A tear forms in my eye, and I feel for an instant that I’ll never see this place again. In an instant, I’m going to be saying goodbye forever to my life, to my home. To Alyssa . . . to everything.
No.
“I’ll be back,” I promise the night, the words overwhelmed as my four Guardians lift their noses to the sky and howl.
I lift my face as well, and as I do, a chilling sight appears. It’s the dark-armored figure I saw before, sitting astride a massive black stallion, greenish fire curling from the horse’s hooves as it paws at the air. The figure, a Dark Rider, raises a hand in a mock salute, but before I can say anything, we catapult forward and my breath is torn from my lungs in exhilaration.
It’s like my first ride on a big roller coaster when I was ten, my stomach dropping before my heart lifts into my head and I feel free. The wind blows in my face as we pick up speed, the trees somehow growing further and further away even as we run faster.
The world turns into a grayish white blur, electric bolts of lightning crackling in the mist around us.
As we cross the threshold, the joy turns into fear as I feel my hands slip and Cole becomes almost ephemeral, translucent. I try to cling more tightly, but my hands seem to be slipping.
“Cole!” I scream. “Something’s wrong!”
He doesn't hear me, his eyes not drifting from straight ahead as he plunges deeper.
Suddenly, I feel pushed from the side by something, and I’m tumbling, falling. I scream before the world goes black for a terrifying second. I swear I’m dead, but then the lights blink back on and a deluge of sound hits me like a wall.
The next sensation is touch, and I feel immersed in something . . . thick, unpleasant. It’s like clay and soup and . . .
“What the fuck is that smell?”
A horse whinnies nearby, and I realize where I am. Scrambling, I work my way out of the horseshit I landed in, trying to get to my feet. I look and see my reflection in a slightly shiny piece of metal. Ugh, I look like shit and probably smell like it too.
I hear a clapping sound from the building I’m next to and a loud, braying woman’s voice peals out. “Stop all your ninnying around, Isabella, and get your flabby arse back in here!” hollers a sternly accented voice that sounds like Eliza Doolittle when she was a flower girl. “Those prissy cocked Faeries aren't gonna serve themselves!”
I blink, wiping more muck off my face as I look around. Where are my Guardians? “Cole? Tyler? Noah?” I ask, trying to keep the panic out of my voice. “Jacob?”
Behind me, a blood-curdling scream echoes in the small horse stall and I turn to see a frightened human girl. She’s got brown hair, tanned skin, and looks scared out of her mind. “Mama!”
Before I can assure them that I’m not a thief, another woman comes out. She’s middle-aged, wearing an outfit that looks like a medieval peasant’s, and the gray streaks in her brown hair tell me she’s also very, very human. “What in the hell are you doing here? Who are you?”
“Looks like I landed in a pile of shit. Pun intended,” I reply, wiping my face again. “Where am I?”
Chapter 6
Cole
The second Cole’s feet touch down on grass, he looks around, shock and fear threatening to rise in his throat. Less than a mile away, the walls of the main center of Lunare rise into the sky . . . and he can’t feel Eve on his back.
Shifting into Fae form, he tries to figure out what’s going on, panic nibbling at his thoughts as he tries to remember. The ride through the Gray plane was going smoothly. He could feel Eve’s exuberance and excitement through their shared bond. Then something strange happened. Something had twisted the group’s spell, sending them hurtling into the unknown.
“What in the three realms was that?” asks Jacob. “It felt like something hit us?”
“Eve isn’t here. We have to find her,” Cole says simply.
Jacob growls, reaching for his waist before stopping. Another panicked thought goes through Cole’s mind. Eve had the satchels and the weapons. “Cole? Little help, here?”
Cole looks around, scanning the area. “I’m not sure what happened. Did all of you feel the disruption?”
Noah nods. “I don’t know what it was, though. It was as if something was disrupting the group’s magic. Jacob, you’ve snuck humans through the Gray before. Is that normal?”
“No. But then again, she’s not human, remember?” Jacob growled. “We should have thought about that. My fault, but . . . shit!”
“And how did we end up here?” Tyler asks, his eyes blazing in anger that he barely keeps bottled inside. “This is the last place any of us wanted to be.”
“No fucking shit,” Jacob says before looking around, cupping his hands around his mouth. “Eve? Where are you, sugar tits?”
There’s no answer, and after a moment, Cole gathers himself, reasserting command. “Search pattern, quickly. Focus on the trees and woods.”
For a half hour they search, using the patterns they’d learned over the years. But still nothing. Cole’s mind is fraught with the feeling of failure. After all, he’s the commander, and Eve was his responsibility. She was on his back and he was in charge.
They all look at the magnificent city looming in the distance. To Cole, it would have been a warming sight if not for the events of the past twenty-four hours and the discovery of Eve’s nature. “I thought we were aiming for the North. Any idea why we’re here?”
Cole squats down, his mind still trying to puzzle that out.
“I have a theory, if you don’t mind,” Jacob says. “What if . . . what if Cassina expected this?”
“What do you mean?” Cole asks, pausing. Jacob was always the devious one. If there was any foul play involved in all of this, he’d be the first one to sniff it out.
Jacob squats next to him, picking up a small stick and scribbling in the dirt like he sometimes does when he’s trying to form words to his thoughts. “Listen, what if Cassina expected us to come here? Could she have somehow done this?”
Cole nods, thinking. It would be Cassina’s style, but there is really no way to know for sure.
Tyler, however, doesn’t care. “It doesn’t matter at this point. We’re here and we can’t do anything about it now,” he growls, looking around. “All that matters is finding her! We—”
Cole cuts off his rant, holding up a hand. He approaches a tree, sniffing carefully . . . Eve? She was on his back. The feeling of her body pressed against him and her nose in his pelt still courses through his veins, and it’s the same essence. It seems impossible. She was never here . . . but the smell continues, drawing him toward the city. “Follow me.”
Without waiting for the others, he shifts into a wolf and the scent hits him like a hook in his brain, pulling him closer to the city. He glances back to see his brothers with him, but with each step, his concern grows.
They get close, until they are on the outskirts just on the other side of the wall, where the servant class and others whom the queen deems undesirable in her capitol live.
“Our worst fears are realized,” Cole says as they shift back, looking around.
Jacob kneels, shaking his head. “You’ve got to be shitting me.”
“The Mother’s cunt!” Tyler swears, the foulest words Cole has ever heard come out of his mouth. “What use are we as her Guardians if we can't even protect her from something like this?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Cole says. “She is in danger, and it is our duty to find her before someone else does. Or does your vow not cover this?”
“You know very well that it does,” Tyler growls.
“What’s the plan?” Jacob asks. “The outskirts are large, and they surround Lunare.”
“We can assume that she’s in this quarter, or at least was,” Cole says. “For now, we blend in and avoid the Lunarian Guard. They will recognize us.”
“We’d better find some disguises. Half the fucking city knows us, not just the Lunarian Guard,” Noah grumbles de
eply.
Chapter 7
Eve
“Is there something wrong with your brain? Are you addled on fairy dust, wench?” the big-breasted older maid growls at me, her patience already thin and wearing thinner. “Where in the nine hells did you come from?”
“Um,” I mumble, probably not doing myself any favors on the woman’s opinion of my intelligence as I look at her apishly. But my brain only sends one signal . . . I stink. I climb out of the pile of horse dung, wiping myself but only getting it more on my body. “I asked you, where am I?”
“I asked you first,” the maid says, gripping a broom in her hand tightly.
“I came from . . . far away.” I hold my hand out in greeting just as I realize that’s probably not the best idea, considering how I look. I wipe it on my clothes, wishing I didn’t look quite so stupid. “Detective Eve Carter.”
I know I probably made a mistake. I should probably have made something up, but it came so natural to me since I’ve practiced it so many times in the past five years.
The big woman recoils from me, scowling. “Detective? You look like a bed wench.”
I ignore her insult. I don’t need the trouble. “Have you seen four . . . Guardians?”
The woman looks scared and brandishes her broom. “The only Guards we see around here are the Lunarian Guard, and the further away those bastards stay from us, the better! They stay in their city, and we stay in our area, lest we catch a beating!”
I look around, trying to put the puzzle pieces together. I’m definitely in a barnyard, connected to a building that looks like some sort of pub based on the sounds and smells I’m getting. The street outside doesn’t look crowded, but other than that, I can’t really tell what’s going on. Finally, I turn to the two maids, who are still watching me warily. “So can you please tell me where I am?”
The older one huffs, looking as if she is about to reprimand me, but I give her the same hard stare that I used to give suspects, and she realizes that I’m not quite the prissy shit-covered girl I appear to be. “You’re at the Boar and Oak tavern. No self-respecting Guardsman would ever come to this place.”
I guess it was a stupid question. No matter what she told me, it probably wouldn’t make any sense. I mean, I am supposed to be in a whole different realm.
“How did this happen?” I wonder before the serpentine little voice that was spawned the moment I used hellfire chuckles. Maybe this was the trap of the Guardians. It’s so alien compared to my normal thoughts but at the same time so convincing, I’m beginning to suspect it’s not my subconscious and something else altogether. Maybe they were lying to you and got you to put on the bracers so that they could control you. That way, they could bring you to their bitch whore queen like a bound little weakling.
No, that’s a bunch of horseshit, I tell myself before the irony hits me and I chuckle darkly. They wouldn’t do that to me. I saw their souls, and they’re better men than that.
Can you really trust the soul of a—
I viciously shove the unwanted voice down and look at the maid. “Do you have a rag I can wipe my face with?”
The older woman grunts, pointing her broomstick at a horse trough. “I don’t know you, and I don’t trust you. You have the look of a Halfling. And you’re looking for Guards. Use the water trough over there to clean yourself off and be gone by the time I have to come back out here or I’m going to have to bring more than a broom.”
I watch as she drags her young companion into the tavern with her, almost slamming the door closed behind her. I shrug and go over to the water trough. The water isn’t all that much cleaner than mud, but at least I’m able to scrub my face to something approaching clean.
I want to look more closely for my missing satchel. I know that my Guardians’ weapons are with it, but a quick look around the horse yard reveals nothing. I don’t have time to search more closely, though. I can already hear people moving around inside, and who knows if the lady was being honest in her threat?
My best bet is to try to find my Guardians. I head out of the back of the tavern, looking left and right before heading right on a whim. The road quickly starts to climb, and I bend into it, hoping that by some stroke of luck, I’ll find the satchel or at least a sign of my guys.
No luck. But as I come to the top of the little hillock that I’ve been climbing, I stop at the beauty I see. The view is like something out of a storybook, with fields so green I can almost smell the fresh oxygen they’re making while off to my right are forests of an almost blue-green, creatures flying around and above them . . . is that a unicorn?
I stare in awe as the unicorn swoops once before settling in a green field and starting to munch contentedly on the grass. To my left is a river, a ribbon of sparkling whitish-blue winding its lazy way through the land and feeding what looks like old-fashioned farms, right down to the thatched roofs on a few of them.
There might be a view somewhere on my planet that matches this beautiful vista, but if it is, I’ve never heard of it.
A galvanizing jolt yanks me around, and an unknown power I can’t define makes me look at what’s behind me. I quiver, fear slipping between my teeth as I see what’s just a few miles behind me. A city . . . a big city.
I look carefully, knowing that this could be important. It’s surrounded by a gigantic wall, and the road I’m on joins others to form what almost looks like an ancient Roman-style paved road leading toward a huge gate to the city. It has to be Lunare.
Surrounding it is a huge shanty town worse than anything I saw in my time in Old Haven. Huge, twisted, and grimy, it makes Old Haven look like Bel Air. Sooty smoke rises from a few spots that I hope are chimneys, and I can sense the danger and evil in the area.
At the base of the hill, I cry out in fear as I see the same Dark Rider from the forest mounted on a stallion just as dark as he is watching me. He turns, and I feel jerked forward, unable to stop my feet as I walk toward the city. I want to scream, but I know if I do, I’m going to be getting the sort of attention I don’t want.
“Come on, guys . . . could use a little help here,” I murmur quietly as I pass the tavern and make the first merge to what’s going to become the highway to the city gate. “Anytime now.”
Chapter 8
Eve
I’m scared spitless. Literally, I’ve been trying to say something, anything, for the past five minutes and can’t even work up enough to wet my lips even as I enter the outskirts of the city.
It’s even worse than at first glance. The buildings lean, hunched and slumped in ramshackle states of disrepair, like a gang of old drunks helping each other walk home by luck alone. Most of the walls are crumbling, some are fire-scorched, and all of them look filthy. I doubt anyone who lives in these places has ever heard of Charmin . . . or even soap.
Still, some dim part of me that isn’t caught in panic notices that as I approach the gate, the dirt tracks I started on have become cobblestone. It takes me a few steps to figure it out, though, because every crevice and crack is packed with mud and dirt to the point the whole thing is almost smooth.
Still, as I pass the first real block of buildings that make up the shanty towns outside the wall, the smell that hits me in the nose is so pungent my eyes water, making me glad that I’m wearing boots.
Desperate, I bear down with all my willpower, hoping to stop my feet. Just as I start to see the guard posts near the south gate, something in my bracers audibly goes ting and I find myself able to turn off the main road, scampering down some side road, quickly finding myself lost in a twisting side road. Sound buffets me from all directions. Children in old-fashioned, filthy clothing scamper back and forth, sometimes in the street, sometimes in what seems to pass for sidewalks, screaming and laughing as they play something that looks like part hide ‘n’ seek, part tag, and part pro-wrestling battle royale. Women and men seem to ignore them, occasionally pushing one out of the way or just straight running one over as they go about whatever their business is.
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The area . . . well, I now know the truth about one old adage. No matter where you go, slums like this are all the same. They stink. And I’ve certainly walked into one. The buildings around me are ramshackle, hastily thrown together with little regard for proper construction techniques or even proper materials, with cracks in the walls and roofs that look like they’re missing tiles or whatever they use around here for roof covering.
But more . . . it’s the smell that drives a fist into my brain and yanks at my emotions. In Old Haven, in some of the poorest slums, I remembered the smell, pungent and heavy, full of chemicals and more that didn’t really identify itself to my brain other than pure disgust. The hints might be different here, but the essence is the same. It’s the smell of poverty, misery, and desperation.
As I try to make myself invisible, blending in with the crowd as best I can, I keep trying to transmit my thoughts. Something must have broken in the bracers, some level of enchantment, and I can only hope that means my demonic powers are gone while my bond with my Guardians may now be stronger. Hey, guys . . . I’m in some shanty town outside Lunare, I think.
Nothing. My head still feels stuffy, like I need to blow my nose, but there’s nothing there. It’s the bracers. Whatever’s broken hasn’t stopped their magic from holding me back.
I understand why they want me to keep my bracers on. I’ve got a power more savage than a supernova in my head, a danger to whole realms. But I’m also in danger right here and now, and if I’m captured or if the wrong people see me, I’m going to be in even greater danger. Maybe I can slip the bracers off for just a moment, just long enough that maybe I can connect with Cole.
Do it, says a voice. I stop, and up ahead in the crowd I can see the Dark Rider, watching me. He. I’m certain it’s a he. He points at my bracers as the voice in my head speaks up again. Take off the bracers and let your power free.
Guardians of Hellfire (Guardians of the Fae Book 2) Page 4
