Life was hard enough without adding those who’d use you up and treat you like you were nothing.
I lifted my head.
“Death to Steve.” Maks curled his free hand into a fist. Bryce returned the gesture and fist-bumped him. “Death to Steve.”
I grinned. “Death to motherfucking sheep-fucking Steve.”
Bryce burst out laughing. “Shit, I always forget about that.”
“I don’t.” I gave a toothy, feline grin. Death to Steve was a good distraction for the reality that we’d turned away from Ishtar and were headed straight toward the Emperor’s Throne. Straight into a place that would—not could—spell death for us. Yes, I had a plan. I tweaked what I was going to use on Ishtar to the Emperor. But that didn’t mean it would work. My plans often went sideways.
And the Emperor was batshit crazy, a split personality that could not be trusted even if he did give his word.
Part of me thought the going would get easier, our path less littered by things trying to kill us. That if we headed toward the Emperor we’d be doing what he wanted and so we’d be okay.
But the thing was, I forgot to take into account where Ollianna wanted us to go.
And it was not toward the Emperor.
5
The night tightened around us as we continued to the west, toward the Emperor’s Throne. The darkness felt as though it deepened its hold on the world as it went on rather than easing with the sun that wasn’t all that far from rising. I glanced up, no longer sleepy despite my place in Maks’s arms. Perks of being a house cat, I often got the best seat in the house. I forced myself to leave the shelter of his body and pulled myself up onto his shoulder.
“Does it seem darker to you two? We are almost at dawn. It shouldn’t be darker.” I swiveled my ears and my head, searching for . . . something. Anything that would give me a clue as to what was going on now. Because there was no doubt in my mind we weren’t finished for the night. A shiver rolled down my feline spine and made the tip of my tail twitch with irritation and anticipation.
“It is nearly dawn,” Maks said. He pointed above us at where the moon sat low in the sky, touching the edge of the horizon. “And you’re right. It should be lighter out by now.”
Bryce grumbled a string of rather creative curses that at another time would have made me smile. As it was, I didn’t disagree with a single one of them. Basically, we were at a “what the fuck now?” moment.
“Hurry the horses up. And go south,” I said softly.
“Could be a trap,” Bryce said.
I couldn’t help the laugh. “Of course it’s a trap. A trap that will come from the west to block us and send us back toward Ishtar. I have no choice. I have to go west. I have to get the flail to the Emperor.”
The flail, in response to my words, gave a shiver as it did so often, only this time I could feel it under my skin, like a sliver that had been embedded in my body.
“Shit.” Maks growled the single word, spun Batman and we were off, racing through the strange dark that shouldn’t have been dark at all. I dug my claws into the shoulder of his cloak, careful not to nick him with my razor-sharp tiny talons. The wind whipped through my fur and I leaned into it, eyes closed and breathing deeply. I scented it as best I could, but there was nothing . . . wait . . .
“I’ve got something.” I frowned and tasted the air with my mouth open, trapping the smell against the back of my tongue for a better “look” at what I’d picked up on. I curled it around my mouth as I attempted to work it out.
“What is it?” Bryce asked. I looked at him, riding easily on Balder right beside us.
“Reptilian, I think. But I’ve never scented anything like this before, and the more I smell it,” I licked my lips and drew a breath again, “the closer it is, which means whatever it is, it’s quick.”
“Okay, moving fast, reptilian. What else?” Maks asked.
“Some sort of elemental creature, I think,” I said. “There’s magic mixed in with the reptile. I’m not sure if it’s Ollianna or the creature itself.” I paused. “Bryce, see if Lila is awake yet.”
She’d been out cold all night now, she had to wake soon. And now would be an amazing moment to pop out of the saddlebag and sweep all of us to safety.
“She’s asleep. Breathing but asleep,” he said a moment later.
That was good and bad. My chest constricted as I looked across to the saddlebag that Lila was curled up in. Except for the bulge of where she was balled up, there was no way to tell she was in there. Damn, we were lucky that she’d been small when she’d drunk the loaded țuică. If she’d been in her larger size, we would’ve had to leave her behind.
The frogs would have had her.
That realization hit me in the center of my chest, and I chased the fear with a spurt of anger that I directed straight at Ollianna. I should have known not to trust a witch, even if she was related to me. When she’d come with us out of the Swamp, I only saw a kindred spirit who wanted to escape a situation that was so like my own. Not fitting in, knowing the others thought less of you and might kill you for being different if they got the chance.
She’d played on my sympathies, and I’d fallen for it, hook, line and sinker.
The wind shifted around us again, swirling in from the south, and whatever spit was in my mouth dried up along with thoughts of Ollianna.
It changed again, coming in from the east, then the north.
“There is nothing natural about that wind,” Bryce said.
“No, there’s not,” I said softly. “It feels like the Swamp.”
Maks grunted. “Smells like it too.”
Bryce wrinkled up his nose. “Like something is rotting.”
I did my best not to breathe deeply; at the same time, the scent of the wind told me a great deal. Ollianna’s witches were still with her. They were still helping her.
Awesome.
I unhooked my claws from Maks’s cloak and leapt off. I landed on all fours, and just crouched there, feeling the earth around us, feeling the pulses of energy that made up this place I called home. The two men and the horses slid to a stop next to me, dust curling around their legs.
I closed my eyes, sifting through all the energy, letting it flow through me and then feeling it lock into me like a fishing hook attached to a thousand lines of everything around me.
“Dad used to do that,” Bryce said, from what sounded like far, far away.
Extending my claws into the dirt, I dug into the desert. Our father had done something similar to this, only it had been to the pride he was tied to. I wasn’t sure if he’d ever been able to sense all the world around him.
I know why you can do what you do, but I think I’ll let you figure it out.
I ignored Marsum and continued to reach for whatever it was coming toward us—a creature for sure, reptile, but otherwise I couldn’t pinpoint it. A sharp snap of power, like the crack of a whip, smacked at me, and I gritted my teeth, feeling the power of the witch behind the blow. It felt like the one they called Mother.
She was old, and strong, and frankly, I was surprised she was helping Ollianna.
I got the impression she hadn’t much liked her young daughter.
I let go of the energy, knowing that it was not worth the fight to see what was coming. It—or they—would be on us in minutes.
“Ollianna doesn’t want me to see what’s coming,” I said. I looked around us, the darkness still weird, but duskier now, and it was accompanied by something else that made my heart sink and pick up speed at the same time.
This was a game changer. The heat of the desert was sinking back in and the cold-soaked ground was giving us more challenges.
“Is that fog?” Maks asked.
“Yeah, but I’d bet you all the jewels I have that it isn’t natural, and that whatever reptile she’s hiding from us is in it,” I said. Dirty white billows of fog rolled forward, and all around us. Though it wasn’t that high, maybe as tall as Balder’s back, I couldn’t see any place that
it hadn’t covered from any direction, giving the impression that we stood in a sea of white. The night faded finally, the light shifted, but it didn’t help us much.
We were surrounded. So much for driving us toward Ishtar. Apparently, we were going to be straight up attacked.
I walked through the doorway in my mind that took me back to two legs. “We can’t outrun this.”
Maks motioned at Bryce. “Let your sister ride. She can do more damage from Balder’s back, and you can do more damage as a lion.”
Bryce gave him a look, just a narrowing of eyes, and I held up a hand. “He’s not being your alpha, Bryce. He’s just making good sense as someone who has years of battles trapped in his head.”
Bryce rolled his shoulders and slid off Balder’s back. “Sorry. It’s an old habit from dealing with the sheep fucker. I’m working on it.”
Maks gave a dry laugh. “Yeah, I imagine that would stay with you.” He pulled his weapon from his waist. It looked like a foot-long stick, but as he held it, the weapon extended into a six-foot-long pike with a curved blade on the end. A weapon of magic that he’d stolen from the Blackened Market.
He took a few swings with it from Batman’s back and the horse stood like a statue without a single flinch. Both horses were trained for battle by yours truly, and despite what we were about to face, I was proud of them. They had carried us so far in this journey.
“A little further, boys.” I leaned forward and gave Balder a scrub on the neck, then reached over and did the same for Batman. A good horse is a hard thing to find, and I’d managed to find two that made every other horse look untrained, making Balder and Batman look like freaking unicorns with their brains, speed, and loyalty.
Balder snorted and pawed at the ground with one front foot, then the other. If I didn’t know better, I’d think he liked going into a fight.
I sat up and stared out at the oncoming fog. I didn’t pull the flail from my back. I knew I would have to, but not yet. Instead I reached under my leg and pulled out the shotgun with the grenade launcher under the barrel. Even though my skin prickled with the imminent fight that was coming, and my adrenaline coursed hot through my veins, I kept my movements smooth. Kept my breathing even and steady.
Balder started to jig under me, snorting and tossing his head, then plunging forward as he quite literally chomped at the bit, picking up on my energy despite my attempt to keep things calm. “Easy, you’ll get your chance.” I leaned forward and patted his neck again.
The fog crept closer and with it came a sound that crawled its way toward us. A weird clicking, like the chatter of teeth, followed by a series of guttural growls. Not just one though, there wasn’t a single reptile making the two sounds. It came from all sides, and many throats.
I grimaced and backed Balder so we were next to Maks and Batman, but facing the opposite directions, protecting one another’s flanks. Bryce sat beside me, having shifted to his lion form, his golden coat dull in the weird foggy light.
“You want to try and talk to them first?” Maks asked.
I frowned. “It won’t get us out of a fight. Let’s just kill them and be done with it.”
He nodded and his forearms glowed with magic as he gripped the pike, but I could see the pull on him.
“You want the amber stone?” I asked him.
He shook his head. “If I use it now, it’ll drain me completely. I don’t have the strength to control it. Same for you and the other stones. Don’t use them.”
I ground my teeth. “Exactly what Ollianna wanted.”
Maks nodded. “My thoughts too.”
The fog spilled closer and closer until it was near enough I could reach out and touch it.
Before I lost sight completely, I lifted the shotgun, took a breath, aimed and squeezed the trigger, shooting into the fog, hoping to hit something, or maybe make whoever it was more cautious at the very least. The boom rattled the air, but was absorbed by the fog around us, dampening the sound.
“It didn’t hit anything,” Maks said. “I’m going to stir up the desert with what strength I’ve got left. See if I can blow this fog off.”
Bryce let out a growl as the swell swallowed us whole. “Stay close!” I yelled.
I pushed Balder sideways, toward Maks and Batman, but they were already gone, somehow swept away in this strange sea of clouds.
“Bryce?” I yelled for my brother.
Someone answered but it wasn’t him. A figure stepped toward me, nothing more than a silhouette really, but the solidity of him (pretty sure it was a him by the breadth of the shoulders) was very real.
“My queen has a message,” the figure said. Not in a hissing voice as I’d expected. No, it was deep and rather gravelly as though he held rocks inside his cheeks as he spoke.
“She can fuck right off and keep fucking off until I tell her to stop her lily-white ass. She’s a coward. Why isn’t she here?” I snorted, knowing damn well that Ollianna would be watching this somehow, maybe seeing it through her creature’s eyes even.
“She gave you your life at the last battle. She could have killed you. She showed you mercy. She tried to direct you to where she wishes you to be, and you are defying her. Turn to the north, ride to Ishtar and she will spare your life.” He stopped about ten feet from me, but I still couldn’t see any features. He wore dark armor that covered him from head to foot with a glint of weapons here and there, the barest flicker of metal.
“She was knocked up and protecting her demon spawn, and if she could have killed me then she would have.” I slowly raised the gun, aiming it at him. “So unless your message is she’s chosen to kill the falak and stop this madness, I think we’re done.”
I didn’t wait for an answer, an answer that would never satisfy me.
I pulled the trigger and the gun bucked in my hand, jamming me in the shoulder.
He roared as he flailed backward, the slug hitting him right in the chest. The fog thickened and the sound of scales slithering across the hard-packed earth filled the air around us. I looked down, waiting for the ophidians to appear. The snake-like creatures slid under the sands and would suck you down in an instant, their venom as deadly as their crushing coils. Only they didn’t like hard ground and we were on hard, hard ground.
What the fuck were we up against?
Jaw clenched, I kept Balder as still as I could, looking to where the reptile man had stood in front of me. He was gone, swallowed up by the fog. Hell, I didn’t even know if I’d killed him or not.
A bellow of rage to my right was just enough warning for me to swing around and raise the gun a second time. The face that appeared out of the fog sent a bolt of fear straight through me, and I hesitated on the trigger. Not because I didn’t want the thing to die, but because I was frozen with pure shock in a way that I hadn’t been in a very long time.
As big and tall as a man, the creature was reptilian from its barely-there nostrils and slanted huge yellow eyes with horizontal slits, to the dark green, sometimes black scales that covered its body from protruding snout filled with rows of teeth, over the top of its head, down its neck and over its limbs. His limbs. Clawed hands dug into my arms and I snapped out of my shock, barely leaning back and avoiding the teeth that came snapping at me.
“Balder, go!” I yelled, unable to use my one leg with the creature pulling on me. Shit, he was pulling me out of the saddle!
Balder lurched forward a step as I wrestled with the reptile man thing, and then stopped as he felt me slide. Snarling, I regained my balance and bared my own sharp canines at the creature, letting out a growl.
He started to laugh.
His hands loosened and I jerked one arm straight up, breaking his hold on me. “Go suck a rotten egg!” I yelled as I pulled the flail from my back and drove the spiked end of the handle down into the creature’s shoulder, right at that sweet spot between neck and torso.
The flail pulsed and jigged against my palm as it drank down the life of the creature, gone so fast that the body
shrunk before my eyes at high speed, skin folding in and crinkling like dry paper. With a whisper of detaching from the wound, the flail released the creature and its body slid away from me. I did a slow spin with Balder, looking, waiting for another one, not daring to shout out for Bryce or Maks.
I reached back into the saddlebag, feeling for Lila. She was there, her scales a perfect temperature and her chest rising and falling. I tried my connection to her to wake her, but that golden marushka in her system was keeping her fully under.
I swallowed hard, suddenly more worried about her than I was the creatures we were facing. Part of me had thought she was just sleeping heavily, like one does after being drugged. I’d thought she’d be awake by now.
I’d been distracted by the frogs.
And now these creatures.
My heart clenched as the possibilities started to spin through my head. What if this wasn’t just a sleeping draught that she’d downed, but something else that we’d missed? Something more sinister? Damn it, I should have thought of it before, but between everything—
A scaled body lurched at us out of the vapor, fast like a striking snake, dark armored scales dripping with moisture from the fog. Balder spun and double barreled the creature, kicking out with both back feet and nailing it right in the chest before I could react. The crack of bone and a grunt of the creature was all I heard and then it was gone again, disappeared back into the fog.
“Come on, Maks,” I whispered to myself. He had magic, Jinn magic, and with his connection to the desert, he should have been able to do something, even if it was to make the fog dissipate as he’d said. But he was also exhausted; we all were.
And fucking Ollianna knew it.
I put my heels to Balder, not to go quickly, just to move. Staying right with two dead bodies of the creatures I’d killed was not a smart move. I could smell them, even through the thick moisture, which meant the reptiles could find them too just as surely.
I didn’t know how the creatures were finding us, if it was smell or hearing, or some other sense I didn’t know about, which meant I had to assume it was all of those senses. Moving through the fog was surreal, like stepping through a dreamscape, only the dreamscape I’d been in had some solidity to it. I kept breathing deeply in an attempt to pinpoint the next reptile, but the moisture was making it difficult. Like scenting in the rain.
Emperor’s Throne: Desert Cursed Series, Book 6 Page 5