Elliot, page 16
part #3 of Anarock Shifters Series
She cracked her victim’s neck and swatted his flailing body at another two dragons running in above their comrades’ backs. She smashed his shoulder into one of their snouts and sent him wheeling away. She wrenched her enemy sideways and used his teeth to cut the second one down the cheek.
All the others attacked at once. That was how colossally fucking stupid they really were. At the first sign of something unexpected, they threw their moronic playbook out the window and descended into chaos. They counted on their numbers and their rotten stupid dragoness to carry the day. Chumps. That was all they were. Chumps and punks.
They pounced on her en masse. They bit and slashed and tore at her skin. She let her rage reign free. She clubbed her dead dragon at random bodies, but she never tried to move her feet. She let those two dipshits hold her to the ground for all time. That was two extra dragons she didn’t have to fight. Let them think they were doing something useful down there.
She laughed inside herself at the sheer folly of it all. Why did she have to fight these dragons? She should be home in Anarock with her own beloved New Breed.
Instead, she was falling under piles of dragons. They scrambled on top of her faster than she could knock them off. One of them landed on her back. Two more joined him and their weight buckled her knees. She steered herself down on top of her tormentors. She smashed their skulls under her bulk.
She thrashed as best she could, but one of them bit the back of her neck. She couldn’t turn around to attack him. She couldn’t do anything with so many on top of her. She sensed herself flagging. This could end only one way.
Something powerful struck her shoulder and toppled her. She crashed onto the ground and what felt like dozens of dragons swarmed over her. Their fangs slashed her every which way. They bit her and screeched in her face. They would tear her apart any second now.
She spotted the mountains in the distance and her mind shut down. She wouldn’t climb them—not in this life. She let go of everything she wanted, everything she loved, everything she hoped for. She let go of Anarock, the Prometheus Crest, her family, her friends, her home, her neighborhood, her city. None of it meant anything now. She was already dead.
16
Elliot squinted across South Claiborne Avenue into Hoffman Triangle. NightRage Crest operated over there. He recognized a few of them walking around. Things just didn’t change that fast in Anarock. If he went over there, he would find NightRage exactly where he left it. He would find wizards. Some of them would almost certainly know how to send him back under the water to the Halcyon Coast.
Did he really want that? Victor sure had his number. He knew good and well Elliot didn’t want to go back to the Halcyon Coast. Elliot might want to rescue Aria, but he sure as hell didn’t want to get stuck on the Halcyon Coast again himself.
How could he ask NightRage for help when he wasn’t sure he wouldn’t get trapped there? He couldn’t. Whatever else he did, he’d be taking that risk. There was no way on God’s green Earth he could absolutely guarantee he wouldn’t get caught.
So this was what it all came down to. It was high time little old Elliot Weeks grew a pair and joined the ranks of the grown-ups. This was the end of his long-drawn-out adolescence. He was a child up until now. He was worse than a child. He was the most self-centered, self-absorbed, self-obsessed brat known to mankind.
All that was over now. He could cross that street and sack it up like a big boy or he could hang it up right now. If he didn’t throw down and help Aria, he might as well slink off to the Halcyon Coast himself because he sure as hell didn’t belong in Anarock.
The New Breed protected their own. They held the line against all their enemies. They stood up for themselves and defended their families. They did what they said they were gonna do. When they spoke, people listened and for good reason.
Being New Breed meant living in the real world. It meant doing what had to be done to get it done. It meant facing reality and never backing down from a fight.
Elliot Weeks never did any of that. He didn’t have to because his father and his brother and his Crest always did it for him. He could dance here and dance there and diddle around doing God knows what.
No one would save Aria—no one but him. He told her he would be there with her. He made her understand that what happened to her would happen to him. He didn’t do that. Now it was his turn to throw down and do what he said he was going to do. He was the one who encouraged her to think about escape. He got his. Now it was her turn.
He shut his eyes. He couldn’t watch himself do this for the second time. He started across the street. He ignored screeching cars and blaring horns. He tripped up the opposite curb and cracked an eyelid. He was on the sidewalk.
He let out a shaky breath and plunged into Hoffman Triangle. The houses and buildings looked the same as Central City, but he knew better. He swerved around several corners. Wrinkled black faces scowled at him from doorways. White boys in sagging shorts watched him pass their front porches. Kids stopped running around their yards to study him.
He hurried on his way hardly daring to make eye contact with anyone. Everyone in NightRage gave him the creeps. He stopped in front of a dingy green house. A horde of lanky black men crowded the front yard. They surrounded a single white woman in an impossibly short skirt. The men strutted around her moving their heads from side to side. Elliot saw their mouths moving, but he didn’t try to make out the words.
The sight made his spine tingle. One of the men rotated around and frowned at him. “What you want, boy?”
Elliot rushed away. He couldn’t go in there. He couldn’t deal with them, so how did he think he could get through to the NightRage Crest?
He halted at another house. The paint probably should have been white. Instead, it looked somewhere between coal-grey and beige. Elliot hesitated on the pavement for a long time. He didn’t see anybody, but he had to go in there.
He couldn’t go back to Central City and say he failed. He couldn’t go to Victor and say he wanted to belong to the Prometheus Crest. He couldn’t do anything until he found out for certain that he did everything possible to get Aria back. He couldn’t face tomorrow without that.
He swallowed hard and pushed open the feeble picket gate. It gave shrill creak like something out of a horror movie. Elliot left it standing open and walked up the path to the steps. The house seemed to sag deeper in on itself with every step. The lawn looked riddled with weeds even though someone mowed it in the last couple of days.
No broken detritus of kids’ toys or car parts or ripped-open bags of trash littered the lawn like so many other houses in this neighborhood. From all outward appearances, it was one of the nicer houses for miles around.
Elliot steeled himself to put his foot on the first step. He hoisted himself onto the warped old porch. The boards sagged under his weight. Was he really going to do this?
He touched the door and it squeaked open without any help from him. It yawned into a deserted living room populated by a faded, moldy carpet and slumped, threadbare furniture.
A grey cat perched on the couch. It studied him and blinked in languid disinterest. He put his foot across the threshold and the door slammed shut behind him. He should have been expecting that, but he jumped out of his skin anyway.
Now he was alone in this unearthly house. He came this far. He might as well go all the way. He ran his wrist across his forehead even though he wasn’t sweating. His ribs hurt. He couldn’t breathe.
His legs worked of their own accord. They carried him down the hall, past bedrooms, past a bathroom with the toilet smashed to a stack of shattered porcelain, past a closet standing open, past a broom cluttered with cobwebs.
Two empty bedrooms opened on either side at the very end of that endless hall. A large canopy bed slouched in one along with some dated dressers and a mirror covered with dust. A single child’s trundle bed stood in the corner of the other room. A large blue flag hung on the wall. Other than that, Elliot couldn’t see anything.
He closed his eyes and gulped. If this didn’t work, he was sunk. He had nowhere else in the world to go—not that he wanted to. He didn’t want any of this. He wanted to be under the water with Aria. He never should have come back to Anarock.
The instant he thought that, gravity caught him and towed him down, down into the Earth. He sank through the floor in a vortex of sucking action. His arms whipped up. A smothering closeness covered his nose and mouth and blocked out his vision.
The next instant, cool, clean air touched his face. He opened his eyes and discovered himself in a darkened room illuminated by a single bare bulb overhead.
Five people sat around a table under its weak glow. They looked like men, but Elliot knew better. They smoked cigarettes and the smoke billowed into the light. They tossed cards onto an enormous stack of money mounded in the middle of the table.
One of them looked up from under a mop of stringy grey hair. “Oh, look who’s here. It’s little Elliot Weeks back again. It took you long enough. We wondered if you thought twice about switching sides.”
“Did you get the information we asked for?” Another one snapped his cards down in front of his friends. “Full house. Suck on that, you piece of shit.”
The first man smacked his lips. “Son of a bitch. I’ll beat you one day, Leon.”
The second man chuckled and scooped the money toward himself. “Not today. If you got any more money, I’ll take that off you, too, Punchy.”
Punchy stubbed out his cigarette on the bare table and raised his eyes to Elliot. “Well? Did you get it or not?”
“I got it,” Elliot murmured.
“Go on,” Punchy snapped. “Tell us.”
Elliot shrugged. “They’re using Luna Kehoe to locate them.”
Leon bent sideways and spat tobacco juice onto the floor. “You’re a lying fucking bitch, Elliot. You come down here lying like that, you’re not likely to get home in one piece tonight.”
“It’s not a lie.” Elliot warmed to his subject. “Isaac Manning was using her power to spy on Bryce Griffin and…..” He broke off.
“On Alexa, you mean.” Punchy collected the cards and tapped them into a neat square.
Elliot looked away and nodded.
“He wasn’t doing that for Victor, though, was he?” Leon barked. “He did that for himself. The Prometheus Crest wasn’t using Luna to find the Omega Battalion.”
Elliot commanded himself to hold his temper in check. “What difference does that make? You asked me to find out how the Prometheus Crest was searching for the Omega Battalion. I told you.”
A shrunken brown creature in another chair burst into shrill giggles. When Elliot glanced his way, he noticed the thing wasn’t sitting in its chair at all. Stumpy legs barely showed beneath its normal-sized torso standing on the seat.
Leon spun around and chopped his hand through the air. “Shut your face, Exos.”
The midget pinched his lips closed, but he barely suppressed his mirth over the whole revolting encounter. Elliot cringed at the sight of him. These NightRage wizards always gave him the creeps.
Punchy rounded on Elliot. “So what the hell do you want from us? What are you doing back here now?”
“I need your help,” Elliot blurted out. “I need you to send me….” He broke off. How could he explain?
Exos cut in. He spoke out in a high-pitched, fluty voice that didn’t sound right in this haunted place. “He wants to go to the Halcyon Coast. He wants to go back to the Blood Kin.”
Elliot spun around staring at him. “How do you know about that?”
Exos laughed so hard he almost fell off his chair. Leon answered for him. “We know all about it. Lots of people know about it. A few NightRage have traveled there, but they don’t think much of it. The Blood Kin don’t have that much power. Not many of them have any magic at all and the ones that do don’t have a fucking clue how to use it. They’re too stuck on themselves to try.”
Elliot gasped out loud. “You’ve been there? Then you must know how to send me back! I have to go. You have to send me back.”
Punchy busied himself shuffling and dealing the cards. “We don’t have to do anything, sonny. NightRage don’t answer to the Prometheus Crest. Go run along to your own people. See if they can send you down.”
“This has nothing to do with the Prometheus Crest,” Elliot cried. “I’m not in the Prometheus Crest. I’m on my own.”
Punchy didn’t even bother to look up. “You’re one of them, all right. You just came from Ogru-Kuche, didn’t you? You told Victor everything. You didn’t even bother to come to us first. That tells me all I need to know about your loyalties.”
Elliot opened his mouth to argue, but he stopped himself. He should have known NightRage would keep tabs on his movements. Punchy was right. Elliot went to Victor first. He came back from the Halcyon Coast specifically to talk to Victor, to throw himself on Victor’s mercy. He never once considered going to NightRage first. He would never do that except as a last resort.
Punchy lit another cigarette and tossed a few coins into the center. “Ante up or shut up.”
The others added their money to the kitty. Elliot watched them mutter their bets and exchange their cards. They didn’t speak to him again until Leon glanced over his shoulder. “Are you still here?”
Elliot’s heart sank. So that was it. He belonged to the Prometheus Crest without even trying. He didn’t have to pledge his allegiance to Victor against all others. It was already done.
The instant he thought that, the Earth spat him back out in the deserted hall of the house above ground. He looked back and forth between the two empty bedrooms. In a heartbeat, he knew he would never come back to this house in life or death. He would never have anything to do with NightRage again. That door closed for all time.
17
Elliot crossed South Claiborne Avenue. He didn’t shut his eyes this time. He was going back to Central City where he belonged. He hoped he never crossed the Avenue again in this life.
He slowed to a walk once he got there. He made his way through one neighborhood after another on his way back to Ogru-Kuche. He didn’t want to see Victor again. He didn’t want to pledge his allegiance to the Anarock leader until he really knew he had exhausted every possible chance of getting Aria back.
What hope could he hold out to do that when NightRage wouldn’t help him? No one in the Prometheus Crest would help him without Victor’s approval. Victor demanded loyalty from everyone and he would demand it from Elliot, too. If Elliot pledged allegiance and broke his word, he could only hope for a quick and painless death. Even that might be asking too much.
He made his way to Aria’s neighborhood. He stopped across the street from her house. He had to explain to her parents what happened to her. He was the only person who could give them that peace. Maybe Tom and Hilda could convince Victor to rescue their daughter, but he doubted it. When they heard that Victor made the decision to leave Aria on the Halcyon Coast, they would bow to his decision. They were too damned loyal not to.
A cheerful voice broke in on his thoughts. “Hey, Elliot!”
He whipped around. His worst nightmare came true when he came face to face with Aria’s two sisters, Gianna and Amaya. They were just as short and petite as their sister with the same long, silken black hair and sharp, flinty eyes.
Amaya grinned at him. “Hey, stranger! Long time no see. Where have you been hiding?”
Elliot’s chest constricted. He had to explain the situation to them, but how? He had to tell them the truth. He couldn’t let them think something happened to Aria without knowing what it was.
The smile evaporated off Gianna’s face and her cheeks fell. “What’s wrong? What’s the matter?”
Elliot swallowed hard. “I’m sorry. I was just trying to work up the courage to go inside and talk to your parents.”
“What do you want to talk to them for?” Amaya broke into nervous laughter. “Don’t tell me you finally got up the nerve to ask Aria to marry you. You’ve been running around that for long enough.”
Elliot shut his eyes and swallowed hard. He flashed back to the moment when he asked Aria to marry him. How could he be so fucking stupid to let her slip through his fingers?
When he opened his eyes, he discovered both girls gaping at him in horror. “What’s wrong, Elliot?” Gianna whispered.
His chin sank on his chest. “It’s Aria.”
“Where is she?” Amaya asked. “Is she all right?”
He held up one hand as much to steady himself as them. “It’s like this. She…..well, she and I were walking around the Quag. It doesn’t matter now why. We just were and she…. something happened. She fell through the Earth into an underground world. She punched through to another world under the waters of the Quag. We both got taken prisoner by an unknown race of dragons and they call their place the Halcyon Coast. We were down there for over a week. I found a way to come back and she’s still down there. I’ve been trying to find a way to go back and rescue her, but Victor won’t help me. I just went across the Avenue to NightRage and they won’t help me, either. They say I belong to the Prometheus Crest and they won’t help. I…. I don’t know what to do. I was just going to tell your parents, but I know they won’t act against Victor.”
He cringed waiting for the reaction he knew would come. The two sisters exchanged glances, but Elliot couldn’t read them.
When they faced him, he hardly recognized their faces. Gianna’s features hardened to a mask of brutal determination. “Don’t bother telling Mama and Papa. They won’t hear a word against Victor. We’ll tell them what you said so they don’t wonder.”
