Mask of Poison (Fall of Under Book 1) by Kathryn Kingsley (great novels to read txt) 📕

“I cannot say. Who is to know how much of your world came through with you?”

She frowned. “Oh, no… if the Dread God has come, then the drengil will follow.”

“We as a people are more suited to defending against such a thing. We are immune to disease and poison. Any wound dealt to us that does not remove our soulmarks is reversable. The only scars that remain are left on the psyche alone.”

“Oh.” That almost brought a smile to her face. But she wouldn’t let herself hope. She wouldn’t. But she couldn’t help but wonder if coming here to Under was not, in fact, a good thing. Their world was alive. Powerful. Thriving. And filled with creatures that could defend themselves. And they had real food! She didn’t get far into her internal debate.

They stepped around a corner. What she saw in front of them sent her staggering back, gripping the hilt of her long knife.

“Be still, Miss Ember.” Lyon placed his hand on her wrist, keeping her from pulling her knife. “It’s all right.”

It was not all right!

It was a monster!

A huge…whatever-the-fuck-it-was was standing in the road a good thirty feet in front of her. She didn’t even know what to compare it to, because she had never seen anything like it before in her life. It walked on six legs, each of them bending in odd and bizarre angles, and looked to have three or four joints per appendage.

It was covered in alternating patches of fur and leathery skin. Its face looked like that of a dead mountain lion she had seen once—large sockets and pointed cheekbones, and only a thin sheet of flesh stretched over the top. She could see veins, pulsing with its heartbeat, beneath the surface of the monster’s nearly translucent skin.

It was looking at her. Its eyes were too small for its sockets…but it was looking at her all the same. Teeth, broken and sharp, jutted from its jaws at odd angles.

Its back was covered in strange scales that reminded her of armor. As she watched, transfixed and horrified, the creature took a deep breath. Its neck expanded like that of a toad. As it exhaled, the scales on its back flipped up, revealing rows of holes in its skin. Air rushed out of them, sounding like some strange and uncanny instrument. It was a deep, bass rumble that rattled the window in its frame, offset by the high rattle of its scales as they shook in the blast of air.

Ember shrank against the wall, her heart pounding in her ears. She kept her knife in her belt but refused to let go of the handle.

“He isn’t going to hurt you,” Lyon muttered to her. “He’s just saying hello. He’s a Bellows. They’re scavengers. They only attack in self-defense.”

“Scavengers,” she managed to choke out. “That—that—”

“Is normal for our world. He is hardly the most remarkable creature that stalks Under. Come, Miss Ember. We’re not far from the Great Hall.”

The creature kept walking, passing them with only another look in her direction. No one else even paid the monster more than a glance. This is normal for them.

She nodded weakly and finally removed her hand from her knife. Lyon began leading her down the sidewalk again, and she followed. After a while, her heartrate began to slow down to something less frantic than a bird’s.

No wonder Lyon seemed so unfazed by the possible presence of the drengil. It was clear she had gone from one world of monsters to another. And in this one, it seemed they were much more unpredictable and far harder to kill.

Which made it much easier for them to kill her.

Maybe coming here wasn’t such a good thing after all.

5

Jakob didn’t understand what he was looking at.

He had fallen asleep in his house. It was a shack, fine, but it was still his shack. He’d fallen asleep on his collection of blankets and straw. He had woken up to the feeling of hitting the ground hard, as if he’d been knocked from a height. Which was weird, since his blankets were on the floor. His shack creaked and tilted. He was lucky it didn’t come down on his head. He could hear that his neighbor wasn’t so lucky.

It was then that he heard the shouting. He assumed it was because the drengil had broken through the barricades, so he grabbed his gun and his knife and burst through the section of corrugated metal that he had attached to his shack to resemble a door.

But there were no shambling corpses. Not that he could see.

But then again, he didn’t really understand what he was looking at.

The barricade…was gone.

As was most of the sanctuary town.

It wasn’t destroyed. It wasn’t some pile of wreckage and death. It was literally…gone. Missing. Poof. Replaced with tall trees and a forest that had absolutely no right being there at all. Whole sections of his former home looked as though they had just simply been deleted. He lowered his gun, not knowing what he was even supposed to be pointing it at.

What was he gonna shoot, the fucking trees?

A guardian—one of the few hunters left behind to watch over the sanctuary city—was standing at the edge of the forest and looking out at it, his bow in his hand. Not knowing what else to do, Jakob walked up to him. “What…what’s going on?”

“I wish I knew.” The older man furrowed his brow. He looked out at the darkness and shook his head in utter confusion. “One second, I’m keeping an eye on the horde outside our gates. A second later, everything just…dropped. I picked myself up, and now, instead of a sea of bodies, I’m staring at a sea of trees.”

Jakob scratched his head. “This is weird.”

“Really? That’s the best you can do, nitwit? Weird?” The guardian shot him a judgmental glare.

He shrugged in response. “It is.”

“Have you even fucking looked up yet?”

No. He hadn’t. He’d been too distracted by the trees.