“Yes. He’s spying on the dark elves and will let us know—”
They have pulled hoods and masks over their faces and are coming out into the crevasse, Sindari reported.
All eight of them?
Six are here. Two went back to meet with others near that lake. Many others. The entire community must know about our intrusion now.
I wished I still had the carbon monoxide detector so I could break it again.
They’re preparing to launch an attack. I will go up the crevasse in the opposite direction and make noise to attempt to distract them.
Thank you.
“Let us know?” Willard prompted.
“Keep climbing. It sounds like they have a way to attack us.”
She looked up and sighed.
The gray sky came into view as we maneuvered around a shelf—it had been protecting us from icy rain that now pelted our helmets and shoulders. I placed my picks and my crampons very carefully, worried the ice would be even worse when slick with moisture. More than once, my feet slipped. My agility wasn’t much help with this feat.
A roar echoed up from below and farther up the crevasse.
“Is he fighting them?” Willard asked.
“Just distracting them.” I hoped.
It is working. They are firing weapons at me.
Don’t let them hit you, I replied.
That is my goal.
We climbed past another shelf, and the ends of the last ropes came into view, the ones attached to anchors on the surface, outside of the crevasse.
“We’re coming up!” Willard bellowed.
“Waiting for you, Colonel!” Banderas’s head came into view, poking over the edge.
Seeing that we were close renewed my energy, and I urged my aching forearms to move faster. Another roar came from the depths below, but it was cut short in the middle, as if Sindari had been struck.
Did they get you? I asked. Are you okay?
Sindari didn’t answer. My charms were under my shirt, so I had no trouble feeling it when the cat figurine heated, then went ice cold. It had done that before when he’d been forcibly evicted from our world—when dark elves had forcibly evicted him.
I hoped that was all it was, that they hadn’t managed to destroy him.
Willard, not as tired as I, surged ahead as we neared the end. My forearms were shaking so badly that I feared I’d drop my ice axes. Twenty feet from the rim, I paused, willing the remaining energy I had to flow into my arms and legs. I could do this.
My neck hairs rose as a surge of magic registered to my senses. Swearing, I gave up my rest and hurried upward. There was no way to dodge up here.
“Look out, Val!” Willard shouted from the top.
I looked down only to see one of those huge black balls of energy crackling toward me at a hundred miles an hour. Hoping my carabiner was secured to the rope, I pushed off the ice, trying to fling myself sideways more than away from the wall.
The blast of energy slammed into the spot where I’d been, power blowing in all directions. It struck me like a hurricane, hurling me farther to the side than my legs ever could have, and my shoulder struck the ice wall. I bounced off, twisting on the rope, my heart in my throat.
“Get her up, get her up!” Willard shouted from above.
Thankfully, my knots held, and I didn’t plummet, but it was like being on a pendulum in a windstorm. I struck several more times before I managed to turn back to face the wall, my crampons dug into the ice.
My rope started moving as the soldiers above pulled me up. By the time they dragged me over the rim, my entire body throbbed with pain. They carried me away from the edge, as if worried more magical attacks would come flying up. Maybe they would.
“Are you all right, Val?” Willard crouched, gripping my shoulder.
I stared up at the gray sky, rain falling, and realized the visibility up here was still horrible. We would be stuck spending the night in the little camp the soldiers had erected. And hoping the dark elves didn’t come to visit.
I sighed. “I’m going to have to be.”
26
I’d heard that camping above the clouds at fourteen thousand feet was surreal, with the stars above magnificent, but we were socked in with the clouds wrapped around us like a dense fog. The rain had turned to snow, it had dropped into the twenties, and it was hard for me to appreciate the nature as I sat outside and night closed around me.
The only thing I could appreciate was that I was drugged enough that my body didn’t hurt as much as it had—though a delightful headache had blossomed a couple of hours ago to add insult to injury—and the dark elves hadn’t sent up any magic to utterly destroy the camp.
Whether wise or not, our tents were set up near the crevasse. The soldiers had done that while Willard and I had been down below, before they’d known that my carbon monoxide detector and I would alert the entire enemy camp to our existence. I still couldn’t believe I hadn’t foreseen that possibility. All evening, I’d been mentally kicking myself and wondering if we’d lost any opportunity to get back down there, overcome them, and destroy their volcano-diddling artifact. If so, it would be my fault. The one person with a camouflage charm who should have been able to sneak in…
I groaned and flopped onto my back. The glacier wasn’t overly comfortable. My sleeping bag was spread in a nearby tent with Willard’s, but there was no way my mind would quiet down enough to allow rest. Another soldier and I had volunteered for watch. He was patrolling the perimeter doing a professional job of it while I sat and bemoaned my mistakes.
From on top of the glacier, I could no longer sense the dark elves. They must have retreated to the depths of the lair. I could still sense that magical alarm in the tunnel near the lake. Nobody would sneak in that way, and I wagered they would set a second alarm at the spot where I’d been melting the ice.
Even if we took the whole team down there, could we shoot our way in? I had sensed dozens of dark elves down there at the edge of my range, and there could have been dozens more of them deeper in their lair. Right now, we didn’t even have Sindari to help. I’d tried summoning him earlier, but the charm was still ice cold against my skin, and he hadn’t responded.
That worried me, but I kept telling myself he’d likely been injured and needed time to recover. He wasn’t dead. It would take more than some dark-elf energy blast to destroy him. I hoped.
Closing my eyes did not alleviate my headache. Since my skull was one of the few things I hadn’t injured that day, I blamed the thin air. Earlier, the altitude hadn’t bothered me that much, but now that my body had quieted down and had time to think about it, I was experiencing a number of symptoms of altitude sickness. My lungs were okay, for the moment, but in addition to the headache, my thoughts were scattered and my brain foggy.
I rummaged in my pack for one of the canisters of pure oxygen Willard had thought to bring along. It was peppermint flavored. Peppermint air in a can. When had the world gotten so strange?
For the tenth time, I checked to see if I had enough reception to call Amber. I’d managed to retrieve her voice mail earlier, but all she had said was, “Never mind.”
If I’d been able to answer, I was sure she would have spoken to me, but she hadn’t wanted to leave a message. It distressed me that I hadn’t been there for her when she’d finally called.
“Thorvald?” Willard called softly from our tent. She’d zipped up the flap earlier, saying she would try to sleep, but it was open now.
“We’re going to be sleeping together. I think you can call me Val.”
“Sleeping in the same tent isn’t together.”
“Are you sure? It’s tight in there. Our sleeping bags are touching.”
“Women bunk with women and men bunk with men. It’s a rule.” Willard waved toward the other tents, dark bumps against the foggy white and gray landscape. It amused me that the tents were “woodland camo” colored. I couldn’t imagine anything less camouflaging on a glacier.
/> “Right. You wouldn’t want any of these unmarried soldiers hitting on you.”
“I think you’re in more danger of that than I am.”
“Are you sure? Haven’t they seen the squat rack in your bedroom? I thought that got guys excited.”
“Clarke was the only one here who’d seen it, and he’s gone.”
“Then I guess you’re safe. He would have tried to make you eighty-seven.”
She snorted. “He’s not dumb enough to try.”
I wasn’t sure I agreed, but it didn’t seem right to take digs at someone who wasn’t there to defend himself, so I kept the thought to myself.
Willard squinted in my direction. “Are you using your charm? I can hear your voice but barely make you out.”
“I am. So I can ambush anyone who tries to attack the camp tonight.”
“You think they’ll come up here?”
“With the cloud cover, I think it’s dark enough that they could.”
“Is there any way we could lure them up if they don’t?” she asked.
“You want them to come up?”
“We’d have a better chance of fighting them up here than down in their lair.”
I had noticed that someone had taken a stab at digging a couple of shallow foxholes in the glacier around the camp.
“Can I be honest?” I asked.
“Are you ever not honest?”
“Rarely.”
“Go ahead.”
“Us succeeding at this mission with this small team and only a handful of magical weapons was always going to be predicated on us sneaking in, catching them off-guard, and only having to face a few of them at a time.” I tried not to dwell on how close I had been to accomplishing that before my failure. Besides, I didn’t truly know that. Maybe that hadn’t been a laboratory I’d been crawling toward but some random stockroom the dark elves had set up.
“I always assumed it was doubtful that we’d be able to sneak up on them,” Willard said. “I should have brought more people. But until you actually got chased out of there by dark elves, we hadn’t actually seen any of them and only had hypotheses about what we were dealing with.”
Sindari and I, with our magical senses, had known earlier, but it would have been hard for her to sell that as proof to her superiors.
“Now we know without a doubt,” was all I said.
“I’ll radio in more help as soon as the weather clears enough that the choppers can come in. Fort Lewis was getting teams ready the last I heard.”
“Teams with magical weapons?”
Willard hesitated. “They should have a few that they’ve acquired over the years. Same as us.”
“If we survive this, I think you should have the army put in a big order with Nin.”
“I wish I already had. It’s hard to get funding approval for magical weapons.”
“She might be open to trade.”
“What kind of trade items would a chef-turned-weapons-manufacturer want?”
I almost said a house for her family, but if the army wouldn’t pay for magical weapons, it definitely wouldn’t pay for a house in one of the most expensive metro areas in the country.
“New deep fryers,” I said. “Fuel for her truck. A few thousand pounds of beef.”
“I’ll keep that in mind. While I’m lying here not sleeping.”
“You too?”
“I’m tired as hell. I thought I’d crash. It used to be that I could sleep anywhere.”
“It’s probably the altitude, not that you’re a less virile sleeper these days.”
She grunted and muttered, “Virile sleeper,” but didn’t otherwise comment on my creative vocabulary.
I sat up and waved the oxygen can. “Want to try some peppermint air?”
“Maybe later. It’s too bad the choppers couldn’t come in and take us down to Camp Muir to sleep. Ten thousand feet wouldn’t have been as noticeable.”
“Zero feet in Ballard would have been even nicer.”
“In your apartment that’s as likely to be broken into as this tent?”
“I’d take the chance.” I looked upward, disappointed at the heavy cloud cover. “We don’t even get a view of the night sky. I bet the stars up here are great. You can’t see much from the city most nights. No Big Dipper, Little Dipper, Orion, Draco.”
“Draco? The constellation or your dragon?”
“He’s not up there.” I wondered what had happened to Zondia. She must not have been heading this way, after all. But if she hadn’t returned to Earth for me, then for what?
“Too bad. A dragon would even the odds a lot.”
“Tell me about it.”
I did wish Zav was with us. Both because I would feel safer going in to face the dark elves with him at my side and because… I’d rather my sleeping bag was touching his than Willard’s. What would he think of a sleeping bag? Master it easily or find the zipper befuddling? I hadn’t seen much that mystified him yet. Even using my phone, once I’d unlocked it, hadn’t seemed to faze him. If he put his mind to mastering our technology, he could probably do it easily. Mostly, it was only words that had altered meanings in the last century or two that confused him.
Remembering the incident at the ice cream shop in Idaho made me smile. At the time, I’d been flustered and angry that he’d overreacted to someone hitting on me. But, looking back, it had been a mild offense. He seemed to be getting better, understanding me and humans more, and maybe even losing a tiny bit of his arrogance. Or maybe I’d started to see through it to the person underneath. The person who had been, ever since we fought Dobsaurin in the water-treatment plant, going out of his way to protect me. Even though I was, as he’d pointed out often, sarcastic and sharp-tongued with him. Now, I wished I could take back some of the snippy comments I’d made. Teasing him was fun, and I didn’t think he minded it, but he didn’t deserve my cranky moments when I lashed out in anger, not humor.
I wished he were here so I could tell him. And also because we had been getting to the point where he’d been closer to trusting me. If his nosy sister hadn’t shown up, where might we be now? Fighting dark elves up here together? Camping out next to this very crevasse and necking in two sleeping bags zipped into one big one?
“Damn it.” I dropped my face into my hand.
I wasn’t going to cry again, but something about this place, the quiet of the wilderness and being on top of the world, gave me too much time to think, too much time to fill my mind with regrets. I didn’t regret taking action to make sure Amber wouldn’t be hurt or used as a pawn again, but I did regret reacting so hastily. Zondia was the one I’d wanted to get rid of, not Zav. I should have calmly talked things through with him and figured out a way we could convince her to leave while he stayed and continued his mission. Continued to spend time with me.
“You all right?” Willard must have heard my soft curse.
“Yeah.” I could feel her looking in my direction, wondering what was wrong with me. “You ever been married, Willard?”
She hesitated, and I was sure she hadn’t expected the question. She looked out at the other tents, maybe making sure nobody else was close enough to hear us.
“I kind of missed my chance,” she said quietly. “By the time I got serious about looking, I was used to being in charge. That works fine if you’re an officer in the military. Less fine in domestic situations. I had a hard time… not being the boss.”
“I think the modern and evolved man is okay with a strong-willed partner with equal say in things.”
“I don’t want to be equal,” she said dryly. “I want to be in charge.”
“Then you need to find yourself a nice beta male who doesn’t mind your pushy nature.”
“I’m not pushy; I’m assertive.”
“And a hundred percent in charge.”
“I might settle for ninety percent.”
“Uh huh. Better find someone who will have dinner ready when you get home and massage your feet after a hard day on th
e job.”
“Those aren’t the guys I’m attracted to. I usually end up in relationships where there’s a lot of head-butting and muscle flexing.”
“From both of you?”
“Yes. I haven’t given up hope, but the older you get, the slimmer the pickings become. And the more rank you get, the more complicated things are in regard to work relationships because of the fraternization policies.”
“You can date outside of the service, can’t you?” I asked. “Seattle is full of single guys.”
“Who has time to look for them?” Willard flopped back onto her sleeping bag. “You should have stuck with the dragon. Then you could have had him introduce me to a sibling. Does he have brothers?”
“I believe so. I think you’re more broken up about the end of our relationship—which was never truly a relationship, since we didn’t even date—than I am.”
“Is that true?”
I took another hit from the oxygen canister. Was it? How frank did I want to be out here?
“No,” I admitted. “I think I screwed up.”
“I think you did too.”
“Thanks so much for your honesty. Just for that, if he comes back, I’m not going to set you up with one of his brothers.”
The ice cracked deep within the glacier, loud enough to wake up anyone who had been sleeping, and Willard didn’t respond to my remark. Not that it had been witty or worthy of a response.
“Besides,” I said, “dragons are pains in the ass. You only met him once, so you don’t know.”
“Oh, I got the gist,” Willard said, dry again, “when he visited my office and commanded me to order you to assist him with the dark elves.”
“And told you he’d claimed me as his mate?”
“Yup. You’d talked about him a lot even before that. I could tell you were into him. And I can see why. All that sexy dragon aura.”
“He’s arrogant and exasperating.”
“Yeah, and you like that. If he comes back, you better tell him you want him in your bed and that’s that.”
Elven Doom (Death Before Dragons Book 4) Page 21
