Lichgates: Book One of the Grimoire Saga (an Epic Fantasy Adventure) (5 page)

A rumble quaked through the library. More books fell. Two shelves pulled inward on the opposite wall, opening like doors and missing the edges of the desk by inches. Beyond the confines of her book-lined prison was a dark cavern, its roof riddled with holes that leaked in the twilight and dripping lines of rainwater. The broken remnants of a white castle tower lay against the side of the cave, most of its bricks crushed to dust.

But Kara had a visitor.

A brunette looked up from where she knelt on the floor. The fading light caught the glint of a golden cross in her hand as flowing curls coursed over her loose white tunic. The stranger paused, watching the library with narrow eyes, but quickly stood and sneered.

Kara forced herself to swallow the rising sting of fear in her throat. She should’ve just stayed in the stupid library.

CHAPTER FOUR

CAGED

Kara’s pulse raced. Her body couldn’t take this kind of stress for much longer. The brunette standing in the cave laughed and slid the gold cross into her pocket.

“It really is my lucky day!” the woman said. “So the Vagabond’s back, now? And it only took a thousand years. We were beginning to think you would never show up.”

Her arsenal of snappy comebacks exhausted, Kara shrugged. The brunette meandered closer, her loose curls sliding over her neck as she gloated. She stopped only when she could graze the Grimoire with her long, pale fingers.

The old leather book imploded at the woman’s touch, scattering its dust in the air. Kara gasped, and the clover pendant’s diamond glowed blue from where it hung around her neck.

“Bring it back!” the woman demanded.

Kara stuttered, unsure of what to say.

“I said bring it back!”

“I don’t know how!”

“Don’t lie to me.” The brunette grabbed Kara’s collar and lifted her to her toes.

She seized the woman’s freckled wrists without thinking. Heat flooded through her hands, just as it had when she pulled the clover pendant out of the lock, and something sparked in her palm. Blue light exploded from her fingers.

The woman sailed backward and crashed against a bookshelf, but Kara fell lightly back on her feet and examined her hands. All of the freckles and wrinkles of her palm were in the right place. There was no sign at all that lightning had just exploded from her fingers.

Books tumbled off the shelves, burying the brunette in parchment and crinkled leather that fell away just as quickly when the woman stood a second later. Her shoulders hunched as she glared, but she didn’t come closer. As much as Kara wanted to run, her feet would not listen.

“How long have you been the Vagabond?”

“Um—”

“You can’t even control what you are, can you?”

“Well—”

A white streak blazed across her vision, and the woman was gone. Something grabbed her shoulder and shoved her into the nearest bookshelf, pulling one of her hands behind her. An itchy material scratched her wrists. Before Kara could take another breath, the woman spun her around. Kara’s hands were now bound in front of her with thick rope.

“Hey! You can’t—”

The woman laughed. “I already did. My name is Deidre. I want you to remember that, because this was too easy. You’ll want a rematch someday, and I’ll be more than happy to oblige.”

Deidre dug her nails into Kara’s arm and pulled her away from the study. The rope wriggled like a worm as Kara struggled. Its fibers dug deeper into her wrists, stinging her fingertips with pins and needles as it cut off circulation to her hands. She stopped resisting, and the rope, in turn, was still.

They turned down a dark tunnel. Kara couldn’t see, and the only sensation besides the moldy damp of the cave was Deidre’s nails as they bruised her skin. They walked for a few minutes, slowing only when they neared the entrance to another passage. Light splashed from it, illuminating gray rocks that cast shadows into the hallway. They walked through, and the glare blinded Kara until her eyes adjusted to the rows of pale gray flame emanating from dozens of torches.

A massive cavern stretched into the expanses above, dissolving beyond the light’s edge into solid darkness. The torchlight illuminated a swarm of ash-gray creatures. The pores on their arms hissed, releasing streams of hot mist that hovered above them. She stopped to gape, but the brunette shoved her forward. Several of the gray monsters snickered or leered at the rips in her clothes.

Something roared nearby. Kara jumped. To her left, two lumbering monsters leaned on their forearms like apes. They loomed over her, their bodies clunky blocks of rock that sent pebbles falling to the earth with each movement. Each had a pair of gaping holes served as a nose. Their lipless mouths cracked and tore as they roared, revealing three rows of stubby teeth.

“What—?”

“Trolls,” Deidre interrupted. “Don’t get too close. We want you in one piece, at least for now.”

The brunette tightened her grip on Kara’s shoulder and turned her toward the trolls. The beasts snorted and shuffled in place, revealing glimpses of a wheeled metal cage that was attached to them with thick leather straps.

One troll lowered its head, leaning closer when Kara passed, and its brown iris shrank as it focused on her with a look of uneasy curiosity. When she was close enough to touch it, the creature lunged, twisting its head to snap at her neck.

Deidre swatted its nose, and it recoiled, screaming. Kara’s knees shook, but her captor continued walking as if nothing had happened, dragging her around to the back of the cage where two gray-skinned soldiers had already opened its gates. Another prisoner sat in the corner of the jail, his hands bound behind his back.

“I didn’t do anything wrong!” Kara said, finding her voice.

Deidre threw her into the cage. “Everybody’s done something, darling.”

The gates slammed closed with a rattle. Kara swallowed hard and pushed herself into an empty corner of her prison. One of the soldiers peered through the bars, eyeing her over the brim of a crooked nose that looked as if it had been broken and left untended more than once in his life. He was easily seven feet tall, and everything about his build was stocky and squared: his jaw, his head, even his shoulders. He muttered something, his words rolling together too quickly for her to understand, and then he shouted in a foreign language to a group of soldiers nearby. They all looked over to where she sat in the mobile jail and laughed.

She draped her tied hands around her knees and tried to calm down, but she was thrown off balance when the crack of a whip sent the trolls and their cage lurching forward. Her cellmate stifled a groan and leaned against the bars, his dark hair sticking to the edges of his olive face.

He was at most a few years older than her but in much better shape, with broad shoulders and toned arms. Though his clothes were torn, there weren’t any scratches or cuts on his skin. He caught her eye and cocked an eyebrow, and it was then that she realized her uncontrollable breath came in quick, shallow bursts. She was hyperventilating.

“Hey,” he muttered. “Calm down. You’ll be fine.”

“Like hell!” She stared out at the throngs of soldiers marching, steam oozing from their pores. “We’re going to die, aren’t we?”

“Relax. We might not. Look at me.”

She glared at him, fitful butterflies dancing a tarantella in her gut.

“Good. Tell me your name.”

“Kara. Yours?”

“Braeden. I don’t mean to be rude, Miss Kara, but what are you even doing here?”

“I was hiking! And then there was this door, and these roots—”

“Wait,” he interrupted, his eyes flitting once over her. “You’re not a yakona? What are you?”

“I’m human! And you’re what, an elf? Are you a yakona?”

He chuckled, but the laugh didn’t make it past the thin wrinkle at the corner of his mouth. He shifted his weight without answering and brushed her leg with his boot.

“Sleep. You’ll need your energy.”

“I couldn’t possibly—” She yawned and rubbed her face.

A sudden rush of exhaustion swept from her toe to her head, as if his touch had summoned it. She leaned into the bars. Her breathing slowed, and she heard him mutter something as she pressed her cheek into the iron. She slept.

A beam of light broke through the corner of Kara’s eye. Her skin prickled with cold, and bits of ice stuck to the ends of her eyelashes. She shivered, and her body swayed, but the cold metal of a rod against her face kept her from falling over in her half-asleep stupor. It was almost like she was still in that cage.

She jolted awake.

A snowcapped dirt road faded into trees behind her, visible through the thick bars of the jail. A white blanket coated the forest to her right as the hot wisps of her breath froze on the air. She shivered.

Her cellmate remained curled in his corner. Behind him, the road dropped off in a sheer cliff shrouded by the fog of a low cloud. The gorge was hundreds of feet deep, its floor masked by a black mist that convulsed and spun. Giant shadows with no shape sped through the haze, churning it.

Braeden stirred, shifting his weight in his sleep. Dark smudges lined his jaw and neck, and he wore a green tunic with dark pants. His clothes definitely weren’t something Kara could find at the mall.

The cage rocked and thudded. The wheels clattered over cobblestone. They passed a tall gate, and its broad doors shut behind them. More gray-skinned men walked along a battlement above the gate, shouting to each other.

Crowded black buildings dotted the edges of the new road, each a dozen stories tall and squished beside its neighbors. Frost sprawled across every window.

Braeden shifted away from her so that, for the first time, she could see his hands. Thick metal shackles dug into his bruised wrists. Trails of a black liquid coursed over the handcuffs, dripping from his fingers onto the wooden floor of their prison.

Something rustled in the far corner. She spun around, but instead of a gray soldier or the brunette woman, she saw only a small white fox. The little creature leaned against the bars and cocked its head, eyeing her as its giant ears flicked around to absorb the trolls’ hulking movements.

The fox trotted over and sniffed the torn hem of her jeans before looking up with its striking blue eyes. She reached out with her bound hands and gently scratched its chin. It hummed with pleasure. Kara grinned.

“At least not everything here is scary,” she said.

The little fox popped its eyes open and stared at her for a moment before it changed shape. Its fur melted away into the wet scales of a red lizard with a single black stripe running down its spine. Kara yelped as the fox-now-lizard creature scurried over the wood and out of sight. She covered her face with her hands and cursed beneath her breath.

She stifled a sob. “I want to go home.”

“Ourea isn’t the sort of place you can leave. It always drags you back,” Braeden mumbled, awake now.

“More comforting words of wisdom?” she asked, peering through her fingers to catch his bruised and battered gaze.

“No. You hardly seemed fond of that.” He stretched his fingers out behind him, and drops of the black liquid fell faster from around the cuffs as he moved.

“What’s wrong with your hands?”

“These shackles have poisoned spikes.”

She whistled. “Wow. Can I do anything to help?”

“No, but thank you.”

“Is that black stuff the poison?”

“I guess you could say that.”

“Is that a yes?”

Braeden frowned. “It’s my blood.”

“Wait, your blood is black?”

Well, it wasn’t the weirdest thing she’d seen in the last twenty four hours. She had yet to recover from those stupid roots and the book that turned its own pages.

“You know, blood is kind of important, Braeden. It’s not usually a poisonous thing.”

“It’s a long story.”

She gestured at the cage. “I’m not exactly going anywhere.”

“I think everything will become painfully obvious if we are headed for the same place, which I hope we aren’t.” His expression darkened, his eyebrows casting a shadow over his eyes. He looked up at her, and a chill crept down her neck.