by Tracy Tappan
Teeth chattering, Faith stared buggy-eyed at him.
“Gonna have to mark you as mine,” Lørke said. “Permanently erase Nỵko from your mind.” The name was limned with disdain.
“P-please,” Faith chattered and choked. “D-d-don’t…”
Lørke set the point of the metal item he’d fetched from the dark liquid on Faith’s belly, several inches from her navel.
It was a tack…so the black liquid must be tattoo ink.
“No!” Faith flopped about on her chain like a carp caught on the end of a fishhook.
Drawing back his hammer, Lørke slammed the tack into Faith’s belly.
A raw, throbbing scream poured out of Faith, her neck arching back, tendons standing on end. The dancer’s entire body turned pasty in such a flash flood that for the briefest moment, Pändra thought that one tack had killed her. But, no. The dancer hadn’t popped her clogs. White-eyed with terror, she strained a pleading look at Pändra again. “Pändra!”
“Faith…” Gwyn tried from several meters away.
Faith ignored her. “Help me, Pändra,” she cried out. “Please.”
Venting a sigh, Pändra lifted her head and opened her eyes all the way. Aye, she supposed she owned it to the girl to help her. She should’ve saved the dancer back on that jut of cave rock when she’d had the chance, but had let her grandiose gesture of sacrifice toward Thomal distract her from it. And here she was still alive, after all—an unhappy happenstance to have woken up to. Jøsnic was supposed to have killed her with that punch back in Ţărână. He wouldn’t have wanted to snuff her, of course, preferring to save her for his use, but she’d seen Jøsnic’s eyes flash Rău red, and she’d bloody well counted on him losing control and socking her too hard. Unfortunately not.
A second tattooing tack was slammed in. More high-pitched screaming.
All right, all right, keep your hair on.
Pändra peered up the length of her chain to the bolt securing it into the cave ceiling. The bolt was about half the size of her wrist. A real chuffer to dislodge by the look of it. Right, then. She gave her body a good swing, aiming to fling herself up high enough to grasp the chain with her feet. She didn’t make it. Damnation, she’d lost all feeling in her arms. And a worse shower of shite was headed her way. Jøsnic had spotted her antics and was striding toward her, his chin dropped into a threatening angle.
No more fannying around, then. She concentrated on her power, shedding the debilitating deadness in her arms and the lingering ache in her jaw from Jøsnic’s earlier knockout blow. She quickly searched for other wounds, but only found a strange iciness inside her, like her organs were coated in frost. Ah. Old Pändra was back, ready to hurt the first living creature who made her feel vulnerable. Bully for her. She needed her former self right now. ’Struth, she’d trade a year of her life for her immortality ring—which sounded kind of ironic, actually.
Grunting, she swung herself again, arching her legs far back, then forward, back, forth, until she hurled herself all the way up the length of chain this time. Latching the soles of her feet onto the metal links, she hung upside down like a chimpanzee, her long hair lashing about in a curtain of blonde streamers. Scrambling up the stretch of chain, she planted her feet on either side of the bolt.
Gawping faces turned up to the sight she must’ve made: stark bollock naked, squatting like a spider on the ceiling. Below her, she saw the smaller Om Rău take a pot shot at Bøllven. Snarling, the two combatants threw themselves into a wild scrap.
Ignoring the punch-up, Lørke foraged in his bucket for another tack.
Shite. Pändra grabbed hold of the chain at the root and pulled on it, hard. Fissures snaked around the bolt. Cave dust, pebbles, and other rubble broke free and pissed down. Teeth gritted, she strained harder, muscles quivering. Rum-rum-ka-shoom! With the rumbling sound of a seven-point earthquake, the chain tore free.
She fell, bringing a sizable chunk of boulder attached to the end of her chain with her. Twisting a Triple Linde on the way down, she landed straight on her feet and already swinging, using her boulder like a medieval ball-and-chain mace. She whipped it at Lørke, but a group of three Om Rău stood between her and her target and— Thunk. Thunk. Thunk. She swiped their heads off their necks with her boulder, red streaking the air in bloody ribbons.
The boulder continued its destructive path toward Lørke, but with so much warning of imminent danger, the Om Rău leader easily ducked out of the way.
The boulder crashed to the cave floor, jerking Pändra into a stumble as it exploded apart into a herd of tiny pet rocks. Buggeration.
Lørke straightened with a deafening bawl of rage, his mighty yell sending more cave debris tumbling down from the gaping hole overhead.
It also triggered the other men to go into their Rău states. Eyes blazing crimson, they began to lunge at nearby women.
“Code Berserk!” Gwyn shouted as she turned and ran.
The women who hadn’t already been grabbed, scattered.
From the tail of her vision, Pändra saw Jøsnic closing the last bit of space between them. She lithely sidestepped him, moving to stomp on the length of her chain near her wrists to snap her bindings off. Hands freed, she rounded on the red-haired giant, her fists raised, manacles dangling from her wrists. She clenched her knuckles tight, her focus narrowed to a point. She was going to have to fight like she never had in her life to survive this. As strong as a Pure-bred male Om Rău was—and without her immortality ring to promptly heal her—it wouldn’t take many blows to land her up the swanny.
Leaping to the offensive, she turned herself into a whirling dervish of violence, surprisingly making it through Jøsnic’s defenses here and there. Not surprisingly, her hits and kicks had no blooming effect on him whatsoever.
“Pändra!” Faith wailed.
Pändra sidestepped again, putting Faith into her line of sight.
Lørke had his hammer poised over another tack at the dancer’s stomach.
Taking two running steps, Pändra flew through the air, performing a textbook-perfect spinning back kick into the side of Lørke’s head. Down like a sack of spuds. That was the corker. The not-so-grand part was that the maneuver had put her back to Jøsnic, and that cost her. Dearly.
A mallet-like fist came down on top of her head, like she was one of those wee critters in a Whac-a-Mole arcade game. And just like one of those sorry little moles, she went straight down into a dark place, a blinding nightmare of agony engulfing her. The cave floor rose up and slammed into her spine and the back of her skull. Manic stars pranced across the surface of her pupils. Her lungs socked in. She struggled to claw through the pain, to recover herself, but her limbs were suddenly made of resin, her brain, a rubbish bin clattering down a hill.
Come on, don’t shag out. It was only one smacker, for crying out loud.
With a nasty growl, Jøsnic came down onto his knees beside her, his colossal arm cocked back to deliver another punch.
A bag of wank for you, girl. There was only one thing she could do.
She opened the cage door on her beast. A crackle darted through her ears. Her vision filmed over with red and her muscles inflated with strength. Pressing her teeth into a tight grate, she struck out with Rău power.
Bones broke. Crunch—and again.
Jøsnic jolted backward, yowling.
She grabbed the chain strung across his chest and yanked. Nipples and navel popped apart, blood spraying in every direction like a hellish fireworks display.
More howling resounded in her ears. Jøsnic’s mammoth fist missiled toward her face.
She lifted a forearm to block him, but…his power was phenomenal. Pain ruptured at the front of her head as the blow landed dead center on her nose. Her vision disintegrated. Blindly, she brought her head up with a sharp snap, nutting her attacker, their foreheads loudly thumping together.
A yell, then another punch from that gigantic fist.
Bone fragments burst off the bridge of her nose. P
ain stripped down to agony. Her hearing changed programming to an out-of-tune radio station, Inga’s voice singing. ♪A little bird crsssssh sat in the pear-tree…
Then she was flying, Jøsnic scooping her off the ground and slinging her over his shoulder.
Will the rapist become the rapee in her final moments? Blood streamed from the shattered remains of her nose as her Rău beastie slunk away. Agony! Agony! Agony! Her neurons fired the signal in her brain. Over and over and over. It dragged her into a deep, dark hole. That sorry mole again. She scrabbled about, trying to tear herself out of it. Her tongue turned gluey. Her brain spun in two different directions.
She jostled on Jøsnic’s shoulder.
Daddy, help me.
Deeper she went. Bones inched toward her brain. Her frontal lobe throbbed. So much pain… The blurry specter of Death appeared, holding out a hand to her. Beckoning. She craned her head up to get a better glimpse of the ghostly form. A single tear leaked from her eye. Thomal…be free, love.
So much pain.
Death waited, hand extended. So patient.
She reached out to accept the specter’s offer, her fingers oddly grey-colored, and—
A flash of lightening whited out her vision. A deafening wa-boom! followed, rocking her off Jøsnic’s shoulder. She landed with a hoarse oomph and flopped over onto her side, her lids mere slits. Who knew death would be so dramatic.
But so it was.
Blackness overtook her, the last thing her conscious mind registering was the sound of her pulse dimming to nothing.
Chapter Thirty-seven
Nỵko skidded to a stop as the cave walls closed in around him, the tunnel narrowing ahead to an impassable gap. Another wrong turn! Dang it! Reeling around, he stumbled back the way he’d come, adjusting his grip on Pändra, propped on his right shoulder, and Faith on his left. Squinting through the deluge of sweat in his eyes, he tried to make out another route through the dim illumination provided by the heat-resistant light strapped to his head.
He found another tunnel and staggered down it. The steady boom of his heart and the whistling of his breath through the chambers of his lungs were the only sounds. He was so weak at this point he’d already dropped Pändra once, and Faith was starting to feel like she weighed one thousand pounds, not a measly one hundred. He should’ve listened to Jaċken and fed before going off on this mission. The sky-high temperature inside these Hell Tunnels was rapidly finishing the job that blood loss from his knife wound had begun: utterly depleting him.
The smart thing probably would’ve been to leave Pändra behind and save himself the liability of her extra weight. After all, when he’d found her, she looked pretty close to dead, her nose nothing but a misshapen mass of pulp. But “pretty close” wasn’t close enough for him when it came to dead…although if he kept scurrying about these tunnels like a mouse in a maze, searching for an exit but only finding more cave, then dead, as in completely dead, as in dead as a doorknob dead, would define them all. Soon.
And even though I may have a possible way into Oţărât, my ability to grab the women then get back out, with an entire town of Om Rău to face down, is still a huge IF.
A little mission tidbit he was proving right about.
When it came to extracting his objectives, however, Nỵko had defied the odds and accomplished that easy as pie. What do you know, but toss a couple flash grenades and every Om Rău in town collapsed to the cave floor, rolling around with their arms clutched over their heads. He’d practically skipped into town, la-di-da…then had almost blown the whole easy deal by freezing up when he saw Faith suspended from a chain, naked, her belly awash with blood. And Pändra lumped on the ground looking very close to dead.
He’d somehow managed to get moving again—maybe inspired by the sight of a barely unconscious Lørke stirring—and grabbed both women. With chaos still reigning around him, he’d run through the dense smoke back into the tunnels, retracing his steps toward Ţărână.
Unfortunately, that’s where the whole easy part of this mission had turned into mud pie.
It had happened about three hundred yards ago, to be exact. The Om Rău, having recovered, had given chase, and in the process of whizzing and wagging through their own well-known tunnels, they’d cut him off from the sole route he knew would get him home.
Now he was staggering around inside a fire serpent’s belly, completely off Thomal’s map, blood loss and dehydration closing in on him at an exponential rate. Awhile back, he was fairly sure the soles of his boots had also seared off.
Footsteps! Ah, crud, someone was coming up fast behind him.
Nỵko lurched into the next left, and—
His legs folded beneath him like a broken beach chair, dumping him onto his knees. Faith and Pändra slid off his sweaty shoulders and crumpled into a couple of sad heaps on either side of him. He moaned.
His pursuer slammed to a halt over him, breathing heavily.
Nỵko sat back on his heels, keeping his head bowed as he mentally accepted the unavoidable. Suicide missions were supposed to end in death, after all. Too bad he was letting the girls down, though. He really would’ve liked to get them back to Ţărână.
“Off your ass, Nỵko,” his pursuer ordered.
Huh? Nỵko managed the impossibly difficult task of looking up. Through the hair caked into his eyes with sweat, he viewed his pursuer.
Shọn, dressed all in black with darker black spots scattered across his shirt and pants. Blood. There was a smear of it on his chin, too.
“You wanna live?” Shọn asked. “Come with me now. Quick.” His younger brother grabbed him under the arm, trying to tug him to his feet.
Of all the things…
“Come on, man! Don’t pussy out on me!”
Nỵko didn’t budge. His body felt overheavy, his big muscles no longer an asset, but a burden to his bones and flesh. “B-b-b…” he tried to explain. The words wobbled around on his tongue. His brain vacantly registered the wrongness of the situation. This was Shọn, a bad guy now. “B-blood-need.”
“Yeah, that’s kinda obvious. But I know a place where we can take a break and figure this out, all right?” With a teeth-clamping growl of effort that spoke of how little help Nỵko gave to his brother, Shọn hefted Nỵko to his feet.
Too tired. Just want to—
“Christ,” Shọn panted. “Try cutting down on the fucking cookies, Nỵko, would you?” Shọn scooped up Faith and Pändra. “You follow me,” he warned. “Or I come back here and kick in your ornaments.”
Can’t, can’t, can’t…Nỵko didn’t know how he could, but somehow he did, one foot miraculously appearing in front of the other as he trailed Shọn. Thankfully his little brother traveled only about twenty feet down the tunnel before ducking into a cave opening. Here, Nỵko was met with the unwelcome sight of a rocky ramp leading up at a steep grade. Up, up—Nỵko huffed and puffed as he climbed, his muscles quivering so much it was like mini vibrator packs were jammed underneath his skin. The one thing that kept him going was the feel of the temperature cooling with each upward step he took. That felt very, very fantastic.
The ramp finally ended in a small, dome-shaped rock room. Nỵko and Shọn collapsed together, cluttering the cramped space with their rough breathing. Nỵko didn’t know how long it took his lungs to return to normal functioning, but when they did, he heard the steady plip-plip of dripping water. He cranked his head to the side. Holy Moly. The cave walls were so slick here that the moist trickling had formed a small pool. Mortal thirst had his tongue automatically trying to dart out and lick his lips, but the desiccated slab merely succeeded in making a crackling sound. That couldn’t be good.
Shọn crawled over to the water and cupped his hands in it. “Drink,” he ordered through his own sips.
Nice thought, but…The pool could’ve been a mirage for how capable Nỵko was of getting to it. The climb to this room had done him in. He was half-blind with fatigue, his whole body shaking to the point o
f near-seizures, his heart lollygagging in his chest, a dull thump-bump that threatened to give up completely any second. “What are you doing, Shọn?” His voice came out as a hoarse whisper, debility wringing it out.
Lifting off his hands and knees, Shọn sank back into a crouch, his forearms braced on his thighs.
“Last time I saw you.” Nỵko paused through a stomach spasm. “You shot me.”
“Don’t be a baby. I winged you. Thomal, too.”
Nỵko blinked slowly and painfully. It felt like his blood-need was moving into his brain, shriveling it up. “Am I missing a punch line here? Are you, or are you not, a Topside Om Rău now?”
Shọn’s eyebrows shot straight up. “You’re joking, right?”
“I don’t hear myself laughing, Shọn.”
“Aren’t I here,” Shọn countered, “saving your ass?”
Nỵko set his jaw, his blood-need drilling out another borehole in his stomach.
“All right, yeah,” Shọn conceded. “I was with them at first. But I’ve spent a lot of time with my therapist topside since you last saw me, and…she’s helped me. I mean, I’ll never forgive myself for what I did to Luvera, but Karrell has been getting me through the other stuff, a bunch of Good Will Hunting ‘it’s not your fault’ kinda shit.”
Nỵko lay there, his throat cinched tight, strangling on some possible way to express the jumbled stew of anger and wretchedness within him. Finally, roughly, “Would’ve been nice to have been clued in on that a little sooner.”
Shọn shrugged, highlighting the fact that his shirt was plastered to his body. “I wasn’t ready to ask to come back to Ţărână, yet. I figured what my therapy actually needed was for me to kill Bøllven as payback for his near butt-reaming.” Shọn flashed a mordant smile, long canines glistening. “Which I just did.”
Nỵko moved his teeth back and forth against each other, his bones hurting, like he’d been chewed up and spit out. “So glad you’ve got that all worked out, Shọn, that it was only a matter of you killing your tormentor rather than me being the worst brother on earth!” He tried to swallow, but his throat refused to do its job anymore. “Maybe if I’d known that a little earlier, I wouldn’t have thrown in the towel on my own life. Maybe I could’ve had…I could’ve…” Druggedly, he turned his head to seek out Faith.
