by S. A. Moss
Guardian Unleashed
Camille Prentice #3
S.A. Moss
Copyright © 2018 by S.A. Moss
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or had, or actual events is purely coincidental.
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1
The creature had been following me for four days.
I’d never been able to catch a glimpse of the thing, whatever it was, but the persistent prickle of goose bumps on my skin made me certain something was watching me.
It had followed me through several portals and doubled back with me when I had to retrace my steps after going down a false trail.
The Wild—the untamed landscape of the Shroud—had creeped me out from the first moment I’d set eyes on it. Since coming to the Shroud two weeks ago to track down where my father had taken Alex, I’d come face to face with a few creatures straight out of my worst childhood nightmares. But there was grim satisfaction in discovering that of all the terrible monsters that prowled the darkness, a twenty-year-old immortal named Camille Prentice was among the most dangerous.
Still, I didn’t like not knowing what was tailing me. My imagination conjured all kinds of horrible shapes to go along with the scratching and rustling that had drifted out of the undergrowth for the past four days. Even if whatever was out there was worse than my worst imaginings, I’d rather know. I couldn’t take the suspense.
I bent to tie a thin strip of cloth to the thick stalk of a sapling near the portal I’d just come through, keeping my gaze focused downward and my ears alert for any sound in the underbrush.
My dad hadn’t lied about portals connecting different parts of the Shroud, but unfortunately, I had no clue where any of them led. Instead, it was all guesswork on my part, crossing my fingers and stepping through a portal in the hope it’d make the magnetic force pulling toward Alex grow stronger instead of more faint.
The portals themselves were easy to overlook. They often appeared on the trunks of the squat, twisted trees that were as common as weeds in the Wild, but I found several on rock faces too. Last week, I’d accidentally stepped through one that hovered in thin air. I was transported mid-stride and had tumbled down a large hill in a strange new landscape.
Every time I stepped through a portal that took me closer to Alex, I marked it with a small piece of fabric tied to something nearby. I hadn’t had the foresight to pack anything for that purpose—I’d never been a Girl Scout, and my wilderness survival skills were minimal.
My tank top and pants were both black, but luckily, I’d never been able to give up my addiction to fun-colored underwear. The neon-green pieces of my shredded bra stood out like neon signs even in the dim light of the three moon-like suns overhead.
I gave one final tug on the knot then straightened, dusting off my hands as I admired my handiwork. To my left, a scuffling sound filtered out of the undergrowth. I peeked in that direction without turning my head. In a shrub about ten feet away from me, a leaf twitched.
Gotcha, sucker!
I pivoted suddenly, raising my hands to unleash a blast of aether toward the shrub when another movement caught my eye. It came from my left again—an area that had, until a second ago, been directly behind me.
My head whipped toward the motion, and I yelped in surprise.
“Shit!”
While I’d been focused on hunting down the creature hiding in the underbrush, something else had snuck up on both of us.
I barely had time to register that thought before a huge furry mass hurtled toward me. It slammed into me, throwing me against a tree. Two large paws pinned me to the trunk, and sharp fangs snapped at me. I turned my head just in time to avoid getting it bitten off, pressing my hands against the creature’s belly and releasing a blast. At point blank range, my hit sent the monster flying back several yards.
It rose to its feet, shaking its body. It looked sort of like a tiger, except its snout was elongated more like a wolf’s—oh, and it had a third set of legs protruding from the middle of its body. I’d watched enough nature shows in my day to know tigers weren’t supposed to be hexapedal.
The middle legs functioned like an additional set of back legs, giving the tiger-creature extra power as it sprang toward me once again, leaping for me with gaping jaws.
Aw, crap.
I dodged, throwing myself to the side. The tiger-creature’s front claws caught the back of my leg, tearing through fabric and flesh. I hissed in pain as I hit the ground and rolled—I’d like to claim the roll was on purpose, but it was more of an involuntary contraction into the fetal position.
Before I could scramble to my feet, the tiger-creature leapt again, front paws hitting my shoulders and pinning me to the ground. Its middle paws pressed against my stomach, making me glad I hadn’t eaten in months.
I blasted it with aether again just as its jaws clamped onto my right shoulder. The force of the blast ripped its teeth from my flesh as the creature hurtled backward. I gasped as pain ripped through me. Being an undead immortal had some benefits—I healed fast and didn’t feel pain or cold as intensely as I had when I was alive. But I could still feel this, and it hurt like a bitch.
The worst part about fighting another immortal was that this could go on forever, unless I found a way to incapacitate it. My best bet was to bind the tiger-creature, but that took a bit more concentration than the furry jerk was allowing me at the moment.
Speaking of which…
He was already back on his feet and charging toward me again. I rolled to the side, and the tiger-creature landed on the empty patch of ground where I’d been just a second ago. His sharp claws tore up the ground as he skidded several feet and came to a stop, turning back to me. Not even taking the time to stand, I threw my good arm in his direction, sending a blast careening toward him. It was a weak hit, and he absorbed it with a slight shudder, not even rocking on his feet.
Dammit. My right shoulder was healing, but I still couldn’t lift that arm. As I scrambled to my feet, it hung limply by my side. And apparently, my aim and power one-handed weren’t great. I dashed toward the large tree I’d been thrown into earlier. If I could get the thick trunk between myself and the tiger-creature, maybe I could buy enough time for my arm to heal. Then I could work on binding him.
Unfortunately, the tiger seemed to know exactly what I was thinking. As I sprinted for the tree, he hit me again, plowing into my back. I fell forward, my face pressed into the ground as his front paws pinned me. Pain radiated from my injured shoulder.
I gasped, struggling to lift my face out of the musty dirt—logically, I knew I didn’t need oxygen, but it was hard to get over the instinctual panic that set in whenever the option of breathing was taken away from me.
I sent out a desperate blast with my left hand, but the shot went wide, slamming into a nearby tree with a whump and a splintering sound.
The tiger-creature roared, and fear lanced through me.
2
I can’t die. I can’t die. I can’t die.
The words ran through my head like a mantra, but they didn’t help much. I couldn’t die, but I could get my head chomped off and have to regenerate from the injury. I really, really didn’t want to do that.
Flailing my arms, I released another torrent of aether.
My right shoulder was healed enough that I was able to release the energy from both hands, but both shots still missed their target.
The tiger-creature’s cold nose pressed against the back of my neck as he sniffed me. I shuddered. He didn’t even need to eat, so if he bit my head off it would be just for the sport.
As I struggled to press up to my hands and knees, I heard a slight rustling sound ahead of us. Then a high pitched squeak pierced the air. A second later, the tiger gave a startled growl and moved back several steps, its body twisting and writhing. The moment its weight was off my back, I sprang up and turned around.
“What the hell…?”
A little creature roughly the same size and shape of a flying squirrel had starfished over the tiger’s face, covering its eyes and sending the huge monster into a panic. The squirrel-thing clung with fierce tenacity, screeching and chittering as the tiger swung its head back and forth.
Shaking off my surprise, I reached out quickly and shot two quick blasts through a filter I created. The filter shaped the blasts into sharp points, and the aether-spears pierced the tiger’s side. It roared in pain, shaking its head even harder. The squirrel-thing finally went flying, landing in the shrubs several yards away.
Before the tiger could attack again, I hit it with two more spears, piercing its chest this time. It let out a deep, rumbling growl then collapsed heavily on its side.
The little squirrel-thing darted out of the underbrush, hopping up to perch on the downed tiger’s body with the air of a hunter claiming his kill.
I chuckled lightly, rolling out the kinks in my almost healed shoulder. “Yeah, yeah, look at you. You’re practically a little William the Conqueror, huh?”
Tentatively, I stepped forward. I had a much easier time binding something if I was physically touching it, but I wasn’t sure I should risk that with this beast—if it healed while I was still trying to bind it, I could lose a hand. I settled for approaching its less pointy end and laying a hand on its haunch.
Luckily, the tiger-creature’s energy was easy to get a read on, and I quickly wove an aether blanket around it, pulling it tight to complete the bind. The tiger-creature went rigid, its six paws drawing up toward its body. My spears had gone right through its flesh, but the holes were starting to close. It wouldn’t be long before the monster was as good as new—though hopefully I’d be long gone by then.
As soon as the tiger was bound, the squirrel-thing scampered down, creeping around the perimeter of the body and stopping every few steps to give it a sniff.
“Careful, William the Conqueror. Don’t get too close to its mouth. I’m getting better at binding, but I still wouldn’t risk it if I were you.”
The little creature looked at me with beady black eyes for a second, then resumed sniffing the body. I don’t know why I expected him to listen to me.
I cocked my head. “Were you the one that was following me? You’re lucky this thing attacked me before I attacked you. Hasn’t anyone ever told you spying on someone from behind bushes is rude?”
His head popped up over the side of the tiger-creature’s body, regarding me seriously. I sighed. “Yeah, all right. Maybe I’m not one to be giving lectures about stalking people. But why were you following me? If this were Earth, I’d think you wanted food. You don’t eat, though, do you?”
With a small chirruping noise, the squirrel clambered on top of the tiger’s body again.
Then, with no warning, he leapt toward my face.
I gave a startled yelp and stumbled backward. But the squirrel-thing just landed on my shoulder and scrambled around to perch there. I let out an unsteady breath and put a hand to my chest, even though my heart wasn’t beating, let alone racing.
“Holy crap!” I gasped. “You scared me.”
William the Conqueror just stared at me. The dim light from the sun glinted off his little black eyes, making him look unnervingly intelligent.
“You want a lift?” I asked slowly. “Is that why you were following me?” I huffed a small laugh. “Too lazy to walk on your own, huh?”
Will—somehow the name fit him—grabbed the top of my ear in his cold little paws and chomped down with sharp teeth. I yelped, and he licked the wound. Ew. I hoped rabies wasn’t something immortals had to worry about.
“Okay, okay! You’re not lazy.”
Seeming satisfied with that, he settled down on my shoulder, looking out over the dark landscape before us. The tiger’s body on the ground was almost entirely healed now. We really needed to get a move on.
I tilted my head slightly to look at my new passenger. “All right, Will, you can come with me. But just so you know, it’s not gonna be a walk in the park. When I find out where my dad’s been keeping Alex, shit’s gonna go down.”
He chittered contentedly, still clutching my ear with his little paws.
Well, he can’t say I didn’t warn him.
3
Will actually wasn’t a bad traveling companion. After that one sharp bite earlier, he’d settled for using the shell of my ear as a handle to hold himself steady as I walked. Every once in a while, he made soft chittering noises as his beady eyes took in the scenery passing by.
After tromping through the thick undergrowth for another half hour, I spotted a portal in the side of a tree.
“Hang on, Will,” I muttered as I veered toward it. I’d made it my policy since day one of my search to check out every single portal I came across. It was still a little terrifying to step into a black hole carved into the side of a rock or tree, not knowing if it would spit me out someplace far worse than my current location. And what if a portal wouldn’t let me back through? To the best of my knowledge, there were no one-way portals, but I didn’t really want to discover the first one.
As I passed through the inky blackness of the portal into a new landscape, the tug around my middle intensified sharply. I sucked in a breath through my nose, my legs going weak. The air here dry, and the scent of pine mingled with the usual sulfuric smell of the Shroud. The trees were taller, their trunks stretching up a long way before finally branching out into smaller limbs.
And the tug pulling me toward Alex was insistent—he was close now.
Trying to tamp down my excitement so I could focus, I squatted down to tie a small strip of my bra to a fallen tree near the portal. Will hopped off my shoulder to sniff around at the dead branches and leaves that blanketed the ground.
When I set off through the barren forest, Will bounded after me quickly and leapt onto my back, scrambling up to perch on my shoulder again. He really was a little lazy, although I wouldn’t make the mistake of saying that out loud again.
A loud crunching and grunting noise caught my attention, and I quickly pressed myself up against a tree, peering around the trunk. Several yards away from me, one of the Fallen lumbered through the forest. His body was essentially human, although incredibly large and muscled by most human standards—but his face bore a large snout and thick, short tusks.
A pig-demon.
The tug around my middle pulled me in the same direction the demon was headed.
I pressed myself close to the tree for a few moments as he passed by me. Once his loud footsteps had faded a bit, I slipped out from behind the thick trunk and darted quickly to another, keeping my footsteps as light as possible. The ground where I’d fought the tiger-creature had been soft and damp, the plants lush. Here, everything seemed dry and dead, and the leaves crunching underfoot made stealth much more difficult.
If I were following someone on Earth, staying hidden would be no problem. I’d just fade out to the mid-plane, becoming incorporeal and invisible to anyone on the earthly plane. But here, I didn’t have that option, so I had to do my sneaking around the old fashioned way. At least the canopy of leaves overhead helped block out what little light the suns gave.
Not wanting to risk being seen, I gave the demon a big lead. I was pretty sure I was on the right track, so I’d rather risk losing his trail than being spotted.
If I was captured too, I’d be no help at all to Alex—and there wouldn’t be anyone coming after me.
Alex.
My chest clenched with worry. I’d tried not to think too hard about him over the past couple weeks, focusing instead on the task before me. I needed to keep my wits about me in the Wild—the tiger-creature had been a visceral and painful reminder of that—and thinking about Alex was an easy way to get distracted.
But now that I drew closer to him, it was becoming harder and harder not to picture his face. His messy, sandy brown hair. His soft green eyes that seemed lit from within. The dimples that popped out when he teased me with a lopsided smile.
He’d been in the Shroud for two weeks. For several days after my father took him, I’d been certain he was dead. The connection that usually existed between us had been completely severed. It had slowly come back online again, and now it pulled me insistently toward him. Occasionally, bursts of pain would flare through the connection we shared, making fear rise in my chest.
What was happening to him here?
I did know that mortals weren’t supposed to be taken to the Shroud, and that as far as the Council knew, no human had lived through the experience.
Don’t think about that, Cam! Alex isn’t like other humans.
Shaking away those thoughts, I slowed my pace as the trees began to thin, opening into a clearing at the base of a mountain. Built into the side of the rising rock face, made of the same gray stone as the mountain itself, was what looked like a castle stronghold. It was nowhere near as large as the Haven, but it was imposing nonetheless.
And honestly, it was hard to get a read on how big it actually was, since only a few walls and one tower turret actually stuck out from the side of the mountain. It was as if someone had poured molten rock over a fully built castle, leaving it to harden around all but the tiny part that hadn’t been covered. Who knew how deep into the mountainside the castle actually went.
