Fire Heart (The Titans: Book One)

by Dan Avera

  “Damn it,” he growled, picking himself up and sheathing his hammer. He held his sword out before him like a blind man's cane, slowing even further until he was moving at little more than a brisk walk. He could hear things—rustles in the undergrowth, hushed growls and angry hisses—but the mist distorted them. They might have been a long way off or a mere pace away; he could not be sure.

  “Over here.”

  He froze, his eyes flicking back and forth and his ears straining to hear.

  “This way.”

  He turned slowly to his left—and came face to face with the Eastland girl. Her hair fell like a curtain around her face, bathing it in shadows, but Will recognized her as easily as his own mother. There seemed to be more blood on her than he remembered, and as he watched a small red line blossomed like a flower on her chest, spreading tiny, spidery fingers that thickened and grew together until the front of her ragged dress was soaked in blood.

  “You want me to follow you?” Will asked, finally summoning the nerve to speak, and she nodded once. “How can I trust you?”

  She raised one small hand and gestured vaguely at the mist surrounding them. “You can see,” she said simply, the whispered words seeming to come from just behind his ear rather than the girl herself.

  Will looked around, confused, and then realized with surprise that she was correct. He had no torch—how had he been able to navigate the mist without one? It should have been pitch black, and yet the fog seemed almost to glow with an eery white sheen. “You did that?” he asked with disbelief, and she nodded once more. “How?”

  “This is not the time,” she whispered. “Follow me, or you will die.”

  Will hesitated for a moment more. She's just a figment of my imagination, he thought desperately. Isn't she? Have I gone mad? Am I dreaming all this?

  The little girl took a step toward him, and then another until she was standing close enough for him to touch. He could see it clearly now—the clean, slender cut in her dress just above her heart, the cut that he remembered each night when he dreamed. She reached out to him with one small hand, her tiny fingers grasping his own and tugging on them gently. “Follow,” she repeated, “or die.” Then she turned and ran, not in the direction Will had been going, but to his left. He dashed after her, unwilling to wait for the yaru to find him.

  The girl led him through the trees at a breakneck pace, and it was all he could do to keep up with her. Branches and roots tore at him with renewed vigor, and each time he stumbled or fell he feared he would look up to find that she had disappeared. But she was always there, waiting for him to right himself and run once more.

  Then, without warning, she came to an abrupt halt. Will skidded to a stop beside her, panting. “Why did we stop?” he asked in as hushed a voice as he could manage.

  She held up one tiny hand for silence and cocked her head as though listening intently. For a moment she neither moved nor spoke, and then her hand snapped forward, pointing in front of them. “There,” she breathed. “They are coming.”

  Will barely had time to raise his sword before the first yaru burst from the fog with a feral scream. It hit him like a boulder, bowling him over so that they fell into a tangled ball of flailing limbs and gnashing teeth. Somehow he managed to keep hold of his sword, and he pounded the crossguard into his assailant's head. Slavering fangs snapped at his face, screeching against the metal of his helm, and he felt claws scrabbling at the leather on his arm.

  “Get off me!” Will roared, and with a burst of strength he had not known he possessed he threw the yaru away from him. It hit a birch with a fleshy smack and a growl of pain, and by the time Will had risen to his feet it leaped toward him again, arms outstretched.

  He was ready this time, though, and he whirled to the side and swung his sword in a cleaving arc down on its neck. Its body, now minus a head and most of its arms, hit the forest floor with a dull thud.

  The whole event had been so fast that Will found himself staring in astonishment at his hands. Did I do that? he wondered, turning his sword over so that the blood on its edge gleamed in the ethereal light from the mist. It had been pure instinct on his part. He had never moved so quickly in his life, he was sure of it.

  “More are coming,” the girl said, and he looked up to see her beckoning frantically for him to follow. She was right, of course—he could hear them now, growling and hissing somewhere within the fog.

  “Are we almost out of this?” Will asked, and the spirit nodded. “Alright, then. Lead on.”

  It was not long before another of the beasts found him, but that slow, simmering rage that he could still feel deep in his chest had grown. He lashed out with his arm, sliding his sword between its ribs and then twisting sharply so that they broke around the edges of the blade. The thing was dead before it crashed to the ground, and Will had already disappeared back into the fog.

  Soon it began to thin, allowing Will a more generous view of his surroundings. It became easier to follow the girl and soon the mist had all but cleared away, letting him chase after her without reservation.

  And then, quite suddenly, she was gone.

  He came to an abrupt halt, his arms windmilling to keep his balance, and looked frantically about for any sign of his guide. “Where did you go?” he hissed, praying to whatever spirits were out there that his voice would not carry. His head whipped from side to side, but she was nowhere to be found. All that remained were the last vestiges of the mist, its curling tendrils waving lazily about along the ground. “Come back!” Will said, his whispered call seeming painfully loud.

  She giggled somewhere off to his left and he whirled around, only to have the sound come again from behind him. “Stupid, stupid Willyem,” she whispered in his ear, and there was a strange, low growl that he knew all too well. “Your sins are catching up to you.”

  He turned slowly, his stomach an icy pit of dread. He knew the girl would not be there. No, that was not her way. Never should have listened, he thought. Now what are you going to do, Will?

  There were dozens of them—too many red eyes to count, glowing in the darkness despite the absence of torchlight. They did not move. They did not make another sound. They simply waited. With the mist gone the moonlight shone down through the treetops, punctuating the darkness with scattered patches of silver. It was barely enough to see by, let alone fight in.

  Will sighed and rolled his shoulders, drawing his hammer with his free hand. “Well,” he said conversationally, “I suppose we'd better get this over with.” The rage inside him—that strange Other that refused to leave him be—chose that moment to boil over. It hit him like a lightning bolt, searing his skin and boiling his blood so that his teeth ground with the pain. Might as well put it to good use, he thought, the words sounding oddly distant and garbled in his own head, and then he charged.

  He had no idea whether the yaru's enormous leader was in their midst, but he realized with a small note of surprise that he had ceased to care. With the Other guiding his hands death no longer frightened him, and as he danced among the yaru he began to laugh. It was a sickly, booming thing, completely without humor. In one of the last pieces of his mind that was his own, it terrified him.

  His sword flashed in the moonlight, liberating bodies of their limbs and necks of their heads until the metal glittered darkly, each swing flinging little droplets of heat out into the shadows. He could barely see the yaru as they came for him and yet...it seemed not to matter. He knew where they were—knew exactly where to place his sword so that they flung themselves onto its point, and where to swing his hammer so that the blunt end punched gaping holes in the beasts' skulls. Blood sprayed into the air, spattering against him like hot rain. It matted his hair and slicked his grip on his weapons, and when it splashed against his helm he tasted it, smelled it, that coppery tang that never seemed to leave him.

  Soon the blood on the ground made his footing treacherous, and the corpses that littered the forest floor seemed to reach for him, trying to drag
him down to his death. But the Other would not let him fall—each time he slipped his foot shot out to catch him, and no matter how the arms and legs and heads caught at his boots the Other nimbly avoided them, immune to their weak attempts at treachery. The yaru could not touch him. For the moment, he was the god of death.

  It ended abruptly, without warning. Will swung his hammer at a pair of crimson eyes only to have them vanish. He buried the weapon's spike deep into a tree with a dull thunk and looked around in confusion. They had all retreated, and the fury inside him soared to new heights. Who were they to run from him? “Cowards!” he shouted, the word manifesting as more of a bestial snarl than anything. “Get back here!” He ran at them but they turned and fled into the woods, vanishing into the shadows without a sound. He stared after them in confusion, and his anger slowly began to subside.

  “Such hate,” growled a deep voice behind him, and he whirled to see a new pair of glowing eyes. These, however, floated a full head above him, and they simmered with an intelligence that the other yaru did not possess. “It burns me without ever touching my skin. It makes me almost...nostalgic.”

  “What do you want?” Will asked, his own eyes reflexively darting left and right in search of an escape route. Thrice-damned forest, he thought furiously. How am I supposed to use birch trees to hide from a yaru?

  “Want?” the creature asked, and its voice sounded almost stunned as though it had never been asked such a question. It looked away thoughtfully for a moment, and though its form was obscured by darkness Will was suddenly struck with the ridiculous image of a yaru touching its finger to its chin in deep contemplation. “I...I am unsure, to be honest,” the yaru said softly. “In the beginning I wanted...youth, I suppose. Vigor. Immortality. We all wanted it, among other things. But I do not think immortality can be bought, or traded, or stolen.”

  Will shook his head in disbelief. “Wh...what?” he asked, bewildered. “What are you talking about? What do you mean 'we'?”

  The glowing eyes turned back to him and the yaru stepped forward into the moonlight. Before he could stop himself Will felt his foot take an involuntary step back. “I am old,” it said without answering his question. “So very, very old. I feel it in my bones, in my skin...in my mind. Most of all in my mind. It is the voice, you see. That terrible, whispering voice that waits in the darkness. It hungers for my soul, and for the things I have taken from it. For a long while I wished simply to die, but...now when I think about death and what it entails, I find myself wondering what will happen once I pass into the Void. And I realize that the voice will always be there waiting for me, waiting to punish me for my transgressions.” The words were so haunting that Will shivered against a phantom chill and took another step back.

  “I do not wish to die,” the yaru continued, oblivious to his reaction. “Not anymore. An eternity of torment awaits me in that other world—punishment for what I have done. But I am afraid of the darkness, and I will not let it take me. And for that, I must kill you once more.”

  Will shook his head. It was a dream—it had to be. Just a terrible, terrible dream, and he would wake soon and walk downstairs and find all his men waiting for him with Castor and Katryna and Hook. But no...everything was too real, too vivid to be anything but real. So what was the yaru talking about? Immortality? And what did Will have to do with any of this creature's mad plans? His mind whirled furiously, trying to decide what to do next. Kill me once more? he thought. What?

  His mind was such a confused whirl that he did not see the first blow until it wast too late. Something hit him in the chest with enough force to lift him off his feet and hurl him through the air, and then the breath exploded from his lungs in a strangled cry as he crashed into a tree. The back of his skullhelm protected only his head, and blinding pain erupted behind his eyes as his bared neck slammed into the wood. He fell to the ground in a tangled heap, staring up into what he belatedly recognized as the night sky. How did that get there? he wondered.

  After a moment Will rose dazedly to his feet. His ears were ringing. Stars that had nothing to do with the sky flashed across his vision. His hand brushed across his chest and found four long, ragged tears in the armor. Lucky, he thought dimly, and then he realized that he was no longer holding his weapons. He looked frantically around for them and spotted something glinting in the moonlight a few paces away. He stumbled toward it.

  “What is the meaning of this?” the yaru's angry voice hissed from the shadows. “One moment you fight like a god, and the next you are little better than a clumsy child. I can still feel it inside you, even now. Do you run from it? Hide from it? Bury it within yourself? I cannot decide if it is a ruse or a fluke.”

  Will fell to his knees next to the shining thing and clumsily felt around in the earth with his hands. Something bit painfully into his fingertip and he realized that it was his sword; he seized the handle and rose to his feet once more, trying in vain to shake away the wool that had accumulated inside his head. The realization that he could not see the yaru's telltale eyes sent a stab of fear through his body and he whirled around in search of them.

  “It has to be a ruse,” the yaru muttered to itself. Will spun in the direction of its voice, but he saw only shadows. “Yes, a ruse. A trick. But you will not fool me—no, no.”

  For an instant something flickered in the moonlight to Will's left, and by sheer reflex he was able to duck. The sweeping blow meant to take his head off passed a hair's breadth above his helm, and then the crimson eyes flared to life before him. Will tried to leap away, but he was too slow—far, far too slow for the massive yaru that seemed to move even faster than the others of its kind. The muscles in Will's legs coiled and bunched and he threw himself backward, but before he could even leave the ground he felt something tear through his arm. He grunted in pain, backpedaling frantically to escape.

  “No,” the yaru snarled, and new pain erupted from Will's thigh as the thing's claws tore through his armor and dug deep furrows in his flesh. He felt them catch the bone, and then his leg wrenched painfully to the side and carried his body into a spinning tumble that sent him crashing to the forest floor once more. He could not even cry out; his breath caught in his throat at the agony.

  He rolled across the ground, and then there was a sharp clang as something hit the side of his helm. He turned to see the head of his war hammer and seized it with his free hand, bringing it up just in time to halt a downward strike that would have torn his chest open. The crimson eyes widened in surprise, and Will took the opportunity to lash out with his sword. The yaru screamed in pain and leaped back into the shadows; a moment later Will felt a fine mist of blood speckle across his arms.

  “You will not have me!” the yaru cried. “No! I will not allow it!”

  Will barely heard the words, though. He grunted in pain as his wounds throbbed, and he squeezed his eyes shut in a fruitless attempt to banish the sensation. Could use some help, his battered mind thought. Wish Castor was here. And Katryna. He whimpered at another twinge of agony, his limbs curling reflexively inward to protect himself. I'm going to die, he realized.

  And the rage, inexplicably absent until that moment, rose within him like a wildfire. Spurred by his pain and fear, it roared through his veins and took control of his body. The Other forced his muscles to obey, pulling Will to his feet despite the gut-wrenching agony that tore through his ruined thigh, and then brought his weapons up to ward off the next blow. His sight flared to life, sharpening against the shadows until he could see the yaru standing before him with almost perfect clarity. It looked frightened.

  “Stay away,” it hissed, taking a step back, and then it howled into the night. Countless glowing eyes swarmed through the trees toward them, surrounding the combatants in a living cage of slavering jaws and gleaming fangs.

  And to his surprise, Will found that he was once again no longer afraid.

  He could feel the fear, to be sure, but it was buried deep beneath a layer of hate so thick that it might as wel
l have belonged to someone else. His eyes roved around his attackers, coldly calculating which would be the first to die, before coming to rest on their leader. “You will not have me,” he said, pointing his sword at it, “not tonight. Not ever.” The words were not his. The Other had spoken with his mouth.

  “Kill him!” the large yaru cried, and like a tidal wave of flesh its minions surged toward Will.

  His sword swept out before him, cleaving through three and four of the creatures at a time as he made his way toward their leader. They came at him from every direction at once, tearing at him with claws and teeth. He screamed as he killed them, a long, ragged roar that boiled up from deep inside of him, and those nearest him shrank back in terror.

  But there were too many of them—too many even for the Other, and soon his hammer was wrenched from his grip. He backhanded the creature closest to him and stabbed his sword deep into its chest. He watched in stupefied fascination as the muscles in his arm bunched and corded, and then tore the blade sideways out of the thing's ribs and into the yaru next to it. He kicked and punched, flailing and snarling like a cornered animal. Finally his sword buried itself deep into a yaru's bone, and when the beast twisted away it took the blade with it. Will roared in anger and seized the head of the creature closest to him, smashing his helm into its face again and again until he felt its bones shatter and the taste of its blood was thick on his tongue.

  And to his complete surprise, he found himself sailing through the air once more. His helm spun away into the darkness, the thick metal of the visor impossibly rent, and something burned across his face. The breath burst from his lungs as he hit the ground, and with a shaking hand he reached up to find three long, wet, ragged wounds from his brow to his chin. He tried to stand but his vision swam sickeningly, and the blood draining from his body sapped his strength so quickly that even the anger went with it. He made it to one knee before he could go no further, and he slowly raised his head to see the lead yaru towering over him. Will huffed a humorless laugh, the exertion of even that little feat leaving him breathless.