Green Agate Pretender Read online

  Dragon fire is more worrisome than napalm, burning hotter, clinging desperately to everything. I knelt and swung my hands down to the floor of the red shell. I pulled the rampaging flame there, concentrating on the spikes. Yellow brass, they slagged faster than iron would have, which was good because the dragon fire consumed the oxygen outside the shell. I pulled my extinguished hands back inside as the red sphere settled to the stone floor, resting in a puddle of molten metal.

  A little bit of mental work, some quick redrawing of the barrier spell pattern I wore, and the sphere became a column around me, bridging floor to ceiling. The space around me narrowed as I willed the chimney to pierce the ceiling.

  Like a mountain climber in a rock crevasse, I put my back to one side of the barrier, and my feet on the opposite side. Knees constantly bent, my body tense, I walked up the chimney to the hole I’d made. I killed the barrier spell as I reached for the pierced floor. I hung by one hand. Then both. The heat of the lower chamber now reached me. I ignored it as I pulled myself into a dark chamber. The only light came from the heated room below, radiating through the hole I’d made. My dragon eyes processed this so I soon found a door into the main keep.

  I went into a hall not regularly used. There were no torches or lamps spaced out to provide light. I grabbed my dangling machine pistol, activating the laser sight. It’s thin emerald beam stabbed out. My dragon eyes double-processed the light. The space shone bright green: one problem solved.

  I listened for the sounds of running guards. With Kellyn in charge again, her loyal troops—those not dead—would be freed, scurrying about under her command. Her tie to the land would soon tell her where the Pretender hid. She’d be on him in no time; I just had to go where the chaos roared heaviest.

  Before joining the hunt, I stripped my upper body, then replaced my shoulder holsters over bare skin. My shirt and parka were tied around my waist by their arms. I hung the machine pistol around my head and one arm, using its strap.

  With a thought, I triggered a partial-change, growing out miniature dragon wings that could carry the weight of my human body. Following a burst of agony, blood dripped down my back. New bone growth from my shoulder blades formed the skeleton structure of wings with bat-like ribbing. New muscle, arteries, and veins filled in, and lastly, skin like leather.

  Experimentally, I fanned the wings, testing their motion. They were wet with blood, but drying, strengthening, and unimpeded by the harness I wore which left the back open except for a single strap just below collar level, high across my shoulders. My PX4 Storm semi-automatics rode in their holsters against my upper ribs. I carried the machine pistol in hand, jogged along in its laser light.

  In the end, howling icy winds drew me deeper, lower into the keep. Along with the temperature drop, snowflakes flurried in the air. I came out in a courtyard abutting an open space overlooking a lower floor. It had been a store room. Now it was a mess of broken crates, and scattered bags of grain, some of them slashed open by swords. In the middle of the floor, surrounded by guards, the Pretender stood defiant in his green agate crown.

  The guards wanted to fall on him and beat him bloody before handing him over to the queen, but he stood in a pool of light that hid his legs from the calves down, like he was holding court in a kiddie pool. The pool was actually a portal; the raging a wind due to a difference in air pressures.

  The Pretender’s breath frosted the air as he bid the wary guards farewell. “It has been fun. Tell the queen I appreciate her entertaining me so well.”

  Kellyn emerged from the shadows. “Tell me yourself, craven dog. Better yet, face me in a fair battle, now that my powers are mine again!”

  He took a step back from the edged tones of her venomous voice. Looking down on them, I could feel the force of her killing intent. As the Pretender retreated another step, he seemed to sink a little more, the aqua glow rising up his legs, past his knees. I estimated he’d be gone by the time he reached the center of his pool, still several steps away.

  I stood by two arched pillars that were connected by a waist-high wall. With moments left to act, I hopped up on the wall and leaned out, dragon wings arched over me as I sighted with my weapon. It sent a green beam slashing downward that was lost in the aqua glow to all those without dragon eyes, able to see the targeting dot on the Pretender’s upper thigh.

  I squeezed the trigger, sending two rounds burrowing into his meaty flesh. He gasped, and screamed, leg buckling under him. He sprawled, head and shoulders still visible in the pool of light. The guards pulled back, their first instinct to protect their queen.

  She screeched at them. “Get out of my way, fools!”

  I fell into a glide, wings fanned, and let the machine pistol dangle by its strap. I wanted my hands free. He crawled toward the center of the pool, almost there…then I was on him, my knees in his back, my hand on his head, grinding his face into…the floor? Nope. No floor. We fell through the aqua light, as if it hid a hole.

  I didn’t know where the portal would open, and who’d be there down a conduit between realities. I thought this might be the way Izumi had gone. I hoped so. I didn’t know who awaited the Pretender’s return, but expected the worst.

  Step by step, body by body…that’s always the way to go.

  I smiled. There was one thing I could do by way of disarming this fool. My fingers were buried in his hair, touching his crown. I knew it for a magic relic of some kind, possibly the source of his power. I took the opportunity to pluck it off his head.

  And then we were spit out of the portal, at a right angle to the direction we’d been moving. We rolled across a gray moss expanse. I felt the rock underneath. There was a last bounce that pitched us up a bank. Flailing with my wings, I recovered, wobbling through the air to the opposite side of a little creek.

  The pudgy usurper splashed into the water, sprawling in the lazy current. “Ah! For woe’s sake, that’s cold!” The water looked about six inches deep. The bullet hole in his leg stained it red. Without seeming aware of me, he swished in the water, searching. “Dropped the damn crown. I’m going to need that.”

  I took a second to look around. We were alone in a cathedral-sized cavern. The walls and ceiling were distant, the rock mottled with growths that gave off a yellow-gray light. There were a few drifting balls of pastel light in the air, Will-o’-the-wisps. They drifted in zones of pink, purple, blue, and green—all of them keeping their distance.

  I pointed my machine pistol at him. “Stand up slowly. Get out of the water.”

  He froze, then turned to look up the bank at me. “You’re here?”

  “Obviously. Where’s Izumi.”

  “I really can’t say.”

  “Can’t or won’t? Because, if you won’t, I’m going to have to get creative.” I pointed the laser sight at his good leg. “I think you need another bleeding hole in your body. Maybe several.”

  “Wait, wait! Let’s not be hasty.” He struggled up, scowling with pain, and managed to stand with most of his weight off the wounded leg. His gaze slid to the agate crown in my left hand. “Give me the crown so I can heal myself, and I will do all I can for you.”

  “Izumi?”

  “The portal dropped her here days ago, but obviously, she’s wandered off. The Will-o’-the-wisps probably know where she went. You should ask them.”

  “You’re not giving me any reason to let you live.”

  “I know how to use the crown. My skills will be needed if we get too close to the Heart of Underhill. There is little that survives that place for long. If she’s gone there…I alone can save her.”

  All this time, he’d been backing toward the wrong bank. I think he had some healing power of his own. He seemed to be putting more weight on the bloody leg. I figured once he got out, he’d try to lose me by hiding in his magical glamour.

  I let him scramble over the far bank. He fell down, as if his leg had given out, and vanished in an illusion of gloom and empty air.

  I thundered my wings,
hopped the stream, and landed, turning toward the blood-scent my half-dragon olfactory senses pulled in. I followed that smell, pointing my green laser beam at the source. He hid his image, his sounds, his breathing, but he’d forgotten about smell, or he just wasn’t that strong a fey.

  My gaze never left the nothingness he occupied. As he moved, I stayed close by. “You can’t lose me,” I said.

  His hand emerged from the glamour, appearing to hover in the air all on its own. He gripped a silver dagger. He flung it at me.

  I deflected it with the agate crown, and gave him a burst of automatic fire. He fell dead to the cavern floor, getting off way too easy. Izumi was more important than wasting time with torture, as fun as that would have been, so I pushed on with only logic to guide me.

  The Pretender seemed to be on his own, but he could have entrusted Izumi to someone to keep her prisoner as a valuable hostage. Anyone living down here would need water. They’d probably stay near the stream. And if Izumi was on her own, she’d have followed the stream as well, knowing it could guide her to the surface.

  I left the body behind me for whatever wanted to come along and eat it. Fairy had her monsters, her creatures born of magic; children of darkness and nightmare as well as wonder. I could only hope Izumi’s ice magic still worked. Her portaling power didn’t, or she’d have returned on her own long before now.

  The Pretender had talked about a place where magic broke. I had a gut feeling it wasn’t that far off. Fortunately, my magic wasn’t fey. I had the shadow power of my father’s Villager dimension, and the dragon magic of my mother’s people, making me a half-dragon warlock. There was no reason to think that the broken heart of Fairy could break my power. Of course, that still left a huge challenge due to the dwarfing power I’d be up against.

  My best hope was that the chaotic Heart of Fairy would work against itself as much as me.

  My green laser beam led the way as I walked with the gentle gurgle and splash of the stream. I put the crown on my own head so I wouldn’t have to carry it in hand. The moment it settled, a new sensation bloomed. I had a tie in my own land that I could feel when there. This far out-country, I shouldn’t have been able to feel it—but it called, there in the darkness, a ghost hovering just out of reach. And other ties were there as well. I felt the varied energies and knew I could go straight to them any time I wanted. I had a link to all the ties through the crown. I also sensed how they’d been broken from a whole, and could be fitted back into place.

  I chuckled in a rather evil way as all the possibilities of this new power opened up to me.

  The Will-o’-the-wisps kept their distance as I passed. The stream took me through several jags, then downslope to another rock chamber where a ridge diverted it to the left and right. There was no way to determine the way I ought to go. If I guessed wrong, it could cost Izumi—and our unborn child—their lives.

  The wisps might know, but unlike Elves, they could lie quiet freely, and were not known to be helpful. I wanted them to forget me quickly, and not mention I was around to anyone.

  “Better flip a coin.”

  THREE

  “People really need to stay

  down when they’re dead.”

  —Caine Deathwalker

  In the back shadows of my mind, golden eyes opened. I heard the whisper of rubbing scales as my inner dragon stirred awake. His thoughts touched mine: The stream is moving downward from chamber to chamber. Don’t you think she would have noticed this, and known she was moving further and further from the surface by going this way? She probably moved upstream to begin with.

  “I don’t want to believe that,” I said.

  Why not?

  “Because it tends to make me look stupid for not thinking of it earlier.”

  I turned and followed the stream the way I’d come. Back in the cavern of the fairy lights, I found them hovering over the spot where I’d left the Pretender. He was on his feet, alive again, talking to the Will-o’-the-wisps. “Keep looking. It’s got to be here somewhere. I need my crown. The Crone will be angry if I’ve lost it.”

  I thumbed-off the green laser sight so I wouldn’t draw attention, and pulled golden dragon magic along my skin to the Demon Wings tattoo across my upper back and shoulders. The tatt activated and my You-Can’t-See-Me spell kicked in. It was my version of fey glamour, and it eliminated detection by all senses.

  My inner dragon commented: Odd. Doesn’t he remember that we took his crown away?

  I answered. Death trauma, physical injury, can sometimes induce a bit of memory loss. He might not even remember getting killed.

  I skulked through the heavy gloom, strolling past him, following the stream toward higher ground. I thought eventually, the wisps would tell him about me, and then he’d be off, tracking the wrong way. In a way, it was good he still lived; Kellyn would have been disappointed if she couldn’t be the one to end him—slowly, after weeks of torture.

  I reached an arch to a new cavern system and went in. The footing became rougher with small boulders and loose gravel. The stream made the best road so I stepped into the cold water and pushed on. There was enough of the fey lichen on the rocks to give me a wan yellow-gray glow to travel by. I thought about using the laser sight again, but decided against alerting anything ahead to my presence.

  I found a carcass lying on its side. The thing was a blue-scaled pony, a pooka, known to lure humans into the water where they could be drowned and eaten. Just a little bigger than a Shetland pony, it lay half on the bank, its hindquarters in the stream. I kicked it over, looking for a wound. Nothing. I picked up the head. The mouth was packed with ice. It had suffocated.

  The ice gave me hope that I was on Izumi’s trail. That hope carried me several hours through the darkness until the stream became enclosed in a wall. Higher, the wall didn’t quite reach the ceiling of the cavern. There seemed to be caves up there, maybe a way back to the stream. Off to the side, I found crumbled ice. Enough of a shape remained to suggest a kind of ice ladder had been used. It suffered from melting, the temperature underground not cold enough to preserve it. I flapped my wings, leaping with dragon strength and streaked up the rock face, into the wide mouth of a cave.

  And there was Izumi, curled on her side, eyes closed, her head pillowed on a small snowbank. Her torso swelled and compressed as she breathed deeply in sleep. She was in her fey form, no longer passing for a Japanese snow woman as she did on Earth. Her usually black hair was white, as were her eyelashes. Her skin was porcelain, shadowed with pale blue. A silk cloak covered her. Her hand poked out, a small pool of light generated by the moonstone of her enchanted ring.

  A fierce tension I’d carried for hours broke within me. I relaxed seeing her alive and well. I stepped closer and knelt, folding my wings against my back as I reached for her.

  A deep green shadow rose up from behind her body. It had solid, pale green eyes like creamy jade, and a female form.

  I speed-drew a PX4 Storm semiautomatic and thrust the muzzle into the shadow’s untextured face, expecting an attack.

  The shadow smiled as if to say: Isn’t that cute?

  And I was gone, back at the ridge that divided the stream. I had that last journey to make all over again. Some magical force, that damned shadow thing, had decided Izumi and me weren’t going home so easily.

  Fuck!

  There was a tremor in the ground. I tottered slightly, watching as a new ridge rose to butt against the first one. The angle they formed cupped the stream, thickening it, sending it in only one direction now.

  Someone wants me to go that way.

  In my mind, my inner dragon faced me, his gold-star eyes hazing the darkness. Are we going to?

  “If not, we may be repeating this loop indefinitely.”

  So, we make a virtue of having no choice, and call ourselves courageous.

  “That’s pretty much it.”

  “You there! Hold up. That’s my crown perched atop your head.”

  It was the Prete
nder again. And apparently, magic was breaking; somehow, he was seeing through my demon magic’s stealth mode. I shut the spell down, conserving energy since it did me no good.

  He yelled, “Wait. You’re walking too fast, hobgoblins take you!”

  “Finders keepers, loser…is a pathetic jerk, begging to die.”

  “Have we met? I seem to be at a disadvantage.”

  I stopped and turned to confront him. “Short term memory gone? I suppose you don’t remember repeatedly raping my mother-in-law, and sending my wife down here into exile?”

  His gaze went abstract as he stared into infinity. A lascivious smile twisted his lips. “That really happened?” He shook his head vigorously. “Never mind, there is business at hand, sir. You have my crown. I demand its return, at once!”

  I drew a PX4 Storm semiautomatic from my shoulder holster, pointed it at his head, and fed him a slug between the eyes. The back of his skull blew out, spraying bone chips, blood, and brains. I holstered my gun and walked off, following the stream deeper Under-Hill.

  My dragon said: He’ll just regenerate and come after us again.

  “If he remembers, I’ll just keep killing him. Enough head shots, and there’s a good chance he’ll regenerate as a braindead window-licker who can only poop his pants.”

  Heading off again, I quickened my pace. The sooner I settled things with whoever wanted to see me, the faster I could get Izumi home.

  As I traveled, gravity seemed to lessen. I was at the point of taking long hopping strides over broken ground, assisting myself with occasional wing flutters, when the stream went over a stone lip and became a thin waterfall.

  I stepped out into space, extending wings, and glided downward in a tight spiral. The cavern I’d been in was dwarfed by this new space. A hole in the cavern ceiling allowed a full moon to cast beams inside. Hundreds of wisps danced on the winds, playing tag, forming mysterious constellations of their own. Other waterfalls fed the space, coming down other walls. Far below, a web-work of streams and splotches of ponds divided the cavern floor into islands, many of them lush with orchards and matting vines.