Rob Thurman - Moonshine

"A memento, Aupheling, keeping your memory forever warm in my heart." He continued to float with all the grace and charm of a corpse bobbing in the river.

"I don't know what pumps your blood, Abby," I gritted with disgust, "but it's not a heart."

Niko jumped into the conversation before I could "entertain" the troll further. "We're looking for something, Abbagor. A crown. Goodfellow says there is very little that passes in this world that you are unaware of."

After a long stretch of silent contemplation, Abbagor commented with melodious complacency, "True. All falls under my benevolent eye." He stood upright, in all his self-proclaimed benevolence. Nine feet tall and nearly as broad, he might have been vaguely man-shaped, but he towered over us like a tree. Granted, it was a flesh-eating tree from hell, but I stand by the analogy. The liquid earth cascaded off him, showing more of the twining slate-colored flesh than I wanted to see. The shifting and the rustling of the tendrils made my stomach do a slow nauseated turn. With every unnatural, sinuous movement, I expected to see a flash of pale skin… human skin. Slave skin. "You may describe it to me."

Okay, it couldn't be that easy; nothing in this life was. And neither was this. We'd come here expecting the troll to put us through our paces, and the game was already under way. Abby wasn't wasting any time in screwing with our heads. "I have a picture." Niko held up the sketch with his free hand.

"Ahhh, the Calabassa," Abbagor said with instant recognition. "Barely ten thousand years old. Modern trash," he added scornfully, "from a refuse race."

And now we had a confirmed name for it. That was just peachy. "And that would be?" I asked impatiently.

"The Bassa." The head, equally as massive as the rest of him, with the upswept ears of a bat, fixed me with its unnervingly unblind gaze. "Your kind, uneducated Aupheling, wiped them out not long after that crown was made. Every male and female, every child, every egg. .And then, if I remember correctly, you ate them." His jaw unhinged into a gaping grin. "Quite tasty the Bassa were, once the poison sacs were removed. The most tender of meat, sweet and mild."

I ignored the yank of my chain. It wasn't news to me that in their day the Auphe had maimed, tortured, and killed anyone or anything that had crossed their path. They had; I hadn't. I didn't. I wouldn't.

Whether Flay agreed with me or not was a different story.

"I'm sure it was a hell of an all-you-can-eat buffet, but that's not what we want to know. If the Bassa are gone, where is the crown now?" Niko and I had decided it was best not to bring up the fact I'd already lost one. If there were two, we might luck out and Abbagor would know the location of the other. If we told him what had happened, he would no doubt lie out of pure capricious spite.

"Its purpose, if it has one, would be helpful as well," Niko added.

"Both hands out begging." The troll expelled a huge sigh, the scent of which nearly dropped me. The ointment on my lip didn't have a prayer of blocking that out. I smelled… God, so many things. Vomit and bile, blood and the adrenaline of hearts terrorized to their physical limits. Ripe decay and the sloughing of rotting skin. I smelled a graveyard of the half-dead, I smelled Abbagor's victims. Viciously, I bit my lower lip until I reached a precarious truce with my own bile.

He was looking at me. I don't know how I knew that, but he was. "You want and want, greedy little half-breed, but what do you give?" Tendrils began to loosen from Abbagor's torso with their questing tips twitching in parody of a sniffing motion as they hung in the air.

"I don't know, Abby. You have my charming company. What else do you want?" I demanded, baring teeth in a humorless rictus of a grin. He wanted to play all right. But for every minute he amused himself, George spent that same minute with Caleb. And that put a serious crimp in my Abbagor fun-and-games tolerance level.

"I want… I want…" he mused as the tentacles crept closer to us slowly and cautiously, showing none of the speed of before. "I want to touch. I want to taste. I want to know what I knew before. I want to know the part of me that is gone." The tendrils began to drift toward Niko and it hit me in an explosion of fear and rage.

Nik. He wanted Nik.

"No way," I snarled, immediately putting a pound of pressure on a two-pound trigger. "No fucking way."

"Be calm, Aupheling." Soothing, so soothing… not. "I only wish to touch. I've missed my fair-haired thrall."

I didn't need any college to know that "thrall" was a fancy word for slave. I'd have to remember to tell Niko that the next time he nagged me about higher education. "Then touch yourself, you piece of shit. Just wait until we're gone to do it." The shotgun was already cocked and I raised the muzzle to point directly at Abbagor's face.

Suddenly disinterested, the troll turned his head away. "That is my price. A touch for what only I know. Pay or no, I care not."

"I could make you care, you son of a bitch." The pound of pressure had gone to one and a half when Niko's hand closed on my shoulder.

"Wait," he ordered calmly.

"No, Nik. Absolutely not." I didn't have to hear the words to know what my brother was going to say. And I didn't have to hear them to say no.

"It's only a touch, Cal," he pointed out in his most practical tone. Reasonable, logical, and a complete and utter lie. The lightest of brushes from Abbagor's tendrils could and had resulted in less-than-innocent things. On our first meeting, he had dragged me at a breakneck speed by my ensnared arms and had cocooned Niko so quickly that my brother had disappeared right before my eyes. He had been lost inside Abbagor. He had been gone. A touch wasn't simply a touch with Abbagor, creepy PSAs aside. And no matter how composed Niko might appear on the outside, he had to be screaming on the inside. I know I would've been. Shit, I was , and I'd only seen what had happened to Niko. I hadn't lived through it as he had.

"No, Cyrano." I shook my head stubbornly. "It's not going to happen. So shut up and start chopping."

I had doubts, serious doubts, that there was anything we could do to Abbagor that would force him to talk, but I would rather give it a homicidal whirl than let him touch Niko.

The hand on my shoulder tightened. "It's a game, Cal. Only a game." Resolute and serene, but so what? Niko would've been resolute and serene at his own execution. "Besides, isn't it better to know that it's coming?"

He had me there. It was coming, one way or the other. I had no delusions that the troll was going to let us walk out of here with a smile and a slimy handshake. Then again, feeling that cold ribbon of muscle loop around you in the heat of battle was different from waiting for it, quiet and accepting. Considerably, horrifically different. I shook my head again. "No. Just… no."

"It's for Georgina." His eyes held mine, gray to gray. "She would do it for me, Cal. Allow me to do it for her."

Dirty pool. Honest and true, but dirty nonetheless. "Jesus." I lowered the shotgun muzzle fractionally and did my best to swallow the apprehension that was a noose around my neck threatening to choke me. "Fine. Do what you want, Nik. You will anyway. Play footsie with the monster all you goddamn please."

The corner of his mouth quirked at my ill-tempered surrender. "Love you too, little brother." Not a hint of sarcasm, not a whisper of irony—there was only tolerant affection. Not only had he gotten all the human genes in the family, but all the emotional stability too. How fair was that? "Very well, Abbagor," he continued, voice hardening to the unwavering blue of steel. "You have your taste. Ten seconds. Longer than that and you and your tentacle part ways."