Storm Siren

by Mary Weber

  “You’re like fresh bait for the bolcranes,” Colin notes grimly. “Probably smell your injury a mile away.”

  I shake my head. “They can’t smell. They hunt using heat visio—” I stall. And stare at him. Ah kracken. Adora didn’t tell him.

  His face turns the color of the dripping, overgrown spindle trees behind him. Their lengthy green branches poking out in all directions like giant needles waiting to impale. He shifts to peer into the thorny forest as the rain drums around us. His barely fevered body will be like a blasted bull’s-eye compared to ours. I thought he knew.

  “Colin, if there was any way around—”

  He shrugs it off with a brave face that is false. He saw Adora’s map. There’s no way around Litchfell except by water, mountains, or cliffs. Which is why very few people ever visit the Fendres.

  “I’ve been planning to keep the temperature around us at freezing. Which means you should be fine.”

  “Maybe we shoulda got here earlier and gone through while it was daylight,” Breck says, making me jump. I didn’t even hear her behind us.

  “It wouldn’t matter. It’s never daylight at the heart of Litchfell,” Colin mutters, indicating he at least knows that much. “So how ’bout we get this over with, yeah?”

  I stand and tug my cloak tighter, suddenly aware of the sound of an airship puttering through the lessening storm overhead. Along with what I swear are hoofbeats coming toward us.

  Flipping around, I glare into the dark.

  Nothing.

  It’s nothing.

  Before I think on it further, Breck pushes past me. “We need to go.”

  Suddenly a chorus of bolcrane screams erupts.

  CHAPTER 28

  THE SHRIEKS OF TORTURED CHILDREN SHATTER the night around us, echoing off the enormous spindle trees and jagged rocks, removing all doubt that the bolcranes sense our flesh.

  The fact that we’re still alive just says they haven’t found it.

  Yet.

  Colin stays close with Breck as we ride fast and hard past miasma clusters that lash wispy tendrils out in search of blood and by giant ticks on trees that supposedly use their teeth if you get too close. I’m trembling and sweating like a rhino-horse.

  Stay to the center of the path, I tell my hands. But it’s all I can do to just keep us on the path while trying to cool the temperature amid the heat and what I suspect might be my own injury-induced fever rising.

  By the time we reach the steam swamps, spasms are wriggling up my spine, making my leg hurt and vision blurry. But even when my head sags, I’m too scared to slow down or pull out the medicine lest I drop it.

  Another miasma cloud morphs, followed by a chilling screech, and I have to blink to focus on Haven as she dodges the deadly fog.

  “Pick it up, boy,” Breck mutters behind me. “I can feel us slacking.”

  When I peek back, she’s nudging Colin, who’s wearing a dazed expression—as if unsure whether the cries in the black woods are actually from flesh-eating animals or the innocent in need of help.

  “Colin, focus!” I yell through my cloak. “Breck, punch him!”

  She does, somewhat awkwardly in her blindness, and his eyes snap clear again.

  “They sound so real,” he says.

  “Well, they ain’t!” Breck barks. “So keep your fool self together.”

  Another shadow looms ahead through the fog. The stench grows stronger as we pass by a stream that smells of cadaver.

  The second time the shadow appears I have the distinct impression of extra hoofbeats again. Coming from behind us. Or maybe from the side?

  A shriek erupts and the forest crunches, and abruptly a body has charged onto the path thirty paces ahead. I blink twice because—What in—?—it looks like a man. Like Eogan. But then suddenly it’s morphing into a black, slime-covered bolcrane.

  We slam to a stop fifteen paces shy of it just as the monster opens his crocodilian mouth and screams, blowing chunks of drool through jagged rows of teeth. My skin crawls. Judging by its fangs, the animal is young, but it’s still bigger than Haven, with jaws that could wrap around my entire torso.

  He elongates his neck and tastes the air with his tongue.

  Then screams again.

  The horses spook, prancing to the side before lurching back as the beast moves his leathery, bloated form forward and flares his poisoned quills.

  “Easy, girl.” I pat Haven and prepare to pull a charge from the air, but as my fingers tingle, my eyesight blips and goes hazy, and then Colin’s horse is in front of me and to the side of me, and I barely have time to hear him yell before the beast lunges.

  My breath slows.

  The moments slow.

  Until all I see are flashes in my head, like a series of paintings in which Breck is thrown off the horse just as the bolcrane’s oozing teeth come down. With a snap of its jaws, the monster clamps around Colin’s chest and drags him, writhing and shrieking, off his mount.

  Noooo!

  I am screaming.

  I can’t stop screaming.

  Then I’m coughing and gasping, and my lightning strike’s exploding, but it somehow just misses the beast. The bolt’s force ripples the space around us, wavering the atmosphere until it crackles and clears.

  And with it, my vision alters.

  I shake my head.

  And squint.

  It’s as if time somehow reeled backward because Colin and Breck are still on their horse and the bolcrane is still charging, and what I saw never happened.

  The mount flips around as the beast skids past. Abruptly Colin’s warhorse leans out and bites the monster on its bare haunch, ripping a chunk of flesh off. The bolcrane shrieks and lurches, but another twitch of my hand brings the next fire strike down like a knife. It severs the beast’s spine, and the thing falls into a black, smoking lump on the ground.

  I barely have time to look at Colin, let alone feel relief or confusion, before our mounts hurtle back onto the path. After that, it’s all I can do to hold on as my feverish mind begins to slip further and the world around us enters a haze. Eventually, I get Haven to slow enough for me to beckon Colin to take the lead. He nods and plows ahead while behind him Breck’s got her arms tight around his waist and appears to have passed out.

  What I wouldn’t give to pass out . . .

  I rub my sleeve across my eyes and refocus on holding the temperature low for one hour.

  Two hours.

  Three.

  Four hours of ice and miasma, ticks, and bolcrane shrieks.

  Not until the gradual graying of dawn does it occur to me that the sounds are slowly fading and the path we’re on has been climbing for quite some time. And it’s lighter here with patches of morning moonlight sifting through the trees.

  Another spell of listless time passes, and suddenly something cold hits my nose. The next thing I know snowflakes are falling. Like tender white kisses gifted onto such a hostile landscape. They’re so eerie and whimsical, I almost laugh at the irony.

  Soon the snowdrifts are thicker, mounding across the ground, encroaching on the steep trail.

  Colin brings his horse to a halt.

  “We can’t sto—” I start to say, but I do stop.

  Because even in my daze I notice it too.

  No breeze. No beasts rustling or breathing other than the horses and Colin and Breck and me. Even the bolcranes and miasma clouds have abandoned their bloodthirst. Suddenly I’m leaning over to vomit, discharging what little is left in my stomach as the scent of rotting flesh hits me and clashes with my pain-induced nausea. It smells of death here.

  Colin watches until I finish, then offers me his water.

  I grab it and take two tablets, drowning them with big gulps before handing the bag back with a thank-you.

  He nods and begins to move us forward only to be met by raucous snorts from the horses. Another minute, and they flat out refuse to go farther, and when I nudge Haven, she actually nips at me.

  Colin s
hakes his head. “We’re gonna ’ave to go around.” He heads for a path no wider than a deer trail.

  “That’ll take us north.”

  “It’s the only way available.”

  Good point.

  I follow him, but we’ve not even gone fifty feet before the blending of trees and snow opens up on our left, and there, hardly any distance away, sits a tiny, dilapidated village. It’s built on platforms high off the ground with bridges running from treetop to treetop amid houses attached to the trunks. In the morning gray light it’s impossible to see the dead bodies, but I can smell them. The original path we were on would’ve led us right to them.

  My stomach threatens to retch again.

  “It’s that village that dwarf was talking about,” Colin murmurs.

  I nod and try to keep the medicine from coming up while holding my breath from the plague-infested air. No wonder the bolcranes didn’t follow.

  I glance at Colin who’s now holding his mouth shut too, then back at Breck, who’s obliviously snoring. My words slur as I try to keep my head clear. “Let’s keep moving.”

  It’s two hours of working our way across the snowy trails with me nodding off frequently until we find one that’ll return us in the direction we need. The paths still climb the mountainside, but the area is starting to appear more like the earlier part of Litchfell—noisier and darker, even with morning dawn in full bloom and the rain gone. My shoulders are drooping hard and I’m having a difficult time controlling the temperature when we finally burst from the path through the thick forest growth into a frosty clearing, which spans fifty feet across ice-covered grass before butting up to a towering, smooth wall of rock. It’s the Fendres line.

  “What in hulls?” Colin murmurs, staring up. The cliff face shoots forty feet above us and to the right and left for as far as the eye can see, like nature’s barrier to keep the forest and bolcranes contained. One that’s only partially effective as I recall, since over the years the forest has continued on up the mountain above it.

  Colin rides over to stick his hand against the massive stone. The ground rumbles slightly, and then he turns back. “It stretches in both directions for a couple hours.”

  The air exits my lungs. The detour took us too far north. “Can you make a path?”

  “If it were a bit lower, yes. Right here? It would take quite awhile.”

  I grit my teeth. Nod. “Let’s get going then. We can still reach the fortress sooner than Adora’s way, but . . . I . . .”

  Colin clicks his mount.

  “But . . .”

  Something’s wrong with me. What was I going to say? My head suddenly feels like a boulder my shoulders can’t keep aloft. My lungs, my leg . . .

  I attempt to prod Haven forward and end up leaning over her to settle my forehead on her neck. Her heat pours off in waves.

  “I think I need—” My foot catches in the stirrup, and then Colin’s hand is holding me in place as behind him Breck stirs.

  “What’s going on?”

  “She needs rest,” Colin answers Breck, while the thought surfaces that Haven would be very put out if I dry heaved into her mane.

  A loud rumble and tearing rips the air, and somehow it’s Breck’s arm holding me up and Colin is off his mount and bent to the ground.

  An arcing crack appears in the rock wall, followed by a crumbling.

  “I just need a minute,” I try to mumble, but the words sound funny.

  Another shredding noise. Colin makes a pulling motion and a rush of stones comes tumbling out, leaving behind a neatly carved-out cave.

  He really is incredible, I think just before my body hits the dirt, and I swear I hear Breck cackle.

  CHAPTER 29

  WHEN I OPEN MY EYES AGAIN, I’M LYING inside the freezing, earth-scented cave. The horses stamp in the dark and between their noise and the stench of sweat, I become aware that something else has stirred my thoughts awake. Like someone moving around inside my mind.

  “Colin?”

  From his sprawled-out position near the sunlit entrance, the boy’s breath puffs up warm and steady and sleep laden. He doesn’t move.

  “Breck?”

  No answer except for a soft cough beside Haven.

  Straightening, I squint at the spot and am rewarded by a pair of blinking green eyes.

  My heart lightens and plunges all in one burst. How he got here—how he found us—I don’t know. My body protests when I stand, but I don’t care. What’s he doing?

  Eogan strides over and brushes a hand over my arm.

  It makes my skin bristle. I pull back. “What are you do—?”

  “To check on you,” he murmurs, moving in so that I’m wedged between his body and the cave wall. “And to warn you not to destroy the fortress.”

  When I open my mouth to argue, he adds, “I’ll take care of it,” with eyes that glitter oddly in the dim. “And when I’m done, I’ll come for you. I’ll take care of you. But you have to trust me. Just stay away from the Keep until I return.”

  The look on his face seems blurry. But it’s also soft. Tender. And this time when he slides his fingers up my arm, I allow it. It feels good and I’m so tired, so cold. So achy.

  For him.

  A lump of misery flares in my chest. No.

  Eogan’s hand brushes my neck and he leans in. His fingers pressing hard.

  I force up thoughts of Isobel wrapped around him and what he’s done to me. To my parents.

  No. I shove against him and end up banging my head against the wall as he slides a hand around my owner circles. For a moment, his face grows even more indistinct. Fuzzy. Like when I first thought he was the bolcrane.

  “Nym, jussst calm down.”

  Something’s wrong. “Who are you?”

  Suddenly he’s on top of me, with both hands around my neck, choking me so I can’t breathe.

  I bring my knee up, but he’s too quick. His leg crushes against my injured thigh, shooting fire through me, and in the in-between seconds before my lungs explode and my lightning flashes at the cave entrance, Eogan’s body wavers in front of me.

  A hint of silver glimmers. His form grows smaller and paler and his eyes dim.

  Until he’s morphed into Lord Myles.

  What the—? The lord protectorate presses harder, but this time when my knee thrusts up it lands a hit in his man-treasures, sending him backward enough for me to fall forward on him, choking, coughing, gasping, blinking in his face, grabbing for which vision is real.

  Then he’s swearing and clamping down on my arm, sending an explosion of unbidden images through my head—of him talking to me at Adora’s party—touching my arm—of orange hair stuck to blood on the floor, and Eogan’s throat being slit. And Colin being eaten by a bolcrane a few hours ago. They hit me one after the other in tangible, real-life succession until the realization settles.

  He can manipulate thoughts.

  “You were following us!” I shove his hand off and scramble away. Horror is dripping from every pore in my body. “Why? What are you doing here?”

  The lord protectorate stands and limps toward me. “So you found your way through my ability? Impressssive. You know, the few times I’ve used it on you, I secretly hoped you’d catch on.”

  The sky sparks along my fingertips. I hold my hand up and let its energy crackle, illuminating the air around us.

  “I love the white hair, by the way. Very . . . Elemental.”

  My hand snaps with the storm’s rumble. “I’ll ask again what you’re doing here.” I edge toward the cave’s entrance.

  He takes a faltering step and grimaces. “Let’s just say I have a certain interessst in seeing the Bron generals succeed. And while by law I have every right to see you hanged, I thought it’d be more beneficial to offer a choice. You can leave the Bron generals alone and come work for me. Or . . .”

  I raise a brow.

  His hand flicks out so quick it’s on my skin before I can move, and a vision of Isobel and Eogan passi
onately kissing nearly launches me off my feet. It’s followed by Eogan stabbing Colin, then turning the knife on me. I squirm as the blade plunges into my chest one, two, three times before it reaches my heart. With a shriek, I fold in half from the impact.

  I squeeze my eyes shut until, after a few seconds, the pain disappears. When I reopen them, Lord Myles is right in front of my face, smirking with those stupidly shiny teeth and offering me a different vision—the one of him and me standing hand in hand, raining a lightning storm down upon the kingdoms. But this time, an old, shriveled man with wolfish features is sprawled disgustingly at my feet. Dead. And there’s a crown on my head and a white dress displaying my neck, my arms, my hand, which is no longer crippled but perfect and beautiful. Gone are the memorial marks and circles on my skin.

  I am perfect. Strong. Elemental. And I am in control.

  It makes my heart ache with a hunger I can’t explain and leaves me gasping.

  I stumble back and bump into Colin, but it’s the noise outside that yanks my attention. A rustling of horses and leather.

  He’s brought others.

  “The Faelen people—your people—deserve better,” I say, finding my breath.

  “Which is why I’m going to give them a ssstrong king instead of a weakling.” The lord protectorate pulls out a knife and holds it up so the morning light glances off of it, then slides a finger on the flat side of the blade. “You can help with that, you know.”

  A shift behind me and suddenly I feel Colin’s hand on the small of my back. I sense him hesitate, then roll over and slip away as I keep my gaze on Myles. I watch his eyes register Colin’s movement.

  “He won’t last long out there.”

  If he thinks that, he doesn’t know Colin. Keep him talking, Nym. “You honestly think you’d make a better king?”

  “Not just me. You and I together. The most powerful Uathúils this world has seen. Just think what we’d become once I finish training you.”