18. Jerrid #2
The dark elf barked a laugh when he saw them. “Now, isn’t this fortuitous. Everything I want handed to me on a flaming silver platter.”
He uttered a curse too foul to speak in front of women and children, and Jerrid wanted to shut his mouth for him, but he remained frozen in place. Silent.
Because that was what he had wanted, wasn’t it?
Jerrid exhaled slowly, his mind a complete blank. What was he to do? He didn’t stand a chance of taking Talos down without Dragon. Who was at this very moment locked up in a box without a key or a lid.
He wasn’t coming to save Jerrid’s hide this time. No one was. He was on his own against a dark elf with magic. Just him and his shade-eaten silence…
Ava shivered in front of him, her palms pressed flat against her sides as she too stood still, probably debating what she should do. If she ran, Talos might kill Roar’s mother. If she stayed, he would probably kill her anyway. And Ava as well. It was his way.
Some monsters were like that. They just liked killing for the sake of it because they could, for no other reason than to make themselves feel power.
They had no choice but to play the game.
Across the bonfire, Echo lifted her head and began to rise, her nostrils flaring, but Jerrid waved his fingers at her. She glared at him but settled down again.
If she went on a rampage in the camp, innocents would be hurt. No, they needed to bide their time.
“What do you want, Talos?” Jerrid called, despising the bleakness in his own tone.
Talos raked him with a frown. “Only what’s mine. You stole my prize, human. Or should I say…dragon.”
No, not anymore, but Jerrid wasn’t about to tell him that. He’d just kill them off all the faster. It was better if Talos thought he might shift at any minute. The memory of the dragon was the only thing standing between him and immediate, unpleasant death.
“Fine. This is between you and me. You can let that woman go. You don’t need her.”
Talos’s tongue flicked over his lips. “Oh, don’t I? You’d like it if I let her go, wouldn’t you? Then you’d do your dragon thing and gobble me up. Well, I don’t like that plan. No, I don’t like that plan one bit.”
It would have been a good plan if Jerrid hadn’t stuffed the dragon part of the plan into an inescapable box.
“Take me instead, then,” Jerrid said. “No one here is a threat to you. They’re just women and children.”
Talos’s gaze flicked over the camp, hovering on Echo’s snarling face briefly before moving on to the huddles of girls around them. “Yes, I can see that. How interesting that we have a whole camp of human girls in the middle of the Shadewood forest.”
Jerrid curled his fingers into tight fists.
“And the children. How strange that they all appear to be half-elvish. One might think that they don’t belong here.”
His gaze returned to Jerrid and lingered, filled with cruelty.
He didn’t care about these girls or why they were here—that they and their half-elf children were on the run from cruel husbands and fathers they’d never asked for.
He only cared because Jerrid obviously cared. And he was going to use it against him.
Talos turned to Ava. “Hello, Ava. I was hoping we’d meet again. We have unfinished business.”
Ava shuddered but drew herself up a little taller, her spine straightening. “I can’t say I feel the same way.”
Talos’s smile turned brittle. “Ah, well, we seldom get what we want in life. Unless you’re me. I have a gift for getting what I want. Good things just…fall into my lap, now don’t they?”
When his gaze roamed over Ava as if she were a trophy in a display case, Jerrid took a step forward.
“Oh, is that why you’re running around the forest afraid for your life?
” he called out, desperately trying to draw attention away from Ava.
“Because it looks to me like all your plans went up in smoke and now you’re a wanted man.
I mean, a wanted elf. Do they have wanted posters in Eroth already with your picture on it?
Do you think they got your face right? You have a really strange face—”
“Shut up!”
Jerrid almost obeyed, but the more he drew attention to himself, the less Talos would focus his eyes on anyone else in the camp. “I don’t want to.”
Talos raked him with a furious glare.
Maybe Jerrid could postpone the inevitable. This was no plan, but what else could he do? He’d banished Dragon, Ava hated his guts, Brynja didn’t trust him, and the girls in the camp were all too young or too scared to be any sort of help in a battle.
Yes, they had superior numbers, but Talos also had flaming fireballs.
And this camp was full of children, so they couldn’t risk giving the dark elf an opportunity to use his magic.
They had no choice but to capitulate unless they wanted someone to get killed.
No matter how he wracked his brains for an alternative plan, nothing came to him.
His brain was a complete, utter blank, filled with nothing but…
Silence.
He’d forgotten what it was like, silence. What it was like to have a place that was his and his alone, a place free of intruders and interlopers. A place free of dragons.
A low, rumbling laugh washed over him, raising goose bumps on his arms, raising the hairs on the back of his neck. His head snapped up, eyes glazing as he realized his mistake.
A place free of dragons, yes, the new voice said around peals of wicked laughter, but you forgot about shadows.