“What’s up, kid?” I hoped he hadn’t come for his shard—the one Zoltan had melted. We hadn’t exactly agreed on the forty dollars as payment for it before he’d been scared away by Zondia’s arrival.
He licked his lips and looked me up and down, his gaze lingering on Chopper’s hilt. His white hair was matted to his head in greasy clumps, a bruise swelled under one eye, and his clothes were torn. Had he looked that rough the other day? I didn’t think so.
“I want to hire you.” He held up two twenty-dollar bills, clenched in his fist.
I politely did not point out that was the money I’d given him. “To do what?”
“Avenge my father’s murder.”
Ugh, I didn’t have time for extracurricular assignments this week. “Who’s your father?”
“He owned the bar. They threatened him, and then he broke their orb, and then they killed him!” He blinked rapidly, moisture filming his eyes.
“Your father is—was—Rupert?”
The boy nodded.
“And the dark elves were the ones who killed him?”
Another nod.
“I’m sorry, kid. That’s horrible.” Now I felt worse for chasing him. “When did it happen?”
“Last week. He… They left him not quite dead, and I thought… I thought he would get better. That he would heal. I went out and gathered food and brought it back and took care of him.” He sniffed. “If there had been a shaman, I would have brought him for healing, but our own people wouldn’t help. They were too afraid. They’re cowards. Dark elves aren’t that scary. Cowards.”
“So he just passed away?”
“Yeah.”
Had he still been alive when I’d caught up with the boy on the rooftop? I wished I’d known all this. I could have gotten Rupert help—and asked him for all the details about the dark elves.
“Who did it?” I asked. “A male and a female?”
Rupert had told me the same two scientists that Zav sought had been the dark elves to install that orb.
The boy nodded and dug out a limp napkin from a bar. “I wrote down their names for you.”
He shuffled forward warily, glancing at Chopper again.
Careful not to make any threatening moves, I crouched down and held out my hand. He deposited the napkin in it.
The writing was barely legible, but I recognized the names, so they were easy enough to read. Yemeli-lor and Baklinor-ten. Zav’s criminals.
“Here.” The boy tried to thrust the forty dollars at me.
I held up my hand. “I’m already after these guys. You don’t have to pay me.”
“You’ll kill them and avenge my father’s death?”
I started to hesitate—Zav would want them taken back to his Justice Court for punishment and rehabilitation. But Zav wasn’t here. And despite what Lirena believed, I doubted he would defy my wishes and come back. This was my problem to deal with now.
“I will.”
“Good,” the boy said savagely.
“What’s your name, kid? Do you have a place to stay? Relatives who will take you in?”
He hesitated again. Was he being shunned because his father had been singled out by the dark elves?
“If not, I know this goblin with ties to the local goblin community… How are your tool skills?”
The boy scowled. “I am Reb. I will be a great troll warrior, not a wimpy goblin worker.”
“You have to survive to grow up first.”
The scowl deepened.
“Wait here. I’ll get you some food.”
Nin didn’t ask questions or charge me when I said I needed five meals. Maybe she’d known about the troll boy lurking behind her truck. Or maybe she didn’t want to charge me when I was spending thousands of dollars on weapons and ammo.
Either way, Reb’s eyes brightened when I deposited the bundles of food in his hands. “Come find Nin—she can get in touch with me—if you change your mind about needing a place to stay.”
I wanted to make him change his mind, but it wasn’t as if the goblins, should they be willing to take him in, could keep him from escaping if he saw himself as a prisoner. He would have to voluntarily stay. And maybe his own people would take him in once the dark elves were out of the picture.
Which would be soon, I vowed.
My phone buzzed. Willard.
“When do we leave?” I answered without preamble.
“The weather is clearing and the report is good for the next couple of days,” Willard said. “We leave in the morning.” She ran down the time, where to meet, and reminded me to bring my climbing gear as well as clothes for all seasons.
“Got it. I’ll be there.”
I hung up. The boy hadn’t left. He crouched in the shadows, watching me.
“I’m going to get them tomorrow,” I said.
“To kill them.”
“That’s the plan.”
Because if I didn’t succeed in killing them up there… they would kill me.
17
The noise-canceling headset dulled the thrum of the engine and the whop-whop-whop of the helicopter blades, but the familiar sounds stirred nostalgia in me. During my piloting days, I’d flown a similar craft. That had been my job, not shooting hostile ogres and orcs. Only a near-death experience had resulted in the army figuring out I had elven blood and pulling me aside to be trained as an assassin.
Today, if we found dark elves on Mount Rainier, I might get to put all that training to use again. For now, I was sitting in the back of the helicopter with Willard, Corporal Clarke, and Sergeant Banderas, a shaven-headed Puerto Rican I’d seen around the office but hadn’t worked with before. The strong, silent type, he wore an Army Ranger patch on his uniform, and I trusted he had experience fighting the magical as well as the mundane. I was less certain about the young and smooth-talking Clarke, who was a courier, not a warrior. But he’d been chosen because he had some magical blood and would be able to, like me, detect dark elves from a distance.
A second helicopter held four more soldiers Willard had picked, people with combat and climbing experience. One of them, Lieutenant Sabo, was a quarter elven. Clarke had never said what species his magical ancestor was, but I suspected fae. Neither of them would have my range, but having more people who could sense our enemies could only help. With their magic, dark elves could sneak up on even elite soldiers.
“Look at the sun,” Clarke drawled in his Jamaican accent, the words clear over the intercom. “It’s a pretty day to climb a mountain. Or have your helicopter set you down right on top of it.”
True to the weather report, the day had dawned sunny. Summer had returned to the Pacific Northwest. We’d left the city early and were flying south along the Cascades, lush green forests below us interspersed with clearcut logged areas, brown scabs on the mountainsides waiting to be replanted.
“There’s no way any dark elves will be out there today,” Clarke added. “We are assuming they’re in caves somewhere, I take it?”
Banderas, who hadn’t spoken more than two words since we’d gathered before dawn, glared at him.
“Is this a no-talking mission, Sergeant? I didn’t know.”
Banderas looked to Willard.
“I know,” she said. “We shouldn’t have given him a headset with a mouthpiece.”
Clarke was never overtly disrespectful, but I’d also never seen him intimidated into silence by someone of senior rank. If he’d made it through Basic without being assigned a lot of extra push-ups and floor-buffing duty, I would be shocked.
“We’ll fly a couple of laps around the mountain,” I said, though the pilots had already been instructed. “See if we can sense any special tourists down there.”
“Special tourists in caves?” Clarke asked.
“They would have to be, yes. Dark nooks and crannies underground. Or under the ice. I looked up Rainier last night. The Paradise Ice Caves melted a while back, but there are all kinds of grottos and caves under the glaciers. Scientists like to explore them. Hopefully, nobody’s up there now.”
“There is a team up there,” Willard said grimly. “They haven’t been heard from for a couple of days.”
“Is that normal?”
“No. The scientists usually explore during the day and sleep in tents outside at night. They’re supposed to keep in radio contact with their base camp. There are carbon monoxide, hydrogen sulfide, and other dangerous gases under the ice. Rainier hasn’t erupted since 1894, but it is an active volcano with discharge.”
That made me grimace. I’d been thinking of how my lungs would do if the volcano erupted and flung ash everywhere. I hadn’t considered that the air in the caves would be deadly. Even if it wasn’t deadly, fumes floating up from magma chambers couldn’t be good for asthmatic lungs. Strange to think that, with all my fighting experience, I might be the weakest link on this team, at least when it came to surviving hostile air.
“We also received a message,” Willard said, “that the seismic-monitoring station that’s had readings that match the numbers in that notebook went silent last night.”
“Could some climbers have knocked it out?” Clarke asked as we flew closer to the white-capped, fourteen-thousand-foot peak. “There are a lot of people up here in the summers, right? Have they reported anything funny?”
Willard shook her head. “No, but the last few days have been too stormy for climbers. If people start up today, we shouldn’t see anyone near the summit until tomorrow.”
Missing scientists and a possibly damaged monitoring station. It didn’t sound like a coincidence or anything that normally should have happened. My gut told me what my senses couldn’t yet confirm. That we would find company up here, and not mountain climbers.
“We’re heading past Camp Muir and up to the summit for our first circuit around the top,” the pilot announced.
We were in forest-service choppers with forest-service pilots. Willard hadn’t wanted to use military craft and risk alarming civilians until we knew there truly was a reason to alarm them.