Banderas put his rifle scope up to his eye and scanned the mountain below. As Clarke had suggested, he shouldn’t see anything, unless our enemies had been tramping around on the glacier at night and left some obvious signs. Dark elves could barely stand bright nights. Coming out in the sun would never happen.
“I watched a documentary on the eruption of Mt. St. Helens last night.” Willard looked at me.
“Riveting stuff?”
“Let’s just say I’m convinced we don’t want to let pointy-eared terrorists make Rainier erupt. It’s a much bigger volcano than St. Helens, has a lot more glacial ice locked up on it that would melt in a hurry, and the flows would dump into much more heavily populated areas.”
“If they’re planning mayhem,” I said, “we’ll stop them.”
Then, like Banderas, I turned my attention to the mountain below. This time of year, it wasn’t completely blanketed in snow and ice but was a mixture of white in depressions and bare rock in more exposed areas. Farther down the slopes, evergreens and grass grew, but above the tree line, it was stark, either white or gray or black. My untrained eye couldn’t pick out the glaciers from the snow. Wherever the caves were, I couldn’t see them from the air.
Willard took out a pair of binoculars. I closed my eyes and focused on the ice and rock below with my senses, practicing the pattern Lirena had shown me to extend my range.
“Saw a cougar,” Banderas said.
“A nemesis most foul,” Clarke said. “Prepare your rifle, Sergeant.”
I didn’t have to open my eyes to know Banderas gave him another dark look.
Minutes passed, with sightings of nothing more nefarious than marmots. Then the pilot said, “I’m swinging by the scientists’ camp, per a request from the USGS.”
“What were they doing up here during the bad weather?” Willard asked.
“They were supposed to pull out three days ago, but they didn’t show up at the pickup point.”
“How many people?”
“Six. Geologists and a couple of microbiologists looking for interesting life near steam vents and lakes under the ice.”
“They may have found it,” I muttered.
We flew over the remains of a camp, tents under inches of snow or torn half-free of their stakes and flapping in the wind. There were no people.
I stretched my senses as far as I could, trying to probe under the glaciers themselves. Would the thick ice limit my range? I wasn’t sure. Even though I hunted outside of urban areas often, the Pacific Northwest was known for its rain, not substantial amounts of snow, and I’d spent little time tramping around on glaciers.
“There must be a cave entrance nearby.” The pilot took us low, almost skimming over the ice. “The other chopper is checking on the seismic monitor, Colonel. The pilot says… it’s gone.”
“Destroyed?” Willard asked.
“Removed.”
“Maybe the cougar ate it,” Clarke said.
Nobody paid attention to him.
“Lieutenant Sabo wants Thorvald over by the monitor’s location,” the pilot relayed a message. “Nobody’s seen anything, but he thought he detected something magical for a second.”
Nobody here scoffed or made a comment about our abilities to detect magical beings and items. These soldiers all worked, at least part-time, out of Willard’s office. They might not have all seen dark elves—I suspected I was the only one here who had—but they’d all seen plenty of magical beings.
The other helicopter came into view as we sailed around the mountain. They were hovering over what looked like a random bare spot on a ridge.
“Wait.” Banderas still had his scope to his eye. “Go lower. Right here.”
The pilot glanced back at Willard.
“Go ahead,” she said. “Val, you sense anything?”
“Not yet.” I tried not to feel useless.
“This is as low as I can get without landing,” the pilot said, hovering above the snow.
“Look at those prints, ma’am.” Banderas pointed the spot out to Willard, and she focused her binoculars on the snow. “Too big to be a bear.”
“They’re too large to have been made by a dark elf.” Willard took a long look, then handed the binoculars to me. “You’ve seen real sasquatch now. What do you think?”
The helicopter hovered relatively still long enough for me to peruse several trails of tracks across fresh snow. Very large tracks. Banderas was right. There was no way a bear had made those. Or bears. A whole pack of the large-footed creatures had passed through. At least six.
“They do remind me of sasquatch prints, but they’re not quite the same. The sasquatch had feet very similar to humans. Large but human. Those prints have marks that were made by digits with claws, not toenails.” I moved the binoculars aside and rubbed my eyes. Between the sun and the snow, it was too bright outside to look at the white ground for long.
“So, what made them?” Willard asked.
I dug my sunglasses out of my pocket. Willard had reminded me to bring them.
As I pushed my headset around to loop them over my ears, a whisper of something tickled my senses. A dark elf? I didn’t think so. But it was something living and magical. It came from farther up the mountain.
When I lifted a finger to point, the presence disappeared. Had it moved out of my range? Or had my imagination been playing tricks on me? Conjuring some beast to go with the prints?
No, I was too experienced for that. Something was out there. Six somethings.
“Follow the tracks,” Banderas told the pilot.
“The other chopper wants to know where we’re going.”
“Follow the tracks,” Willard said. “Tell them we’ll be there soon. We’re tracking something else.”
Flying low, the pilot took us up the slope. Between the snow and the rock, the mountain seemed too bare to hide much, but then we flew over a glacier, and numerous cracks and crevasses grew visible. One of the mountain-climbing trails crossed over a deep gap in the ice, a meager bridge without handrails stretching over it.
Something tickled my senses again, and I leaned forward as much as my harness would let me.
“The footprints disappear into that crevasse,” Banderas said. “All six sets. It looks too deep for them to jump down but…”
“They don’t pick up again on the other side,” the pilot said.
He took the chopper in circles, trying to pick up the trail.
“It looks like they went down into that crevasse,” Willard said.
“They couldn’t have,” Banderas said. “Look at that thing. It’s wicked. You’d need climbing equipment to go down there without dying.”
“If you’re human, you would,” I murmured, my gaze locked on the shady depths of that wide crack in the blue and white ice. The contours of the sleek walls hid the bottom from view. It could have been fifty feet down. It could have been five hundred.
“Is it possible it’s not the dark elves up here enacting their plan?” Willard asked. “But something or someone working for them?”
“Working for, ma’am?” Clarke asked. “Do dark elves have employees? Give them benefits and a 401(k)?”
“Think enslavement rather than benefits,” I said. “I didn’t see any other species while I was in their lair, but I wasn’t there long. It wasn’t a cozy place to hang out.” I shivered, thinking of that massive statue of bones and the vat of blood. And the sacrifice of that girl they’d been about to make…
Willard was looking expectantly at me. Waiting for an identification?
I wished I had one. “From the size of the prints, ogres would be a possibility. They don’t have the strongest of minds and would be susceptible to mental compulsions.” But ogres didn’t quite match up. The ones I’d met wore footwear and also had something closer to toenails than claws. “We could also be looking at some creatures the dark elves made with magic. Guardians or slaves to come out into the daylight, since they can’t. Uhm.” A new thought occurred to me. “How many scientists are on the missing team?”
“Six,” Willard said.
And six sets of prints. Even though I’d never heard of magic that could turn human beings into giant monsters, my mind ruminated on the possibility. If that had happened, would there be any hope of turning them back? Or would we have to kill them?
“I’ve circled the area five times, Colonel,” the pilot said. “The trail’s gone.”
“Right.” Willard waved him away from the crevasse. “Make a note of this spot, but take us to the other chopper.”
I watched the crevasse as we retreated, uneasy as I considered what kinds of allies the powerful dark elves could have enslaved or conjured out of thin air. Last time, I’d managed to get the best of them, but only because I’d had Zav with me and because they hadn’t been prepared for him. This time, I didn’t have a dragon… and the dark elves would be ready for us.
18
The helicopter landed next to the other one on a snow-covered shelf looking up at the summit. Once the blades stopped whirring, the mountaintop grew very quiet, save for the rustles and clanks of soldiers gathering gear and putting crampons onto their boots. I was the only one not wearing a Kevlar helmet, tactical vest, and carrying a rifle, but I had traded my usual jeans and duster for layers of lightweight waterproof hiking pants, shirts, and a jacket that promised to keep me warm if it dropped below freezing. Under the shirts, I wore Nin’s magical armored vest, and Chopper had its usual spot across my back, Fezzik in the thigh holster.
With the sun beating down on me, I was already warm and would shed the jacket if we ended up trekking from here. It had to be in the sixties, so worrying about cold-climate survival tactics seemed strange, but I trusted Willard’s promise that the weather could change rapidly up here. The fresh snow was a testament to how cold it got, even in August.