The Heart of a Monster: The Complete Series

Chapter 12

Lance

We tumbled through the rift over a series of sprawling green hills that sent a crisp herbal smell into the air. I soared down through the shadows and twisted in a last-second flip to land in a patch of gloom at the edge of a boulder, enjoying the sensation of moving through the fresh mortal-realm air even in my invisible state.

I spun around to face Torrent and Crag as they descended the short drop from the rift after me. I had the vague sense that it was night in this area, but some sunlight still gleamed along the horizon.

“This is that Norway place?” I asked.

Torrent nodded, studying the landscape around us. “The country where Quinn thought the special group of sorcerers she heard about might be based. It’s not that big a country. If we were able to come out here without her command pushing us back?—”

I perked up with a burst of eager energy. “Her orders have worn off!”

Crag made one of his usual grim expressions. “Or she’s left, so we’re not so close to her that it’s a problem. How long has it been since she planned to come here?”

Torrent hummed to himself. “I’m not sure. Let’s find the nearest human habitation—there’ll be some clue there.”

I never paid much attention to the passing of days anyway, and it was particularly hard to keep track in the shadow realm, where there was no night and day, only that endless sort of twilight. It was good to be back. Good to think that maybe I could return to Quinn soon… even if the memory of her aiming that twisted power at me sent a shudder right down the center of my body.

But even as I tensed up inside, the ache of being without her pealed louder. I needed her, needed to be stroking her smooth skin and nuzzling her soft hair, needed to hear her gleeful laugh and the gentle voice she used when she was worried about me. I needed to make sure none of the beasties out there had gotten their claws into her in a much more vicious way than I ever would.

I needed to understand why she’d forced me to leave. How could she have turned that awful magic on me when she’d been so upset about how others had done the same thing? How could she think I needed protection, like Torrent said she must have believed?

I would get answers. I leapt after the others through the swaths of darkness, doing my best to ignore the jitters passing through my nerves.

There were other sorcerers around here somewhere. Powerful ones, maybe ones who taught new sorcerers how to bend our wills and enslave us. The thought set my fangs gnashing and my ghostly claws digging into the earth, and at the same time it made me want to whirl around and dash as far as I could get from any of them.

No. Torrent had found me, and we’d found Crag, and we would stick together. Once we’d just worked together, but now we were something more than that. We were tied to one another by our feelings for Quinn, but our association went beyond that aspect too.

I liked them. I trusted them. They’d helped me when no other being would have, and I’d helped them when I could as well.

I’d also hurt them. My gaze slid to the impressions of Torrent’s tentacles moving through the dusk, knowing that one of the tips was mangled beyond repair by my fangs and fiery breath, and a fresh surge of horror welled up inside me.

I shoved it away and pushed onward as if I could run away from that memory too.

Quinn hadn’t blamed me. Torrent and Crag hadn’t either. But how could I not blame myself? It’d been me, too weak to fight off the sorcery that’d slammed into my brain. Me who hadn’t been prepared enough to fend it off. My fangs and claws that’d slashed at both of them.

I would have killed Quinn if they hadn’t stopped me. If?—

I stiffened up just as I started to fling myself at a shrub we were passing with the urge to savage its brambles. To show I decided how I wielded my body now. I yanked myself away with gritted teeth, checking whether Torrent had noticed my lapse.

Going around destroying things and picking fights didn’t help anything. I knew that, even if part of me still wanted to do it. My limbs itched with the uneasy restlessness.

“There’s a cottage,” Torrent said, veering to the right.

I trailed behind him and the gargoyle, burning off as much of the anxious energy as I could by taking unnecessary twists and turns to stretch my body. At one point I nearly crashed into a mortal animal that sensed me even through the shadows and hissed with a flash of pointed teeth. I snarled in return and was about to launch myself at it when the cuff of Crag’s fist against my shoulder brought me back to the task at hand.

“Torrent’s going in. Come on.”

Chagrinned, I hustled after him to the wall of the cottage. It must have been night, because snores were carrying through the one window that was cracked ajar. Torrent had already vanished inside.

I circled the cottage, eyeing the weather-worn walls and the bed of flowers out front, but I’d only completed the circuit twice when Torrent emerged. He shook himself, flexing his tentacles. I could tell from his voice that he wasn’t pleased.

“It’s been more than a week. Plenty of time for her to have come and gone.”

He paused, and I immediately filled in what he hadn’t said with my mind. There’d been plenty of time for the sorcerers to have done something to Quinn that’d take her out of this world too.

“If she died, her magic would die too,” I said, my lips drawing back with a growl. “When was the last time we felt it repel us?”

Crag drew his massive form taller as if to command our attention. “We can’t make any assumptions from that. Hundreds of miles could be a fairly small distance compared to the entire mortal realm. It’d be easy for us not to have stumbled on that boundary.”

“We need to be sure. We?—”

“We will be sure,” Torrent said in his firm but even way, so calm the growl faded in my throat. He rubbed his jaw thoughtfully. “If she came here and already saw the sorcerers or never found them at all and then left, she’s most likely gone back to America, where she’s most at ease. And where Rollick’s most current resources are. That’s where our enemies were making trouble. Once she finished with her investigations here, why wouldn’t she return?”

That made sense. I spun around tightly enough that I could have snapped at my own tail with my jaws. “Then we go to America and see if we feel her magic pushing us away. Or should we track down these sorcerers first?”

Just asking the question made my skin bunch up beneath my scales. How many beings did that group have under their control? Would they try to grab our minds too? I wanted to snarl at myself for suggesting it, and to slash my frustration into the earth, and?—

“We don’t know where to start beyond getting to this country,” Torrent said. “If Quinn didn’t find them, then I doubt we could, and if she did, then she’s already got it covered. I say we head to Jacksonville first and work from there.”

He glanced at us as if checking for our approval rather than insisting on the course of action. Crag rumbled his agreement. I blinked at Torrent and then nodded too, although I’d have gone along with whatever he suggested.

Torrent always had good ideas. I’d have followed him to track down those sorcerers if he’d felt we needed to… but I couldn’t promise what I might have done to them if they’d come within reach of my claws.

“Good. Let’s go, then.” Torrent turned back toward the rift we’d emerged through.

Thankfully, moving in our shadow forms didn’t take up much energy. We traveled across the rolling landscape, leapt up to the rift, and then darted through the hazy plains of the shadow realm until Torrent found another rift he was satisfied with. When we sprang through that one, we found ourselves on a beach with salty ocean air wafting over us and the sun just setting beyond the buildings on the western horizon.

This was the city where we’d first watched Quinn. Where she’d clambered to the top of those tall buildings and looked so pleased as she gazed out over the city.

A pang hit me: the longing to have joined her properly for one of those expeditions, to have listened to her tell me what she loved about the view. And maybe to have offered some additional thrills near one of those precarious edges.

Then I registered that we had come out, and we were here, and nothing was deflecting us. But that didn’t mean anything. She simply might not be here.

“If she’s still with Rollick, they could have gone back to his favorite city,” I pointed out, lashing my tail. It was hard to say whether I’d rather she was with Rollick for the protection he could provide or far from him after the ways he’d manipulated her in the past.

Torrent gestured to the rift. “We’ll check there next. She said we had to stay ‘hundreds’ of miles away, so two hundred at a minimum. We’ll keep moving from city to city until we’ve covered every two-hundred-mile span or encountered the barrier of the spell.”

And if we never encountered it? I bit back the question as a renewed wave of restlessness swept through my body. How would we find her then? She could be anywhere. She might not even be alive. But Torrent and Crag knew that as well as I did. What was the point in saying it?

The ache of longing inside me spread through my chest with each rift we slipped through. The place called Los Angeles offered nothing of interest. We emerged into desert and forest and flat plains of golden grass, small towns and soaring cities.

My spirits had sunk when we approached what must have been the twelfth or so rift—and my senses jarred on the threshold.

My eyes widened. I whipped my head around to look at the others. “I can’t go through. She must be close—close to wherever that rift leads to.” And wherever that was, she was alive.

“I feel it too,” Crag said gruffly.

A smile crossed Torrent’s face briefly before he became stern again. “This one opens out to just north of New York City. She’s in the northeast, anyway.”

But we still had no idea exactly where. Or what she was doing there. Or if she was okay or simply hanging on to the barest thread of life after some major injury.

I pushed closer to the rift, unable to deny the impulse to tear my way through to her. The magic that’d clamped around my skull with Quinn’s sorcery-laced voice clutched me harder, but I thought I felt a bit of a wobble through it that hadn’t been there when I’d tried to double back to her before. I shoved myself even farther into the rift and caught just a glimpse of blue sky before my body forced me to recoil.

“It’s getting weaker!” I rasped with uncontainable excitement. “The spell is wearing off.” Hopefully that didn’t mean there was something wrong with her. We’d expected the sorcery to dwindle over time on its own, after all.

Torrent’s eyes glimmered with a trace of hope. “Then we’ll stay nearby, figure out the exact boundaries we can’t cross, and see what we can do to help her in the meantime. There are other rifts in this area.” He paused. “Will you be okay, Lance? It might be… frustrating knowing she’s there but not being able to reach her.”

I understood why he was asking. The memory lingered in the back of my head of how I’d been careening around the shadow realm when he’d found me. Even now, my muscles were straining to fight the magic keeping me from Quinn with all I had.

But if I made a disturbance in the mortal realm, that could be bad for her and the three of us too. It could draw our enemies’ interest. Or sorcerers’ attention. Or who knew what else.

I closed my eyes and stretched my limbs one at a time, exerting my will over each of them in turn. The need to see Quinn, to hear the answers only she could give me, still jangled inside me, but I would control it. If I couldn’t command myself, how would I ever stop sorcerers from enslaving me again?

“I’ll be good,” I said, and flashed a fanged grin at Torrent. “Let’s get back to our woman.”