The Wild Ways (43 page)

Read The Wild Ways Online

Authors: Tanya Huff

Tags: #General, #Fiction, #Fantasy, #Epic

BOOK: The Wild Ways
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Clutching the bar on elevator’s gate so hard the metal cut into his palms, Paul stared at the creature hauling Charlotte Gale into the air. Enormous arms were attached to massive shoulders that tapered down to stumpy legs. It had a head, and Paul thought he saw a face before it was blocked by the Gale woman’s body.
It looked like living rock.
Except rock wasn’t alive.
“
Living earth, remember?”
Wasn’t alive.
Wasn’t.
“I have the skins.” Eineen’s hand closed around his arm, warm, grounding. Something in her touch pushed the terror back. “We need to get out of here.”
He still couldn’t get his fingers to unclench, but he nodded toward the . . . the Troll. The gesture turned into a flinch as it flung the pieces of the smashed guitar aside. “We can’t.”
“We can’t do anything.”
“We can’t leave her.”
“She’s a Gale. She’ll be fine.”
Catherine Gale would have been fine. Paul wouldn’t have worried for a moment about Catherine Gale. Had he not been running for his life, he might have worried about the Troll. But the Troll wasn’t crushing Catherine Gale and Paul realized that nothing could have convinced him of the differences between the two women more than the terror he now felt
for
her younger relative. Even Eineen’s reassurances came in a distant second.
“We have to do . . .”
A horde of small furry creatures swarmed down over the elevator, swerved wide around the Troll, spotted the Goblins at the last minute, shrieked, swerved again, and disappeared down a different tunnel.
“What the hell?”
“Boggarts.” Eineen’s grip tightened slightly, but the calming effect had definitely lessened. “The gate is in these tunnels.”
Paul looked at the Troll, past it to the Goblins, then turned just far enough to look at Eineen. “You think?”
Something hit the top of the elevator, bounced, and a single Boggart scrambled across the open area and after the rest.
The Troll didn’t seem to notice.
Or had noticed everything and not reacted. What the hell did Paul know about Tro . . .
At first he thought it was bird, maybe a big golden gull—not that gulls came in gold but what did he know about b . . .
“Dragon! Oh, my fucking God, that’s a DRAGON!”
The tail slammed the elevator, rocking it, knocking him back. The wings, half folded, filled Canaveral. The head dipped low on a long, sinuous neck. Steel screeched as carts were crushed under enormous clawed feet or flung to crumple against the wall.
The space filled with fire, a heartbeat of searing heat that didn’t burn, and a boy in his mid-teens with pale blond hair, crouched over Charlotte Gale’s body next to a pile of stone. He was naked, but, other than that, he looked absurdly normal. He turned. Wild, golden eyes locked on Paul’s face as he wailed, “Help me! I don’t know enough about Humans!”
So much for normal.
Smacked by the dragon’s tail, the cage door had buckled.
Paul dragged at it. He’d never move it. “I can’t . . .”
The boy’s eyes flared. The door unbuckled and snapped open so fast Paul nearly lost a finger. He stepped forward, but Eineen still had hold of his arm.
Eineen was on her knees, face hidden behind her hair.
“Hey!” He couldn’t get free of Eineen’s grip. Trying hurt. “Eineen!”
She shook her head, her hair waving like kelp at low tide. “The Prince.”
Which was when Paul connected the dots. In his own defense, this was his first dragon. The boy
was
the dragon. The dragon was the prince Eineen had been going to ask for help. And none of that mattered.
“Get up.” He tucked his free hand under her other arm and hauled her up onto her feet. “We have to help him. He doesn’t know enough about Humans.”
Something he said, or maybe because it was him saying it, got through. Eineen tossed her hair back and stared past him at the boy. At the woman on the floor.
And then they were moving, Eineen dropping back to her knees beside the body.
No, not the
body.
Blood still bubbled between parted lips. It wasn’t a body until she stopped breathing.
 
“Did you do this, Highness?”
Jack glanced over at the Selkie touching the pile of rubble that had been the Troll and shook his head. “No, Charlie did. But she’s hurt. She’s hurt bad and she won’t wake up and I don’t know what to do.” He couldn’t control the smoke that puffed out with every word. He waved it away from Charlie’s face and bit his lip until he tasted blood. He wasn’t going to cry. Crying was weakness. Weakness was death.
A drop of water splashed onto Charlie’s arm and rolled off.
“You have to take her home, Highness. Her people can heal her.”
The Selkie’s voice was soft but insistent. Jack rubbed his nose on his wrist and said, “How? Home is too far away and . . .” He looked over the rubble at the empty tunnel where the Goblins had been. They’d fled when he’d arrived, but he’d seen them. “The gate is down here. Stupid! I’m so stupid! I followed the Boggart to find the gate, so of course the gate is down here. I can take her through the gate, cut through the Under Realm, and out again by Allie. Allie can fix anything.”
“If you move her, she’ll die.”
Jack glared up at the man standing by the Selkie. “I have to move her, or she’ll die!”
“The blood, in her mouth . . . there’s internal damage. Broken ribs, for sure. If the ends haven’t punctured a lung yet . . .” The man’s voice trailed off and he shook his head. He looked really upset, like he cared, so Jack didn’t kill him for what he’d said. For stopping him from taking Charlie home.
“Okay.” He touched Charlie’s hair because that wouldn’t hurt her. He just had to think about this. He was a dragon, but a dragon would eat her, and he didn’t want to do that even if he could have. He was a Gale and a Gale would take her home, but he couldn’t do that. He was a sorcerer and he could turn her into butterflies, but butterflies died so easily. He could move things without touching them. He could . . .
He could make clothes out of nothing.
First day he’d been here, right after he’d followed his father’s blood through from the UnderRealm, he made clothes out of parts of David’s rental car so he’d look like everyone else. David had been really, really pissed, but that didn’t matter now. Point was, he could make
things
out of other
things
.
He could make a
thing
so he could move Charlie.
There were bits of the Troll broken up under her so Jack started with those, smoothing them out and connecting them together. They weren’t Troll anymore. Whatever Charlie had done, they were only rock. Then he shoved the Selkie out of the way and brought more bits over and started to curl them up and around, just barely touching Charlie’s skin.
“She’s not dead! You can’t . . .”
The Selkie stopped the Human male before Jack did. That was good because Jack didn’t want to split his attention, but he totally would have fried that guy if he tried to tell him what he could or couldn’t do.
He was especially careful around Charlie’s head, but he might have caught a bit of hair anyway.
Then he sat back, took a deep breath and looked.
Except for a circle over her mouth and nose, he’d totally encased her in rock. The troll had hurt her and now it would keep her safe while he got her home.
“As long as I don’t whack her on anything, I can move her.”
He stood, changed, and realized that if he stayed small enough to get through the tunnels to the gate, he’d be too small to carry the rock and Charlie.
 
Paul had watched the rock flow and change and feared for a moment the boy—dragon—was building a coffin, but it soon became clear he was using the rock to immobilize Charlotte Gale’s injuries. Casting her in stone, as it were. He’d have laid her out were he building a coffin, not taken such care to wrap her where she lay.
When the boy stood and became a dragon again, the problem he faced was obvious to anyone with eyes. “We can lift her into one of the carts.” If they could find a cart the Troll and then the dragon-boy hadn’t crushed. “And then we can roll her to the gate.”
Another flash of fire and a naked teenage boy stared at him, wide-eyed. “How did you . . . ?”
“The rock has made the . . . has made Charlotte Gale not only heavy, but bulky. You’ve got to stay small to fit through the tunnels. It’s just a matter of putting the information together and coming up with a solution. It’s what I do.”
The dragon-boy’s smile made Paul feel as though he’d just—well, slain a dragon wasn’t the best analogy under the circumstances, but he felt like he’d finally done something important with his life. The feelings Amelia Carlson had evoked for a job well done weren’t even close.
He stepped away to find a working cart and realized Eineen had remained on her knees, once again locked in place, staring at the dragon-boy.
When Paul touched her shoulder, she said, “Your people do not do such things.”
Since he had no idea what she meant, he turned his attention to the dragon-boy who shrugged, light catching the scatter of golden scales on his chest. “I’m unique.”
“You’re impossible.”
His teeth were almost Human when he grinned. “Sometimes.”
“You’re . . .”
“I’m in a hurry! Get up and help, Seal-girl!”
She stood as if she were a puppet and he’d pulled her strings. Paul didn’t like the look of that, but since the dragon-boy then ignored her, he decided it was a problem that could be temporarily forgotten. Kind of like the whole naked issue.
They found a high-sided cart with a dent in one side that still rolled. Unfortunately, they could only roll it about a meter before a tangle of crushed carts blocked the tracks. Paul glanced around Canaveral. This was a staging area. With any luck, a working forklift had been left behind when the mine had closed. Just because he hadn’t seen one . . .
“Seal-girl!”
“My name is Eineen, Highness,” she snapped as she pushed past Paul. Seemed she wasn’t happy about the puppet experience either.
The dragon-boy rolled his eyes. “And mine’s Jack. Now help me push!”
“You can’t,” Paul began, but it seemed they could. Eineen put her hands next to the dra . . . to Jack’s on a piece of buckled metal and the two of them shoved what was probably half a ton of crushed steel out of the way. Jack’s eyes flashed gold again, and forced the cart over a section of flattened track and rolled it up beside Charlotte Gale’s body.
“Wait!” Paul swallowed as Jack turned glowing golden eyes toward him. Had to swallow again before he could continue. “You’ve immobilized her injuries, but you’ve got to be careful moving her. Her insides could shift.”
Contents could shift during shipping.
He shook the thought away. “If you can lift her on your own, Eineen can get into the cart and steady her as she’s lowered. We can stay in the cart with her to steady her as you roll her to the gate.” Although given Charlotte Gale’s current weight . . . “Try not to make any sudden turns.”

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