Master of Miasma (The Valhalla Series) (19 page)

“
What the hell's going on?” I ask when he joins me, shunting the lever back down, sealing us off from the attack.

“
Calamity is befalling us elskling. Hurry.” He sprints to the pile of stones, kneeling before them, explaining, “I found an escape out of this cave. We'll be leaving the hard way.” He hands me a carryall.

Adrenaline must be a warrior gift because now I can see in the dark. How the hell does that work then?

Mac grabs a bunch of stones the size of eggs and quickly jams them into his backpack. What a weirdo, this is like SEAL training. Is he going to go running through the mountains with a sack of stones on his back?

“
What are you doing?” I demand, wondering why the hell he's wasting time when they're upon us.

“
These are thundereggs. We need them.”

“
What for?”

I mean come on, they're as exciting as a bland stack of pebbles in a quarry. Why are we taking stones when we should be fleeing?

His eyes darken, the hue in them deepening to broiling mist, “Just grab as many as you can, stuff them in your pockets if you have to,” he orders, snatching huge handfuls and passing them to me.

Exasperated, I arch both eyebrows, “Macala you are the giant here, not me. I'm half your size and don't have the muscle to haul stones in full flight mode.”

“Emma please, just do it!”

The urgency in his tone catapults me into action, ramming them into my cargo pockets and in my bag. Before I'm done collecting eggs from the enormous stockpile he grabs my hand and starts running up the cave to the right, to a barely discernible tunnel.

Bodily boosted, I'm running as fast as my little legs will carry me. Breaching the foxhole that opens our getaway into the forest he pauses, his chest heaving with exertion, looking around while pulling every shadow over us, hiding us in the dappled nightshade of spruce.

“
Shhh,” he murmurs, glaring at my breathless gasping.

Suffocating, the only real noise my banging heartbeat in my head, I crouch with him, wishing I knew what the hell is going on.

A mammoth shadow leaps into the air, felling three full grown trees when it lands not six feet away from us. Involuntarily screaming I scramble back while debris and mulch confetti all over us, getting in my mouth, eyes, and hair.

Four more behemoths of solid shadow loom large, barely discernible in the black on night of our territory, crunching, trunks splitting, demented roaring shaking the ground and rattling my teeth as the forest grows thick with foe.

Macala shoves me away to run in the opposite direction as a low growl begins shaking the ground, buzzing my backbone in unparalleled fear. After struggling with a shadow half the height of the aspens, Mac bolts free, careening after me. Plucking a stone egg out of his pocket he launches it at the rumbling beasts cloaked in darkness. He boosts out of another crouch, shunting his arm around my waist when he catches up with his long stride, he lifts me like a toddler, sprinting full throttle down the incline, his feet sliding in the thick carpet of pine needles.

Stuck under his arm like an old pillow about to be tossed in the dump I watch behind us at the fracturing image of the hunters, my vision jarred with his aggressive gait and with the random leaps he takes so his feet don't snag on jutting rocks.

The night lights up as the egg breaks on impact, blasting lightning right up to the sky, singeing our foremost attacker to instant charred ash, igniting the trees into crackling flame.

Thundereggs? Like the kind you'd expect the god of thunder to own? Jesus! They're 'thunder eggs'. They unleash
storms
.

He keeps chucking them over his shoulder as we run, pitching them like grenades, setting the night into a frothing cloak of storm clouds birthing from stones and rising quickly to cover the world in noctem's tempest.

Each stone is liquid lightning, firing rockets of deadly pyrotechnics into anyone stampeding behind us.

Thunder canons overhead in angry grumbles, his endless barrage of stone-eggs smashing into the advancing army, breaking on collision, exploding instant electricity into nebulous puddles which then vaporize in deathly wild bolts of chaotic fire, searing ions and blinding me with their brilliance.

The air is polluted with acrid stench, overpowering the fragrant incense of wet earth laced with moist mushroom and undergrowth. Coronas blister the damp domain with fulminous flares, every thunderegg surging chain lightning up to the sky.

“
Can you run?” he demands, putting me down on a knoll.

“
Yes!” I nod, terror firing my limbs, and with confidence in his strange treasure installed I snag a thunderegg from my pocket, ready to break it in someone's face.

The blanket of sinister cloud enshrouds the reality on the ground from any aerial surveillance while unleashing a vicious attack on the ground around us. Ice starts pelting down in huge nuggets, white egg clones of what birthed the storm, smashing down debris and pummeling our trackers. It's horrendously painful when they connect, spurring me into running away from the fallout faster.

Electric streamers discharge as Macala continues to throw stones and I join in. Stoning someone has suddenly taken on a completely different connotation for me and I relish adding to his siege with my own. Fulgurant forks slash luminous rods into the dark, strobing the demise of colossal giants.

Megajoules of power bomb cacophony into reverberating around us, echoing in rapid-fire grumbles in the torrid storm clouds funneling in wild spans of smouldering vapor.

Speeding downhill behind Mac the forest floor is so spongey with decomposing foliage we're soundless as the Shadows that we Raven's are known as.

Trampling through gloom thick with hatred and petrichor, while catastrophic tension dogs us, I run like the devil after Mac, not having time to doubt my resilience or question my Olympic abilities.

The wall of destruction behind us has felled turrets of spruce and disguised us in the covert shroud of a lactating storm. Rain and hail missile down in unrestrained fury, impenetrable and blinding in its ferocity, lacerating ice shrapnel into us that feels like it's slugging into my thighs as I charge.

Sheet lightning buffers the darkness, chasing it back, warding it off in violent wrath.

My hand is yanked and I'm hauled in an accelerated blur of barraging ice-spatzle to a cliff, the edge appearing too soon. Unable to halt, my feet refuse to find purchase in the slippery avalanche of surging rivulets.

I'm about to scream when Mac clamps his hand over my mouth and we both drop, all solidity ceasing as the ground gives and we're sent luging in a slew down a burrowed duct, sliding with enough friction to encrust my spine with scabs as we rattle over protruding roots and rock.

Plummeting in a death drop I can barely breathe for the stagnant seconds it takes for the disaster to wane. The fissure flattens and we slide to a muddy halt in a grove claimed by shimmering moonbreath. I feel scalped from the acceleration which snagged my hair on our adrenalizing fall into another dimension of adversity.

Water laps lasciviously over pebbles and moss, slicing up the darkness a hundred yards away with satin eels of Luna's sprinkle of solace. It twinkles the darkness with a glimmer of hope, the cadence of the wind softly fluting down here instead of raging in stampeding temper.

The maelstrom and conflict hasn't reached this hollow yet.

Mac stares up, his hold on me tight with restraint, communicating we remain absolutely still with his body language. Like gargoyles on a mausoleum we're stuck together with invisible frostbite, stiffened by cryogenic alchemy. I daren't breathe as I follow his gaze to the nemesis surfing the sky.

Nefarious darkness drifts its necrophilial breath across the moon, nullifying the luminary's ambiance with the mephitis of subterfuge. The vestal veneer is veiled and we're plunged into twenty layers of deeper shade. The supernatural smoke skims lower to the ground than the cumulous creations floating icebergs across a midnight heaven. Clouds clustered with moonlight start to bleed over with the stain of menstrual hemorrhage, casting a crimson pall over the entire forest. It desecrates the hallowed night with a diabolical brush, the filthy miscreants distorting the crisp beams with hellacious billows of bloodlust.

Looking away from the scudding phenomenon obscuring our only visibility, I track their flight through the lacy canopy of boughs starkly black against the paler savagery mocking the night sky.

Puffy white clouds which lazily meandered astral ships to meet the dawn are entirely entombed as the nocturnal velvet scorches to a black so malefic I close my eyes, hiding the power glistening in their depths from scouts sniffing out harii from their shadowed shields.

I'm almost praying I don't suddenly burst into my own unique brand of camouflage. I suppress my alarm and surrender to the guardianship of the man congealing my blood and bruising my skin with his grip. Incrementally turning my head I hide my face in his shoulder, watching proceedings with my peripheral vision, paranoid that I'm his achilles heel who will end up betraying our position and slaying my soul's partner.

He covertly siphons shadows over us, scavenging sooty atmosphere so dense it's like standing in the fallout of volcanic ash wet with grief.

Shhh
, murmurs in my mind while he injects a thick confusion into my head with a steady crackle of darklight. I vaguely recall reading that they call the static noise in outer space, darklight. It fills the void with frequencies the way Mac is doing to me now.

It's peaceful, a respite in the carnage we left behind and the doom breathing down our napes. Chills continue to crucify me even though my mind is in stasis.

In an incubator of cocoon-like insulation I inhale, exhale, endlessly, leaving my mind to slide aimlessly while slowing my heart-rate down to a comatose level. The wait is excruciating and interminable. Time ceases to exist in the vacuum of paralysis seizing our fealty.

Tendrils of mist skirt the lagoon before dispersing away to higher ground. We wait another protracted epoch of terror before Macala slowly exhales his tension, his indomitable bulk daring to soften in the lowering of defenses.

In sheer relief he hugs me tight, crushing me in a straitjacket of pain because the muscles lining my neck to my shoulder-blades have seized in agony from the harrowing wait, so still and anxious.

Wincing involuntarily, sound is too loud in the silence palling the planet.

“Come,” he murmurs, so low it's a transmitted thought more than a spoken command.

Drawn up off my numbed ass he folds me in his warmth with an arm around me, leading me into gossamer moonlight, straight to a slope of moss. The closer we get I can see it's a shelter, utterly disguised amid the greenery of the woodland's camouflage. He opens the tall door that looks like decomposing log smeared in dabs of lichen and carefully placed bark, leading me into a quaint shelter, deep and sound, and warm.

There is a giant's bed at the rear, adorned on either side with love crystals which emit a welcome glow, refueling my soul with much desired mercy.

A table stands aft with two chairs, a couch, and a mandolin. There is even an unlit hearth waiting for kindling.

“What is this?” I whisper, amazed.

“
Harii always have a contingency plan. I prepared, I knew this was coming I just didn't know exactly when. Through there,” he points to a black hollow to the right of the bed, “is a bathroom, and wardrobe. We have enough clothing and food to last us some time. We have to be careful for a few weeks but after that we need to scout the catacombs for life. We all have an escape plan, hopefully everyone evacuated unscathed. We'll reconvene at new moon at a predetermined location.”

“
But clothes for me? How–”

“
I knew elskling,” he taps the temple next to his left eye.

The Book of Shadows constantly updates itself with past, present and future, that is reinforced with Odinic foresight and revelations solidified by the concurring infallible oracle -
he knew
. And thanks to Kake he couldn't forewarn or tell me. No wonder he couldn't stay away with disaster peering over his shoulder, constantly egging him to seek me out and torment himself in the process.

A wonderful blessing floats behind the closed front door of his lair, the first tweet of daybreak's imminent presence. Knowing soon light will purge us of stealthy shadows I flatten my lungs in a heavy expulsion of air, shrugging off my muddied jacket and dropping my bag of stones. My legs feel bruised from running with rocks in my pockets and I empty the stash onto the floor next to the bag.

Dropping to his haunches he copies me, unbuckling a sword and contraption, offloading his backpack, standing again with four thundereggs in his hand. I admire him as he walks away, placing one either side of the bed as lethal back up, then to the sideboard of the tiny dining space where he plucks two tulips from their sconces.

Sitting down at the table he cracks a thunderegg as if about to make a lightning omelet, pouring luminous liquid into the smoky-quartz glass. He repeats the process with the other tulip. Beckoning me over he offers me one, “Drink this. It will accelerate your metamorphosis and give you the strength of Odin.”