Luathara - Book Three of the Otherworld Trilogy (8 page)

“Meghan,” he hissed, “there are some faelah in the campground.  I need to go take care of them.”

I sat up, the color draining from my face.  I knew this was going to happen!  This was exactly why I hadn’t wanted to go camping in the first place.

Cade moved to stand up, but I grabbed his hand.

“Wait, I can help,” I insisted.

Sure, the thought of confronting faelah in the middle of the night wasn’t my idea of a fun camping trip, but I didn’t want to be
that
girl: the one who sat quivering in fear as her boyfriend took on the role of knight in shining armor.  I grinned despite my fear and annoyance.  Cade really was my boyfriend now, wasn’t he?

“No, you’ll stay here.”

It wasn’t really a demand, but I crossed my a
rms and narrowed my eyes.  “I'
ve been practicing with my bow, which is in the back of your car, and this is a much more public place than the swamp.  What if the faelah decide to start searching tents?  The people two campsites down from us have a baby.”

Cade hesitated, then drew his mouth in
to
a hard line.

“Alright,” he finally conceded,
draw
ing me
up
so he could give me a quick kiss.

My stomach fluttered again and I was disappointed when he pulled away.

“Put on some shoes and a sweatshirt and follow me.”

I quickly obeyed
and soon we were picking our way over the lumps of my sleeping friends.

“Wha . . ?” Robyn mumbled as she sat up from her sleeping bag.

“Shhh, lie back down Robyn,” I told her.

“What’s going on?” Will grumbled.

Robyn slumped back down and turned over in her sleeping bag.  “Meghan and Cade are sneaking
out for a lovers' tryst
,” she huffed.  “Go back to sleep, it’s probably three in the morning.”

I didn’t correct her assumption, nor did I grow annoyed at her claim.  As much as I would have liked to be fulfilling Robyn’s hypothesis, I had more important things to worry about at the moment.

The sound of the tent zipper as Cade opened it was much louder than I thought it should have been.  We stepped out into the night, still bright with moonlight but obscured by the dark shadows cast by trees, trailers and tents.  Cade took my hand again and we went straight for his car.  He unlocked the door and drew out my bow and quiver, leaving his own behind.  I gave him an odd look, barely discernible in the pale moonlight, but before he could
answer my questioning gaze
, he had somehow flipped the seat bottoms up in the back of his car to reveal an impressive collection of weapons.  My eyes grew wide when he chose a sword.  Not just any sword.  This thing was a good three feet long, plus another foot for the
hilt.
  Cade’s grin told me my jaw had dropped open.

“I need you to pick off the little ones Meghan,” he said.  “Can you do that?”

I nodded numbly, wondering just what we were going up against.  I had a sneaking suspicion it wasn’t going to be those demented gnomes or even one of the bigger things I’d managed to take down over the summer.  I got an arrow ready and started following Cade quietly, my
heart beating a fierce tattoo
against my ribs.  I wanted to go back to the tent and hide under my sleeping bag.  Then I gave myself a mental kick. 
Stop being so pathetic Meg!  You wanted to go with Cade, and besides, you’ll be facing this stuff every day very soon.  You won’t last a week in
Eile
if you can’t handle a few stray faelah.

Breathing deeply to calm my nerves, I crept silently along, always following Cade and keeping my ears open for stray sounds.  I felt a little ridiculous sneaking around the campground in the middle of the night, dressed in my pajamas and tennis shoes, holding a bow like some sleepwalking nerd who had taken her hobby of live action role playing a little too ser
iously.

Eventually we came to a low spot in the campground, only a few dozen yards from the closest tent, the one with my snoring friends in it.  I caught a clear glimpse of the lake in the distance, the
moon pooling in the silver dimples
over its black surface.  A dumpster and several trash cans formed a dark obstruction of the view, and the
dozens of
oak trees clinging to the hilly campground offered many good places for faelah to hide.

A sudden crash sounded to our left as one of the trashcans fell over.  Cade whipped around, keeping his sword low but pointed away from him.  I fought the urge to press myself against his back.  Instead, I lifted my bow and chose an arrow, getting ready to do battle.

A heartbeat later, two small creatures came rolling out of the trash bin, snarling and fighting over a chicken bone.  At first glance they looked like raccoons, but as I watched them I could see they were definitely Otherworldly. 
B
ushy
tails
and
patchy
fur
covered their hides
, but it was the legs and heads that made me blanch.  The
faelahs'
arms looked mummified; shrunken skin stretched over bone, and their heads were completely devoid of flesh.  Cade tapped his sword tip on the asphalt and the horrid creatures stopped their argument to look at us.  I felt my stomach turn.  Bloody eyes
peered out
from gore-stained skulls.

“Now Meghan,” Cade hissed under his breath.

Pushing aside my fear and disgust, I drew my bowstring back, took aim, and let an arrow fly.  It pierced the side of the first creature, causing it to scream in agony.  The other one scrambled to get away, but I had already found a new arrow.  As it tried to scurry up the hill into the shadows, I took aim and released my bowstring.  This time the arrow lodged into the back of its neck.

I grinned, very proud of myself, and it was only when Cade leaned in to give me a one-armed hug and plant a kiss on the top of my head did I realize how badly I was shaking.  I had always managed to stay relatively calm in the swamp, but then again, that was always during the day and practically in my backyard.  Here, it was dark and there were other people who could be immediately hurt.

“You did great Meghan,” Cade whispered against my hair.

I didn’t have much time to enjoy the moment because the dark campground was shaken by the roar of some Otherworldly monster.  Cade’s grip tightened right before he released me and stepped away.  He made ready his sword again, this time positioning it so that its length protected his torso.

“What was that?” I breathed, feeling cold sweat break out on my forehead.

“C
u
thra,” Cade growled, his jaw tight.  “They don’t normally visit the mortal world, unless-”

He paused, so I prompted him,
“Unless?”

“Unless they are sent by someone with great power,” he finished, turning his head to give me a grim look.

S
ent by someone with great power . . .
  The Morrigan.  I gulped, tempted once again to run and hide, but I never got the chance.  In the very next moment the huge beast stepped out of the shadows of the trees.  I think the smell hit me first, that clinging scent of death and rot and evil.  The monster was about the size of a Clydesdale horse and walked on all fours.  Instead of hooves it had long-fingered hands and feet with wicked claws at their tips.  A bedraggled mane ran down the back of its neck all the way to its small tail.  Like most of the Morrigan’s evil faelah, it appeared to have been dead for a week.  Its face, so disturbingly similar to the two faelah I had killed, was broad and ridged with bony spikes.  Saber-like teeth lined its mouth and its small eyes glowed with a malevolent orange.

As if
the Cuthra's
size and muscle mass weren’t terrifying enough, it stopped and stood up on its hind legs.  Oh, it could walk like that too?  Now it could use its long, powerful forearms like spiked wrecking balls.  Wonderful.

“Meghan, I want you to go back to the tent, wake your friends, and get out of here.”

Huh?  My mind was still numb from processing what it was seeing.

“What?”
I rasped.

Cade whipped his head around, his eyes fierce.  “I want you to get out of here!”

“No!” I said without even thinking.  “I’m not leaving you!”

Cade gritted his teeth.  “You don’t understand.  I have to use my
riastrad
against the C
u
thra, so I want you as far away as possible.”

Riastrad
.  Cade’s battle fury.  The same battle fury he had inherited from his father, Cuchulainn.  I had seen it once before, when he had died protecting me from the Morrigan’s mutated hounds.

I placed a hand on his arm and forced him to turn and look at me.  “I have seen you use it before Cade.  I’m not afraid of you.”

His mouth was set in a grim line, the sword in front of him gleaming in the moonlight.  “I don’t want to hurt you Meghan,” he murmured.

I tightened my grip on his arm.  “You won’t.  But I’ll keep my distance just in case.”

Terrified as I was, I couldn’t leave him to fight this battle alone.

His shoulders drooped insignificantly and then he nodded once.  Reluctantly, I stepped back several paces before turning and looking for a good place to watch the battle.  There, behind two boulders marking the boundary of the campground.  My heart was in my throat and I was tempted to crouch behind the stones, but Cade might need my help
. 
I positioned myself so that I faced the monster, then drew an arrow from my quiver.

The creature moved forward, close to fifteen feet tall now that it stood on its hind legs, and swiped at the air in front of Cade with a massive paw, its razor sharp, bear-like claws almost making contact.  It opened its mouth
and let out a great roar, its nose, eyes and throat glowing with red coals like the C
u
morrigs’ had.  My knees went weak again and what little sense I had left spent its energy wondering how this thing wasn’t waking up the other campers.  Perhaps its glamour disguised the sounds it was making, or maybe they thought it was a bear and they were hiding in the false safety of their tents.

I didn’t have much longer to think about whether or not the C
u
thra could actually be heard, because in the next second Cade lunged at it.  I almost screamed as I ducked my head.  What was he thinking?  That monster’s reach was far greater than his and it was obviously much stronger.  When the C
u
thra bellowed again, I
risked
a peek.  Cade was back to where he had started, his chest heaving, his sword, dripping in near-black blood, held
to the
side.  He had managed to cut the faelah, but now it looked angrier than ever.

Cade hesitated, and as I squinted in the pale moonlight, it looked like his eyes were closed and he was trying very hard to concentrate.  The C
u
thra moved forward slowly, back on all fours, twitching its tail like a lion about to pounce.  I wanted to shout out a warning, but then I realized what was happening.  Cade began to grow larger, his hair gathering in spikes.  His arms seemed to dislocate and his eyes grew wild.  The
riastrad
.  When he was done with his transformation, he was a full two feet taller than usual and more closely resembled the C
u
thra than the young man I loved.

The sword he carried looked like a dagger in his hand, but as his battle fury took full control of him, Cade made quick work of the C
u
thra.  It wasn’t an easy fight, not in the least, but I could tell by Cade’s quick movements and the monster’s flagging strength that soon the problem would be gone and we could return to the tent.

As I watched the
fight
from afar, I spotted a few more of those little faelah I’d shot before the C
u
thra arrived.  A pack of them, like rats smelling blood, waited on the outskirts of the ensuing
struggle
.  Feeling a rush of adrenaline, I aimed my arrow and shot.  The first creature squealed and fell to the ground, twitching.  I readied another arrow and took aim at another one.  Twelve arrows later, they were all dead.  I wondered at their intelligence, since none of them fled after witnessing their comrades fall.  Perhaps they were too focused on the smell of blood to
car
e.

“Well done Meghan.”

I jumped.  I had been so fixated on killing the faelah I hadn’t noticed that Cade had finally killed the C
u
thra and morphed back into his more human-looking self.  I grinned sheepishly and glanced up at him.  He looked tired and bedraggled in the torn remnants of his clothes, but not nearly as exhausted as he had the day he fought the mutated C
u
morrig.

He must have seen something cross my face because he asked, “What’s wrong?”

“Oh,” I flapped a hand, “nothing.  I just thought you would look more, uh, worn out after
your
riastrad
.”