The Drowned Tomb (The Changeling Series Book 2) (25 page)

Peryl gave her brother a dark look. “Is that really a good idea?” she whispered to him. “You know you always break them.” She looked across to Robin and Karya. “He’s so heavy-handed. Kills everything, sooner or later.” She considered. “Usually later. He tends to pull off arms and legs, don’t you, dear brother? Like that pixie you had, remember?”

Ker’s monumental visage darkened further still. “It tried to run away,” he rumbled. “Spiteful thing. Can’t run with no legs.”

“Yes dear, I’m sure you had your reasons, but the clean-up is horrible. I don’t want to be picking faun out of my hair for the next few days.” She patted her brother’s huge arm. “Just snap its neck now, and if the Scion still doesn’t open the doorway, we can go and do the same to the little human boy sleeping in the dirt out there.”

Ker nodded reluctantly, looking unhappy about it.

“No! No! Wait!” Robin threw his hands up. “Just … stop a second.” His heart was racing. These two creatures were more than just dark. They were clearly unbalanced. And here he was, trapped deep underground with them. No other way out of the chamber, no way back now that the tunnel leading here had collapsed. Robin and his friends were buried alive with these ghouls. He wondered if the people in the city above had felt the tremor of the tunnel’s collapse, as they went about their shopping in the sunshine. That seemed a world away. There was no one to help them down here. No one but themselves to rely on, and neither he nor Karya had any mana left.

Miss Peryl and Mr Ker were regarding him with interest. Ker’s huge white paw was poised above Woad’s slim blue throat.

“We
all
go through,” Robin said. “All of us, Henry too. No one gets left here. I’ll open the Janus station, or, well, I’ll try to, but just don’t snap anything or rip anything off, okay? Deal?”

“Can I have the tail when you’re done later?” Peryl asked Ker in a curious tone. “I think it would make a nice belt if I have it tanned.”

Ker growled possessively, and cradled the faun a little tighter, holding him away from his sister. Robin was sure Woad’s tiny ribs were about to snap in the grip of the ghoulish bear.

“Stop! Don’t! Let us all go through and I’ll help,” Robin said urgently. “There might be other things you need my help with, on the other side. Like that.” He pointed a wobbling knife at the redcap door. “Those are my terms, okay? It won’t cost you anything and I promise I’ll unlock the station.” He was pointing the knife from one Grimm to the other, unsure which of the two was most dangerous. Karya squeezed his arm.

“Are you mad?” she whispered shakily to him. “As soon as we get to the Netherworlde side, they’ll slit our throats anyway. Well,” she considered. “Everyone except you.”

“Oh, alright,” Peryl said indulgently, as if she was doing Robin a huge favour. “Fine, we have a deal. We’ll do it your way. Activate the Janus station. We’ll all go together, just one big happy family.”

“R … Rob?” a voice came from behind Ker. The entire assembled party turned to look.

Henry had appeared, stumbling in the doorway. His school uniform was covered in dust and his hair wild. He’d cut his lip and his chin had a smear of blood. “What’s going on? Where…” He trailed off, taking in the scene.

His eyes widened. “Woah! Where did the incredible hulk come from?” he said shakily. “I didn’t think I’d hit my head that hard.” He noticed Woad and his face instantly changed from confusion to outrage. “Oi! You put that faun down, Goliath. He’s not yours.”

Ker bared his teeth at Henry like an angry dog. “Mine!” he grumbled. “The faun stays with me.”

“Henry…” Robin was relieved to see his friend upright, even if he did look more than a little concussed. “Come here. To me and Karya, now. It’s okay, they won’t hurt you.” He glared with venom at Peryl, who looked back with an arched eyebrow. “We have a deal. Don’t we?”

She shrugged carelessly. “Oh please, like I’d waste my breath on this human gnat. He wouldn’t be worth the effort.”

Henry edged around the room warily, and a little woozily, not taking his eyes off the frightful and surreal pair.

“So…” he said unsteadily as he reached Robin and Karya, rubbing the back of his head gingerly. “Strife and Moros are the pretty ones in the family, eh?” He nodded to Eris’ servants. “So which one of these two lovelies is the one you snogged then, mate? Because to be honest, you could do better.”

“Silence that human or I’ll have his flapping tongue for a bookmark,” Ker growled.

“I’m serious, Scion,” Karya said to Robin. “There is no honour in Grimms. If you think for a second they will keep their word, you’re wrong. We’re dead as soon as we step through to the Netherworlde, and the Shard is as good as lost.”

Robin shook his head. He had a plan, of sorts. “When we hit the other side,” he whispered sidelong. “The second we arrive. I want you to tear us away. Don’t care how far, don’t care which direction, or whether you keep us in the Netherworlde or back here, just get us away from them. We’ll think of something then.”

“I can’t,” she hissed, as the Grimms steadily approached. She led him backwards up the steps to the monolith, Henry following. “I don’t have anything left in me. That pasty psycho is right: I don’t think I could move a blade of grass right now.”

“I have mana you can use,” Robin said.

“It doesn’t look like it,” she replied, frowning at him in confusion. “You look like you’re going to pass out. How much energy did it take you to open that doorway?”

“All of it,” Robin shrugged. He still hadn’t taken his eyes off their enemies, Ker lumbered up the steps, Woad in arms.

“I couldn’t possibly touch your mana stone anyway,” she said, exasperated.

“I wasn’t talking about mine,” he muttered to her. He wiggled his knife in his hand. The pommel stone flashed in the light. “Just … just be ready, okay? We’ll only get one shot to escape.”

Karya’s eyes widened in shocked understanding. She grabbed Robin and Henry’s arms, linking them tightly. Henry, still dizzy, looked down in confusion. Clearly mistaking the gesture for one of nerves, he gave her hand a small reassuring squeeze. She glared at him witheringly.

“Well?” Peryl said. “We’re waiting. Let’s all get back home.”

Ker nodded in agreement, the spikes of his blood red hair slicing his face into shadow and light. “Dis calls. And my army awaits us.”

Robin had never operated a Janus station before. The one he’d first encountered hadn’t looked like this. It had been a circle of stones atop a hill, and Karya and Woad had done all the work. The only other time he’d been through one, on a sandy beach, he’d been half possessed and unconscious.

He didn’t need to figure anything out, however. As soon as he set foot within the archway, a strange vibration seemed to ripple through the sanctuary, making dust fall from the domed roof above them. A strange feeling ran through his body, like pins and needles, and the air between the archway of stone seemed to grow thicker. His Fae blood was activation enough for this portal, it seemed.

They bunched up together within the stones. Robin held tightly to Karya. His knife was in the hand she clung to, so that they held it together. It made Robin’s skin crawl to be standing so close to the Grimms. Peryl was watching him carefully with narrow, amused eyes, and Ker loomed above them all like walking doom.

“No tricks now, little Fae,” he spat through sharp, gritted teeth. His massive gnarled hand was over Woad’s face. Robin couldn’t see if the faun was awake or unconscious.

The odd prickling feeling was intensifying, a sense of vibrating from within. The air was thicker still and seemed to be filling with a thin golden mist.

Robin steadied his feet, preparing to go once again deep down the rabbit hole. And then the mist rushed up and enveloped them, obliterating all from view, and the world fell away into darkness and silence.

FAEFROST

Everything was confusion in the moments that followed. Robin’s feet hit the ground, freezing and wet, icy powder flooding in over the tops of his trainers. The sensation was unexpected and shocking, and it took his brain a moment to register what it was.

Snow? Deep snow, almost to his knees.

An icy wind buffeted him as soon as they arrived in the Netherworlde, howling in his face like biting teeth and tearing through him. It roared around them, keening like a great lost spirit. As the golden mist disappeared, Robin got a glimpse of rocky walls, glittering, rugged and green, mountains perhaps, draped with ice, and overhead a white sky pregnant with enormous billowing snow clouds.

“Now,” he yelled to Karya over the wind. His face stung with the cold. Still gripping her hand, he barged into Miss Peryl as hard as he could, knocking the Grimm off balance as he lunged past her, driving through the thick white snow toward Mr Ker, meaning to reach out with his free hand and grab at Woad. At the same time, he heard Karya yell to Henry to hold on tight, her voice whipped away by the howling gale, and he felt her fingers slide down the knife he clutched until they closed around the garnet stone set in the pommel. Around Phorbas the satyr’s mana stone. There was a familiar lurch as Karya tore, and the world began to fall away again, as quickly as it had come. But at the last moment, his face a nightmarish fury, Ker dodged and turned aside, spinning the unconscious form of Woad out of reach so that Robin’s grasping hand closed on thin air. Robin’s eyes widened in horror.

An icy hand grabbed his shoulder painfully. Peryl had grappled him.

“You traitor!” she screeched, but her words were swallowed up by the tear. The wind, the snow, the mountains, all melted away, and Robin found himself once more hurtling through the blackness, aware of Karya’s hand gripping his own and the knife, and of Peryl’s painful grasp, monstrously strong, digging deep into his collarbone.

He hit the ground hard as the blackness suddenly receded.

Snow again, soft and freezing, but not as deep. It glittered between his fingers as his head stopped spinning. There was no wind here. Wherever Karya had torn them through to, it was a more sheltered place than the other.

Shaking off Peryl, Robin scrabbled to his feet, staring around wildly. They were on a perfectly white, gently sloping snowy plain, bright moonlight flooding down on them, making the landscape glow brightly enough to hurt his eyes. The sky was covered with pale clouds above them, through which the moon diffused, blanching the sky, and the still, silent air here, freezing and fresh, was filled with fat flakes of softly falling snow. Robin’s breath came in great gasping clouds.

From the corner of his eye, he saw Karya and Henry, also struggling to their feet, shaking off snow in clumps. Karya looked shaken and nauseous, as though she had been electrocuted. Her hands were shaking uncontrollably as Henry dragged her to her feet, his own hair already piling up with snowflakes and his teeth chattering in the cold.

Of Woad and Mr Ker, there was no sign.

No sign at all.

“Woad!” Robin called hoarsely, his voice breaking. He stared despairing and desperate at the others. “We left Woad! We left him! I tried to grab him but … Ker still has him. We left him behind—”

“Robin!” Henry cried in alarm. “Behind you!”

Robin was knocked off his feet as a heavy blow landed in the small of his back. He fell, splayed in cold powder, rolling over and staring up to see Peryl standing over him, white against the night sky.

She looked demented. Like a fury from hell, her purple hair wild about her head, glaring down at the boy she had just kicked to the ground with undisguised anger. Her teeth were bared, her eyes blazed and her expression was murderous.

“Worm!” she yelled, gusts of snow blowing in the air between them. “You horrible little liar! Where have you taken me? Where is my brother?” Robin tried to get up, but his feet slipped in the snow. The Grimm raised her arms towards him, shaking white hands outstretched. “I’ll kill you! How dare you! I’ll kill all of you!” she spat furiously. Shadows crept between her fingers like black snakes of smoke, thickening and building. Henry and Karya were too far away, he couldn’t get up in time, she was going to blast right through him in her anger.

“How dare you betray me, you Fae scum!” she hissed. “I’ll teach you the meaning of pain, you brat! I’ll—”

She stumbled. There had been an audible crack. Robin watched as the Grimm tottered a little, looking confused, and then her eyes slowly rolled back in her head and she collapsed to the ground, face first into the deep snow.

Standing behind her, holding a large rock between its mittened hands, was a figure, silhouetted in the snow. A stranger, bundled in pale furs and a deep shadowy hood, like a wilderness hunter.

Robin blinked up in confusion at their saviour. Whoever it was, they had just cracked a rock over the Grimm’s head, knocking her out.

The figure stepped forward, still holding the rock above its head.

It was a boy, a few years older than Robin. His thick, bundled clothing looked like wolf skin wraps against the cold, pale and thick. A leather pack on his back criss-crossed his chest with straps.

The boy’s eyes were narrowed with suspicion and as silver as mercury, his face serious beneath the thick fur hood he wore. He frowned down at Robin for a moment, standing there like judgement itself. Then he unceremoniously dropped the rock with a thud into the snow. It landed an inch from Peryl’s head.

“She was attacking you,” he said. It was more of an observation than a question. His voice was surprisingly deep and flat. The boy stared at the unmoving figure of the Grimm, his eyes still narrowed and intense, like some wild creature ready to bite or bolt. “Was she right to do so?”

“No,” Karya said weakly, breathless in the cold. “She’s a Grimm. A servant of Eris, and she meant to kill us.”

The boy considered this, staring at the three children. There was no hint of friendliness or warmth in his face. He looked as though he might decide to pick the rock back up. Snow fell around them all on the white moonlit plain in soft and silent clouds.

Eventually, the silver-eyed boy seemed to reach a decision.

“Then I made the right choice. It is lucky for you I was nearby,” he said gruffly. “No one comes up on the tundra.” He glanced around, as if to verify that they were alone on this snow-blasted plain. “No one travels the Gravis Glaciem. It’s a forgotten place.” His jaw worked silently. Robin saw his hands bunch in his mittens. They looked home-made, like everything he wore. “That’s why I’m here.” He held out a hand to Robin, to pull him to his feet.

Robin started at it, still confused.

“Take it then,” the boy snapped, and Robin did, pulled to his feet roughly.

“I don’t know where you all came from,” the boy said, frowning seriously at them all. “But this is my patch. If you are telling the truth, and that really is a Grimm, she won’t be down for long. We should get out of the open. It’s not safe out here anyway.” His critical eyes roamed over the three of them, his frown deepening. “You are all wearing stupid clothing. You’re going to freeze to death if I leave you here.”

He seemed to be struggling with something for a few moments. Eventually he sighed heavily down his nose. His breath a gust in the chilled air.

“Come, I know a place. A safe place. Safer than here anyway.”

As he had pulled Robin to his feet, the strange boy’s wolf skin hood had fallen back. His hair was messy and light grey, like ash or old snow, but what Robin noticed was not the colour, but that there were the two stubs nestled above his ears either side, almost lost in his hairline.

Each of these flat stubs was roughly the size of the palm of his hand. They were the stumps of sawn-off horns.

“You’re … you’re a Fae?” Robin said in wonder, his teeth chattering as he stood staring at the older boy. “Your horns are gone but—”

“It is not safe to be a Fae in the Netherworlde anymore,” the boy said curtly, looking visibly angered by Robin’s words. “I’m not a Fae. I’m no one.”

“We have to go back for Woad,” Henry insisted beseechingly to Robin. “We can’t just leave him with that … that troll. Did you see that thing? It was like Mr Strife on steroids.”

Karya looked as though she were falling asleep. Robin had never seen her so weak. “I can’t,” she said. “Can’t tear … no mana. Need to rest.” She managed a smile over at Robin through the falling flakes. “Genius idea, Scion, using your old tutor’s mana, but it’s all gone now. I can’t tear until I, until…”

“Karya?” Robin looked at her in concern. She swayed a little, and then collapsed, Henry catching her clumsily before she hit the snow. It was falling faster around them now, getting heavier, silently filling the air like confetti.

“She’s passed out, mate,” he said to Robin, looking worried. He glanced up at the grey-haired Fae, who was watching them all silently. “This guy’s right, we need to get her out of here, at least away from little Miss Murder-in-Mind there. The snow’s getting worse. But…” Henry looked devastated, shaking his head. “ … Woad.”

Robin nodded grimly. It had all happened so fast. His throat felt thick, knowing that their friend was still with the other Grimm. But what could they do right now? He had no idea where in the Netherworlde they had arrived through the Janus station. And he had no idea how far from that spot Karya had managed to tear them, or in what direction. Woad could be ten miles from here, or a hundred, or more. “We … we’ll think of something, Henry,” he said, his teeth chattering. He blinked snowflakes out of his eyelashes. “We’ll get Woad back.” He stared down at the unconscious form of Miss Peryl.

A very dark part of him wanted to pick up the rock.

Robin wanted nothing more than to get away from her. As far as possible. He looked back to the strange, wild boy who had saved them, the hornless Fae who was staring at them all cautiously, his face a mask of wary distrust.

“This place you mentioned. Is it far? Is it really safe?”

The boy nodded. “Safe as anywhere,” he said. “It’s my place. My secret place. No one knows it.” He stomped through the snow, dipping down and taking Karya easily from Henry. “You’re on my patch,” he repeated. “I’m out here to avoid trouble, and you strange travellers show up out of thin air, bringing a Grimm along. A Grimm! I want to know your business. Leave the dark thing.” He nodded to Peryl, his flashing silver eyes filled with cold fire. “She will come to no harm out here, more’s the pity. She’s probably making the ice feel cold.”

“I’m Robin,” Robin said. “Thank you … again. She almost killed us. If you hadn’t been nearby—”

The boy looked at Robin coldly. His mercurial eyes narrow. “I hope I didn’t knock out the wrong person,” he said. “Come on, this way. It’s not far, and the snow is falling enough to cover our tracks. I am Jackalope. But you can call me Jack.”