Fire Heart (The Titans: Book One) (12 page)

Davin,
Will thought, wracking his brain. Something
did
strike him as familiar about the name, though he could not remember where he had heard it before. His mind was a jumbled, chaotic mess that refused to concentrate on anything other than the threat before him.

“Something is different,” the boy continued. “You are not the same.” He gave Will another long stare, the reflected fires dancing in his eyes lending him a disturbingly demonic appearance. “I am glad it was you who came first,” it said abruptly. “It would have been most tedious to kill the other one and wait for you to seek revenge. You have my thanks, such as they are worth.”

Will's men flicked another flurry of nervous glances his way, but he said nothing.

“Times are rapidly changing,” the boy said, having apparently expected nothing in the way of a reply. “The dawn of something new is at hand, as it should have been so long ago. Were I anything else, it would sadden me that you will never be a part of it.”

As though launched from the string of a crossbow the yaru snapped into action. They had been anything but motionless, fidgeting with mad anticipation throughout the entirety of the boy's conversation, but the sudden movement caught Will so completely unaware that he only barely brought the point of his sword up in time. The yaru that had leaped at him adopted an oddly human look of surprise as his blade slid easily between its ribs and out through the skin of its back. It hung there for a moment, red eyes staring stupidly at the reeking blood running down Will's sword, and then he planted his foot against its chest and drew his arm back, letting it fall to the ground. Liquid darkness, red as a ruby in the torchlight, pulsed rhythmically from the wound and ran down its front.

Then, to Will's surprise, something strange happened. Time seemed to crawl around him, moving far too slowly for it to be the familiar battle-calm that settled over him during a fight. He looked around in confusion.

To his right
,
Sam, his face creeping into the beginnings of a feral snarl, was bringing his sword down in a cleaving arc toward a leaping yaru, its claws outstretched and angled like knives toward his chest. Sam's sword would never fall in time.

To Will's left, a yaru had just begun to tackle another man and was drawing his throat toward its glistening fangs. The man had a look of surprised horror etched across his face, and the mace he had been holding was now tumbling from his loose fingers.

And then he looked back to the oak tree.

Something awoke inside of him at the sight of the child-thing, some deep, primal emotion that he had never experienced before. Rage, unbridled and white-hot, pure in every sense of the word, tore through him with all the force of a hurricane. It boiled his blood, scorched his skin, pounded against his skull until there was nothing else but the anger, the grinding hate that was centered completely on the thing masquerading as a child. He wanted to kill it, rip it in half with his bare hands, tear into it with his teeth like a rabid animal, and just as the fury threatened to boil over and consume him he felt, just as he had in Brightstone, that
thing
stir deep inside of him.

It shifted in his chest, writhing like a snake as it struggled to be free. It whispered in his ear, the words too soft to hear, but he understood their meaning all the same.

“Fire.”

The word was so quiet, so hushed, that even he could barely catch it as it tumbled from his lips. And yet, for a single instant, it seemed the world paused. There was no sound, no movement, nothing but that one, beautiful word.

He blinked.

The feeling was gone.

Sam screamed as the yaru drove its claws deep into his chest, bowling him over in the process. With his free hand he drew the dagger at his hip and plunged it into the yaru's neck, stabbing it again and again until fitful sprays of blood jetted from the wound and spattered across Will's arm and the side of his face. At the same time the yaru on his left tore into its victim's throat with its teeth, and Will felt wet warmth splash across neck and shoulder.

It happened too quickly for his reeling mind to react, and by the time he had regained enough control to swing his sword into the second yaru's neck its victim was dead. Behind him he could hear Sam drawing his last ragged, wheezing breaths.

Silence. It was so sudden and so oppressively thick that it stopped Will in his tracks as surely as a stone wall. The yaru, he realized belatedly, had not made a sound. Only the men had cried out, and now they, too had stopped. He pulled his blade from the still-twitching yaru corpse at his feet and looked around.

A lot of blood on the ground,
he thought, and his gaze roved across the ravaged bodies of his men with an oddly distant fascination. It was almost as though he were viewing them from a long way off, or perhaps through another man's eyes.
That was fast,
his mind mumbled sluggishly.
Thought we'd hold out a bit longer.

“What did you say?”

He looked up to find the young boy staring at him, its face no longer emotionless but twisted ever so slightly into a delicate mask of fear. Had the effect been on anyone else—a trouper, perhaps, or one of Prado's resident thespians—it would have been a remarkable bit of acting.

“What?” Will asked, his words coming hoarsely from a mouth suddenly dry.

“What did you say?” the creature asked again, its eyes flashing red. The yaru all began to creep away from Will, hissing in agitation at their leader's sudden fright.

Will looked around at his dead comrades once more. “Killed them,” he whispered. “Just like the villagers.”

“
What
,” the child hissed, “did you
say
?” The child began to grow then, its body twisting and stretching grotesquely to a symphony of snapping bones and squelching flesh. Its clothing melded back into its skin, which began to bubble and churn as it adopted the pale hue of yaru flesh. Within moments what had previously been a young boy now towered into the air, fully half again as tall as Will. It tensed its muscles experimentally and gave a low growl. The other yaru shrank back in fear, chittering and hissing as they scuttled away to safety. “Answer me!” the monstrosity screamed. “What did you say?”

Will stared in mute horror, his mind finally snapping back into normalcy. His eyes darted from corpse to bloody corpse, and then to all the yaru growling menacingly at him from a safe distance. There were undoubtedly more behind him.
I can't win this,
he realized, the knowledge of his own doom
settling like a leaden weight in his chest. He tightened his grip on his weapons and gritted his teeth.
Won't take me without a fight.

“You have no idea, do you?” the massive yaru growled. “I saw it in your eyes, and
still
you do not recognize the call.”

The creature was right: Will had absolutely no idea what it was talking about. The night's events had all conspired to render him confused, angry, and more than a little frightened, and his mind had been left without even the faintest inkling as to the yaru's desires. But looking at the corpses strewn around him, Will realized that even if he was meant to die, he would much rather make his killers work for their meal.

So he ran. He turned without a second thought and plunged into the wall of fog, swinging the spiked end of his hammer into the nearest yaru's head as he went. It gaped at him in surprise and its arm reached reflexively for him as he passed before it slumped to the side, dead.

The mist's innards were just as solid as Will had suspected and he silently cursed his bad luck. He could barely see three paces ahead of him, and when he ran into the first tree he slowed to a quick jog. It did little good, though, and after only a dozen steps he was given the niggling suspicion that the yaru had somehow taken control of the forest. Branches lashed him like wooden whips, pinging off of his helm and plucking at his clothes. His boot caught on something and he fell flat on his face.

“Damn it,” he growled, picking himself up and sheathing his hammer. He held his sword out before him like a blind man's cane, slowing even further until he was moving at little more than a brisk walk. He could hear things—rustles in the undergrowth, hushed growls and angry hisses—but the mist distorted them. They might have been a long way off or a mere pace away; he could not be sure.

“Over here.”

He froze, his eyes flicking back and forth and his ears straining to hear.

“This way.”

He turned slowly to his left—and came face to face with the Eastland girl. Her hair fell like a curtain around her face, bathing it in shadows, but Will recognized her as easily as his own mother. There seemed to be more blood on her than he remembered, and as he watched a small red line blossomed like a flower on her chest, spreading tiny, spidery fingers that thickened and grew together until the front of her ragged dress was soaked in blood.

“You want me to follow you?” Will asked, finally summoning the nerve to speak, and she nodded once. “How can I trust you?”

She raised one small hand and gestured vaguely at the mist surrounding them.
“You can see,”
she said simply, the whispered words seeming to come from just behind his ear rather than the girl herself.

Will looked around, confused, and then realized with surprise that she was correct. He had no torch—how had he been able to navigate the mist without one? It should have been pitch black, and yet the fog seemed almost to glow with an eery white sheen. “You did that?” he asked with disbelief, and she nodded once more. “How?”

“This is not the time,”
she whispered.
“Follow me, or you will die.”

Will hesitated for a moment more.
She's just a figment of my imagination,
he thought desperately.
Isn't she? Have I gone mad? Am I dreaming all this?

The little girl took a step toward him, and then another until she was standing close enough for him to touch. He could see it clearly now—the clean, slender cut in her dress just above her heart, the cut that he remembered each night when he dreamed. She reached out to him with one small hand, her tiny fingers grasping his own and tugging on them gently.
“Follow,”
she repeated,
“or die.”
Then she turned and ran, not in the direction Will had been going, but to his left. He dashed after her, unwilling to wait for the yaru to find him.

The girl led him through the trees at a breakneck pace, and it was all he could do to keep up with her. Branches and roots tore at him with renewed vigor, and each time he stumbled or fell he feared he would look up to find that she had disappeared. But she was always there, waiting for him to right himself and run once more.

Then, without warning, she came to an abrupt halt. Will skidded to a stop beside her, panting. “Why did we stop?” he asked in as hushed a voice as he could manage.

She held up one tiny hand for silence and cocked her head as though listening intently. For a moment she neither moved nor spoke, and then her hand snapped forward, pointing in front of them.
“There,”
she breathed.
“They are coming.”

Will barely had time to raise his sword before the first yaru burst from the fog with a feral scream. It hit him like a boulder, bowling him over so that they fell into a tangled ball of flailing limbs and gnashing teeth. Somehow he managed to keep hold of his sword, and he pounded the crossguard into his assailant's head. Slavering fangs snapped at his face, screeching against the metal of his helm, and he felt claws scrabbling at the leather on his arm.

“Get off me!” Will roared, and with a burst of strength he had not known he possessed he threw the yaru away from him. It hit a birch with a fleshy smack and a growl of pain, and by the time Will had risen to his feet it leaped toward him again, arms outstretched.

He was ready this time, though, and he whirled to the side and swung his sword in a cleaving arc down on its neck. Its body, now minus a head and most of its arms, hit the forest floor with a dull thud.

The whole event had been so fast that Will found himself staring in astonishment at his hands.
Did I do that?
he wondered, turning his sword over so that the blood on its edge gleamed in the ethereal light from the mist. It had been pure instinct on his part. He had never moved so quickly in his life, he was sure of it.

“More are coming,”
the girl said, and he looked up to see her beckoning frantically for him to follow. She was right, of course—he could hear them now, growling and hissing somewhere within the fog.

“Are we almost out of this?” Will asked, and the spirit nodded. “Alright, then. Lead on.”

It was not long before another of the beasts found him, but that slow, simmering rage that he could still feel deep in his chest had grown. He lashed out with his arm, sliding his sword between its ribs and then twisting sharply so that they broke around the edges of the blade. The thing was dead before it crashed to the ground, and Will had already disappeared back into the fog.

Soon it began to thin, allowing Will a more generous view of his surroundings. It became easier to follow the girl and soon the mist had all but cleared away, letting him chase after her without reservation.