Lycan Legacy - 4 - 5 - 6: Princess - Progeny - Paladin: Book 4 - 5 - 6 in the Lycan Legacy Series

by Veronica Singer

  It happened suddenly. I had a premonition of imminent danger, a shock to my brain and heart that made me want to escape—now!

  I always trust my instincts. I jerked at my safety harness, only to find it locked. In an instant, I popped a razor-sharp claw, sliced through the harness, and jumped to my feet. There was a tug at my back as Ariel tried to stop me, but it was too late. I’m faster than almost anything on earth.

  A microsecond to decide, then I reached for Mike. He had raised up but was moving too slowly for me. My claw sliced through his seatbelt and I grabbed him by the straps that held his parachute. Three steps to the hatch and I threw us both into the pre-dawn void.

  Only an idiot would jump out of a perfectly good airplane.

  I told my subconscious to shut up and spread my arms and legs out to stabilize.

  Serenity overcame my fear of falling. It was peaceful to float out here, a peace I hadn’t felt in months.

  Don’t take a nap, Luna; the wake-up call will be painful. I shook my head and brought my head back into the present.

  Mike and I were falling as one, locked together by my death-grip on his parachute harness. It reminded me of our first tandem dive. We were both facing the sky, watching the aircraft float away. I barely noticed the tiny figure that jumped out of the hatch after us. Those smooth movements, like a ballerina’s, showed that Ariel was coming after me to get answers.

  The explosion of the aircraft was all the answer she would get. My premonition had been accurate, and I hoped the bitch had been close enough to the blast to die. I blinked to clear away the afterimage and saw pieces of Israeli soldiers and airplane tumble toward the ground.

  At my side, Mike was waving to get my attention, then he started pulling his mask off. The hose to my oxygen mask flapped wildly in the wind, cut in half. Ariel hadn’t been quick enough to stop us, but she had managed to sabotage me. My oxygen mask spell, controlled by my werewolf side, had appeared, making the military oxygen mask unnecessary. I extended my oxygen mask spell to cover Mike’s head as well. The rush of wind around our heads stopped, and all I could hear was his breathing, coming in gasps.

  “It’s okay, Mike,” I said, stopping him from removing his mask. “I don’t need the mask.”

  All I got in return was a confused expression and slow blinks. It took me a moment to realize: In response to the emergency, I had sped up my metabolism to its maximum, to stretch out my reaction time. At this rate, instead of hitting the ground in ten seconds, it would feel like one hundred seconds. But the result was that talking to Mike was impossible.

  We didn’t have time to waste. Assuming I could speak slowly enough to be understood, what was the shortest message I could give him?

  “H…a…v…e … f…a…i…t…h, … M…i…k…e.”

  Have faith? We were parachuting into a foreign country with no team, no backup, and no way home. Things couldn’t get any worse.

  A shot rang out, and a bullet passed by—close enough that I could hear the thwipping sound it made as it passed.

  Ariel had survived the explosion and was bearing down on us. She had straightened out into a headfirst dive position to cut wind resistance and get closer to us before shooting. Shooting from that position at two targets should be impossible, but the woman was impressive. A second shot glanced off Mike’s combat helmet, leaving a trail of torn Kevlar, and his eyes unfocused at the impact.

  I had a spell that would render the primer in cartridges inert, but it took time and concentration to perform. Mason could do it in an instant. Could I do it in midair while dodging random shots? No way.

  I scrambled to put myself between Ariel and Mike. I wasn’t bulletproof, but the same premonition that had driven me to jump out of the aircraft meant I could predict the path of her shots.

  Ariel spread out her body and slowed her descent, now matching our velocity but slightly above us. She snarled and fired again. I didn’t bother jerking as the shot passed harmlessly to our right. I gave her the finger and raised my weapon. I’m a terrible shot with a rifle but was hoping to ‘spray-and-pray’ and get a lucky hit.

  I set the fire selector to multiple fire and pulled the trigger. The damn gun didn’t work. Had we been hit with some kind of sabotage curse? If so, why was Ariel’s weapon still working? I checked the safety and tried to cycle the action to clear the weapon, but it still wouldn’t work.

  Ariel grinned around werewolf fangs and took aim. I felt the ‘hot spot’ that my premonition showed as the bullet’s target on my forehead. I threw the useless rifle at her, missing by ten meters or more, but the movement of the throw sent Mike and me into a spin.

  Luckily, the spin made Ariel’s shot miss. Mike and I scrambled to straighten out without drifting apart. Once we were stabilized, I wondered why Ariel hadn’t taken another shot. I looked around and grinned to see her tumbling. She must have jerked at my throw, causing her to spin too. Take that, bitch! I’m the only one up here with bullet radar.

  Her own grin widened as she stabilized and drifted even closer. She raised her weapon, then glanced down toward the ground. She stopped smiling, dropped her weapon, and popped her chute.

  Shit! How close were we to the ground? Instead of looking at a possibly sabotaged altimeter, I used the position of the moon and the sun to determine our height. Eight hundred feet? No time to worry about Ariel. Time to deploy.

  Mike and I were floating head-to-head. He had thrown off the momentary confusion from the near miss on his helmet, and his eyes were clear.

  I reached for my chute release and he duplicated the motion. I realized my hyper-speed had faded, exhausted from overuse.

  We pulled our chute releases simultaneously and braced for the jerk.

  But they didn’t open.

  2

  Seconds from a collision with Earth, I desperately gathered magical energy, forcing it into the air below us. With no time to calculate, I forced the air to rush upward at hurricane speed. I had once stopped a runaway car this way, and as the force of the wind blew us back into the air, I regretted not perfecting that spell when I’d had the chance.

  Luck was with us. We didn’t get blown apart, we didn’t get blown hundreds of feet into the air, and we didn’t smash into the ground. Instead, we bounced as if on a trampoline and came down to a rough but survivable landing.

  I was shaking in reaction to the close call, gasping from the exertion. I looked around frantically for Mike. He was sitting on his butt on the ground, knees up, with his head between them. His breathing was strange, halting and gasping. I worried I had injured him in the fall.

  “Mike! Are you all right?“

  He sat up straight and looked at me with glee. “Let’s do that again! I haven’t had that much fun in years.“

  “Do it again? I didn’t want to do it the first time! That scared the crap out of me. How can you be so calm?”

  Mike stood and stepped over to me, holding out his hand to help me up. Despite my being stronger and faster than him, my knees were wobbly, and I appreciated his help.

  “Because you said, ‘Have faith, Mike.’ I had faith that Lady Luna, the patron saint of lycanthropes, would see us through the danger.”

  More jokes about starting a religion in my name. “I’m no saint. Landing without dying was pure luck.”

  Mike rubbed his chest, where his good-luck charm hung. “Of course it required good luck, so it’s a good thing I was wearing this.”

  That talisman was more than a good-luck trinket. Created by Mason from enchanted gold, infused with the magic of both Earth and Fae, it could do amazing things. Could it have helped? With magic, who could know?

  “Let’s keep our luck going by finding Ariel and getting on with our mission.”

  Despite the setback of losing our aircraft, our support team, and most of our equipment, Mike didn’t hesitate, “Luna, where you lead, I will follow.”

  We trudged to the top of the nearest dune, relying on my ‘bullet radar’ to warn me if Ariel tried to tak
e another shot. I turned my head to catch the scent of our last remaining contact.

  We found her three sand dunes away. She was down in the hollow section between dunes, still in shadow while the tops of the dunes were barely touched by the morning light. She was hunched over, holding her left leg in her hands.

  Far enough away that the scent of magic wouldn’t betray me, I activated the spell to disable her weapon’s cartridges. Even if she were faking an injury to trap us, she wouldn’t be able to shoot.

  “Ariel, get your ass in gear.”

  She jerked around and aimed her weapon at us. When she pulled the trigger, nothing happened.

  “Sand must have jammed your weapon,” said Mike. “Lucky for us.”

  “Get up here!” I commanded. “I have questions and you will answer them.”

  “I can’t move. My leg’s broken.”

  A broken leg shouldn’t stop a werewolf. We can recover from much worse than that.

  “Heal yourself and get up here.”

  “I can’t,” she gritted out. “My pack is gone. Without their energy, I can only heal at a normal rate until the moon comes up.”

  Mike gave me a puzzled look, so I explained. “Members of a pack can share lunar energy, and alphas can control the energy flow. Alphas are stronger than the rest of the pack because they can direct the energy to themselves.”

  “So without her pack…?”

  “She’s just a hairy bitch with anger issues. At least until she can absorb some moonlight.”

  “The lack of moonlight doesn’t seem to bother you. That gash on your cheek has already healed.”

  I rubbed my cheek, dislodging dried blood. “I didn’t even notice. Anyway, higher-strength alphas can store lunar energy inside themselves.” I left it unsaid that, aside from my natural storage ability, I had an amulet, crafted by Mason, which held centuries of lunar energy.

  Still turned away from us, Ariel muttered, “I will kill you, you know. For what you did to my pack.”

  “See?” I said to Mike. “Anger issues.” I raised my voice. “I had nothing to do with what happened up there. I was lucky enough to see the glint of starlight on that incoming missile. You must have a mole in your organization. Once we complete this mission, I’m going to go up your chain of command and kill them one by one until I find out who tried to kill us.”

  “The traitor isn’t Israeli. Of that, I am sure. Anyway, you’ll never be allowed back into my country. You may as well go back to the US now, commit suicide, and save everyone the trouble of hunting you down.”

  “How do you plan on stopping us?” I included my allies in that statement.

  “We kept your mate out of here.” She sounded petulant.

  I shot a look at Mike. He was one of the few people who knew that my mate Mason was stuck in the magical equivalent of an ICU in Fae, recovering from our last adventure. The thought of Mason lying injured and unconscious sent a sharp pain through my heart. At least the cubs were safe, napping in a slow time bubble next to him.

  Mike jumped in. “You think Mason didn’t come on this mission because he was afraid?”

  “Why isn’t he here, then?”

  “Because Mason coming here would be the magical equivalent of bringing a nuclear submarine into Jeddah port. It would restart the Gulf War.” He looked down and shook his head. “Only this time we would fight it with supernaturals and magic, neither of which have much regard for human life.”

  I changed the subject. “Mike, there’s no sense arguing with her. Let’s head out.”

  “But she’ll die here.”

  “So? She swore she would kill me the first chance she gets.” I pointed to my nose. “And she meant it. She’s not lying. Hell, she tried to shoot us as soon as we showed up.”

  “That’s because I thought you had sabotaged the aircraft.”

  “You’re a werewolf like me. You can smell a lie,” I said. “I did not sabotage the aircraft. I will do everything in my power to save the hostages.”

  There was a lengthy pause as she inhaled deeply.

  “Did I speak the truth, or a lie?” I asked.

  “Truth,” she confirmed reluctantly. “But you’re sneaky. Maybe you were targeted. That means you’re still responsible for the deaths of my pack.”

  “See, Mike? There’s no reasoning with her. She’ll betray us at the first opportunity.”

  “Still…”

  “Plus, she has a broken leg. I will not carry her traitorous ass through the desert.”

  “We don’t leave allies behind,” insisted Mike stubbornly. He was entirely too nice for this kind of work.

  “There’s no way we can bring her with us. Unless…” I waited.

  “Unless?” Mike and Ariel asked at the same time.

  “Unless she submits to me and acknowledges me as her alpha. Then I could share enough energy to heal her, and I could sense betrayal through our pack link.”

  “Never!”

  “Never it is. Let’s go, Mike.” I turned away. “She can rig that parachute as an awning, survive two or three days until the moon is stronger, then heal herself and make it through the desert to get home.”

  Mike looked downfallen. “You’re the boss. Since she has a chance…” He turned back to Ariel and said, “Good luck.”

  I was already halfway down the dune, heading toward our destination. Mike hurried to join me.

  “She does have a chance, right?” Mike fretted.

  “One in a million, but yes,” I said—loudly enough for her to hear.

  We were at the crest of the next dune, heading into the morning sun, when I heard a faint, “Wait! Please wait.”

  A quick glance at Mike showed he hadn’t heard. I could just keep going and leave her to her fate.

  Should Mason have left you to your fate?

  Damn conscience. I put a hand on Mike’s shoulder to stop him, and called out, “Are you going to submit?”

  A pause long enough to convince me she had changed her mind, then, “Yes, I will submit.”

  We trudged back over the dunes. We approached her warily, walking about ten yards apart to prevent her from pulling any tricks—me because I knew she was a traitorous bitch, Mike because of inborn caution.

  Ariel sat on her butt, her left arm propping her up. Sand covered her left hand. The slightest tensing of the muscles of her arm was all the warning I got. She pulled her hand out of the sand to reveal a Jericho 941 pistol wrapped in a plastic bag.

  Smart woman. The bag would have kept the sand from jamming her pistol. Too bad I had already rendered all bullets in the area inoperable.

  She bared her fangs as the hammer clicked on a dud. Then, hampered by the plastic bag, she frantically tried to eject the dud to try again.

  I was on her in an instant, kicking the weapon away with my steel-toed combat boot. Her ulna cracked under that blow and the pistol flew away.

  I stomped on her arm, holding it down with my right foot, and put my left foot on the center of her chest to keep her from attacking with fangs. She snarled impotently and tried to snap at my leg.

  “I should never have come back for you,” I said. “You have too many tricks to trust.”

  Even with her left arm and right leg broken, she was still dangerous. Mike moved in to her right and bent down to help restrain her.

  Ariel swept her free hand up and slapped Mike on the forehead as she screamed a curse in Hebrew.

  The blow shouldn’t have hurt Mike; his skull was tough as iron. But he stepped back dizzily and his eyes went blank. There was a strange glowing symbol on his forehead.

  “He’s my golem now!” shrieked Ariel. Then she barked an order in Hebrew.

  Mike bent over woodenly and pulled his silver knife from its sheath.

  I froze for a second, unwilling to believe that my comrade would attack me. The deadly silver blade was inches away from my throat before I reacted by rolling backward, followed by three backflips to gain distance from him.

  Mike followed w
ith plodding steps, as if resisting the spell that enslaved him. The symbol on his forehead glowed more brightly with each passing moment, and Mike’s movements became quicker as the spell took greater control.

  While I dithered, Mike leaped. His jump pushed me onto my back as the silver dagger slid into my chest. I grabbed his wrist and stopped the progress of the blade only an inch from my heart.

  I had my clawed right hand on Mike’s throat, and my left hand was holding his wrist to keep the blade from plunging into my heart. My muscles trembled with the effort it took to keep him from killing me.

  I was stronger and faster than Mike. Even with the silver poisoning my blood, I could kill him in an instant. But I couldn’t bring myself do it.

  “Mike, you need to fight this compulsion. You don’t want to hurt me.” And I don’t want to kill you.

  Mike’s push eased for a second, then increased as the symbol glowed even brighter than before.

  Dammit. There had to be a way to break that spell. Could I scrape the symbol from his forehead? No; magical vision showed it had penetrated to the bone.

  I had a wild idea and acted on it instantly. There was only a tiny chance it would work and let me avoid killing Mike, but it was better than nothing.

  I kneed Mike in the groin, which elicited a groan. He pulled back slightly. Under Ariel’s spell, he was almost impervious to pain.

  Instead of trying to roll away, which would have exposed my back to Ariel, I pulled my hand from Mike’s throat and reached into my invisible handbag. I pulled out a nickel-sized gold coin, one of Mason’s inventions. He had created them to use on our vehicles to prevent anyone taking control and causing a crash.

  Would this work on a human like Mike? Could Mason’s magic overcome the golem spell? Only one way to find out.

  I slapped the coin onto Mike’s forehead and held it there with my palm as I spoke the invocation spell. Magic flared brighter than the sun, and Mike jerked as if electrified.

  Under my palm, I felt the coin vibrate madly as it wormed its way into Mike’s skull.

  Mike spasmed on the sand, his jerking limbs throwing sand everywhere. His forehead was a mess of blood and skin. I stood and bent over him to help. In the rush, I forgot Ariel.