Iron and Magic
“Can we have the beat-up armor after you’re done?” Gwendolyn asked.
Hugh almost sighed. “Yes.”
“Okay,” Radion said. “We can live with that.”
Elara strode down the hallway. The after-battle jitters had morphed into unease, then outright dread. Exhaustion set in, as if a massive weight rested on her shoulders and kept getting heavier and heavier.
Quick footsteps echoed behind her.
Just what she needed. Elara caught a sigh before it gave her away. She didn’t have the energy for verbal sparring right this second.
Hugh caught up with her.
“How much do you want to spend on tests?” he asked, falling in step with her. “Give me a ceiling.”
She almost pinched herself. “How badly do we need them?”
“We don’t need them at all,” he said. “We don’t have to know what the armor is made of. We need to know how to break it and we’ll find that out tomorrow. Basically, how much money do you want to spend to keep the smiths happy?”
Thinking was too difficult, and making a decision was even harder. “A thousand. Fifteen hundred at most.”
They started up the staircase.
“More than I would’ve given them,” Hugh said.
“Since when are you fiscally responsible?”
“I spend money to keep us alive.”
She almost groaned. “Please don’t start about the moat, Hugh, I can’t take it right now.”
“Begging? Not like you. What’s bothering you?” he asked.
She missed her magic. It was her shield and her weapon; she felt naked without it. She wanted it so badly, it was almost a physical pain. This was wrong, Elara reminded herself. She tried to push the need out of her mind, but it refused to leave. The stakes were too high to give in to magic cravings. If she did, it would undo her in the end.
“Fourteen,” she said, grasping at a distraction.
“Yes?”
“There were three men and fourteen mrogs. If they all had the same number of creatures, where is the fifteenth mrog?”
“Perhaps one of them only had four.”
“The man at the Old Market had five too,” she said.
Hugh’s face showed nothing, but his eyes said he wasn’t happy. She wasn’t happy with that thought either.
They came to the third floor and she turned into the hallway.
“Where are you going?”
“To check on Deidre,” she told him. “The little girl.”
“Is she alone?”
“No. Lisa is with her, and she is good with guns. Savannah got Deidre to talk. She has an aunt in Sanderville. We called her, and the family will be coming to pick her up in the next few days.”
“I’ll send an escort,” he told her.
“Thank you.”
“It’s one o’clock in the morning,” he said. “The kid is probably asleep.”
“I know. I just want to make sure she’s okay.”
He followed her. They walked together through the shadowy hallway.
It was comforting, walking like this next to him. It was like walking next to a monster, but if something jumped out at them from the shadows, he would kill it, both because it was his job and because he would enjoy it. He wasn’t carrying a sword, but it didn’t matter. At the core, Hugh d’Ambray was a predator. She understood that all too well. There were two monsters in this hallway, he was one and she was the other, both of them horrible in their own ways. The vision of blood spreading through the clear water came to her. She shivered.
“Cold?” he asked.
“No. Hugh, do you think Redhill is like the Old Market?”
“Yes.”
“Where do they take them?” She glanced at him. “They kill these people, so they have pounds and pounds of dead weight. They have to transport them out, but the shapeshifters lost their scent at the palisade. You would need vehicles or wagons to transport the people. It wouldn’t just leave a scent trail, it would leave a regular trail a mile wide.”
“Yes.”
“There is no trail. There is nothing. The people and the warriors vanished into thin air.”
“Yes.”
“Are we dealing with an elder being?”
His face was grim. “Probably.”
She almost hugged herself. Certain creatures required too much magic to survive the seesaw of magic and technology. Djinn, divine beasts, gods… They only manifested during a flare, a magical tsunami that drenched the world every seven years. The rest of the time they existed outside of reality, in the mists, in the secret caves, in the primordial darkness. A dark swell of memories rose inside her, and she crushed them before they had a chance to drag her under.
An elder being could open a portal to its realm. She had seen it firsthand during a flare. An elder being brave enough to risk appearing during a magic wave would be infinitely more dangerous. Nobody could predict tech shifts, and if the magic wave suddenly ended, the elder creature would likely die.
“We need to figure out the nature of the bond between the beasts and the handlers,” she murmured.
“Could be telepathic navigation,” Hugh said. “Would explain why the humans stood still.”
It took concentration to navigate. “But five? Most Masters of the Dead can hold what, two vampires? Three?”
“Depends on the navigator. Daniels can hold a couple hundred.”
Elara stopped and pivoted toward him. “A couple hundred?”
“She can’t do much with them, but she can hold them. There is a lot of power there, which she doesn’t use most of the time. Like you. Why do you hold back, Elara?”
Excellent time to make her escape. She pointed at the door ahead. “This is my stop.”
“Not in the talking mood?”
“Good night, Preceptor.”
He nodded, turned without a word, and strode down the hallway. He’d walked her to the door. That was almost… sweet.
The only way the Preceptor of the Iron Dogs would ever be sweet is if he were walking her into a trap. Elara turned around, peering at the shadows, half-expecting something to leap out at her.
Nothing. The soft gloom of the hallway was empty. The man had her paranoid in her own castle. This marriage was a gift that kept on giving and just when she thought she had him figured out, he changed his stride.
Outside the walls a dog yowled, its howl breaking into hysterical furious snarling. Alarm shot through her.
The door swung open under the pressure of her fingertips. The window stood wide open, the white curtains billowing in the night breeze. Deidre sat on the bed, still like a statue, her eyes wide and unblinking. Lisa’s body slumped on the floor by the window, her shotgun on the rug, next to the bed. A creature squatted over Lisa, its clawed hands hooked into her flesh, biting into her neck. It had nearly chewed through it and Lisa’s head dangled, her brown eyes dark and glassy.
The creature looked up, big owl eyes empty, flat, like the eyes of a fish. Blood stained its nightmarish fangs.
She had to save the child.
The only weapon in the room was Lisa’s shotgun. Knowing Lisa, it would be loaded. The other door in the room led to the bathroom; it would be too flimsy to hold against the beast and once they got inside, they would be trapped. The only way out was through the doorway where Elara stood. If the little girl ran to her, the beast would catch her before she could.
“Deidre,” Elara said, her voice calm. “Crawl toward me. Do it very slowly.”
The girl swallowed. Slowly, ever so slowly, she shifted onto her hands and knees. Elara took a slow gliding step sideways toward the bed and the gun.
The beast watched her, Lisa’s blood dripping from its mouth. It licked its fangs, running its tongue on the shreds of human flesh stuck between its teeth. Outside the dogs snarled in a frenzy.
Deidre crawled to her. An inch. Another inch.
Another.
Elara took another step.
Ten feet between them.
Nine. Deidre was almost at the edge of the bed.
Eight.
The creature leaned forward, lowering Lisa to the floor, its gaze locked on them. Elara held her hand up, palm toward Deidre.
They froze.
The monster stared at them.