Chapter 18
Quinn
“So your idea is that you could distract him?” I said to the pair of impish demons who’d just carried out a demonstration in how they could belch puffs of smoke. “Obscure his vision with the clouds so he can’t tell what else we’re doing?”
One of them nodded eagerly. The other emitted another burp, which honestly barely contained enough smoke to obscure my sight, let alone a giant sea serpent’s. But I wasn’t going to say that to their faces when they were trying so hard to be helpful.
Instead, I jotted it down on the notepad where I’d been keeping track of our allies and their abilities and shot them a grateful smile. “Thank you. I’m sure that’ll come in handy when we confront the leviathan.”
From an indistinct noise behind me, I thought Lance might have muffled a skeptical snort. He came up behind me and kissed the back of my head. “I’ll find more useful beings to bring back,” he murmured. “If I keep searching, there’ve got to be more who won’t turn their backs on the rest of us.”
“You’ve been doing your best,” I reassured him, knowing it was true. He, Crag, and Rollick had only been back at the desert house for an hour or two at a time in between ushering new recruits here. For the first little while, they’d insisted that one of them had to be present at all times to watch over me, but now that we had enough loyal beings prowling around the house that they really could be considered an army, I’d persuaded them that all of them working toward stopping the leviathan was better for my well-being than acting as additional bodyguards.
That didn’t mean I didn’t miss them while they were gone, though.
I gazed out over the desolate landscape where I knew hundreds more shadowkind lurked in the patches of gloom at the bases of the straggly vegetation, around stones and boulders, and everywhere dips and cracks had formed in the dry earth. They were keeping out of sight when they weren’t talking to me, but enough of them surrounded me that my sorcerer energy vibrated in my chest with the sense of their presence.
Unfortunately, the majority of them were lesser creatures or not particularly powerful higher beings who couldn’t contribute much more to a battle than nipping at the leviathan’s heels… or blowing puffs of smoke at him.
A burly, man-shaped being with small tusks jutting from beneath his square jaw appeared in front of me. He flexed his bulky arms and swung his fists a few times through the air. “Maybe I can help pummel him unconscious. I might not be able to do it alone, but if enough of us go at him…”
“We’d have to make sure he falls where the new moving trap can hit him,” Lance pointed out. “Hard to move him anywhere once he’s out.”
I sucked my lower lip under my teeth. “That or just weaken him rather than knocking him out completely. Getting him out of sorts, dizzy and disoriented, would make it harder for him to fight back. And maybe easier for me to use my sorcery on him if I need to.” I tipped my head to the man, who I thought Rollick had told me was a troll when he’d escorted him in earlier. “How hard can you hit?”
He grinned. “When the behemoth had my mind, they only saw half of what I was capable of. I was fighting them the whole time inside, dragging against their commands. Watch this.”
He marched over to a narrow boulder that stood beyond the edge of the yard’s protections, cracked his knuckles, and slammed his fist into the rock. A crack opened up from the top about halfway down the middle of it.
Lance let out an approving whistle. “A leviathan skull is probably stronger than that,” he couldn’t help saying, though. “Also, it’ll be moving, not standing still for you to punch.”
I swatted him. “It’s a start. Don’t become a pessimist now.” But something the troll had said was niggling at me. I studied him as he walked back over to us. “You said that you didn’t use as much strength when the behemoth ordered you to do things. He couldn’t make you put in your full effort?”
The troll grunted. “It felt like a full effort by the time it happened. Just pushing back against the influence meant I used up some of my strength on that. Like punching through water rather than air—the drag holds it back.”
I wasn’t sure I totally followed his explanation, but it sparked a flicker of excitement in me. “Do you think… if you were ordered to do something you wanted to do… that the magic might add more to your effort instead of taking away from it? If it was propelling you forward instead of you fighting against it?”
The troll’s eyebrows rose. “I don’t know. I didn’t like anything he wanted me to do… mostly because he wanted me to do it and didn’t care how I felt about it.” He paused, seeming momentarily wary of me. “I guess we could try and see what happens.”
I swallowed thickly, knowing what an expression of trust it was that he’d even offered. “Are you sure? I know that having any kind of sorcery worked on you would probably bring up bad associations.”
He shrugged, lifting his chin as if in defiance of his own worries. “We’ve got to find out what’s possible. I’d rather have you in my head than the beast that’s tearing up the coastlines.”
I couldn’t argue with his logic, and I didn’t want to. Jittery anticipation was already tickling through my nerves—jittery because I was afraid I might be wrong and my hopes would be dashed all over again. But he had a point. We needed to know if my suggested strategy would work, and as soon as possible.
We had no idea how soon the leviathan might be able to carry out the final stages of his plan and actually drag the Highest beings through the rift he was preparing.
“All right.” I stood up. “I’m not going to exert full control on you or anything like that. I’ll just command you to punch that boulder again, and as soon as you have, the magic should wear off. Nothing permanent.”
The troll nodded, his eyes gleaming. He looked like he was starting to get excited about the possibilities too. Lance hummed thoughtfully, watching us both with a growing smile. I had the impression that an awful lot of the eyes in the shadows were fixed on the unfolding scenario.
I dragged in a breath and drew on the magic twined through my heart. It took no effort at all to throw just a flash of it at the being in front of me. Punch that boulder as hard as you can, I thought as the odd syllables spilled from my lips.
The troll’s muscles twitched, and for an instant I was scared he was going to react to the sorcery with panic or anger after all. Then his grin came back. He strode across the dusty earth without hesitation, heaved back his arm, and flung his fist at the boulder like he had before.
Except it wasn’t exactly like before. This time his knuckles slammed into the stone surface with so much force the rock split right apart. It tumbled over in jagged chunks, nothing left but a stump no higher than the troll’s knees.
He let out a triumphant laugh and spun to face me. “I could feel it! The magic, flowing through me, and I moved with it instead of straining against it. And it was like it was my magic, making me more powerful. How else can you use that power?”
Hope was expanding through my chest, light and fluttery. “I don’t know,” I admitted. “But it seems like it should help with just about anything we want to do.”
The impish demons might be able to produce more smoke. Lance might be able to lunge faster, Torrent wrench harder with his tentacles. The magic that most sorcerers used to constrain the shadowkind might also be capable of boosting their supernatural abilities, transforming them into even stronger versions of themselves. The irony of it provoked a giddy chuckle of my own.
I might have continued the experiment, called for more volunteers to see what other ways we could make this new discovery work for us, when a few beings wavered into sight about a half a mile from the house, one of them letting out a shout of warning.
“Hey! We’ve got a sneaky one here. What should we do with him?”
Three of the figures I recognized as beings who’d volunteered for the security patrols: a svelte guy I believed was some kind of large cat shifter, a skinny harpy woman with slate-gray feathered wings and taloned feet, and the beefiest member of the selkie clan Crag had sent our way. It was the selkie who’d hollered. I didn’t understand what he was hollering about until he tugged a much smaller figure in his grasp into better view.
The petite man whose neck he was clutching didn’t stand much higher than the selkie’s waist. But it was the reddish-gold curls and his forest-green suit that made him instantly identifiable.
I stiffened where I stood at the same moment as Lance hissed through his teeth. “The leprechaun,” he snarled.
The small, spritely man who went by the name Goldie had been a friend of Torrent’s. Had, because not long after I’d first met him, he’d sold us out to the villainous duo’s minions. I’d never expected to see him again, and I couldn’t say I particularly wanted to.
But he must have come out here looking for us for a reason.
“Are you sure he’s alone?” I called across the scrubby field. “And no weapons or anything dangerous on him?”
“Just him,” the harpy confirmed. “I flew around to scan the area and make sure of it before we brought him over. He says he has an important message, but he wouldn’t give it to anyone except you or the kraken and his friends.”
I gritted my teeth but waved them over. “Keep him at a distance, but I’ll talk to him. I’d rather not have to scream the whole conversation. All three of you, stay on guard around him.”
Lance shifted into dragon form to encircle me with his scaled body like a living shield. I rested my hand on his shoulder, feeling the distrust and protectiveness radiating off him as our patrollers led their prisoner closer.
“He’s been in with the leviathan and his lackeys,” I said in an attempt at reassuring him. “He might know something useful. He did use to be Torrent’s friend.”
Lance’s growl told me exactly how little that fact warmed him to the new arrival. I didn’t disagree with him. But I could admit that Goldie hadn’t seemed totally happy about the whole betrayal business. He’d been risking us killing him where he stood by coming out here. His reasons had to be important. We’d just be careful about the conversation.
I held up my hand when the group was about twenty feet away. Crossing my arms over my chest, I stared Goldie down. His face looked ruddier than I remembered under that heap of curls, and now that he was closer, I could see that his suit had gotten scuffed and torn. The best smile he managed was tight and pained-looking.
“Thank you for giving me a chance to speak,” he said, looking right back at me without flinching. “It’s been a long time, with a lot happening in between, and I know we left things on a very bad note the last time you saw me.”
“The last time I saw you, you were arranging for me to be kidnapped and eaten,” I replied. “I think ‘a very bad note’ might be understating the situation a little.”
His smile pulled into a grimace. “Yes. Well. I’m free of those degenerates now. I wish they’d never gotten a hold on me. I don’t like what I’ve seen of them since at all. You seem to be doing something to make their lives harder, so I figured if there was anyone to tell what I know, it’d be you.”
“And what do you know?”
Goldie rubbed his mouth, wincing when the selkie tightened his grip on his neck. “The big serpent doesn’t think he’s got enough power to pull off his plan yet,” he said with a cough. “He’s figured out that there’s a bunch of top sorcerers living in Norway. He might be headed out there already to look for them. I don’t want to think about how it’ll tip the scales if they’re really out there and he finds them.”
The blood turned cold in my veins. I knew for sure there was an enclave of powerful sorcerers in Norway—and that they wouldn’t have a hope in hell of defending themselves against a creature as ancient as the leviathan. It was possible he wouldn’t find them, but Rollick had managed to locate their home with very little information to go by, so I didn’t think we could count on the monster failing.
I’d hated what I’d seen there. Those sorcerers were monsters too. But having the leviathan chow down on them and absorb their magic was just about the most horrible outcome I could imagine.
He might not be quite strong enough to summon the Highest yet, but after that grand feast?
I tensed against the nausea rising through my abdomen. “Why should we believe you?” I asked, and then remembered I didn’t even need to get into those kinds of questions. I could confirm the truth of his statement in a matter of seconds.
Squaring my shoulders, I gathered my own magic and opened my mouth. Tell me why you’re really here.
My voice pealed across the terrain in those strange sounds of the sorcerous language. The energy smacked into Goldie’s head without any resistance—he wasn’t under the leviathan’s control.
The leprechaun shivered, and his mouth popped open. “I’m afraid of what’ll happen to this world if the leviathan gets what he wants. I was hoping the warning might help you stop him. And that maybe I’ll be a little less likely to get killed if I’m on your side instead of his.”
The selfish admission at the end fit what I knew of his character. And I didn’t think he could have lied while my magic was compelling him. But that didn’t mean what he believed he knew was the truth.
“How did you find this out?” I asked him in my regular voice.
Goldie spread his hands. “After our last encounter, those brutes hauled me off to the leviathan, but I managed to keep a very low profile among his minions. And he didn’t have much use for me. He forgot I was there, and his magic wore off eventually. He also didn’t notice me around when one of his other slaves gave the report about the Norway sorcerers. I saw how interested he was. It’s not like it’s a secret what he’s done with other sorcerers and why.”
No, I supposed it wasn’t. That didn’t sound like a staged conversation. I bit my lip.
Even if it wasn’t guaranteed to be true, I needed to warn the enclave. If they got out of there in time, holed up in some other country where the leviathan didn’t know to look for them, maybe he’d never find them.
But how in the world was I going to send that warning—across the ocean, to people who’d enslave or slaughter any shadowkind that crossed their paths?