Bryce, page 15
part #2 of Anarock Shifters Series
In answer to his thoughts, she slipped her hand into his. Was she thinking the same thing? He didn’t look at her, but her palm touching his, her fingers lacing into his grasp calmed him as never before. One more time, he thanked his lucky stars he had her with him. She came back for him. She had a clear shot at freedom and safety and home and family and she gave it all up to help him.
He pressed her hand. Old habit prevented him from offering any other acknowledgment, but he didn’t see any reason to maintain appearances. Everybody knew Bryce and Alexa were together. If they didn’t know, they might as well find out now as later.
Darkness fell and still the Battalion marched overland. Some unseen magic-user at the long column’s head erected invisible bridges over swamps and marshes. The Battalion didn’t have to pick their way around innumerable lakes and streams. They walked in a straight line over the top heading westward, always westward.
They walked all night. When dawn broke, the Battalion dragged its weary way into a clearing. People flopped down. The monsters curled up in the shade without bothering to shift.
Bryce looked around him and frowned. He spent the better part of the last twenty years ranging through the southern Louisiana bayou. He thought he knew it as well as anyone, but he didn’t recognize this place.
He stopped Maurice hurrying past. “Where are we?”
“The Honeycomb.”
“Hey!” Bryce called after him. “Where is this?”
Maurice bustled on his way and didn’t stop. Alexa migrated to Bryce’s side. “What’s wrong?”
“This place….” Bryce scowled at his surroundings. “I don’t know it.”
“It could be anywhere. I’m sure there are places you’ve never been.”
He shook his head, but he didn’t stop glaring at everything around him. “Think about it. We’re a day’s travel from New Orleans. Technically, we should still be in Quag belonging to Anarock. Pop and Victor and Malachai and I hunted over this land for years. I should know it.”
“Yeah, but…..”
Just then, Francois came along. He bent down and dunked a large paintbrush into a puddle. He lifted it dripping and passed the bristles through the air. Where the brush painted, buildings, fences, and houses appeared out of nowhere.
Bryce moved out of the way to make room for him. A second later, Maurice and two more magicians came along. Working together, they uncovered a massive edifice crowding the entire clearing. Log walls, cabins, and even some three-story wooden buildings rose out of nothing. They packed the area inside a high fence constructed of thick timbers.
Bryce and Alexa blinked at it in amazement. The four magic wielders moved in a steady line around the clearing creating this tiny city out of emptiness.
As soon as the houses and buildings appeared, the Omega Battalion started moving into them. Monsters shifted into their human forms—or semi-human forms—and climbed the stairs. People drew water from wells and smoke billowed from the chimneys.
Forsythia came along and took hold of a heavy timber gate in the fence. She nodded her upside-down head at Bryce and Alexa. “You two better come inside before I lock you out.”
Bryce woke from his trance and he and Alexa moved inside the perimeter with as much dignity as they could muster. Bryce couldn’t stop staring at everything. “Is this…..?”
“This is the Honeycomb,” Forsythia told him. “McCain keeps it hidden so no one will bother us. We use it as our headquarters when we’re not on campaign. No one can see us here. The spells hide it from intruders.”
“Is that how we got here?” Alexa asked. “Did we pass through some invisibility spell? Is that why no one knew this place existed?”
“No, no,” she countered. “We passed through a portal. We’re in a different dimension from the rest of the bayou. That’s what makes McCain such a genius. Only he could think of something like this.”
“I see. So he opened the portal. Is that his power?”
“He doesn’t have any power,” Forsythia replied. “He got Abrica to open the portal for him. His only power is his intellect. That’s what makes him such a superior leader.” She pointed to a nearby cabin. “You two can stay there. You might want to settle in because McCain wants you both at the council of war this evening.”
She moved off and left the pair alone. Alexa blinked after her. “Fucking great. We’re in another fucking dimension.”
Bryce lowered his voice so no one would hear him. “Did you catch that? He doesn’t have any power of his own besides his superior intellect.”
“What good does that do?” She rounded on him. She didn’t make the same effort to keep the volume down. “We’re stuck here and we can’t get out. We don’t have any way to cross back over to the real world.”
He did his best not to burst out laughing. “Don’t worry about that. We’ll play it cool until they leave here for their next ill-fated campaign. They’ll take us back to our own world themselves. When the time comes, we’ll take them back to Anarock and blow them all to kingdom come.”
Her jaw dropped. “You’re serious!”
He whispered low into her face. “He wants us at the council of war. We play along the way we always have. Shit, we even encourage them to go back and we go along with them. We’re safe here until they do. No need to rush off when we can stick around and keep an eye on them.”
18
Alexa rested her head on Bryce’s chest in their new bedroom. This large queen-sized bed and the downy mattress offered a pleasing contrast to their narrow camp cots.
She couldn’t stop staring at every detail of this cabin. The heavy log walls and vaulted timber ceiling gave her a feeling of solidity and comfort, even safety. It reminded her of…. well, home. This was the safest place she’d been since leaving Anarock. If she considered the constant threat of military annihilation, she might even be safer here than in Anarock. Wouldn’t that be something else?
Being safe didn’t mean anything, though. She was on the other side of an interdimensional portal. She and Bryce were still prisoners of this harebrained Battalion with no foreseeable way to get out.
No matter how many times she turned the problem over and over in her mind, she couldn’t come up with any plan better than Bryce’s idea of playing along. First, they had to get the spell lifted. Then they had to find a way back to the Quag—the Quag they knew and loved.
Only the Battalion could do both of those jobs, so why not go along with it? As long as McCain believed or pretended to believe that the couple was loyal to him, what better way to kill two birds with one stone?
She couldn’t stop thinking about Victor holding out his hand and beckoning her to return to Anarock with him. That hand tempted her like nothing else, but that, too, was an illusion. Riley stood only a few feet away. Victor wasn’t offering Alexa his heart. He wanted to help her—nothing more.
Not even his heart could tempt her to abandon Bryce. If she went back to Anarock, she wouldn’t have been happy there knowing Bryce was still on the run. She belonged with him, not hanging around Anarock.
A loud knock rattled the house. Francois’s voice piped through the walls. “Council time! Rise and shine!”
His bootheels drummed away down the steps and they heard him knock at the next house. Alexa sighed and closed her eyes. “I guess this is it.”
Bryce kissed her head and wriggled out from under her to sit up. “Let’s get this over with and see what he wants us to do. We might get another opportunity somewhere along the line.”
She didn’t want to get up, but when she stood on her own legs, her energy returned. She was going with him wherever that turned out to be.
Outside, they met Boris and Susie coming from somewhere. Bryce and Alexa followed them to another house like all the others. They climbed up to find McCain and his surviving lieutenants standing in the main living room.
McCain didn’t smile his fatherly smile now. He scowled and compressed his wrinkled lips the way he did on the march. “Now that you’re all here, let’s get down to business. As you all know, yesterday’s fiasco was just the beginning. It was our first pinprick to soften them up and erode their defenses. Now that we know how they work, we can undermine them next time.”
Bryce didn’t ask how McCain planned to do that. He didn’t have to because Maurice did it for him. “How can we undermine them when they have such powerful magic? Those things that came from under the bridge are a hundred times stronger than all of us put together and they have so many more of them. We could never defeat them all.”
McCain rounded on him baring his gnarled teeth. “I haven’t figured out how we’re going to do it, but we’re going to so you better start working it out. You can slope off into an early grave with the rest of the traitors if you think we can never defeat them. They’re pissants just like all the other enemies that tried to destroy us. We’ll find a way. We have to. We have to dominate. We have to conquer. That’s what this Battalion was created to do and we’re going to do it. Now who’s got an idea?”
He surveyed the faces surrounding him, but no one said anything. Most of his chickenshit sycophants wouldn’t even look him in the eye. They all knew he was out of his fucking tree. They were all just too afraid of him to say so out loud.
He spun around. “What about you, Francois? What do you say? How do you propose we defeat those trolls under the bridge?”
Francois shrugged and shuffled his feet. “It’s kinda hard to say when we don’t even know how many of them they have. They took the form of water when they first attacked us. For all we know, they can take any form they want. They could take the form of any element or even multiple entities at once. We’d never be able to….” He stopped himself from finishing.
McCain snarled under his breath and curled his lips at his cringing followers. “You’re all just as useless as you are ugly. I gave you a direct order to come up with a way to defeat them. I don’t want to hear that you can’t. I want to hear how you’re going to obey me.” He wheeled around and locked his eyes on Bryce and Alexa. “What about you two? You know them better than any of us. What can you tell us about them? How many of them are there?”
“Do you mean NightRage Crest?” Alexa asked.
“How the fuck should I know who they are?” McCain barked. “I asked you a question. I don’t need a bullshit history lesson.”
Alexa willed herself to stay calm. She didn’t hold out any hope of talking sense into this shithead. She found herself talking to the others instead of McCain. “The magic wielders who were hiding under the bridge are called NightRage Crest. They’re one of several house Crests of Anarock. They’re the most powerful magic-users, but they’re not the only ones. Even if you defeated NightRage, Victor will still call up the others to stop you.”
“You still haven’t answered my question,” McCain rumbled. “How many of them are there?”
“How many NightRage? I’d say probably close to five thousand.”
Susie screamed out loud and her hand flew to her mouth. She gaped at Alexa in horror. The others exchanged glances while the truth sank into their heads.
“Victor is leader of the Prometheus Crest,” Alexa went on. “They’re the leading Crest of Anarock and NightRage is their chief rival. If Victor sealed an alliance with his enemies to block you from taking Anarock, you better pack a lunch if you want to defeat them. They won’t go down without a fight and he’ll call up all the other house Crests to fight you. You might have some powerful magicians in this Battalion, but NightRage is just as powerful and you don’t have near as many as they do. Christ, those kids held back your entire force on their own before you broke down their barrier and that’s not counting the shifters from the Prometheus Crest. They sent out a handful of dragons this time. They have hundreds more, not to mention bears, wolves, and cats. They won’t let you walk in and take the place. I can promise you that.”
“We’re doing it!” McCain whirled away from her. “Start thinking, idiots! I want a plan on the drawing board by dawn tomorrow. We’re going in and we won’t let anyone stop us.”
Alexa watched the others hedge. They kept glancing right and left, but none of them would meet McCain’s fierce gaze. “Exactly how many people do you have in this Battalion?”
McCain confronted her growling. “What do you want to know that for?”
“I’m just wondering…..” she mused. “I was wondering if the numbers in your traveling column are all the people you have. Can you call up any others or is that it?”
He waved aside. “That’s all we have. We don’t need any others.”
“Oh.”
His head shot up. “What are you trying to imply? We can take them. We have to.”
She nodded but didn’t answer. For some reason, the Battalion looked a lot bigger when she first encountered them. She made the mistake of thinking they could call on limitless numbers to bolster their ranks when their comrades died in battle.
Now that she and Bryce got inside their secret headquarters, she realized her mistake. The Omega Battalion consisted of perhaps three hundred souls—definitely not more than five hundred.
No way in Hell could such a small force take Anarock, not even with their magicians and monsters and shifters. Anarock was just too strong, but McCain would never admit that. She could see him digging in his heels even now.
He humphed under his breath and strode to the window. He looked out at the Honeycomb. The longer she spent inside this hidden compound, the more she understood the name. The tight-packed buildings formed a warren of compartments all occupied by creatures and oddities and strange combinations of genetic aberrations living together. If she ignored his white eyes, McCain might be the closest thing inside the fence to something human.
He spun around again and his countenance didn’t comfort her at all. “You two did well during the battle so I’ve decided to reward you. Susie will lift the spell. You’ll be free to use your dragon abilities as you see fit from now on. I plan to use you to fly over that place and scout the terrain. You can tell me all about it so we can find some weakness.”
Alexa couldn’t speak. She never expected success to come so quickly and with so little effort. She thought she and Bryce would have to dawdle around here for years before they found a way to lift the spell.
Bryce responded for her. He nodded in a casual way, but he didn’t jump up and down or fall at McCain’s feet in worshipful thanksgiving. He kept his voice steady. “We appreciate it. We won’t let you down.”
“I know you won’t.” He sliced his finger at Susie.
The poor girl still hadn’t recovered from her shock at hearing the odds against their success, not to mention survival. Tears stood in her eyes when she stumbled forward. Susie kept her head bowed touching her palm to Alexa’s chest. A second later, she turned to Bryce and did the same thing. “It’s done.”
“Now all of you get the fuck out of here,” McCain snapped. “I need to think.”
The other lieutenants beat a hasty retreat. They managed to keep their composure so they didn’t glut the exit in their rush to get as far away from McCain as possible, but they didn’t stand around, either.
Bryce and Alexa waited until the majority vanished before they headed for the door. McCain’s harsh voice cracked behind their backs. “I want to see the two of you back here at dawn. We’ve got work to do.”
Alexa glanced back to see him glowering at his retreating followers. His eyes bored into her, but she couldn’t read him. In that instant, she knew she hated him enough to kill him. He was pure evil. She’d be doing the world and the rest of the Omega Battalion a favor by relieving them of McCain’s noxious presence.
Bryce touched her arm and they slipped outside. They sauntered back to their own house in no particular hurry. On the way, Alexa made up her mind that she wouldn’t help McCain conquer Anarock. She wouldn’t even pretend to help him. She already told him and the rest it was impossible. If he persisted in this cockamamie scheme, he was too far gone to help. Better that he should die and make room for someone sane to take over.
Bryce held the door open for her and they entered their own living room. Bentwood chairs and couches populated the sitting area. A counter across one wall acted as kitchen. An iron hook swiveled over the fireplace just like an old-time settler’s cabin.
Alexa didn’t know how she could cook on something like that, but already she loved this place. It surrounded her in security and assurance. She felt more at ease here than she even felt in her parents’ apartment back in Ogru-Kuche.
Bryce drifted into her line of sight and stopped. He dominated her view and eased close to her. He touched her cheek and passed his thumb across her lips. A sizzle of thrilling ecstasy prickled through her. Was he suggesting….? “Hey, baby.”
Her breath caught. She couldn’t answer. His body blasted his power into her. It demanded that her nerves respond to the silent suggestion rippling through her.
“We’re free, baby.” He only whispered, but those words vibrated down the centuries. They changed everything.
The muscle of his thumb tightened to grip her cheek. He lifted her mouth to his and she tasted the vapor on his tongue. They were free. They could go anywhere they liked. Nothing could stop them—except the portal.
The next instant, she was kissing him—or was he kissing her? He captured her with his lips and eyes. Those glowing green orbs glistened a hair’s breadth beyond her nose. They questioned her but didn’t answer anything.
His unstoppable touch appeared behind her back. He pressed her into himself and her pussy lips sobbed apart in aching desire. She wanted him now the way she wanted him always. She felt herself falling under his …. She didn’t want to call it a spell. She’d had enough spells to last a lifetime.
He demanded her in a way she couldn’t resist. His muscles directed her to respond to him. His bulging package between her legs ordained that she should open to him and welcome him in.
He flexed his knees and plowed up between her legs. Her thighs drifted open and his prick stabbed into her cunt. He ground the wetness into her panties. She sensed his hardness inside his clothes. Just knowing he was hard in there excited her almost to the point of climax.
