Lethal Red Riding Hood (Dark Goddess Chronicles Book 1)

by Leonard Wilson

  She saw herself struggling to throw off the arms of Axy and Keely as they fought to drag her back away from the battle. She saw the volleys of flaming arrows streaking across the night sky, igniting anything that the explosions hadn’t already. She saw Hart Cove burn in the cleansing, holy fire of the Inquisition’s wrath.

  At some point, she stopped screaming and resisting, and allowed herself to simply be dragged while she sobbed uncontrollably. Then she’d been flung over Axy’s shoulder and bounced along there while her friends ran. As the first rush of horror ebbed, Jenilee’s rational mind began clawing back to regain the control her emotions had vacated. The last thing her friends needed at the moment was to have her reduced to this senseless baggage. Her legs worked just fine. She only had to use them.

  Jenilee began to struggle again, and told Axy to put her down, but her protests got drowned out by a new round of screams. Townsfolk surged past them in a panicked mob. Instead of being lowered to the ground, she found herself flung there when someone collided with Axy. It was all she could do to curl up into a protective ball and weather the crush of fleeing feet.

  Somewhere beyond it all, a woman’s voice rang out above the chaos, outraged to the point of sounding half unhinged. “No forgiveness! No quarter! You die tonight! You all die!”

  When Jenilee finally dared uncurl—covered in bruises, and with blood trickling from her nose and busted lip—she looked up to find herself filled with a cold, horrible sense of déjà vu. Astride a black and dreadful charger sat the rider in the unforgettable red cloak who’d been there at the moment the world went mad.

  Though she rode alone this time, she managed to radiate a level of menace which Auron and all his entourage together had failed to achieve. A bloody axe in one hand and a the reins of her charger in the other, she slashed wantonly at anyone the wheeling beast brought within her reach, and the blood-red cloak whipping about her seemed to blaze with a fire of its own, just as it had in Jenilee’s nightmare vision back at the Drunken Squid.

  A shot rang out. The rider jerked. She tumbled from the saddle, but somehow managed to land in a crouch rather than a sprawl. Even before she regained her feet, she hurled the axe and a man in the uniform of the town garrison went down with the weapon protruding from his throat, his spent flintlock tumbling from his fingers.

  “You all die!” the woman screamed again, no longer sounding merely half unhinged. She grimaced for a moment as her hand touched her shoulder where the ball from the gun must have struck, and her fingers came away bloody, but she gave no other indication of feeling the pain. She just grabbed another axe that hung from the saddle of the horse and began to lay about her again like a woman possessed.

  Another man from the garrison stepped between her and a fleeing girl, and he managed to parry the woman’s axe before taking her knee in his stomach. Her axe flashed again, and the man crumpled before her onslaught. Then she spun on the man who’d been stepping up behind her, cut his throat with one neat slash, and hurried on, not even stopping to notice that her latest victim had actually been wearing the livery of the Inquisition. Jenilee had seen men in a drunken rage, but whatever insanity or religious ecstasy drove this woman had taken her past that and into levels of berserk fury that barely seemed human. Worse, she swung the axe like she’d been born with it in her hand—or perhaps with a meat cleaver. This certainly smelled more of butchery than of battle.

  Jenilee realized she’d frozen again when Axy grabbed her by the arm and hauled her back to her feet, but she fought free of his grip and she staggered a step away. “No!” she shouted at him.

  “No?” Axy gave her a puzzled frown as Keely appeared at his shoulder.

  “I’m not doing this again! I can’t do this again!” Jenilee said, tears streaming down her face.

  “Jenny, snap out of it!” Keely screamed as the madwoman in red, drenched in blood, ran out of victims within easy reach and began stalking relentlessly in their direction. “We have to go! Now!”

  “I’m so sorry,” Jenilee sobbed. “You’re both dead. You’re already dead.”

  “Jenny!” Keely screamed desperately.

  “Five…five hundred and…sixty-two,” Jenilee stammered.

  “What?!” Axy demanded.

  “Five hundred and sixty-two,” Jenilee managed more levelly, though she still felt like she was choking on the words. “The number of tally marks on page thirteen. The number of times I’ve…watched her…kill you.”

  The world dwindled into just one small sphere of light around the three of them at that admission, the sounds of the chaos reaching them, but slow and distorted and muffled.

  “Jenny, I’m already plenty scared,” Keely said. “You don’t need to scare me more.”

  “At first, I saw it every time I closed my eyes,” Jenilee sighed miserably. “It comes a lot less now, mostly when I let myself get stressed or scared, but that’s still way too much.

  “I was supposed to be the one to die, you idiots! Me!” she sobbed. “I was dead weight. You two could have saved each other and gone off on your happily ever after! What good is me alone?

  “You know what’s on page thirteen?” Jenilee demanded angrily. “You know what’s on page thirteen?!” A well-worn and serious-looking tome appeared in her hand, and she flipped familiarly through it. “This is what’s on page thirteen!” As she thrust the open book toward them, a vision unfolded within the vision, and there she was two days older on a gray and dismal morning in which it was impossible to tell lingering smoke from lingering fog.

  Caked in mud and covered with bites from mosquitoes and leeches, she stumbled slowly up the hill from the swamp. Around her stretched a plain of mud and ash, populated with crumbling black timbers, fire-scorched stone walls, and the countless forgotten corpses of people she’d known her whole life.

  Not a soul moved in the ruins of Hart Cove, only the ravens raucously feasting on the dead. Not a building remained intact. Not a ship or boat remained in harbor that hadn’t been left scorched, broken, and mostly submerged. The choking air smelled of blood and death and ash.

  Jenilee didn’t actually vomit, having nothing in her stomach to lose, but it took quite some time for her to finish retching. When at last the spasms subsided, she pushed herself back up to her knees, and drove the heel of her hand fiercely across her cheeks, leaving streaks of muddy ash under her eyes.

  “Dry your tears, girl,” Jenilee’s voice prodded contemptuously from within the pages of the rules. “Because no one is coming to do it for you.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Inquiring Minds

  Keely woke disoriented, with her head pounding and her stomach churning, but managed to take some small comfort in the fact that she didn’t have to—never had to—fight Jenny for control of her head after those nightmares. She loved her friend dearly, but the girl lacked the stomach to stick around in their aftermath, and would retreat into whatever dark corner of reality she liked to hide in.

  Behind her she would leave nothing more than the fading dream, a body still overcharged with emotion, and another tally mark on page thirteen of the Rules. This time, though, the woman in red refused to fade with the rest of the dream—or at least the red she’d been in did. Through the darkness and haze and chaos and blood, Keely hadn’t gotten a good enough look at the woman to recognize her if they’d been standing nose to nose, but that cape…

  She shivered and realized about that time that she lay on her side in near total darkness against a cold stone floor, her cheek and her ear resting in a shallow puddle. She went to crawl out of it, only to discover that her hands hand been chained behind her back. She tried to twist her shoulders and roll away, but the effort set off a small explosion in her head, and with a little yelp of pain she let that go as a bad business too.

  “I guess that means you’re awake,” a woman’s voice asked out of the darkness.

  “Only against my better judgment,” Keely groaned. “Whatever it is you think I’ve done, you’ve got the wrong
girl.”

  “Oh, yeah. That line always wows the Inquisition. ‘Really? Gosh, I’m sorry. I wish you’d told us before we burned down your cattle and chopped off several of your limbs.’ Skip the excuses and tell me what you thought you were up to, ransacking the library.”

  Keely kept her silence for a few moments while the gears in her brain began to sluggishly turn. “Elissa?” she asked at last.

  It was her interrogator’s turn to be silent for a moment. “All right…” she finally said hesitantly. “Let’s skip the first question for now and ask who the heck are you and how do you know me?”

  “You’re with the Inquisition?” Keely asked incredulously.

  “Yes,” the postulant answered after another brief pause.

  “No you’re not.” Keely sighed with as much relief as she could muster over anything at the moment. “Just tried that line myself, and much more convincingly—for all the good it did me. So either they’ve released me to the tender care of the abbey—which I’m sure didn’t happen—or you’re taking a huge risk by interfering with their business. And it’s not like I have anything you want. They even took my boots,” she said wiggling her toes in the cold, dank air. Then the realization hit her hard. “They took my boots!” she howled.

  Suddenly oblivious to the pain shooting through her head, she thrashed around on the floor until she’d found a wall to beat her feet against to release the rage and frustration. “They took my boots!”

  “Hush!” Elissa scolded urgently. “You don’t want them down here a moment sooner than they were already planning. Just count yourself lucky they didn’t take your dress.”

  Keely calmed herself, but lay on the floor panting and seething for at least a full minute before she was able to speak again without shouting. “So what do I know that’s worth risking your life to find out?” she asked at last.

  “You’re not in a position to be asking the questions here,” Elissa said with a frown barely visible in the faint light, but clearly conveyed in her voice.

  “On the contrary. I’m in no position to be answering questions. I’ve got nothing to lose, and the only card I have to play is whatever I know that you don’t. So you do me a favor first, or I take everything I know to the infernal pits with me.”

  Elissa gave a frustrated sigh. “If you’re going to…”

  “Bring me my boots,” Keely cut her off.

  “What is it that’s so special about your boots?”

  “Just bring me my boots,” Keely insisted.

  “Do you have a key in them? A weapon? I won’t…”

  “They’re my boots, and nobody messes with them. I’ll get myself out of this just fine, thank you, but I’m not leaving without my boots—so this will all come off a lot simpler for everybody if you’ll only round them up and bring them to me.”

  “That’s it?” Elissa asked suspiciously. “Just boots?”

  “My boots. Good, sturdy, comfortable, lived-in boots of great sentimental value,” Keely said.

  “Would I even recognize them if I saw them?”

  “They’ve got a little paw-print design stamped into all the edging. Can’t miss it.”

  “And if I can manage to find them and bring them to you,” Elissa asked, “you’ll what…?”

  “Tell you anything you like.”

  “Will it be the truth?”

  “If that’s what you like.” Keely shrugged as best she could while lying on the floor with her hands behind her back.

  “All right. I’ll see if I can find out what’s become of them,” Elissa agreed, and she disappeared quietly back into the darkness.

  Keely just lay there in the timeless darkness, humming softly to herself and tapping her bare feet on the wall—for what could just as easily have been twenty minutes or two hours—before she heard the soft scuffle of Elissa’s returning footsteps. “Found them?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Elissa said, crouching down to lay them in front of Keely’s face. “I’m not proud of what I had to do to get them, but they’re your rightful property, so here you are.”

  “Where were they? What did you have to do?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “If you didn’t really want to talk about…”

  “Stop it!” Elissa snapped. “I was in a bad mood before and I’m in a worse mood now. You really don’t want inside my head.”

  “All right,” Keely said. “But I can barely tell these are boots, much less mine. Did you happen to bring any light with you?”

  “How about some sunlight?”

  “You carry that around, do you?” Keely asked, quizzically.

  “Just hush,” Elissa said shortly, helping Keely to her feet. “Follow me and keep quiet.” She scooped up the boots in one hand and laid the other on Keely’s shoulder as she led the way deeper into the gloom.

  They’d only gone a few paces when Keely let out a half-stifled yelp behind Elissa, and started cursing under her breath.

  “What?” Elissa hissed.

  “Stubbed my toe. Could we maybe go ahead and get those boots on me?”

  “Yeah. Trying to feel my way while leading you and holding them isn’t working, anyway.”

  Keely leaned up against the cold, stone wall while Elissa helped her into the boots, then they continued cautiously on their way.

  “Better?” Elissa asked.

  “You have no idea,” Keely whispered. “So, uh…What exactly are we doing?”

  “Escaping,” Elissa replied quietly. “You wanted that, right?”

  “I told you I’d handle that myself.”

  “Are you trustworthy?”

  “Not particularly, no.”

  “There you go then,” Elissa whispered as they squeezed through a tiny space barely wide enough for them to fit sideways. At first Keely could feel stone on one side and wood on the other, but before long it was stone on both sides.

  “But why?”

  “Because I’m not as self-serving as you think. Because I don’t care who you are or why you’re here, what you’ve done or what you intend to do. For all I know you might deserve a headsman’s axe, but no one actually deserves the Inquisition. They’re everything a priestess should never be, and if I stand by and leave you to them when I could be saving you, I’m in the wrong line of work myself. No matter what you think, some people just do the right thing to do the right thing.”

  Keely accepted the answer without further comment, and they worked their way through a series of dank, claustrophobic, pitch-dark tunnels. “Isn’t it customary to have guards on a prisoner? And locked doors?” she asked at last. “That sort of thing?”

  “Yes. But keeping prisoners at Belgrimm Abbey isn’t customary,” Elissa said. “What is customary is building hidden passages and forgetting about them. Just exploring dusty corners of the library, I found three different maps to tunnels built during the abbey expansions in three different centuries, each seeming oblivious to the existence of the older tunnels. All we had to do to get out of your cellar was squeeze behind some barrels and out through a corner that the blackhoods never peeked into.”

  “Pity you weren’t on hand before our lady Jane came looking for me,” Keely said. “Wait, did you hear that?” She stopped suddenly.

  “Hear what?” Elissa—who’d taken a step or two on—whispered as she groped back in the darkness for Keely.

  “Sssh!” Keely hissed urgently.

  “All I hear is your chains clinking,” Elissa whispered.

  “I’ll ask for quieter chains next time someone throws me in a dungeon,” Keely answered, but she managed to stop the rattling. “Maybe it was just echoes,” she said after a few seconds of silence, “but I could have sworn I heard someone following us.”

  “Just keep moving,” Elissa whispered. “Any blackhoods trying to follow us would either get lost in nothing flat or give themselves away with whatever light they’ve brought.” Finally finding Keely’s shoulder again, Elissa pushed on through the darkness and up
a couple of flights of stairs.

  At last they emerged, blinking, into the light of a disused, cobweb-ridden room with a small window overlooking an alley outside the abbey. “I’m the only one who’s been here in years,” Elissa said, pointing a toe at a set of footprints in the dust. “You’ve got your boots, there’s a way out, and if we can manage to wrestle your chains under your feet…”

  “Don’t worry about that,” Keely said, draping the empty manacles over Elissa’s shoulder as she stepped past to peer out the window.

  “But…” Elissa stammered.

  “Oh, and thanks,” Keely said, smiling with satisfaction as she looked up and down the empty alleyway, then she pulled her head back inside and leaned against the wall. “You really did me a good turn. I owe you, and I may not be trustworthy in general, but I do pay my debts. So what did you want to ask me?”

  “Well, you can start by telling me how you got out of those chains!” Elissa said.

  “Oh, blast!” Keely slammed her forehead into the heels of her hands. “I promised, didn’t I?”

  “You promised,” Elissa nodded, with only a trace of smugness.

  “Well, I’m not a witch or a demon, okay?” Kelly groaned.

  “Did anyone say you were?” Elissa asked with a puzzled frown.

  “Okay—maybe just a little. I don’t know where you draw the line. The point is there are people who would turn me over to the Inquisition for the answer to that question.”

  “Even if I would, I’m in too deep to do that now. So tell me already.”

  “You’re sure you wouldn’t rather…”

  “Just tell me!”

  “Okay, okay…” Keely raised her hands in a gesture of surrender. “But I’d better just show you.”

  “This isn’t going to hurt, is it?” Elissa asked warily. “Because if this is like one of those stories that ends with some horrible magic trick that…”

  “Oh, hush.” Keely took a step out from the wall, raised her hands high above her head with the palms splayed outward, then took a deep breath as she closed her eyes in concentration. A few moments passed, and just as Elissa began to ask if that was all that was going to happen, Keely began to shrink very rapidly.