“I’m going to take a lot of shit for this,” said the pilot. “I think I violated a dozen Civil Aviation regulations already.”
“You may have to break a few more before the day is over,” I told him.
Bloedermeyer told him where to go, and we zoomed northwards. The resort looked small below us. We flew over it in a matter of minutes, approaching the development site in a fraction of the time it would’ve taken to drive there. The pilot asked where we wanted to go, and I explained that we were looking for snowmobile tracks or something similar.
“Take a lap around the perimeter,” said Bloedermeyer. “If we can find the truck parked at one of the access points, we can follow the tracks from there.”
The helicopter banked hard to the right, my stomach lurching as we accelerated eastwards. Bloedermeyer fed a stream of directions to the pilot, telling him to navigate this way and that according to his memory of the numerous logging roads that crisscrossed the region. We followed a well-traveled road, skirting the edge of a raging river until we came to a pullout that Bloedermeyer said was popular with backcountry skiers
There were five trucks and three cars already parked in the lot. Sure enough, a group of four was busy unloading snowmobiles and ski gear from the back of a truck I might have easily mistaken for Nathan’s.
“Do you see the truck were looking for?” Asked Bloedermeyer.
“I think so,” I leaned out the open door of the helicopter, straining against my seatbelt to try to get a view of the truck. The tour company’s logo should have been printed on the side, but I couldn’t see it from this angle. “I can’t be sure, though.”
“Can you take us down there?” Bloedermeyer asked the pilot.
I saw the pilot shake his head in annoyance, but he dropped us down another fifty feet, turning sideways so we could see the side of the truck. The skiers gestured angrily, but the pilot held us in place until I confirmed that we’d found what we were looking for.
“That’s the truck,” I said. “I’m sure of it.”
“Look, there.” Bloedermeyer pointed to a set of snowmobile tracks heading down towards the river. A sketchy log bridge had been constructed, and only one set of tracks disappeared into the development site on the other side.
“The skiers would have no reason to go that way,” he explained. “It’s nothing but cliff edges. That has to be our track.”
Bloedermeyer ordered the pilot to head off in the direction of the tracks. If Nicola was still alive, we were closer than ever to finding her.
Chapter Twenty-Six
The track proved extremely difficult to follow. It wove between the trees and dipped in and out of little valleys and ravines. We’d periodically lose it for several minutes, forced to circle back until we picked it up again. Nearly a quarter of the development site encompassed the lower slopes of the mountain, and it was through this terrain that Nathan had been traveling. It didn’t seem possible to build anything along here. I wondered why Bloedermeyer had purchased so much land he couldn’t conceivably use.
“Eventually, this will be developed all the way up the slope,” he said. “That’s still five or six years away, but once the main section is done, we’ll begin working our way back this way. It’s a lot easier than you might think. Most of the latest influx of buyers aren’t exactly savvy. You could build these houses hanging half over the edge of a cliff prone to rock slides, and some idiot would still pay a couple million for it.”
I bit off a sarcastic response. It was no wonder the locals weren’t happy about this development. If they knew the full extent of Bloedermeyer’s plans for the area, they’d probably have been a lot angrier. Not angry enough to kidnap his daughter or blow up a machine on the job site, but all the hate directed towards him must have made him a prime target for whatever it was the Protector had become during its centuries of imprisonment. Bloedermeyer had no doubt sent surveyors throughout the entire region. That alone would be enough to upset the local animals. If the Protector had sensed their fear, it would’ve had an easier foothold to corrupt them, bending them to its will and using them as weapons. I imagined the same went for Nathan. He hadn’t tried to hide his dislike for Nicola’s father, and that pure hatred had probably been what had allowed the darkness to influence him into thinking that sacrificing Nicola was the only way to save the town.
At least, that’s what I had to believe had happened. The thought that Nathan might be doing this entirely of his own volition was sickening. Nothing about my interactions with him had given me the impression he was a bad person. Surely all the time he’d spent with his great-grandfather in preparation for his role as Lorekeeper would have taught him to hold himself to the highest standards of decency and righteousness. I could only hope that enough of the real Nathan remained for us to reason with. The alternative was unthinkable.
“We’ve lost the trail again,” Bloedermeyer said over the headset. “The trees are just too thick here. We’re wasting too much time, dammit. There has to be a better way.”
He took his phone out of his pocket to check the time. I saw that his screen was covered in notifications, and he scrolled through them rapidly before tilting the screen towards me.
“Do you know this Eric person?” He asked. “He claims to have information pertinent to Nicola’s disappearance.”
“We can trust him,” I said. “My phone was destroyed yesterday. If he’s been trying to get a hold of me, he must have figured he could go through you. What does he want?”
“There are no specifics here.” Bloedermeyer handed me the phone allowing me to see for myself. “He just says he desperately needs to talk to you.”
I punch the button to dial Eric’s number, then slipped the phone under the earpiece of my headset. I could barely hear the ringer, and Eric’s voice was distant and crackly when he finally picked up.
“Eric, it’s Alex,” I shouted. “Nathan took Nicola. If you know where they might have gone, you have to tell us right now.”
“Alex?” He asked. “Where are you? I can barely hear you.”
“I’m in a helicopter. We’re flying over the development site right now,” I shouted. “We’re closing in on Nathan, but we’re having a tough time following his trail.”
“I’m going to drive out there right now,” Eric said. “Don’t go anywhere until I’ve gotten there. I have information you’ll want, but I can’t explain it over the phone.”
“We can’t afford to wait,” I told him.
Bloedermeyer took the phone out of my hand. “Where are you?”
He listened, nodded, then hung up the call. He then keyed his headset and told the pilot to head back to town.
“Your friend better have answers,” he said. “Searching by air is useless, anyway. We need more information if we’re to have any hope of locating my daughter.”
The helicopter turned sharply and sped back to town. It was only a matter of minutes before we were touching down at a small helipad at the edge of one of the better-appointed developments. Eric stood beside his truck, and he ran to us the second our skids hit the ground. He hopped inside and accepted a headset from Bloedermeyer.
“Where have you been?” I asked him. “I’ve been trying to get a hold of you since yesterday.”
“I had to go into the city,” he replied. “Beyond that, I can’t go into details. Let’s just say I was out of cell range. I think I figured out what’s going on, though.”
He glanced at Bloedermeyer, then back to me as if to ask how well he could trust him. I knew how stupid it was to let yet another person in on the secrets people like Eric and I kept, but it was too late for that now.
“Say what you have to say,” I told him. “It’s his daughter out there. If you have information that could save her life, we can’t afford to waste another second.”
Eric wrestled with doubt for only a moment before nodding and beginning his explanation.
“It took some digging,” he said, “but I found some things in our histories
that line up with what Nathan probably told you about the lost local legends. It seems this great Protector of his was just one of an entire race of beings that inhabited the world millennia ago. We’re talking sometime around the age of dinosaurs. Our knowledge on this topic is sketchy, but there are even theories suggesting that these beings were what caused the extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs.”
“How do you know this?” asked Bloedermeyer. “And what’s this about a great Protector? Ancient beings? Is this some kind of joke?”
“It’s not a joke,” I said. “I told you this would be hard for you to wrap your head around, but there’s more to this world than you could possibly understand. Who recommended my services to you?”
“One of my investors,” he said. “He’s from the city. Mr. Trang? He said you did some work for him this summer.”
Well imagine that. I wasn’t surprised to hear that Trang had his fingers in an investment as lucrative as real estate, and I didn’t know whether to be flattered or concerned that he was recommending my services to his business partners. One thing was for certain, I wasn’t about to let Bloedermeyer know that one of his investors was actually a dragon in human form.
“I remember Trang,” I said. “I don’t know what he told you about the work I did for him, but he hired me specifically because of my ability to use magic in order to do things other consultants can’t.”
Bloedermeyer frowned and shook his head. He looked down at the ground racing by below us.
“This is ridiculous,” he said. “You’ve already asked me to put a lot of faith in you without giving me any solid information, and now you lay this on me?”
“Why do you think I didn’t want to tell you?” I asked. “You’re right that we don’t have time to screw around. You’re going to have to take it on faith that magic is real. I have a feeling you’re going to see it firsthand before the day is over. I’d give you a demonstration right now to make you feel better, but I don’t think the pilot would appreciate me casting spells that could mess with the helicopter.”
“I’m not convinced the two of you aren’t insane,” he said, his voice heavy, “but if it helps me find my daughter, I’m willing to accept it for the time being.”
“So anyway,” said Eric. “Little is known about these beings, except that they were godlike in power. Though they rarely took physical form of any kind, they held sway over virtually everything in their domain. Like gods, they were too focused on themselves to really mess directly with the world all that often, but their constant in-fighting did result in a lot of what historical geologists now believe were massive-scale natural disasters.”
“So what happened to these beings?” I asked. “If the one supposedly trapped here is just one of many, where are rest? Why are they not still out there today?”
Eric shrugged. “Nobody knows. We have only the vaguest collection of rumors passed on through our connections with the fae. Since they predate human life, we have no records of our own. And you know how reliable the fae are when it comes to sharing information. Getting a straight answer out of them is like trying to chew gum while getting a root canal.”
“So if something happened to wipe them out,” I said, “there’s a chance this one was spared because it was trapped underground in some kind of prison. And now, because of this development, it’s waking up and discovering weaknesses that didn’t exist when it was first locked away millions of years ago.”
“Probably, yeah,” Eric said.
“This is all very fascinating, but how does that help us find Nicola?” Bloedermeyer asked.
“I dug up every piece of information we have on this region,” Eric explained. “Other than Charles…” he paused to look at me meaningfully, “this whole area is something of a supernatural dead zone. I had to go back to some of the earliest explorations of this valley by early European magic users trying to settle here. There’s not much useful in those records, but I did discover one mention of ‘malevolent energy not conducive to the working of magic dedicated to the Light.’”
“That doesn’t sound like enough to narrow down the search,” I said.
“Not on its own,” Eric acknowledged. He looked out the helicopter door. We were back over the job site now and the pilot was asking where to go. “Tell the pilot to head northeast.”
Bloedermeyer relayed the directions to the pilot, and we made a beeline for the farthest corner of the development site. We hadn’t managed to track Nathan’s snowmobile path nearly this far during our first pass of the area, but it did line up with the last direction we’d figured him to be heading.
“There’s nothing out here,” Bloedermeyer said. “Are you sure this is the right way?”
“On one of the old hand-drawn maps, there’s a place marked with symbols for danger and death,” Eric said. “For some reason, satellite maps of this specific section always turn out blurry. I checked every database I could think of. Even aerial photos are unreliable in this one small patch of land.”
Bloedermeyer nodded. “I think I know where you’re talking about. We sent surveyors up there to check it out, but they had so many equipment failures we just moved on. It’s a low priority area, so I figured we could return to it next summer.”
“It probably wouldn’t have made a difference,” Eric explained. “It’s more than just electronic interference. There some sort of dark influence seeping into the world from somewhere around that site.”
“I’m almost out of fuel here,” the pilot said over our the intercom. “I can drop you somewhere, but I won’t be able to wait around while you do your thing.”
“Drop us in that clearing,” said Eric. “It’s probably best we go on foot from here anyways.”
“Come back here the second you’ve refueled,” Bloedermeyer ordered the pilot. He’d already unbuckled his seatbelt and looked ready to jump out of the helicopter before it even touched down.
When the helicopter landed, we pulled off our headsets and jumped out. The pilot didn’t wait a moment longer than he had to, lifting off immediately and forcing us to bend low to avoid the cyclone of snow swirling around us. We crouch-ran to the edge of the clearing where we waited for Eric to tell us where to go next.
“Up there,” he said, pointing to the top of a cliff.
The rock wall was icy, steep, and treacherous. I didn’t know how he expected us to climb up it, but he led us through a cluster of trees to a place where a narrow path wound its way back and forth up the wall. Not far from where we stood, Nathan’s snowmobile sat abandoned.
“Looks like this is the place,” I said. “I guess we start climbing?”
Eric took the lead. He hauled himself up onto the first ledge, then reached back to give me a hand. Being shorter than either of the other two by nearly half a foot, I had a tougher time navigating the large blocks we had to clamber over in order to make progress. My gloves were too thick for me to get purchase on the rock, so I had to strip them off and deal with the icy numbness that came from gripping frozen handholds with bare skin. Thankfully it took us less than twenty minutes to work our way to the top.
“I had no idea this was here,” said Bloedermeyer. “And I thought I knew every inch of this land.”
The three of us stood staring at an ice cavern large enough to drive a city bus into. A single series of footprints led into the cavern’s entrance, undisturbed enough that they couldn’t have been left more than a few hours earlier.
“What are we waiting for?” asked Bloedermeyer. He began marching towards the opening. “If Nicola is down there, we have to go now.”
I hurried after him, activating my mage sight but seeing nothing out of the ordinary. That didn’t account for how I felt, though. My skin crawled. As with the compulsion surrounding the sasquatch’s home, I wanted to turn and run the opposite direction. This time it wasn’t because a spell was trying to drive me away. The Black Fog attacked my mind more tenaciously than ever. I experienced fleeting thoughts of abandoning Bloedermeyer
to save myself. Worse, I had the brilliant idea that if I just killed him now, all of our problems would be solved. Even though Eric was only trying to help, he wasn’t immune from my ill-tempered thoughts. All I could think about was how he’d abandoned me when I’d needed him most. Had he not run off to the city, Nathan might not have been able to trick me into following him out to the middle of nowhere so he could try to kill me.
I shook my head and rubbed my eyes. I knew this was just the Black Fog influencing my thoughts. Trying my best to remember why we were there in the first place, I followed Bloedermeyer deeper into the cave system that stretched out into the depths of the mountain.
When we’d gone far enough that it was no longer possible to see even the faintest bit of light streaming in through the opening, Bloedermeyer produced a flashlight from his pocket. Eric retrieved his phone, activating the LED light on the back. Bright blue light illuminated the way before us.
We pushed onwards, an unspoken agreement between us that we wouldn’t turn back until we found some sign of Nicola.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
The icy cave walls gave way to rock the deeper we went. Smooth and round near the opening, it eventually narrowed and became difficult to maneuver through. Stalactites and stalagmites filled several small rooms. Side chambers branched off every so often, and it was only by standing near each of these possible exits and closing my eyes to attune myself to what I felt beyond them that I was able to isolate the direction where the Black Fog felt most oppressive. The further along we went, the more difficult this process of navigation became. After an hour of slow progress, I had a pounding headache and was having a very difficult time keeping my thoughts away from anger and violence.
“You don’t look so hot,” said Eric.
“Gee, you think?” I shot back. “I haven’t slept in two days, numerous things have tried to kill me, and now I’m stumbling around blindly in a cave system containing an ancient evil with a million-year-old grudge. Sorry I don’t look like a fucking video game character. Let me just stop and do my hair and makeup for you. You want me to rip my shirt a little so you have something to drool over?”
Black Ice (Black Records Book 3) Page 22
