Linn closed her eyes and tried to think. She had Lambent, tucked away like Pele had shown her, along with her backpack. And her cell phone. Her eyes popped open. She focused her power, and reached for the backpack, pulling it out of the place between where it had been stashed. Merrick was a sight, as he startled sideways and his eyes widened.
Granny nodded. “Good girl. Now, boy, your family has never fought alone, and although there are no wolves in Kentucky...”
Merrick nodded thoughtfully. “I should go outside first.”
“Please do,” the old lady said drily.
As he walked through the door, she turned to Blackie. “I have a gift for you.”
“Oh, I couldn’t accept...” he started. Linn turned on him.
“Shush! In the fairy tales, the real ones, not the silly happy birdy ones, when the old woman offers help and gifts to the hero, he has to treat her with respect and take it, because it’s important.”
Granny Clinch laughed out loud at this. “Mythology has taken the shapes it has, in stories and legends, for a reason, child. I don’t say you are wrong. Come with me, Blackie.”
Linn was left alone, with the peaceful valley full of birdsong below her, and she turned on her cell phone. A truly modern weapon, she thought, amusing herself. She had a bar of signal. It flickered away, then came back. She tried walking around, which didn’t help.
Linn made the call, not sure it would go through.
“Mom?”
Theta’s voice sounded warped. “Linn? Is everything all right? Bes arrived here, but we hadn’t called him. He’s on his way back to you.”
“We’re not with Mac’Lir...” Linn started. The phone emitted a warble, and the call dropped. She looked at the screen. No service bars.
Linn went into the house, not seeing Blackie and Granny Clinch, so she went all the way outside. There, she stopped in the open door in surprise. Merrick was standing in the yard, eyes closed, and a ring of creatures around him.
A regal German Shepherd dog got up and trotted over to her. He sat in front of her and looked up, then offered his paw, gravely. Linn shook it, feeling silly.
Merrick spoke. “I’m calling to the wolves, and he will be your bodyguard.”
“Does he have a name?” Linn asked. “Or are you controlling him?”
“Oh, um, I don’t know, and I’m not really controlling that one, he’s very well trained already. Just enhancing his intelligence a little.”
Linn looked down at the bright brown eyes. “I shall call you Colonel,” she murmured to the dog. She looked back at Merrick.
He had dogs and coyotes, and something that looked an awful lot like a wolf. She could count twenty... twenty-one with the Colonel who was pacing beside her now in perfect heel position.
“How many can you handle?”
Linn was familiar with the concept from Coyote, who could send a bit of his Power with an animal to use as a mobile spy.
“I think this is as much as I can. I haven’t done this by myself before. I have a headache.” He rubbed his temples.
“Are you going to be ok?” Linn didn’t know how she could help, but she could try.
“Yeah. It’s just that one...” Merrick glared at the wolf, who lolled out a pink tongue in a doggy laugh. “He’s fighting me.”
“How did you find a wolf?”
“Oh, he’s a wolf-dog. It was fashionable a while back. People didn’t realize how hard they were to train, and a lot of them wound up abandoned.”
Linn looked down at the beautiful dog next to her. “Surely he wasn’t abandoned.”
Merrick shook his head. “Most of them aren’t. I will have to make sure they can get back home, after...”
He looked sick with worry, now.
“We’ll leave as soon as Blackie is ready.” Linn assured him. She looked at her phone. Still no signal, drat. She powered it off. It didn’t work in the Path, or the other plane.
They were alone, and facing an unknown enemy. “Merrick, can you guide the Path?”
He looked dubious. “I don’t think so.”
“So the only place I know how to go is the castle itself, which might land us in the middle of the trouble, or that farm where you rescued me.” Linn mused.
He looked alarmed. “That’s on earth.”
“And it won’t help.” She sighed and shook her head. “It’s miles from the doorway to the sidhe.”
“I can help with the location to guide you to.” Granny Clinch walked out of the house, Blackie on her heels.
“Are you coming with us?” Linn felt her heart leap. Oddly, for all that she was trying to be grown up, the idea of having an adult to lean on was very reassuring.
Granny shook her head. “No, child, I cannot leave here.”
Granny held out her hands, and Linn grasped them. Granny closed her eyes, and Linn followed her lead. With the sight, she could see Granny’s green aura, the clear green of grass, rather than Mac’Lir’s stormy gray-green. A spark leapt from Granny to Linn, and she could feel the jolt of it, like a big fat static electricity shock.
“Ooh...” Linn rubbed her hands together, as Granny released them.
“You will do well, girl.” Granny hugged her, and Linn leaned into the old woman, feeling how she was bones and sinew, small where she looked bigger than she really was through force of personality.
Blackie had shifted back to cat form, and now he walked over and shouldered into Linn.
“Can you talk in this form?” She asked him.
He yawned, revealing his long fangs and pink tongue. Linn took that as a no.
“We will be back to return the dogs,” she told Granny, and opened the High Path.
There was a moment of confusion as Merrick rallied his pack through and into the dimensional rift. Linn stepped calmly into it, and the Colonel walked beside her without hesitation. She took a deep breath, and tried to steady her racing heart.
They might not be much, but they could at least try. She started to run.
Chapter 10
Linn stepped out of the High Path into a world of swirling mist. The grass under her feet was pearled with dew-drops, and she couldn't see far at all. This wasn't a natural fog, she knew at once. She had been part of a party moving under the cover of a sea-fog like this once before. Only they hadn't been attacking, just being very, very secretive.
Now, she listened. The world was hushed, closed in to the area surrounding her like a soft cocoon. Linn whistled softly. Merrick, his pack at his heels, stepped out of the path, with Blackie taking the rear position. They paused for a second, like her, orienting themselves. The Colonel licked her hand, making Linn jump.
Then the whole pack turned like one, ears pricking forward, and she could hear it too. The clash of metal, and hoarse shouts. They surged forward, Merrick shifting as they began to ran, and all the beasts were gone into the fog, leaving her alone with the big shepherd. She looked down at him and sighed.
“I need to be faster. Or a horse. A horse would be good.”
None appeared out of the fog, so she started to jog in the direction the pack had gone. She didn't dare break into a full run. First, arriving where the fight was worn out and out of breath would be a bad thing. Second, stepping in a gopher hole or on a rock and breaking an ankle would just be humiliating.
This would be the second time she would arrive on the battlefield. The first time the fighting had all been over, and a truce for healing called between combatants. She had had no idea what had happened, or where they were. This felt eerily like that, only now the fighting was still going on.
“So this is what they mean about the fog of war,” she commented to the Colonel, who was ranging ahead, then behind, in a sort of ellipse that had her at the focus. “No one knows what the hell is going on.”
The swear word, however mild, made her feel both guilty and weirdly grown up. “I think I want-”
Linn reached up over her shoulder and pulled Lambent from the portal without breaking her st
ride. The sword's blade coruscated with light, a display of the power pent up when it was created and dedicated to her. Linn really wanted a pistol, and her rifle, and maybe a shotgun... no, definitely a shotgun, one of the kinds with a magazine. That wasn't possible. Lambent would have to do, and the light was pushing the fog away from them.
It wasn't until she paid attention to the effect her sword was having on the fog that Linn realized what it had been doing. Tendrils of it had been reaching toward her, like fingers. Now, they flinched back sharply, retreating into the bank of white cloud stuff. She held Lambent in front of her, never stopping, moving onward, the big dog staying behind her now, guarding where she couldn't see. Linn moved slowly, listening.
A yelp off to the left a bit sounded like one of Merrick's pack. She shifted her direction toward it. The fog retreated, and she could see a yellowish-brown coyote rolling in combat with a small creature she couldn't make out well. They were moving quickly enough she didn't dare stab at it, lest she hit the pack animal and injure it, by extension injuring Merrick as well.
Linn lowered Lambent as they rolled toward her, and poked sharply when a bony back was topmost. The thing shrilled, and let go of the coyote. It had been clamped on with legs and arms, biting at the thickly furred neck with teeth and not making much headway, Linn realized in the split second as it stood up, because there wasn't a lot of blood on its mouth. Now, it began to dance around, trying to reach the wound on its back with both hands and making pitiful noises.
Linn hesitated. It had to be a goblin. She could see the resemblance to the coblyns, but where they were well-formed and even beautiful, this warped thing was something from a deep nightmare. Greenish-brown, streaked with filth, and with only a few wisps of hair on an over-large head, it wailed one last time, and then turned on her. She held up Lambent as it leapt, wide black eyes gleaming in the reflected light, mouth gaping hideously and showing jagged, broken teeth. The Colonel hit it in midair, with a sickening crunch and snap of his jaws, and they both landed in a heap to her right. Linn took a step back.
The dog shook itself, glanced at her, and paced around behind her again. Linn swallowed hard, trying not to look at the crumpled body of the goblin, and started moving again. She could hear barks and screams, now, and a hoarse roaring that made her shiver. With Lambent held loosely in front of her, so her arms weren't under too much strain, she trotted toward the battle.
The ground began to drop away under her, and she stumbled, afraid she would fall. As she straightened, Lambent at her side, there was a flash of green light, like all the lightning bolts in the world hitting something in front of her, and she stopped, dazzled and half-blind for a second. When her eyesight cleared, she could see that the fog was gone, and the battlefield stretched out before her. It backed up against the castle, and she could see a knot of people in the gate, fighting, and all across the garden were goblins, beasts she didn't recognize, and Merrick's pack, snarling and howling. The deep roar sounded again, to her left, and her head snapped around. Blackie, rearing, his mouth open and red, screaming a roar, his war-cry, as a wave of goblins attacked him.
Linn lifted Lambent high and started running. She trusted the Colonel, and the coyote he seemed to have deputized, to cover her back. She kept an eye on her destination, but tried to look everywhere else, too. This time, when the goblin popped up like a jack-in-the-box, she didn't hesitate, simply swung Lambent while continuing her own momentum, and the sharp-edged sword bit into his neck. She jerked the blade free, feeling it grate on bone, and out of the corner of her eye she could see the Colonel snap a goblin neck like he was shaking a rag doll. She didn't stop. She couldn't stop.
She became aware that she was screaming, her voice raw. Lambent was dripping with blood, as she hacked inelegantly at two goblins attacking her. One held a kitchen knife, the other a corroded, broken shard of a sword. She cut through the wrist that held it, and it tumbled to the trampled herbs they were running through. She didn't dare stop moving. Blackie's coughing roar came again, as he dropped the goblin whose throat he had just ripped out in a spray of blood, and she caught his eye.
They didn't need to talk. They had fought like this once before, with less light than the leaden sky overhead let fall. Back to back, turning slowly, they moved toward the gate, letting the goblins come to them. The coyote and the Colonel made up the other points of their compass, and Linn stopped thinking about it... There wasn't time, between one goblin on the point of her sword, and the next leaping at her legs, trying to bit through her Achilles tendon. She saw abstractly that some of the blood running down her leg now wasn't goblin green, but she didn't feel the pain. There wasn't time. She had to keep moving.
The castle wall, rough, gray stone, with windows high above them, came up suddenly. She hadn't been looking at it, only at what was moving in front of her. They had been joined by another two of Merrick's dogs, and the gate wasn't far. The wall meant they could put their backs to it and move slowly sideways, hacking and hewing and biting, always toward the gate. Linn watched another green lightning bolt reach out, flickering, horizontal... someone at the gate had a powerful weapon.
There was something here that wasn't a goblin. It turned away from the gate it was attacking, looming over them, a small figure Linn couldn't make out in its huge hand. The troll dropped the little creature, Linn was very afraid it was a coblyn, and couldn't look... and reached out for her. Merrick, in wolf-form, barking like mad, flung himself on the massive forearm. White teeth flashed as Merrick slashed with them at the tendons in the wrist. The troll howled with rage and pain, and with tears in the tiny eyes, tried to curl up around the painful wound.
Linn charged. As the troll drew his arm up toward his chest, taking Merrick for a ride, she slashed at the closest inner thigh, hoping that it was as delicate an area on a troll as it was on a human. She left a gaping wound in the wake of her blade, the clear blood sizzling with the power she was channeling. The troll dropped to his knees, keening on a scale that raised the hair on the back of her neck. Merrick howled and fell free of the troll. He was rubbing his head on the ground now, and Linn realized that the troll's screams were above human hearing range and into a range that hurt the wolf's ears.
“Merrick!” she shouted, hoping he could hear her. “Shift! Shift!”
She couldn't stop to see if he did. The troll's throat, since he was on his knees now, was almost in reach. Holding Lambent with both hands, and channeling enough power to make it look like the blade was on fire, she leapt toward the unguarded head of the troll, who was supporting himself on his knuckles. Her blade sank in deep beneath his chin, and the clear blood spurted out, splashing over her and burning. Linn realized with horror that troll's blood was acid. He fell forward, as her momentum carried her up, and she kicked off his upper arm and used her free hand on the back of his neck to get herself up onto his back and he collapsed flat, driving Lambent all the way through his spine. Linn had let go of her sword in the mad scramble to stay on top, and she stood on his back, screaming. She couldn't help it. The wounds earlier hadn't hurt, but the troll blood burned and she couldn't move, couldn't think–
A wave of gray-green washed over her, and she felt her eyes roll back in her head. The sounds faded out, and her knees buckled.
Linn woke up staring at grayness, backlit, and painful to her eyes, which burned. She tried to lift a hand to rub them, and discovered that she couldn't move. She was bound in some way. With a squeak of alarm, she tried to wriggle free, feeling her skin itch and crawl. Whimpering, she had to stop to take a breath, and the Colonel's fuzzy face appeared in her line of sight. He looked at her with big, liquid puppy-dog eyes, and licked his nose. Linn made herself relax. She might be tied up, but the dog wasn't worried, which hopefully meant she shouldn't be, either.
Relaxing didn't help the pain. Her upper body, throat, and face burned like she had poison ivy and a sunburn all at once, and she couldn't touch anything, her hands were immobilized. It didn't feel like ropes, just that she
was held down by something soft.
“Colonel, are you sitting on me?” Linn rasped. Her own voice startled her, husky and raspy. Her throat ached. How much screaming had she been doing? Was the battle over? She turned her head away from the big dog, who blocked her view on that side, and discovered she was lying very near the vast bulk of the troll, who wasn't moving. Linn looked up at the sky again. The sun was starting to burn through the clouds, and tears started streaming from her eyes in pain as the light hurt them. She closed her eyes.
Not being able to move made her think about how much she hurt. Her leg, where the goblin had gotten under her guard and taken a chunk out. It couldn’t have been too bad, she was able to keep running on it. Her upper body, which itched and burned. The troll’s blood hadn’t been hydrochloric acid, or she’d be dying in agony. But it hadn’t been lemon juice, either. Linn shivered. The Colonel nosed her cheek and stretched his body out alongside hers, offering her some welcome warmth.
She started thinking about the battle, what she could have done differently, done better. There had been no way to know about the danger of the troll blood, but could she have struck differently to keep her sword? A slashing blow rather than a stab would have been the ticket. Linn twitched. She still couldn’t move, and didn’t know why.
Images she hadn’t really processed during the heat of battle came back now, flashing into her mind. The broken body of one of the dogs, tripping her and feeling slippery under her feet where it- Linn tried to think about something, anything else. Had they won? Where were Merrick and Blackie now?
She got images she wasn’t entirely sure were right, of Blackie under a pile of goblins, still fighting. Had she seen that, or was her imagination creating her worst fears? She knew she had seen a coblyn fall, broken, from the troll’s grasp. She had refused to look, then, as it might have been Deirdre. Now, the body falling limply, cartwheeling in midair, kept replaying behind her eyelids. Linn opened her eyes.
The God's Wolfling (Children of Myth Book 2) Page 8
