Clan. So he did know more about them than he was letting on. “It shouldn’t take us more than a day to ride straight through. Day and a half at the worst. We go as fast as we can. As quiet as we can. Got it?” I looked at Ford first who gave me a solemn nod, his lips pursed together as he visibly fought another round of gagging. Lila bobbed her head and Shem nodded as well.
“Then let’s dive in.” I slid back. “And hope we can dodge the fairies and the witches and whatever else is in there.”
Yeah, it was the whatever else that worried me too.
11
The edge of the fairy stones in the swamp land grew larger as we approached, and I’ll admit, I held my breath as Balder and Batman stepped over the rounded tops, the tips of their hooves clearing them easily. I stared down at the stones as best I could without hanging out of the hood, fascinated by them. I’d not seen hide nor hair of the little fairy folk when I’d come through before. I’d known that they were being held as slaves, but that was about it. Were they working with the witches now? Or had they taken over the forest?
Would they be friend or foe? Strike that, I already knew.
I leaned farther out and started to scoot from under the gray hood. Shem lifted a hand and shoved me back without a word. I grimaced, hating that he was right. I needed to stay out of sight. Bad enough the two men were riding out in the open, plain as day. I mean, yes, it was night, but you get my drift.
So instead, I stared ahead at Ford on Batman, thinking about Maks. There were some similarities between the two men, which made sense because they’d been raised together. But Ford was far more . . . submissive wasn’t the right word. But Maks had taken me down, dropped my ego, and shown me that he wasn’t to be treated badly. That I wasn’t any better than him because at the time I’d thought he was nothing but a human.
Not that I’d treated Ford badly, nor did I want him to drop me or anything. I gritted my teeth and blew out a slow breath of pure frustration. What was wrong with me?
I knew what was wrong. Ford had stood behind me, stood up for me, and treated me better than most of the men in my life, and hell, even I could admit he was easy on the eyes. If, and it was a big if, I were looking for a mate, he’d be a candidate. Even if I only ever admitted that to myself.
The other thing was, he wanted a big, powerful female lion. Two of those three words did not describe me in the least. So even if I wanted things to move forward, they wouldn’t. And I didn’t want them to move forward.
“So why am I comparing them?”
The problem was, I whispered that last question to myself. While I sat next to Shem’s ear.
He cleared his throat. “Strange, isn’t it, how the heart can break into tiny pieces, yet even when the wound is fresh we can still be drawn to another who perhaps is a better fit for us. Sometimes the heart knows better than we know ourselves what we need.”
My brain didn’t catch on to what he was saying for a good ten seconds.
And then it did.
And then I was pissed. I opened my mouth and nothing but a low hiss came out.
“Don’t claw my eyes out just yet.” He lifted one hand, palm facing me. “You know that lions aren’t meant to be alone. An alpha needs a partner they can trust. Maks knows that too. So does Ford.”
“Shut up before I do claw your seedy fucking eyes out.” I snarled the words. Fighting hard to keep them quiet. The trees around us reached out with long spindly branches that caught at clothes and hair, tugging in all directions, and one pulled the hood back, exposing me for just a quick second. Shem caught it and pulled it forward once more.
“Ford is good for Kiara. Young. Strong,” I said. “He doesn’t want a tiny cat like me. His words, not mine.”
“She needs a beta,” Shem said. “He’s not that. It won’t take much to bring him up to alpha status. Kiara is going to need a beta who won’t hurt her. It’s why she’s responded to you so well. She needs a competent alpha to show her the way, and a beta in her bed. You don’t need that. You need balance of someone as strong as you.”
Thundering Christ on a camel, there was no escaping him, and I couldn’t leave the space in the hood for fear of bringing down the witches. I couldn’t even yell at him because it could put us all in danger. “Shut the ever-loving fuck up,” I snarled.
“I’m just saying, I never moved on from loving your mother and it cost me. How much more could I have done to help you if I’d taken a proper mate and stayed close to the pride? Maybe I could have stopped Ishtar from taking you and your brother, even.”
“Shut it.” I slid down into the back of the hood and curled around myself, burying my head under my front paws, but I could still hear him. His words burrowing into my head. Not out of malice, I knew that.
Shem was trying to push me past the hurt of losing Maks. “Ford is for Kiara,” I said again. “Or some other young fertile lion.”
“Then why are you hiding?” The question was so quiet and yet it stabbed through me. I didn’t want to examine that at all. I didn’t want to examine why I was so upset.
Because there was a flare of something, of a heat you didn’t expect, with Ford’s mouth on yours? And that scares you? Somehow makes you disloyal?
I curled tighter around myself. Cowardly? You bet. But I could do nothing else. I held tightly to the memories I did have of Maks. Of his touch, his love. His laugh and the sound of his voice. Even while part of me knew I would never have that again with him, I wasn’t ready to just give up. That wasn’t my style.
And it was just too fucking soon, no matter that a tiny part of me wanted to point out that it would always feel too soon.
So instead of Shem’s voice, I focused on the sounds around us. The water as it plooped with each of the horses’ hooves as they dropped into it, the slosh of their legs as we moved deeper into the swamp. The snort and blow as they tried to clear their nostrils of the stench of the swamp.
“Go slow,” I said. “We don’t need any broken legs.”
The two men did as I asked, slowing the horses, and I stayed where I was, listening. Feeling. Hurting. Confusion rocking me as that heat from Ford whispered through me again.
Ford and Maks, two brothers, and both good men. What were the odds?
Fuck. I hated Shem in that moment. Hated that he was forcing me to look at Ford and Maks through logical eyes. Because there were parts of what he was saying that were absolutely right. Lions liked to have their mates, they liked to not be alone.
“You fought hard for Steve too, didn’t you?” Shem asked, breaking the silence between us.
I didn’t answer. I didn’t have to. We both knew that answer.
He sighed and adjusted his seat. “That’s who you are, Zam. I would never expect you to give up on Maks without a fight. I just don’t want you to let something—or someone—else go by while you fight. Just in case I might be right about this.”
Goddess of the desert, why did he have to be so bloody logical? Why couldn’t he still be the Uncle Shem I grew up with, the one who threw caution to the wind and carried around the title of crazy as if it were a badge of honor?
I wrinkled my nose and snorted once before I spoke, choosing my words carefully.
“If I say I will . . . be aware . . . of this other thing,” I couldn’t say Ford’s name even, because he’d told me himself he would never want a puny little thing like me, which made this whole conversation a total moot point, “will you shut the fuck up about it? About him?”
“Done.” The satisfaction in Shem’s voice was too much. As if he’d convinced me to throw myself at Ford and beg for him to be my mate.
“Fucker,” I growled as I crawled farther up his shoulder. The heat and humidity were enough to put a slight curl into the ends of my short fur, and buried in a hood against Shem’s back was not where I wanted to be. I’d told him what he wanted to hear. For now, he would leave me alone.
“Uncle Fucker to you,” he said, and damn it, my lips twitched. Uncle Fucker indeed.
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The night slid past us in near silence after that. With each hour that ticked by, the tension around us grew. I kept waiting for a trap to spring, for the screech of a ghoul or some other nasty working for the witches. With the swamp as foul as it was, we had to give the horses water from our own water skins. A bit of a trick, but both Balder and Batman gladly turned their heads for the fresh, if slightly stale water out of the canteens.
I finally broke the growing tension as Lila dozed clinging to the front of Balder’s saddle, swaying with each of his steps, and Ford riding ten feet or so ahead of us. Still gagging every once in a while, which left me with a permanent half grin on my face.
“What can you tell me about my bloodline, Shem?” I asked. “The magic in it? Flora thinks she can teach me, but when I try to work the way she wants me to, there is nothing there. But then when we were in danger with Maks and the Jinn, the magic took over and was more than I could have ever imagined. But I couldn’t control it at all, not like Flora thought I should be able to. It just did whatever the fuck it wanted.”
Shem grunted and scratched at his face, the crisp sound of his nails against the stubble a sound that made me think of my father. Of watching him shave when I was a little girl wondering why anyone would want to grow hair on their face.
Shem’s answer pulled me out of the memory of my dad. “No matter what Flora thinks, I don’t believe the magic is trainable. The magic in you, that is. And if it was, certainly not by Flora. She’s a priestess of Zeus; her magic was given to her, not born within her as is the case in your blood.” He snorted and rolled his eyes. “She means well, in her own way, but I think she and Merlin have more up their sleeves than they are letting on.”
I frowned and stared out into the swamp, frustrated. His answer was not far from what I was thinking might be the case, but I’d hoped he would have a different one. “So what do I do? How do I learn how to make this work for me?”
He blew out a slow breath and then cleared his throat as a waft of wind went by my nose that smelled a great deal like rank dog shit. Even my eyes watered with the sharp acid-laced smell until the swamp blurred. Sweet baby goddess, the smell was so bad that if anything was sneaking up on us, we’d never know until it was too fucking late to do anything about it.
“Sorry, I needed a moment there,” he grumbled, then spat to the side and gagged a little before he went on. “Your mother always said that her magic was not trainable, that you had to just let it be. That she would learn or she would die, and there was nothing else she or anyone else could do about it.”
I bowed my head, shaking it. “Well, that didn’t work out so well for her, did it?” He grunted and I went on. “She did die, Shem. You think she’d want you to give me advice that ended up killing her? Because maybe if she’d trained her magic, then Marsum wouldn’t have killed her. Maybe she could have fought him off. Maybe right now we wouldn’t be where we are, fighting to find the Oracle, a creature that by all accounts may or may not even let us get close without frying our asses!”
Shem tipped his head so I could clearly see the look in his eye. “And then she would have taken Marsum’s place if she’d killed him. Just like Maks did.”
Damn it.
He rubbed a hand over his chin. “Trust me when I say I have looked at this from all directions for years. Trying to find a way to say we should have done this, or she should have done that. I tell you what she believed and that is all I can do because your magic is like no other. Unless you think you can get your grandfather to tell you something of it.” Shem shrugged. “He might. He seems taken with you. Perhaps he thinks you are more easily controlled than your mother was.”
He wasn’t wrong about anything he said. But that didn’t mean I was any less irritated by his fuckery with those words of his. Or the frustration that came with them. Because yet again, I was stuck wondering how to make this life of mine work, how to find my way out of a situation where there was no light at the end of the tunnel. Hell, I couldn’t even see the fucking tunnel at this point.
“I need a break from you,” I grumbled and leapt out from under the cover of the hood. I landed partway up Balder’s neck, startling Lila out of her doze, and then leapt across to Batman’s rounded ass. He jigged sideways a bit, looked back, saw me, and gave a long snort that may or may not have come with the horse version of an eye roll.
Ford turned around. “Shouldn’t you be hiding?”
A gray swath of material flew through the air and landed in his lap. We both looked at Shem who shrugged. “She should hide. You know, witches that hate her and all are watching.”
I leapt up to Ford’s shoulder and then dropped down onto the bundle of cloth and burrowed partially under it. Ford flipped a corner over my body so that just my nose and eyes peeked out.
“You okay? I heard you and Shem talking back there and it sounded like it was getting heated.” Ford raised both eyebrows. I promptly ignored his question. I needed a distraction.
Matchmaking it was. If I got him and Kiara hooked up, then he would be completely off my menu.
“I never asked you what you thought of Kiara,” I said. “I mean, it’s not like there has been time to talk about it, but I am your alpha and I’d like to know what your . . . intentions are with her.”
The shock on his face was worth whatever would come next. His jaw dropped open and his eyes were about as confused as if I’d smacked him over the head with a hammer. “Kiara?”
I laughed softly at him. “Yes, you know the one. Young, golden lion, fertile, strong, powerful shifter? The one that you went into the Jinn’s Dominion to help me rescue. She’s the one I told you about.” Actually, that wasn’t true, I’d told him about Darcy, but Darcy was now solidly with Steve, so we would pretend I said Kiara way back when. I flicked an ear at him and a thought crossed my mind that I didn’t like. “Tell me you don’t have a thing for Darcy. I’m not sure I’m okay with that.” Of course, that was assuming Darcy was alive. No. No, I would not think like that. Even if she was no longer the friend I’d thought she’d been, I didn’t want her dead. Never that.
I just really wished she didn’t have her head so far up her own ass. Or Steve’s ass, which seemed to be the case.
He managed to pull himself together. “Well, uh, Kiara is a typical lioness. If a bit on the meek side. I mean, she’s obviously coming out of that, but I don’t think she’s looking for a mate now, do you? I didn’t think pursuing her was a good idea.”
His question and assessment of Kiara were valid. I’d watched her and there hadn’t been a single moment where she’d done more than glance in Ford’s direction. I tried another tactic. “Maybe Nell then? She’s lovely, if a different kind of shifter.”
My gut twisted at the thought of keeping Maks’s ex-lover close to me through Ford. The combination of the stench of the swamp and an image of Nell and Ford together brought on the urge to gag. I tried to fight it, failed as it overwhelmed me and I let it roll, my body heaving uncontrollably.
Kitty gagging. Not a pretty look on anyone.
Ford laughed. “So. You aren’t immune to the stench either.”
I shook my head, let him believe that was why I’d retched.
I swallowed back the last of it and tried again. “Kiara is getting stronger. And she’s fertile. That’s got to be big points as I assume at some juncture you’ll want to start your own pride.”
His lips tightened and then he frowned. “Wait, how do you even know that? Her fertility, that is.” He snorted and then sucked in a big breath which made his eyes water. “Fuck, that is some seriously bad stink.”
“She was pregnant with Steve’s cub,” I said, ignoring the smell. “But she lost the baby when the Jinn took her.”
“Oh, shit.”
I nodded. “That’s where the fire in her is coming from. She’s lost a dream. They took it from her.”
He shook his head, his eyes thoughtful. “No. I don’t think that’s where her fire is coming from at all. I think she
has an alpha who finally sees the strength in her. An alpha who doesn’t treat her like a stupid little girl, but as the lioness she is. There is power in belief, you know. You believe in her. I think that is why she is changing.”
His words sent a chill through me. I wasn’t sure what to say to that. Maybe nothing? Praise was not something I was used to.
Certainly not from a full-blooded lion shifter. I sighed. “You were a right dick when I met you. Calling me names. Calling Lila names. Why the change now?”
He grinned down at me. “Maybe I saw an alpha worth following too. Maybe she saw something more in me than anyone else ever had and gave me a chance that she didn’t have to.” He paused. “And I resort to being a dick when I’m nervous. Can’t help the male knee-jerk reaction.”
I looked away, uncomfortable with the way he stared at me.
Which was all well and good because it allowed me to really listen to the swamp. A bird call rocketed through the air, loud and almost violent in the noise it made. My hair stood on end. I couldn’t help the way my body puffed up. Ford saw it and slowed.
“It’s just a bird,” he said. As if he were going to comfort me.
“And what bird would that be?” I asked, a low hiss building in my chest.
“Swamp bird?” he offered.
Shem caught up to us and I looked across at him. He was not smiling. “That sound what I think it is?”
I nodded. “They’ve found us.”
12
The sound of the bird that was not a bird but in reality the witches of the swamp communicating that there were intruders, aka, me, Lila, Ford and Shem, rattled through the air again.
“You sure that’s not just a bird?” Ford tipped his head. “Sounds like one to me.”
I leaned out and stuck my tiny yet razor-sharp claws into his thigh closest to me. “Listen to me, you dumb schmuck. I know what I’m talking about and we do not have time to convince you otherwise.”
“Run or hide?” Shem asked, interrupting us. “What’s our best shot at this?”
Oracle’s Haunt: Desert Cursed Series Book 4 Page 9