“That’s a different look for you, Abby.” My finger was taut on the shotgun’s trigger. “New hairdresser?”
For once Niko didn’t bury a pointed elbow in my ribs. He knew that manners alone wouldn’t bring us Abbagor’s cooperation. The monster had to be entertained. A bored Abbagor would no doubt try to kill us, but an amused one might play with us first. Give us what we wanted to know. It would make our despair sharper when he took us . . . more enjoyable.
“A memento, Aupheling, keeping your memory forever warm in my heart.” He continued to float with all the grace and charm of a corpse bobbing in the river.
“I don’t know what pumps your blood, Abby,” I gritted with disgust, “but it’s not a heart.”
Niko jumped into the conversation before I could “entertain” the troll further. “We’re looking for something, Abbagor. A crown. Goodfellow says there is very little that passes in this world that you are unaware of.”
After a long stretch of silent contemplation, Abbagor commented with melodious complacency, “True. All falls under my benevolent eye.” He stood upright, in all his self-proclaimed benevolence. Nine feet tall and nearly as broad, he might have been vaguely man-shaped, but he towered over us like a tree. Granted, it was a flesh-eating tree from hell, but I stand by the analogy. The liquid earth cascaded off him, showing more of the twining slate-colored flesh than I wanted to see. The shifting and the rustling of the tendrils made my stomach do a slow nauseated turn. With every unnatural, sinuous movement, I expected to see a flash of pale skin . . . human skin. Slave skin. “You may describe it to me.”
Okay, it couldn’t be that easy; nothing in this life was. And neither was this. We’d come here expecting the troll to put us through our paces, and the game was already under way. Abby wasn’t wasting any time in screwing with our heads. “I have a picture.” Niko held up the sketch with his free hand.
“Ahhh, the Calabassa,” Abbagor said with instant recognition. “Barely ten thousand years old. Modern trash,” he added scornfully, “from a refuse race.”
And now we had a confirmed name for it. That was just peachy. “And that would be?” I asked impatiently.
“The Bassa.” The head, equally as massive as the rest of him, with the upswept ears of a bat, fixed me with its unnervingly unblind gaze. “Your kind, uneducated Aupheling, wiped them out not long after that crown was made. Every male and female, every child, every egg. And then, if I remember correctly, you ate them.” His jaw unhinged into a gaping grin. “Quite tasty the Bassa were, once the poison sacs were removed. The most tender of meat, sweet and mild.”
I ignored the yank of my chain. It wasn’t news to me that in their day the Auphe had maimed, tortured, and killed anyone or anything that had crossed their path. They had; I hadn’t. I didn’t. I wouldn’t.
Whether Flay agreed with me or not was a different story.
“I’m sure it was a hell of an all-you-can-eat buffet, but that’s not what we want to know. If the Bassa are gone, where is the crown now?” Niko and I had decided it was best not to bring up the fact I’d already lost one. If there were two, we might luck out and Abbagor would know the location of the other. If we told him what had happened, he would no doubt lie out of pure capricious spite.
“Its purpose, if it has one, would be helpful as well,” Niko added.
“Both hands out begging.” The troll expelled a huge sigh, the scent of which nearly dropped me. The ointment on my lip didn’t have a prayer of blocking that out. I smelled . . . God, so many things. Vomit and bile, blood and the adrenaline of hearts terrorized to their physical limits. Ripe decay and the sloughing of rotting skin. I smelled a graveyard of the half-dead, I smelled Abbagor’s victims. Viciously, I bit my lower lip until I reached a precarious truce with my own bile.
He was looking at me. I don’t know how I knew that, but he was. “You want and want, greedy little half-breed, but what do you give?” Tendrils began to loosen from Abbagor’s torso with their questing tips twitching in parody of a sniffing motion as they hung in the air.
“I don’t know, Abby. You have my charming company. What else do you want?” I demanded, baring teeth in a humorless rictus of a grin. He wanted to play all right. But for every minute he amused himself, George spent that same minute with Caleb. And that put a serious crimp in my Abbagor fun-and-games tolerance level.
“I want . . . I want . . . ,” he mused as the tentacles crept closer to us slowly and cautiously, showing none of the speed of before. “I want to touch. I want to taste. I want to know what I knew before. I want to know the part of me that is gone.” The tendrils began to drift toward Niko and it hit me in an explosion of fear and rage.
Nik. He wanted Nik.
“No way,” I snarled, immediately putting a pound of pressure on a two-pound trigger. “No fucking way.”
“Be calm, Aupheling.” Soothing, so soothing . . . not. “I only wish to touch. I’ve missed my fairhaired thrall.”
I didn’t need any college to know that “thrall” was a fancy word for slave. I’d have to remember to tell Niko that the next time he nagged me about higher education. “Then touch yourself, you piece of shit. Just wait until we’re gone to do it.” The shotgun was already cocked and I raised the muzzle to point directly at Abbagor’s face.
Suddenly disinterested, the troll turned his head away. “That is my price. A touch for what only I know. Pay or no, I care not.”
“I could make you care, you son of a bitch.” The pound of pressure had gone to one and a half when Niko’s hand closed on my shoulder.
“Wait,” he ordered calmly.
“No, Nik. Absolutely not.” I didn’t have to hear the words to know what my brother was going to say. And I didn’t have to hear them to say no.
“It’s only a touch, Cal,” he pointed out in his most practical tone. Reasonable, logical, and a complete and utter lie. The lightest of brushes from Abbagor’s tendrils could and had resulted in less-than-innocent things. On our first meeting, he had dragged me at a breakneck speed by my ensnared arms and had cocooned Niko so quickly that my brother had disappeared right before my eyes. He had been lost inside Abbagor. He had been gone. A touch wasn’t simply a touch with Abbagor, creepy PSAs aside. And no matter how composed Niko might appear on the outside, he had to be screaming on the inside. I know I would’ve been. Shit, I was, and I’d only seen what had happened to Niko. I hadn’t lived through it as he had.
“No, Cyrano.” I shook my head stubbornly. “It’s not going to happen. So shut up and start chopping.” I had doubts, serious doubts, that there was anything we could do to Abbagor that would force him to talk, but I would rather give it a homicidal whirl than let him touch Niko.
The hand on my shoulder tightened. “It’s a game, Cal. Only a game.” Resolute and serene, but so what? Niko would’ve been resolute and serene at his own execution. “Besides, isn’t it better to know that it’s coming?”
He had me there. It was coming, one way or the other. I had no delusions that the troll was going to let us walk out of here with a smile and a slimy handshake. Then again, feeling that cold ribbon of muscle loop around you in the heat of battle was different from waiting for it, quiet and accepting. Considerably, horrifically different. I shook my head again. “No. Just . . . no.”
“It’s for Georgina.” His eyes held mine, gray to gray. “She would do it for me, Cal. Allow me to do it for her.”
Dirty pool. Honest and true, but dirty nonetheless. “Jesus.” I lowered the shotgun muzzle fractionally and did my best to swallow the apprehension that was a noose around my neck threatening to choke me. “Fine. Do what you want, Nik. You will anyway. Play footsie with the monster all you goddamn please.”
The corner of his mouth quirked at my ill-tempered surrender. “Love you too, little brother.” Not a hint of sarcasm, not a whisper of irony—there was only tolerant affection. Not only had he gotten all the human genes in the family, but all the emotional stability too. How fair was that? “Ve
ry well, Abbagor,” he continued, voice hardening to the unwavering blue of steel. “You have your taste. Ten seconds. Longer than that and you and your tentacle part ways.”
“So bold. So audacious . . . for a human.” Abby was entertained but good now. The mud sloshed around his waist as more tentacles shot into sight. The pit had to be five feet deep. If we tumbled into that . . . if Niko was pulled in, there would be no getting out of it. I hooked the fingers of my free hand onto the waistband of his black pants. It was probably futile as hell, but I did it anyway.
“Bold, audacious, and highly annoyed,” Niko said flatly. “Get on with it, troll.”
“Such an impatient race. Comes from being barely evolved, I suppose.” As the words flowed, so did the tentacles, but they weren’t alone. In his trench, Abbagor moved. Ripples of mud spread sluggishly from his path, releasing a smell of decay so strong that it rivaled the stench that already saturated the place. It wasn’t the by-product of corpses, although I was positive there were plenty of those to be found below the bubbling brown surface. It was the smell of sickness, the putrescence of living flesh, not dead. Abbagor was sick. Maybe I’d done more damage last year than I’d thought. Or maybe Abby had picked up a really bad fungus down here in the swamp. Who knew? But from what I was getting a whiff of, he was rotting from the inside out.
I tensed as the troll approached, but stood my ground. He was moving slowly, cautiously . . . so careful not to scare the kiddies. He didn’t want to ruin his good time, now, did he? “That’s close enough,” I warned with lips twisted in disgust.
“A true Auphe, king of all you survey.” Abbagor had teeth. Fangs actually. I hadn’t noticed that last time. Curving and black as the talons on his hands, they were full of poison, if the yellow dripping from the top two were any indication. “You are the word made law, and I obey.”
That’d be the day . . . the day Abbagor was a particularly pungent fertilizer. Abbagor bowed to no one, not even the bygone Auphe. And a sick Abbagor was only that much more dangerous. I’d seen those nature specials when Niko had refused to turn over the remote. Predators tend to get cranky when wounded. When he’d previously tried to kill us, the troll had actually been in a good mood. I really didn’t want to see a bitchy, disgruntled Abby in action.
Attention back on Nik, Abbagor murmured again, “A touch. Only a touch.” But it wasn’t a tentacle he extended toward my brother; it was his hand. Four or five times the size of a man’s hand, it was held out palm up. And in the center of that palm was a mouth, a human mouth. Pale lips, soft and full. Not just human, but a woman’s mouth. One of his prisoners. How they were dissolved within Abbagor, how they continued to live, I didn’t know. I didn’t want to know. If I did know, I had doubts that I would ever sleep again. Then again, the sight of a rosy pink tongue tip peeking between those lips might have just sealed that deal for me anyway.
It also happened to be the trigger to Niko’s losing it. Of course, a loss of composure and temper came off a lot better on my brother than it would have on me. Lips thinned to nothing and eyes dark with a cold fury, Niko said in a tone that would’ve been conversational if not for the razor edges lining every word, “Remove it from my sight or I’ll remove it from you.” His sword was already in motion, stopping to hover bare millimeters above the clay-colored wrist. The blade hung perfectly motionless, still and sure.
Personally, I was all for the chop. Yeah, big fan of the chop. But Abby gave in, the son of a bitch. “Very well,” the troll sighed dolefully, pulling the hand back. “I bow to your prejudices, human.” Right. “Prejudices,” it would’ve almost been funny if not for the revulsion and horror that saturated the air like a dank humidity.
An especially plump tendril took the place of the hand. Deftly avoiding the naked blade, it rested gently on the back of Nik’s hand. “Ahhhh, I remember. That piquant flavor, so unique. You taste of metal and blood, of green grass and blue sky. And, after all this long, long time, you still taste of . . . me.” The tentacle didn’t curl or grip; it didn’t threaten in any way. At least, not physically. It simply . . . petted. A light caress, a soft stroking, harmless, right? Wrong. Niko’s olive skin faded slightly as old memories came to a boil. It was the faintest of differences, nearly undetectable, but it was enough for me. And by God it was more than enough for Nik. “Okay, that’s it,” I snapped, knocking the writhing cord aside with the shotgun. “You’ve had your jollies. Now tell us about the Calabassa.”
“That was hardly the agreed-upon ten seconds.” As one, all the tendrils retreated with an unnatural speed to wrap themselves back into the whole of Abbagor. “Seven at best.”
“Close enough, you bastard,” my brother said with a deadly calm.
There was going to be a fight—we’d known that going in—but as it stood now Niko just might beat Abbagor to the first blow. And if he didn’t, I was more than happy to move up in line. But at the last moment it looked as if the battle might be postponed for a minute or two. Abbagor was going to speak and there was nothing Abbagor liked more than showing off his knowledge. Funny, you never think of killing machines as being proud or full of an almost human conceit, but sometimes they can be.
A heavy, pregnant silence surrounded the troll like a poisonous fog. Finally, he pronounced with a rippling displeasure, “Disguised cheaters, prating mountebanks.” I recognized that it was a quote, but I couldn’t identify it. Not much of a surprise, considering what I read in my spare time. Didn’t you just hate it when monsters were more literate than you?
“Seek out your kind,” he continued. “They have the Calabassa. They’re quite enamored of baubles.”
My kind. He knew. How could he know already? It was impossible. It had only been a little over a day. “My kind,” I said between stiff lips. “What do you mean, my kind?”
“Not your kind.” The venomous grin gaped wider and the large head tilted in Niko’s direction. “His kind. Gypsies.” Both of us, Niko and I, were half-Gypsy through Sophia, but my human half was easily washed away, it seemed.
“Gypsies? Which clan? And what is so important about the crown?” Niko asked, sword still in hand. “Does it perform some function? Is it especially valuable in any way?”
“One taste, one question.” The mud sloshed as Abbagor took another step in our direction. It looked as if playtime was over. “But here is a question for you. I see all. I know all. I am all. Did you think the passing of the Auphe at your hand would escape me?” Another step, slow and ponderous. “Did you think I wouldn’t know what you’ve taken from me?”
Ah, shit. I knew. We’d destroyed what he considered his only real rivals and, in an odd way, his only real love. At least, we’d thought we had. We’d taken away the battles, the blood, the happy-go-lucky massacres. Yeah, we’d ruined his good time. And now, after playing with us, he was about to ruin ours. Never mind that it turned out the Auphe weren’t completely gone, although they’d apparently kept a low enough profile that even the troll who knew everything hadn’t known about their survival. We could tell Abbagor his information was thirty-six hours out of date, but I sincerely doubted he would buy it. And why would he want to try when it was so much more fun to kill us? As much as Abbagor liked to talk, he liked to kill more. And killing us would be the best part of his day.
But first he had to catch us.
We ran, but not before I fired the shotgun. I didn’t hope to kill Abbagor; I already knew the futility of that. I just hoped to slow him down long enough for us to make our escape. As hopes went, it wasn’t a big one, but you took what you could get. I had time for only two successive shots before the troll was out of the mud and on us. The first shot shredded his neck in a spray of meat and viscous purple blood. The second tore away half of his face, revealing the bone beneath. It only made his grin wider as the flesh peeled away. “Aupheling, don’t go,” bubbled playfully through the blood. “You are all that is left to me now. The last of my nemesis. My companion in pain and pleasure.”
Uh-huh. If only t
hat were true. My shoulder ached from bearing the brunt of the shotgun’s recoil, but I didn’t let that hold me back . . . especially once I saw what the troll had been hiding under the mud. His once-mighty muscled legs were now green mottled bone wreathed in ligaments, tendons, and bands of naked muscle. They also were hosting the occasional chunk of putrefying flesh that stubbornly refused to release its grip. The legs of a corpse, yet they moved—and moved damn fast. It was like seeing long-flattened roadkill come to life and chase you.
With our feet churning up the filth, Niko and I headed for a tunnel opening. It wasn’t the one we came through, but any port in a troll-made storm. We were nearly there when the crude doorway crumbled instantly, collapsing in on itself. For a split second of confusion, I thought I actually had brought that grenade I’d been wishing for earlier. But no . . . a crumpled half of a steel beam was buried in the dirt above where the opening had been. Great. The troll was actually throwing pieces of the bridge at us now, as if the Brooklyn Bridge could spare any. God knew what else he had squirreled away in that pit of mud . . . a small Volkswagen maybe? I’d been accused more than once of having a hard head, but that much of a test I didn’t want to put it to.
Both Niko and I whirled around and split hastily into opposite directions as Abbagor hit the now-solid wall where we had just stood. The blow shook the entire cavern, and more earth and rock showered down. The place was falling apart; a sick troll apparently wasn’t much in the home-improvement-and-repair field. Swiveling, I backpedaled as I fired the shotgun again, this time hitting the monster in the back. If he’d been a man, he would’ve gone down as limply as cooked spaghetti. Of course he wasn’t a man. He was a killing machine whose time had finally come. It was too bad that the extroverted son of a bitch wanted company on that ride.
Back twitching from the shot, he turned and literally exploded into a mass of weaving tentacles, several of which flashed across the expanse between us and wrapped around my legs with astonishing speed. Or it would’ve been astonishing if I hadn’t seen it the last time Abbagor had tried to kill us. Dropping the gun, I scrambled for the knife that had saved my ass with the bodachs. We’d see if it stepped up a second time. I was aiming a quick slice to free myself when I was jerked bodily in the air and tossed. I landed squarely in Abby’s keepsake box.