Ollianna turned to face me square on. “Your blood is more mixed than any one person I’ve ever met, Zam. And some of it is the blood of a line of witches that has been dead for many years.”
I rubbed a hand over my face. “Enough of that kind of blood that it could be where my magic comes from?”
Her eyes popped wide, shock written clearly there. “I’m sorry, did you say you have magic?”
A shout of pain from Shem got my feet moving in the direction of the camp the two men had set up, which gave me time to think about just what I was doing confiding in a witch I just met, a witch who’d saved me, yes, but also had tried to kill her own siblings. Even if it was to save the others.
A fire crackled and danced. Shem was stretched out in front of it while Ford doctored the older man. Shem grimaced and groaned. “Not so tight, cub!”
“I’m not a cub, old man,” Ford growled as he finished wrapping Shem’s arm. “And stop whimpering. You’d think you’d never had an injury before.”
My lips twitched. “He was never much of a fighter, more of a runner.”
Ford grinned and Shem frowned. “That’s not fair. I’m not big like the other lions.”
“And I’m a fucking house cat, but I still stand at the front of a pride,” I pointed out as I slid to the ground. Both horses had been un-tacked and were nibbling on the bits of grass that sprouted out of the sand around us.
“You’re special,” Shem said.
I didn’t care what he thought, what he said. I wasn’t special. I was a fucking idiot. I was the head of a pride that was splintering and now I’d brought a witch with us that I wasn’t fully sure I could trust. And I just didn’t care enough to think any more about it right then.
I yawned, my jaw cracking and my spine tingling with fatigue as I stretched. The others were talking and I didn’t care. I just wanted to sleep. A teeny tiny part of me wondered if Ollianna had put a sleep spell on me, but I didn’t think that was the case. More likely being a full-sized jungle cat had a fair bit to do with the fatigue, along with the run all night through the swamp and the multiple shifts of my body between sizes. How many had there been? Six, I think. I wasn’t sure I’d ever done that many in such a short time.
“We sleep till dawn, then head to the others,” I said around another wide yawn before I closed my eyes. Curled around myself, my red cloak back on me and now my only cover, I wanted nothing short of oblivion for a few hours. Lila landed on me and dug down into the curl of my body where she settled with a happy chirp.
Tomorrow, I’d talk to her tomorrow about the stone. Fear lanced me for a moment thinking about that confrontation, but I pushed it away and wrapped tighter around her.
As I drifted off, a blanket was laid across me to protect us both from the chilly night air of the desert. For a moment, I could pretend it was Maks. That he was there and looking out for me.
“Sleep well, Alpha,” Ford said softly as he walked away. I squeezed my eyes shut even more, willing myself to sleep, wishing to be anywhere but there in the desert with Ford in that moment, feeling my heart torn in multiple directions. No, that wasn’t fair. As long as Maks was alive, Ford didn’t really have a chance. Because as long as Maks was alive, I had to believe I could bring him back.
No matter what I’d told Shem. And with that full understanding of my own heart finally settling over me, some of the anxiety fled, and I fell asleep.
Only the sleep was not real sleep, but a dream world I’d visited once with the Ice Witch, Magi, when she’d wanted to show me the past and the things that had brought me onto this path of mine.
I didn’t even open my eyes at first, I couldn’t. I could feel the dream world around me, the weight of it, the feel and smell of it.
“Please let this be just a brilliantly vivid dream,” I said and then slowly opened my eyes.
Nope, this was no dream, and I wasn’t the only one who’d fallen into it.
15
I groaned where I lay on the desert sand, Lila still curled inside the crook of my body. Asleep but not, this dream world was not a place I wanted to be. Because what happened here was mimicked in real life. Get a scratch here? Wake up bleeding. Die here? Yeah, dead in real time.
I lifted my head to see the horses standing with their heads down, each of them with a back leg resting as they slept deeply.
Neither Ford nor Shem were there in the dream world, but Ollianna was, her body curled up on her side as I had been, her bright red hair spread out over her back and face.
“You think she could step into this world too?” Lila said softly, as if she were worried she would wake Ollianna up.
“That would be my guess, if I were to guess, that is. Maybe you have to have witch blood to be here?” With the exception of Lila, that made sense. The Ice Witch was a witch, Ollianna was a witch, and apparently, I had witch blood in me. I pushed slowly to my feet and Lila scrambled to climb up the front of my shirt and situate herself on my shoulder. As I stood, Balder lifted his head, cracked a yawn and then shook his head. I watched as his eyes opened and he looked right at me.
“You can see me, buddy?” I asked.
He bobbed his head up and down, yawned and went back to sleep.
“Must be an animal thing,” Lila said. “’Cause look around.”
I did as she suggested in time to see a few desert animals scurry across the sand, barely pausing when they saw us, but there were no other people. Well, except Ollianna, and I wasn’t about to wake her in this place.
She was with us, but I was no fool—she was a witch, and I didn’t trust her further than I could throw her at this point. That’s what I told myself anyway, even if a part of me was totally comfortable with the witch tagging along. Ridiculous, I was going soft in my old age.
Behind us was a bit of a rock bluff outcropping, the reason the men had chosen this as the place for a camp no doubt. “Let’s get up higher, see what we can see.” I reached up before I even finished speaking, digging my fingers into the chipped rock ledges. I pulled myself up, hand over hand, until my feet were able to get a toe hold on the stone. My cloak flared out behind me with a sudden downward whoosh of air.
Lila swooped around me, barrel rolling happily. “Blinking piles of fairy shit, you should see what’s up at the top!”
I grunted and worked harder to get myself up the stone face. “You think fairy shit sparkles?”
She laughed. “You know what I mean!”
Lila paced beside me, never once asking if I wanted to shift to four legs and let her carry me to the top. I wasn’t ready to face that form again, knowing what I wanted was as far away from me as the moon. That, and I wasn’t sure how that worked here in the dream world. I wasn’t shifting again unless I had no choice.
The top snuck up on me. I was just suddenly there, climbing over the edge, flat on my belly. I lay there a moment, breathing it all in, wondering how this dream would end. The dry smell of the desert wrapped around me with a hint of rain on the horizon. I lifted my nose and breathed it in, eyes closed.
“Look, look!” Lila’s excitement was demanding. I pushed to my feet and opened my eyes at the same time.
Below us on the far side of the rock bluff was something I couldn’t quite comprehend. At least, not at first.
The ground below was smooth and flat with tiny rivers flowing here and there, a dark line to the left, and a darker line to the right.
Snow-capped mountains dominated the top left of the image near one of the thick dark lines, and I stared at a wide green forest below it. “My gods, it’s a map of our world, hemmed in both sides by two walls.”
Lila circled my head, finally finding her way back to my shoulder. “Right? And look, there’s the Oasis.” She pointed with the tip of her left wing and I looked in that direction. Indeed, there was the Oasis, the water looking as crystal clear as ever, even if teeny tiny.
The desert spread wide, showing the Jinn’s Dominion and their glittering domes, then on to the swamp we’d only ju
st survived. My eyes shot east to the edge of the blasted lands. The ground there was ash, dust, fire. To find the Oracle and get the answers I so desperately wanted, we had to cross it. I squinted at the edge of it, movement making me stare harder. “Is that the others?”
Even as I said it, I knew I was right. The closer I looked, the more I saw tiny movement of different creatures and people on the map. Some were there and then gone so fast I wasn’t sure I was seeing them at all. But the ones on the edge of the blasted lands had to be my crew. I did a head count. And they were all there, even those I couldn’t sense. Steve, Darcy, and Nell. Were they hurt maybe? A closer look was what I needed.
On an impulse I didn’t understand fully, I reached out to the map, my hand over it, fingers wide.
“What are you doing?” Lila asked.
“Not sure. Trying something,” I said as I drew my fingers together as if I could pull the image closer. The map wobbled and for just a second that section of it came into perfect clear relief to the point where I could see faces, and one of them wasn’t very happy. But then again, when was Steve happy if he wasn’t fucking someone over?
As soon as I relaxed my fingers the map slid away from me, shimmering and dancing, snapping back into place.
“Try again,” Lila said. “Maybe you can make it stay closer to us.”
I nodded and lifted my arm. A hand dropped onto it, large with a ruby stone set into a single ring. I knew even before I turned who it would be.
“Do not touch the map,” the Emperor said.
I yanked my hand back from him and the map now seemed a thousand miles away. “Why not?”
“It will fall apart if it is touched too often. It is the one place I can see the world and all those places I once roamed freely.” His eyes went to the miniature of our world, thoughtful. He was dressed in baggy clothes made for the desert, a shawl wrapped loosely around his neck that he could lift if the winds swept up. For an old man, his body was thick, built like a brick shithouse, as my dad would have said, and still full of muscle.
He turned away from the scene and his eyes locked onto Lila. “Who is this you bring with you?”
She slid down my back, hanging from the edge of my cloak so she was fully hidden. I squared myself to him. “Leave her out of this. Whatever the fuck this is.”
The Emperor gave me a smirk. “Fine, be a child about this then.”
I didn’t let his words bother me in the least. “What are you doing here?”
That question drew a laugh from him. “What am I doing in the place I created? The better question is what are you doing here, little bad luck cat?”
I took a step back, feeling the edge of the cliff behind me. “I fell asleep, woke up here. That’s the general way it happens.”
He took a step toward me. “You’ve been here before?”
I clamped my lips shut, feeling as though any additional words would somehow get us into trouble. And though I didn’t fear the Emperor as I had once, I was no fool. He was locked away for a reason, and it wasn’t because he made too many angel food cupcakes for everyone.
He held up both hands to me, palms out in a mock surrender. “I created this place as a way to be part of the world after that son of mine stuck me in a box. He thought I was fully bound away, but he forgot a step in the spell. Not that I was surprised.” He sighed and rubbed a hand over his face like nothing more than an exhausted, exasperated father. “There was never a mage with more penchant for messing up a spell than Merlin.”
Even though Merlin and I didn’t always see eye to eye, I found myself bristling. “And just why would he lock you away from the world if you were such a good man, huh? You don’t exile your own father for no fucking reason.”
The Emperor smiled at me. “I never said I was a good man, Zamira. I never claimed to be anything but what I am.” He spread his hands wide.
I frowned and pinched my lips together. He sighed. “The world is not black and white. It never has been. There cannot be white and black without gray and all the shades of light and dark between them. The colors that light the white parts, and the stars that light the dark.”
“Waxing philosophical will get you nowhere with me,” I said. “Gray, black, white, there is still right and wrong, good and bad. You still want to be free and rule the world. So which of those are you? Would you be master of our world?”
His grin was wide. “All of them.” He looked out again to the map. “Would you not want to be free if you were caged, Zamira? Would you not want the ability to go where you wish, when you wish? To be what you wish?” There was something in the depths of his eyes and for a moment I thought I saw an image of a large black jungle cat stalking through dense foliage, barely visible but for the burst of green from eyes that locked on mine. Cages, there were many kinds of them and he knew it.
Fucker.
He reached toward me, and I froze as his hand went to the handle of the flail that stuck above my one shoulder. “This would free me. A powerful weapon is all it would take to truly break my cage. Another mistake my son made.”
I twisted so his hand slid away from the weapon, but my foot slid back and I lost my balance. His hand snapped out, locking his fingers around my wrist, the only thing keeping me from falling.
I stared at him, defiance roaring through me. “And with you free, the falak would what, just fuck off?”
“As long as I live, the falak will sleep. I bested it in my youth, many thousands of years ago, so long ago that it lives only in memory as a legend of the desert. Yet it is no legend. Killing me will do the world no good.” He smiled as though he thought he had me in checkmate, cornered and perhaps even forced to do as he wished.
He reached out with his free hand and touched my cheek, his skin rough, hot like a flame. I snapped my head away and he laughed. “So like your mother, so full of fire and a passion for life that drives you like nothing else would. But the question is, will you burn out like she did? It seems the way of some women, to push themselves to the brink.”
With a twist of his wrist, he yanked me forward so I was on solid ground. Only he was between me and any sort of escape.
“Come to me, Zamira,” he sang. “Free me with your weapon.” His voice wove deep into my skull, tugging my feet toward him even though my mind screamed at me not to. Lila’s claws dug into my back.
“Don’t listen to him,” she whispered, and that was all I needed to pull back.
Trusting Lila was easy, but leaving the crooning power of my grandfather’s voice was not.
“I will never bring you this weapon.” My feet were on the edge of the cliff again.
He took a step toward me. “Bring it to me, granddaughter.” There was so much command in his voice that I struggled to breathe around the weight of it.
I tipped my chin up and looked down my nose at him. “And if I don’t?”
“Then I will have someone take it from you and free me from this place. And then you and I will have a discussion face to face that you will not like.”
I forced a smile. “Threats will get you asbo-fucking-lutely nowhere with me.”
With a snarl, I spun away from him and leapt off the cliff, stretching my body out as far as I could.
“No!” he roared as I fell, and there was a moment when I thought his magic might wrap around me. But it slid away, barely touching the back of my body as I fell toward the map. My eyes went to the blasted lands again, searching for the Oracle. For her haunt.
“Shift!” Lila screeched.
I did, the change flowing over me like water running downhill as if I hadn’t already shifted six times that day. Lila’s claws dug into my now smaller, furred body. She swooped across the map toward the blasted lands and I stared, finally seeing the edge of the Oracle’s Haunt right in the center.
Lila spiraled downward, and as we dropped, she managed to snake her head around so she could look me in the eye. “You see where the Oracle is?”
I nodded. “I did.”
; “And you saw what was between the Oracle and us?”
I grimaced and bared my teeth. “Yeah, I saw that too.”
Fuck, I wasn’t going to catch a break any time soon, was I?
That would be a resounding nope, not today, probably not tomorrow either.
16
Merlin
Merlin paced the large space within the pyramid where his father lay, supposedly asleep, supposedly spellbound. Five hundred steps in one direction, five hundred in the other, a perfect square of larger than average proportion.
“Why am I here? All the spells are in place. None of the booby traps have been triggered. Everything is as I left it two hundred years ago. Hell, there isn’t even a rat turd to be found in here.” He clasped his hands behind his neck as he walked, frustration ebbing and flowing through his body. He had come to be sure his father was still here, to be sure the spells had not been broken, and they were not. Yet he found himself unable to leave, unable to move forward with his other plans.
His father was working with someone. Maybe more than one someone.
And the trap that was not his own? Because it had almost killed him? How Zam’s mother had gotten in here…he had no idea. Merlin rubbed his shoulder where the arrow had torn into the flesh. It hurt, even after binding it and waiting out the healing.
He sat on the stone and leaned against the wall. “If I want to speak to him again, I must fall asleep and let myself go into his world.” Merlin pursed his lips.
All of it was a bad idea; he knew that, but he tipped his head back and closed his eyes. If he could see his father—carefully, without being seen himself this time—then he might be able to make sure the Emperor’s power was still low, that he was still weak enough for all of Merlin’s spells to hold him until Zam was ready.
Oracle’s Haunt: Desert Cursed Series Book 4 Page 13