Blood Trinity (Belador #1)(56)
“Stop.” Vyan raised his hand to enforce his order. Hair pricked along his arms. He sniffed the air for a hint of danger. The breath he inhaled burned his throat, indicating the threat was near and powerful. They’d entered the monster’s invisible cage. Vyan’s hearing sharpened with the possibility of facing a creature in battle. Thin twigs snapped beneath his feet, loud as a tree being axed.
He and his men moved to circle their warlord.
Batuk shook his head and lifted a single finger to indicate all of his men should remain behind him except his first in command. An arrogant move when facing an unknown enemy.
Resigned to his fate, Vyan fell into step with his warlord, who pushed into a clearing.
The entire jungle stilled. Nothing scuttled across the ground or swooped through the air between the webbed branches overhead. A foul odor assaulted Vyan’s nose and throat.
He caught a sound, a deep, rasping noise coming from a large animal. He gained Batuk’s attention before pointing across the opening to where a palm frond shot fifteen feet above the ground and trembled in sync with each ragged breath from whatever hid there.
Batuk took another step into the opening.
A strong vibration tripped through the air, followed by a low, keening howl filled with menace, as if the animal warned them they had trespassed in his domain and there was no way out.
Vyan’s blood pumped hard in his body. He touched his sword, which hung in the leather sheath at his hip, but had to take care. The witch who’d freed their small number had warned that any use of majik in the monster’s spellbound cage would backfire against them.
A snarl bellowed in the dense forest in front of them. Trees swayed and the ground trembled.
The animal raised its head.
Vyan had never seen anything so repulsive. How could something alive smell of swamp rot? Most of the body was covered in sores and scabs. The small parts that weren’t were a hideous patchwork of filthy hair and scales. Batuk believed they sought some form of a man, but this thing stood ten feet tall and could be nothing other than a monster.
Vyan drew his weapon, heartened at the shirring sound of eight more swords drawn behind him.
“No!” Batuk ordered. “Sheathe your weapons. Now!”
So we die like slaughtered lambs? Vyan held his frustration in a firm grasp. He did as ordered and stood beside the warlord he’d sworn fealty to many centuries ago.
The animal drew its cracked lips into a snarl, fully exposing uneven saber teeth. He tipped his head back and bellowed, the sound neither human nor animal but clearly a message that they had wasted the head start the beast had given them. In its haste to get to them, it uprooted trees as thick around as Vyan’s waist and bounded forward in heavy steps, shaking the ground.
When the beast entered the clearing, it was half human. At least, the barrel chest, two long legs and two dangling arms were humanlike in structure. It wore threadbare jeans but no shirt over the hair on its chest, which was matted with blood. Scales wrapped its abdomen and ran across its hunched shoulders. Each three-toed foot was twice the length of Vyan’s.
Black eyes peered from beneath a jutting forehead.
“By all the saints, what is that?” Vyan whispered, but he never got an answer.
The animal raised its bulging forearms with four thick fingers dangling from each hand. It pointed jagged fingernails at Batuk.
“I am here to offer you a deal,” Batuk said, raising his hand in a silent order for the animal to stop.
Instead, the beast took another step and clenched its stubby fingers into fists that cut his palms. A warning, but the monster was curious, or it would have slain them all by now.
The men mumbled in harsh whispers, clearly questioning the sanity behind this march. Even Vyan wondered if his warlord had lost his mind while traveling through the portal.
The animal sniffed the air, grunted, then peered past Vyan and Batuk. On its next sniff, it growled, as if preparing to attack.
Batuk called out over his shoulder. “Bring the woman.”
Woman? Vyan went cold at that one word. He caught the scent of innocence before Nhivoli and another soldier marched forward with a young female bound and gagged, hanging by her hands and feet from a narrow tree limb supported across their shoulders. She appeared to be unconscious at first, but the animal’s growl roused her. The poor girl took in the scene with wide eyes, then jerked back and forth, bleeding where the ropes cut into her soft skin.
Fury screamed through Vyan’s brain and threatened to explode. He stopped the men from entering the clearing and spoke to Batuk. “You cannot do this.”
“Do not argue with me.” Batuk’s hand moved to his sword. His face gnarled with rage. “This is the only way to free our people. Without the beast’s help, we have no chance against the Beladors once they learn of our escape from Mount Meru. Do you not care for your people? Have you forgotten all you have lost to them?”
Drawing a sword on Vyan would have been less of an insult.
The animal snarled and growled, pawing the ground.
“Wait, I have an offering.” Batuk waved the men into the clearing.
The reminder of all Vyan had lost in a bloody war with the invading Beladors crashed through him. Pain forged an alliance with his anger to tear a fresh gash through the heart that had withered in his chest over time. He’d spent centuries dreaming of revenge, willing to do practically anything to make the Beladors pay, but using this woman stirred something inside Vyan he’d been sure had died along with his wife eight hundred years ago.