Lathyr Tricurrent, to me! To fight! the Air King shouted mentally, and Lathyr realized the building outside the game, in true reality, was under attack.
Must stay!
Dark ones! the king snapped, and began to pull on Lathyr through all the air in his body. He wouldn’t be able to stay, and he had a terrible feeling that a Dark one had entered the game.
He grabbed Kiri’s shoulders, gasped, “Being disconnected. You quit, too!”
Kiri fisted her hands, jerked—the motion to log out. She remained solid, her eyes widening, even as he felt himself fade. “Not working.”
CRASH!
“Keep trying. Dark. One.” He jerked his head at the horizon of hills and the thumping footfalls. “Coming. Real. This game is real. Look at your bleeding. Run!” Lathyr strove to stay with her, but the king was far more powerful than he, and he was yanked into the real world and the CEO’s office.
To see a disheveled Air King with a fierce fighting grin, Cloudsylph. Sword in his hand, the elf ducked behind an upturned desk. Fight!
A clash came and Lathyr whirled—both guardians—the elf and the dwarf—fought also.
“Two great Dark ones!” shouted Cloudsylph, fighting sword against long and thorny claw-sword dripping venom of the monster. Huge black humanoid monster covered in black chitin, with seeping protuberances—when droplets hit, the rug burned. Nasty smell.
“Here!” yelled the dwarf, and threw a trident at Lathyr.
He caught it and it felt good in his hands. Adrenaline pumped through him. “The game’s turned real. Kiri—”
The guardians stilled for an instant. The King of Air beside him grimaced. “Too bad, you’re here now.” He jerked his head at the side of the room and Lathyr’s heart stopped as he saw a torn panel of meld-electrical conduits. The game server? How would that affect Kiri?
Then the wall to his left crashed down and the second Dark one, horribly huge, lunged through. Lathyr snapped hardscale over his body, wishing for the armor he’d left in the game, angled his trident, yelled his war cry and charged. Praying with blood and breath that Kiri would be all right. She’d run. She’d find a place and hide. They’d pull the Dark one out of the game. And Lathyr would return to her.
* * *
Kiri watched Lathyr’s face contort as he struggled to stay in the game, but he faded—and as he did, Kiri noticed that his skin turned the pretty pale blue. Good trick. But what fascinated her were delicate, transparent little ruffles seeming attached to the underside of the upper curve of his nostrils. Beautiful.
Another shudder of the earth under her feet jolted her alert. Earth armor, he’d said, and Dark one, and run! He hadn’t been thinking, you couldn’t run in earth armor, too heavy. Her head itched and she rubbed at it again. Hurt, too. Her fingers came away tacky with blood and her breath stopped. Looked real. She touched her fingertips to her mouth, tasted. Blood. Her blood.
The whole scene enlarged, brightened, as her eyes widened even more. She gulped. The game was real? WTF!
Her head really hurt. Her current armor weighed her down. What would happen if she did use earth armor, would she actually have stone sprout in plates along her body?
Crash! Crash! The thing’s head, gigantic and round, with heavy brow ridge and features scrunched in the middle looking like nothing human, rose above the hill.
Time to get out of here. She motioned again. Nothing. Reached for her visor.
Touched nothing.
“Logging off,” she said, voice quavering.
The monster advanced.
She remained in the game—in the game that had turned into reality? How could that have happened? Magic?
Magic. Maybe. Lotta stuff had been happening lately that was close to being inexplicable through logic.
Think later! She was stuck and didn’t know the rules. Did she still have powers? Her breath came too fast, bringing dimness and tiny sparks—hyperventilating. Don’t think! Don’t analyze reality and game. Hell, not the time to feel, either. Tactics. Strategy. Whatever.
The thing thunked higher and higher against the horizon, like nothing she’d ever seen or imagined, bringing a hideous stench that flew at her in bits like wasps or flies or—yeah, she’d seen stuff like that in the game. She flung a shield around herself. They smacked into it with nasty buzzing and squashes. She felt the impacts against her force field. How could that be?
A bolt of lightning struck an inch from her feet, the blast rocked her, singed her toes.
Terror flooded her. She turned and ran into the forest, trying to recall what other game monsters inhabited it—though she and Lathyr had just fought through it—had they spawned again?
And now she felt far too squishy as a magic user instead of as the toughest warrior. Dammit!
Crash! Zap!
She wondered how many hit points she really had. How many the monster did.
How could she win?
Hell. How could she survive?
* * *
How many of them are there? Lathyr broadcast mentally.
Two! yelled the dwarf and elf guardians.
Three! shouted the Air King. I saw three.
Blood chilling, Lathyr’s mind scattered. He whirled back to the Dark one he’d first seen, leaped over the desk, fought with the dwarf, slashing, backing the monster up, dipped his trident in a pool of steaming, smelly acidic green venom.
Two Dark ones working together? grunted the dwarf, slicing off a limb.
Must really hate the Eight and the Meld, or want the Meld, responded the elf, his face formed in a dreamy smile as he struck, slid aside from an attack.
Where’s the third? demanded the Air King.
Lathyr’s belly twisted. In the game with Kiri.
Curses came from the other men, and a wisp of feeling from the Air King brought on his breath near Lathyr’s ear. Grief at losing a subject.
Lathyr couldn’t think, could only thank the great Pearl that he’d been fighting in the game lately and his skills weren’t as rusty as they had been.
He ducked under the tall elf guardian’s arm, slid sideways, thrust his envenomed trident in the Dark one’s belly, hard, hard, harder!
His weapon stuck.
Shrieking rage, thrashing limbs. Lathyr used all his skill, all his air power to leap back...but a huge hand with black and pointed nail-claws swiped at him, got his arm, sent him tumbling.
Immense pain surged through him, blood and water gushed from his wound—his arm drooped half-off at the shoulder! He went down as agony took his breath and sat crushing on his chest.
Stuff poured from his mouth, too, vomit and water and mucus and life force as his bilungs constricted. He was gone.
Worse, he couldn’t return to Kiri.
He had failed.
“Greendepths!” Cloudsylph’s voice whipped out like ice shards.
The King of Water wouldn’t let his woman heal Lathyr this time.
Failure. Pain. Death.
Blackness swallowed his consciousness like a tsunami and threw him away.
* * *
Leaves and twigs crunched under Kiri’s running feet as she sped through the forest. She heard a whole lot, more than she wanted to, like her own whooshing breath, all confirming this terrible game was real. If she ever got out, she’d never—effing Eight Corp could take their job and shove it up their butts till it stuck in their throats and strangled them.
Roaring. Not her. She whispered prayers.
Ripping wood, cracking. The forest wasn’t safe, either. She strove to think through the terror. Map, remember the map! She was in Earth Realm. Forests. Caves.
Crash! Crash! The monster giant thing, abomination, came after her. From a horrified, compulsive glance or two back, she thought she saw wings. Spiny, bony, bat wings.
Kiri quivered. Trembled so much she fell and a log sailed over her head. Luck. Sheer luck had saved her.
Okay. Okay. Luck happened in a game, some good. Some bad. Your keyboard freezes up on you in a fig
ht and you were down.
Your character was down.
This was real. She was pretty damn sure.
Map. Caves. Run to the caves. The monster couldn’t squeeze into the caves. Maybe the dwarves had made the caverns strong enough not to collapse on her. Real dwarves? Maybe.
She zigzagged through the forest, ducking under cover, repelling the insect clouds. She didn’t know their powers but figured being stung wouldn’t be good.
Run. In the Earth Realm she’d chosen the zip run travel power, feet on the ground, no flying or jumping. Run. Run. Run. Dodge through there. Roaring and thrashing and creaking and crashing and black thunderbolts snapping and sizzling, sensory overload. The smell of scorched earth and scorched electronics—oh, no!—and ripped-up plants and fresh wood, sawdust. Not good. The gag of putrification, of—evil? Vibration against her skin, her eyelids...her shields. She still had shields. She had zip run. What other powers? Earthworks. Battlements. She pivoted, flung her arms out in a circle, called the power. “Earthworks, there, and there and there.” Breath, breath. “Battlements, there!” She wouldn’t think how little that would slow down a monster. Again she spun, and kept on spinning—rocks and broken wood shoved away from her, whirled away by her twister spell. That wasn’t an earth spell. That was air! What was going on?
Shoot. She didn’t know what spells she had or didn’t and then there was that odor of fried wires, plastic, metal. How scrambled was everything? What kind of reality was this?
No time to figure it out. The caves were a short stretch to the northeast. She had zip run and zoomed.
And went straight off the cliff and into the ocean.
She hit hard, painfully, but this was the Water Realm, the easiest for her to maneuver in—and her character had changed once again with all the levels that she’d gained here. Much, much stronger. And she and Lathyr had fought a Dark one here in the Water Realm before.
A huge displacement of water sent her tumbling.
Gigantic, bat-winged Dark one.
She rolled with the percussion, scanned the bottom. She knew this place, the soft silt, the deceptive sand that hid huge eels ready to swallow an unwary mer. Where was the eel’s fake-plant-frond trigger?
Moving fast, she zigged and zagged, got caught by an energy bolt. Real! Searing pain. Tears that mixed with water. Go. Go. Go. Lure again, like she and Lathyr had done before. No, don’t think of him, what might be happening otherwhere.
Go!
There, dippy faltering swim, pretending even more hurt. Dark one following, immense presence behind. Walking instead of swimming. Stupid of him, good for her.
Something heavy weighed on her back. Quick glance. Speargun! Yay. Get it! Point it!
There’s the eel-frond trigger. Zoom. Hit it hard. The quarrels move slow. Too slow. Push to surface. Is there a surface?
She popped up, gasped, bad hurt in lungs. Dammit.
Six pants and she was okay.
Thrashing below...eel and evil. But she’d put her money on the great Dark one, if she didn’t go down and try to finish him off. Head toward the Water Palace—and what and who would she find there? The King and Queen she’d already met?
Fight!
Down she went again, sifting water/air through her teeth in an effort to avoid the lung pain. Yep, the eel had wrapped itself around the Dark one. Twice. Still looked like it was losing, with big chunks of it ripped off.
OTOH, Dark one didn’t appear so hot. Kiri shot. Again and again and emptied her quiver-bag. Long tear in a wing. Coupla bolts in the head. Slowed it down a little.
The eel thrashed and died. Time to get outta here!
Blood, guts, ichor, stuff saturated the water. She turned and swam as fast as she could. Not as fast as zip run and it had nearly caught her when she used that. God. God. God.
Glance back. Huge ball of hard water crackling with black energy heading toward her. Cliff face ahead, surface!
She looked down, clenching her speargun tight. The Dark one was slower. One wing was gone. Didn’t heal like the one she and Lathyr had fought in Water Realm before. Good.
Her gun weighted with another spear. She’d been all out. Magic.
Can’t question. Pause. Sight. Shoot the thing in the eye.
A roar that banged her against the cliff. Huge pain. Grit teeth, raise the speargun, fire in the hellish open mouth!
This scream higher than she could hear, only feel the shock. More tears gushed from her eyes in pain.
Then the Dark one simply vanished.
And so did she.
* * *
She came back to the room with a thunk that had her knees crumpling her to the floor, only able to huff, “Uh, uh, uh.” And with a serious case of the shudders. She still hurt.
What was all that about?
Too darn real.
She pulled off her visor and tossed it onto the counter. Then she peeled off her gloves—glad to have had them and the spells they projected, but wonderful to get rid of them. They stuck to her hands and turned inside out. Blinking, she saw that what she’d thought would be filaments were no more than lines. Huh. They’d left marks on her skin like henna.
A knock came on the door. “Kiri? Are you there? Are you safe?” Sounded like Jenni Emberdrake.
Kiri grunted, but apparently not loud enough. Turning completely paranoid, she scuttled on hands and knees away from the direct path from the door. “What happened?”
“Terrorist attack,” Jenni said crisply.
That froze Kiri’s brain. “In Denver?”
“Yes,” Jenni said, and her British accent was back.
There was a soft swiping sound of a key card and a click of a lock. Kiri had been locked in? Crap. The handle depressed and Kiri held her breath, looked wildly around for a weapon. Nothing.
But Jenni Emberdrake stood on the threshold, scanning the room and the computer equipment as if for damage. That felt right to Kiri, what the real woman would do. Then Jenni’s gaze lit on Kiri, crouched in the corner and a breath whooshed from her. The room seemed to get warmer.
Kiri stood, put a palm on the desk and leaned on it. Jenni looked the worse for wear. Kiri had never seen the woman’s hair so wild; usually it was smooth, or at the most, tied back and a little fuzzy.
Jenni put her hands on her hips, nodded once. “I guess it’s time to tell you what’s going on.”
Fear flowed through Kiri, up from her gut and down from her brain and meeting in her throat to close it. She didn’t want Jenni to tell her anything, didn’t want to confront all the little anomalies in the life of Kiri Palger.
Didn’t want to think the bus accident hadn’t really been an accident.
“Don’t look so shocked or horrified,” Jenni said. There was a hint of dancing blue color in her brown eyes, but her smile was warm and sympathetic and comforting and loosened the breath trapped in Kiri’s lungs. “I think you’ll be intrigued, and...pleased.”
“Huhnn,” was all Kiri could manage.
Jenni turned. “Come along, we’re meeting in the inner conference room, the outer offices are a bit of a mess. The broken windows are being repaired first.”
Broken windows. On the thirty-second floor. Not good at all. The computer room looked downright friendly. Not one smashed thing.
Kiri sniffed. Still smelled fried electronics, just not here. Lucky.
“Come on,” Jenni insisted and Kiri heard glass cracking under the woman’s feet.
Stay or go? Jenni knew the situation. Kiri didn’t. Yet she walked lightly to the door, saw the doors of the outer offices shut for the first time. There was glass underfoot, but the doors seemed unmarred as did the inner glass insets. The occasional sight she had of the offices showed much less devastation than what would have happened if the bow windows around her computer desk and home office had blown. Odd.
They entered the conference room and the first thing Kiri noticed was that the man sitting at the large table looked familiar. The guy at the bus accident with Lathyr. His
skin was pale, his hair silver-white. His ears were pointed.
The door was closed behind them by Aric Emberdrake, who appeared even bigger in what looked like green leather armor and who had a sword at his hip. A sword. His long hair seemed a dark green.
Lathyr stood as they entered. He wore a sword on his right hip, a long dagger in a hilt strapped to his left thigh. He appeared very pale, with lines on his face and his mouth turned down as if in remembered pain. He held his left arm stiffly.
A sniff came from the bottom of the table where Mrs. Daurfin sat, thick arms crossed over her sturdy body, glowering at Kiri.
“Please, sit,” Aric said. He drew out a chair for Jenni, then Kiri.
She sat.
“I’ve ordered tea and cheeses. We need the protein and tea is civilized,” Jenni said in firm tones. She glanced at her husband and away.
Now that Kiri thought of it, Aric wasn’t exactly sending off civilized vibes. Neither was Lathyr. Or the head honcho at the head of the table. She’d bet her entire career that he carried weapons, too.
There’d been a fight, even outside here in the real world.
“Thank you, Jindesfarne,” said the...man...in the power position in a melodious voice that had Kiri straining her ears to catch each nuance.
Lathyr sent Kiri a soft glance, as if he’d like to come over and sit with her. She wouldn’t mind holding his hand under the table, and she was aware that he’d scanned her for any injury. Nothing major on the outside, but her insides quivered and her mind prepared for an incipient earthquake.
With a last nod, Lathyr sat. So did Aric, in a chair next to Jenni. He clasped his wife’s hand, right there on the conference room table. Jenni twined fingers with him.
“I believe we are the only ones here,” the one at the head of the table said.
“Except for the repair force,” Aric said.
The man inclined his head.
“The Meld Project people left immediately,” Aric said. “I checked on them, and none of their work was compromised.”
“Of course not,” said Mrs. Daurfin. “I guarded it.”
“Casualties?” asked the man in charge, but as if he already knew.
“None among us.” Aric’s eyes gleamed. “We did a good job.”
Enchanted Ever After (Mystic Circle) Page 16
