“Stay away from him, Victoria!” George ordered. “His familiar took the worst of the blow, and is hiding inside, ready to attack as soon as he gains strength.”
George walked over to the transformed dragon and gave him a brutal kick to the ribs.
“Get up!”
Elizabeth started to come closer, but George looked up at her and his anger was palpable.
“Come to see what your interference has wrought? He’s going to live, at least, until Victor gets here,” George said.
“Vic is here?” Victoria asked, ignoring George’s order to stay away.
“Yes,” George said.
“Come here, little one. You should have run, if you wanted to, earlier,” George whispered into Elizabeth’s mind.
She ignored his request.
The dragon prince wasn’t bleeding that Elizabeth could see. When he stood up, as ordered by George, an angry, red scar marred his right side, where his familiar had been wounded.
Big grey was a huge vampire, as well. She’d somehow forgotten. He gave her a quick look over, before he glared at George.
“Are you okay?” Victoria asked.
He turned to her.
George smashed his smaller sword, hilt-first, against the back of the other male’s head.
He crumpled.
Victoria caught his body with her water, before he hit the ground.
“Bind him or kill him,” George said. “I don’t care which, but do one before Victor gets here.”
Stalking over to Elizabeth, George grabbed her hand with a grip that said he wasn’t letting her go again, soon. It burned with his unsatisfied anger.
Victor had to be going after Jill, if he had split up with George.
She didn’t feel Daemon anywhere.
With the injury she had suffered earlier, the claim would have definitely fired and connected them, if Daemon had been in the same realm.
She had to hope that Victor and George had chased after them alone.
Not wasting another moment to do what she must to protect her family, Elizabeth stabbed her last oak stake into George’s chest, before he could read her thoughts again.
He smiled at her the moment before he turned to ash.
She felt her heart squeeze in pain, then a familiar tingle all over her body, before she looked down.
The asshole had staked her, too.
November Rain
Maeren
Torsten
Torsten dug his fingers deep into the mud of the field, ignoring the rain running down the sleeve of his cloak to pool around his wrist.
He twisted his hand free with a squelch, after a moment, and called Jaeson over.
“How many days ago did the merchant say the air witch bought the chalk?”
“Less than a week, sir,” Jaeson answered.
The ground was still saturated with the kind of heavy magic created by an amplification circle. Grass and mud covered what lines may have been chalked, but the earth retained the memory of it, forming an afterimage as bright as the sun to his magic.
He remembered well, how it felt to stand in the pinnacle of such a circle, amplifying earth to take down walls that had stood for longer than he had lived.
Torsten couldn’t tell what kind of magic had been used, only that it had been violent.
The area still showed evidence of a fight.
Thick branches had been torn off of the surrounding trees and the field scorched black, with piles of muddy ash left that had not been completely washed away by the rain.
When Torsten touched the ground, he’d felt dozens of field graves, where vampires had been incinerated.
It was like slipping a few decades back in time to the clan wars. So many fields like this, with males turned to ash in their prime, fertilizer for the earth. Battles that had left a thick coat of grey over everything, until it was all he could see and taste.
As a general, he’d had to brush the ash off of his uniform like any other dirt and march the soldiers left alive to the next field.
Cleaning his hand of mud with a shake, Torsten looked around the field once more, blinking the light rain from his vision.
He’d rather a good downpour that was over and done, instead of this wet mist that blew right into his face at the slightest breeze. It got water in the eyes, mouth, nose, and every little piece of clothing that wasn’t tied tight to seal out the damp.
The fog that rose up from the ground permeated even the thickest layers of clothes, given enough time. They were sitting ducks for any water elemental to attack.
His daughter and granddaughters didn’t belong on a field like this.
Torsten had fought so witches would be free to choose their place in Maeren, not restricted by their clan lines. They shouldn’t be forced to serve one male after another, passed on like prized cattle, owned by the wealthiest families.
Kaila had wanted freedom. One slaughter should have been enough to pay for that choice.
The king had shown them all it could be done, taking wives from every clan to unite them, blending magic and blood for one kingdom.
Witches no longer had to follow the prejudiced demands of their clans. The balance had been preserved.
“There are claw marks on the trees,” cried out a young, panicked voice. “Looks fresh, sap’s still sticky with . . .”
Retching followed the presumably grisly discovery.
Torsten turned to the soldier that had shouted.
Maeren save him from boys, barely bearded by downy whiskers.
The young man looked grown, with the muscles and the height expected of an earth vampire in his twenties, but his lack of life experience was almost painful to watch as he hunched over and emptied his breakfast from his stomach.
Torsten was no mother hen to gently push him out of the nest.
“Jaeson, quiet that soldier before he announces to the town that a dragon attacked here.”
Letting his friend deal a blow of common sense to the soldier he’d only brought along to provide companionship to his granddaughters, close to what their age would be now, Torsten waded through the muddy field to the large oak.
The damage wasn’t obvious from this direction, the century-old tree so large that the branches broken off at the back of it were hidden, until seen from the other side.
Wedged up higher than he could reach from the ground was a shredded arm, misty rain pebbling on its pale, swollen tissue like scales on a gutted fish belly, bloated from its watery grave.
Blood had dripped down to mix with the sap, settling dark and thick against the wounded tree, in memory of violent death.
It looked like someone had tried to hide in the tree, only to be forcibly ripped from its branches.
Whoever it was, had to have been clueless about dragons if he thought a tree a good spot to avoid detection. Not that there were a lot of other options in this field.
“Why didn’t the arm turn into ash?” asked the boy, almost whispering, after Jaeson had finished with him.
“Only a chi release results in enough energy to cremate the remains, upon death,” Torsten said, pushing off the ground to leap up, onto the tree. His fingers grabbed the closest branch that could hold his weight to pull himself up. “The owner of the arm was taken alive.”
Torsten held himself off the ground with one arm, flexing muscle built in mines and carved out in battlefields. He stretched impossibly far, reaching with his other hand for the amputated limb, nothing to support him but earth strength.
The oak branch he held, groaned at his effort.
Knowing the boy below couldn’t see around his body, Torsten silently cursed the wide tree and called the severed arm to him.
There was still enough blood left in the ripped vessels to sing to his magic. It let him give animation to the dead arm to shift it by a few inches. He grabbed onto the fingers in a cold, grave handshake, pulling to free it from the tree.
The plopping sound of clotted blood, gushing out of the dislocated elbo
w when Torsten wrenched it—putrid wastes falling to land on the muddy ground below—had the boy vomiting, again.
Even Torsten disliked the ripe ones.
Thankfully, his magic didn’t need to taste the blood to trace it. He only needed to touch the magic stored in the blood and he would be able to feel where the rest of the body had been dumped, as long as it wasn’t stuck up a tree, like this limb.
No dragon, full of this much rage, would have let the vampire he ripped the arm from live long.
The ground could carry Torsten’s earth to probe for miles, subtle vibrations of the unlucky vampire’s magic amplified by the minerals and rock that Torsten knew by heart.
Searching for this buried body would be child’s play with so much blood to trace.
Dropping to the ground, careful to avoid the boy’s mess, Torsten handed the arm to Jaeson.
They would finish checking the field before chasing down the dragon’s victim. It wasn’t as if a dead body would be running off on them.
“Now, let’s go over the story again. The merchant said there were three witches and at least one had air?” Torsten asked Jaeson to confirm.
“Yes, sir. He also said that the third witch seemed to have some healing ability, wrapping the wounded witch’s arm and stopping her bleeding,” Jaeson answered.
He had made the chalk seller spill all the details of his best customers. It had been after the merchant had hinted he knew witches who might not be opposed to a little blood trade . . . if wealthy miners, like themselves, could provide high-quality chalk.
The potential deal had spelled the seller’s doom.
How low had Kaila let her pride sink?
Torsten slammed his hand against the tree trunk and wished it could be the spittoon he had sent flying into the merchant’s back post, like he had been told Elizabeth sunk a few coins with air to impress the chalk seller and the vampire buying her blood.
Jaeson had wisely taken over the interrogation for him at that point, before Torsten completely destroyed the merchant’s shop.
“The blood deal . . . the healing. Why would Kaila allow her daughter to be hurt?” Torsten mused aloud. “The amplification circle must be the reason for obtaining the chalk at such a high price—but why?”
Kaila had been so protective of her daughters, even in her letters, so Torsten couldn’t reconcile such strong maternal instincts with letting her eldest buy their chalk with her blood. It was simply unfathomable.
“We’re not sure on the identity of the third witch, sir,” Jaeson reminded him.
True enough. Jaeson had lost even his tightly controlled temper when the merchant told them why the air witch had bled all over his shop, the stains still visible.
How the vampire had torn and ripped into the witch’s wrist in his haste to take what he had purchased, and how she had paled with shock and hemorrhage.
Torsten had meant to pull Jaeson back in turn, but his friend had quickly knocked the seller out cold, calling the name of his deceased daughter.
Jaeson’s sweet Deborah had been killed in a blood trade last year.
Torsten had helped Jaeson bury her, reliving his own grief in the process, for his stalwart friend and right-hand man.
After the interrogation was ended by the seller’s unconsciousness, they’d gone to the village to dig up further clues.
The boy had proved he wasn’t completely useless that night, dragging them both to the nearest pub for an ale, while he went out and questioned more townspeople.
He had found out that the witches were known here, mute sisters that had grown up in the area, although no one knew quite where their cottage was located, out of town.
The boy had even gotten descriptions of the sisters, not that Torsten had anything to compare them to in real life, having never met his granddaughters.
Unfortunately, no one remembered much about the third witch, other than her dress was too small.
In an edge town, where nobody was wealthy, commenting on her clothes meant it must have been a terrible fit indeed.
Was Kaila so poor that she was wearing the hand-me-downs of her daughters?
The pub had been a fortuitous choice to rest. Edgers were a gossipy bunch and they had plenty to talk about after a fight out of town that had been so loud and bright that the older ones among them had crossed their chests and prayed to ancient Maerenian gods to protect them.
The Wastes held darker creatures than most of the younger generation could even imagine, but it was rare such beasts were forced to hunt so close to the human realm.
One thing the king's enforcer had been very good at achieving was imposing the boundaries between Maeren and humans. The monsters had been regulated to wild lands.
It had taken only a few marks worth of ale to loosen the tongues of the witnesses. Probably, they could have heard the stories without paying, but ale would blur the memory of who was asking questions the next morning.
Torsten hadn’t known what to expect, with incredible tales of lightning on a cloudless day and the roar of a large beast that had deafened even the thunder rumbling from the hills, as a battle raged in the middle of nowhere.
The guards from a few towns over had been alerted to the disturbance and reported finding the evidence of some sort of territorial fight.
This field didn’t seem like the type of land to go to war over. Nothing was here, but nearly infertile dirt.
There was clearly more to the story then they had been told at the pub.
Torsten picked up a piece of discarded rope from the ground, still tightly tied and coated in ash. This was how executions were done, prisoners bound and slayed without an honourable end.
Perhaps the guards had covered up what had really happened, turning to ash whoever had been left here and tied up.
“There’s more rope by the hills,” the boy said, already exploring everywhere but near the tree.
“Is the rope tied?” Torsten asked.
He waited for the boy to run to the closest hill and shout back an affirmative.
“Dragons didn’t do this,” Jaeson said.
He was seated on a rock near the site of the amplification circle, tapping the severed arm by its curled fingers on grass.
The scorched blades of grass had been bent backward, likely by the force of whatever magic had been done in that circle.
Dragons didn’t use amplification. They had no need to boost their magic, already so much stronger than everyone else, with their modified souls.
“I think the dragon came afterwards,” Torsten said. “Do you remember the young dragon in Donkaer?”
He would be surprised if Jaeson didn’t remember seeing such an unusually young dragon, even if it was just another male.
A female dragon would have been worth halting their search. No one had ever seen another female of their kind since the king had poisoned them into eternal stasis.
No females, no new baby dragons. Even the sucklings had been poisoned through their mother’s milk, and by the time the slow potion had started its work, it had been too late to save anyone.
Jaeson grunted. His eidetic memory was likely recalling everything about the dragon they had seen, while searching edge towns for hints about Torsten’s family.
Jaeson had once told him that he assigned everyone he saw a nickname. Not to call them by it, but to label them in his head, letting him pull incredible detail about anyone he had met from his memory.
He also could crunch other information in a similar way, making him well suited to his role as Torsten’s head of spies. He never forgot a face or a threat.
“We weren’t the only ones bribing the pub patrons. It was a little too easy to get them to talk and the story sounded rehearsed, like it wasn’t the first time it was told. The dragon from town must have heard it and got here first,” Torsten concluded. “What I want to know, is why a dragon is chasing the same trail leading to my daughter.”
“Rainy night . . . He was looking for a water witch,” Jaeson
said. “Water and fire, I think. Such opposing magics don't mix together too often. He was asking the ward witches if they had done any protection tattoos for a water witch lately, and then he told them that his sister was missing and she had a minor talent in fire as well. He paid in gold.”
Torsten raised an eyebrow in question. Gold was as uncommon in these parts as a witch with fire and water magic.
“I should have mentioned it earlier,” Jaeson said, sounding disappointed in himself. “We were talking with the guards about the territory dispute at the time.”
The guards had made it sound like a simple argument between neighbours that got out of hand, not this battlefield, or else Torsten would have come here sooner.
Instead, they had spent another night in town looking for anyone that knew of a good healer, in hopes that his daughter was still practicing her magic for the less fortunate.
They had faked illness in the boy, who had done a good job of groaning and holding his belly.
Torsten should have known he was weak stomached by his stellar performance.
“The dragon wasn’t looking for my daughter or my granddaughters. None of them have water magic,” Torsten said, excusing Jaeson’s unusual slip-up. “Maybe the dragon is the one chasing his own tail. I prefer we catch up to him and ask for his intentions.”
Jaeson smiled, handing the severed arm over to Torsten.
“And here, I thought you dragged me along for a boring chase across the countryside,” his spymaster said, looking more alive.
“I almost left you home for Kaila’s sake but there’s no better tracker,” Torsten admitted.
His daughter may not even remember Jaeson, if he was very lucky.
“She stole twenty years from us, hiding out here,” Jaeson commented, ignoring the subtle threat to leave him behind. “If you didn’t drag her home, after finding out she was alive, then I would have gone by myself.”
Too bad, Jaeson never forgot Kaila.
Catch a Tiger by the Tail
Human Realm
Jill
No Witch Way Out (Maeren Series Book 2) Page 21