White Stag (Permafrost #1)(42)
“Show yourself!” I snarled. Whoever, whatever these creatures were, they needed to know they wouldn’t cow me no matter how vulnerable I was, swinging from the vines.
“Poor girl.” This voice was obviously male, and his words stung like dripping acid. “So much to lose, so little understood.”
“Odin’s ravens! Who are you people?” The voices echoed all around me, the words repeating themselves over and over like a chant. I whipped my head around the cavern, but besides the feathers and old bones, the only moving thing was the sluggish liquid dripping off the stone.
“That’s not very nice,” the female said. This time I pinpointed her voice to a crevice above me. The creature’s large dark eyes twinkled with amusement, cracks formed along her eggshell-white skin, and a shock of brilliant green hair hung in her face. Oh no. Gods above, not this.
The male clucked his tongue and stepped into a patch of the shining moss. He stood there as I hung from the vines, boredom in his reddish gaze. His ebony skin was also cracked in places, and a tail swept beside his legs, the tip twitching back and forth. The bare skin of his chest flaked away at his ribcage until the bloody bones and muscles underneath were exposed.
I swallowed my rising dread. Svartelves. It had to be svartelves. The good news was that they probably weren’t going to cut me up and eat me; the bad news was that they were notorious for driving people insane. Somehow, that made becoming an hors d’oeuvre a lot more appealing.
“Tibra is right. You should be nice,” the male said, leaning against a jagged stone. The red liquid dripped onto his bare chest and spread out like roots to his shoulders and fingertips, to his neck and breast, and down to his stomach before sinking into his body and disappearing. He circled around me, and I caught a glimpse of his hollow back. With his eyes on me, I felt very, very naked. “You could’ve ended up like her”—he flicked his tail toward Elvira’s broken body—“but we decided to catch you.”
“She didn’t die from the fall; I killed her.”
He raised his eyebrows slightly. “Oh? Well, perhaps you could explain the broken neck, then? Or the spine?” He curled his upper lip as he nudged the body with his foot. “Of course, a fall couldn’t have gouged her eyes out, now could it? I guess we can share the credit, if you wish. You already possess her power, anyhow.”
From behind me, the girl giggled again. “Can we keep her, Donnar? Can we?” With the way she widened her eyes at Donnar and clasped her hands together, Tibra looked like she was begging for a pet. I swore inwardly.
Donnar did another circle around me, his tail flicking back and forth with contempt. Almost like Soren’s growls, it had a language of its own. “She smells like goblin,” he said as he stuck his face in mine. “A strange odor for a human.”
“And you smell like svartelf, and that’s a strange odor for anyone,” I countered. “Now if you would be kind enough to let me go.”
Donnar laughed. “Go where?”
“Home,” I snapped.
“And where is that?” Like Tibra, his eyes sparkled in delight at this new game. Like Tibra, he was also very lucky I was restrained right now.
“Stop playing with me. I’ll give you whatever you want, but just let me go home!” There was a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. And where is that? If I tried to picture home, the image became blurry, unfocused. I shook off the image. I knew where my home was.
Donnar shook his head, tutting as if I were a naughty child. “You didn’t answer my question, though. Where is your home? Your village has burnt to the ground, your blood relatives have all perished, humankind see you as a blood traitor. Yet here, no matter what changes you make, you will always be human first and goblin second, and your morals will be compromised by the way society has run for thousands upon thousands of years. Not to mention, why leave and search for your heart when it beats right in front of you?”
A chill went down my spine. “How do you know so much about me?”
He smiled, showing yellowed fangs. “It is my job to know. I wait and I watch and I see your fates play out in the bloodwater that flows down the mountain. There are those who seek me for this knowledge, but the more I give, the more they come away with their minds broken. But you already experienced that—even if you did not know it at the time.”
“Strangely enough,” I snapped, “I don’t know what you’re talking about now either! Stop playing mind games with me. Let me leave!”
“Why?” he asked again, his tail sweeping across the floor as he knelt beside me. “You have nowhere to go. And what world would accept a creature warring against herself?”
“I’m not warring against myself,” I said. My stomach churned at the thought that this creature knew of my every struggle and was laying it out before my eyes. The pit in my belly grew as his words goaded me like a cattle prod.
Donnar clucked his tongue again and drew a line down my jaw with his dark fingers. I shivered as claws protruded from his knuckles. When he brought his hand away, he left a warm, wet mark behind. Then with a flick of his wrist, he slashed the vines apart.
My head cracked against the ground, and I groaned at the multiple stinging cuts and bruises. It was hard to think through the thick haze of pain; my injuries screamed, demanding my attention. The blurry, sleek rainbows of the bloodwater and the shining moss doubled before my eyes, and the world slipped further and further away with every throb of my head.