Emerald Wars (The Dream Traveler Book 3)

by Nicole Knight

  Oh Goddess no.

  “Your time starts now.”

  “Shit.”

  I tried to drag Thomas, but he still wasn’t responding.

  I have absolutely no time for this.

  I slapped him as hard as I could across the face, leaving an angry red hand print.

  His eyes snapped closed, and then opened slowly.

  He was back.

  "What was that for?” he asked me, holding his cheek.

  “I’ll tell you later,” I said. I grabbed his hand and started to pull him out of the room.

  He spared one glance back at the Queen before we left her throne room. The Queen let out a chuckle that caused the hair on my arms to rise. She could not be trusted.

  “What is going on?” Thomas asked me as we raced through the tunnels. I tried to remember the way, I was our only chance at getting out of here because Thomas was in a daze when we came through here the last time.

  “We have three minutes to get the hell out of here with an air bubble. After that, it disappears and we will drown. Shut up and let me get us out of here!” I shouted at him.

  Like the smart man he was, he shut up.

  All I could hear was our panting and my inner thoughts.

  Right up here, then straight through that ruby covered doorway and then left at the giant statue.

  Thank the Goddess I paid attention.

  We were almost to the doorway when someone slid in front of my path and brought us to a dead stop.

  My time was ticking.

  Chapter Ten

  Kennan

  That stupid bitch. I want her dead, for real. I don’t know what the hell kind of tricks she just pulled, messing around with me in my sleep like that, but she would pay. I hoped her mom was living the life squeezed out of her right at this moment.

  It took a necromancer and three healers to wake me up from my sleep. I bet she didn’t have any idea how much it cost me to be brought back from the death she delivered in my dreams. How the hell had she managed to do that? Whatever it was, I wanted that power. I wanted to make people, including my father, fear me. Terrorizing him in his sleep was the best way to do that. He couldn't dismiss me if he spent every moment, awake and asleep, fearing me.

  What her stunt cost me was more than she could ever fathom.

  My father had laughed in my face when I was brought back.

  “Stupid idiot, bested by a teenage girl again,” he had said.

  Newsflash Father, I’m a teenager too.

  But that won’t stop me from getting even. She had trashed my naval fleet, ransacked my deliveries to the castle, took down statues and encouraged my people to revolt.

  Who the hell does she think she is?

  A nuisance that would be dealt with.

  I’d seen the girl around school in Arlington for three years, and she had never been capable of something like this. She just appeared one day in the Morthlands apparently coming from nowhere. No one in the Morthlands had seen her prior to her murder of King Eduard, that fat lazy worthless waste of oxygen. How did some mousy girl like her rise to power the way she did, become as powerful as she has?

  I know what happened. Those dipshits back in Arlington gave her confidence. “Oh Violet, you flipped a football player over your shoulder. Oh Violet, you turned down the hottest guy in school, you’re so cool!” They quickly inflated that pretty head of hers with their praise, thinking she was too good for me, and that I was nothing to be scared of.

  She was so wrong. I am what nightmares are made of.

  Samantha snickered at my side, finding my anger funny.

  “What in the hell is so funny?” I asked her, hitting her in the face.

  She stood up, wound her arm back and punched me in the jaw as hard as she could. My head knocked back against the top of my back and I saw stars. It took me a minute to bring my head back up to where it belonged.

  When I did she spoke nice and slow.

  “I don’t know who you think you are, but you will not ever lay a hand on me without my consent, and you will not hurt me to boost your own ego. You are letting this little princess get to your head and it’s sickening to watch. You are no brother of mine. You don’t even deserve the crown. I may just kill you and then take over the other kingdoms myself. You are a miserable excuse of a human being and the dumbest Smart to ever be born. You're even dumber than Father,” she spat.

  Neither one of us was a fan of our father, and I didn’t like her comparison one bit.

  My vision turned red.

  I imagined putting my hands around her neck and squeezing. If I did that, Father would kill me. He had Samantha promised to some man to keep him from starting a revolt. He was worried that her betrothed would rise up and take over the throne, so he was doing what he could to keep him occupied. Right now, that meant dangling Samantha in front of him like a piece of meat, and the old dude took the bait.

  Sickening.

  I ignored my sister and got back to important matters. I needed a new angle, something else to leverage against Violet. I took her castle, and she wasn’t there. Her family wasn’t there, nothing I could use against her. No plans were left behind, no indication of what she was up to next. There was absolutely nothing. Samantha was right, Violet had gotten under my skin, like nothing else. I don’t know how she got to me in my dreams, but it was messing with my head. It seemed that only she has the power to royally screw me over. She continues to do it over and over again, and I seemed to allow it.

  I had no doubts that she somehow lived through our nosedive to the ground, because that was just my luck. Who would purposefully kill themselves without a way to undo it? Only a crazy person.

  Let’s not forget the power she took from me in a different dream. It felt real, and I felt weaker when I woke up. I had to work double time just to replenish what she took. I desired to take hers and let her live, just to be cruel. I wanted to punish her for the misery she brought to my life, the embarrassment I’ve suffered at her hands. I wanted to make her hate me even more. I wanted her to feel misery and defeat. I wanted her broken. If I took her magic she would be a slave in a magicless body, and I’d finally have control. Maybe to spite her I’d take all of the stones she stole from my family, and her original stone. I’d condemn her to a life of misery in Arlington.

  I yawned but shook my head to snap out of my exhaustion. I needed to avoid sleep, so Violet couldn't keep attacking me. I couldn’t let her have any more power over me.

  I left the room and walked through the hall. The Alpha of the werewolves was in the castle today, speaking with Father. Father’s confidence in me was slipping, and he had started taking matters back into his own hands, like growing our fighting forces. I had told him not to worry about it, I was stealing magic and becoming more powerful than anyone in the Kingdom, including him. He had smacked me hard across the face and sneered down at me in disgust.

  “You will never be more powerful than me, no matter how much magic you steal. While you may steal from others, they fear me. Their loyalty will remain to me and not you,” he had said, before telling me to get out of his sight.

  I was born without magic, but that didn’t stop me. Anyone with enough money can pay a magic-worker with dark magic to make them a potion. The potion I acquired, allowed me the smallest amount of magic, and with that, I was able to start stealing from others. I did it occasionally here and there over the years, with no goal in mind but to wait for my grandfather's death , and then my father. I figured I’d take advantage of a weak Kingdom in a power struggle, but Violet had ruined that. She was driving me mad, and desperate times called for desperate measures.

  I should have started sending the shriveled bodies of those I stole magic from to Violet to mess with her head. But, I stole her castle before that idea came to me, she was in hiding and I had no idea where to find her.

  I passed my father and the werewolf alpha in the hall and I tried not to sneer. My hatred grew the less he trusted me. When I kill Violet I wi
ll take her Kingdoms, and I will use their armies to kill Father, and Grandfather if he’s still kicking. Then I will have the continent. Hydra wouldn’t stand a chance. Corone was our ally, and they would do as I said, unless they wanted me to conquer them too.

  I wasn’t quite sure about Samantha and where her loyalties lay. It didn’t matter though. If she wasn’t with me, she was against me.

  I made my way down into the dungeon. We have been keeping the magic workers with desirable qualities down here. One by one, I have been draining their magic. It kills the poor sap of course, but that wasn’t my problem. My only problem was that it takes a while to recover from the drain. It took a lot of energy to absorb the power from another, and then hold onto it. If that weren’t the case, this whole room would have already been emptied, and I would have long ago defeated Violet.

  What I really needed was a damn sleepwalker. They were incredibly rare, so rare that they don’t ever share their abilities with the world. People fear those who can control them. A sleepwalker could do just that. They took control of dreams, and could therefore control anyone who was sleeping.

  I wanted a sleepwalker so that I could defeat Violet without a war in an ultimate display of dominance. I wanted to be so powerful that she knew she stood no chance and surrendered. War was always a risk, no matter how high you stacked your cards. Something could always come and blow them down. If I found a sleepwalker and absorbed their abilities, I could destroy Violet from the inside out.

  I haven’t found one yet, but it was only a matter of time. I had some of my best assets looking into it. They knew that if they let me down, they wouldn’t take another breath.

  I entered the dungeon and looked around at my magical donors.

  Who was next?

  Chapter Eleven

  Violet

  My light brightened up the darkness that surrounded us. The forest felt different from the last time we were here. Wisdom was no longer living here, and his magic wasn’t keeping the critters at bay.

  In the outskirts of the forest, lots of small furry animals ran around the tree branches and danced through the leaves. Some looked like strange crosses between squirrels and chipmunks. Some looked like crosses between raccoons and monkeys.

  If someone from National Geographic got in here, they would never want to leave.

  One day I would have to come back here and sketch these strange animals. Right now I didn’t have the time to dedicate to that, and the weight of kingdoms on my shoulders kept me moving.

  Axel and I walked in comfortable silence. I wondered if he was in awe about how far we have come since we were last here.

  After we went very deep into the forest, well past Wisdom's tree house, things got very quiet. The animal chatter and the rustling of the leaves, which gave away their position, stopped.

  The hair on my arms raised. The nagging feeling that we were being watched nagged me.

  Back home when a forest went silent it meant there was a bigger predator nearby. The animals couldn’t possibly think we were a predator, They’d been loud our whole journey, until now. Something new must have entered the area, it would explain the anxiety I felt.

  I had once completed some reading for an animal science class. In the textbook the author mentioned a scenario involving divers who swam with smaller sharks. Suddenly the smaller sharks disappeared and one much larger approached. This felt like that scenario.

  I shivered.

  “Axel, the last time we were here, you said we needed to be loud to scare the predators. That they wouldn’t attack if we were singing,”I said, trying to keep my fear out of my voice.

  Axel’s eyes got huge. He looked around, as if noticing for the first time it was too quiet.

  “We are being loud. The forest was being loud,” he said.

  He opened his mouth to start the lullaby just in case. Then a creature jumped out of the bushes and attacked him. It let out a vicious snarl that hurt my ears, causing pressure to build in my head. The stench from its breath carried to me. I could only imagine what the smell was like for Axel, who was not even a foot from its mouth.

  The creature looked like a monster from the book, Where the Wild Things Are. It had horns on its head and grey shaggy fur. It had long claws sprouting from its paws. One of those claws was cutting into Axel’s shoulder as it attacked him.

  Oh shit.

  “Enough!” I shouted at the creature as I used my control of the air to lift it off of Axel.

  The creature looked startled and turned its attention to me, while still hanging in mid-air.

  “What is this?” the creature asked.

  “What?” I asked in shock.

  Did this creature actually speak?

  “What is this? Why do you have me floating in the air? Why separate me from my meal?” It asked with an angry snarl. It’s teeth were sharp, and large.

  I looked over at Axel to see if he was hearing this, and he looked at me like I grew a third head.

  “Do you not hear it talking, like us?” I asked Axel.

  “No, I just hear it struggling and grunting in the air,” he said, as he stood up.

  He brushed the dirt off his leather armor, but blood still ran down his arm from the puncture wound.

  “You were about to eat my mate. I will not allow that,” I told the creature.

  “I don’t care about you or your mate!” The creature snarled.

  Too bad I don’t care about his next meal.

  “Who do you answer to?” I asked it.

  “No one, but my king.”

  “Take us to him,” I demanded.

  “Absolutely not!” It said. It was the angriest it had sounded yet.

  “You will, unless you want us to eat you,” I said, in an eerily calm voice.

  I lifted my left hand in the air and summoned a large fireball. I tossed the fire to the ground beneath the monster. It squirmed above the flames which grew taller by the second. It must have had the desired effect, because it nodded its head in agreement and its body shook in terror.

  I lowered the beast back down to the ground, next to the fire. His terror quickly passed and it hesitated for a moment, likely to calculate the odds of it being able to kill me, before I killed it. He must have assessed his odds the same way I did, as it turned its back to me and walked into the forest.

  I quickly used some water to put out the flames.

  “Let’s go,” I told Axel.

  “Since when can you speak to beasts?” he asked me.

  “I don’t know. We don’t have anything like them back home. Maybe this was a gift from the trials? Maybe I can speak to all animals?”

  “That would be convenient. Maybe the dragons will understand us when we ask for their help,” Axel commented.

  “I think the dragons understand us when we talk to them,” I answered. “I don’t think we can understand them.”

  “You mention dragons?” the beast asked from ahead.

  “Yes we mention dragons,” I repeated, filling in the context for Axel.

  “You are seeking out the dragons?” the creature asked.

  “Yes we are.” Was he a little slow?

  “Good luck to you then. I will look for your burnt corpses in the swamps somewhere,” it taunted.

  “That’s what you think,” I said, as confidently as I could.

  I had survived a dragon attack when I first came to the Morthlands, but that was due to luck and my magic. I had no idea what I was doing, and was lucky to have survived that.

  Now that I thought about it, was that Venia that stepped in on my behalf? Maybe, I’d have to ask if I ever saw her again.

  That dragon attack came with consequences I had only recently considered. I had blinded that dragon, and who knew if it regained its sight? I wouldn’t put it past the dragons to hold a grudge if they knew it was me.

  As if sensing my uneasiness the creature just mocked me. I considered tossing another fireball it’s way.

  “Tell me about your king,�
�� I told the creature.

  “He is not a forgiving king, and he likely won’t forgive you walking through these woods without his consent. He is brutal and all of the beasts in these lands fear him.”

  “Does he have any likes or dislikes we should know about?” I asked, as innocently as I could. It never hurt to understand your opponent before you stepped into the ring.

  If this King commanded a whole population of these monsters, then maybe they could help me. Maybe I could gain enough numbers to completely overwhelm Kennan, and he’d give up before any fighting began.

  “None that I would ever share with you, girl.”

  Rude.

  “Queen,” I corrected.

  The beast didn’t retort.

  “Are there any other creatures or beasts we should know of that live on these lands?”

  “There are plenty of other beasts, and magical creatures alike. Morthshadow is the land of nightmares. Hasn’t anyone ever told you that?”

  “No they haven’t,” I said, while giving a pointed look to Axel. How did no one think to mention that to me, it was half of my original Kingdom.

  I wouldn’t pick a fight in front of a potential enemy, but I sent my annoyance to Axel through our bond. He had the good sense to look down.

  “Humor me?” I asked the creature.

  I swear it rolled its eyes at me.

  “The vampires are almost extinct, they have been hunted down by my kind for hundreds of years. There are still a few who have managed to evade us. They lurk in these woods near the borders of the other Kingdoms, hoping to come across a defenseless traveler.”

  A shiver ran up my spine.

  What if I had come across one before I knew what they were, and knew how to use my magic?

  “How do you kill them?” I asked.

  “Are you stupid?” the creature asked me.

  Annoyance was laced through every syllable. He really wanted to be made into shish kabobs.

  “No, I am from another world entirely. I have lived here for less than a year.”