Wrath and Bones (62 page)

He knew the Orcish words; his massive eyebrow twitched up. 

“Yeah, be afraid,” I told him, showing him my jar, holding it up. “See this —
blurk!
— candied mummy meat?” I felt my gag reflex dance and nearly
yurp
ed again. “If I eat this, you better be runnin’. Cuz look out!” I shuddered and my throat made an involuntary
kachk
noise. “What kind of souped-up maniac eats this, right?” I put the jar down and tried to scare him with meaningful oogly-boogly fingers that came out more like disappointing jazz hands.

His head jerked back, and I saw a flicker of uncertainty.

“Oh, you don’t like that?” I asked. “Do my oogly-booglies give you the heebie-jeebies, Manflay?” I started doing a nifty combination of jazz dance moves, mystical-looking hand gestures and fancy footwork, all meant to intimidate and/or buy me time by confusing him. I might have thrown in a little bit of the running man and the sprinkler, too. I would have moonwalked, but I always fucked that up, and now was not the time for that.

It seemed that it might work for a second, and his grip tightened on the handle of his war hammer. Having exhausted my disco repertoire, I completed my assault with the kind of jive and jiggle moves that would have qualified me three seconds of ill-deserved YouTube fame. I wiggled my hips and shook my booty and boogied closer, not daring to lose ground now that I had his attention. He took two more lumbering steps back from my flailing.

He straightened slightly, stretching his neck back like he had a crick in it. Then he thumped his belt area with one hand:
thwap!

“My awesome dancing is not an offer to slob on the knob, trollface,” I told him.

He stomped closer, no longer interested in my jiggling and witchy fingers, and reached down to swipe the gold Lilith’s Heart pod from the snow by my feet. I squawked and slap-chopped it out of his hand. It plopped to the snow between our feet.

He growled and darted forward to howl all up in my grill. Spittle shot out from between his teeth and misted my face and hair. His breath smelled like fish guts. The severed heads on his shoulder spikes offered mercifully dry and silent screams. My face scrunched up as though I could close myself off to the stink. When he was done bellowing, I retorted with my own shout.

“Shut
uuuuuuuuuuup
,” I yelled. “I’m not done dancing!”

He made to swipe the pod again, but his size made him less agile than I was. I got to it first, and popped it in my mouth for safe keeping, because I am a complete, unthinking idiot.

The pod began to sting against the roof of my mouth, but I crammed my lips tight even as my throat tightened to refuse the acid entrance.

Manflay jabbed a hairy finger at my lips, wriggling it as if to worm it in between them. He pried at my lips but I held firm. I ground out a frustrated fuck-off noise and held my teeth tightly together, though the wet heat of my saliva seemed to be melting the Lilith’s Heart fast. Rivulets of lava were running to the back of my tongue and I tried to cough with my jaws still clenched shut. It tasted green and sour and fiery with heat. The troll considered the sweat on my upper lip and the suffering in my suddenly wide eyes and started making a noise that I soon recognized as a chuckle. Hot breath streamed from my nostrils to fog the air in front of me and I whimpered at him.

Mouth full of gopping, horrible hot goo, I slurred, “Yoo ma’e me ‘oo fiff.” Stinging juices ran out the side of my mouth and down my chin. “Urg!” I said, before swallowing the rest of it helplessly.

My belly immediately revolted with a cramp sharp enough to double me over, and I barked an
oof!
Now the troll was really yukking it up, and even slapped a scrawny knee.

“Oh, I’m so glad my misery is entertaining, Manflay Bonehack,” I snarled, holding my savaged abdomen. “What a stupid name. You just wait until I can stand upright, I’m gonna—“ Another cramp stole my words and my knees buckled.

Manflay howled with laughter and dropped his hammer completely. He threw both burly arms in the air and shook them, dancing from one foot to the other. The Blue Sense reported that he was thrilled with this turn of events and curious to do some more experimenting.

“Don’t get your walrus skins in a knot, buster,” I warned him from my huddled position in the snow. “Any second now, I’m gonna rebound up out of this fetal position and plow you one right in the schnozzola!”

The third cramp nearly killed me, and a warning gurgle in my nether regions warned that this heat was moving through my system fast; I was at risk for soiling my pants in front of the scout and Declan and my future queen. I rolled into a tighter ball and wailed. The laughter died abruptly and I heard a clay clink and then a gooey sucking noise. A giant hand landed on me, and I prayed this was it…he was going to put me out of my misery by crushing my head in a spray of bone chips and brains against the ice.

But I was rolled over, and that hairless finger jabbed at my lips again; this time it was sticky. My eyes popped open and I tried to yell, “no!” Opening my mouth to yell was my second mistake. The troll, in an unexpected act of calling me on my empty threats, shoved a big chewy hunk of mellified man into my mouth.

I shouted
yakkk
and tried to spit it out. Manflay’s big hand slapped around my nose and jaw, like people do when they’ve given their dog a pill from the vet. I wriggled, kicked, and struggled like a disobedient puppy, but Manflay had me well in hand and was determined to help. He dropped to one knee next to me, his weight shaking the ground as it landed, held my head still with one hand while trapping my mouth shut with the other. This was not how I had ever pictured dying: held down by a troll with human jerky in my mouth. My back was cold from the snow and ice ground against my spine. Worst of all, the honey coated my tongue and trapped the acidic, spicy Lilith’s Heart remains directly next to the sensitive flesh of my tongue, doing precisely nothing to relieve the burning. Tears sprung to my eyes and began streaming down my cheeks and into my ears. I gazed up at him, sure his weathered face was the last thing I would see.

Though my forehead felt like a frozen pork chop, the Blue Sense finally stirred from the contact of his bare hand on my face; he wasn’t worried about me, or the
Falskaar Vouras
, or being alone here.
Because he wasn’t
.

“You lied!” I tried to say under his hand; though the words were muffled and distorted, he saw from the look in my eyes that I’d figured out his secret. He’d lied to his people. They were with him. The troll invasion had begun. He’d already told them it was safe and they were close behind him.

He saw the realization in my wide eyes and nodded slowly; I was right. They were already on their way, a whole horde of them. Hundreds. Maybe thousands.

He was distracted by something in the distance, but at this point, I was losing hope. Suddenly, he erupted from our huddle with a burst of angry energy. At the same time, I felt a wave of ferocious, voracious, devouring hunger and craned my head back against the snow to see Declan at the coast dragging a dark, wet figure from the ocean. The troll bolted in their direction, raising his hammer as he ran. A foreign buzz awoke in my veins as Remy began to feed from an unexpected source: Rask’s crewmen. More than one. Three men who had been in the rowboat surrounded the lady’s prone body, offering their wrists in turn. The troll swung his hammer and pitched into the circle of DaySitters. The mortals screamed in unison and were either scattered or hurled aside by the brutal swinging blow.

Remy’s chin was slick with blood when she launched up from the snow to push him back, her form voluptuous after her quick feed, eyes bright, lips plumped and glistening. Declan’s power stirred as he channeled a telekinetic blow, tossing the troll to one side. It wasn’t enough. The troll was on his feet alarmingly fast. Remy shadow-stepped away from him and ended up beside me. She looked disappointed at how easy he was to dodge.

I managed to crawl to hands and feet, and finally to a crouch next to my pack. I picked up the yeti nail clipping, my final artifact. Lilith’s Heart was a boiling ache in my belly, churning around a glob of mellified man. I didn’t know what to do with the yeti nail, so I offered it up to Remy.

She took it with a little smirk. “Is that what I think it is?” Her voice was rusty with disuse, her accent a complicated French mess, but there was no mistaking from her tone that she knew she was here to kick
all
the ass.

“If you think it’s the nail of a yeti, sure. I brought the other two treasures, but Manflay made me eat them.”

She secreted the nail into her palm and turned to face the troll, who was shrugging off Declan’s attempts to telekinetically toss him around.

The wind pushed the thick, wet hair back from Remy’s pale face. Her light eyes glittered as their eerie shade of green flashed over to chrome like Harry’s.

“You’re not about to release the Kraken, are you?” I asked her, only half-joking.

Remy smirked. “Not... exactly.”

“Whatever it is,” I asked, “can we deal with it?”

“I can. You?” She looked at me doubtfully. “No. And them?” She sighed. “They won’t like this one bit.”

I turned to see who she was talking about. There were shadows now in the blizzard, dark figures moving through the snow. The other revenant houses. Were they coming to help her, or to stop her? Did they know what she had at her beck and call? Would it be as bad as I thought? Would I be able to stop wanting to yark up the pod and the wad soon?

She cut her eyes at me, and I remembered her telepathic powers.

Remy held out one palm in a
come-no-further
motion, black lace sleeves cutting intricate patterns against her pale forearm, the
Falskaar Vouras
stopped as one, wary in their approach to begin with, and equally wary about obeying their future queen’s body language. Would they obey her words with more confidence?

Her face was serene, the soft green of her eyes going to hard Dreppenstedt silver as she accepted the mantle of power granted by her immortal father and the blessings of her station. In her first act as queen, she faced the troll scout and all the ships bobbing in the ocean behind him with the hint of a smile, and I started to believe that maybe this was going to work. Remy Dreppenstedt was either completely mad, or she had the biggest balls on the planet. 

“Let him come to me.”

As one body, the
Falskaar Vouras
made no move to disobey, but I sensed this had less to do with respecting her wishes than fearing her abilities; if she got herself slaughtered here, I feared the immortals would stand and watch it happen rather than offer their assistance. It would be her first and last test, and only after she failed would they step in to stem the invasion. If she needed help, I might be her only ally here. I began assessing the competition with an eye to what help I might be able to offer. I could puke on somebody's boots and maybe cling to an ankle or to.

It took the troll all of half a heartbeat to assess the situation; a dozen primeval revenants stood aside while a single, slight woman faced him down on her own. And then there was me. He dismissed me with a single glance. The coward in me wanted to burrow under the snow and listen to Toothless Hawkins and His Robot Jazz Band on repeat until this whole thing blew over. Too bad I traded away my iPhone to some spriggans.

The scout stood up straight and gave a little stretch of his neck, then took two steps toward Remy, cocking his head to one side and then the other. Inter-species body language for
what-are-you
? She licked her lips and smiled, flashing full fang, but made no move to approach him. Instead, she relaxed her shoulders and waited for him to come to her, her face soft and unconcerned.

“With whom do I speak?” Remy asked.

“I am called Manflay, yieldling. Where is your Master? Where is your king?”

“He is removed,” she said.

“For what reason?”

“That’s none of your business, troll,” Malas Nazaire spoke up.

But Remy answered lightly, “Madness.”

The scout’s lips peeled off his teeth and he shook enough to clue me in that he was laughing.

Remy’s lips curled into a red crook and her laugh matched his, husky and monstrous. “I am the only master you need worry about, scout. And I am no yieldling now.”

His shoulders did an interesting ripple as though the tension travelled from left to right, and he craned forward down at her. I tensed as his face got close to hers, so close that his exhale moved soft strands of black hair back from her pale temple.

“Time to go home,” she said quietly. “You were told not to return. Your appetites are intolerable. The age of the troll has passed.”

“We return.” His upper lip lifted off a human-looking canine again. “We hunger.”

Remy was unmoved. “Your kind will not return again.”

“And who will stop us?” He cast a calculating eye to the elder revenants, dismissing me and Declan entirely. “Your old men do not seem eager to stand at your side. Could it be that they do not like you, Little Fangs? Perhaps they want me to destroy you for them?” He sneered. “You are alone. I will cook my dinner over your dust tonight.”

His eyes flicked at me, and I knew I was on the menu.

“Then I will take them…” He continued, pointing at the
Falskaar Vouras
with his massive war hammer, and the wiry muscles in his arm stood at attention, strained against leather strapping, bulged alarmingly. It did not surprise me to find that the hammer had silver spikes along its flat planes. I wondered if he had access to rowan wood, and pushed invading thoughts of Batten out of my head. “... and use their ashes to paint my face.”

“Is that so? Just you?
One
troll will take down all the
Falskaar Vouras
single-handed?” She indicated them with a wave of her hand. “My, my. Aren’t you an impressive specimen,” Remy purred up at him. “You’re quite right, of course: they want to watch you to ruin me. But they also need me. I don’t need them.”