The Elves of Cintra (Book 2 of The Genesis of Shannara)

“Lo siento.”


He had no idea what she was saying. By the way she said it—almost to herself, rather than to him—he wasn’t even sure she was aware of what language she was using. It was as if by speaking the words, she had dismissed him from her mind. He watched her walk away and wondered if he ought to go after her. He didn’t like the idea of them splitting up like this, not staying together when they were so close to finding what they had come all this way to discover.

But mostly he didn’t like what he had heard in her voice.

It sounded as if she was leaving.

It felt as if she was saying good-bye.





Chapter THIRTY


ANGEL PEREZ WAS AT PEACE. A deep, pervasive calm had settled inside, an infusion of a sort that she hadn’t experienced in years. She couldn’t explain it. Nothing justified it. If anything, she should have been riddled with fear, terrified of what waited in the rocks below. Her nerves should have been all sharp-edged and raw.

After all, she was probably going to die.

She walked toward the cluster of huge boulders, the mass of dark stone like the jaws of the earth amid the whiteness of the snow, waiting to devour her. The runes carved in the gleaming surface of her black staff glowed brightly. She knew what was hiding in the rocks. The demons. The spiky-haired female that had transformed into a four-legged horror and tracked her north from her home, and the companion it had found in the Cintra. Somehow the pair had discovered their destination and caught up to them. It shouldn’t have come as a surprise, and in truth it didn’t. She had suspected all along that the demons were one step ahead of them, ever since Ailie and Erisha had been killed in Ashenell. She had known it for sure when they had reached the hiding place for the hot-air balloons and found one of them missing. She had known right away who had taken it. There was no way of determining the truth of it, yet she had known.

She had been waiting ever since for them to surface, knowing that they would in the same way she had known that the struggle between them would end here. Standing on the hillside as Simralin assured them they were almost to their goal, she had felt the demon presence and known it was time. She had been anticipating it ever since she had escaped the last attack, deep in the ruined forests of California, where only Ailie’s warning had saved her. She had said nothing to her companions, but she had been waiting for it. Now it was here. The confrontation she had always believed to be inevitable had arrived.

Still, she was at peace.

She did not want Kirisin or Simralin to know what was happening. If they found out, they would want to stand with her. They could not help. She would worry for them, seek to protect them, and thereby lessen her own chances of surviving. Those chances were small enough as it was. If she faced only one of the two, she might be able to kill or disable it. If both were waiting for her, the best she could hope for was a quick death. She had no illusions. In all likelihood, she was not coming out of this.

She thought it very odd that she wasn’t frightened. She had been terrified after her last encounter with the female demon, so afraid that she could barely think clearly when she and Ailie fled its attack on the Mercury 5 for the Oregon border. She had known then—had known—that the next time she was forced into a confrontation with this particular demon, she was going to die. Twice she had escaped it, but only barely. The third time would be the end of her. She was tough and skilled, but this creature was more than she could handle. She had been extremely lucky before. She could not expect to be so lucky again.

It almost made her smile. Perhaps the inevitability of what waited had leached all the fear out of her. Perhaps by knowing that she must stand and fight, she had become resigned to what that meant. She was not afraid of dying or even of what dying meant. She was not afraid to face this monster, even though she might suffer in ways she had never imagined possible. If this was the death that had stalked her since birth—as some form of death stalked everyone—if this was where it was meant to end for her, she could accept it.

She could not explain this willingness to embrace her fate, but she found comfort in it. She had found grace.