rushed out of them, sounding like some strange and uncanny instrument. It was a deep, bass rumble that rattled the window in its frame, offset by the high rattle of its scales as they shook in the blast of air.
Ember shrank against the wall, her heart pounding in her ears. She kept her knife in her belt but refused to let go of the handle.
“He isn’t going to hurt you,” Lyon muttered to her. “He’s just saying hello. He’s a Bellows. They’re scavengers. They only attack in self-defense.”
“Scavengers,” she managed to choke out. “That—that—”
“Is normal for our world. He is hardly the most remarkable creature that stalks Under. Come, Miss Ember. We’re not far from the Great Hall.”
The creature kept walking, passing them with only another look in her direction. No one else even paid the monster more than a glance. This is normal for them.
She nodded weakly and finally removed her hand from her knife. Lyon began leading her down the sidewalk again, and she followed. After a while, her heartrate began to slow down to something less frantic than a bird’s.
No wonder Lyon seemed so unfazed by the possible presence of the drengil. It was clear she had gone from one world of monsters to another. And in this one, it seemed they were much more unpredictable and far harder to kill.
Which made it much easier for them to kill her.
Maybe coming here wasn’t such a good thing after all.
5
Jakob didn’t understand what he was looking at.
He had fallen asleep in his house. It was a shack, fine, but it was still his shack. He’d fallen asleep on his collection of blankets and straw. He had woken up to the feeling of hitting the ground hard, as if he’d been knocked from a height. Which was weird, since his blankets were on the floor. His shack creaked and tilted. He was lucky it didn’t come down on his head. He could hear that his neighbor wasn’t so lucky.
It was then that he heard the shouting. He assumed it was because the drengil had broken through the barricades, so he grabbed his gun and his knife and burst through the section of corrugated metal that he had attached to his shack to resemble a door.
But there were no shambling corpses. Not that he could see.
But then again, he didn’t really understand what he was looking at.
The barricade…was gone.
As was most of the sanctuary town.
It wasn’t destroyed. It wasn’t some pile of wreckage and death. It was literally…gone. Missing. Poof. Replaced with tall trees and a forest that had absolutely no right being there at all. Whole sections of his former home looked as though they had just simply been deleted. He lowered his gun, not knowing what he was even supposed to be pointing it at.
What was he gonna shoot, the fucking trees?
A guardian—one of the few hunters left behind to watch over the sanctuary city—was standing at the edge of the forest and looking out at it, his bow in his hand. Not knowing what else to do, Jakob walked up to him. “What…what’s going on?”
“I wish I knew.” The older man furrowed his brow. He looked out at the darkness and shook his head in utter confusion. “One second, I’m keeping an eye on the horde outside our gates. A second later, everything just…dropped. I picked myself up, and now, instead of a sea of bodies, I’m staring at a sea of trees.”
Jakob scratched his head. “This is weird.”
“Really? That’s the best you can do, nitwit? Weird?” The guardian shot him a judgmental glare.
He shrugged in response. “It is.”
“Have you even fucking looked up yet?”
No. He hadn’t. He’d been too distracted by the trees. But, on cue, he looked up. And on cue, he swore.
There were too many moons. And too many stars. He went wide eyed. “Oh. Shit.”
“That’s better. I—” The guardian stopped. Jakob stopped.
Everything stopped.
A chill ran up his spine as he took a step away from the woods. A noise came from it that he could recognize.
The howl of a wolf broke the night air.
But that wasn’t enough to give him the goosebumps that spread over him. It sounded somehow larger and worse than a wolf. How a howl could sound worse, he wasn’t sure. But he knew that whatever that sound belonged to, it wasn’t the standard scruffy kind of wolf he had seen when he had traveled from one citadel or sanctuary town to another.
And when two pinpricks of green light appeared in the shadows, like two candles burning in the darkness, he knew he was right. The thing sprang forward, and it was larger than his shack. Jakob screamed and fell over, landing hard on his ass.
The guardian grunted and fired his bow at it. The arrow landed with a thunk into dead flesh.
Flesh that didn’t seem to care.
A huge and exposed skull of some enormous canine-esque creature shone in the light of the impossible moons that hung in the sky. The creature was at least twelve feet tall at the shoulder. It prowled forward, growling low.
What kind of new drengil was this? Had the plague reached some cache of sleeping demons?
The guardian wisely turned and ran, shouting for reinforcements and hollering for people to get away and escape.
Jakob hadn’t even realized he had fallen over until he tried to run away and was unable to do much more than scramble in the dirt. He heard the sounds of people screaming and fleeing, and wished he were among them.
Instead, he found himself staring up at the massive, rotted creature…who was looking right back down at him.
The skulled face lowered toward his, dwarfing him. The creature didn’t smell like a drengil. Even decayed as it was, the wolf didn’t smell like rotten flesh, despite its form looking decayed. It smelled like the woods. Like rainfall on leaves.
The creature turned its head to one side, the green light peering at him from inside the empty sockets where an eye should be. It didn’t flicker or blink.
Jakob tried to scramble back farther, but a massive paw landed on his chest, pinning him to the ground. Claws that were sharp and black as pitch were pressed against him, but thankfully not in him. Not yet.
The message was clear—stay put.
He was too terrified to argue about it. He lay there obediently on the dirt, staring up at the thing, and wondered if its huge, white fangs were about to tear into his flesh.
Worse still, it seemed it wasn’t alone.
“What have you caught, wolf?”
A female voice. Amused and sultry. He didn’t glance away from the creature above him.
“It seems I have caught a mortal…” the giant wolf replied.
Jakob’s astonishment at the fact that it could speak was washed away by his continued terror. The voice was low, raspy, like bone sliding on rock. The creature, despite having a lower jaw, didn’t move it when he spoke.
The creature’s head whipped up and away from him then. The wolf raised itself up but did not lift his claw from Jakob’s chest. “And there are many more.”
The woman approached. Jakob let out a terrified whimper. The woman was…he didn’t even know what to think. First, she was naked, wearing only chains and scraps of fabric. Two, she was covered in strange marks, lines of green that wandered over her skin. Third, she had a wooden ma
sk that covered her forehead and temples, from which sprouted horns that…looked like they belonged to her.
And she had a tail.
And she was looking down at him with green eyes that belonged to a cat, slitted and strange. She raised an eyebrow at him. “He does not smell of Earth.”
“No. He smells of somewhere cold. Somewhere that reeks of death,” the creature over him whispered. Well, whispered loudly. “Get the others. Round up the mortals. I fear something terrible has happened to our world, Kamira.”
The woman—Kamira—grimaced. “Do we kill them?”
The monster looked down at him as if thinking it over. “No. Leave them unharmed.”
Kamira reached out and yanked the arrow out of the creature’s shoulder. The monster didn’t even flinch. She turned it over in her hand before she tossed it over her shoulder as though it were utterly unimportant. “And if they fight?”
“Break as few as you must to keep the others in line. But I think there are only a few fighters in their midst.” The creature lifted its head as if it were sniffing the air. “I sense fear.” He paused. “But be wary…”
“I know,” Kamira bared her teeth in an unfriendly expression, “I smell it, too.”
“Smell what?” Jakob was astonished that he could even speak. And of all things, that was what he chose to say? By the grave of the Allfather, I’m a fucking fool.
The creature turned back down to him, seemingly surprised as well. It lowered that huge, ghastly skull of a head closer to him. When it spoke, the single word sent a chill rolling through Jakob so hard that he shivered.
“Poison.”
The night air suddenly turned into a sea of frightened screams and animal sounds of every kind. Growls, barks, roars, screeches—these creatures came in every size and shape. Several ran past him and the giant wolf. One looked like a crossbreed between a man and a bat. Another, a tiger. Another, a snake. They were all ghastly and terrible.
Jakob almost missed the drengil. They were at least predictable.
“Stay close.”
Jakob blinked. What had the creature just said to him? It took him a second to process. Stay close? “Pardon me?”
“If you run, I’ll chase you.” The raspy monster lifted his claw from Jakob’s chest. “Stay at my side, and I will not need to.”
“Wh—why?”
The creature sighed. “Do you want to be hunted and rounded up?”
“No?”
“Then stay near me and you won’t be.” The creature paused. “Be a sensible mortal, will you? I am having a trying night already.”
“O—okay,” Jakob stammered. He didn’t know what else to do or say. He pushed up to his feet and brushed the dirt out of his fur and leather coat. The thing wasn’t killing him. He really wanted to keep it that way.
“What is your name, mortal?”
“Jakob.”
“I am Dtu. Come.” And with that, the hulking creature began to walk on all fours. Once he managed to think about it long enough, it was clear the beast was male. Very visibly male.
Jakob kept his eyes from lingering as he walked beside the wolf. “What an odd name. I haven’t ever heard one like it, and I travel the world.”
Dtu’s back was heavily curved, as though he could straighten up far taller than he chose to be. He prowled through what remained of the sanctuary city, sniffing at different buildings and structures. “This is no longer your world.”
“Oh…” What else was he supposed to say to that? He brushed his hands over his clothing again, fidgeting with one of the straps of his coat. “It isn’t?”
“You see the sky, don’t you?”
“I do. But…all right, where am I, then?”
“It is named Under.” Dtu paused.
“Are there drengil here?”
Dtu glanced at him, a green glowing dot measuring him up for a moment. “You will need to give me more information than that, little Jakob.” He sounded amused.
“I—oh—um.” Now he felt like an idiot. That was pretty normal for him, though. “The corpses of our dead plagued our world. They rise from the ground and seek to eat the flesh of the living. This was our home—our shelter away from them. But we lose more of us every day to them.”
“You are accustomed to fighting to survive and being treated as food by everything that looks at you. Good. That will make your understanding of this world come faster.” The creature turned back to look at the ramshackle homes around him. “You will find our world is no friendlier than the one you have come from. You are still prey.”
Jakob didn’t reply for a long moment. “Are you going to kill me?”
“Not right now.”
“That’s nice.”
The creature laughed, raspy and rough. His lower jaw briefly opened with the sound. “You have nothing to fear from me in this moment. But we are a community of cursed souls, and those who reign with me may outvote any wish I might have to spare you.”
“Reign with you? Are you royalty?”
“No. But I am a king.”
That made no sense to him. None of this did. He shook his head, not sure how to take all of this. He supposed he could faint as another choice. But unable to will that upon himself, he just plodded alongside the giant undead wolf-monster. “Are you a Varúlfur?”
Dtu stopped and turned to him. “A what?”
“A wolf who can change into a man. Or a man that could change into a wolf. They were protectors.”
“I suppose. Yes. I am what you know as a Varúlfur. I fear things are much more complicated than that.” Dtu tilted his head up and sniffed the air again. “Things are always too complicated.”
“Why would it be simple? That would be too easy.” Jakob sighed, beleaguered.
Dtu chuckled again. “Nothing in this world is easy. It seems your world was once like one we know, named Earth, but somewhere along the way diverged.”
“I am sorry if we brought this death along with us.”
“There is little to be done for it, I fear.” Dtu turned and began walking again, and Jakob stayed obediently at his side. “There is a new moon in the sky. I feel the presence of a new king, and I…do not rejoice for it.”
There was so much packed into that statement, Jakob didn’t know what to do with it. So many questions rolled over each other in his mind, and none of them took purchase. He was tired, he was hungry, and now he wanted a beer. “Does your world have alcohol?”
Dtu laughed hard, his mouth opening again. “Yes, little Jakob, we do.”
“Thank the dead gods. I think I might need a lot of it.”
They had reached the town square. Creatures perched on buildings or stood in alleys, blocking the escape of the gathered group of frightened people in the center. A few were lying on the ground, clutching broken limbs, or not moving at all. It was not as bad as he would have expected. The guardian who had fired at Dtu was likely dead, judging by the hole in his stomach. He would not have gone quietly.
It was sad. But guardians and hunters died. That was their purpose. Someone had already put a knife into the guardian’s brain, ensuring he didn’t get back up. He hadn’t been bitten by a drengil, but it was still tradition.
“Go. Join the others, little Jakob.” Dtu jerked his skulled head in the direction of the frightened crowd.
“Thank you for not killing me.” He paused. “Yet.”
The wolf chuckled. Jakob obediently walked to stand with the others. He knew their faces, if not their names. This sanctuary town had been a small one. And not a very rich one. Because of that, there was a great deal of mistrust between the living. It had become clear a few years into the onset of the drengil plague that sometimes it was not the bodies outside the walls that were the problem—it was the ones inside.
People could be terrible.
But now all the jealousy and coveting of goods didn’t matter, did it?
An enormous tiger creature began to shift, their bones snapping and cracking as they shrank and cha
nged. It sounded excruciatingly painful, and Jakob cringed in sympathy. When it was done, it was the woman he had seen before. Kamira, he thought he remembered her name was.
“Now what do we do with them, Dtu?”
“I’m afraid I am not quite sure.” The wolf walked forward. The crowd shrank away from his fearsome visage. “Yej is not far. We take them there.”
“It is still a three-day walk. You want to herd them that far?” The woman groaned. “It will be worse than sheep.”
“Then tie them together if you worry about them wandering off. But we should take them to the Priest. He will know better what to do with them.”
“I see. Pawn things off on my husband as usual.” She laughed. “Very well. We will herd them there. I wish to see him, and if I have to drag these poor souls along with me, so be it.”
“They are mortal. They will need food and shelter.” Dtu turned to some of his fellow creatures. “Go and gather all you can find. We leave within an hour.”
There was a frightened murmur through the crowd, but the wolf silenced it as he straightened to his full height. Jakob shrank back with the others. Oh. That was why he crouched. He was terrifying.
More terrifying.
“I am Dtu, King of the House of Moons. I welcome you to Under. Your arrival here is unexpected. You find yourself now within a world of myths and monsters. To run is to invite death—for these woods are filled with creatures far less friendly than your drengil. You are safer with us than you are in the darkness. I recommend you come peacefully.”
The murmur of the group said they didn’t quite believe it. Jakob, for some reason…did.
His world had never been a friendly one. What did it matter how he died, after all? Whether from the teeth of a drengil or from the monstrous wolf in front of him, it was still death. At least Dtu could speak and…seemed reasonable. There was no talking down the dead or trying to convince them to leave him alone.
So, without anything else to do, he stood there with the others…and waited to be herded off into the woods and into this strange world of Under.
Mask of Poison (Fall of Under Book 1) Page 5
