Fire Heart (The Titans: Book One) (11 page)

It was low, just barely touching their ankles, but it stopped Will in his tracks as surely as a stone wall. “Death and damnation,” he cursed beneath his breath, and gave a short, sharp whistle to draw his men in.

“Thrice-damned Pradian fog,” Sam snarled. “A fine time for it to make an appearance.”

“Stay close,” Will whispered. “If this gets any worse, we'll go back. No sense in letting our enemies get the drop on us.”

“Er...sir...” one of the men said, and pointed over Will's shoulder.

It was a wall. There was no other word to describe it, so dense was the fog that had formed not ten paces from them. The torchlight gave a sinister sheen to the swirling vapor, and though the darkness prevented Will from seeing very far to either side he had no doubt that the wall stretched for at least as far as the ends of the forest.

“It's moving,” Will sighed. “We need to hurry. Remember—stay together. If you get lost here, nobody will find you.” He sheathed his hammer and took a torch from the man nearest him, then knelt and held the flames close to the ground. Rather than shrink away from the heat, however, the curling fingers of mist seemed completely unaffected. They simply swirled and churned, oblivious, and Will frowned in frustration and waved a hand over the ground to clear away the fog. It sluggishly complied, drifting lazily away to reveal a streak of dark, shimmering red.

“We can't track anything through fog like this,” one of the mercenaries growled. “We can't even tell what direction it's going—”

“The trees,” another man hissed, and Will looked up in confusion. “It's almost like...they want to be found.”

A chill settled over Will that had nothing to do with the mist. The man was right. Smeared just as before across the trunk of the closest tree was a streak of blood, ominously dark against the white bark of the birch. It seemed almost to be pointing, and Will followed its indication with his eyes. “There,” he said softly, pointing. “About ten paces away. Another mark.”

“This is a trap, Will,” Sam growled, his hand tightening around his sword's grip with an audible creak. His eyes darted back and forth in search of a threat. “We should go back. They have soldiers and whatever Light-forsaken creatures chewed Rik to bits. We
have
to go back.”

But Will barely heard him. He remained crouched where he was, motionless and silent, his eyes locked on the phantom in front of him. She said nothing this time, choosing instead to give him a blank, unreadable stare from where she stood at the very edge of the torchlight. The blood that flecked her face and stained her clothes seemed to care little about the fact that it lay in darkness, and it glowed a dark, angry red.

You will die here,
a voice said in his head, though Will could not be sure if it was the specter or simply a memory.
Turn back.
But he could not turn back. The wall of fog—much closer now than it had been only moments before—loomed behind them. There would be no going through it. He shook his head in frustration.
Gefan's Holy Light, how in the name of the Void am I supposed to turn back? Leave me alone, damn you!

“I can show you the way.”

Will whipped his head up in surprise, just in time to see the Eastland girl dart off to his right, her little body glowing like a beacon between the trees.
No,
he thought,
impossible. It's only my imagination.
And yet he hesitated, unsure. What if it was indeed a spirit from the Void? But if it was the little girl, why would she help him? It made no sense—she had no reason to.

“Captain?” Sam said, a note of anxiety pitching his voice. “Your orders? The fog is getting closer. We need to move.”

Will looked off in the direction the girl had gone, hesitating for only a moment more.
No,
he thought again.
No...she isn't real. I'll get my men lost. Or killed.
He stood and glanced at the blood on the tree. “We can't go back,” he said aloud, “so we press forward. Stay sharp.”

They followed the blood o
n the trees, the streaks pointing
the way like ruby arrows that
led
them further and further from the wall of mist at their backs. It was never far behind, though, never out of sight. It loomed behind them, a pale specter that seemed to hound their footsteps no matter how quickly they ran. To Will it did not seem natural—perhaps it was some Void-spawned thing conjured by their enemies to herd them into the waiting trap. But no, such an idea was ridiculous. Those powers did not exist, just as the Eastland girl no longer did.
This life is taking its toll on me,
Will thought as he brushed his fingertips against another stain.
After this...I need to leave Castor. He will understand. I just need to live through this, and then I can be done with sellswording.

And as if on queue, he found Rik's body. He skidded to a halt, his boots digging furrows in the soft earth, and like a boulder tumbling down a mountainside he felt his heart plummet.

The villagers had been horrifying, to be sure. Their bellies opened and their bodies splayed in an archaic symbol for a long-dead god, Will was certain they would haunt his nightmares for years to come. But Rik...

“Spirits above,” Sam whispered, falling to his knees beside Will and covering his mouth with his hand. “Spirits...spirits above...”

The boy had been hung by his remaining leg from the lowest branches of an enormous oak; whoever had put him there had used his intestines to tie his ankle to the thickest part of the wood. He had been opened from belly to throat, his organs exposed and his ribs broken outward as though to welcome whoever found the body with an embrace. Only half of his face remained; the other was a shredded, bloody mess, undoubtedly the work of whatever creature had gnawed the fingers from his left hand.

Wait...
Will froze, caught suddenly in the thrall of memory. He had seen this before—the same brutal, animalistic pattern that, when inspected closely, inevitably began to seem less bestial and more human.

“Yaru,” he whispered, and with blinding speed he cast his torch to the ground and drew his war hammer. “Yaru!” he cried, and his men paled visibly as they, too, cast their lights at their feet and drew their weapons with shaking hands.

He should have seen it before—red eyes. Sand dragons and
dhe'ghar
glowed a yellowish green at night, but only yaru had eyes the color of blood.
No,
he remembered, his eyes darting frantically around the forest,
only red at night. They're black during the day. Black as jet.

There was no scream when the first man died—just a strange, sickening squelch and a muted gasp, which was followed closely by the thud of metal into soft earth. Will whirled to his left just in time to see a man's arms disappear into the wall of fog.

The second man
did
scream—a short, clipped, ragged thing that ended as abruptly as it had begun. It sent a shiver down Will's spine. Grown men were not supposed to scream like that.

“Circle!” he cried, standing with the mist to his left and the oak to his right. “Form a circle! Get your backs together!”

They did, but not before he saw from the corner of his eye a pale, ghostly shape dart from the fog bank with impossible speed. There was a flash of crimson and a glint of teeth that shone orange in the torchlight, and then it was gone, dragging a third flailing man into the fog. The mercenary screamed in
terror, and then again in pain before his cry was cut short with a loud, wet crunch. Will fancied he saw for the briefest of moments a spray of darkness that marred the unbroken mist.

And then the chittering began. It was exactly as he remembered it—the lure, the ambush, and now the noise, that high, keening giggle that could have been a child or a small dog. It came from everywhere at once, punctuated randomly by long, piercing shrieks that fell somewhere between a woman's enraged scream and the roar of a plains lion.

“Gefan have mercy,” one of the men whispered, the sound of his chattering teeth nearly drowned out by the nightmarish din.

And then they came. It was not fast as Will had anticipated, nothing at all like the time he had hunted them in the mountains. The noise never stopped, not even when they crept on all fours from the swirling veil of fog or the dark shadows that the torches could not touch. They clambered cat-like from the trees, the muscles beneath their naked skin rippling with anticipation.

That was the thing he remembered most—the skin. There was no hair, nothing to shield the yaru from the elements, and their pale hides glistened from sweat or mist; he could not tell which. They were man-shaped, but Will knew from the past that had they been standing, they would be a head higher than him at the least. There were no lips, just a mouthful of yellowed, grinning teeth that seemed to be far too plentiful. Where there should have been a nose there were narrow slits that flared as they caught the mercenaries' scents. Where there should have been ears, there were only holes. Fingers and toes ended in long, deadly claws that could open a man from chin to navel as easily as any sword. And there were no genitals—just smooth, uninterrupted skin.

One yaru clambered from the branches of the oak, pausing on its way down to sniff at Rik's corpse and tear into his side, wrestling free a mouthful of bloody flesh that hung with stringy bits of viscera.

The noise stopped abruptly, and the sudden silence that followed in its wake was deafening. Will unconsciously yawned to pop his ears.

“Clever,” said a voice, the single word cutting through the night air with all the cold, emotionless precision of sharpened steel. It was a man's voice, dull and devoid of any inflection. “Always so clever. And yet...Davin would never have fallen for such a ruse. Not even as a boy.”

Will felt his heart skip a beat.
They can talk?
he thought in a sudden panic.
What else can they do?

“Clever of you to follow the signs. Clever of you not to follow the girl.” The voice seemed to curve upward at the very end, giving the last statement the hint of a question. “Or perhaps...not. Time will tell.”

A chill ran through Will's body. How had the yaru known about the Eastland girl? Was she...real?

When a little boy stepped from behind the oak Will felt his heart sink.
The same boy I saw in Prado,
he realized.
The one who was staring at me in the tavern.
But when he turned to look at the boy face-on his breath hitched. The child was not afraid in the slightest. He simply gave Will a blank stare, his dark eyes reflecting the flickering torchlight with a dull, dead luster. It was...cold. Calculating. Completely devoid of any emotion. Will felt his blood run cold.

“Very clever,” the child said in that grown man's voice. It sounded almost flanged, as though there were multiple people speaking in unison, but the effect was so soft that it may very well have been Will's imagination. “I
can
see it even through the eye slits in your helm. Even in the darkness. You recognize me. Perhaps you do not realize it yet, but something deep inside of you stirred at the sight of me.” The child sighed, and it was such a sad, defeated sound that Will felt his heart twist deep in his chest. “You have the same eyes as Davin. Beautiful eyes. Chilling eyes.” The boy shook his head. “I hated those eyes.”

Several of Will's men were darting confused glances in his direction. “I...didn't know you could speak,” Will said lamely, his mouth oddly dry. “That's new.”

“Perhaps not as clever as I thought,” the child-thing said, and its eyes flashed momentarily red. “No questions about who I am? About why I was in Prado? How I was in Prado?”

“Well...” Will said slowly, feeling somewhat ridiculous for having a conversation with a yaru. “Who are you, then? Why and how were you in Prado?”

The child stared at him impassively, saying nothing. “No,” it finally murmured, its voice so soft that Will had to strain to hear it. “No, perhaps I was wrong. You are nothing like Davin. Not yet. How fortunate of me to find you before
they
did.” Will opened his mouth to speak, but the boy was not finished. “No,” it whispered, its eyes flashing again, “I can see it in you, buried deep inside. And...something else. Different. You are him, but you are...not.” Something flickered across the boy's face, so quickly that it might never have been there at all. But Will had seen it so many times before that it was as unmistakable as the back of his own hand: fear. “Curious,” the boy murmured.

“Captain,” Sam whispered, “we should move—force our way out and—”

“That,” the child-thing interrupted, “would be most unwise.” He gestured expansively at the yaru that crouched anxiously around them. “They have not eaten for some time, and a chase would only anger them.”

“Then what do you want?” Will asked, his voice much harder than he felt. “If you're going to kill us, then be done with it. I'll not have this waiting around.”

“I am going to kill you,” the boy said, “but I wish first to speak. To understand.”

“To understand what?” Will growled.

The boy cocked its head as though curious, and for a moment did not respond. When it did, its voice carried the faintest flicker of emotion. What that emotion was, however, Will could not be sure. “You do not recognize me,” it said. “Nor do you recognize the name 'Davin'. This has never happened before. Even the sandwoman recalled feeling a brief moment of recognition when she met Davin for the first time.”