Cornucopia Read online

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Cornucopia

  Debra Dunbar

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Debra Dunbar

  Copyright © 2017 by Debra Dunbar

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Chapter 1

  I stood before a shimmering gateway amid the rubble that used to be an upscale mall in Columbia, Maryland. Irix was going to kill me for this. That is, if the elves or the demons on the other side of that gateway didn’t kill me first.

  “Are you going to go through or spend all of eternity staring at it?” The gate guardian asked me testily. He was an angel, but a minor type of angel that didn’t really inspire any sort of awestruck respect. And he was a jerk. Although if I had to spend a hundred years in a pile of rubble staring at a gateway in case a demon came through, I’d probably be a jerk too.

  “In a minute. I need to…prepare.” There was nothing to prepare for. Walk through. Meet a demon escort on the other side. Go help a group of humans in Hel grow crops in what was fast becoming a desert. Try not to get killed. And in return for that, Irix would receive immunity.

  Immunity was important, because Irix was one of those demons that angels such as this gate guardian were supposed to kill on sight. I loved Irix, and having him turned into a pile of sand by an angel would put a serious cramp in our relationship.

  This whole no-demons thing meant we’d been sneaking around since we met. Every time things got dicey and one of us had to use our special abilities, angels came running. Which meant Irix had to high-tail it back to Hel. Which meant a separation of months that was making me cranky.

  Of course, I wasn’t technically supposed to be frolicking around on the human side of the gates either, but the angels liked elves, and in their eyes that’s exactly what I seemed to be. It was to my advantage that my succubus half remained hidden to them. Although in Hel I’d be better off as a full succubus and not an exotic half-breed that would bring all kinds of unwanted attention and most likely my death.

  Risk death and gain immunity for my beloved. It was a good bargain, in my opinion. I just needed to work up the nerve to walk through that gateway.

  “Any day now, elf,” the gate guardian drawled. He sat down on a chunk of concrete with rusty rebar sticking out of it and spread his wings. “Although I’ve no idea why you want to go back to Hel. You all just got here. And here is a whole lot better than Hel.”

  I’m sure it was. The elves had begun some strange migration from the land of the demons. I wasn’t certain what spurred their exodus but the whole thing worried me. This was my safe space, where I could blend in the with humans, go to college, get a great job, make a future with my incubus boyfriend. Yes, I needed the energy generated through sexual activity to survive as a half-succubus, but as far as the humans were concerned, that just made me a bit on the slutty side. None of them was trying to kill me. But with a bunch of elves invading the place I’d always called home, that might change.

  Maybe I should stay in Hel. Maybe I should stop procrastinating and walk through that gateway.

  I took a deep breath, shut my eyes, and stepped forward. The first thing that hit me once the disorienting vertigo settled was the heat. It was a dry, dusty heat that settles into your pores and turns your hair into straw. There was a faint smell of dry grass mixed with an even fainter aroma of stagnant water. It might be dry where I stood, but not too far off was water. Yucky, slime-filled, bug-infested, water, but still water.

  The dizzy, puke-on-the-ground feeling had passed so I opened my eyes and looked around. Hel was…. well, it was hell. don’t know why I expected anything different. I’d read Dante, I’d heard the sermons, but nothing prepared me for the desolation and the stark contrast between the ‘kingdoms’ before me. I stood in a land of oppressive heat, red sand and packed clay burning my feet clear through the rubber soles of my sneakers. The air felt thick and heavy. It was like an electric blanket whose warmth seeped through my skin and into my veins. Something about the atmosphere here sparked a part of me – no doubt the succubus part.

  In the distance I could see that the desert eventually became pockmarked with brownish plants. The scent of fetid, swampy water hit my nose with more strength than it originally had when I’d stepped through the gateway. It told me the place the demons called home wasn’t all a dry, fiery pit. But that was in the distance. Where I stood there wasn’t the slightest hint of water, and the only vegetation was the scraggly brush poking through cracks in the hard ground and the occasional tumble weed. Although I got an odd feeling the tumble weeds were more sentient than our plant life back home.

  And then I turned.

  To my left stood a lush forest, divided from the red desert as if a surveyor had marked a precise and geometrically defined border beyond which no deciduous life could pass. I walked over to the woods, shoving my arm through the invisible line to touch the bark of what looked to be a black locust sapling.

  The magic flowed over my skin like cool spring water, like the sound of wind chimes in a lilac-scented breeze. My elven half sang at the feeling. I walked all the way in, breathing in the greenness of it all. This was Wythyn, the elven kingdom of my mother. And as much as I wanted to hate it as well as the elves who’d killed her, I couldn’t help but be enchanted by the rich beauty of this forest.

  But I wasn’t here to marvel at the elven magic that had created such a Garden of Eden in a world of desert and swamp. I was here to see if I could mimic this skill. Or at the very least provide genetically modified crops that would somehow manage to thrive in the barren red clay and sand. Both seemed impossible tasks, even for a half-elf.

  I left the lush forest and instantly sweated as the heat of the demon lands hit me once again. Ahead to my right was a different landscape, somewhere in between the two opposites I’d just experienced. The human area of Libertytown had been carved out of the elven forest, grudgingly ‘gifted’ to the humans after an imp named Sam, the Ha-Satan, had secured their freedom. Unfortunately, once that section of land was no longer part of the Elven Kingdoms, the elves had refused to continue the magical environmental controls that kept the land lush and fertile.

  Thus Libertytown was fading like the fields in late autumn, trees bare of all but brown and yellow leaves, grasses baked in the sun, crops stunted and withering. I strode with purpose to the border, my shirt already clinging to my back with sweat.

  The magic that hit my skin this time was faded and dull. The air was dry, but without the intense heat of the demon lands. If this was what I had to work with, if the temperature and scant humidity were consistent, then there were crop modifications I could make that would feed these people. But I feared this was a mid-state, a stage on the slow slide into the inferno that lay just outside the border.

  Somehow I had to make this work. I’d need to perform a miracle so Sam and her Archangel lover would grant immunity to Irix. He’d be able to walk am
ong the humans without fear of an angel catching and killing him. He wouldn’t have to keep dashing back to Hel to throw off the scent, waiting for the search to be over before coming back. I needed to do this for him. Somehow.

  Plus, I did feel sorry for the humans here. They’d been kidnapped and brought to Hel, some as older children and adults, some as changeling babies. They were free now, but this was the only life they knew. If I couldn’t help them, they’d have no choice but to return home through the gates, and try to carve out a life in a place where they didn’t speak the language, had no marketable skills, and didn’t even have basic identification. No one would believe hundreds of children who’d gone missing decades ago had suddenly turned up wearing strange clothes and speaking gibberish. And the changelings – their parents had buried the dead elven babies that had replaced them, thinking their children had stopped breathing in the night. As far as the human world was concerned, they were dead.

  I ached for their plight, so here I was. Because of Irix, and because deep in my heart I wanted to help these people. But if I were to be completely honest with myself, there was another reason I was here – curiosity. I was a botanist, my shiny, newly printed degree hanging on the wall in my room back home. I’d thrown my cap in the air at graduation, thrilled to be starting a new life. And this was exactly the sort of challenge I loved.

  “You do look like an elf!”

  I spun around, my heart ready to pound out of my ribcage. Behind me was a small demon. He had long, lavender-colored limbs, and tiny scales on his torso along with tufts of hair sprouting from the top of his head and out of his ears. Instead of a nose, the demon had a long, wrinkly snout that twitched up and down. It made him look like a half-starved, perverted, Snuffleupagus.

  “Are you…you must be Rutter?”

  “In the flesh.” The demon bowed. His odd appearance didn’t bother me; I was just glad to meet someone this side of the gates who spoke English. As skilled as I was in botany, I sucked at foreign languages. I only knew a few phrases of heavily accented Elvish, and not one word of that weird language the demons and angels spoke. Rutter was assigned to me as an interpreter and a bodyguard. From his appearance I was thinking his skills in the former far outweighed his skills in the latter, although I hated to judge a demon by his color…and snout.

  “So what’s your plan, pretty elf-lady?” he asked. He was rubbing his snout and I wasn’t sure if it was a suggestive motion, or he just had an itch.

  “Walk into Libertytown. Talk to this mage Kirby. See if I can modify any existing crops to thrive in this environment. Depending on my success at that either go home or try to come up with another idea.”

  His face wrinkled upward. “Aren’t you going to make the forests grow again? Like the elves did?”

  “I’m a half-elf. Anything I do weather-wise or with the environmental conditions is going to have a very small radius and last for probably two hours tops. That’s not a solution I can offer them,”

  My words were rather abrupt and I immediately regretted snapping at the little guy. My shirt was glued to my body with sweat. My hair was a hot, limp mess down my back. I’m sure my eyeliner was raccoon-worthy. Still, that wasn’t an excuse for being short-tempered with my demon escort.

  He didn’t seem to mind. I remembered hearing that he was a Low, the bottom-of-the-barrel as far as demon hierarchy went. Maybe he was used to being snapped at. Which made me feel even worse about my slip of temper.

  “Well, I’m yours for however long you’re here, so come with me, Miss Amber.”

  Rutter strode forward and I followed, easily keeping pace with his short, bowed legs. We left the blisteringly hot desert behind and entered into something that felt like a dry heat wave in a California summer. I reached out a hand to brush against the golden-green grasses and didn’t recognize the strain, although they were similar to winter wheat back home. Hmm. Perhaps with some tweaking, I could get this to thrive in a more arid environment, although not in the desert I’d just walked out of. If that was what Libertytown was reverting to, I didn’t have a lot of faith in my ability to hold their starvation in check for more than a year or two.

  It was the same with the trees. Perhaps an Acacia would do better than these oaks and maples. I’d need to check the soil, since Acacia varieties didn’t tolerate high levels of salt, and I doubted the human settlement had spare water for wide-scale leaching. They were very drought tolerant, though. And if the nighttime temps dropped low, Acacia did as well in cold as it did in heat. If evening temperatures didn’t drop much below freezing, then possibly some Sumac – Rhus Iancea specifically - would thrive. They did well in the arid lands of South Africa, so there’s nothing that said a similar species wouldn’t do equally as well here. Eucalyptus perhaps? Or Mesquites, which did so very well in poor soil.

  Of course, none of this addressed the problem of crops. The humans could hardly eat Eucalyptus leaves like a koala. Alfalfa? Beans? Eggplant? Dwarf kale. Brassicas did well in hot, dry climates. I’d need to select a suitable cultivar, but even with a heat and drought-tolerant strain, we’d need to consider irrigation. There had to be a way to divert water here, and with even a small irrigation system, they could keep their soil stable enough to grow specialized crops.

  “Rutter? Is there a water source nearby? A lake, or river, or even an underground spring?”

  The demon turned to me his snout swinging with the motion. “The swamps aren’t far. Rivers and lakes are mainly north and west.”

  Swamps. “How far are the swamps? Do you know what the water is like? Would it be suitable for irrigation, or even for humans to drink?”

  He rubbed the side of his snout. “We can get to the swamps on foot in an hour or two. Do you want to go there? I thought you wanted to go see the humans and the Kirby Mage. I’ve never met an elf who liked the swamps, but since you’re half demon, maybe you’ll enjoy them.”

  “Can you describe them?” I pressed. I hated to take the time to truck out to these things if they were full of sulfur or had a PH that would etch metal.

  “They’re kind of gooey. There’s green and blue slimy stuff on top, and sometimes your feet get stuck on the bottom and you drown. And the bitey fish – they’re on you in seconds. The Mistress likes to eat them, but most demons think they taste like a bitter twig. They’re kind of crunchy inside though, if you like that sort of thing.”

  “Do you drink the water?” He had to know more, but getting information from Rutter was clearly an exercise in patience. “Do you think the humans could drink it?”

  Rutter scrunched up his face, the snout shortening by a good six inches. “Drink it? Are you crazy? It’s slimy. I’ve never seen anyone drink it. Well, maybe on a dare but that demon didn’t look too good afterward,”

  That answered my question. I still didn’t want to give up on the idea of irrigation, but it seemed that endeavor might be a long-term project. I wasn’t an engineer. Maybe if I put the wheels in motion, one of the humans here could take on the task of putting an irrigation system in place that drew water from the distant lakes.

  Any further thoughts of crops receded to the back of my mind the moment the town came into sight. I’d expected something primitive, like grass-topped huts and crude stick fences, but what I saw would have put a European village to shame. The streets were cobblestone, smooth and even with a sandy mortar holding the stone together. Flanking the roads were row upon row of tall houses. Some were stone, some were brick, some were wood. A few had been done in a Tudor style with cedar wood batons and stucco over the wood framing. Straw and carved wood baskets sat outside colorfully painted doorways. I saw curtains in the windows, lacy with a floral or striped print. I also saw hundreds of eyes peering at me. A group of women stood in the street holding baskets of laundry. Their conversation died as they caught sight of me, and they watched silently as Rutter and I passed by.

  I’d never felt so out of place. I’d been raised a human, completely unaware of my freakish genetic make-up unti
l I was in college. I’d been an elven baby swapped for a human changeling one, except I wasn’t dead, and I wasn’t fully an elf. My mother, knowing how I would be hunted, had paid to have me declared dead and smuggled into the human world, to be raised as one of them. She’d had someone watch over me as I grew up. And she’d paid for her crime with her life. She’d intentionally lain with a demon, allowed one to impregnate her, and safeguarded the abomination that resulted from that union. Me. My whole childhood I’d been raised as Amber Lowrey, while the real Amber had been stolen from her crib and served the elves in Hel as a slave until she’d been ransomed and brought home.

  She was my sister, now called Nyalla. She was no blood relation to me. None of my human family was, but they were as close to me as any real siblings and parent could be. Nothing about me was human, but somewhere deep in my soul, I was. I’d always be a human. And the suspicion of these people I considered my own, their silence and staring eyes, cut me. They only saw an oddly dressed elf-woman with a demon escort. They only saw an elf, the same as all the elves that had enslaved them their entire lives. In their eyes I was no different, and I ached to think I’d been lumped in with a group of beings I’d grown to despise.

  Rutter led me to a beautiful stone shop. It was three stories, and I assumed there were living quarters above the store. The heavy metal-reinforced wooden door made a cheerful jingle as he opened it and I walked into a paradise. The scent of cedar and cinnamon, of sage and lavender, of rue and juniper, all mixed with an acrid note of a sulfur match recently struck. Dried herbs hung from twine stretched along the ceiling. Stacks of staffs and wands were in a far corner. Each wall was lined with shelves packed full of labeled glass jars. But this was clearly a supply shop. I’d expected this Kirby person to have hundreds of finished goods for sale – amulets and scrolls, rune-covered wands and stones that glowed. There were a few baskets of stones behind a glass case, but none of them glowed. As much as I adored this shop, I was a bit let down. This wasn’t any different than the occult and magical supply shops that I haunted back home. I’d expected…more.