Authors: Tanya Huff

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

The Wild Ways (42 page)

BOOK: The Wild Ways

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“Are you sure?”

Something hissed in the darkness between the last two charms.

“Pretty sure, yeah.” Fishing a pick from her pocket, Charlie slammed out fifteen seconds of power chords.

“Sister Mary Benedict,” Paul gasped as the sound rolled away from them. “She terrified me in grade two. I haven’t thought of her in years. What . . . ?”

“Basically,
don’t make me come up there
,” Charlie told him, pick sliding from sweat-slicked fingers. “Now run!”

THUD.

BOOM.

“Boom?” Charlie demanded of the universe.

“Why is it so close?” Paul gasped and tripped over a rail. Eineen kept him upright until he regained his footing.

“Inertia.” Charlie dodged around a row of empty carts. They probably weighed a couple hundred kilos each, but they were trembling. Not a good sign. “Once it gets moving, it keeps moving faster until something stops it.”

“What the hell’s an equal and opposite reaction to a Troll?”

Good question.

“If we get the elevator high enough, it’ll fall down the shaft.” Eineen could have been inside the elevator and halfway to the surface by now, but she held her pace to Paul’s. More or less. Could be true love, could be because she didn’t know how to work the machinery.

Not really the time to speculate,
Charlie reminded herself running out of a flip flop and leaving it behind. Faster to kick the other one off.

Eineen reached the cage first, still dragging Paul behind her.

Charlie pushed past as they began to drag the gate closed.

BOOM.

BOOM!

She turned. It felt like she was turning underwater, moving against the pressure exerted on reality by the creature coming out of the tunnel.

It walked like a gorilla, massive body bent forward, the impact of its fists against the floor making the carts shimmy off the rails. Its half circle of a head sat directly on shoulders that scraped the sides of the tunnel as it emerged.

The darkness behind it splintered into glittering and gleaming, although the Goblins stayed prudently back. Waiting to see if the right side won.

Speed of the elevator. Speed of the troll. Charlie sucked at math, but it was obvious they weren’t going to get the cage far enough up the shaft.

The Troll would hit the steel.

Reach up. Grab hold.

If it went over the edge, it would drag the crushed cage down the shaft with it.

Simple choice, really: Die in the elevator.

Or take a chance.

“What are you doing?” Eineen shrieked as Charlie slipped out past the closing gate.

“I have no idea.” She was a Gale. They had roots sunk deep in the earth. The Troll was living earth.

And she was about to try and stop an avalanche with a song.

Fun, wow.

She’d dropped her only pick so it was back to her thumbnail and blood on the strings.

What stopped moving earth?

Heavy metal.

She remembered asking a guy in a different elevator if he knew the weight of the battery pack it took to run a portable amp. Not the sort of thing she wanted to schlep around with her. Here and now, it suddenly seemed worth the effort. A wah wah pedal wouldn’t have hurt either.

The Troll reared back when the sound hit it, the ceiling of Canaveral just barely high enough to contain it. Its fists came off the floor and spread into three-fingered hands—thumbs and fingers the same length.

Its legs seemed too short to be jointed. Upright, it moved slower, but it kept moving.

Bare foot stomping the beat into the rock, Charlie screamed defiance over the chords. Metal didn’t have to sound pretty, or melodic, but it had to be loud. The music bounced off a hundred different hard surfaces and ricocheted, creating a discordant harmony.

Behind and around, filling in the spaces, her fiddler threw in “Devil in the Kitchen.”

The Troll ignored the shower of dislodged rock that fell from the ceiling and bounced off head and shoulders. It shoved one of the heavy steel carts out of the way and kept coming.

Slower though. Definitely slower.

That was good.

It’d stop before it got to her.

It would stop . . .

It grabbed the guitar, grazing Charlie with one finger and knocking the wind out of her. As it lifted the guitar and her by the strap now jammed painfully up under her arm, the ricochets of sound continued, but she couldn’t reach the strings to pull them into a whole. Time slowed as the guitar splintered. Strings lost tension in the collapse. Sighed in defeat.

Without an instrument . . .

With no way to bend the music . . .

Keep playing,
Charlie begged the fiddler, but silence answered.

The tension on the guitar strap gave way. Charlie braced one foot against the Troll’s torso, clutched at its shoulder, dug her fingers into the ridges of living rock, and looked it in the eye.

Its eyes were the same slate gray as its body. Wild eyes. Truly wild. No allegiances.

Living earth.

The Gales had their roots sunk deep in the earth, but no one, nothing, had ever rooted in the Troll.

And doesn’t that sound ridiculously smutty,
Charlie thought.

It flicked away the ruined guitar—Charlie heard the pieces hit the ground even if she couldn’t, wouldn’t look—and closed a hand around Charlie’s body.

Fuck my life. Should’ve stayed in Calgary.

Time continued moving slowly as her ribs began to crack.

The Troll’s eyes widened at the sound, and for the first time, it actually saw her. If she had to guess, Charlie’d say it didn’t like what it saw.

This
was Wild. It answered to no one and nothing but itself. It didn’t need music to form and direct its power; it was power. The look in its eyes said,
I know you. And I’m not impressed.

As the pain started to catch up, Charlie frowned. The Troll’s eyes weren’t slate gray. They were Gale gray.

And Gales didn’t care if walking slag heaps were unimpressed.

Gales knew what Wild meant. They knew it had to be contained, controlled, before it became all there was. Sure, the aunties could take Uncle Edward down, but they were tied to place. Allie had slapped the Dragon Queen home, but she couldn’t leave the city. Gales who could do little damage were free to wander as they would—in spite of what her mother thought, Paris would survive the twins—but Gales who could change the very nature of reality were shackled.

And no one had shackled them. The certain knowledge of her own death lending clarity, Charlie knew they’d limited themselves. One day an auntie had looked out at the carnage, folded her arms, and said,
That’ll be quite enough of that.
But every now and then, a bit broke free. A Wild Power. Untied. Because every now and then, something too big to ignore bellied up to the bar and declared it could take all comers.

Her frown deepened. Pain might have mixed a few too many metaphors there, but the point was, the power wasn’t in the guitar, or she’d never have been able to pick up a guitar she’d never seen before and play away the storm. The instruments focused the power. The power was in her.

Another rib cracked.

Charlie didn’t have breath enough to scream.

Pain wasn’t
focusing
. It was distracting.

You think love hurts?
She didn’t have breath enough to snicker either.
Try having your ribs crushed by a Troll.

Her phone rang.

You have got to be kidding me.

“Charlotte Marie Gale!” Auntie Jane’s voice was tinny but remarkably clear considering it came from Charlie’s pocket. On an unanswered phone. “A little less smart-ass and a little more focus. I will not have you killed in such an embarrassing manner.”

Right. Let’s not embarrass Auntie Jane . . .

Charlie squinted the Troll’s eyes back into focus, sucked in as much air as she could, and hissed with everything she had left, “Piss off.”

As she hit the floor, and it felt like a hot iron spike jammed up through her chest, she realized she should have told it to put her down first.

TEN

J
ACK SPLIT THE DIFFERENCE between keeping an eye on the Boggart and not giving himself away, but that still put him high enough he had to keep one eye out for planes. Although he’d never admit it to a Gale, who were in lots of ways just as narrow-minded as his family on the other side, planes were one of the reasons he wanted to stay. Beings without flight had claimed the sky. How cool was that? No one in the UnderRealm had ever tried it. Sure, his uncles would have taken them apart the first time they got off the ground, but that wasn’t the point—they hadn’t even tried.

Humans were pretty cool.

He was a lot less pissed off at his father than he used to be.

The Boggart squirmed under a fence that guarded three sides of a property—a cliff and the Atlantic guarding the fourth—and headed straight for the cluster of buildings over by the edge of the cliff. There was a car by the building and a guy asleep over by the fence, but Jack couldn’t see anything that said there was a gate around. He circled, and as he came in from over the ocean, saw the Boggart squirm through a square hole in the roof of one of the buildings and disappear inside.

Adjusting his size so as not to bring the building down, Jack landed and stuck his head in the hole. The Boggarts, all the Boggarts, not just his, had definitely gone down there. The smell was unmistakable; old damp sofa cushion mixed with ash. No, old damp sofa cushion mixed with the inside of the vacuum.

If he was going to follow, he’d have to get smaller still. Deep breath and . . . clench.

The breeze off the ocean blew the smoke inland as he snickered. Good thing he couldn’t change size in skin, he’d fall into the toilet. Digging his claws into the tiles, he reminded himself to repeat that observation to Charlie later.

Deep breath and . . . clench.

All that time he’d spent messing around with the mail delivery person was about to pay off. It wasn’t easy compressing himself into hawk size; none of his uncles could get this small, and he was bigger than all of them. But then, none of his uncles were sorcerers. Or Gales.

It didn’t matter that he was smaller than the Boggarts now. He was finding the gate—not heading for a fight. Besides, at this size, his flame would cut like a blowtorch, and if he had to get bigger, too bad for the building.

Finally small enough, he turned on the diagonal so his wings would fit, and dropped into the hole.

It was fun following the shaft through the building, the Boggarts’ trail easy to follow. Too easy with a side order of maximum gross-out at one point. He’d have fried the damp pile as he passed to kill the stink, but he was afraid of cutting through the thin metal under it and Human buildings were weirdly flammable.

There were twelve Dragon Lords, so most of the UnderRealm built in stone.

When he reached a shaft that descended down into the earth with Boggart-scented cables running from enormous pulleys, he knew where he was. Back home, Dwarves mined the mountains near his mother’s cave. Cameron had laughed when he’d told him, but Dwarves weren’t a cliché where Jack came from and anyone who got along that well with his mother had balls out of proportion to their hei . . .

Music? Charlie.

He hadn’t been hurrying, but now he folded his wings close in to his body and dove, snapping them out as he emerged into a huge room carved out of the rock.

Snapping them out further to their full width when he saw what the rock had hold of.