Torsten poured himself another finger of whiskey. There wasn’t anything more he could get out of the prince. He offered a toast to him more out of politeness than real gratitude.
He also couldn’t resist making the prince finish off his drink.
One day, he was going to repay this prince for all of his insults and lies.
“Thank you for taking the time to provide this information. I’m sure Kaila will want to thank you as well, personally, when I tell her how you so thoughtfully explained where to find her and bring her home, safe and sound.”
The prince froze, holding his glass midair.
Torsten clicked it and smiled.
“There’s no need to tell her it was me. Your thanks are more than enough. And Jill, of course. I’ll gladly take care of Jill in my harem, when you return her,” the prince finally replied.
Torsten stopped smiling. His granddaughter was not a commodity to be traded.
“Perhaps we’ll all visit the castle together, once I’ve brought my lost family home,” Torsten said. He would be there to offer his granddaughters the protection they deserved. “With your invitation, of course,” he added.
They both knew that it was a mere formality. The prince couldn’t decline a war hero.
“The royal family always welcomes a visit from you, General Ansulf,” the prince said with his pinched mouth.
He finished his drink, as if to wash away the disgust of having to address a dusty, old earth miner by title.
At least, the milksop hadn’t referred to him by his battlefield name. General Blood Stone would have more difficulty sneaking through the edge to capture his wayward daughter from the human realm.
He would need more discretion to fetch his daughter as the prince wanted.
Afterwards, he may just need to impress upon Kaila that family stood together, no matter their past mistakes or notoriety.
Her time among humans could have led her to forget that Maeren was a male dominated society and he was the head of her family, now that her husband was dead.
As much as she may wish it was otherwise, he couldn’t leave her and his granddaughters alone, when times had become so dangerous, once again.
Dragons, demons, and a missing king. It was time his daughter came home. She had a lot of explaining to do.
End of the World as We Know It
Human Realm
Elizabeth
Elizabeth had looked over her shoulder the whole run back to the portal, after the disaster at the market.
She’d expected Daemon, or dragons, or even the townspeople to be chasing after them, screaming that they had been tricked.
The newly enlarged familiar tattoo, covering half her body, seemed to weigh her down, dragging her feet when she needed to make a swift escape.
Jill and Victoria hadn’t helped, either, with all of their questions.
How come Daemon hadn’t mind sucked her control away?
Did she get heartburn from all the vampires her familiar had eaten?
Why had the horde of sick vampires attacked them like zombies, with a one-track mind, going for their blood like fresh brains?
What happened to Geer—they certainly hadn’t missed hearing Elizabeth scream out his name when he fell from the sky—and was he in her head right now?
Should they blindfold her? Did they need to keep quiet?
She agreed to the quiet, desperately.
The questions had been endless. Mostly, they had all been scared and anxious after their close escape.
Elizabeth knew she looked like someone who had witnessed a horrible car crash, not hurt herself, but stunned in a way that only trauma could steal her sense of safety and shake up her world.
Except, she had been hurt. Earth magic, like her mother’s, could feel the healed rents in her wrist that Jill had tried to hide.
The real interrogation had begun when they got home. Her mother was the Inquisition.
Elizabeth hadn’t gotten a free pass on Daemon, like earlier, when her mother had let slide mention of her daughter’s broken heart and anything related to the male that had claimed and betrayed her.
Once the safety of her daughters was compromised, their mother had wanted to know every little detail of Daemon’s telepathic conversation with her.
It had been more painful than the savage vampire bites Elizabeth had suffered.
Then, came the questions about the real dragon. Geer, it seemed, worried her mother more.
That talk her mother had with Kim must have included some unpleasant facts about dragon courtship.
Elizabeth hadn’t even complained when her mother insisted that all of the glyphs for protection against dream tracing were repeated, right then and there, with their troublesome chalk.
Kaila had made Jill draw out Rai. She asked Victoria to explain the amplification circle twice, both for herself and then repeated again, in front of Kim at the dojo, where she’d dragged them all after questioning.
They were battening down the hatches.
At least, they hadn’t had their chalk confiscated and been confined to their rooms.
There hadn’t been time for such mundane punishments. Trouble was coming. It may not have caught them before the portal, but there had to be consequences.
One-two, buckle my shoe. Three-four, kick down the door?
The first twenty-four hours after the attack in Maeren had been spent at Kim’s house, or more specifically, in her dojo.
Uncaring for her wooden floors, Kim had gotten down on her hands and knees. She had engraved a circle big enough to hold them all, marking it with charcoal she lit and blessed to scorch her will to protect them.
Her classes were cancelled until further notice.
The magic Kim had displayed was all spell work. It was limited to her home, where she had layered spell after spell with wards, glyphs, and chalk, to let her work magic, even if she couldn’t hold it in her near soulless chi.
This had been hastily explained by her mother, when Victoria was distracted, helping to chalk glyphs.
There were obvious limits to such magic, but the nice part was that Kim could use any type of magic. She wasn’t limited by her tiny bit of air soul, since this kind of magic was done without directly using chi, other than to activate it.
Nobody blew down their warded house.
Geer may have popped into her dreams, but when Elizabeth woke, all she remembered were grey eyes, staring at her from a dark puddle.
It left her feeling unsettled. Those eyes had seemed . . . haunted.
Whenever she got antsy about something in the past, her quick fix was to get out and go hunting for rouge vampires in the human realm.
She certainly had the energy for it. Maybe it was the happily fed familiars inside of her, but she was practically sparking with excess power.
In the morning, she had asked Kim if there was some way to bleed her magic off into a vessel, like making a battery, for the rest of them to use.
Kim had given her a long look, noting her strange glow, and said that feeding male elementals was the only way she knew to transfer the power.
That wasn’t happening. Elizabeth was feeling a little bite shy after the last wrist chomping she’d taken.
Victoria had quickly suggested that they try to connect through the blood bond and see if they could share magic, like mates supposedly could with each other.
Kim had shook her head, but didn’t see any harm in trying. In fact, she’d even given them some ideas about how to best find that bond that connected them. Some meditation and spiritual focus that had Jill popping in with extra advice.
It made for a boredom breaker, at least.
They spent most of the third day at Kim’s dojo mostly failing to connect, but the one time they finally did, it was nearly explosive.
Victoria levitated, just like Elizabeth, and the glyphs they had laboriously inked on Victoria’s body started to glow white hot with power.
“Hey, look, Wendy’s flying. Think h
appy thoughts!” Elizabeth shouted in excitement.
“How do I control this free ride?” Victoria asked, sounding a little intimidated as she gained height.
Good thing the dojo had high ceilings.
Elizabeth tried to feel for her magic. “Uh, I think I control the amount of air funnelled through the bond, but you control the use of it. If you don’t use the air somehow, then you’re going to levitate by default. I always need to levitate to hold a lot of lightning in my chi, or else, it will ground.”
“Ground?” Victoria asked, sounding more uncertain about this whole endeavour as she floated higher.
“What lightning does, Tor. It goes boom and lights things up, connecting the sky and earth. Electricity seeks the fastest way to the ground,” Jill explained, whistling at the glow coming from Victoria.
It wasn’t often Elizabeth’s family saw her using her magic at this level, never mind another witch.
Seeing it from another perspective, Victoria looked wicked cool, lit up with magic.
“Nobody goes ‘boom’ inside of the dojo!” Kim ordered. She didn’t sound as impressed.
“Take it easy, Elf. Slow and steady,” Elizabeth shouted up to Victoria.
“Let’s try to reinforce the protection on the ceiling, while you’re up there,” her mother suggested, giving them a task to test their newly shared power.
“Do the spelling like you normally would,” Kim instructed.
Victoria nodded.
“Feed the magic into her chi, so she can draw on it,” Kim added to Elizabeth. “Keep it steady, but a trickle.”
Kim wanted Elizabeth to control her lightning like she was pouring water from a pitcher into a straw.
Neither of them knew what it was like to have liquid fire in their veins. One didn’t just pour a little lightning.
“Uh sure,” Elizabeth said.
She had to try. If she could control the intricate circuitry of the brain, then surely, she could stopper the flow of her electricity to a trickle.
It probably would have helped if she had tried this the first time without the pressure so built up from overload.
Victoria effortlessly started a spell, Maerenian words pouring forth as well as her magic.
Elizabeth could feel that it was Victoria's own fire that she was using, at first.
Closing her eyes to focus on Victoria’s chi, Elizabeth pictured the bright ball of energy calling to her own, the threads from their blood bond glowing white, but faint.
It had been a while since they first made the bond, and naturally, it was fading.
Elizabeth ignored how that made her feel, pushing her lightning onto the threads.
They immediately lit up nuclear. Victoria stammered her Maerenian words.
“Gently,” Kim said, whispering it.
Elizabeth breathed in, sucking her magic back.
Control her heart. Control her power. Keep it inside.
“Dial it down just a little more,” Jill said, her voice coming from Elizabeth’s other side.
Elizabeth did as her sister said, comforted by having her family near in a way she hadn’t anticipated. Their barriers were open. Elizabeth could hear their unspoken awe.
The lack of fear wasn’t new from her family, but there was always something inside of Elizabeth, waiting for condemnation as a monster.
It was her family’s trust that she would never use her magic for evil that let her continue to use it despite that worry.
Her mother as so proud of her right now.
“Look, it’s working!” Jill shouted, pointing at the newly reinforced glyph for the protective magic on the ceiling. It was glowing with power.
Only, Elizabeth was still glowing as well.
“This isn’t really taking much magic,” Elizabeth complained.
The trickle she was letting out was like a dripping tap, not exactly enough to drain her full tank, even if it added up to what Victoria needed to reinforce her spells.
“That’s because what you’re doing isn’t the same as a feeding,” Kim said. “Victoria can only use the magic that you feed her immediately. Although you are directing it to her chi, because that’s where she’s used to drawing from to perform spells, the magic isn’t really interacting directly with her chi. Your magics are not compatible. She can’t store your lightning and air, so she has to use them up, or it will be wasted. She can only use a little at a time.”
“Or I’ll go boom,” Victoria called down to them.
“That’s really not funny,” Elizabeth said.
She shot Kim a worried look.
“I’m sure that she’ll just keep leaking magic to the atmosphere. It’s probably why her glyphs were glowing,” Kim said.
Sure enough, Victoria had stopped glowing when Elizabeth slowed the trickle of her magic. The glow was coming back again, now.
It still had nothing on Elizabeth’s own magical radiance, and she had never gone boom, so far.
“What’s next?” Victoria asked, looking pumped.
She was twirling through the air, enjoying her weightless experience.
“Keep reinforcing,” Kim said.
“Reinforce what?” Victoria asked, looking around for any weak spells.
Honestly, they had done a pretty good job earlier.
“Everything,” Kim replied. “You two should work together for the practice.”
Victoria looked around at the protective spells and glyphs again. They were everywhere.
Elizabeth groaned.
“Start with this simple connection, sending magic to Victoria for reinforcing the defensive spells. When you are in Maeren, you can get into an amplification circle and try heavier offensive spells. Think about how Daemon controlled his familiar through Elizabeth,” Kim said.
Whoa! That sounded way more advanced.
Daemon had also used his connection to Elizabeth to control the minds of Jill and Victoria, though lightning. He’d been the one in control.
Being able to share her magic with Victoria was cool and potentially useful, but Elizabeth didn’t want to do anything where she took over Victoria’s free will again.
That line had been crossed once. If Elizabeth kept crossing it, the line would only get blurred, and that scared her more than anything.
“It’s like becoming a temporary demon,” Victoria said, not dissuaded at all. Her excitement was palpable. “Elizabeth can give me more power than I could ever hold on my own. I could wield lightning!”
“Potentially, yes.” Kim smiled up at her. “The Blue Queen probably did something similar to allow her to hold her shield up for days against the king’s army. No amplification circle would have been enough for one witch, but bonding to others to send her magic would have given her endless power to defend her people.”
Jill stopped drawing practice glyphs on the floor. “Really?”
Elizabeth had always wondered how Kim had managed that feat. Knowing she had help didn’t make it any less amazing.
Unlike Elizabeth, she hadn’t the power of lightning to make the bond easier. Kim had to learn about bonds, spells, and amplifying her power, all on her own, at a time when witches were even more oppressed than they were now.
Her defiant act had been one of daring and skill.
“Just a little lightning bolt, Liz. When we get back to Maeren, I want you to let me do it once,” Victoria pleaded.
By the fourth day at the dojo, Elizabeth was willing to let Victoria try out a whole storm of magic, if it got her out of here.
She was climbing the walls, levitating to paint tiny glyphs with chalk infused oils that Kim had made to help their spells last longer.
Elizabeth still was feeding her magic to Victoria for her own spells, while she also painted each stroke of the glyphs, following the ancient texts Kim showed her, through her memories.
She even shouted down critiques at Jill for her sister’s sword technique as Jill tried out the new weapons under their mother’s tutelage.
Although t
heir mother didn’t really have much martial arts knowledge, she had solid fighting skills. Especially with steel weapons.
Their mother was the only one that could match Jill for pure strength, both of them delivering brutal earth-powered blows that tested the resilience of their weapons.
“Keep your arm up, you keep dropping it like a wet noodle!” Elizabeth helpfully shouted down, dotting a golden glyph with a sun and upside down sickle moon.
A book suddenly smacked Elizabeth from behind, making her ears ring as it slammed into the back of her head.
She dropped from the ceiling like a rock as her concentration broke.
Victoria fell, as well, with her connection to Elizabeth’s air cut off.
Cool water caught them both, Victoria quick to pull from her gourd.
Elizabeth looked up at Kim’s double heads, stars dancing across her vision. She blinked and blinked again, trying to clear the mist that was fogging her vision.
“Pull your water back. I have you both,” Kim said, and suddenly, the mist disappeared.
“I thought you were more hard headed,” Kim said in lieu of an apology.
Elizabeth flopped back in the shielded fire-net holding her.
“Some slayer she is, getting taken out by the Encyclopedia of the World, twenty-sixth edition,” Jill said, tossing the twelve-inch thick volume like it was a paperback to their mother.
“Better than a wet noodle flopping her sword around like—”
“Ladies!” Kim said. “I believe I will be the one to continue to provide instruction to my student on her technique, if you are going to continue to mistake fluidity for slack.”
Jill stuck her tongue out at Elizabeth.
Their mother caught the childish taunt.
“Your sensei has taught you well, Jill. Although, you pull back too often on your blows instead of committing, when your earth strength would let you plow through enemies. A battle is no place for fancy sword work. You need to be quick and dirty.”
The older witches eyed each other. The difference in opinion wasn’t only between the sisters.
Elizabeth’s head smacked against the wooden planks as the fire-net dropped her the last few inches to the floor.
No Witch Way Out (Maeren Series Book 2) Page 17