The Ghoul Vendetta

by Lisa Shearin

  “A soundproof battlefield,” I noted with approval. “Just what the doctor ordered.”

  “Janus doesn’t want his ritual disturbed.”

  I gazed at the haze with a tight smile. “You can’t always get what you want. If you try sometimes, you just might find, you get what you deserve.”

  The highlands rose on both sides of the river. On the opposite bank, slightly downriver loomed Storm King Mountain. I tried to use the view to help ease my growing anxiety.

  “These mountains remind me of home,” I said.

  “They do for me as well,” Rake murmured from my side. “I’ve always thought it would be nice to have a weekend home here. The mountains near my home in Davans Perch are very similar to these.” He was silent for a few seconds. “Is there anything I can do to convince you to stay here?”

  “We’ve had this discussion.”

  “And there is time for us to have it once more.”

  “My answer’s the same.”

  “Makenna, I—”

  I reached down and took his hand. “I know how you feel.”

  “No, you don’t.” Rake moved closer, his breath soft against my cheek. “I don’t want to lose you.”

  “You’re not going—”

  “I can’t lose you.”

  That shut me up.

  “I can’t imagine my life now without you in it.”

  I searched Rake’s dark gaze and saw something I’d never seen before—at least not on Rake.

  Fear.

  He wasn’t afraid of what we were walking into or what we would have to face and fight once we got there. Rake Danescu was genuinely afraid of losing me. Goblins didn’t admit vulnerability lightly, if at all.

  “These things are an ancient race, Makenna. Some would say they are gods.”

  “I’m not one of them.”

  “Nor am I. But that does not change the fact that they have capabilities far beyond human.”

  “Are you saying I can’t handle it?” I wasn’t defensive, merely curious. I’d felt outclassed since my first day at SPI. Tonight would just be one more time that I felt out of my league. But I knew what Rake was implying—this time was different. This time death was a real possibility. I wasn’t buying it. “So sea monster deities are more dangerous than Isidor Silvanus, Lucifer’s lieutenant, and the hosts of Hell? Because we all came out of that one just fine.”

  “Luck runs out for all of us.”

  “Luck had nothing to do with that. It was determination, skill, and cunning. Well, you were skillful and cunning. I was just determined.” I paused. “And I still am.”

  Rake sighed and raised my hand to his lips. “Very well.”

  “Just because I’m going doesn’t mean I’m not worried about one very big thing,” I admitted.

  “Which is?”

  “Janus knows we’re here. He even went ahead and set up an altar. It’s at the exact intersection of those ley lines and tonight’s the summer solstice, so it’s where and when he has to do his ritual.” I wasn’t about to say “sacrifice Ian.” I was determined that it wasn’t going to happen, so I had no intention of giving that act any acknowledgment or power by saying those words out loud. “Yet he’s obviously confident that he can keep us from interrupting him. How?”

  “We’ll find out,” Rake said.

  “You don’t seem concerned about what might be waiting for us.”

  “I would rather know everything my adversary had planned, but there are times when it simply isn’t possible. I accept that, plan for every contingency that I can, and prepare to be flexible if it becomes necessary.”

  I just looked at him.

  “You can’t control everything, Makenna.”

  “That doesn’t mean I’m going to stop trying.”

  He leaned forward and kissed me on top of my head. “And that’s one of the reasons why I love you.”

  I froze. “What?”

  He smiled ever so slightly. “I did say that word, didn’t I?”

  “Yes, you did.” I paused. “Do you want to take it back?”

  Rake pondered that for a moment. “No. No, I don’t.”

  “I . . . I don’t know what to say to that. Well, I do, but I don’t think I’m ready to say it yet.” I took a deep breath. “But I do feel a very strong need to do this.”

  I stepped in closer than we already were, stood on tiptoes, took his face in my hands, and kissed him.

  Part of it was gratitude. Rake was risking his life to help save Ian. He didn’t have to do it, but he was, and I knew I was a big part of the reason behind that. He cared what happed to Ian because he cared about me. No, he loved me. He had just said it. The rest of what I was feeling was something else, something more—maybe almost . . .

  I’d intended to kiss him briefly and then pull away, as I’d done on the boat. It wasn’t like we had much by way of privacy. However, at that moment of contact, with Rake’s lips soft and pliable beneath mine, I suddenly didn’t care who saw what we were doing. I wanted to do more; I needed to do more. I pressed my mouth insistently against his, the tip of my tongue exploring the smooth sharpness of his fangs. Rake shivered at the contact, and his breath came in a quick hiss as his arms wrapped around my waist and hips to pull me hard against him, deepening the kiss, devouring me.

  “Rake?”

  It was Calik.

  Rake took his lips away from mine. He was panting. “Dammit.”

  “I’m sorry, but it’s time.”

  Rake’s eyes were midnight pools as he gazed down at me. “Not half as sorry as I am.”

  Calik made sure we heard him as he left to rejoin the others.

  My breathing had taken on a ragged edge. “Rake, I . . .”

  He lowered his lips to mine, stopping me from saying what I didn’t know how to say—at least not yet.

  “With a kiss like that, you don’t have to say anything. I firmly believe that actions can speak much louder than words.” He smiled slowly, his voice a husky whisper. “And that kiss, my beloved Makenna, was a shout.”

  35

  THERE’S no good way to sneak onto a six-and-a-half-acre island.

  Rake and I would be going over in the first wave and staying there. While some of our commandos were also mages, they didn’t have the strength to fully conceal a dozen people from sight and sound on a narrow stretch of rocky beach. Rake did. The ward the Fomorians had put on the island kept us from being seen by anyone on the far shore. We needed something to keep the Fomorians from seeing us.

  Roy Benoit had put his recon mission from this morning to good use. We didn’t land on the island’s new docks and stairs. The climb would have left us vulnerable to attack from above, plus we would have to climb all those flights of wooden stairs to get to the top. I remembered from this morning that they’d creaked. The other side of the island hadn’t been suitable for a dock, but it was perfect for dragons dropping off passengers, with solid rock leading up to the Bannermans’ house and the castle walls beyond. When the next wave of commandos arrived, Roy had told us we’d split up and approach the castle from two sides.

  Since we hadn’t found the portal, Kitty would be staying with the Garrisons and Kylie. If we did need her, she was a thirty-second dragon flight away.

  Some of the dragons would be making one more trip for Yasha, Vlad and friends, and Alain Moreau, who was now dressed like our commandos. Once on the island, Yasha would go full werewolf. I knew that anything that tried to get between him and Ian would be torn to shreds. Vlad ground out his cigar against a boulder and carefully put it on the edge of a picnic table where he could pick it up again when he came back. Confident guy. Though if anyone could survive a battle with an ancient race of gods, it would be Vlad.

  The moon was climbing higher in the sky.

  An hour until midnight.

  It was
time to go.

  Our dragon crouched as low to the ground as it could, but it was still like trying to mount a Clydesdale. Rake reached up, grabbed the saddle horn with one hand, put a foot in the mounting stirrup and vaulted into the saddle.

  I stood there, staring stupidly. “Oh yeah, that’s easy.”

  Rake leaned over and extended his hand down to me.

  I would have asked if he was kidding, but I knew he wasn’t. I got as close to the dragon as I could, and reached up as far as I could.

  Rake bypassed my hand, gripped my forearm, and in one smooth move, swung me up into the saddle behind him. It happened too fast for me to get out a squeak, let alone a scream.

  As soon as I had found out how we’d be getting to the island, I’d popped my second Dramamine of the day. I’d arrived here this morning in a helicopter. Now, I was about to fly across the Hudson on the back of an overgrown bat, and somehow I didn’t think I was going to like it.

  I was right.

  I’d picked out a spot between Rake’s shoulder blades to keep my eyes on for the trip over. I made the mistake of letting my curiosity get the better of me, and looked down. My logical mind knew we would be in the air for less than a minute, but my lizard brain was positive that I was going to fall off the sky dragon’s back right into the kraken’s gaping maw. My lower legs were strapped into the stirrup harness, so even if the dragon did a barrel roll and flew upside down, I still wouldn’t fall off, though I was certain that if that happened, I’d be praying for a quick death. If by some miracle I made it intact to the other side, my flipping stomach would probably render me unable to do anything but throw up on the feet, fins, whatever of the first Fomorian that jumped out at me. My hands had a death grip on the back of Rake’s half of the saddle. Fortunately, there were hand grips built in, or my fingernails would have surely made their own.

  The landing was smooth, almost as smooth as Rake’s helicopter, and without the noise or the having to duck under rotor blades. Though a helicopter couldn’t get mad and roast you like a s’more.

  Me, Rake, and Sandra and her team waited in silence for the dragons to return with Roy and his people. Rake concealed the team until then.

  The moon provided enough light to see that what the ruins of Bannerman Castle didn’t take up on the island, undergrowth did.

  There was a path of sorts, from here to the house, that had been more or less tamped down by kayakers who came to see the island and explore the castle, meaning the way was mostly clear if you were only about a foot wide and walked single file. Off-trail were brambles and stone and brick from the decaying buildings. That the footing was uncertain would be putting it mildly. The relatively maintained trails that we had used this morning were at the top of the hill.

  We knew where Janus would bring Ian. Getting to the castle ruins through whatever Janus had arranged for us would be the hard part.

  SPI’s commandos could and would move like wraiths in absolute silence because that was how they moved all the time, even though there was no point in tiptoeing when the bad guys knew we were here. Whether Janus had guards stationed to ensure we didn’t make it to the castle in one piece was a question I wasn’t in a hurry to have answered.

  The feel of the ley lines running beneath the island had increased from a low thrum to an eager vibration as if the island itself was waking up.

  It was.

  In my opinion, the ancient Native Americans had had the right idea. This place was best avoided at night, especially a night when the veils between the worlds were thin, when monsters forbidden to walk the land came up from the depths.

  It was way too quiet.

  That right there told me we were not alone.

  Silence was one of the warning signs that there was an apex predator in the area.

  It was a warm summer night on an island in the middle of a river. The night should have been alive with crickets, frogs, cicadas, and night birds. Even the wind seemed to be in hiding. Nature recognized evil a lot better than the rest of us, but we didn’t have the luxury of hiding until it passed.

  The question now became where was the evil and what form would it take?

  Janus knew we were here.

  My skin felt like it was trying to crawl somewhere and hide.

  From the night I had first encountered him on an icy street in SoHo, to the abandoned subway tunnel under Times Square, Janus terrified me, and I hadn’t even been the one he’d been stalking for years. Grandma Fraser had always said that the scariest thing I’d ever face in my life was the unknown. Regardless of what the unknown turned out to be, it’d never be as terrifying as what I would come up with in my own head. Sometimes it sucked to have a vivid imagination.

  Janus’s goal was to break the curse that had bound his people from taking and ruling what they believed to be rightfully theirs. Lugh Lámhfhada had killed Balor their king with a spear through his eye. With their king gone, the Fomorians had no chance of standing up to the army of the Tuatha Dé Danann. They’d been banished and had stayed that way for four thousand years. I wasn’t buying that Janus was doing all of this out of loyalty to his dead king. That would take nobility. Janus was thirteen kinds of evil, but he wasn’t noble, and I seriously doubt he ever had been. No, there was something else in it for him.

  Power. The ultimate power.

  I’d imagine after four thousand years of living in exile, the Fomorians would be grateful as all get-out to the one who freed them.

  That was what Janus was counting on.

  He wanted to be king.

  And to be king, the first thing he had to do was kill Ian and break the curse on a race of sea monsters.

  Behind us, the second wave of commandos landed.

  Showtime.

  • • •

  The dragons went back to get Yasha, Vlad and friends, and Moreau.

  Two mages on each team deployed a magical version of a camo shield in front of their teams as they moved. It wouldn’t stop or deflect weapons, but it’d confuse the heck out of an opponent’s aim.

  Rake’s job of concealment was done. Our job was now scouting and air support. We would be flying over the castle ruins and reporting back via headsets to Roy, Sandra, and Moreau. Calik and his squadron’s job was to rain flaming destruction on any Fomorians who tried to stop them.

  At least this time, I had a rock to stand on to get back into the dragon’s saddle.

  As far as we knew, Fomorians couldn’t fly. Between that and our dragons’ harness-mounted ward stones, we felt relatively safe flying over the castle ruins.

  Rake banked our dragon over the edge of the island and toward the castle. Just because there wasn’t any light coming from inside the castle ruins yet didn’t mean no one was inside. The Fomorians were a race of ancient Irish gods/monsters. They’d been waiting for close to four thousand years for this night. They’d chosen this island. The only structure on the island that Janus would find worthy was the castle. Janus’s ego alone wouldn’t allow him to sacrifice Ian in a clear spot in a briar patch. He would have set the stage for his night of nights in the most dramatic setting he could find. It would need to be bathed in moonlight. Janus wouldn’t be satisfied with anything but high-drama, Broadway-caliber lighting.

  The light of the full moon illuminated the ruins of the castle walls, but its glow didn’t make it to the ground inside. Having spent their exile in the ocean depths, maybe the Fomorians didn’t need light—or couldn’t tolerate it.

  Fear twisted the pit of my stomach.

  Or we were horribly wrong about Janus’s plans.

  Beyond the island, from the deepest part of the river, came a sound like the blowing of a massive horn. It sounded for several seconds then trailed off.

  Our dragon jerked beneath us, and Rake pulled back on the reins and said something soothing in Goblin. It didn’t work for me and the dragon wasn’t buyin
g it, either. Something was being called. It wasn’t any of us calling it, so it had to be bad.

  Another horn blew from downriver, and a third from upriver.

  The other dragons were equally skittish; their pilots struggling to calm them or at least keep them under control. Rake had said sentry dragons were highly intelligent. That these highly intelligent animals wanted to leave told me more than I wanted to know about what was happening.

  Rake and I looked all around us. We were at least a hundred feet above the highest point on the island. Nothing moved on the island below us, or in the river around us.

  Until it did.

  A slice of river in the direct beam of the moon bubbled and roiled as if a submarine was surfacing.

  It was bigger and it was worse.

  The kraken.

  And it was surfacing just off the side of the island where we’d dropped off our commandos.

  Rake swore and his hands blazed red with battle magic.

  In the sky around us, the pilots who had magic at their beck and call called it, their hands glowing like Rake’s. The dragons, including ours, gave what sounded like coughs which apparently pushed the fire up from their lungs—or wherever it came from—and got it ready for launching.

  That night on the Persephone, I had only seen one or two of the kraken’s tentacles. Never in my wildest nightmares did I think the entire beast would be nearly half the size of the island. We were in the air. I could only imagine what this thing looked like from the ground.

  I could see Rake speaking furiously into his headset. The wind kept me from hearing him, but I wasn’t the one who needed the warning.

  The kraken reached out with one tentacle, then two, wrapping them around a tree and a boulder, and started pulling itself up on the island.

  “Hold on!” Rake yelled over the sounds and flashes of gunfire from below as he put the dragon into a dive toward the beaching kraken.

  The dragon knew what to do. When we got close enough, a column of fire blasted from its mouth, setting fire to the tentacle wrapped around the boulder. Other dragons followed suit until it looked like an aerial dogfight out of an old war movie. More tentacles were out of the water, and while launching what looked like a red laser from the palm of his hand, Rake had to bank sharply to avoid a tentacle that snapped like a fleshy whip to knock us out of the sky.