Elf Saga: Bloodlines (Part 1: Curse of the Jaguar) Read online

  “Your dad? Oh, Wolfram the chef! Little Mom never stops talking about him. They were best friends!” Rajani throws her arms around me for a long, bosomy hug. “This is so exciting! Are your mom and dad here too?”

  “Uh, no. It’s just me.” I stand up to escape any more hugs. The interior of the windmill is mostly one huge empty tower with ledges and lofts connected by steps and ladders all the way up to the top. I see beds and tables and lamps and tools and potted plants all over the place. It’s all wires and vines, strange machines and exotic herbs everywhere I look. So, a mess. “What about your mom? Nadira, right? Is she here?”

  “No, sorry. My folks are off on another honeymoon somewhere.”

  I stare at her. “Gone? For how long?”

  “Oh, who knows? It was a couple of months, last time.”

  “Months?” I lean on the edge of a table. I just can’t catch a break. Five weeks at sea, thousands of leagues to the far side of the world, and all for nothing. Unless... “Do you know if she still has her crystal ship?”

  “Of course!” Rajani beams. “They’re off on it now, wherever they are. Somewhere warm, probably.” She quickly makes the bed and fetches the steaming cup of green slime.

  “So it’s gone too.” I rub my eyes. “Perfect. That’s just perfect.” I want to flip a table over and smash the entire windmill to the ground, but I’m pretty sure that won’t help. Much.

  “What’s wrong?” She comes toward me. “It’s just a little honeymoon. Their eighth or ninth one, I think. Don’t your parents do that sort of thing?”

  I glance at her and then away. “My parents split up when I was little. It ended… badly. But it’s nice that your mom and dad are still together.”

  “Oh, I’m so sorry.” She pets my arm and offers me the tea again.

  I shake my head. “I don’t suppose we could grill up a little steak maybe? Or lamb chops, with a little pepper and butter?”

  “Sorry.” She shrugs apologetically. “I’m vegan.”

  Of course she is. I rub my eyes.

  She starts drinking the tea herself. “And I don’t have a dad, by the way.”

  “Huh?”

  “Two moms. Big Mom and Little Mom. But don’t tell them that I said that! I don’t think they’d like it if they knew I called them that in my head.”

  “You have two moms?” I stare at her. “Seriously? How does that even work?”

  “Uhm. I don’t know. It seems to work really well. Do people not have two moms where you come from?”

  I shrug. “It’s two more than I have.” Damn it. Why would I even say that? I don’t want any pity from her. “So, listen, Rajani, I’m sort of in the middle of dealing with something, and I need to see Nadira. Like, yesterday. It’s really important. And urgent.”

  “Well, I’m really sorry, but I don’t even know where she is, or when she’ll be back.” Rajani pouts at me with her great big puppy dog eyes.

  I slump into a chair and stare at the mess of amber rods and little steel hammers and wire coils on the table in front of me. I bury my face in my hands and make a loud, stupid sighing noise, trying to blow out all the anger before it gives me a heart attack.

  “Why don’t you tell me what’s going on?” Rajani sits down next to me. “Maybe we can work something out? I bet I can help if you tell me about it.”

  I lean back and stare at her, this happy little girl with her happy little world with two mothers and her own personal entourage of faeries. “Well, do you know where the lost city of Yas Yagaroth is?”

  “Sorry, no. Sounds familiar… but no.”

  “Then unless you happen to know where I can find a crystal ship without waiting for your moms to come home, then no, you can’t help me.” I rub my eyes and look away again.

  “Well, actually… technically… I do.”

  I look at her sharply. “Do what?”

  “I do know where you can find another crystal ship.” She smiles nervously, then looks away, then looks back at me, biting her lip. “Okay, so here’s the thing. When I was sixteen, Little Mom thought I was old enough to drive, so she gave me her old ship and she tried to teach me to fly it, but I was really bad. I mean really, really bad. And about a month after I got it I… sort of… crashed it.”

  I blink. “You crashed a flying crystal ship? Near here?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And it’s still there?”

  “Well, yeah. Big Mom was super pissed. I mean, they fought about it for like… ten whole minutes. It was epically awful.”

  Ten whole minutes? Poor baby!

  “And in the end, they said that when I wanted to fly again, I would have to go down there and get the ship out myself,” Rajani says. “And the funny thing is, in all this time, I’ve never really wanted to fly, so I never bothered to go get it. I mean, I’ve visited a bunch of countries with my moms, and I just really like being here, so I figured, why bother? You know?”

  I narrow my eyes at her. “So where is your ship now, exactly?”

  “The, uh, ravine.” She bites her lip again. “I kind of crashed it in the worst possible place. A few feet to the left and it would be in a field, but instead, it’s basically in a big black chasm, underground, in the dark, where there’s probably a whole nest of dragons and kareens, and other scary things.”

  “Of course it is.” I sit and stare at the wall for a minute. “Why is nothing ever easy?”

  “Lots of things are easy, silly.” She starts counting on her fingers. “Sleeping, eating, singing, dancing, hugging, kissing, masturbating…”

  “Buh buh buh!” I cut her off. “Boundaries. Don’t you have a filter between your brain and your mouth?”

  “Sorry.” She grins and blushes. “I guess not.”

  I stare at her for a moment. Well, I’ve come this far, haven’t I? “Okay. How far is it to this ravine?”

  She nods to the west wall. “It’s about a ten minute walk that way.”

  I nod at her. “Well, Rajani, what say you and I go get that ship of yours?”

  She bites her lip. “When? Right now? But what about the dragons?”

  I flex my hands. Whatever her little faerie friends did to me, I feel great. Solid, strong. If I’m going to do something stupid, now would be the time. “I can handle a few cave dragons. Come on.”

  Fifteen minutes later we’re standing on a windswept slope of a lovely green, grassy hillside and gazing down into a big black scar in the ground. It looks like the world was just ripped open by some angry giant, and then left that way, all exposed rock and earth and roots. The sunlight only goes down part way before the angle of the shadows swallows up the bottom.

  “Spiffy.” I start down into the ravine, finding good footholds everywhere, some of hard stone, some of springy roots. “Seems safe enough. Come on, Raj.”

  “Uhm. Okay.” She takes two steps down, slips, and falls squarely on my back, where she hangs like a clumsy toddler. “Oof! Sorry! Uh, heads up?”

  “Yeah, got it. Just hang on to me. I’ll do the climbing.” The added weight isn’t too bad.

  “Are you sure?” She locks her arms around my throat, choking me slightly.

  “Yeah, I’m sure,” I gasp. And down we go. At first it’s easy. Then we get down into the shadows and I can barely see what I’m doing, and it gets harder. But Rajani strikes up a light, and that makes it easy again. I notice that the light is one of those amber rods I saw back in the house. That’s handy. At least she can’t set my hair on fire with that.

  “So, I don’t want to sound all negative or anything,” she whispers in my ear. “But what happens if we can’t get the ship out?”

  “We’ll get it out,” I grunt as I continue to lower us down into the darkness. “My story isn’t going to come to a grinding halt in the ass-crack of the world.”

  She giggles. “I certainly hope not. But you know, Gen, some stories don’t make it to the big finish. Tons of them. You know, life just sucks like that sometimes.”

  “Well, my l
ife sucks plenty, but it’s not stopping here.”

  “How do you know?”

  I grimace, knowing that I’m about to quote my mother. “Because I say so.”

  We reach the bottom of the ravine and Rajani releases her death-grip on my windpipe and hops down. The light of her amber rod is just bright enough to let us see the dense tangles of the roots sticking out all around us like pale, dead snakes, and the light gleams on the dark carapaces of the beetles and centipedes swarming over the earthen walls.

  “Ew!” Rajani shudders. A lone faerie peeks out of her hair, and then ducks back inside again.

  I grin. “Come on, Raj. I’ll protect you from the big bad bugs.”

  “Promise?”

  I lead the way down the narrow, dark path as it winds between the rocky walls. The sky looks like a pale blue scar overhead, and I wonder how fast I could I climb back up there with Rajani on my back if anything went wrong down here.

  Probably not fast enough.

  “So, have you ever killed a dragon?” I ask.

  “Oh gosh no! I’ve never killed anything! Unless you count that cheesecake Big Mom made for my birthday last year, which was delicious, and I just demolished it, all by myself. Oh my gosh, so good!”

  “Uhm. Okay.” I frown. “But you did say there are dragons down here, right?”

  “Maybe. Who knows? No one ever goes down here,” she says. “Do you smell mushrooms? I smell mushrooms!”

  “Focus, Raj.” I sweep some roots out of my face. “Dad told me once that you guys can use your faeries to fight, so tell me how that works, in case we run into trouble.”

  “I wouldn’t know. You’d have to ask Big Mom, she’s the big bad Feyeri warrior,” Rajani says. “She’s all hardcore with making trees grow out of monsters’ eye sockets and yucky stuff like that. I have no idea how she does it. Gives me the heebie jeebies.”

  I stop. “So how do you fight?”

  “Oh, I never fight with anyone. Who would I fight? What would I fight about? Ganache? Baklava? That’s crazy talk!”

  I sigh and start walking again. “Okay. Rajani lives in a non-violent, dessert-centric fantasy world. Check.”

  “Hey now, Miss Frowny-Pants, I live in the real world. I study hard, and I work hard, and I heal people with faerie magic. That’s all very real. Nothing fantastic about that.”

  “Uh huh.” I push through a tangle of dead brambles, snapping twigs loudly as they snag on my deerskins and hair. I stumble free on the far side a step ahead of Rajani, and I freeze. “Oh shit.”

  “What?” Rajani bumps into me from behind, almost knocking me forward. She touches my arm to look around me and then finally sees what I see. “Oh shit.”

  There’s a pile of… things in front of us. At first glance they look like a dozen fat, white babies all sleeping in a heap, but then I see one of their faces and it’s definitely not a baby. The face is crushed flat, and it’s almost perfectly circular. The mouth is a thin scar below two slitted nostrils, and when the lips part I see thin, needle-like teeth.

  “Kareens,” Rajani whispers. “Bad. Very bad. Need to go now. Time to run away, very quickly and quietly.”

  “No.” I grab her wrist and hold her still. “I can handle this. What, uh, what are they and what do they do?”

  “Kareens drive people insane with nightmares, and then when you’re totally crazy and helpless, the kareens come and eat you.” Rajani shivers. “Alive.”

  “Sick freaks,” I mutter. “How many faeries do you have with you?”

  “Two. Wait.” She pats her thick green hair. “No, three.”

  “Well, faeries can make things grow, so can you grow some vines to tie up these kareens before they start noshing on our toes?”

  “I can try.” Rajani teases the three faeries out of her hair and whispers to them, gesturing at the sleeping kareens, and then the little green sprites dash out into the air, whirring on their delicate wings, and they start to work their magic.

  The vines grow quickly, slithering up out of the earth in a dozen different spots all at the same time, snaking up and over the pile of kareens, winding together and weaving a crooked green net over the little monsters.

  I nod my encouragement silently, not daring to make a sound.

  And then Rajani sneezes.

  A big, wet, loud sneeze.

  “Oh gross!” She looks with horror at the hand she sneezed into.

  “Get back!” I whip out my hatchet as the kareens’ black eyes snap open and the pale beasties jerk upright, straining against the vines winding around their legs and necks. They hiss at us, their little clawed arms pawing at the air, trying to reach us.

  “What do we do? Whatdowedo?!” Rajani yanks on my arm.

  I yank my arm free. “We’re okay, calm down. The net’s holding, see?”

  The net vanishes, and then the entire ravine vanishes. Everything is just gone. Rajani, the walls, the faeries, the kareens, all gone. Everything is black and silent.

  I freeze, looking around carefully, listening.

  Nothing.

  Oh shit. The kareens got me. It’s nightmare time.

  Out in the darkness I hear a soft shuffling sound, like old shoes dragging through the grass, slowly coming closer. It’s behind me and in front of me. It’s all around me.

  My hatchet is gone.

  I raise my fists and notice that the jaguar spots on my hands are gone.

  I blink.

  Why the hell are my spots gone?

  The four creatures that shuffle out of the darkness are not kareens, or dragons, or any big scaly thing with claws or fangs. They’re me. They’re all me. Copies of me.

  One is limping forward, most of the flesh torn from her body, leaving her little more than a bloody skeleton shambling blindly onward. But half of her face is still there. Half of my face.

  One is crawling on her belly, dragging herself forward on her arms. Her legs are missing, and her torso is a gray mangled chunk of shredded meat and skin. Rotten. Decayed.

  One is walking with her head tilted back, staring up at the black sky. Her arms and legs are bulging with muscles so huge that her skin is beginning to split open. Her neck is thicker than her skull. And I can see a huge round lump throbbing violently against her breastbone. Her heart. It’s pounding so hard that it looks like it might erupt from her chest at any moment.

  The last one is hunched over at the waist so I can’t see her face. Her bare skin is covered in huge pustules bigger than my fists, monstrous blood blisters all red and purple, ringed in sickly white and yellow. And the top half of her head is just gone, like her brain swelled up and exploded her skull from the inside.

  I want to vomit.

  I try to run but my feet won’t move. They’re welded to the ground.

  “Stop! Stay back! Get away from me!”

  They don’t listen. Naturally.

  They just keep shuffling closer. The skeleton, the rotter, the muscles, and the pustules.

  “Seriously, get back! I will beat you freaks bloody if you so much as touch me!”

  I keep yelling. They keep coming.

  When they get so close that I can smell the decay and blood, when I can feel the heat coming off their skin, I start throwing punches, trying to shove them away. I can shove anyone away. Hell, I can throw a man fifty feet.

  But I can’t move these creatures.

  My fists thump gently on their skin, and they don’t even feel it. My arms are thin, fragile, useless. I barely have the strength to lash out, and when I do, there’s no power in my strikes. I’m flailing like a bundle of wilted flowers.

  I scream as the four of them slowly collide against me and each other, enclosing me in this tiny cell of overripe and dying flesh, pressing tight and hot all around me, suffocating me.

  I screw my eyes shut, still trying to shove them away with my weak, useless hands, but I can’t.

  I can’t stop them.

  I can’t fight them.

  I can’t do anything.

/>   So I stop trying to fight. I ignore the horrible sensations on my skin, I stop trying to breathe, and I run away in my mind. I run all the way across the damn ocean, all the way back home, and fall into Dad’s arms.

  Dad.

  Crying by a fresh grave.

  Crying next to a girl, a sad-faced girl from out west with a bulging belly.

  NO!

  I lunge forward and slip free of my four twisted doppelgangers. My feet break away from the ground and I start to move, to walk, to run! I run into the darkness, away and away and away from the half-dead freaks wearing my face. I squeeze my eyes shut and run until my legs ache and my skin shivers and my body feels like it’s on fire…

  I smash face-first into a wall of rock and almost fall down. Rajani is lying on the ground behind me, tears streaming down her face, quiet whimpers escaping her lips in the dim light of her glowing amber rod, as her three faeries huddle in her hair.

  I turn and see the kareens gnawing madly at the net of vines, straining to break free.

  “Get out of her head!” I bring my boot down on the skull of the closest kareen. And then the next, and the next. I kick them against the rocks, and yank them up by the tangled vines before smashing them back down again. Within half a minute, they’re all dead.

  “Rajani!” I shake the green-haired girl, and her eyes flutter open. “You okay, kid?”

  She manages a weak smile. “Who are you calling a kid, honey?”

  I help her up and after a moment she seems okay to stand on her own. She looks around at the kareens splattered against the walls of the ravine. “And this is why I don’t fight.” She turns and throws up.

  I grin and wait.

  After she recovers, straightens up, smoothes back her hair, and arranges her dress, she asks, “So, I assume you were trapped in some terrible nightmare too?”

  I start walking, picking my way past the remains of the kareens and continuing down the dark, narrow path. “Yeah, you could say that.”

  “How did you get free? I’ve never heard of anyone getting free of a kareen nightmare by themselves.”

  I shrug. I don’t really know myself. “I almost didn’t. But… I found a way, I guess.”

  Thankfully, she doesn’t ask about my nightmare, and I try to forget it ever happened. The bloody, bony, rotting, blistered faces are still hovering in the dark corners of my mind, and there isn’t much in this ravine to distract me, so I change the subject. “So… what’s it like having two moms?”