Mad Lizard Mambo (26 page)

“Nothing is forever, Kai. Not rules. Not people. What are you so afraid of?”

A melancholy crept into me. One I’d beaten back on more than one occasion. There were a lot of regrets piling up at my feet, and most were bittersweet. Ryder was tempting, so damned tempting, but there were strings attached to him I didn’t know if I wanted to pull. Same went for his cousin, Alexa, and I’d loved Dalia since the moment I’d met her but knew she deserved better than me, a better life with kids and a husband who’d grow old with her. It all left me alone and sitting in the ruins of my life. The people who shaped me were dying, and I was staring into a vast unknown with a damned golden-haired, emerald-eyed sidhe lord staring back at me.

“We’ve known each other for what? A couple of months now? Not that long by human
or
elfin standards. And sometimes you
push
. I’m not good with push.” Sighing, I rubbed at my face, suddenly exhausted and talked out. “You’re asking me to change something I’ve got to keep me from getting involved too deeply, and I don’t know if you’re worth it. I don’t know if
I’m
worth it.”

“I am. You are. I keep saying this, and still you don’t believe me. I know. Everything in me says so.” Ryder stood as carefully as he sat down, groaning softly when he straightened his knees. “Wake me in four hours, please. If there’s to be no bones jumping, you can at least get enough rest. The humans’ dead god knows I’d rather face a dragon down than deal with you without any sleep.”

WE REACHED
Groom Lake midafternoon on the third day in. Or rather, according to a dumbstruck Ryder, we reached the Underhill mountains the elfin called Oighear Bhais and the earthen salt flats they now dominated. The maps we were following were dead wrong about the place. Either the mapmaker was drunk or had no depth perception, because the small range and massive expanses indicated on the map were nowhere to be found. Instead, the salt plains were about as flat as a three-breasted hooker peddling her wares under C street, and referring to the crenulated obsidian spires cutting into the flat chrome sky as something as small as mountains was laughable. Cupping an ellipse of a fog-shrouded valley, the crags dominated the landscape, throwing long, jagged shadows across the gray, dusty packed earth with its tufts of Underhill forest woven in between its folds.

We’d come through a thick misty bank with next to no visibility, and I’d just made the decision to find a place to pull over when the road swooped around a gulch and dropped us into the mist-shrouded valley. The pea soup made it hard to see down into the former flats, but there were faint sketches of crumbling buildings outlined against the bright gray fog. Stopping the transport, I left it in idle and climbed down to get a better look at where we were heading, with the others tumbling out to stretch their legs and, in Malone’s case, blurt out a river of questions I had no answer to.

“Shush.” We needed quiet. Or at least to maintain the quiet sitting on the valley floor. “Hear that?”

“Nothing,” Ryder murmured softly. “That’s… troubling.”

“Marshall’s courier didn’t say anything about the forest patches, did she?”

Malone shook his head, and I listened again, hunting for any sign of wildlife.

“So either there’s something wrong here or—”

“Someone or something’s already down there,” Cari finished.

There should have been birds or something making noise. The air was wet enough to moisten the valley, the mists spritzing a damp kiss on my skin, and a few thin waterfalls slid down the mountains’ sharp, black rock face, disappearing into a thick haze below. Most of the old forest was a combination of thick pines and oaks, but a few stands of cotton floss shone among the dark greens. The elfin birch stands were fantastical, pink and powder blue swirls topping black-dappled white trunks, swaying slightly when the wind picked up.

Then the afternoon was broken by an enraged howling roar and the sky filled with dozens of flapping black wings.

“Bats?” Malone asked, his eyes following the swarm as it migrated to the opposite side of the valley.

“No, worse. Snakes.” Flyers weren’t a bad thing. They showed a fairly healthy ecosystem, but even if I hadn’t already heard the rumble, I’d know there was something larger living on the valley floor. The winged snakes were scavengers, preferring to snack on the remains of a kill instead of hunt on their own. “Bats usually keep to themselves. Flyers are curious. We’ll be picking snake shit out of our gear for weeks if we’re not careful.”

“Do you want to take the transport down or walk it?” Cari came up behind me, slinging her rifle strap over her neck to let her weapon hang at her hip.

“No, Malone won’t make it.” I cut the boy off with a shake of my head before he could protest. “You’re dog bit and tumble dried. Don’t be an asshole and try to tough it out.”

“Yeah, not like Kai,” Cari interjected, and Ryder snorted, catching a laugh before it escaped.

“Shut up and get back into the truck, Caridad.” Jerking my thumb toward the cab, I took one last look at the valley.

The road we’d followed to get here petered out a few hundred yards down the slope, but I’d expected that. Salt flats tended to eat up any asphalt laid down on top of them, and the old highway to Groom Lake probably hadn’t survived the Merge. Not much survived the Merge in the inner corridor. Old Vegas was a wasteland of burned out geezers, snarling reptilian monsters, and con artists, which, according to Dempsey, was pretty much what the city had going for it before. A few birds circled the trees, darting shapes too round and small to be anything other than avian, but the uneasiness lingered, murmuring through the leaves.

“Think that guy Oscar beat us here?” Cari asked. “If he was heading here?”

“He was. The loser he’d left in Dutch’s henhouse was pretty adamant. Marshall told someone something, and now they’re looking for God knows what. Can’t be Ryder’s screw-a-sidhe-fecund spell. No one in their right mind would be wanting that.” It was a small poke, and he bared his teeth, mocking me with my own gestures. “There’s too much noise in this. Ciarla, a Hunt Master with young, powerful dogs, and a pack of humans with a connection to Malone’s dead mentor. None of it connects, or at least nothing I can see.”

“Because we are missing a piece of the puzzle. We know Oscar’s name but not what he wants or why he wants it,” Ryder pointed out. “That is our biggest problem?”

“Right after whether or not the ground’s going to hold the transport’s weight.” I was willing to leave Malone in the truck if the flats were fragile, but I’d have to leave someone with him, and I couldn’t not take Ryder. He was the only one who’d know what the hell we were looking at. Cari watched me, her eyes pinned to mine as I divided out the risks versus the rewards. “We’ll need to fire up the sonar and see what’s under our feet. If we’re lucky, it’s solid pack. If not, then….”

“Don’t go borrowing trouble just yet, Kai,” she countered. “Come on, Malone. Let me show you how this works so you can be running the scans while I’m on turret duty.”

I stayed quiet while they climbed back into the transport, wincing when the sonar flared on and caught the edge of my hearing. Something about the hum made my eardrums itch, and I’d have put it down as an elfin problem, but it didn’t look like Ryder was bothered one bit.

Or at least not by the sound. Something else chewed at him, something darker and thinner than a bounce-back of echoes into a giant salt lick.

“What’s up?” I turned, standing shoulder to shoulder with him, staring out at the chopped-salad landscape and the stygian, glassy mountains looming over us. “’Cause you’ve got that face… that pinched-up thing going on with your mouth and eyes I usually only see when Alexa’s flirting with everything that breathes.”

“Alexa always flirts. It’s her nature. These mountains, Kai. Remember when I told you this area was contested?”

“Yeah.” My blood was unsettled in my veins at the sight of the black stone. The place bothered me on some level I couldn’t pin a donkey tail to, and Ryder seemed to be right there with me. “Do you remember it from before? Where this was?”

“These mountains—this stretch of them—were unsidhe. Old settlements, old bloodlines began here, forming Houses and then Clan, but they would have migrated to the Courts, just like the sidhe did, leaving their old crèches behind.”

“Anyone know what’s here?” I contemplated the range. “Any of the sidhe done any surveying? Someone maybe we can link to if we’ve got a signal? If we ever
get
a damned signal.”

“Not that I know of. No one has come out here, at least no sidhe that I know of. It hasn’t been important to map out places. Just like the humans, we’ve concerned ourselves with the people we have with us, not those who are long dead.”

“There’s not been a lot of time to go digging up the past. We’ve been too busy rebuilding and counting our dead.” That was something I understood well. Every race—sidhe, unsidhe, and human—were torn apart by the Merge. There were probably entire human cities left to ruin because there simply weren’t enough resources to go around. “Marshall did say the university has only just begun exploring the Central Valley. Don’t think anyone’s got out here yet. Would the unsidhe come looking for something here?”

“There wasn’t any Court left at Oighear Bhais, but I couldn’t tell you for certain.” His shrug was apologetic and his smile rueful. “We spent so much of our lives in a cold war with the unsidhe, avoiding one another as much as possible, the Dawn Court has little information about the Dusk. I know Oighear Bhais was sacred to the unsidhe. There were temples with priests, but I don’t know exactly where. The mountain range was long, stretching through several territories, but the black glass, that belonged to the unsidhe.”

“So what you’re telling me is….” I turned Ryder’s words over in my head. “That there could possibly be unsidhe monks living down there? Near the mountains?”

“Possibly,” he sighed. “Maybe even probably. I wish I could be more certain. I was not expecting… this part of Oighear Bhais to be here. Marshall’s notes were too unclear. Are you going to be okay with the unsidhe, if we find any?”

It was my turn to grimace, then mutter, “Why? Why would I need to be okay about the unsidhe?”

“Because if they want to return to a Court,” Ryder replied. “No elfin—other than you—wants to be alone. I’d be honor-bound to help them.”

“Of course you are,” I tossed back. “Well, let’s hope there aren’t any down there, because Oscar’s got a Hunt Master, and all we’ve got is a Malone, a pretty
hibiki
, and two elfin. Not a winning hand there, Your Lordship, no matter what card game you’re playing.”

WE FOUND
the unsidhe ruins at the far end of the valley, broken elegant spires half buried under sheared-off obsidian flakes from Oighear Bhais’s glassy black face. It was also where we found the body.

Elfhaime made my skin crawl, but Oighear Bhais’s dead, nameless city was so much worse. My blood curdled in my veins, a bilious, anger-laced vomit flowing through me, filling my stomach with iron knots and clenching the scars on my back. It took everything I had in me to stand in the ice-flecked fog and keep my guts inside of me, but walking away wasn’t an option. Not now. Not ever, really, but if I had to choose one time I’d have loved to walk, it would have been standing there in the cold afternoon shadows of Oighear Bhais, contemplating the unsidhe horrors waiting for us in a dead city’s ruins.

There were echoes of beauty and elegance, spiderweb-thin bridges folded in over toppled turrets and crumpled-in chateaus. The ruins predated the Merge, possibly even most human civilizations, but it’d been a long time since feet touched the city’s broken cobblestoned walks or anyone looked through its arched windows. Bits of bright colors popped through the darkness and crawling vines, murals torn apart by time and the elements, but spots remained, glimpses of a past life.

We were awash in death’s echoes, its frigid fingers reaching through time to brush at our faces, reminding us nothing lived forever. Even if the ground sang with eons of steeped malevolence, we were listening to a dirge, and it was making me sick.

Ryder’s hand on my shoulder stilled the nausea, and I took a long, shuddering breath, hoping to chase away the stink of fear in my lungs.

“He’s human,” Cari remarked, hunkering down to examine the dead man. Placing her hand on the small of his back, she murmured, “Cold too, but this place is iced over. He’s stiff, so rigor mortis pretty much has him locked solid, but once again, last night dropped to almost freezing.”

“Yeah, that’ll prolong it.” I nudged the dead man’s bare foot, spotting a dirty, worn sneaker lying a few feet away. “Cold shortening—see how the muscles are contracted—so yeah, he was probably here from last night. Let’s flip him and see if we’re lucky enough for it to be Oscar.”

We weren’t.

“Oh God, his….”

Malone turned green, and I pointed to a small red bush at the edge of the salt flat rivulet. He almost made it, and Ryder stepped closer to the dead man as we all ignored Malone’s retching.

Stepping out of the way of the man’s unfurling damp intestines as they slithered free from a wide gash across his abdomen, I took out the sheet I’d downloaded at Dutch’s. The data I’d gotten from the Post on Bennett was sparse, hardly more than a picture and some contacts, most of whom were dead. Flicking through his known associates, I found one that came close to resembling the chewed-up man lying at my feet and angled the trans-sheet to compare. Cari and Ryder peeked over my shoulder to take a look.

“Definitely black dog. Guess the cockroach at Dutch’s was right. Oscar’s got himself a Hunt Master.” I studied the flickering screen. “Maybe it’s this guy? Henry? We’ll have to print him down to know for sure.”

“Hard to tell,” Cari muttered, squinting at the photo. “His face is kind of eaten up. I mean, we know there’s four of them—three now if you count this guy. I can do a reading on him if you want me to. He’s probably got enough juice left in him I could get something.”