by Steve McHugh
“It sounds like it’s not going to be a fun journey,” Zamek said.
“What’s life without a little excitement?” Persephone asked with a smile. She looked considerably healthier than she had when they’d found her. “Go find Dralas. I’ll be here.”
Layla turned to leave and paused by her father, who sat by himself in the corner of the room. “Thank you for not trying to escape.”
“You asked me to help, I’m helping,” he told her. “Your mother is here, isn’t she?”
Layla nodded. “She’s conflicted. Apparently, she didn’t realize that hurting me would cause her emotional unpleasantness.”
“That beast will turn on you the second you relax your guard,” he said, nodding at the cat.
Layla looked at the saber-tooth panther and held her gaze for several seconds. “I don’t think she will. The blood elves tortured her, twisted her into something that’s no longer one of her kind. I think she understands I saved her life.”
The big cat purred and licked the back of Layla’s hand.
“Until she gets hungry,” Caleb replied.
“There are plenty of blood elves around,” Layla said. “You like blood elf, girl?”
The cat made a low growling noise.
“Apparently not. Maybe it’s an acquired taste.”
“You’re really keeping it?” Caleb’s voice held his disbelief.
“She’s not an it,” Layla said, her voice hard, aware that everyone in the room was watching the exchange between her and her father. “And she’s not a possession. If she wants to go, she can go. I’m not stopping her.”
The cat rubbed her head against Layla’s hand, and she scratched her behind the ear. The panther’s fur was thick and soft, and she let out a contented noise as Layla continued to scratch.
“And they call me insane,” Caleb said, disgusted.
“Keep that up and she might eat you,” Sky called out to him, gaining a laugh from several of the others in the room.
Layla and Tarron left the house, the panther following.
“Do you think my dad has a point?” Layla asked. “Will the panther try to eat me? Shadow elves can do, like, low-level empath stuff, yes? Do you sense anything?”
Tarron smiled and shook his head. “No. I sense nothing but a desire to protect you. You saved her life, and she knows that. You’ve gained a powerful ally today. But you need to name her.”
“Yeah, I just don’t know what. I don’t want to call her something generic, like Shadow or Hunter.”
“Maybe pick something from your vast knowledge of pop culture.”
Layla laughed. “That’s Kase and Chloe’s fault. The pair of them opened my eyes to comics, anime, and more geeky stuff than I even knew existed. How about Fluffy?”
The panther made a noise indicating that Fluffy was not an option.
“I will think on it,” Layla told her.
“I find it fascinating that your companion is as intelligent as she is.”
“Can I ask you something?”
“Of course.”
“Why are there big parts of your life that I can’t access in my mind?”
Tarron stopped by the end of a row of houses. “Ah, well, shadow elves can limit what someone sees when they link.”
“That doesn’t seem very fair. And you allowed me to see you murder someone, so why keep the rest from me?”
“I understand that it might not make you think the best of me, but I needed you to trust me for who I am. If you discovered that I’d killed someone once I’d gained your trust, that would have put us at odds. So, yes, I keep things to myself. Just like I can jettison a lot of things about the people I merge with. Shadow elves can’t keep more than a few people’s memories in their minds. It’s only the ingrained, long-term things like language that really stick. A lot of other stuff just sort of floats away. Eventually, you’ll start to find that my memories will fade. I don’t think anyone in shadow elf society was able to keep them for longer than a few weeks.”
Layla expected to be angry about that, but she found that actually she was just disappointed that he hadn’t been completely honest. “You didn’t tell us that when we agreed to merge with you.”
“No, I know. I’m sorry about that. I didn’t want an existential conversation when we needed to leave.”
The saber-tooth panther let out a low growl, and both Layla and Tarron crouched and made their way to the end of the nearby wall, before looking out at whatever had caught the animal’s attention.
“Dralas,” Tarron said, standing up and turning back to the panther. “It’s okay, he’s a friend.”
The panther made a dismissive snorting noise.
Layla rubbed the side of the animal’s head. “You did good.” She hurried after Tarron, who had sprinted over to Dralas. The giant sat on the edge of a cliff, his legs dangling over the side into the abyss below.
“Dralas, you okay?” Tarron asked.
The giant turned back to his friend, his eyes puffy from crying. “I’ve lost everyone I ever loved. They’re dead. All of them. Giants don’t live for thousands of years like you do. My family. My friends. They’re all gone. The oldest of my kind is two thousand years old. I’ve missed out on all of that. It hit me all at once. I hadn’t realized until I sat and started to think about it.”
Tarron placed his arm around the giant’s massive shoulder. “I’m sorry, my friend. I did not think.”
Dralas smiled. “It’s not your fault. A lot happened in a short period of time. To both of us. I just want to be able to see my parents again, and that’s not possible. I want to see my brothers and sisters, to hold their children, to watch them grow. That’s all gone because the sun elves decided to be dicks.”
“It sounds like that’s what they’re best at,” Layla said.
Dralas looked back at her. “That and pompous arrogance. It’s their . . . superpower, I guess is the right word.”
“You want to come back from the edge of a thousand-foot drop?” Layla asked.
“I’m not going to kill myself,” Dralas told her, but even so, he moved back from the edge, taking a seat on a ruined wall.
“Thank you,” Layla said.
“You have a large cat with you,” Dralas said. “I did not expect that.”
“This is . . . I honestly don’t know yet,” Layla said. “Naming was never my strong point.”
“Nice to meet you, nameless one,” Dralas said, offering his hand, palm out, for the panther to sniff. She licked his fingers.
“Well, she likes you,” Layla said. “I think that’s what it means.”
The panther swished her in the face with her tail.
The four of them made their way back to the rest of the team, where Chloe was outside looking excited.
“I have names,” Chloe said as Dralas and Tarron went back into the house.
“For what? The panther?”
Chloe nodded.
“Okay, go,” Layla said.
“Binky?”
“No.”
“Adora, Selina, Shuri, Jiji, Appa, Hinata, Winry, Angua.”
“You’re literally just naming characters from anime and comics that you like, aren’t you?” Layla asked.
“Technically, it’s stuff that Kase has shown me over the years, but there are book characters in there too.”
“You like any of those?” Layla asked the panther, who snorted.
“Guess not,” Chloe said, slightly downbeat. “I’ll keep thinking.”
Persephone appeared in the doorway. “We need to go.”
“The naming ceremony will have to wait,” Layla told Chloe.
10
LAYLA CASSIDY
Zamek led the way through the mountain, and the group came across no blood elves, or even a trace of them. Occasionally, in the distance, they could hear the sounds of horns being blown, but the panther’s ears perked up each time and quickly relaxed. Apparently she wasn’t a fan of blood elves either, which was something La
yla could certainly understand.
Zamek led the group to the mouth of a tunnel that was big enough for a Boeing 747. Crystals twinkled inside, giving light where only darkness would normally be.
“What are they?” Chloe asked, as everyone took a moment to rest.
“We call them sun crystals,” Zamek said. “The rays from the sun hit the top of the mountain and heat it up, that heat is passed down through the crystals. We tried not to mine them as the light vanishes the second you remove them from the rock, so this tunnel would have just been for transportation between the dwarven city and the shadow elves below. Back when this place was the working city of Thorem, this entrance would have been heavily guarded.”
Tarron looked down the mouth of the tunnel. “Were the dwarves good to the shadow elves who were brought here?”
“To my memory, yes,” Zamek said. “We had peace. The shadow elves lived in their own city. They came here as prisoners after the civil war, but we didn’t treat them as such. Your people were allowed to roam the realm outside the mountain at their leisure. I’m sure there were dwarves who took liberties with the shadow elves, but I never saw it. But then my position meant I rarely went to the shadow elf city below.”
“What was it called?” Chloe asked.
“I don’t know,” Zamek said. “The elves didn’t tell anyone its name. I don’t know why.”
“Probably because we’d already lost one home and didn’t want to have to lose another,” Tarron said, his voice containing more than a little anger.
“I am sorry about what happened,” Zamek said. “I’m more sorry that my people died because we tried to do the right thing. The sun elves would have destroyed you all if we hadn’t agreed to take you. They sent squads of assassins after groups of remaining shadow elves. The rumors I heard . . . if they’re true.”
“They are,” Persephone said. “The sun elves were brutal to their shadow elf prisoners. Trust me when I tell you that whatever awful, evil thing you’ve heard they did, they more than likely did it.”
“And did anyone try to stop them?” Tarron asked.
“The accords were drawn up to deal with the problem,” Persephone said. “They were created the moment we learned what the sun elves were doing. They ensured that everyone had the right to trial by one-on-one combat. A large group of sun elves could easily kill shadow elves by the dozen, but one-on-one, the sun elves were no match for the shadow elf warriors.”
Tarron took a step into the mouth of the tunnel. “The sun elves butchered my people, butchered humans, took whatever they liked, and there was never any recompense for their actions. And now I’m told no one even knows where they are. When this is all done, I’m going to find them. I will bring to justice those who committed atrocities against my people.”
No one else had anything to say after that, so they made their way down the tunnel and found that the lower they went, the fewer crystals lined the walls. Most of the group were able to see in the dark pretty well, although Dralas had to be led by the hand when he kept hitting his head on unseen stalactites.
They didn’t see any blood elves, but the group stayed silent for much of the journey. After an hour of walking, the tunnel forked, with one way containing a purple glow, while the other remained in darkness.
“Which way?” Persephone asked Caleb, dropping Hades’ ring into his hand. Caleb had been almost silent from the moment he’d been taken from the house where Sky had suggested the panther might eat him.
“Left,” he said, pointing to the purple-lit tunnel. “He’s about a mile in that direction. I see only darkness around him.” He gave the ring back.
“Where does that go?” Sky asked Zamek.
“The purple tunnel goes straight to the heart of the shadow elf city. I assume the other tunnel goes to whatever they found under the library. It certainly wasn’t here the last time I was down this far. I suggest we go that way first and find Hades and the others. We might not be able to get back out of the city without causing a commotion.”
“Also, I like the idea of being shrouded in darkness,” Chloe said.
“I do not,” Dralas told everyone, his voice booming all around them.
“It’ll be okay,” Tarron told him.
Dralas looked down at his friend and nodded firmly. “Let’s be going then.”
They continued down the darker of the two tunnels with Layla’s dad walking beside her. “You know this is folly, yes?” he asked.
“We save Hades and everyone else, we get out of here, and we help defend Helheim,” Layla said. “The plan is easy—”
“The execution is not,” he interrupted.
“Thank you for your massive amount of help and guidance,” Layla said sarcastically. “Now kindly shut up unless you have something useful to add.”
Caleb looked angry at having been dismissed in such a manner, but Layla didn’t care. She was tired, fed up, and had been through the ringer the last few days. The very last thing she wanted was to be lectured about the survivability of their mission.
After a few minutes the saber-tooth panther began to growl. Everyone stopped walking and moved to the side of the tunnel. Layla, who was next to the panther, whispered, “Blood elves?”
The panther pawed at the ground several times.
“Lots of them?” Layla asked.
More pawing at the dirt.
Layla and Chloe moved up to the mouth of the tunnel, which sat above a twenty-foot drop into a huge empty cavern. Layla dropped down into it and crouched behind a stalagmite. Her father followed with Tarron, Dralas, Chloe, Zamek, Sky, and Persephone just behind them. Persephone gave Caleb Hades’ ring again.
“He’s over there,” Caleb said, pointing to the mouth of a tunnel at the end of the cavern, one of four that led from it. “It’s hard to judge though. I think all these crystals are screwing with my tracking.”
While everyone discussed what to do next, Layla moved through the cavern with Tarron and Dralas behind her, and the saber-tooth panther next to her. When they reached the end, they entered the tunnel her father had indicated and walked through it until the sounds of voices began to echo all around her. She was grateful for the darkness as she crept to the end, finding herself a hundred feet above thousands upon thousands of blood elves. At the far end of the stadium-sized room was a dais that could have fit hundreds of people at once. Her mother stood upon it as two blood elf commanders did something that Layla couldn’t make out.
“We’re too far away,” Dralas said.
Before Layla could say more, the dais exploded into life.
“It’s the elven realm gate,” Tarron said. “They’re taking the rest of the blood elves out of this mountain.”
“We need to hurry,” Layla said. “Wherever they’re going is about to have a war on its hands.”
Layla returned to the others and relayed what she’d seen.
“So, we need to stop them?” Sky asked.
Zamek shook his head. “We’re outnumbered ten thousand to one. I say we find the captives and figure out a way to get as far from here as possible. If those blood elves are going to Helheim, our side is going to be screwed.”
“I have an idea,” Layla said. “If we wait for the elves to go, we can use that gate to leave.”
Tarron smiled. “It will have the added benefit of making them unable to return to this realm because I’ll link that gate to Shadow Falls.”
Layla nodded. “Okay, we find the captives, and we piss off the bad guys. It’ll be a productive day all round.”
Caleb took the lead as the team moved down one of the tunnels. The occasional blood elf was no match for the nine of them, and they soon found the prison where the blood elves had taken their prisoners. From the darkness of the tunnel, Layla counted two dozen blood elves and many more prisoners as they were moved toward the various huts that littered the area. There were twenty huts in all, all made of wood and stone and looking like they had seen better days. They surrounded a large courtyard that co
ntained nothing but stone and dirt. There were no fences or anything to stop the prisoners from escaping. The only exit was the tunnel the group currently occupied.
Layla sucked down her anger at seeing one blood elf punch a prisoner, knocking him to the floor, then kicking him as he tried to get back to his feet.
“Kill them all,” Persephone said, her voice like iron.
Zamek unslung his battle-ax. “My pleasure.” He walked toward the two guards at the front of the prison, who reacted to his presence, but died before they could offer any real resistance.
The rest of the group charged after Zamek, who let out a war cry that echoed around the mountain, drawing blood elves to him so that he could cut them down in quick succession.
Layla avoided a blood elf’s blade and turned her arm into a spear, skewering a second in the skull before taking its blade and plunging it into the heart of the first. She removed the blade and remade her arm as she moved through the prison, killing the blood elves, who seemed to pour out of the buildings, as she went.
One managed to hit her in the back with a hammer, but the panther quickly tore its head clean off its shoulders and spat it out as if it were rotten food.
The battle took only a few minutes, but by the end there were dozens of dead blood elves, and the rescue party had received only minor wounds.
“Get everyone out,” Layla said, looking around for her father. Unable to see him, she turned to the panther. “You find my dad?”
The panther ran off between two huts, and Layla followed, discovering her father crouched over a blood elf, repeatedly stabbing it in the neck and face. A second elf lay on the ground beside the first, its head hacked off. Caleb saw Layla and smiled, his bloodstained face nothing but a horror show.
“I think it’s dead,” Layla said.
Caleb stood, the smile still on his face, and walked over to a barrel of water nearby, dunked his head inside, and cleaned off the black blood. “It cut me,” he said by way of explanation.
Layla sighed. She couldn’t begrudge her father killing blood elves—she’d just done the very same thing—but the way he appeared to be genuinely thrilled about it made Layla feel uneasy. She and those she fought alongside took no joy in the lives they were forced to take, but Caleb did. He reveled in it, like an addict getting a fix. He judged who deserved it. He’d decided to kill people because he enjoyed it, not because his life was on the line.
