The Glass Gargoyle (The Lost Ancients Book 1) (24 page)

“See, I was ready to let you just go and sit in prison, waste of fine meat I thought, but I was fine with that. I kill her, you out of way, all good.”

Zirtha floated closer, no longer walking, and her feet at least two inches off the ground. “But you wouldn’t stay put. Had to go sticking that nose where it didn’t belong. Not that it will reduce the taste, you see, even nosey people have wonderful tasting noses.” Her accent was gone now too, but that was the least of my worries.

Reaching up, I frantically pulled on the door, but I couldn’t get the handle to budge. The air around me had become heavy and dense as if she was pulling in too much magic in a small space. Or it was the weird odor she was sending out—like rotten oranges buried under a pile of drunken dregs. My vision doubled, then tripled as my eyes swam with tears.

The thing was, I knew all of the known races in Lindor. I knew all of the known races outside of Lindor. I didn’t know what in the hell she was. I was going to be eaten by a cannibalistic dust bunny.

My limbs could no longer hold me, and I slid down against the door. Unfortunately I had a wonderful view of my impending doom as Zirtha marched toward me.

“But whhh….” My mouth gave out as well. Lucky for me my eyes and my brain were both still fine.

“But why? Is that what your last words were? What an epitaph. I’d say it would be fitting for your gravestone, but alas, no one will be finding enough of you to bury. Like so many other diggers, you’ll just wander off. Another vagrant lost to time.” She drifted to the ground, her eyes glowing brightly in the growing gloom of the room as she moved closer. “I don’t know why, and I don’t care. I was hired to keep you out of the ruins. So far I have failed. My employers do not approve of failure, however they not specify how I kept you out of the ruins.” Her tongue worked its way out of her mouth, its thin black tip covered in barbs.

My legs stuck out awkwardly, landing where they did when I lost muscle control. She stooped down and picked up my foot. I was terrified yet oddly grateful that I couldn’t feel anything as she lifted it to her mouth.

An instant later the door behind me rattled as an explosion of gravel hit it.

A stream of color that flew out over my head clarified that. No gravel was involved, that was the sound of a few hundred faeries hitting the door as they all tried to fly in through the girls’ tunnel at the same time. The first wave had flown past Zirtha and were coming back around. I thought I could make out my three faeries, but since they were all covered in war feathers it was hard to tell.

A tiny gray faery dropped in front of me. Short gray fur covered her, and she had a long twitching tail. I’d never seen a flying cat, but this one looked like it. A mini flying cat with faery wings. And a thin crown.

“You stay. My people take eater. I guard you.” She was fierce, the tiny cat-faery, and I had no doubt she meant what she said. But somehow I didn’t think Zirtha would even notice her tiny body as she swallowed us both.

But the stream of faeries kept coming.

Zirtha batted them at first, but didn’t seem concerned. However within moments there were hundreds of tiny bodies flying around her. All armed with sticks. Immediately the old Zirtha appeared. Her eyes changed color, her lips and tongue went back to normal.

“Hello, my little friends…” She held out her hands, suddenly filled with sweets.

As if commanded by an unseen general, the fifty faeries closest to Zirtha charged forward and stabbed her with their sticks. It shouldn’t have done any damage, the sticks were little more than pins.

But judging by the look of pain and fear that flashed across Zirtha’s face, the faeries had some tricks up their tiny sleeves.

As the first wave backed off, another wave of one hundred darted forward. This continued until the entire swarm had hit her repeatedly. Zirtha tried to fight through them to me but the bright wall of wild faeries held her back. She tried to call in spells but something about the faeries was canceling all magic. The room was clearing of the heavy magic feel and the nasty smell, and I had a feeling I could move if I really needed to.

The little gray cat-faery rose up about a foot into the air. She didn’t say anything, but all of the faeries turned toward her. Her staff was larger than the other faeries’ and more solid. She raised it high above her head, then an odor of fresh flowers flooded the room. It must have come from Queen Mungoosey, for that surely was who floated above me. What the smell of flowers and her motions meant I had no idea. However the wild faeries knew. So did Zirtha.

“No, you can’t. You don’t exist. What are you—” Her protestations ended in a cut-off scream as all of the faeries let loose a war cry and dove forward. The pressure in the room grew as the remnants of whatever Zirtha had been pulling in combined with Mungoosey’s elemental faery magic. The moment the faeries’ war sticks all hit Zirtha, everything exploded.

Actually only Zirtha exploded. Tiny pieces of her spread out as the faeries struck, then collapsed back into a small mass. I was extremely grateful at not having been eaten by a giant fanged fluff ball, but I didn’t want to be picking pieces of her out of my furniture for the next few years. Luckily whatever the faeries had used to destroy her pulled the pieces back into one neat pile of dust.

The faeries all circled the area, yelling war screams and thrusting their sticks into the air.

Except three.

Crusty, Garbage, and Leaf all looked quite fierce in their makeup and war feathers, but they were still my girls.

They flew up, then dropped to bow before the small gray queen.

“You have done your people proud.” Mungoosey’s speech was surprisingly clear. “On behalf of my kingdom, we thank you for bringing us this opponent.” Waving her wand, she dubbed all three of my faeries. “You have earned your war blades.” With that she turned back to me and flew very close. “There is much darkness, you will need light. We will watch.” Back to her cryptic self, she flew up and out the tube, the wild faeries whooping and chanting as they followed.

My three faeries flew up into the air and hovered, torn between staying with me and following their queen. Garbage looked to be the most likely to follow, but Crusty drifted back down to my knee. Moments later so did the other two. I did notice that Garbage kept looking up toward the tunnel.

“Is all good, we protect you now.” Garbage finally tore her gaze away from the tunnel long enough to wave her stick under my nose.

“And you did. Your queen was extremely gracious.”

“Yes, she save you.” Garbage gave the smuggest look that would fit on that tiny face, then flew off toward the faeries’ castle.

“Now we never hear end.” Crusty sat forlornly on my knee.

“What did I miss? Aren’t you both happy as well?” Leaf didn’t look any cheerier than Crusty.

“Yes, happy you not eaten,” Leaf said finally. “But it was Garbage’s idea to go find Queen Mungoosey. Now she leader.”

I wiggled my toes to make sure my legs were in working order, then carefully pulled myself up. Crusty didn’t move, just hung on to my pant leg with her free hand as the leg went vertical.

“Hasn’t she always been sort of the leader of you three?” Not that they usually listened to her, but I thought of her as the leader.

“Yes, but now she knows we know.” Crusty let go of my leg, then she and Leaf followed Garbage’s earlier flight path.

I shook my head, I couldn’t figure out faery thinking even when my brains hadn’t been scrambled by a bizarre encounter with a homicidal fuzz ball.

I went into the kitchen to get some much needed drink. When I couldn’t find any booze, I went for lemonade instead. The Dewdrop would be a good idea, but I was more rattled than I thought. My hand kept shaking as I sipped the tart drink.

A pounding on my front door almost sent me into the ceiling beams.

“Damn it! Who is it?” Forcing my hand to set the clenched glass down on the counter I walked over to the door, the death of Zirtha released the spell holding it closed. But I didn’t realize until I was almost bowled over by Alric.

“What the hell has been going on in here?” He was wearing a long black cloak and had the hood pulled up. But there was no way I didn’t know who he was.

The sword I’d seen when we grabbed Sammy was back and pulled half way out of the scabbard. A brace of daggers hung on his other hip, and from various bumps and bulges he had even more weaponry than I could see. Clearly the faeries hadn’t been with him all day.

He’d obviously come hunting something. I just hoped it wasn’t me. From the scowl on his face as he looked me over, I wasn’t sure that it wasn’t.

“What just happened?” He slowly re-sheathed his sword, but I noticed his hand didn’t stray far from the hilt.

Once I decided he wasn’t going to skewer me, I went back to the kitchen and finished my lemonade. Then I answered him. I was getting more than a bit tired of being everyone’s favorite target.

“Zirtha tried to kill me,” I raised my hand as he started to respond. “Oh wait, it gets better. She wasn’t Nirtha’s cousin or whatever she called herself. And she wasn’t whatever weird breed Nirtha was.”

“A Laxiarian, Nirtha was a Laxiarian. Annoying, but harmless.”

I flashed my best glare at him for cutting me off. “Doesn’t matter. Do Laxiarians have long barbed tongues and fanged teeth? Do they have spells that can suck the life right out of a person without touching them? No? Then I stand on my assumption, Zirtha wasn’t one of those.” I went and poured myself more lemonade, the shaking in my hands was finally leaving. Who knew sugar could almost be as good as ale?

“Where is she?” He flung back his cloak to reveal a very different outfit from the previous night. When he’d gone to meet with Covey, I hadn’t even recognized him. Easily could have passed for another academic. Which obviously was his goal.

But now he was the real Alric, or as close to real as I’d ever seen. Black garbed from his boots to his hair. The only thing breaking it up was the surplus of steel weapons hanging off him. He adjusted a few of those items as he sat on my sofa.

“You’re sitting on her.”

“What?” He jumped to his feet and spun around.

I hid my grin at his reaction behind another sip of lemonade. There really weren’t any parts of her on the furniture, at least I hoped not. Zirtha appeared to have imploded back into herself.

“She’s probably not actually there. I think most of her is in that pile of dust. The one you walked through when you charged in here. She exploded. Well, exploded, then imploded.”

Alric swore and bent down over the scattered dust pile. There really wasn’t much there, even less now that his boots went through it.

Just as he began looking for something to wipe the Zirtha dust off his boots, my faeries came flying back into the room. They’d changed out of the war feathers and had put away their war blades. All three lit up the instant they saw Alric.

“Do you see? We did that!” Garbage buzzed around the closest to his head, something she normally didn’t do. She was clearly relishing her new role of leader.

“Well, it wasn’t just—” I started to clarify when all three faeries started violently shaking their heads behind Alric. Then they buzzed forward and swarmed in front of him.

“It was us, we did that.”

“Just us.”

“No one else.”

I narrowed my eyes as I watched all three. “But—”

“Just us.” Crusty flew right up to my face and stared me in the eye. For some reason they didn’t want Alric to know about the other faeries.

“I’m not sure how they did it, but yeah, the girls destroyed Zirtha.” All three tiny faces broke out into smiles.

His lovely green eyes narrowed and he cocked his head. “Really. These three little things destroyed a full Grimarian troll?”

Luckily I’d finished most of my lemonade. “A what? Those aren’t real, they’re children’s stories they could never really exist.” Children’s nightmares more than stories. The creatures were the most vile, vicious monsters ever created by a literary mind.

He smirked. A real smirk. A tall, far too handsome, man of mystery standing in my living room, smirking.

“What’s so damn funny?” I sloshed more lemonade into my glass, then put the jug back without offering him any.

“It’s not funny really, it’s just that’s the first sign of terror I’ve seen from you. It’s good to know that something scares you.” His smile faded. “And it should, she should. Grimarian trolls do exist. But they don’t live in Lindor anymore they were all banished centuries ago. And for one to be here, now… Did she ask about the gargoyle?”