Forged in Fire (39 page)

“Look,” I shouted. “You followed us. We have friends stationed out here; we need to check on them.”

“Don’t move,” he called. I could see he had the radio in his right hand and the pistol in his left. We didn’t move, waiting for Johnny Jump-Up to come to his senses. We could hear his radio squawking. After a few minutes, he threw the mike into the car and came out from behind his door. He held the pistol on us, shoved the car door closed with his hip, and started walking toward us.

“We’re with Black Briar,” Katie said, motioning to Gram over my shoulder. “We’re looking to see if our people are okay. The sheriff knows about us.”

He lowered his pistol when he got closer. “Yeah, he told us to cut you folks some slack,” he said. “But dispatch says the sheriff was out here. You seen him?”

I shrugged. “Only got here a couple a seconds ahead of you, officer.” With shots fired, all that blood and no body, I figured he was already dead. What really surprised me, though, was that we hadn’t seen anyone here associated with Justin and his crew yet. The deputy was a young guy, Katie’s age, maybe, and scared out of his mind. This was normally a pretty tame beat. Mostly drunk and disorderly in town and some speeding when the tourists were in town.

“You need to let us check on our friends,” Katie said.

It sounded like she was giving him a command. Either way, he nodded and motioned with his gun. “I need to check on the sheriff. Hang on.”

He went to the abandoned car. I looked past the burning vehicles and into the area up into the hills. We’d been so busy not crashing, we hadn’t noticed the fires burning up the hills beyond Anezka’s place. If I stepped away from the burning trucks, I could just make out people milling around up there. Not that far, few hundred yards at most. What was keeping them?

The cave had to be that way, and if I were Justin, that’s where I’d be taking the hostages. He had some plan that likely involved sacrifice and blood. We had a little bit of time, but not much.

The junior officer reached into the sheriff’s car and picked up the mike. He radioed in to headquarters.

“Kelly, this is Cam. Sheriff’s missing, shell casings all over the place, and a hella lot of blood. Can you call in the state boys? I’m here with a couple of the Black Briar folks, over.”

He motioned with his head, giving us permission to go look for our people. We jogged over to the Black Briar encampment. It was smashed: tents rent open, honey bucket overturned, and two bodies down.

One was ours, but not the second. Katie checked our guy, but he was way too dead. They’d taken his fingers.

The second was facedown, dressed in a hooded cloak. I guessed a guy by the build, but a dead one by all the blood. I flipped him over. He had a couple crossbow bolts in his chest. I pulled his hood off his face and found quite a surprise. It was an elf. Son of a bitch!

“Katie,” I called to her. “It’s one of Skella’s people.”

She stood and walked over. She had tears on her face, but she was pissed. “Anyone we know?” she asked.

I looked at the guy again. Being dead changed the way your face looks in general, muscles all relax, blood pools, that sort of thing. Still, I recognized this guy. I didn’t really know him, but he wasn’t in the Sarah and Katie fan club.

“He was one of those that kept staring at us the last time we were up to Vancouver, remember? He was chopping wood when we walked by. Skella said he didn’t like that she brought us into their village.”

“Hope that means Skella is still on our side,” Katie said, stepping around the bodies. “They butchered Lonnie, cut off his fingers.”

I shuddered. Why the hell would they cut off someone’s fingers?

“We waiting for Jimmy?” I asked. I know what my answer was. There were three more of our people out here. Where were they?

“No,” she said. She pulled her guitar off her back, took it out of the case, and strummed a few chords. “Let’s try that new song you found me, huh?”

She began to sing the eerie little ditty. On the one hand, it made you want to tap your toes and snap your fingers, but on the other, it made you want to look over your shoulder for the monster you didn’t see coming.

Almost immediately, her nose started bleeding, but she sang through it twice. It showed us two things. One was a trail going off into the mountains, a glittering path of phosphorescent contrails that marked the passage of a large group. The second was another of our crew, dead. We hadn’t seen her—Abrielle was down a slope, fifty feet away from the main camp. She’d run, by the looks of things, not that it helped her. She’d fallen down an embankment, looked pretty broke up from the top side. It would take some climbing to get her, but she wasn’t moving.

I was debating on how to climb down to make sure she wasn’t still alive somehow, when the sound of several vehicles came roaring from up on the road.

We scrambled back up the slope to the camp and saw Jimmy and Stuart with a dozen of our people decked out in armor and weapons. Three pick-ups total.

They went around the first cop car, slow enough to make sure no one was inside, and pulled up near the wreckage, where the deputy stood beside the sheriff’s car.

The three trucks rolled to a stop and folks piled out. Jimmy went straight for the deputy, who had taken the scatter gun from the sheriff’s car and was watching across the road.

Katie went to intercept Jim, and I headed for Stuart. I was pleased to see that he had some veterans with him, including Kyle George. Stuart nodded at me and got the crew into a skirmish line. Never know when the attack was gonna come.

I pulled Stuart aside, gave him the rundown on what I knew. He was surprised we’d beat them out here, but when I pointed to the Ducati he just shook his head.

“So, we figure either they have Steve and Jayden, or they were out on patrol and are hiding somewhere. Not like anyone could miss all this,” I swept my hand to encompass the still-burning vehicles, “unless you were already dead.”

“Lovely,” he said, scrubbing his face. “Deidre’s calling in the rest of the troops, and they’re trying to figure a way how to get them out here. Skella was a no-show.”

Damn. I told him about the one cultist we’d found, and he followed me over to the camp. He knelt and examined the body. “Good shooting, at least.” He looked around. “That Lonnie?” he asked, pointing to the body nearby.

“Yeah, and Abrielle’s about fifty feet that way,” I pointed to the slope, “and another thirty down.”

He winced, but didn’t go look. Instead, he straightened up and walked back to the troops. Jimmy was there with the police officer.

“Okay, people,” Jimmy was saying. “We have at least six bad guys and four civilians in the general area. We anticipate a lot of bad shit.”

Katie shook her head. “That should narrow it down,” she said, where only those closest could hear her.

“I want a defensive position here; use the terrain, but I’d rather we were on the farside of that mess,” he pointed to the burning vehicles, “and away from that dome.”

I pointed up the mountain, toward the burning fires. Jimmy and Stuart walked around the wreckage and up the hill. “Damn,” he said. “That’s a whole lot of people.”

“What you reckon?” Stuart said. “Fifty? Hundred?”

I looked over at the small group of us. Counting the deputy we had seventeen known fighters. That didn’t include Steve or Jayden. They were just MIA. Seventeen against a hundred. We were screwed.

Stuart began barking orders, and the crew double-timed it around the wreckage and began setting up a line. Two runners moved the pickups over to the line and began unloading supplies. For getting out here as fast as they did they had a lot of stuff—boxes of crossbow bolts, pole-arms, and guns. Guns had a tendency to stop working when magic was around, but if they only worked once before the magic shut them down, then we were up on the game.

“I want snipers here.” Stuart pointed down the road about fifty feet, where an embankment gave an elevated view of the road coming up and the rocky terrain along the north side of the dome. “And here.” He pointed over to a good size elm tree that had a decent view of the dome and the road back toward Leavenworth.

Jillian ran to the truck, took out a sniper rifle, a crossbow, and a messenger bag full of bolts. She slung them over her shoulders and headed to the elm. She was petite but had an eye for long-range work.

Kyle grabbed his kit, a rifle, crossbow, and sword and headed to the embankment.

The rest of the crew got in a nice skirmish line partway into the ditch along the side of the road north of the dome. They could hold that pretty well with the pole-arms and crossbows. None of them drew their firearms, but each had a pistol at their side.

I was impressed.

“Guess it’s up to us now,” I said, nodding to Katie. “We have two friendlies unaccounted for, as well as the hostages.”

“Aye,” Katie said, dropping the case from her guitar by Jimmy’s truck and slinging it over her shoulder for easy access. “And you know the folks up the hill know we’re here. We aren’t surprising anyone.”

“There’s another wrinkle,” Jimmy growled. “They took the ring.”

“The Valkyrie ring you boys have been studying?” Katie asked.

Jimmy nodded. “We still don’t know what it does. But Stuart and I were discussing it. Might be some sort of dark magic. Maybe we were supposed to keep it away from evil bastards like this group.” He jerked his thumb toward the mountain. “Just keep an eye out for it.”

“Hell, Jim,” Katie said, with grim determination, “if the brain trust hasn’t figured it out, maybe it wasn’t taken on purpose. Maybe one of ’em thought it looked cool. They did take the time to snatch the kids. That’s more likely what they were after.”

“We gotta go,” I said, tugging at Katie.

Jimmy nodded at me. “Scouting only,” he said. “Do not engage the enemy.”

I pulled Gram free of her sheath. Flames erupted from the blade, but I felt no heat. “Right. Scouting.” I winked at Katie, who smiled.

“Wabbit time,” she said, picking up a crossbow and slotting a bolt home.

Part of me should have been more concerned, especially with the gleam in Katie’s eye as we headed off. But I was too busy with the song the sword sang in my head. We were going to battle. What could be better?

Sixty-seven

T
risha watched the tableau before her, eagerly awaiting her transformation. She could feel the power here, like a vibration through the soles of her feet. Justin had promised her great things—a chance to make a difference.

Justin stood atop the outcrop, looking down on the road below. To his left, Anezka’s home, his home for a while, glowed the shade of decayed flesh. An altar stood before him, the intricate grooves cut into the stone to channel the blood to either side, where receptacles waited to catch the sticky red offering.

To his right, a brazier burned, the coals glowing a red and yellow panorama of pain. Several utensils hung to the side, ready to be placed in the fire, to enhance their already-craven utility.

Trisha stood behind him, naked, her face a contorted mask of jubilation. Jai Li and the troll twins were being held in the cave behind him, the entrance masked by his intricate spells. “To keep them safe,” he’d told her. “Safe from this offal who willingly serves the great beasts.”

Mr. Philips sat on the ground before her, bound with twists of barbed wire and his head covered in a leather mask. She knew his kind, the bootlicker who served a monster rather than being a man in his own right. She knew he would die screaming like a pig. That was the thought that buoyed her. This man would die to draw out his master, and then Justin, her lover, would bring down another of the fell beasts. And she’d help. She’d be like Sarah, a hero, someone who saved her loved ones, not someone who lay wounded on the battlefield while those she cared about were savaged by giants.

This was her moment of redemption. Her mind buzzed with possibilities. He promised her power, promised her glory. All in the name of protecting, she told herself. For the children.

“Do you see the maggots before us?” Justin asked, pointing down to the road below them. “Our enemies gather to thwart us, to prevent you undergoing your immaculate transformation.”

She could not see who they were, the tiny figures below, but she knew they meant to harm Justin, to prevent his actions, and that made them her enemies. If only she could go back to the children, for just a moment, to comfort them. How hard it was to think beyond Justin and his words. Those were clear as the sun. Everything else fell to shadows.

Sixty-eight

K
atie and
I
slipped around the dome, ignoring the shapes that moved within. They were off radar at the moment. As long as the dome held, they were harmless. At least in theory.

We’d covered a couple hundred yards and were coming into real rocky elevation when we caught sight of Steve and Jayden. They flagged us down, and we ran to where they hid.

Jayden was wounded, and Steve had lost his crossbow.

“We took out three of those bastards,” Jayden said, grimacing against the slash on her leg. It had a field dressing, but the bandage was soaked with blood.