The Turquoise Tower (Revenant Wyrd Book 6) (7 page)

Angelica shivered.

“Alright,” Jovian said. “Everyone be on guard. We aren’t alone out here.”

“What is it?” Caldamron asked.

“Black shuck,” Jovian said, his eyes distant, scanning the darkness around them.

Caldamron pulled them all back and took out his gun.

“Follow my instructions,” he told them. “Don’t pull the trigger until you’re ready to shoot. This is the trigger,” he said, showing them. It was much like the trigger of some of the crossbows Angelica had used at home. She knew the safety that went along with crossbows, and figured they would be similar for the gun.

Silently he pulled out his powder horn and showed them how to open it. They followed his lead and emptied a specific amount of powder down the barrel of the gun. Next they laid a square of fabric over the opening of the barrel and pressed one of the metallic balls into it. With a rod they tamped the bullet into place.

“Now, when you’re ready, you pull this part back, and pull the trigger,” Caldamron said. “Be ready for a kick — these things recoil, which I’m sure you aren’t used to with your bows.”

They separated. Angelica had her hand on her sword, and the other one held the gun up. She wasn’t sure if the ball would fall out if she carried it casually, and didn’t want to take the chance.

Still the darkness around them thickened, and when she really thought about it, maybe they weren’t just shadows after all. They eased to a halt as Maeven scanned the area ahead. He passed his gun to Jovian and pulled out his bow.

Angelica tried to see what he was looking at, but through the darkness she couldn’t make out anything.
Probably because his sight’s better than mine
, she figured. But still, she didn’t like how the shadows skittered around her peripheral vision, as if alive.

She closed her eyes as Maeven prepared his attack, and let the wyrd that resided within her mind slip free. She sought out the shadows, and what might be within them.

Immediately a face screamed into her mind’s eye. Green, rotting, and somehow familiar. Golden eyes.

She gasped as Maeven loosed the arrow.

“I got it,” Maeven said. Jovian and he darted forward, through the deeper snow and into the darkness where Maeven’s arrow had flown.

“What’s the matter?” Caldamron asked, stepping closer to Angelica.

“Nothing, just seeing things,” she lied. Why would she see Amber like that?

Her head roiled dizzyingly and she felt the earth tilt under her. Caldamron grabbed her arm and eased her down into the snow.

“Would you like to tell me the truth?” the cat-man asked.

Angelica swallowed heavily. “Something’s out there,” she warned. “Something putting images into my mind, making me see things that aren’t real.”

“Do you think it’s this black shuck?” Caldamron asked.

“I don’t think it’s in their power to do that. They’re just a higher version of dalua.”

“Like our hecklin?” Caldamron asked.

“Yes, from what I gather.”

“Are you feeling better?” he asked her.

“I’d like to sit a moment longer,” she said. She took the time to observe the shadows. Was it her imagination, or were they moving around, swirling like fog? She closed her eyes, and the earth tilted again.

In her mind she saw the shadows part, and within the shadows crouched a figure in black. Despite the warmth of her wyrded cloak, Angelica felt a shiver run up her spine at the energy radiating off this being she was seeing.

It was a woman, from what she could tell, crouched on the snow, her back to Angelica.

Angelica opened her eyes, and gazed ahead. If she was right, this figure was straight ahead of them. Now that she had seen the woman in her mind, she could feel her out there in the night.

“I have to go there,” Angelica said, nodding forward.

“We should wait for the others,” Caldamron said.

“I can’t wait,” she pushed to her feet, but Caldamron gripped her wrist painfully. His claws bit into her flesh, stopping her from pulling away.

“Maybe you didn’t understand me, LaFaye. We will wait for the others.” There was a rumble in his voice that stopped Angelica in her struggle to be free of his grip. She realized then that a guard was so much more than keeping you safe from outside sources. They would also keep you safe from your momentary lack of judgment.

“Alright,” Angelica conceded. “You’re right. With everything we’ve been through it is silly for me to go looking in the darkness for something.”

Caldamron nodded, and then Angelic thought how truly stupid her attempts to scout out something in the darkness had been. Not only would she get separated from her group in the endless expanse of the mountain highlands, but she would walk right into the grips of whatever was messing with her mind.

There was a loud bang and a small flash of light in the direction that Jovian and Maeven had vanished into. Angelica jumped, raising her gun. Caldamron placed a hand on her arm and pushed the gun down gently.

“That was their gun,” he said.

Another bang and a spark of light.

“Are they okay?” Angelica asked.

“We can go to them if you would like,” Caldamron said. But then a hoot of excitement came to their ears from where the guns fired, and Angelica sighed.

“No, I think they’re okay. We’ll wait here.”

“What do you think it is, anyway?” Caldamron asked motioning with his chin in the direction Angelica had wanted to explore.

“I don’t know.” But Angelica had an idea what it could be.

“Are we ready?” Jovian asked, cutting short her train of thought. He held up three rabbit carcasses, skinned and gutted already.

“This should do for tomorrow night,” Maeven said. “We’ll hunt more tomorrow while we travel.”

“Is there something wrong?” Jovian asked, sensing the tension of the group.

“I just want to get back to the cave,” Angelica decided. She looked in the direction where she had felt the figure and shuddered, but the presence was gone.

On the way back to the cave Jovian fell back beside Angelica and pressed her further for information. She told him what she had felt, the dizziness that came with it, and the rotting face of Amber in her mind.

Jovian’s eyes grew dark.

“Do you really think it could be a verax-acis?” Angelica asked, speaking the name that had been in her thoughts since she had seen the shadows part in her mind and the image of the woman flood her third eye.

“What else could it be?” Jovian asked as they neared the cave. Faint yellow firelight spilled out of the cave opening. The smell of roasted meat came to Angelica’s nose, and her stomach growled painfully.

“I don’t know. I know they said the dungeons in the Ivory City had been emptied of verax-acis, but I didn’t give it much thought.”

Jovian and Angelica drew to a halt outside of the cave. Maeven took the carcasses from Jovian, and with Caldamron he disappeared into the cave.

“He used them last time,” Jovian said. In the distance an owl hooted. He didn’t have to say who
he
was. Angelica knew he meant Arael.

“That’s what everyone says,” she agreed. “So what do we do? Can they be killed?”

“Everything can be killed,” Jovian said. “We just have to get through their mind games to see the real them.”

“Should it be a consolation that they won’t kill us before we get to the Turquoise Tower?” Angelica wondered.

“No, because while they wouldn’t kill you or I, there’s no telling what they will do with the others. We can’t think we are safe for a moment.”

And that’s where Angelica knew she had gone wrong. For some reason she thought this route through the mountains would be without trouble, but trouble was exactly what they were finding.

“So, what do you think is following us?” Joya asked once the last of the hunting party exited the warmth of the cave. “The ghost wolf thing?”

“I can’t really be sure.” Cianna sat on the floor near the fire. Shelara was behind her, puffing her soapy smoke into the air, adding a calm atmosphere to the cave. Russel soaked up the heat further back in the cave, writing in his journal. “But I have my suspicions.”

“What are they?” Joya asked, giving the meat a crank over the fire. The outside was starting to cook, and occasionally juices would sluice down onto the fire, awarding them with a tantalizing smell.

“Back when I was a child I had a pet wolf,” Cianna started. And then she launched into the tale of how she was out in the woods one day and Altavius, her pet, had been killed. “It was the first time I’d ever worked necromancy. Well, the first time I can remember working necromancy.” She left out the details of how she had felt Altavius’s spirit moving through her and back into his own body. “And he was alive once more. But Sara and Annbell told me that it wasn’t real, he wasn’t really alive, and we had to put him down again. I know now why we had to do it; he wasn’t really alive, just a corpse, reanimated.” She shivered. “But something happened when we put him to rest — his spirit came back.”

And he had been her companion ever since. Until she met up with the chaos dwarves, and had her run-in with Wyrders’ Bane.

“I thought he was dead. With all of the spirits of the chaos dwarves coming to me after I’d killed them, I lost track of Altavius. It was during the corruption of the Well of Wyrding that he left.”

“So you think this is Altavius?” Joya asked.

Cianna shrugged. “I can’t be sure, but it feels the same. It feels like him.”

“Well, what are you waiting for?” Joya asked.

“Well, I don’t want to tap into my wyrd and have it alert those sentries we’ve been seeing in the skies.”

“I don’t think it will,” Joya said, but the look on her face said she wasn’t so sure about that.

“Exactly.” Cianna sighed. “I think he’ll come to me when he’s ready. If it’s Alt, he can sense me, and he’s never had a problem before. I don’t know why he’s being so bashful.”

“Because he feels you’ve left him,” Shelara spoke from back in the cave.

“I think she’s right,” Russel spoke for the first time. Cianna had almost forgotten he was there.

“What do you mean?” Cianna asked, turning to their companions at the rear of the cave.

“Well, think about it. Wyrd was corrupt, and all of those spirits were crowding around you. If you weren’t tethered to him, how was he to find you in the chaos?” Shelara sat up.

Cianna shrugged. “He’d always been able to find me before.”

“But you were having your own issues with your wyrd, isn’t that so?” Russel asked. Shelara scowled at him, obviously not liking him horning in on her conversation. He didn’t seem to notice. He closed up his journal and tucked it away in his pack.

“Yea, I guess.”

“So, he was lost to you, and couldn’t find you. Of course he is staying behind, not wanting to come to you for fear you will reject him, like he feels you rejected him before.” Shelara put the pipe back in her mouth, and lounged against the rock once more.

“Huh,” Cianna said. “I didn’t think about that.”

“Poor little thing,” Joya said. “He feels abandoned.”

“How do I fix it? How do I let him know it’s okay?” Cianna asked.

“You’re the necromancer,” Shelara said with a shrug.

“Do you think my wyrd would really affect the angels? Do you think they would know?” Cianna asked.

“I don’t know,” Joya said with a shrug.

“But the wyrd would be different, right? The wyrd for an angel?” Cianna asked.

“Of course it would,” Russel said, coming to sit beside the fire. “We’re angels, after all.”

“So what would it be?” Joya asked. “What makes our wyrd different?”

Russel shrugged. “Beats me. But there has to be a difference, right? I mean, not right now that we’re still partially human.”

“Not all of us,” Cianna said.

“Well, I think maybe until you get your wings your wyrd might be more human than you think,” Russel said. “The point is, I think those up there that are looking for us have a wyrd that’s different than ours.”

“But different how?” Joya wanted to know.

“What do we know about angels? Besides the obvious?”