Warden (Book 2: Lure of the Lamia) (12 page)

When the purple light seemed at its brightest, Errol pulled out his dagger and brought it down on the bracelet, bifurcating it, and then tossed the pieces into the fireplace. Immediately, the flames blazed up and out into the room, almost singeing Errol’s eyebrows and making the girls yelp in terror as a noise like a gigantic gong suddenly reverberated throughout the house, rattling the entire place like a pair of dice. At the same time, Talia screamed – a high, oscillating surge of sound that seemed to go on for far longer than she should have had air in her lungs.

Errol stepped towards the door, now focused on the last thing he had to do.

“Wait,” said a voice behind him – Gale’s – as he pulled the door open. “Talia. Will she be all right?”

“I don’t know,” he answered. And then he was gone.

Chapter 21

Errol furtively approached the troupe encampment, intent on remaining unseen – not an easy task when the entire band seemed to be packing up at whirlwind speed. Regardless of the outcome of Anru’s argument with the mayor, they were clearly planning to bolt. And with good reason.

There was a killer amongst them. A literal monster.

However, for reasons unknown, they were choosing to harbor the thing. Errol, on the other hand, meant to see that the lamia was stopped once and for all.

It was still well before dawn, but there was manic activity all over the camp, like an anthill that had been stepped on. There was only one place where things appeared relatively calm, one spot: Anru and Miabi’s tent.

Errol circled around until he could approach the tent from the rear. Then he slipped up next to it, unseen, and listened. He could hear a voice inside, and after a few moments of concentration could make out who the speaker was.

“What did you say to him?!” Miabi was saying. “Tell me!” Errol didn’t hear a response, but Miabi went on, saying, “You are a mean, spiteful little creature! We feed you, care for you, protect you, and what do we get in re–”

Miabi stopped in mid-sentence and turned as Errol entered the tent, a menacing look on her face. In her hand she held Berry in a white-knuckled grip. Based on what he’d heard, Errol assumed she was trying to get information from the little man.

“I can tell you what he said,” Errol announced. “He said that a girl is never just a girl, regardless of her appearance. I didn’t quite understand what he was talking about then, but I do now.”

Without taking her eyes off Errol, Miabi reached towards the ground, where Berry’s cage happened to be located. She opened it, thrust the homunculus inside, then closed the door – all the while maintaining eye contact with Errol.

“Warden,” she finally said, as if Errol had not spoken. “To what do we owe the pleasure?”

“I think you know,” answered Errol, wand and dagger in hand. “The lamia. You’ve been harboring it. I don’t know if you occasionally use it in your sideshow or you think it’s some kind of pet, but I know it’s here and I know it’s Tilbi.”

Miabi took a step towards Errol. He pointed his wand directly at her and she froze.

“Tilbi’s my daughter, Warden,” Miabi said, “so even if what you say is true, you can’t have her. In our family, we take care of our own.”

“She’s a murderer. She’s killed at least three people – maybe four if Chad’s dead. I have to stop her.”

“Tilbi is a youngling, my baby girl. What you claim is monstrous, and beyond what the child I raised is capable of. If you don’t believe me, ask her yourself.”

She gestured to an area behind Errol. Alarmed, he anxiously turned, weapons at the ready. There was no one there. Too late, he realized his mistake. There was a sound like fabric being torn, the distinctive rip of rent clothing material. He tried to turn back towards her, but wasn’t fast enough. His hands were gripped and jerked above his head so fiercely that his feet were lifted off the ground. He found himself face to face with Miabi, but now the lower half of her body was that of a snake, and the upper portion was scaled. Off to the side lay the shredded remains of her clothes, which had apparently burst at the seams when she changed form.

“You came in search of a lamia, and now you’ve found one,” she said, forked tongue sliding sibilantly in and out of her mouth. Errol wasn’t entirely sure, but looking at her now, the lamia seemed bigger than he remembered, longer. A new, more frightening thought about the monster suddenly occurred to him.

Before he could focus any more on the notion that had just entered his brain, powerful hands squeezed his own, making Errol drop his weapons. He muttered a word under his breath, and all the torches in the tent went out. He swung his legs up and kicked out at the place where Miabi’s face had been. He was rewarded with the feeling of his feet connecting solidly with something pliant. There was a hiss of pain, and then the hands holding him let go and he dropped to the ground.

The lamia’s tail whipped madly back and forth, knocking over various items in the tent. Errol went to his hands and knees, feeling around in desperation as he tried to locate his dagger or wand. He still had his throwing knife, but he couldn’t see a thing at the moment. Moreover, he was worried that the lamia – like some serpents – might have excellent night vision.

Suddenly, the tent came down on them. It only took a second for Errol to realize what had happened: Miabi’s tail had knocked down the tent poles.

Abandoning the search for the rest of his arsenal, Errol stood up, pulled out his throwing knife, and began slicing open the canvas covering him. He’d only made a hole big enough to stick his head through when someone tackled him and bore him down to the ground. Moreover, powerful hands under the collapsed tent suddenly gripped his arms, making him practically immobile. And all around him came an unmistakable hissing.

Over the next few minutes, he was forcefully held on the ground, face essentially in the dirt, while the tent was raised again in total darkness. His one attempt at rebellion was when he was able to form a spark in his hand and tried to shoot it at whoever was holding him. He missed. The next second, however, his hand was caught in a grip of steel that squeezed unmercifully, grinding the bones together.

“Do that again,” said a voice so close that the forked tongue touched his ear, “and I’ll break every bone in your hand.” Errol didn’t doubt the truth of the words; he stayed quiet and docile.

When the tent was finally raised, Errol was hauled to his feet. That’s when he realized that there was not one but two people holding him – one on each side. And as the torches were slowly lit, he had another revelation. They weren’t people at all. They were lamias.

There were four of them – five if you counted Miabi, who had shifted back to human form. Two of them were holding Errol. Directly in front of him stood Miabi, adjusting a fresh set of clothing she had obviously just put on. To her right stood two other lamias – one in front of the other. The one in the rear he looked at and, after a moment, recognized as Sharn. She met his gaze for only a moment, and then looked away. In front of Sharn stood Tilbi – the murderer. Now that he understood what she was, he could see traces of the young girl in the lamia’s visage, although the similarities were slight.

There was a wicked wound on the left side of Tilbi’s chest, just a little above where her heart should be. It was obviously the wound caused by his dagger. Noting his attention, Tilbi hissed at Errol, fought to get at him. Thankfully, Sharn kept her hands firmly gripped on her little sister’s shoulders, keeping her from going anywhere, and used her own tail to pin Tilbi’s back out of the way.

All in all, Errol realized that the thought he’d had earlier, when Miabi had held him aloft, was correct. He’d noticed that her serpentine form seemed too big to be the lamia he’d actually been trying to catch – which meant that there was more than one. Too late, he now understood that they were an entire family of monsters. (Presumably the two holding him were Miabi’s other two daughters.)

The men, too, it seemed. Thinking back, Errol now grasped the fact that Baro bumping into him earlier as he threw his dagger had been no accident. The knife-thrower had intentionally tried to hinder Errol in order to protect his sister. So much made sense now…

“As I told you, Warden, you can’t have Tilbi,” Miabi said, bringing Errol’s mind back to the present. “We–”

“Let’s just get this over with,” Errol stated resignedly, cutting her off. “No need to drag it out. I don’t need the speech or your gloating.”

Errol felt disgusted with himself. He hadn’t ever really wanted to be a Warden, but he’d taken the responsibilities seriously since his brother had vanished. Now he’d allowed himself to become a victim of one of the things he was supposed to protect the people in his ward from. Thus, he found it odd that he suddenly wasn’t afraid to die (or die horribly at the hands of monsters, which had always been his fear), but rather that he would die a failure. That in death he was letting Stanchion Ward down. That he was letting Tom down.

Miabi looked at him oddly. “Very well, then,” she said. She turned and nodded towards Sharn, whose hands moved up swiftly from Tilbi’s shoulders to her head, and then twisted violently. Tilbi fell to the ground lifeless, head turned almost completely around on her body.

“As I said,” Miabi stated, with tears in her eyes, “we take care of our own.”

*****

Afterwards, Errol found himself alone with Miabi. (Apparently Anru was aware of what had happened, and was in mourning of some sort.) Sharn had returned his weapons to him while her sisters had taken away Tilbi’s body.

“It wasn’t her fault,” Miabi said after a few moments of silence, looking down at her hands. “Not really. I should have seen that she was having trouble with the transition.”

“Transition?” Errol asked.

Miabi finally looked him in the eye. “You know what I am. I make no excuses for it. It’s as nature made me.”

“It’s in your nature to kill innocents?”

“You misunderstand. I am a lamia. I can’t change that. But if I could, I would choose to be fully human. But even if I’m not fully human by your definition, it doesn’t mean that I can’t act that way.”

“Are you trying to say that you
don’t
kill?”

“Neither I, nor my family, wantonly shed blood.”

“And Tilbi?”

Miabi sighed. “You have to understand. A lamia has two great passions in life: children and its mate. When I met my husband, he was widowed, with four children. For a lamia – especially one like myself, who only wanted to love and be loved – it was perfect. In time, I came to have children myself. Fortunately, my sons are all human, but my daughters…well, they’re like me.”

“That still doesn’t explain Tilbi.”

“Like me, each of my daughters has the ability to assume either of two forms – lamia or human. However, the talent for shifting between the two usually occurs around the age of maturity. For Tilbi, the ability to transition came a lot earlier, and with it came some of the natural instincts of a lamia.”

“The desire to find a mate,” Errol guessed.

“Yes.”

“So that’s what happened to the guys here that she killed.”

“Yes and no. Tilbi had just turned twelve – not even in the stage of puberty in her human form. Boys would have been more interested in Sharn than in her.”

Miabi’s comment brought something to mind, illuminating a fact that Errol had paid little mind to.

“Everyone who was attacked. They had all spent time with Sharn.”

Miabi nodded. “Flirting is part of what our girls do. They try to get the local boys to buy our wares, come see our shows, participate in our games of chance. Sharn is very good at it.”

“And Tilbi was jealous.”

“Yes. So she told each of those boys that Sharn wanted to meet them. But then she went to them herself, revealed her true nature.”

“Let me guess, the boys were less than impressed.”

“Terrified would be a better word. And as for Tilbi’s reaction…let’s just say that lamias don’t take rejection very well.”

“But you knew. You knew the night we found that first body. You could have stopped it then.”

Miabi looked at him furiously. “I thought my daughter could still be saved! I thought there was still a chance she could learn to control her impulses!”

“Well, you were wrong, and because of that people are dead.”

“Don’t you think I know that? Don’t you think I feel terrible? But at the same time, Tilbi was a child –
my
child – and she couldn’t control herself!”

There was a level of anguish in her voice that Errol couldn’t ignore, even though he now knew what she was. It reminded him of his recent run-in with the White Widow, and an elemental truth he had learned from that encounter: even monsters love their children.

“So why all this?” he asked. “You were initially planning to leave and take her with you, with nobody the wiser. What changed?”

“Because after she came back tonight, I knew there was no saving her, no getting her to stop. She’d gone feral.”

“Feral?”

“She would never have stopped killing, even if someone did fall in love with her. So we did what we had to do.”

“But why do it in front of me?”