A click at my back showed she had not forgotten me. I spun around to find she had crawled to retrieve her pistol. The bitch had tried to shoot me in the back.
I picked up Mike’s silver-bladed dagger and stepped toward her. She scrambled back through the sand, frantically trying to cycle the ejector with her broken wrist.
“How did you think this would end, Ariel?” I asked. “Even if you’d killed me, you’d still be stuck in the desert with a broken leg. Mike would have left you to die so he could complete the mission. There’s no way you could come out alive.”
“All I need is to eat your heart and drink your blood. That would have given me the energy to heal. With Mike as my golem, I could have made it home.”
Mike’s seizures halted. I held my breath while listening for a heartbeat.
After what seemed an eternity, a faint thump-thump came from his chest.
“He’s alive,” I whispered.
“If he lives, he’s my slave,” taunted Ariel. “My magician’s spells are unbreakable.”
3
“Luna, what the hell happened? I feel like someone hit me on the head with a sledgehammer,” groaned Mike.
Ariel snapped out a command in Hebrew. Mike furrowed his brow and said, “I don’t know what that means. Anyway, I don’t take orders from you.”
Ariel’s face fell and relief flooded my heart. I wouldn’t have to kill Mike.
“Unbreakable?” I said to Ariel. “Looks like my magician is more knowledgeable than yours.”
I stepped up to the kneeling Ariel and kicked the useless pistol out of her right hand. Oops—another broken wrist.
I held the silver blade to her throat. Tiny wisps of smoke rose from my hand where the silver tang touched my fingers. I ignored the pain and smiled down at her.
“I hate killing werewolves,” I said. Ariel’s eyes opened wider, and she smiled. Until I continued: “Usually. But in your case, I’ll make an exception.”
She froze as the blade touched the skin of her throat. The scent of her burning flesh was sweet.
“Close your eyes,” I whispered. “I’ll make it quick.”
“Luna, don’t kill her,” said Mike.
Without taking my eyes off Ariel, I said, “Mike, you’re too nice for this job.”
That slight hesitation was enough. Ariel flopped onto her back and tilted her chin back as far as possible. “I submit to Luna of Luna Pack!” she shouted desperately. “Please don’t kill me, alpha.”
“See? She submitted. You can’t kill her now.”
“Oh, yes I can.” I leaned over and touched the blade to Ariel’s throat. “It’s not like touching home plate. I don’t have to accept her submission.”
“But we can use her. She speaks the local languages. She can carry our packs. You said she can’t betray you once she submits.”
“She’s tricky,” I said, and pushed the blade deeper into Ariel’s throat. “Even with a pack link, I can’t trust her. She would be exiled from any other pack with the shit she’s pulled so far.”
“Please, Luna.”
I looked at Mike. His face was bloody from the slashes on his forehead and he looked exhausted. The battle for mental control had taken a lot out of him.
“All right.” I pulled the knife back from Ariel’s throat. “Stay down,” I ordered.
The capitulation took only a few seconds. I shared lunar energy with my new packmate, but just enough to allow her to heal her wounds.
She finally stood. With head bowed, she muttered, “Thank you, alpha.” She was trembling with rage, but there was nothing she could do about it now.
“This pack link feels weird. Not like my old pack links.”
“It’s not,” I said. “I added a little something special. It links our fates.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that if I die, you die. In extreme circumstances, I’ll drain your life force to stay alive.”
“Links like that are forbidden. You’re a monster!”
“Says the woman who planned to eat my heart and drink my blood to survive. I’m just returning the favor.”
She opened her mouth to argue. I held up one finger and said, “Shush!”
Ariel clamped her jaws shut and cast her eyes down.
“Mike, sit down. Ariel will bandage your wound.”
“What? I’m not a fucking nurse—” Ariel’s voice choked off as I tugged at her mental leash.
“You’re whatever I order you to be. You’re lower than a runt in my pack.”
She gritted her teeth to bite back the bile she wanted to unleash. But she kept her eyes averted and hurried to open the first aid kit in her backpack.
After Mike’s wound was bandaged, Ariel stood. “How did you break the golem spell?” she asked.
“Your magicians gave you some magical trinkets for this mission. My magician did the same.”
“What ‘trinket’ did you use?” asked Mike.
“One of the gold coins Mason uses to prevent a remote takeover of our vehicles.”
“The ones we put on the hoods of all the pack’s vehicles?”
“Yes. I wasn’t sure it would work, but I took a chance.”
“You embedded a magic hood ornament in my skull to stop the golem spell?”
“It’s not what we made them for, but in an emergency…”
“‘If it’s stupid but it works, it ain’t stupid,’” quoted Mike.
An old military motto, but it fit. I grabbed my pack and handed it to Ariel. “Carry this,” I ordered.
She bared her fangs for an instant, then bowed her head. “Yes, alpha.” She took the pack.
Mike rose to his feet slowly and started trudging to the top of the dune. The rising sun limned his face with bright light.
“Sorry I can’t share energy with you, Mike,” I said.
“It’s okay,” he responded with a sigh. “The only easy day was yesterday.”
“What?”
“It’s a saying that got me through Hell Week,” he said. More military history I didn’t understand.
I took his pack and handed it to Ariel. “This bitch is our pack mule. She’ll make the trip easier for both of us.”
Mike looked like he wanted to object, but held back. He handed the heavy pack to Ariel, and she took it without comment.
I took a moment to orient on the sun and the moon, locking in our position compared to our destination.
“We go that way,” I said as I pointed to a distant dust storm.
“Oh, shit,” said Ariel.
“What?” I asked.
“That’s an ifrit, a dust devil,” she said.
“So? We’ll just walk through it. It can’t hurt us.”
“No! What’s the word in English? A dust devil is what we call a djinni!”
I looked at the distant storm. It was now a funnel of sand and fury, almost a mile across. A tornado of magical energy.
“Won’t it just ignore us?” I asked. I struggled to remember Mason’s lessons on magical menageries. He had said the djinn were like dragons, aloof and uninterested in human affairs. Unless they wanted to play games.
Ariel dropped both packs and slumped her shoulders in resignation. “Normally, yes. We’re insignificant to them. But you let loose a torrent of foreign magic in its backyard.”
“Foreign magic?” asked Mike. “Like your mind-control spell? Don’t blame this on us.”
“The golem spell is local magic.” Ariel fought for an analogy. “It’s like a smell the djinni is used to.” She stared at his forehead. “New magic, unique magic, makes us a target.”
I briefly wondered if my hurricane spell had also irritated the djinni, then suppressed the thought. It didn’t matter now.
“Let’s get down to that depression between the dunes,” I said, pointing. “The djinni might not be after us, and we can wait out the dust storm down there.”
Mike started down right away. Ariel held back for an instant, then obeyed her alpha.
>
We hunkered down as the storm approached. Mike was eerily calm, but Ariel dithered. She started muttering in Hebrew. I couldn’t tell if she was mouthing a prayer or a curse, so I glared at her to make her stop.
We sat on our haunches and covered our heads with our arms as the funnel of sand hit. The roar of the wind was deafening, and the pounding of the wind was like being punched by a hundred fighters.
Mike and I had our oxygen-mask spells to allow us to breathe, but I had no idea how Ariel survived. And frankly, I didn’t care.
In a few minutes—which seemed like hours—the pounding ceased. We were almost covered in sand and grit, but we were alive.
My ears popped with the change in pressure as the storm passed.
“See?” I said. “It ignored us. That wasn’t so bad—”
“Stupid foreign alpha!” Ariel spat. “That was just the beginning. We’re in the eye of the storm. Now comes the hard part.”
I opened my mouth to respond, then the storm hit us with full fury. A hurricane-strength wind pushed me to the ground with irresistible force. Even with my oxygen-mask spell, it was hard to breathe with that force pushing on my body. The sandstorm was like a giant sandblaster stripping away at everything. My clothes were shredded under that maelstrom.
If it was this bad on me, how was Mike going to survive? I crawled over to him and covered his body with mine. Despite the thunderous noise of the storm, I could hear his whispered prayers.
I could survive the storm if it passed soon, and Mike would be safe.
But the storm didn’t ease up. It continued beating us with unrelenting force.
Mike was nearly buried in the sand. I was covering his body, lying face-down on top of him with my arms pushed into the sand on either side of him.
Desperation drove mad thoughts. What could I do against a djinni? They were creatures of fire and air, unrelated to human elements like earth and water and spirit. A lot like demons, in fact.
Could a demon trap hold a djinni? There were stories of bottles that held these creatures, rendering them impotent. Mason had created many such bottles to help Dr. Patrizia trap demons, and I could vaguely remember the spells he’d used. Could I duplicate them?
It would take a lot of magic and a lot of glass to create a djinni trap. I squeezed my hands, compressing the sand into lumps of silica. Silica was another name for glass. And magic? I had the magic of the tornado that was being dumped on us in fury.
Without a second thought, I unleashed a spell, channeling all the rage and energy of the storm into the sand beneath us. It was more magic than I had ever used before—an amount that would have killed me to channel only a year ago.
Over fifty meters below, a ball of silica melted, then formed into a globe—a globe that grew under my direction.
It started out the size of a baseball, then expanded to soccer ball size, then beachball size. I forced more magic into the object and the sand around it melted to silica, adding to the mass. Larger and larger it grew; three meters across, ten meters, twenty meters, fifty meters. Then I thickened the walls into crystalline buttresses that almost no force on earth could damage.
Its walls were three meters thick, stronger than sapphire, without stain or defect. The most perfect object I had ever conjured.
Still, it needed something more. The extra-dimensional twist that would make it inescapable for a creature of fire and air. What did humans call it, a Klein bottle? I twisted the glass like the world’s largest glassblower, tying a knot in both space and matter. An opening into the bottle appeared directly below us, going through that extra dimension and making it a one-way valve. A valve that I could expand or contract at will.
It was done: a huge globe of impossible structure erected in the sands just beneath us.
The storm continued unabated; we couldn’t survive much longer. I willed the valve to open to the size of a manhole cover. The sand started trickling into the opening of the bottle, and Mike and I were pushed down by the force of the storm.
Just before it pushed us through the entrance of the globe, Ariel jumped onto my back. That freeloading bitch was going to ride my tail to safety. Too late to throw her off to die in the storm, though.
We all dropped through the opening. There was a moment of insanity as we shifted through the one-way twist in space I had created at the entrance. Then we fell.
The piled-up sand softened the impact of our landing. I held my arms stiff to protect Mike from being crushed under the combined weight of me and Ariel.
Still, he was breathless and barely awake. I threw Ariel off my back with a grunt, tossing her four meters across the space. She landed heavily and slumped unconscious. The sudden silence made my ears ring as the storm swirled impotently above us.
I stood and looked at what I had wrought. The hole through which we had entered allowed meager light to illuminate our refuge. We were in a space about twenty meters across, standing on an enormous pile of sand. Sand continued to pour down the entrance, as if we were in the bottom of an hourglass. It quickly spread out, filling the bottom half of the globe.
With a gesture I shrank the one-way hole in the glass to the size of a dish plate. The flow of sands trickled to a stop, leaving the entrance exposed to the sky.
In the center of the space was a column of glass, extending from the sand-covered bottom to the entrance at the top. It resembled a tube, but with an impossible shape. The extra-dimensional shift made the light entering through the column bounce strangely around the area, illuminating some areas and leaving others in pitch darkness. It was like being in a funhouse made of magic mirrors.
Luckily, none of us needed help to see in near darkness.
I rolled Mike onto his back, made sure he was breathing, then stroked his forehead. “Mike, are you all right?”
His eyes fluttered open, and he wheezed. “Okay, the jump was fun. But let’s never do this again.”
I laughed and hugged him. “I’m glad you’re alive!”
“Me too,” he said with a grunt. “Can you let me breathe now?”
I pulled back quickly, embarrassed at my reaction to finding him alive after the pounding we’d taken. “Sorry, Mike. I’m just happy you survived.”
I stood and shivered as the grains of sand that had been sandblasted into my body were ejected. It was like a million mosquito bites at once, but quickly passed.
My clothes were a mess, shredded everywhere the sand had pounded. The heels of my combat boots had been sanded down to paper thinness. I salvaged some clothes from my ravaged backpack and stripped.
I ran my fingers through my hair, dislodging a pound of sand onto the floor. My scalp itched fiercely for a minute, then healed. Not as good as a shampoo and a good soak, but the best I would find in this desert.
I looked up as I pulled on my pants. Mike was facing away, staring at the hole at the top of the column of glass. He was still shy around me.
I buttoned up my top, slid my feet into my sand-blasted boots and said, “Okay, Mike, I’m dressed. You can turn around now.”
He took a quick peek to make sure I was decent, then turned.
“There’s something weird about that opening up there. It hurts my eyes to look at it.”
“It should. That’s a one-way extra-dimensional interface to the actual world.”
“One-way?” he asked. “Does that mean we’re stuck here?”
“Not necessarily—” I began, but was interrupted by Ariel’s groan. That crazy bitch had survived the sandstorm and the fall. I hated her, but she was werewolf tough.
Mike nodded, knowing I wouldn’t discuss using magic in front of another werewolf. Although it would take an idiot to not realize that I had used an impressive amount of magic to create this underground terrarium.
“Another of your magical trinkets?” asked Ariel as she looked around at our globe refuge. “You seem to have a lot of highly potent magical devices at your disposal.”
“You think her husband, the most powerful magici
an on Earth, would send her out without some tricks up her sleeve?” scoffed Mike.
He rubbed his bandaged forehead to emphasize that one of Mason’s ‘trinkets’ had already overcome her most potent weapon.
“Maybe,” she muttered. I could feel her thoughts skitter away from the impossible notion of a werewolf using magic. Trinkets, yes. Wielding magic? Impossible.
“We should reserve such potent objects for a country that really needs them. Like Israel.”
“Your alpha will decide where to place her efforts, runt,” I snapped.
She opened her mouth to argue, but stopped as our house-sized globe shifted.
A giant hand, spanning over thirty meters from thumb to pinky, plunged through the sand as if it were water and lifted us hundreds of meters into the air. My stomach dropped with the acceleration, then flipped.
An eye the size of a billboard focused on our globe, and I suddenly felt like a goldfish in a bowl.
“What are you doing in my domain?” the djinni said in a voice like thunder.
4
Ariel said something in Hebrew that I was sure meant, “Oh, shit.”
I tugged on her mental leash, choking off any further comments.
Mike’s eyes glazed over in shock. What did he see looking at the djinni? This type of creature was like a force of nature; they appeared different to different people.
I saw a scowling face with pores the size of manholes, swarthy skin, and a goatee. A turban topped his head, with a diamond as big as a house in the center. Looking down revealed an embroidered vest over a naked chest. There was no navel on his flat belly, just a smooth expanse of olive skin. Below his waist spun a funnel cloud, effortlessly holding him in the air.
My human side wanted to grovel; this creature was so much more powerful than any magic I could muster that it would be no contest. But my wolf side had other ideas. Instead of snarling, she bolstered my confidence. Bolstered it enough to overcome fear.
I crossed my arms, tilted my head back so I was looking down my nose at him, and said, “Your domain? Who the hell died and made you the boss?”
Lycan Legacy - 4 - 5 - 6: Princess - Progeny - Paladin: Book 4 - 5 - 6 in the Lycan Legacy Series Page 56