Because she would keep on killing. She would keep on hurting others.
Only I never got the chance to follow through; I didn’t have to.
Her grandchildren took care of it for me.
27
I held my maternal grandmother tightly, my magic and hers pushing on one another, testing before there was any real fight. The jungle seemed to exhale around us, the thick canopy and thicker underbrush rustling with movement.
“I think you’re going to regret your actions,” I said softly, shoving her away from me, straight into the arms of her other grandchildren. One of the men caught her and she relaxed into his arms, thinking herself safe. He held her while the other next to him grabbed her head and snapped her neck in a move that was just like Lila killing Corvalis.
Her jaw went slack and her eyes that had been narrowed at me widened ever so slightly before the light slid out of them.
An inglorious death for a woman so very afraid of the world.
I looked at my cousins, not sure what to say. From the shadows of the jungle stepped the girl, the youngest of the group. She approached me, her hand clenched over what I knew would be the stone.
“I don’t want to guard it,” she said.
“Why?”
“Because it makes people crazy, just like you said.” She rolled her hand over and opened her palm. In the center lay the smallest stone, only it wasn’t a stone so much as a shard. A shard of blue, as if chipped off the stone the Wyvern had given me.
Two sides of the same coin, destruction and creation. I was sure of it.
I held my hand out and the girl dropped the blue shard into my palm. “Thank you.”
“We should be thanking you,” she said. “Grandmother would never have turned her back on us without you here. You gave us a chance to free ourselves.”
I clenched the stone in my hand, feeling the power in it, feeling the jungle seem to breathe around me again as if it knew that I held the shard. I shook my head. “She guarded the stone for a long time. It seems to drive even the best crazy.”
I tucked the shard into my leather pouch on my hip, shifted from two legs to four, and ran to the edge of the clearing where I paused. “I battle for the world,” I said. “Wish me luck.”
“Maybe we will meet again, cousin,” she said softly. “I wish you the luck you will need to survive, to meet again and talk of family.”
They held up their hands to me, the body of our grandmother lying between us. I mimicked them, feeling the tie between us tighten. Family.
I turned my back and ran for all I was worth through the jungle, racing against time. We had one more stone to find . . . and only a vague idea of where it could be.
I found the big tree that we’d tumbled down at the very beginning of this excursion. One ginormous leap I’d never have done in my smaller form, and my big claws dug deep into the bark as I leapfrogged my way up to the top branches. Once there, I shifted again, this time to my house cat form. Lighter of foot, I scrambled up to the very top of the tree where my jungle cat form could never have stood.
A shadow passed overhead. “Lila!”
That shadow paused, swung around and headed my way. There were no vines reaching for her, though I could feel them as if they were a part of me, as if through the stone there was a connection still to the jungle. “A world of creation,” I said softly.
Looking out around me at the treetops and the distant mountains, the sounds and smells of this place that hummed in my blood, I could believe this was where the world had begun. And a part of me was sorry to leave it.
Lila’s talons closed around me and lifted me high above the canopy. I didn’t scramble up her leg, but instead stayed where I was to watch the jungle slide away behind us.
“Zam, are you okay?” Lila bent her head down to me. “You’re crying.”
I blinked a few times and scrubbed at my face with my paws. “I’m okay.”
At least I thought I was. The pull of the jungle on me was stronger than I’d thought it would be, now that I was leaving.
“I want to come back here, one day,” I said, more to myself than to Lila or Maks. I pulled myself out of Lila’s talons and with a turn of her body she helped me get onto her back. Maks sat quietly, pale from the blood loss. I shifted back to two legs and wrapped myself around him, holding him tightly. He leaned back against me and I put my cheek to his.
“Was it hard to get the stone?”
I closed my eyes. “Harder than I thought.”
Maybe another day I’d tell them what happened, but for then and there, I needed to keep it a story that was no one else’s but my own.
“Where to next?” Lila asked, seeming to understand I wasn’t ready to talk. “For the last stone?”
I opened my eyes but kept my chin on Maks’s shoulder. “What is the purest soul? That is still the issue.”
Lila hummed quietly to herself and then she all but stumbled in mid-flight. “The Tempest!”
I looked at Maks and shook my head. “It wasn’t a Shakespeare quote, Lila.”
“I know. I know! But I was thinking through the plays, thinking about how to stump Maks and I got one, but I think, I think it answers the question.”
“Well, go on, then,” I laughed. “What is the quote?”
“‘A puppet show in real life. Now I’ll believe that unicorns exist, and that there’s a tree in Arabia where the phoenix lives.’” She paused. “We’ve already found the phoenix in the Oracle. What if . . . what if, the purest animal is the unicorn?”
“Shit,” Maks breathed out the word. “I think she’s right. It makes sense.”
Lila looked over her shoulder. “But I’ve never seen one. Last I heard, they all had their horns cut off so they could hide from other supernaturals. They were being used and killed too often because of their purity.”
My stomach rolled with the thoughts that wrapped around me. “Or that’s what we were told because their horns had so much power in them.”
Maks put his hands over mine. “The last herd was seen in the steppes above the desert, but that was a long time ago, hundreds of years.”
“It’s a place to start,” I said. “We can pick up Balder and Batman and find the herders I bought Balder from. They might know something. They’d have the stories at least to start with.” I tried not to think about what would happen if we failed, if we didn’t find the last stone. Would we still have enough fire power to take out Ollianna and the falak? Would it be enough to stop Ishtar? Finding a unicorn, though, that was not going to be an easy task. Not by a long shot.
Gods, I didn’t know and that was the worst of it, the not knowing.
We flew straight through the night and into the next morning before we were back on familiar ground. Literally, we flew over Dragon’s Ground.
“Wait,” I said. “Lila, what about your grandmother? She’s a seer; would she help us?”
Lila slowed her wings. “I could use a break.” On a spiral, she coasted to the ground, not far from where the wall had resided for so many years. The wall that was now broken, the spell shattered, allowing supernaturals to come and go as they pleased.
Lila landed, and Maks and I slid off. I divvied up what was left of our food stuffs between Maks and me. “Sorry, Lila, not sure there is enough for you.”
She shifted down to her smaller form and flew up to my shoulder. “You can carry me for a bit.”
“Fair enough.” I held up a stick of dried camel jerky and she took it, chewing right in my ear.
Maks leaned against a tree, his eyes closed. “This is not how we should be going into battle. Drained, tired, injured.”
“You mean like we usually do?” Lila said around a mouthful. “Because let’s be honest, it’s not like we’ve ever gone into a fight knowing we were all at our best.”
She chattered at Maks, and they began to trade Shakespearean insults, each one worse than the last. The words flowed over me, and I found myself staring at a spot beyond the trees, a sl
im opening between a large boulder and a tree that had to be a thousand years old by the way it was bent and gnarled. In that space thrummed an energy I felt under my skin.
I gave a slight bow at the waist. “Amalia, lovely to see you again.”
Laughter rolled out around us and Lila shot up from my shoulder, shifting to her larger form in the blink of an eye, putting herself between us and the laughter.
“Oh, granddaughter, you are home!” Amalia appeared slowly, as if she stepped through a bank of fog. Her pearlescent scales were as stunning as before, creams and whites and silvers like the grand dame she was.
Lila didn’t stand down. “Grandmother, I am not here to stay.”
“I felt the death of your father,” Amalia said. “We all did.”
There was a moment when I thought Lila would shrink and duck her head, but she held it together and stood a little taller, spread her wings a little wider. “I know. I killed him. Him and Trick.”
Amalia blinked at Lila. “Then you are the ruler of Dragon’s Ground now.”
Lila shook her head. “I am here only because we need guidance. You are one of the few true seers left in this world, and we are on a desperate hunt.”
I stepped back and Maks moved up beside me. This was Lila’s moment, not ours.
Amalia sat back on her haunches. “As you are my leader, I cannot deny you help.”
“I am asking, not demanding,” Lila said. “Even now with my father dead, I know I am not welcome here. I know that taking the emerald stone away has caused a rift between the dragons.” Her voice hitched. “A rift that caused someone I thought was my friend his life.”
I swallowed hard, my throat suddenly tight at the thought of Trick. I could all too easily imagine the pain Lila was going through as I had walked that path with Maks, not knowing if I would have to kill him at the end of it.
Slowly, the old dragon bowed her head. “The cost of coming into your own—”
I watched as Lila’s shoulders and head drooped, as if the words of her grandmother would weigh her down. That was a whole lot of nope.
I waved a hand, stopping her. “No. This was not Lila coming into her own. This was the three of us pitted against a dragon who has had it in for her since she was born. Lila came into her own years ago, you just didn’t want to see it. No one wanted to see it.”
Her grandmother looked down at me. “I see, little cat, you have also found more than you bargained for. Your life is not yet your own, and I don’t think it ever will be.” Her eyes were sad and thoughtful. “If Lila leaves now, she will never be accepted as leader here.”
“I don’t want to be the leader, Grandmother,” Lila said. “I will protect my people. I will be the guardian they need, but I will never lead.”
Chills swept through me at her words, and I was so, so proud of her. Not for turning down the call of a leader, but because it was what she wanted. No one was asking her to turn it down.
Again, her grandmother bowed her head in acquiescence. “Then a boon I give you. The creature you seek is far closer to your heart,” she pointed a claw at me, “than you could have ever realized. You are matched with him and he has seen to your soul and found it worthy of his gift.”
I frowned up at her. “What do you mean? I’ve never met a . . .” My words trailed off, and those chills from before? Yeah, those came back in waves so hard that my knees buckled, and I went to the ground.
White noise rushed through my ears. I was sure Maks and Lila were talking to me, but I couldn’t hear them. All I could see was my life and my one constant through it since I was a young woman.
Me and my horse.
My horse who was smarter than any other, who seemed to understand me speaking even though he had no reason to. My horse who had more speed and stamina, more heart in him than was possible.
My horse who had fought for me, and me for him to the literal walking of a line between life and death.
My horse . . . who was not a horse. My horse who I had left behind to keep him safe from the dangers we faced.
“We have to go.” I stood and stumbled toward Lila. Maks helped me because my legs were shaking so hard. All this time, all this time . . .
And so many more things made sense.
The times I’d survived when I shouldn’t have. When I’d been able to find Balder and he was able to find me.
We were in the air and flying hard toward where we’d left the horses before Maks’s voice really penetrated my head.
“Zam, is Balder in trouble?” He turned me toward him.
“No.” I paused and shook my head. “Well, maybe if someone else figures out what I just figured out. He’s the unicorn, Maks. Balder is a fucking unicorn.”
28
As we flew away from the jungle, back to where we’d dropped Batman and Balder off at the edge of the desert, I made myself ask Maks the question I’d been avoiding.
“Maks, talk to me about the falak. What do your memories say?” I forced the words out. “I mean, if Ollianna kills Shax, and the falak has no fear of anyone, what happens? Does the world really end?”
He leaned his head against me, and his breathing slowed. The words that flowed from his mouth did nothing to ease my worry, not one bit.
“When the falak came before, it devoured the land. Thousands of feet long, its coils would literally wrap a city up and crush it with as little effort as breathing. Fangs as big as trees, venom that flowed like a river from its mouth and a desire for nothing more than filling its belly with anything it could find. It pulled dragons from the sky, and scattered any whose power might thrwart it.”
My guts twisted up. “That’s all? Well, that’s not too—”
“It ate magic, and the supernatural creatures even far from it began to fade, their very life force being sucked away just by its mere presence within the world.”
Lila blew out a breath. “We could—”
“It had only one weakness, and that is lost to all but the Emperor.”
I held still, waiting. “Maks?”
“Yes?”
“That it?”
He lifted his head off my shoulder where he’d rested it. “Yeah. I think so.”
There was no disputing that the falak was bad. We’d always known that. But not . . . goddess on a mangy donkey, we did not have the fire power, the magic, the knowledge to deal with a creature like that.
We had to kill it.
If it didn’t kill us first.
After that, there wasn’t a lot to say, or maybe we were all just too wrapped up in what we’d learned, and how it impacted all of us. Or maybe, just maybe we all realized right then how bleak our path ahead of us was.
Fuck.
Lila flew to the edge of exhaustion to get us to where we’d dropped Balder and Batman off. She circled once, and my heart couldn’t handle it.
The horses weren’t there. Of course they weren’t. I’d known they would go deeper into the steppes. That had been my plan and hope for them. I’d taken the jewels and stuffed them into a crevice near where I’d left the horses. Because honestly, if we died trying to get the final stones, what did it matter if someone else found them? The world would be done.
With a light hop, Lila landed, and Maks and I were off her back in a flash. I shifted to four legs, taking my jungle cat form, and Maks followed my lead. “Stay here!” I yelled over my shoulder at Lila.
We needed her rested for getting us all the hell out of here.
I bounded up the rocks, Maks keeping pace in his caracal form. He scented the air. “They were still here last night. But there is something else.”
I drew in a big breath, catching wind of something deadly. “Fucking Ollianna!”
I scrambled to where I’d buried the stones at the top of the slope. The flat stone I’d laid on top was undisturbed, and I flipped it off and dug through the loose soil until I found the leather wrapped bag. I grabbed it in my mouth and nodded at Maks.
I was going to fucking kill them all if
they’d so much as harmed a hair on either horse. Mind you, the plan was likely to kill them all anyway.
Up the slope, we scrambled, following not only the smell of the horses and lizard men, but the hoofprints as well. More than hoofprints; soon the tiny scuttles of small lizard bodies turned into bigger feet, more human-like.
We turned on the speed, running full tilt down the far side of the slope, leaping over rocks and divots, letting gravity help us along.
A whinny full of fear shrieked ahead of us.
Faster, we needed to go faster. I flattened out, digging deep into whatever reserves I had left, thinking about Balder giving his all.
Even if he hadn’t been a unicorn—and shit, I still had a hard time seeing him that way—I wouldn’t have left him to this if I’d had any choice in it.
Maks and I hit the bottom of the slope, skidded, dug our claws in and turned hard to the left down a narrow alley. I didn’t have to know this place to feel the walls closing in and recognize a funnel when I saw one. The first of the lizard men came into view.
There were about thirty of them, not so many as before, not by a long shot.
But they had the two horses cornered.
Balder was on his back feet, striking out as the lizards shot forward, trying to get at his belly to disembowel him.
I dropped the bag of stones and literally leapt into the fray, hitting the first oversized gecko in the back, driving him to the ground, my fangs buried in his neck as I crushed it with one bite. Maks shifted to two legs beside me, using his weapon and its long reach to do damage while the creatures still had their backs turned, while they didn’t realize they were about to get pincushioned.
Claws and fangs, blade and blows, we had half of Ollianna’s creatures dealt with before the rest seemed to realize what was happening. When they finally turned, they had their backs to Balder.
That was not a smart move.
As I took out two lizard men at the knees, he shot in, grabbed one by the connection between shoulder and neck and shook him until his neck snapped and he went limp.
Emperor’s Throne: Desert Cursed Series, Book 6 Page 20