Blood of Half Gods (21 page)

She smiles as if we’re having tea on the veranda.  “My name is Rhamba. I have come to collect my friends.”

“You can’t have them,” Kallen growls.

Rhamba laughs.  “Fairies are so serious.  I will have my friends.”  Turning to me, she says, “I look forward to the next time we meet.  We have much to discuss.”  Then she’s gone.  And so are the other two.  Well, that sucks.

I turn to look at Kallen as I struggle to push down my magic.  “What were they?”

He shakes his head as he’s having his own struggle with magic.  “I do not know.”

“Are the two of you done trying to cave the house in?”  Radella asks dryly from the door.  “You could have killed everyone else here.” Glad she’s so concerned about
our
safety. 

I tilt my head to the side.  “Sorry, we were kind of busy fighting off magical creatures who can impersonate whomever they want.  Maybe we should make sure that you’re not an imposter.”

That makes her look nervous.  “What are you talking about?”

I scrunch my brow up.  “The three people who were just here, you couldn’t have missed them.”

“No, there was no one here except you two.  Are you sure your concussion is not affecting your ability to think clearly?  Seeing people who do not exist is a sure sign of mental instability.”

Why is she trying to mess with us about this?  “Right, you really didn’t see the three people we were fighting?”

“Radella, stop this at once,” Kallen says, his voice stern as if he’s her father.

She puts her hands on her hips.  “You two are the ones seeing imaginary people and you tell me to stop?”

I look at Kallen.  “You really did see them, right?”

He nods jerkily.  “I pushed one into the room, remember?”

Oh, yeah.  The one that looked like me.  That he kissed.  A surge of jealousy tries to rise again, but I squelch it before it can get very far.  “Then why didn’t she see them?”

“See who?” Kegan asks from behind Radella.

“Oh no,” Alita says from behind him.  She drops to her knees with her hands on her head.

Kegan crouches down in front of her.  “What is it?”

“This whole area is filled with black magic,” she says.  And then she faints.  At least, I hope she fainted.  I don’t have time to check before Kegan scoops her up and trots down the hall with her to get her away from here.

“Whoever those people were, they definitely use black magic,” I say.  I’m queen of stating the obvious.  Kallen just nods thoughtfully. 

“You two really saw others in the room?” Radella asks.  I think she’s starting to believe us.  Having Alita faint because of the amount of black magic surrounding us probably helped.

“Yes,” Kallen says.  “Two were posing as Xandra and me, and the other was here to retrieve the first two.”

Looking at me with her hands on her hips, she says, “You are supposed to be this all powerful being.  Why did you not stop them?”

Who needs magic when you can just punch someone in the face?  I take three steps before Kallen catches on and grabs me by the arms.  “This is not going to help,” he says in my ear. 

“Maybe not, but I’ll feel a whole lot better,” I growl.  A few days ago, I think Radella would have egged me on.  Today, she backs up the three steps I took towards her.  “Instead of insulting me, you should
do your job
and figure out how you’re going to keep Dagda safe if they come back.  Because if my magic wasn’t strong enough, do you really think yours will be?” 

That gets her to stop and think for a minute.  It’s almost comical watching the realization hit her that she will be rendered completely useless if these magical people, creatures, whatever, decide to go through Dagda to get to me.  She turns and practically runs away from my door.  I’m assuming back to wherever she left Dagda.

But, that brings me to another question.  What do they want with me?  If they truly wanted me dead, as Dagda suggested, then the one who posed as Kallen could have killed me in my sleep.  There’s a happy thought.  I run my hand through my hair like Kallen does when he’s upset about something.  My fingers catch on snarls, of course, since my hair was wet when I went to sleep earlier.  Not as satisfying as I hoped it would be.

“Kallen, there’s something I have to do.  You probably aren’t going to like it, but I would really like it if you came with me.  I’ll understand if you don’t want to.”

He puts his hands on my shoulders and turns me towards him.  “If you think you are going anywhere without me, you have not recovered fully from your concussion.”

“Aren’t you going to ask me what it is?”

He shakes his head.  “I am not.”

Wow, that’s a lot of trust.  I have no idea how to respond to that.  Kallen comes to the rescue by dipping his head and kissing me lightly.  Leaning his forehead against mine, he says, “Xandra, I do not care if you are about to commit murder.  The last two days of not knowing where you were, or even if you were alive, would be worth any darkness on my soul from helping you commit any number of atrocities.”

I can’t help a small giggle.  “I’m not planning to kill anybody.”  But that was one of the sweetest, if not necessarily the most romantic, or sane, thing he’s ever said.

He stands up straight again and smiles.  “That is a relief to hear.”

Grabbing his hand, I say, “Come on.  We have to find Breena.”  He gives me a strange look, but he follows me out of my now really dusty, probably hazardous and bordering on a cave in, bedroom.

Chapter 18

The house is in an uproar.  Dagda is howling like a werewolf.  Radella is corralling her security team and trying to come up with a defensive plan.  Quinn is bellowing about waging war immediately.  No matter what they’re all saying, it all boils down to violence on a grand scale.  Mob hysteria provoked by an unknown enemy never turns out well.

So, I’m going to slip past the library and down the marble stairs.  Everyone is so busy trying to get someone else to listen to them; no one even turns an eye in our direction.  When we reach the kitchen, Breena’s father is there alone.  He’s hunched over the table with a small knife in his hand and a piece of wood.  He’s whittling it into something.  I can’t tell what.

“Do you know where Breena is?” I ask him.

He mumbles something unintelligible.  I’ll take that as, no, he doesn’t know where she is.  I’m pretty sure asking him again isn’t going to make his answer any better.  So, we wait.

After about fifteen minutes, Breena finally shows up in the kitchen.  “We must go,” she says, as if
we
haven’t been waiting for
her.

Once again, I turn to leave the kitchen and a gnarled hand clamps down on my arm.  How do I get this old man to stop doing this without hurting him?  It freaks me out.  He holds the little figure he whittled out to me.  Reluctantly, I take it. 

“For the beautiful virgin who captures hearts, a touch of blood holds them in place,” he says.  “A touch of poison prevents escape.”

Wow, that was beyond creepy.  And what’s up with the whole world being so concerned about my virginity.  I don’t spend time worrying about other people’s virginities.  Except Kallen’s, of course. 

I force a smile and say, “Thank you.”  He mutters something as he sits back down at the table and I shove the figure in the pocket of my sweater, next to whatever he gave me earlier.  He sure likes giving gifts.  I wonder how you tell a crazy person to stop doing that without hurting their feelings?  I know, I can’t.  I’ll just have to get rid of them later.

“We must go,” Breena says impatiently.

I’m with her.  I grab Kallen’s hand and pull him and his puzzled look out the back door of the kitchen.  The night has turned chilly and I wish I had grabbed a sweater.  I probably won’t need it in a couple of minutes, though, when I start sweating because I have to jog to keep up with Breena’s long strides.  She’s worse than Quinn.

The walk is long and paranoid.  Breena jumps at every little noise, which makes me jump.  Kallen’s still confused and hardly seems to notice that Breena is darting around bushes and trees like she could actually hide behind any of them.  Strange that she knows exactly where each possible tree to hide around is, though.  I’m suspecting that this isn’t the first time she’s made this journey. 

Huh, Breena may be keeping some interesting secrets.  Hopefully, none of them will get me killed.  It’s just now dawning on me that this Devas Giant, who claims to have connections to the Daityas, could be drawing me into a trap.  I should probably create a reference chart that could help me in these situations.  It could have little boxes with arrows on it that say things like: Has the person you are following ever acted like she likes you?  If no, is she leading you far out into the outback of a country you don’t know anything about?  If yes, you should strongly consider the fact that you may be an idiot and she may be psychotic.  Oh well, too late now, I guess.  I’ll work on it after this calamity is over.

Soon, we can see a great house in the distance.  It’s bigger than Quinn’s, and a lot fancier.  Even from this far away, I can tell that it has elaborate spires and gargoyles on every corner.  The closer we get, the more I notice.  The windows are leaded glass, each of them forming a lily in the center.  The oak doors are tall, even for Giants.  I wouldn’t be able to reach the knockers if I had stilts.  Well, one, because I still wouldn’t be tall enough, and two, I don’t have the balance it takes to use stilts. It was just a bad analogy all around.

I think we’re headed for this humongous house, until Breena abruptly turns right and I almost walk into her knee and hip.  “Where are we going?” I ask.

“You will see when we get there.  The trees have ears.”

See, paranoid.  Even if the trees did have ears, there aren’t enough of them around to be worried about.  I’m not going to argue, though.  What I will do, is make sure that I’m prepared for an ambush.  I pull a little bit of magic, hoping that I will be able to keep it under control.  Kallen does the same thing.  I don’t know if it’s because we’re thinking the same thing, or he’s worried about the fact that I did it.  Probably a little of both.

After another few minutes, we come to a small building.  Small by Giant standards, anyway.  It looks like an old tool shed or something.  It’s rundown and should probably be condemned.  The roof has huge holes in it, and one wall has started to crumble, making it strongly resemble the leaning tower of Pisa.  The stone walls were painted white at one time, but now they’re mostly gray.  The wooden door has rusty hinges and no glass in its windows.  Breena swings it wide open and gestures for us to go in ahead of her.

Not going to happen.  “I’d feel better if you lead the way.”

With a pointed look that lets me know that she’s offended, she walks into the building, letting the door swing closed behind her.  That was rude.  Kallen pulls the door open and I walk in after Breena.  I don’t mind walking ahead of him.  That means he has my back.

Breena disappears into a room at the back of the building.  The door for it fell off its hinges long ago.  It’s almost pitch dark in there, as there are no windows.  I can barely see Breena in the middle of the room, tugging at something on the floor.  After a couple seconds, a trap door swings up and open.

After another pointed look, she starts to disappear into the floor.  She’s smart enough to know that I definitely am not going to crawl ahead of her into a dark hole in the floor.  I’d like to think that I’m at least a little bit smarter than the women in horror movies.

Peering down into the hole, I see there’s a rung ladder.  A rung ladder made for Giants.  I think I’m going to need a grappling hook and harness to get down it.  I look at Kallen and he raises his brows at me, wondering what I want to do.  I guess I’m going to have to give it a shot.  I crouch down next to the trapdoor and with Kallen’s help, I drop down and dangle a moment as my feet search for the first rung.  My toes barely skim it.  I let go of one of Kallen’s hands and reach out for the side of the ladder, letting my feet drop onto the rung.  Once I’m on that one, I repeat the process by myself, seriously wishing that I had taken gymnastic lessons at some point.  They would have come in handy about now.

It seems like it takes forever to see the bottom.  Once I’m on the second rung from the bottom, I about have a heart attack when Breena puts her hands on my waist and lifts me off.  She sets me down on the ground about three seconds before I would have attacked her with magic.  Guess she was just trying to be helpful.  Kallen jumps down on his own.  Showoff. 

We’re now in a smaller room with the ladder and a door.  Nothing else but dirt.  Breena pulls a key from her bra, or slip, or whatever it is Giant women wear under their clothes.  Using it to unlock the door, she swings it open, revealing a long, underground passage.  Why does she have a key to an underground passage in what I think is the Daityas’ village?

“Where does this lead?” I ask.

She hesitates, debating how she wants to answer, I bet.  Finally, she says, “I am…was…close to Ellu.”  She looks down at her face as she says this.

I tilt my head and raise my eyebrows.  “How close?”

She doesn’t look up when she says, “Closer than you two.”