Emperor’s Throne: Desert Cursed Series, Book 6

by Mayer, Shannon

  She stumbled back and let out a roar that rattled the air around us, beating at the air in my lungs like a drum. I put a hand to my chest, holding the sound there, and hearing not only the triumph in it, but the grief and the pain. She was not a killer. She’d not wanted it to come to this between her and Trick, or her and Corvalis.

  Her jeweled eyes blinked a few times and then filled with tears as she took a few steps toward me, shifted to her smaller size and flew into my arms. I held her close as she sobbed, clinging to me. Maks circled us both, holding us tightly.

  There were no words to say, because it was not all right. Killing her father had been a necessity, killing Trick kept us all safe, but making it happen didn’t make it all right.

  A slow series of claps from behind us slowly turned me, even though I knew who it would be.

  The Emperor strolled toward us, the flail strapped to his back as it had been to mine a short time before. “Well done, granddaughter. Truly, you fight like you do not care if you die.”

  Lila trembled against me, again in anger, not fear. I held her tighter. “I fight for those I love. That means I fight with everything I have, even unto death.”

  Maks took one hand and waved it between us and the Emperor. Black flames shot up from the rock cutting off the Emperor’s approach, a literal line drawn in the sand between us. “No closer. You’ve made it clear that not killing any of us was not part of your promises.”

  The Emperor laughed. “I will tell you this. When the time comes for us to fight, it will be glorious. And your little flames will mean nothing, Jinn master.”

  He gave me a wink, thumbed his nose at Maks, turned and walked away, down the slope toward the ocean. I hurried after him in time to see him drop a hand into the water, and a burst of magic flow out of him. From the depths came a creature that made no sense to me. I could not decide if it was an animal of mythology or just one from the depths.

  More coils and tentacles than anything else, attached to a brilliant red body that was large enough to eclipse a decent-sized fishing boat. He stepped out onto it as if it were a boat and the creature swam away with him. He turned and lifted a hand, three fingers in the air. “Sunset on the third day or our deal is off.”

  I lifted him my own personal salute. “One broken promise and our deal is off, Shax.” He flinched and I wondered if he regretted giving me his name. Or if it reminded him of someone he was once, before whatever corrupted his mind took over.

  Maks pulled me back from view. “Holy shit, what the hell is that?”

  I shook my head. “No idea. Not sure I want to know.” I tightened my hold over a now-quiet Lila. “Holy shit indeed. Lila, are you physically hurt?”

  She bobbed her head once and a small whimper slid from her that I think was a yes. I pulled on my magic, weaving it through her and closing the wounds as easily as if I’d been doing it all my life. Strange to have such access to so much strength and power. She let out a sigh and promptly fell asleep.

  “What now?” Maks said. “We can’t leave this rock. The goddess only knows what kind of booby traps are in the water itself. And if there are more of those things . . .” he waved a hand at the shoreline where the Emperor’s beast had risen from the depths.

  He wasn’t wrong, and we needed to go farther east yet, well into the human lands.

  “Until Lila wakes up, I think we’re stuck here,” I said softly. Lila grumbled in her sleep and stretched out in my arms so her belly was up to the sky and her limbs were flopped in every direction, like a veritable rag doll.

  Maks leaned over and scratched her belly with one finger. “I can’t believe you were a dragon.”

  “Me either,” I said.

  He took my hand, lacing our fingers together. There weren’t really words for when your mate suddenly turned into a creature they weren’t supposed to be able to turn into.

  “At some point, we should talk about it,” he sighed, “but how about not right now?”

  I leaned into him and he slid his arm around my waist. “Yes, agreed. Not right now.”

  I could still feel the Emperor’s magic inside me; that was worrisome. Did it mean he’d put some sort of hook into me, under my skin so he could track me? Or maybe so he could control me?

  Yeah, I thought both were a possibility. Ones I’d not taken into consideration when I’d made the deal with him, mostly because I knew that I had to make the deal. There was no other way, so what did the cost matter? We would have all been killed if I’d not made that deal. I was sure of it.

  Of course, now that the fight was over and we’d all survived one more step, the cost was more than relevant.

  Shit.

  I started back across the rock face, up to the crest of the island. The bodies of Corvalis and Trick were hard not to notice. Maks let go of my hand and went straight to Corvalis. He lifted his right hand, twisting it at the wrist, and the dragon’s head turned to face him, eyes flat and dead.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Just taking a precaution.” Maks’s magic curled through the dragon’s mouth and wrapped around the upper fangs. With a pop, he pulled them out, and tucked them into his pouch on his hip. “Just in case.”

  I stared at him. “Just in case what?”

  “There are spells and magic that require dragon fangs,” he said. “Maybe we won’t need them,” he rolled his shoulders as if stretching them, “but I’d rather take them and not need them than the other way around.”

  I went to Trick and laid a hand on his side. What words were there to say goodbye to someone you thought was a friend, but turned out to be a liar and a traitor? I leaned into my hand, feeling the residual warmth from his side. “You chose poorly,” I said. His mother was right not to name him after the dragon hero that she’d considered. He’d have sullied the name with his treachery.

  “We just wait then?” Maks asked.

  I sat, then lay flat on the ground, so I was looking into the sky. “We wait for Lila to wake.”

  Maks lay beside me. “Middle of the day, good time for a nap.”

  I closed my eyes and yawned. “Think we need to take turns sleeping?” I said the words, but I was already sliding under the spell of fatigue that wrapped itself around me.

  He mumbled something but I was already gone, snuggling against him, holding Lila between us.

  For the first time in I didn’t know how long, I slept deeply and without stepping into the dreamscape. At one point, I jerked awake, panic flooding my system as if I’d been running.

  “Just sleep.” Maks curled his arm tighter around me and I did just that.

  My dreams were normal, I mean, they were nightmares to be fair, but just that. Regular nightmares of death and total destruction without a dreamscape to fear I would die in, or to come out of barely rested.

  Hours stretched by before the rough ground of the rock we were sleeping on finally outmatched my desire for sleep. I yawned and stretched until my muscles slowly relaxed and loosened their hold on every knot that I’d been clinging too. I slowly sat up. The light had shifted, nearing dusk. Hours indeed. We’d gone into the Emperor’s Throne in the morning and now had slept a good portion of the day away.

  “Did you spell me?” I asked Maks. He yawned as he sat up.

  “Not a chance. I was too tired. Passed out right after you.”

  “At least we know they are really dead.” I stood, still holding Lila. She’d been hurt the worst and even with being healed had needed the sleep more than me or Maks.

  Lila stirred in my arms, rolled and opened her eyes; her claws dug into my arm as she faced the very still form of Trick. I didn’t try to put her down. “He . . . he told me that he cared about me,” she said. “But he was a liar, just like my father.”

  “I wonder why he let us through the Dragon’s Ground that first time,” I asked, more to myself than to Lila. But she answered anyway.

  “He told me up there as the battle started,” she said. “I asked him the same thing and he said he d
idn’t want to kill me. He felt bad because I was so weak and he didn’t want to be the one to kill the Gnat. So he let us pass thinking my grandmother would do the job, or some other dragon.”

  Maks stepped up beside us. “And when he came to help?”

  “My father sent him, seeing that I was sweet on him.” Her voice was tight, not with tears, but anger. “He was sent to keep an eye on us, to find out where the stones were. They wanted them all, hoarders of jewels that they are.”

  I took a few steps back from Trick. “What do you want to bet that Corvalis was still in thrall to Ollianna? Not that he wouldn’t have attacked us, but if he was coming for the stones, he wasn’t just looking for the emerald.”

  Maks gave a low grunt of agreement. “That makes sense. He might have thought he was free of her, but . . .”

  “I don’t feel bad for either of them,” Lila said. “Neither of them deserved my love.”

  “No, they didn’t,” I said.

  Maks reached over and took Lila from my arms and held her out in front of him. “‘She’s beautiful, and therefore to be wooed; She is woman, and therefore to be won.’ Don’t you ever forget that, Lila. You are worth fighting for.”

  She burst into tears, huge gulping sobs, and threw herself at Maks, wrapping herself around his neck. “Damn you, Toad. You aren’t supposed to make me cry!”

  “You don’t know what play? Excellent, I finally won!” He gave her a hug and she hiccuped a laugh.

  “Of course, I know that. It’s Henry VI, Toad.” She climbed to his shoulder and wiped her eyes, deliberately turning her back to Trick’s body. “We need to get off this rock.”

  “Please don’t shift on top of me,” Maks said.

  Lila grunted, let him go and shifted beside him, going to full size as fast as I shifted to my house cat form, then bumped him with her hip. “Fine. But that’s only because you said nice things.”

  Maks climbed up on her back first. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  Lila turned to look at me. “You coming?”

  I drew in a deep breath and nodded. “Yeah, just thinking about what we’re going after next.”

  “The changeling?” she asked.

  The bitch in the jungle, if Ishtar was to be believed.

  I took hold of the base of her wing and pulled myself up onto her back. “Yeah, the changeling in the middle of a jungle with a stone she probably won’t want to give up.”

  25

  Lila flew us across the open water between the continents easily with no one chasing us. What a shock that was.

  Maybe Ollianna thought the Emperor had killed me. That was possible. Then again, it might just be that we were far enough out of Ollianna’s range that her power couldn’t reach us.

  That seemed more likely. Until she had my head on a pike, I didn’t think she’d believe me dead. I smiled to myself, taking that as a weird compliment.

  “You told the Emperor you didn’t have the stones,” Maks said, startling me out of my thoughts. “Is that true?”

  I swallowed hard. “I knew that if I walked in there with them on me, he’d try to take them. So I stashed them before we left.”

  Lila let out a low whistle and shook her head. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

  “I didn’t think about it until the last minute,” I said. “And then everything was happening so fast that I didn’t have time to even mention it.”

  We banked through a cluster of low-hanging clouds that smelled of rain and left a good amount of moisture clinging to our hair and clothes.

  “So . . .” Lila drawled out that one word, “do we have a plan?”

  I grimaced. “Not really. I know very little about changelings. Maks, you got anything in those memory banks of yours?” I looked over my shoulder at him.

  He closed his eyes and his chin dropped to his chest as he began to speak. “Changelings—they aren’t shifters. They are created when two infants are exchanged. Usually a human child and a fairy child but not always. The term can be applied to any infant taken from its home and swapped with another. Which means that we could be looking at literally any kind of creature that walks under the sun.” He opened his eyes and shook his head. “Not a lot of help.”

  It was and it wasn’t, he was right about that.

  There had been one picture on Ishtar’s desk, a picture I’d seen in my mind when the Emperor and I had been connected. When we’d been talking about finding the other stones.

  The image of a large black jungle cat. But did that mean she knew about the other stones? Did it mean she was looking?

  “I can feel you tense up, you know,” Lila said. “What did you just think of?”

  “Hang on, let me see if I can put the pieces together,” I said.

  The Emperor had talked about my grandmother, his concubine, that she was from a distant land. That she’d been brought in special for him.

  Bloodlines.

  What if she . . . what if she’d been stolen specifically for the Emperor? And another child from the desert had been put in her place? Wouldn’t that make my own grandmother . . . a changeling?

  My heart began to beat harder as a burst of adrenaline rushed through me. The pieces were there, I could almost see them.

  From where, though, had my grandmother been taken? A lush forest, a lush jungle . . . the darkest parts of the jungle to hide a large black cat? “Lila, we need to scent for green, living things, for the most lush part of the jungle.”

  “Okay.” She curled through a burst of wind and dropped us lower through the clouds. It was only then that I saw how far we’d come. We were flying south, along the coastline of what had to be Africa.

  I leaned over her side to get a better look.

  “Talk to me, Zam,” Maks said. “I can’t help you if I don’t know what you’re thinking.”

  The words fell out of my mouth as I tried to explain what I was seeing, what I was feeling—that it could be my grandmother that had been given the last stone. “Of all the people out there who would want to keep the Emperor imprisoned, who better than one who’d been forced to give him a child? One who hated him?”

  “What about the Jinn bloodline, didn’t that come from your grandmother’s side? How could she have been brought in from the jungle?” Lila asked. “Not to be the devil’s advocate here, but your reasoning doesn’t make sense. I mean, it’s close but . . .”

  A shiver ran from the top of my head, down my spine to the soles of my feet. “I can’t explain it. I just know that it’s right. Maybe it will make sense when we see it.”

  Maks cleared his throat. “Could be that we are facing a Jinn shapeshifter then,” he said. “And if it was a changeling for a changeling, it would be a female Jinn, like you, Zam. Powerful, able to adapt and use more magic than any male Jinn.”

  That trickle of a shiver turned into a raging river along my back and I started to shake. That was it.

  That was what we were going to face in the jungle, a Jinn of more power than any we’d yet seen.

  I blew out a slow breath. “Then let’s go find her.”

  Maks held out a hand. “If it’s a Jinn, and we’re right about that, then I can find her. Or him. Perks of being a master now.”

  His hand began to glow with the deep blue magic that was his unique blend, a color that hadn’t happened until after he was freed from the other masters.

  The smoke swirled around his fingertips and then shot out in five different directions.

  It didn’t take more than a minute for him to open his eyes and point. “It looks like you were onto it. There is a Jinn, and she’s to the south, and farther to the west.”

  Lila banked her wings, adjusting our flight path. “So this Jinn we are looking for, will she strike first, do you think?”

  I looked out past Lila’s shoulder toward the swath of green that we approached. “Probably.”

  “So we’re going in stealth mode?”

  I blew out a breath. “One more heist.”

  Maks
pointed out exactly where he was picking up on the other Jinn.

  “Does it seem strange to you that two stones were given to Jinn?” Lila asked as we circled high above the treetops, looking for a place to land. Which wasn’t going to happen. I could already see there was no space large enough for Lila’s wingspan.

  “Yes,” I said. “It seems damn strange, but I—”

  A burst of vines shot up out of the trees, straight up for us, unfurling at a speed that Lila couldn’t dodge. They were thick with suckers covered in a sticky substance that I could see even at a distance.

  I held tightly to her, a quick plan coming to me. “Let it drag us down, Lila!”

  “WHAT?”

  “When we get close to the treetops, we’ll all shift,” I said. The vines whipped around, tangling around our middles. “Don’t show them our hand. They can’t know we have magic.”

  Them.

  Yeah, I wasn’t betting on a single Jinn holding the stone, whatever the stone was.

  If it was the stone that allowed for creation, there was literally no telling what we’d be up against. And if it was the stone that bestowed gifts of power on others, that wasn’t much better.

  The vines tightened around us and I struggled not to struggle. “Maks?”

  “Yeah?” he grunted.

  “Feel like Jinn magic to you?”

  “Nope.”

  “We’re in trouble, aren’t we?”

  “Yup.” He wiggled his hand and a tiny flow of magic swirled around us, sinking into my skin. “But that will keep the vines from sticking when we shift.”

  One good thing, but I had a feeling it wasn’t going to be enough when it came to dealing with this changeling, whoever and whatever it was.

  The treetops were coming up faster and faster. “Here we go,” I said as the first whiff of the jungle trees curled up my nose. A blend of green living things, along with green dying things, and in the smack middle of it, the smell of jungle cat.

  The first branch touched Lila’s belly, and she shifted first, gone from beneath Maks and me. I twisted to the left as I shifted, taking a full-on dive into the trees. Of Maks all I caught was a glimpse of tawny hide as his caracal form plunged into limbs.