The Azar Omnibus: The Complete Azar Trilogy (The Azar Trilogy Book 0)

by Grace McGinty

  A scream from outside the door chilled the blood in Azar's veins, and she rushed towards the door, right on the heels of Mira and Danian.

  When she stepped outside, time slowed. It was a bloodbath, an undulating mob of animals all attacking a single target.

  Lida.

  Chapter 9

  Everything slowed, the clarity of battle taking over as she jumped the rail of the cabin’s tiny porch, wading into the mass of Weres. Some were transformed. Large wolves, bears, big cats and even snakes were in the mass of bodies. Eagles swooped down from the sky, and part of Azar was vaguely aware of their sharp talons slicing at her skin. She heard Mira yell to incapacitate not kill unless necessary. Oh yeah, the Green Man didn’t like violence.

  She lit the bear's fur on fire. It wouldn't kill him, but it would sting like a bitch. But as soon as the Werebear ran off, several wolves took its place, circling her and biting at her legs and ankles. There was only one thing to do.

  Azar released her inner Ifrit, trying to do it as quickly as she could. The fire traveled up her body at astonishing speed, her wings bursting from her back like a hot knife through butter. She didn’t restrain the flames that leapt from her body, instead letting them burn as high and as hot as they could.

  The wolves backed away from the searing heat. She flapped her wings once, pushing herself above the mass of bodies, and flew over to the middle of the group to where Lida lay prone in the center. Careful to pull the flames on her lower body close, she stood over Lida's body, shielding her from the vicious onslaught of claws and teeth.

  The ridiculousness of the situation penetrated her brain. The woman had threatened to kill her less than an hour ago. But her basic instincts were to protect, something honed from being a firefighter for most of her life. Regardless of her personal feelings about a person, nobody deserved to die like this.

  She spread her wings out, the flames dripping off them and onto the flesh of the animals still standing too close. She created a ring of fire, eight feet tall around the group, like Killian had taught her. She confined most of the Weres inside the ring of flame with her. She pulled the fiery ring towards herself, shrinking its diameter, forcing the Weres to inch closer and closer to her molten heat. Some of the closer ones began to whine loudly.

  "Enough!" she boomed over the cacophony of noise. "Lie down and surrender, or cook in your own skins. The choice is yours."

  Apparently, turning into a fiery beast gave her a flair for the dramatic.

  The fighting stopped, as the animals who had ferociously been attacking Danian realized they were trapped. Of course, Danian was also trapped, and a brief look of panic crossed his face. Jann and fire were not good friends. He schooled his features back into a battle mask, his stance tense in case the Weres attacked him again.

  To make her point, Azar sent out her flames a bit further, licking at her enemies like tongues. The ones immediately around her dropped to the ground, and slowly the ones further out followed suit.

  "Return to your original forms," she shouted over the noise, that had quickly changed from battle cries to scared whimpering. The air around her became blurred, as the Weres switched forms en masse. The changing of so many Weres distorted the energy around their bodies, messing with the light refraction. It was kind of like watching a wolf change into a man beneath the surface of a swirling river. If they weren't trying to kill her, it would actually have been a pretty magical moment.

  The birds of prey above her screeched and took off, but a freak hail storm came down, the golf ball sized stones punishing their small bodies until they were forced to land, broken on the ground. Mira ran to where they fell, taking them into custody.

  Danian waved a hand. That was it. But the results were immediate. The faces of the Weres around her got euphoric, the ones that were still shifted switched back to human. They all stood in unison, blissful smiles on their faces, every single one of them naked as the day they were born. Danian's eyes glowed perfectly white and it gave her the jeebies. Azar turned to Jack, who still stood on the porch, looking on.

  "Is there somewhere we can put these guys for the night?"

  Jack tipped his head towards the cabin. "They can stay in here with me, so they don't freeze to death."

  Danian started herding them through the doors. That’s exactly what it was, herding. The group were docile as lemmings now. Mira followed behind, with a naked guy and girl, their hands locked behind their backs with hunks of ice. Danian waved a hand at them, and warm smiles spread across their faces. They followed their compatriots into the cabin. Azar counted twenty-seven naked bodies. It seemed like overkill for a simple retrieval.

  The only people left outside were the injured. One boy, he wouldn’t have been more than twenty, was still lying to her left, a huge gash in his side, blood pooling around his body. A woman a few feet over was curled in a ball, moaning in pain from the burns on her body. Another man sat against a tree, a long dagger pinning him to its trunk, like a butterfly to a board. Beneath Azar's feet, blood bubbled from Lida's mouth as she gurgled out a moan. She let the Ifrit recede, until she was standing in her human form. Her naked human form. If Lida wasn’t dying at her feet, she was sure she'd be completely embarrassed.

  "Mira!" Azar yelled. Mira was next to her in a blink of an eye.

  "Look after the boy, staunch his wounds," Mira said firmly, and Azar leapt towards the boy.

  The gashes were deep, and his eyes were wide with fear. Panic overtook her, her mind flashing back to the last time she was leaning over a boy who was bleeding out in front of her.

  Her breathing shuddered to a stop, cold flooding through her body until she gasped. She couldn’t do this, not again. She couldn’t have his life on her conscience, couldn’t cause him unimaginable pain. Aaron’s screams still echoed through her dreams. She wanted to scramble away from him, run until she could no longer smell fear and blood.

  A large hand clamped down on her shoulder. She looked over at Jack, his face serious for once, but his eyes were reassuring. There was a shirt balled up in his other hand. A sense of well-being passed through her body, warring with the panic. She took a second to pull the shirt over her head.

  Finally, she took a deep breath and looked at the bleeding boy. The three deep gashes ran over his hip, probably a stray swipe from the bear, becoming shallower as they reached his stomach. It was all that saved him. If those gashes had been deeper around his stomach, he would have bled out in seconds, the contents of his abdomen lying next to him. If she could staunch the bleeding, seal off any arteries, he might have a chance

  "I'm sorry, this will hurt. But you won't be dead," she apologized softly.

  She put two hands over the gash that ran over his hip to his stomach and pulsed out a quick blast of heat. The boy’s scream curdled her stomach, but she moved to the next gash and repeated the procedure. And again. She was as grey and shaky as the boy when she was done. He'd passed out, thank god, but his color didn’t look good. She turned to see Lida was blue, and she was barely breathing.

  Mira was yelling down the phone for a medical evac. Finally getting the answer she wanted, and thrust the phone back in her pocket.

  "I'm taking the injured to the Vancouver compound. Lida is in stasis, but I'm not sure if I can keep her alive until they get here." She looked at Jack. "Give me a hand putting them in the SUV?" Jack nodded, picking up the boy at his feet like he was a doll. Azar raced to open the back, dragging their duffel bags out and dropping them in the dirt at her feet. Jack laid the boy gently into the cargo compartment. Mira was there, holding Lida, and sliding her into the back seat. The tiny woman lifting the much larger Ghul looked strange, but Mira was stronger than her diminutive stature portrayed.

  They went over to the two other injured Weres. Mira placing a cooling hand on the woman’s burn, and Azar pulled the dagger out of the man’s shoulder. His eyes burned with hatred, and she was tempted to put the blade back in. Instead she sealed up his wounds and found a little bit of satisfact
ion in his girlish scream. Jack’s eyes were also cool when he looked at the man, and he unceremoniously helped the man to truck. He whispered something in the man’s ear, and the guy turned even whiter. He hurriedly hopped into the front seat of the SUV under his own steam. Mira sealed his hands in bindings of ice, along with the woman with the burns, just in case they got any ideas on the way to the airfield.

  "I'm getting choppered out. I'll arrange transport for you, Danian and Jack, as well as the captives at 0600. Be at the airfield." With that, she was in the SUV and roaring down the road.

  Azar stood next to Jack as the cloud of dust settled around them. She turned and saw what had once been the front yard of Jack's cabin. It was now a scorched, muddied ring, blood stains marring the ground. It looked like the battleground it was. The trees around the yard seemed largely untouched by her flames, and for that she was thankful. The last thing she wanted to do was inadvertently start a forest fire.

  "Sorry about this," she murmured apologetically as she waved her hand at the mess in front of them.

  He shrugged as he picked up the bags and moved toward the cabin door. “I’ll bill the Djinn Council.”

  The sun had started to set, and the wind was cold. The dusk was eerily free of noise. The mountain breeze had picked up and was slicing against her bare legs.

  "It probably wouldn't have been so bad if you'd helped," Azar said peevishly. He held the door open for her, and she stepped into a room of naked people. It was like Woodstock in there.

  "I apologize, but like I said, I can't raise a hand in violence. They fully intended to eat you after they killed you, so I couldn’t step in. It was within the circle of nature. If they'd had any other plan, I may have been able to help.” He shrugged. “However, you seemed to have it under control." His smile was full of respect, and Azar felt herself blush. She noticed Ibsali was back to being a painting on the wall, and she breathed a sigh of relief.

  She briefed Danian about Lida's condition and Mira's orders, and then set about finding clothes for everyone. She raided the small chest of drawers pushed up against the end of Jack's single bed. Azar got her own duffel bag from the porch and pulled on some sweats.

  When they were all fairly dressed and huddled around the fireplace, Azar allowed herself to relax a little. She sat next to Danian and Jack at his little hardwood table, and Jack poured them all a stiff drink.

  "Is it hard for you to keep them in this state?" she asked Danian. She didn't know much about mind control, but it sounded like hard work.

  Danian shook his head. "No, I’ve implanted the control deep. It'll stay there until I, or another Jann, undoes it. But the effort of creating such deep control has worn me out," he said with a large yawn. “If you think you can handle things here, I'm going to go and have a quick power nap."

  Azar nodded. “Sweet dreams.”

  He grinned as he walked away. In truth, the Jann scared her a little. The fact that the Jann could implant control so deep within a person that they would never rouse, well, that terrified her. Walking around like a zombie, never functioning on this plane again, it was a horrifying thought. Though, there would be worse fates than being stuck in her oasis with Bast.

  She ran her hand through her hair and looked at the Fae across the table. He was a fable, a myth, a man with such an unnatural visage that he was beautiful. Not in the same way that Bast was beautiful, or even the way Keenan was good looking. They were too conventional, which is a word she'd never thought she'd apply to Bast. No, Jack's beauty was that of nature; not the beauty of snow capped mountains or anything so ordinary. Jack's beauty was that of early morning fog, or the porous surface of a river rock. You couldn’t quite put your finger on it, but you knew that it was perfect in its perceived imperfections, untouched by humanity.

  "Jack, can I ask you a kind of personal question?"

  Jack cocked his head at the wistful tone of her question. "Of course."

  "How do you survive being alone? Century after century of solitude, it sounds unbearable to me. I'd rather remain the way they are, locked in their mental cell, then have to endure a millennium without companionship." Her voice was more adamant than she intended as she pointed at the huddled group of Were.

  Jack didn't say anything for a long time, just staring into the flickering lights of the fire. She studied his face, with his slightly wild eyebrows, unforgiving slashes over his strange, moss colored eyes. Two little creases marred his forehead, the almost-human imperfections softening an otherwise inhuman face. His high cheekbones and the soft lines of his face should have made him look feminine but instead they made him look approachable. Almost human.

  He finally focused back on her face, and Azar found it hard to draw her gaze away from those eyes. There was no menace or lust in his expression, no wariness or deception. The face that looked back at her was something pure, undiluted by the grim industrialism of the modern world.

  "When I was younger, I had companions. Women who would come and live with me in the wilderness, and I'd watch them grow old and die. Even those of my own race. The Fae are long lived, but I am immortal. One of the few, true immortals. After a few millennium of heartbreak, I decided no more. I could not take the loneliness, the sadness that would always follow one of their deaths. So I made the earth my companion; its smallest creatures to its tallest structures. I found solace in nature’s embrace." His smile was bittersweet. "I, like nature, can adapt to almost anything."

  He saw her look of pity and smiled. “Don't worry, I haven’t been living like a monk. I have enjoyed every kind of woman that nature has had to offer over my long years. Women with bodies like the juiciest of peaches and skin like the richest of cream.” She had a feeling that only Jack could make being a player sound poetic.

  He bounded to his feet and strode over to a record player in the corner. He chewed his lip as he flicked through the vinyl records, giving a little "aha" of triumph when he found what he wanted.

  Soon, the smooth sound of Dean Martin’s Sway curled around the room, and Azar smiled too. It was a song made for dancing.

  “Will you be my companion and bring me happiness, even for just a night?” Jack asked as he sauntered back to her. The question sounded indecent but his tone held no guile. His face promised just a dance, even if his words didn't. His hand reached out to her, his eyes daring her to dance with him.

  She loved a challenge, almost as much as she loved to dance. “Just a dance. No sampling of any peaches,” she warned jokingly. He just smiled and held out his hand.

  She took it and he pulled her straight into his chest, his large hands spanning across the small of her back. He gently began swaying to the music, his movements gradually getting faster, his footwork getting more complex. He led her around the room, his body swaying against hers to the rhythm of the big band. His eyes sparkled with mischief and heat.

  He twirled her quickly and when she spun back into his arms, he dipped her back so low that her hair brushed the ground, her breasts straining upwards. He was a masterful dancer, and she wondered where he had learned to dance like this in the wildernesses of the world.

  He danced to steps of his own, but they told their own story, like he was seducing her with music and magic.

  His hands were strong and sure against her back as he pulled her back up and into his chest. She could feel every muscle of his body against hers as he held her close and just moved them slowly around the room. The touch of his hands and the sensual way he swayed to the music was making her uncomfortably hot. He spun her in his arms again, stepping forward to stop her mid rotation, so her back was pressed against his front, one hand on her hip, the other still holding her left hand firmly. He dipped his face into her neck as their bodies swayed in perfect sync, and she let out a little gasp as he spun her back to face him again.

  She lost herself in the music, and in Jack. The song blended into the next, and the next, Jack's rhythm changing to the beat of the song.

  When all that was left was the crackl
e of the blank space at the end of the record, Azar finally came out of her trance and leapt away. Sweat dripped down her back and she didn't think it was from the exertion of dancing with Jack. Swallowing hard, she turned her back on him, gathering her wits. When she'd gotten her raging hormones under tentative control, she turned and smiled politely.

  "Thank you for the dance." She kept her voice purposefully steady, her face schooled into a mask of polite nonchalance, as if she didn't know what they'd just done was akin to vertical foreplay. He just looked at her knowingly, a crooked smile on his face. She mumbled some excuse about feeding the Weres so she could turn away.

  She walked steadily over to the kitchen and busied herself making sandwiches. She kept her back to him, and hummed lightly to herself as if her body wasn't in turmoil. She could understand why humans were beguiled by the Fae, and happily gave up their lives and loved ones to spend the rest of their days amongst creatures like Jack. She had almost been as entranced by Jack as the Weres were by Danian. If Jack had tried to kiss her, she wasn't sure she would have stopped him, and that made guilt burn like acid in her gut.

  Jack had disappeared from the cabin by the time she had turned to hand a sandwich to each of the entranced Were creatures. It sounded strange, but if you put food in their hands, they would eat it, and if you put a glass in their hand, they would drink the contents. She got them all settled, and sat down to watch them in their artificial bliss.

  She recognized Aaron’s ex-girlfriend from her file and gave the girl the stink eye. She had caused all this drama, and hurt Aaron in the process. In Azar's book, that was a far more heinous crime than attacking Lida, or even conspiring against the Djinn. Aaron had been through so much, and she had kicked him while he was down. She found grim satisfaction knowing that she would get her comeuppance. The Djinn would question them all before they sent them back to their respective packs for punishment.

  The night was so silent, and her prisoners so docile that she found herself bored. She pottered around, keeping busy as the night passed. She read one of the newer books in Jack's bookcase, too scared to touch the older ones in case she damaged them.