The Deer Prince's Murder: Book Two of 'Fantasy & Forensics' (Fantasy & Forensics 2) (22 page)

The sound of a clanging gong shattered the quiet of the morning. Shaw flipped over, awake in an instant. Galen shook his head, groggy from sleep, and began to get to his feet.

“What is it?” I cried.

Zenos slammed the two books on his desk closed, and then shouted over the din. “Something has set off the magical wards that protect the Guild!” He gathered up the texts and pushed towards the front door with them still tucked under one arm. I followed behind, just in time to see the old man raise his staff as he reached the outside. “Get back, dark power!”

Destry neighed, rearing up in answer. The dawn light illuminated his dark equine body like a particularly lively marble statue. The pooka’s eyes flashed golden yellow and his hooves churned the air.

“Wait!” I cried, “Don’t hurt him, Zenos! This creature is a friend!”

“A pooka?” Zenos blinked and took a wary step back. Galen joined us in a clatter of hooves. Shaw squeezed through the door and brought up the rear. “I must admit…never have I heard of a pooka doing anything but delivering bad dreams or bringing terrible news.”

“He’s okay once you get to know him,” I said reassuringly. “What’s going on, Destry?”

“I’ve been looking for you all over Andeluvia,
chére
!” Destry exclaimed, in an out-of-breath voice. “Sirrahon has come upon the Fayleene! The dragon, he is turning their sacred forest into a charnel house!”

Chapter Thirty

My heart sank. No, it would be better to say that it
plummeted
.

We’d run out of time. And Sirrahon was upon us. Galen’s handsome face was pale with shock. Shaw’s looked eager. Liam’s had a grim aspect I’d never seen before.

“We have to go, now!” Liam demanded.

“It will take you hours to reach the Fayleene woods on horseback,” Zenos pointed out. “At least a couple by griffin flight, as well.”

“I’m aware of that,” I said. I dug into the folds of my jacket, took out my gun and removed the spent magazine. “Galen, do you have enough magic built up now to get us there?”

He shot me a troubled look. “Yes…though I must warn you, I won’t have enough magic to bring us all back should we run into trouble.”

“I would rather die,” Liam said firmly, “than fail to protect my people.”

“Thou need not worry about thy griffin,” Shaw declared. “Wouldst I rather die ’ere I miss another chance to prove mine own mettle!”

I fished out my spare magazine. “Well, I’d prefer
not
to die if at all possible. But we’ve got no choice.”

“Then I shall notify the king and his palace guard,” Zenos said. He hefted the two books under his arm. “And you’ll need these.”

I took the Codex and the smaller book that Zenos had been using to help with the translation work and turned to Galen. The wizard nodded, grabbed the volumes in one beefy hand, and stuffed them into one of his saddlebags. I slapped home the fully loaded magazine into my weapon and steadied my breath. That was about all the preparation we were going to get.

“Let’s do this,” I said, trying my best to keep the shakiness out of my voice.

Galen’s voice rose and fell as he recited the words to his spell, and the world vanished in a white flash and the old-bleach smell of ozone. I’d braced myself better this time; the stomach-turning lurch didn’t knock me to my knees, at least.

The world swam into focus. I swayed on my feet for a moment. Retained my balance. But any pleasure I felt in my accomplishment was doused as soon as the smell hit my nose.

During transport, the ozone smell was terrible, but at least it was temporary. Fresh air wasn’t more than a second or two away.

Not this time.

Searing, hot wind blew ash into my face. Shaw let out a squawk of surprise and dismay. Ozone had been replaced with the thick, sooty smell of burning peppermint. Glowing embers rained down around us like some hellish kind of snowflake.

We stood in the smoldering remains of the Fayleene’s Sacred Grove. The great trees that had cast their branches overhead to form the cathedral-like roof had been smashed, branches turned to so much kindling. Bare trunks stood like pillars in an ancient, ruined temple. And lying half-buried amidst the debris that choked the clearing were the remains of Quinval’s charred body. Two other Fayleene, senior does by the looks of them, also sprawled nearby. A charnel reek emanated from their half-burned corpses. Flames still danced among the smaller trees and underbrush off to the left. On the right, pops and hisses rose up from the ash-choked waters of a little stream.

“By all that is sacred,” Galen whispered, as he took in the ruined, burning surroundings.

If the devastation shook Liam, he didn’t show it. Instead, he took a few steps forward, ears perked and focused ahead of us.

“Over here!” he called. “All Fayleene, to me!”

A rising crescendo of crackles came from the underbrush to the left. Dozens of Fayleene, most covered in soot and a couple sporting minor burns, emerged and began to join us in the clearing. A not-so-distant
thud
shook the ground, a horrible giant-sized footstep followed by an indescribably awful
slithering
sound.

“This is not the most desirable of situations,” Galen said, as he danced back a couple of steps. That might have been the understatement of the year, but he raised a hand, murmuring his words of power to himself. A ball of blue energy began to grow in his palm.

“Some luck still holds,” Liam remarked, as one of the Lead Does ran up to us. “It seems that Orlaith still lives.”

“Protector!” she brayed, as she slid to a stop before him, “We are undone! You and your friends must do what you can to stop this!”

I bit back a retort. Yes, the Fayleene had some nerve to say that, after threatening to kill us the last time we’d been within their Sacred Grove. But with their world shattered and members of their species lying dead around us, it wasn’t time for snappy comebacks.

“I shall,” Liam said firmly. He raised his voice so that it boomed into the clearing. “All of you, listen to me! I need your presence within the wood, your fey powers, to boost my own. Elsewise we must flee and be destroyed as we do so.”

One of the younger stags bleated plaintively. “What do you wish of us, Protector?”

Liam nodded towards the stream. “Shelter there. Follow the water away from the clearing so that you are under some cover, at least. I will do my best to keep the dragon away from you.”

“But what good will that do if the dragon–”

“It will help keep you from burning to death when the woods catch fire, if nothing else!” Liam snapped. “You heard me! Move!”

“Shaw, Galen,” I added, “come on. While the Fayleene head for the stream, we need to get to the far end of the grove. Otherwise we’re all one big target.”

Behind us, the spotted flanks of the Fayleene merged into a fawn-colored mass as they crossed the clearing and splashed into the stream. The water only reached as high as the bellies of the younger does and stags, but Liam was right about one thing: it would give his people at least a little protection from the fires that lit the woodland around them.

Shaw clambered over the masses of branches that clogged the clearing with ease. Galen had to help me over a few spots, wincing once or twice as burning embers continued to fall around us. At least I had some layered, non-flammable clothes on, and Shaw’s fur-and-feather combination gave him protection. Galen’s exposed equine hindquarters had no such protection.

Liam had a similar problem. As soon as he’d sent the herd of Fayleene on their way, he joined us at the far side of the clearing, trying his best to avoid the hot spots along the ground. A small burning leaf settled in the base of one antler. I swatted it away before it could hurt him. The wind shifted for a moment, shrouding us in mint-scented black smoke.

“I didn’t expect our dragon friend to set the place ablaze,” I coughed. “Is there anything we can do about this?”

Liam’s eyes scanned the cloudy skies overhead. The iron gray of the clouds was lit by the fire into the red of a celestial forge. He nodded, as if to himself.

“There just might be. With the new powers of mine, there just might be.”

The Fayleene princeling’s eyes glowed. They took on the same faraway look that I’d seen when Liam had ‘spoken’ to the various forest creatures. Shaw was the first to spot the new arrivals. He jabbed his beak in the air in excitement.

“Have my eyes gone tricksy?” he marveled. “’Tis been nigh upon thirty years since I have seen the like!”

I craned my neck and looked about until I spotted them. Two birds the size of California condors soared overhead with the effortless grace of red-tailed hawks on a spiraling thermal. Their bodies were solid black, with strange, squared-off wings and conical yellow claws.

“What are they?” I asked.

“Thunderbirds,” Galen replied, with an approving grin. “Very clever. A very rare species that I didn’t realize nested in these woods. They have two well-known abilities: calling down lightning is one. The other is–”

From far overhead, the twin birds let out the thin, high-pitched whistle of a tea kettle that had been left on the stove for too long. Then in unison, they brought their wings down together on a single beat. Thunder rolled across the clearing, echoing off distant mountains.

Then the clouds overhead opened up with a drenching shower of cool rain.

The shower only lasted fifteen, twenty seconds at most, but the fires around us were beaten down and drowned under the fat load of raindrops. Other sections of forest continued to burn, but the flames had to fight for purchase now on the freshly moistened wood and damp bark.

And just like that, as I thought for a split second that things were starting to look up, another thud shook the ground. A slither. Followed by another thud, one overlaid with the bending and snapping sound of trees splintering under an unimaginable weight.

We all looked skyward as a shadow rippled across our faces.

A shape loomed above the trees. A hot wind blasted my cheeks again, like someone had swung open the burn-box of a wood stove. The moist beads of rain that clung to my hair evaporated in an instant. Above the horrible whamming of my heart, I heard the pumping-bellows sound of enormous, leathery wings.

The dragon looked ash-black for a moment. But as he drew into the light I saw that his scales were the all-too-familiar color of drying blood. They glistened, but not with the sheen of a healthy snake. The creature’s scales were the thickness of terra-cotta roof tile, and they gleamed like slabs of ruddy marble shot through with veins of mica.

At first glance, Sirrahon didn’t quite look like one of the dragons from the heraldic tapestries in Fitzwilliam’s palace. In fact, his low-slung profile and arched back resembled a supersized snapping turtle I’d once seen in the Pike County millpond. Unlike those comically inoffensive turtles, Sirrahon had neatly folded away a pair of bat-like wings along the sides of his upper back. Running down the middle was a ridge of ten-foot high spinal scales that would have sent a Jurassic-era stegosaurus slinking away in shame.

Sirrahon’s four legs were mastodon-thick, with spade-shaped claws. One set of these claws closed around a medium-sized oak and gave it a twist, snapping the trunk off at ground level. Mesmerized, I followed the path of the giant claws until they placed the tree into the dragon’s mouth. With a
crunch
, it was gone.

The thought ran through my fear-addled mind:
I suppose it’s too much to hope that Sirrahon’s a strict vegetarian.

The dragon’s eyes were the glittering yellow-white of xenon headlamps. Below the eyes was a hooked beak of a snout, full of sharp teeth and complete with sulfurous vapor billowing out of the nostrils like a pair of active hot springs. His long neck swung skyward. Then, moving much too quickly for anything so large, Sirrahon rose up on his hind legs.

A curse from one of my friends. Gasps from another. I didn’t see who had done what. It was too much to take in, until my mind could grope for some kind of yardstick to measure things against. With a shiver, I realized that Sirrahon’s body alone was the size of two railroad cars stacked end to end.

The dragon’s head shot out. With a
snap
, he crunched down one of Liam’s summoned thunderbirds in a puff of black feathers. An earth-shattering
boom
as he brought his front feet down again. A
snort
, followed by the accelerating chuff-chuff of an oncoming diesel engine.

“Dayna!” Galen grabbed me around my waist and slung me across his back like a sack of potatoes. “We must be elsewhere!”

The centaur’s hooves bit into the soft dirt as he sprang forward. I hung on with one arm, looked back over the wizard’s equine hindquarters.

Sirrahon’s jaws gaped impossibly wide. I looked up, right into the very cavern of nightmares, saw almost absently that the creature’s teeth ran all the way down his throat. The rumble of a volcanic explosion.

A cone of fire erupted from that horrible cavern as I held on to Galen for dear life.