Then an arrow struck B’iff in the shoulder, forcing him to drop his gun. I had a chance.
I threw open the door and ran so hard I almost tripped over my own feet before grabbing his gun off the pavement.
Layla shot another arrow through the giant’s thigh.
The guy was the size of Andre the Giant, and his thighs were more like tree trunks than legs.
I could swear the ground shook a little as B’iff dropped to his knees.
Layla charged after him and delivered a quick knee to his orcish jaw.
It was the first time I’d gotten a good look at B’iff. The night he stabbed me, he’d had his face mostly covered. Now I knew why. His skin was a dark brownish-green, and he had massive bottom incisors that overlapped his lip. He was as ugly as any orc in the Lord of the Rings movies and larger than most of them.
Something about the way Layla seemed to manhandle him; I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t sexy. She was badass.
What had I been thinking when I went to her rescue in the alley two nights before?
As if kicking the giant’s ass wasn’t sexy enough, she ripped a piece of cloth from her shirt and used it to tie his wrists together.
“Caspar,” Layla said, catching her breath. “Help me get him into your back seat.”
“Are you kidding me? He won’t fit.”
Layla nodded. “His keys are still in the ignition of the truck. Can you check and see if he has a spare?”
“No way! I’m not leaving my Eclipse on the side of the road.”
I glanced at Agnus. He was sitting alongside the road, licking his junk.
I looked away. For some reason, now that he could talk to me, it felt more awkward than usual seeing him do that.
But I had to admit, Layla had a point. We couldn’t just leave the orc tied up on the side of the road. “Fine, we’ll call a tow truck.”
“We need more rope,” Layla said. “This won’t hold him for long when he comes to.”
I nodded. “So, what are we going to do with him?”
Layla shrugged. “Interrogate him. Try to figure out what he did with the Blade of Echoes.”
“And then what?”
Layla sighed. “This is war.”
“On your planet, maybe. But we are not executing him. Not here. Not in my world.”
“Look, we don’t have time to talk about it. Help me get him into the bed of the truck and get that tire changed.”
Chapter Sixteen
Throwing an unconscious orc into the back of a truck isn’t easy, even for two people. Layla had to draw on her magic to muster the strength. I would have done the same if I had any idea how to control the magic inside me. It wasn’t like we had time for another meditation session on the side of the highway. Aside from the fact that there weren’t any trees nearby, we couldn’t risk B’iff waking up. Or us getting caught. I don’t know why. I suspected that if any passersby saw two vehicles with shot-out windows and tires, not to mention a giant body with arrows stuck in it, they’d be inclined to call 911.
The giant barely fit in the bed. We had to bend his knees and pose him in the fetal position to get the tailgate shut.
As I changed the tire, I occasionally glanced down the highway for any sign of flashing red and blue lights. On top of everything else, I was reasonably sure the truck had been stolen. I somehow doubted an orc from another planet had a credit profile, much less one sufficient to secure a quick auto loan.
But that was the least of my worries. If we got caught, how would we explain the body? Not just the fact that we had a body in the truck, but this particular body. There was no way B’iff would pass as a human, not even an ugly one.
Agnus was still tongue-bathing himself on the side of the road.
I wished the truck had a better jack. The small jacks they provided with spares were hardly usable. And they certainly didn’t do the job quickly. I released the jack and gave the lug nuts an extra turn to make sure I had them on right. It had been a while since I’d changed a tire, and I’d never done it on a truck.
We tossed the jack and the old wheel on top of B’iff. I threw the rifle behind the driver’s seat and hopped in. I’ve never been much of a gun guy. I’d shot a few .22 rifles when I was in the Boy Scouts growing up, but I didn’t know enough about guns to even know what sort of rifle this was. There are rifles. There are pistols. Then there are machine guns. That was as well-versed as I was in terms of gun categorization.
“Agnus!” I shouted. “Come on. We don’t have time for baths!”
My cat stopped licking himself and stared at me dagger-eyed, but when Layla climbed into the passenger seat after storing her bow and quiver behind the seats, he hopped onto Layla’s lap.
My heart was racing. The adrenaline had kept me moving. That was fading, but my stomach was still churning with nerves. What would we do if B’iff woke up? Where the hell were we going to go? I still saw the glow that oriented me toward the Blade of Echoes in the south.
“We need some rope,” Layla said.
I nodded. “Not sure they have rope at convenience stores. We need to find something else.”
Agnus leaped off Layla’s lap and behind the seat as I pulled back onto the highway. “I think there’s something back here that might work.”
Layla reached back, grabbed whatever Agnus had found, and pulled it into her lap.
“It might,” Layla said, raising her voice to speak over the extra-loud noise we were experiencing on account of the blasted-out windshield.
“Jumper cables?” I yelled back. “Might work to tie him up.”
“And we could put the clamps on his nipples. Until he talks.”
I winced at the thought of that. “Damn, that’s cruel and unusual.”
“Caspar doesn’t like his nipples touched,” Agnus blurted.
Layla looked at me, and from what I could tell in my peripheral vision, was grinning widely. “Good to know. I’ll have to remember that for future reference.”
“Don’t you dare,” I said, “unless you want to see what a genuine conniption fit looks like.”
Layla laughed. “What? I can’t hear you. The wind...you said you want me to pinch your nipples?”
“No!” I shouted back. “Not what I said!”
Layla reached toward my chest.
I slapped her hand out of the way. “I told you, don’t do it! Do you want to get in an accident?”
She was giggling, but I was serious. My nipples are strictly off-limits, even to attractive women or elves.
Layla was still chuckling as she pointed toward the side of the road about a hundred yards up ahead. “There, see that barn?”
I nodded. “Looks like the thing is going to fall at any moment.”
“It’s perfect.”
I cocked my head. “Perfect for what?”
“For the interrogation.” Layla looked over her shoulder at the truck bed. “He’s still out. Not sure how much longer he’ll stay that way.”
I slammed on the brakes and turned sharply when I spotted a small, overgrown dirt road off the side of the highway that looked like it led to the barn. A loud thump. B’iff’s body had slid along the truck bed and rammed into the cab.
“Careful!” Layla exclaimed. “You’ll wake him up.”
We all bounced up and down as we drove down what used to be a road. “If anything is going to wake him up, it’s this.”
“Um, guys?”
“What, Agnus.”
“The orc is gone.”
“What?” Layla said, turning around, then looking all around. “Where did he go?”
The truck suddenly stopped. I hit the gas. It wouldn’t budge.
I looked in the rearview mirror and saw him. He’d lifted the back end of the truck.
“Dammit! This thing is rear-wheel drive.” I figured it probably had a four-wheel-drive mode, but I didn’t know where to begin looking for the switch.
Layla grabbed her bow and quiver from behind the seat and kicked open her door. Leanin
g out, she pulled back the string.
B’iff lifted the rear of the truck higher. The tires kept turning as I fruitlessly stepped as hard as I could on the gas.
“I can’t get a clean shot,” Layla said. “We need to bail out.”
“What?” I asked.
The next thing I knew, she’d jumped out the door and, coming out of a somersault, aimed and fired an arrow at B’iff’s leg.
I didn’t know if it hit. I couldn’t see, and I wasn’t half the gymnast Layla was. Did she expect me to do the same?
I grabbed the rifle from behind the seat. It wasn’t like I knew for sure how to use it, but I’d have to learn quickly.
I hopped out of the truck, barely landing on my feet. Not the same acrobatic skill Layla had employed, but I was out.
I aimed at the orc and squeezed the trigger.
Nothing happened.
Agnus jumped out of the truck behind me. “Turn off the safety!”
I didn’t bother to ask how my cat knew more about guns than I did. Most likely television.
I examined the gun, trying to find the safety switch.
There was a loud bang. B’iff had dropped the truck, and a half-second later, he yanked the rifle out of my hand and pointed it at me.
Dear Jesus, I don’t want to die.
I closed my eyes, expecting the worst. I heard a loud noise.
Not the rifle. It was the door of the truck. B’iff hit the gas, showering me with dirt and grass as he peeled out.
Layla grabbed the tailgate and tried to pull herself into the truck bed.
B’iff turned his wheel hard to the left, the truck did an aggressive ninety-degree turn, and Layla went flying into the weeds.
I ran over to her, grabbed her hand, and helped her to her feet.
“Well, shit,” Agnus said. “Which one of you is going to carry me back to the car?”
Chapter Seventeen
“He didn’t shoot me. Why didn’t he shoot me?” I asked as we walked side by side along the shoulder of Interstate 44.
“I don’t know.” Layla’s voice was somber as she rubbed her forehead. “It doesn’t make sense. He saw you were alive. He now knows you survived the knife wound.”
“Maybe he is smarter than to think he can mess with prophecy,” Agnus interjected.
Layla shook her head. “We still don’t know why the Blade was moving and he wasn’t with it. Someone is helping him.”
I nodded. “He could have sent the Blade somewhere in the mail, just to throw us off. So he could sneak up on us.”
“That doesn’t make sense either. If he was trying to lure us out, trying to stop us from pursuing him, he would have shot you just now. He would have tried to shoot me.”
“I know it’s not the same thing,” I said. “But in Christianity, there are probably a dozen different interpretations of the book of Revelation, different views about the end of days. When will there be a tribulation, if the seven years is literal or figurative, if there’s a millennium or if those numbers are also symbolic. Is there a chance that the orcs have a different interpretation of the prophecy? I mean, when he caught up to us on the highway, he tried to take us out. He tried to stop us; he shot at our car. But after he got a good look at me, after he realized I was me, that I had survived, he just took off in the truck without us.”
Layla ran her right hand through her hair. “I can’t imagine any interpretation of the prophecy that would make the appearance of the chosen one beneficial to the orcs.”
I bit my lip. “I assume this prophecy is old. Dates back several generations.”
Layla nodded. “To the first generation that left Earth and came to New Albion.”
“And is this prophecy in a bible, a sacred text of some sort?”
“We have scrolls, but only the elven priests read them directly. But they teach them to us as children.”
I scratched my shoulder. “Is there a chance that what they teach you to memorize is a redacted version of the original?”
Layla took a deep breath. “I suppose, but it makes no sense that they’d keep any of it secret if it radically changed the way the prophecy was understood. I mean, the whole point of teaching us the prophecy as children is so we’ll recognize it if we see it come to pass. It’s how I know you keep fulfilling it.”
“I’m not saying they cut out important facts intentionally. But if you’re supposed to memorize it, my guess is that they teach you to remember what they think are the essential parts. The orcs have access to this prophecy too, right?”
Layla nodded. “The original druid who made the prophecy delivered identical scrolls to both the elves and the orcs.”
“I see,” I said. “Then it isn’t beyond the realm of possibility that the parts of the prophecy the orcs teach their kids include elements you don’t know.”
“I think I see where you’re going with this.”
“Back in the Middle Ages, there weren’t Bibles in the common language, either. Even when Wycliffe, Luther, and others produced versions of the Bible in the vernacular, most of the people were illiterate. For centuries, most people just trusted that what the priests taught them was true. Not until the Reformation, when people started to hear the Bible read aloud in their own language, did people start to question the prevailing interpretations of the church authorities.”
“Maybe. I mean, I don’t know much about that. But if what you’re saying is what happened with our people, if our priests have been feeding us their own simplified, skewed, interpretation of the prophecy—”
“Even if you did have access to the scrolls, there’s a chance that people would still disagree about how it should be interpreted. Like I said, there are thousands of Christian denominations today. They all read their Bibles. They all think they have it right. They fight over their dogmas as if eternity itself depended on them. The prophecy you think you know might not be as cut and dried as you’ve been taught to believe.”
Layla shook her head. “But that doesn’t make sense. I mean, what’s the point of a prophecy if people don’t understand it? It should be simple. Straightforward. The way I was taught, the prophecy about the chosen one was simple. Several items, like a list of qualifications. Whoever checked all the boxes could only be the chosen one.”
“I don’t know. All I’m saying is that there might be more to it than that. I can’t speak about the elven prophecy, but when it comes to the Bible, I’m not so sure the point of prophecy is to predict the future. I think we miss the forest for the trees when we focus on all the details. So far as I can tell, the whole point of prophecies was to encourage people who were suffering, who were in seemingly hopeless situations, so they knew a better future was on the horizon. So they had hope. I mean, a lot of people try to read prophecies like a horoscope, like they’re consulting a fortune-teller or something.”
“Is that what you think about the elven prophecy?” Layla asked.
I shrugged. “I don’t know what to think. Probably because I know nothing about the prophecy.”
We got back to the Eclipse. I stared at the shredded tire.
“Gonna change it or what?” Agnus asked.
I sighed. “I haven’t had to change a tire in maybe ten years. Now twice in one day?”
“Stop your bitching. Get to work!”
I chuckled. Unlocked the door and popped the trunk.
I said a quick prayer that the spare wasn’t flat.
I pulled out the tire and the crappy jack that came with the car. Prayer answered. The tire looked pristine.
“You two might as well hop into the car,” I said, handing Agnus to Layla. “On the bright side, this should be easier to change than the truck tire.”
Chapter Eighteen
Layla’s knee was bouncing up and down rapidly as we pulled back onto the interstate. She was nervous. While I’d known her less than a week, in the brief amount of time we’d been acquainted, she hadn’t shown the slightest hint of being anxious. She had the answers, even though s
he was keeping them to herself. Now that her answers didn’t fit the evidence of the situation anymore, she was unsettled.
I’d dealt with people in similar situations as a minister. As a pastor of an aging congregation, my funerals far outnumbered my weddings. There is nothing quite like the feelings of a person when it dawns on them that for the very first time, they are facing a world without their mother or father in it.
There’s comfort in recognizing that someone who loves you, someone probably a bit wiser on account of more life experience, is still walking the Earth. There’s a safety net there.
The anxiety that someone experiences when their parent dies, or even when their parent begins to exhibit signs of dementia, is profound.
In a sense, Layla felt like she’d just lost a parent. It wasn’t just that her father had passed or even lost his memories. He’d hidden his true intentions from her and manipulated her with half-truths at best or blatant lies at worst.
How could someone make sense of something like that?
One simple act—an elven giant, a being she’d been raised to discount as a brutish orc acting out of character according to the prejudices she’d been inculcated with—had unsettled everything she believed.
I could relate to that. My own life was in upheaval.
With my career and ministry likely in the toilet, I wasn’t sure what my purpose was anymore.
Was I a player in this prophecy like Layla thought? Was I meant for something else that wasn’t clear yet? No clue.
I couldn’t say where all this stuff was going, but I could fix a flat tire. I could get in the car and drive. I could keep walking through the darkness of uncertainty, and I could trust that the light would show up eventually.
Yes, I was anxious. Of course, I was nervous. Just minutes before, I had been staring down the barrel of a rifle. It was terrifying. I’m not saying I have all this spirituality stuff down. I have doubts. I have fears. I’m not nearly as brave as Layla. But I was a little curious, too. These strange powers, this magic—how much could I do? And if I did happen to be part of some prophecy, well, I’d be lying if I said that the idea wasn’t a little intriguing. I mean, we all want to matter, and if Layla was right, my life did matter. A whole civilization that I didn’t until recently think existed depended on me.
Who Let the Dogma Out (The Elven Prophecy Book 1) Page 10
