The troll grunted, then lifted me in the air by my arm and slammed me onto the frozen asphalt. Agony ripped through my bones.
With its stony fist pressing down on me, there was nothing more I could do. Within moments, the High Elves were locking iron handcuffs around my wrists.
Chapter 5
Ali
A guard tugged on the chain connected to my manacled wrists. The whole situation had me walking at an awkward sideways angle. At this point, I could only hope they did not know I was a chief assassin. With any luck, they simply thought I was simply a thief.
My body had taken a battering in the past hour, and I winced with every step. Since they’d blindfolded me, however, I had no idea what my surroundings looked like. Footsteps echoed, and the air smelled of moss, dank rocks, and death.
In here, it was far too hot to wear my coat, even if the fur was fake. Sweat trickled down my neck.
Best guess was that I’d been taken to the Citadel. In the years following Ragnarok, when my people had been imprisoned deep within the earth, the High Elves had constructed a colossal fortress in the center of Boston. A thousand feet high, its stark walls were interrupted only by the heads of marble gargoyles. Pale gold spires ringed the tip of the tower, like a crown atop Beacon Hill.
It had always seemed so clean and beautiful—a fortress that shielded the ornate and mysterious world of the High Elves. I’d never been inside it, but I imagined lots of glittering parties and gilded ceremonies.
The elves called it New Elfheim. But to everyone else, it was just the Citadel, the seat of their power. All I knew was that it was part temple, part prison, part castle. It housed priests, prisoners, and royalty all within the same looming fortress.
Whatever the case, it was a constant reminder that High Elves now ruled the city, and that my kind wasn’t part of it.
Clearly, I wasn’t being taken to the royal section of the building. Even with a blindfold covering my eyes, I’d been able to work out that much. High Elves didn’t live in places that smelled worse than a sailor’s armpit. No, it was straight to the prison blocks for me.
Crushing disappointment pressed on my chest. I’d been so close to saving my people. The task had been to go to the bank, to steal the safe deposit box. And something in that box would lead us to Galin. He was the sorcerer who had locked the Night Elves underground, and I longed to kill him. His death would break the spell and lead to our liberation.
But it seemed I’d fucked it all up. Which item was even the right one? Would’ve helped if they’d explained that.
I felt like the tip of a blade was piercing my heart. When I was little, Mom always told me that was my destiny, that I’d bring the Night Elves into the light again. Before she’d died in the subterranean caves, she’d said I was the North Star, and I would guide the Night Elves to freedom. And I'd always believed her.
My thoughts shot back to Barthol. Fear streaked through my nerves when I pictured him pressed facedown in the snow, handcuffed by High Elves. I could only hope he’d escaped, that he’d made it back to our safe house.
I couldn’t let myself think of any other possibility or I’d fall apart completely. So, I shut a mental steel door over my worst fears and tried to focus on the sounds around me.
The creak of ancient hinges pulled me out of my worries as the guard pushed open a door. As he tugged me deeper into the Citadel’s depths, my right side brushed against a damp wall.
“What’s happening?” I asked.
“You’ll see soon enough,” the guard replied, in that annoying singsong voice that seemed to be universal to High Elves.
Truthfully, tonight was the first night I’d ever encountered High Elves face to face. They were the mortal enemies of my kind, Dokkalfar, Night Elves. And now, the blond bastards ruled Midgard, what had been world of men. They killed my kind on sight, or for sport.
When they weren’t slaughtering Night Elves, the High Elves were imprisoning us in caverns under the ground. Every Night Elf like me had dreamed of freeing our kind. And I’d nearly had the chance…
There it was again, that frosty bloom of regret spreading over my heart.
But revenge against the High Elves would never be easy. Here in Midgard, we were outnumbered. Barthol and I had spent the last year planning the robbery. We’d kept a low profile, sleeping in abandoned townhouses, scrounging food on the streets. We’d steered completely clear of the High Elves the whole time, never getting too close. Never risking death until we had to.
The guard slowed, and I heard him suck in a sharp breath. Something had him on edge. He stopped, fumbling with his keys. Judging by all the jangling, it sounded like his hands were shaking. What did he have to be scared of?
A low growl reverberated in the cellblock, and the sound slid right through my bones.
It was like nothing I’d ever heard. The hunting cry of the troll had been terrifying, but at least it’d sounded dumb. This growl was barely audible, yet somehow managed to convey a brutal savagery. It was a strangely haunting sound, shivering over my skin and turning my veins to ice.
The guard ripped the cell door open and pushed me to the ground. My knees bit into the cold, jagged rock, and I tried to stand, but the guard pressed a foot to my back as he undid my handcuffs.
Again, that low, quiet, forlorn growl slipped over the stone like wind howling through trees.
The guard gasped. He was terrified.
“What is it?” I asked.
He didn’t answer as he ripped the blindfold from my face. I rolled over to look at him, catching golden eyes wild with terror. Then he stumbled back out of the cell, slammed the door shut, and ran down the corridor and out of sight without looking back.
I was left alone in complete darkness. Not that I particularly cared. Night Elf eyes were magically adapted to a life underground.
I squinted, studying my surroundings. Unsurprisingly, a row of thick iron bars separated me from the corridor’s glistening stone floor. Jutting from the wall behind me was a granite slab, covered in straw. My bed, apparently. No sign of food or water.
My instincts told me to stay back, that something deeply unnatural and evil lurked nearby.
And yet—curiosity had me shifting closer to the bars, peering between them and into the corridor. I scanned the narrow hall, counting ten cells in the block, five on each side. Iron rods barred each of them from floor to the ceiling. From this vantage point, I could only see into the cell across from me, but it was like the darkness was thicker there.
I squinted, trying to understand what I was looking at. In the back of the cell, where a stone bed should have jutted from the wall, pooled inky shadows that my eyes couldn’t penetrate. As I stared, the shadows began to move, coalescing into something denser.
The low growl returned, skimming along the rocks and trembling over my skin. Across from me, the darkness seemed to lengthen into the shape of a man. An enormous man, looming over the back of his cell—six foot five at least, big as a god. What was he?
The hair on the back of my arms rose. Still crouching on the cell floor, I inched back. No wonder the guard had been freaked out.
Without warning, the man shifted so fast that my heart skipped a beat, a flash of movement in his cell. When the smoke around him thinned, my breath caught in my throat. His tattered shirt revealed a thickly muscled chest tattooed with runes gleaming with magic.