“Nalik…” She pulled in a deep breath. Stood and focused everything she had on the small space that separated them. The scent of orange filled the air, replacing the damp scent of cave. Kept her eyes closed. When she opened them again there was a nearly solid wall of green between them. Ripe oranges hung off the branches of the tree she’d put directly in the rock of the cave floor. The cave floor he had created with whatever power he had. She was no different than he, was she?
“If you’re Frankenstein then what am I? The Bride? Because my grandfather did something to me when I was still in diapers. More than any of the others. And whatever it was allows me to do this.”
She closed her eyes, sought the earth around them, and then gave a push to the soil.
Cass had never managed a full tree before, not on this scale. But satisfaction burned in her at what she’d created from the earth. And at the complete shock on his face. She pulled the largest orange she could find free and tossed it to him. “Here’s the dessert. From one freak to another.”
Chapter 9
What was he supposed to say?
He asked himself that over and over as he studied the orange in his hand. The eight foot tree growing in the center of his cave. The girl sleeping at the roots, her fingers wrapped around the grasses that had grown around the trunk of the tree as she slipped into slumber.
As it grew toward her, like it was drawn to her.
She wasn’t just a half-Druid or even a quarter. Something that was often despised and ridiculed in world of the tree hugger Kinds, if he recalled correctly. No, this girl was fully Druid while being fully human.
Something that he wouldn’t have thought possible if he had ever considered it.
How? What the fuck had that bastard done to her?
She cried out in her sleep, and it took little energy for him to pick out the thoughts and fears fighting for control of her rest. The leaves of her tree rustled above her until she settled.
No wonder she had been so frightened to go underground. No Druid took that well.
Some kept in her grandfather’s basement laboratory had gone mad within days. The older the Druid the more likely it was to happen. Or the more powerful.
What could have made a man who was supposed to love and protect her use her the way her grandfather had?
He stood and stepped closer to her. The branches of that damned orange tree—why an orange tree of all things?--creaked and cracked, the sound threatening.
The tree was protecting her. It must have sensed the monster within him.
He plucked another orange and ripped the peel from the fruit and sank his fangs deep.
Oranges were his favorite fruit, after all.
The grasses were thickening around her, nearly covering her as the chill of the night deepened around them, even in the cave. She was Druid, and safe in her little nest. Nothing would harm her now; the tree and grasses would ensure that.
And what they didn’t, he would. He strengthened the defenses around the perimeter, closing the hole they’d entered completely. He didn’t need it to get in and out anyway. He’d only left it open for her sake. But she was asleep, probably for a long while, and it would take him little time to carry out what he planned. He’d be back long before she woke.
With barely a thought he flashed himself into a bat and flew straight up, to the holes he’d placed in the cave’s ceiling, and out into the strange night.
***
Wherever they were was darker than he was used to. Almost like the longest winter night of Alaska or the far north of Canada. He’d been there a time or two. Siberia, as well. But this terrain wasn’t nearly as cold.
Just dark.
But it didn’t remind him much of Colorado, either. The grasses were thicker, more like the jungles of South America where his particular branch of Dardaptoans had originated nearly two thousand years ago. And the plants were unlike any he recognized.
He’d seen some wildlife, though not as much as he’d thought he would. There were deer-like creatures, similar to the modern animal that roamed his world now. A few birds, nocturnal, competed with him for space in the sky.
The air felt heavy and oppressive, though the temperature was moderate. He tensed, even hidden deep in the body of the bat.
Every instinct he had told him something was wrong with this place, in a way he had yet to figure out.
He picked up speed. He wanted to find the nearest town and figure out where in the three hells they’d been warped to and then get his ass back to his Rajni. There was nothing about this that he liked at all, and least of all having Cassandra alone.
With just a damned tree and a few rocks to protect her.
The distant lights of a city glowed miles away from where he flew. It was there he headed.
Fifteen minutes later he was disgusted by what he’d found.
The inhabitants of the city were humanoid in appearance, though he sensed some demon and other ancestry mixed in. They were barely on the level of Gaian Middle Ages in technology or hygiene. The city was a bit more modern in architecture, mostly stone and wood, but the windows had no glass. Leather skins provided what protection there was from the cooler night temperatures.
He gave up on the idea of finding help in this place and instead started searching for information. With the portion of demon blood he could sense, there had to be someone in the place that sold portkeys.
Or someone who knew where he could find some.
That was the only way he was getting his Rajni back where she belonged.
It took little effort to turn his physical self into something to match the creatures he saw loitering in alleyways and doorframes. The filth was much harder to manifest on his skin, and then he said screw it and kept his body clean. He was Dardaptoan, after all, and uncleanliness was something despised by most of his people. The woman who’d birthed him was the one exception to that characteristic he’d ever found. He stood several inches over the average of these people, and he enhanced that. Made himself taller, stronger, and cleaner than the people he’d seen here. Made himself stand out considerably.
He even enhanced the ugliness of the scar on his face—it suited this place that he was in and signified that he was nothing to mess with.
He carried his sword prominently displayed at his hip. He walked so that anyone staring at him would see the strength beneath his tunic.
The tunic that was strangely similar to those worn by the inhabitants of this world. Did they possess common ancestry? Three hells if he knew—it was certainly possible.
Wherever he was, it had similar elements to their society as that from which he came. Interesting. As only a handful of the eighteen realms could make such claims, from what he remembered of his studies centuries ago.
Dardaptoans evolved from a mix of their goddess’s tears at her arrival in Gaia nearly seven thousand years ago. And they’d changed rapidly three thousand five hundred years ago when the goddess met the Wolf god and the war between the Lupoiux and the Dardaptoans raged. These changes stopped occurring when the other deities locked the damned bitch goddess and the dog in Levia for three thousand years.
But the Dardaptoans came from those tears and the goddess’s family’s DNA, from the people of whatever world it had been that she had left behind. He had never asked, though he’d met the girl goddess a handful of times, just where she had come from. He’d barely resisted spitting on her for what she’d done to him. To his sister and brother.
She was supposed to protect the innocent. None had been more innocent than his young sister. None.
He’d had no interest in the other realms—other than the ones he hunted from—but now he wished he’d at least learned their names and how connected to each other every realm was. Some could be easily traversed. Others, not so much. Levia, the sparsely populated realm where the girl goddess and the Wolf had been kept for so many millennia, could only be reached by traveling through two interconnected realms. Levia could not be reached directly wi
th any port key. An added protection that would serve the place well if the rumors of coming wars were true. But then again, from what he’d heard, Levia had little population except displaced Lupoiux and a handful of Dardaptoans who’d accompanied the girl goddess back after her mating with the Lupoiux god. The leader of the people the Dardaptoans had despised for millennia.
Was this place the same? How in the three hells was he supposed to get her back home?
He thought about the damned girl he’d do anything to protect. Thought of how she’d looked with a damned plant wrapped around her for warmth and protection. Thought of how beautiful she’d looked with the Druidic power in her eyes.
Failure this time just wasn’t going to be an option.
Chapter 10
He searched for a marketplace, some kind of shop that would provide them with supplies, though he had the skills and powers to ensure that every need the girl had was met easily. A world’s supplies told him a lot about the place. And the economy. A marketplace that sold mostly goods needed for minimal survival hinted at a world far different from the one that he had left with its electronic toys and touch screen phones and other such stupid luxuries.
And what magics existed in this place.
Gaia frowned on anything not human in nature, though most of the damned idiot humans had no idea that real magics even existed. New Age shops were cropping up here and there—mostly ran by Witches who worshiped the goddess Nelciana—but the general mass of humans shied away from the places ran by the true Nelcian followers.
The demon realm, Relaklonos, was far different. It had less technology than Gaia and electronic devices fried within months of being in the magic-charged climate. But the magics were very well developed.
And portkeys were sold like lemonade at a Gaian kid’s homemade stand.
Would that be the case here?
Portkeys were somewhere in this place; he just had to find them. Then he’d take what he needed and get that girl home.
Or die trying.
**
What he found was that while minor magics were bartered in this realm, the more complex were not. But that didn’t mean that the portkeys he sought weren’t nearby. There were some somewhere, he just had to find them.
The next place he headed was a bar. For of all the realms he’d traveled in his centuries in Gaia—he’d visited seven of the eighteen—the one thing that was a constant was a people’s need to gather. To imbibe and wash away some of the pain of their miserable fucking existences.
And where there was alcohol, there were loose tongues. Information. Some that was free-flowing, and some that could be bought.
He’d helped himself to some coin from a register of a shopkeeper that he’d watched cheat a young woman out of twice what he’d deserved, a young woman who’d obviously not had it to spare. Nalik had no issue with taking from a man like that. Not when it was for the safety and provision of his own female.
For that girl he would do anything; taking coin was nothing.
He kept himself small and insignificant in the body of the bat and peered in the window of what appeared to be the darkest, nastiest, roughest bar in the worst district of what he now knew to be the capitol city of the realm of Evelanedea. One of the realms he had never heard of. The goddess cursed him, yet again.
That made him a bit itchy. Leery. At least in the demon world of Relaklonos and the barely civilized realm of Euschao he knew what to expect. He’d been to those worlds many times. And he’d heard enough in recent months from the females in his own world about Levia to get a general idea of what that world was like.
But he knew nothing about where they were. Time to find out.
He studied the occupants of the bar through a window while he formulated his plan. He would target those men similar to himself, find common ground. He’d been an expert at blending in for most of his life.
He flew to the back alley and found the darkest spot. Transformed himself back into his regular body. He would enter the room as exactly what he was. A bad son-of-a-bitch that these creatures would not want to screw over.
The sword he carried openly for anyone to see was worth more in their currency than the building that housed the bar and what he assumed were small apartments above it. And he knew he carried himself with an air of importance and do-not-fuck-with.
Even in this area of dangerous shits, he’d stand out as one of the toughest. It was exactly what he was aiming for.
He rubbed a hand over the bar, saying nothing until the bartender looked over at him. “Strongest you’ve got. Clean glass.”
He watched the male carefully, until he was satisfied the drink would be relatively safe.
Not that he intended to drink it.
“New to Edni?” The male, apparently a younger one from his physical appearance, was nervous, but doing his damnedest to appear nonchalant.
Nalik didn’t answer, studied the other occupants of the room. They were watching him, though very few appeared to be. He smirked. They thought they were tough, but he could so easily read the truth in them.
Most were youths, no more vile than typical Gaian gang youth. He’d preyed on quite a few of those in his time. Posturing. He had seen that so often in soldiers too young to grow beards. He had thought he’d left that life behind him more than a century ago. The wars would bring it all back again.
He caressed the hilt of his sword, knowing eyes would follow his movement. Would catalog the citrine and garnet that gilded the hilt. Greed would do the rest. It always had. He sniffed the drink and held it to his lips. Straight vodka smell. Interesting to find a Gaian drink in such a place.
Evidence that someone somewhere had realm-hopped between the two worlds. Portkey? Or some other means of travel?
He turned to the bartender. “Where can I find a portkey?”
The boy paled beneath his sallow skin. “I do not know, sire.”
“Lying isn’t a good thing to do. I know they exist and I know they can be found.” He pulled some of the coin he’d stolen free from the pouch around his waist. He’d figured out their values earlier. “Just a little information, that’s all I’m after.”
The bartender wiped the bar near Nalik’s glass. “I don’t have the information that you seek, traveler.”
“Now, you see, I believe you do.” Nalik turned his back on the room and focused his attention at the boy. “All I need to know is where to find a couple of port keys, expense isn’t an issue. Give me what I need, and I’ll be gone. And your pockets will be a fair sight heavier than they are now.”
“And my head a fair sight more bloody. I am not after being made an example. Everyone knows portkeys and the selling of such is more than illegal. It’s treasonous.”
He hadn’t expected that. And this didn’t seem like the part of town where legal would matter much to the citizens. “Maybe. But people do sell them, do they not?”
“Not in this place.”
He had to give the boy credit. He did not bend easily, though Nalik could sense the lie in the boy’s words.
Someone did sell the keys around here. Nalik just needed to find them. Before the girl woke.
***
Cass woke when warm hands lifted her from where she rested. She wasn’t frightened; she knew who held her even before her mind cleared. “What time is it?”
“Time for you to eat and get cleaned up. We’re leaving in half an hour.” He thrust a small bag toward her and Cass took it. It was warm in her hands. She pulled the odd paper back and found two small pieces of bread and a small fruit the size of a tangerine.
“Where did you get these?”
“Marketplace eighteen miles north of here.”
“You left me here alone.” Of course he had. Why wouldn’t he? She was just surprised he had come back at all. “Did you find out anything? Where are we?”
“Evelanedea. Not sure where that is.”
“It’s where Kennera and her friend Nelciana came from. It was in a book in Theo’s
library.” Her cousin Mickey had loaned it to her. It had been filled with fantastic accounts of differing plants, like she had never seen before. She’d poured over it—and the accompanying maps—for hours over the summer. Kennera had promised to answer questions about the plants someday. That day had never come, and it wasn’t until after Cass had questioned Theo about the goddess had Cass learned that Kennera and her friend were political refugees from Evelanedea. For more years than Cass could fathom. It made her time at Dardanos resort seem so trifling, when she thought about it.
He focused his attention more fully on her, and Cass shivered. Why did his eyes, unlike any of the other Dardaptoans’, freak her out so much? Objectively, his eyes were quite beautiful, the color of dark honey. Sometimes they were so dark they appeared black. Which was unusual, she knew, for most of his people had eyes that were in the yellow range. She’d never seen yellow eyes on humans before. But his were almost brown, like a humans.
But then again, Dardaptoans were far from human, weren’t they?
“How much do you know about this place?”
She hesitated, pretending absorption in her small breakfast. Should she tell him that she’d discussed this place with her cousin’s husband a time or two? That after Mickey had loaned her the small book Theo had asked her if she was curious about the place? That he’d answered the few questions she had had.
She didn’t know much about this place, but she’d wager she knew more than most of the people in Dardanos. Theo had saw to that. “Theo told me a few things. Said I needed to know them.”
“Care to share?”
“What do you want to know?"
He snatched the fruit she’d been playing with and peeled it the rest of the way. The tough outer covering had been too difficult for her to pull free, but it was nothing for him. He waved the fruit under her nose. “Eat. Then tell me what that magic eight ball Sebastos told you.”
Out Of The Darkness Page 4
