I rolled my eyes skyward. “I am leaving now.” I walked to where Balder stood and gave him love, scratching under his chin.
“You’re leaving him?” Ford asked.
I didn’t turn around. “I am.” I didn’t want to, but like the others, I couldn’t risk Balder’s life just because I wanted him with me. “If I don’t come back—”
“You will.” Shem dropped a hand onto my shoulder. “You have to, Zam. There is no other way for this story of yours to end.”
A shiver crawled down my spine with his words.
But were they words that would bring me home, or were they the words that would seal my doom?
22
Merlin
“Oh, Merlin, do you see where they are?” the Emperor crooned softly as he tightened his hold on Merlin’s head, squeezing until it felt as though a vise gripped him and not hands. That was the problem with the dreamscape they stood in, it held all the pain and suffering that the real world held too. “They think the Oracle will help them, but she won’t. I have made sure of it. Riddles, at best she’ll give them riddles they can’t unwind. And now you are going to help me retrieve that flail.”
Merlin stared at his father, hating him even as he spoke words that were not truly his own. “Of course.”
“Good boy. You always had a way with the animals. Do you see the birds?”
Merlin wanted to close his eyes, but he could no more escape this moment than he could escape the dreamscape he was held in. If someone woke him up on the other side, he would be free of his father.
But who would find him there, lying within his father’s prison?
Flora. She was his only hope to escape now.
“I see the birds. What do you wish for me to do with them?” he asked, his voice hoarse from hours of screaming.
He’d given his father what he wanted before he’d truly been broken. There was no other way to retain a shred of his own person on the off chance he could escape.
“I want you to possess them. Attack the dragon and the witch and gather Zam. Bring her and the flail here. To us.” The Emperor smiled. “And then I will be free.” He reached out and snapped his fingers. A clear box grew into view, within it, the crunched up body of Zam’s brother, Bryce. Golden eyes stared out at Merlin.
“You see, I had him all along. I urged the dragons to kill the lion. I know she needs him to complete the spell that would end me.” The Emperor sighed. “Foolish, but she will do whatever I ask in order to free him.”
Merlin nodded and pushed his thoughts toward the seagulls roosting for the night in the blasted lands. They rose up as a flock and the Emperor let out a roar.
“Not the seagulls, you nincompoop! The desert falcons twisted by the waste!”
Merlin bowed his head, hiding the small smile. “You were not specific, and I did not see the falcons.”
“Bullshit,” the Emperor snarled.
Before he could lay into Merlin, he moved his consciousness to the falcons that his father wanted him to take hold of. “Since they are twisted from the toxic waste, you understand they may not respond the way we hope.”
“They will do the job you tell them to. Now, take Zamira and the weapon before I lose my temper with you, son.” The Emperor dropped a hand on Merlin’s shoulder and he couldn’t help but flinch.
“Yes, sir,” he whispered as he drove his mind into that of the birds, bending them to his will, hoping that he could at least keep Zam alive. He would do all he could not to hurt her, to keep her away from the Emperor.
And that was going to be quite the challenge. He drew in a solid breath and sent the birds into attack formation.
23
The desert night was quiet now that we had walked away from the other shifters. But I could feel their eyes on us still, Ford’s especially. I had to fight not to hunch my shoulders. This was for the best. I could not take the pride consisting of women and children into the blasted lands to find the Oracle.
Ollianna stared up at Trick as he spread his wings and tipped his body to one side, offering us a way to climb up onto his back.
“I did not think I would ever fly with a dragon,” she said. “I believed they were all gone, taken to the Blackened Market.”
I froze mid-step, her words reminding me of a promise made to the dragon mothers by not only me, but Maks too. A promise to find their stolen children and bring them home. “I’m sorry, what did you say?”
“The Blackened Market. It is a place in the far east where hatchlings are taken to be sold.” Her green eyes never left Trick as she spoke. “We would see them go by on their trek every ten years.”
Ten years? I looked to Lila who nodded. “Dragons only hatch out every ten years. That is their cycle.”
I scrambled up onto Trick’s back and then leaned down, offering Ollianna a hand up. As I did, her skirt divided into pants and a thigh-high pair of black boots, laced in red satin, and her bodice shimmered, turning into a leather bustier.
“Must be nice to be able to do that,” I said, thinking about how long it had been since I’d last put on clean clothes. Far longer than I wanted to recall at this point.
“You should be able to one day.” Ollianna settled behind me. “You’re quite strong, if completely wild. Twenty years of training would do you a world of good.”
I barked a laugh. “I don’t have one year to give you, never mind twenty.” I shrugged and settled the tips of my boots against Trick’s scales, using them as a stirrup of sorts. “Besides, I just want clean clothes. I smell like I crawled through gorc shit.”
Ollianna laughed. “Yes, you do stink.” A trickle of warmth slid over me from the top of my head down to my toes. I blinked, shocked to see my clothing sparkling clean, the whites crisp, the red cloak back in place and my riding boots shined to a high gloss.
“Thanks,” I said, lifting my sleeve to sniff it. Fresh as a daisy in the spring.
“Of course. I’m downwind of you.” She laughed again and Trick laughed with her as he leapt into the sky.
“I like her,” he rumbled. “Even if she is a witch.”
I gripped my legs around the base of his neck as best I could as he winged upward, high above the blasted lands. Looking over the side of his body, the world spread out in front of us, just like it had in the dreamscape.
“Lila,” I called to her over the rush of the wind and she swung in close. “The Oracle’s Haunt was smack in the center of the blasted lands. Do you remember seeing anything that was in the way other than the obvious shit on the ground? Like the gorcs?”
She shook her head. “No, once we were passed the horde, it was clear sailing minus the toxic waste and open lava pits.” She grinned. “No problem now!”
With a tip of her wings, she barrel rolled away from us, below Trick’s belly. He grunted and watched her as she swept off to our right, using the currents to her advantage.
I could have teased them both then about the way they looked at each other, or the way Lila was casually showing off her moves, or even how Trick was being beyond helpful . . . but with each passing second, the energy around me, around us, changed, deep and warning.
As though my body knew there was more coming, that there was a battle ahead. Or maybe it was just fear of what could be, fear that I wouldn’t be able to help Bryce or Maks. Goddess of the desert, what if I had to walk away from them both? My brother and I had years where we were close as children; then after his spinal injury, he’d changed, darkened, and gotten mean. But the second the injury had lifted from his body—another of Ishtar’s games—he’d gone back to being the brother I remembered, his spirit intact along with his body.
And then there was Maks. He’d told me to leave him, to forget him, but he’d called me his mate and I felt the truth of that to the very center of my heart and soul. Like an ache in my bones, I wanted him beside me. I didn’t need him, that made me smile, but I wanted him there with me, wanted him to be my mate in life.
But if he was truly lost, was
I a fool to ignore Ford?
“Do you hear that?” Trick’s question interrupted my musing.
I tipped my head to the side, catching the wind with one ear, but we were moving fast enough that I got nothing but the rush of the air. “Nothing. What do you think you hear?”
“Wings. Lots and lots of wings.” He grumbled, and around us the clouds billowed, drawing in close around us.
Ollianna grabbed my shoulders. “Does he know that lightning through him will hurt us?”
“Trick!” I yelled right before the first boom of thunder went off.
He grunted. “I’m not a complete fool. I know not to use my lightning with you on my back.” I wasn’t so sure as a bolt of lightning shot past us, barely missing us as if he’d not remembered until the last second.
The sudden storm eased though, as if maybe he had forgotten. Ollianna’s grip didn’t lessen on my shoulders, and her hand brushed against the handle of the flail. Just a bump. She wasn’t trying to touch it, I don’t think.
But the flail didn’t know that.
She screamed and jerked her hand away, or I should say tried to jerk her hand away. The wooden handle of the flail stuck to her and when she pulled, I was yanked from my seat. “What the fuck?” I yelped as I tumbled backward. The flail slid from the sheath on my back and I reached up and grabbed it, the only thing between me and a freefall as I hung from Trick’s side. I looked up to see the wooden handle seemingly glued to the back of Ollianna’s hand, splinters piercing her skin, and her face as pale as the white snow of the Witch’s Reign.
“Let her go,” I growled, tightening my grip on the handle.
The flail shivered, warmed and stuck harder to my hand. I locked eyes with Ollianna. “Brace yourself, I’m going to pull it free.”
She nodded. “Hurry, it’s drawing my magic.”
“Lila, I’m going to fall! Catch me!” I yelled as I put my feet against Trick’s side and shoved, pulling the flail with me. It let Ollianna go, and she screamed as her hand tore . . . and for just a moment, I thought there was laughter in the air as I flipped backward into open sky. I floated there, hanging as though I wasn’t about to plummet to my death, and then the world caught up with me and I dropped, arms and legs wide, cloak splayed out behind me. I clung to the flail, unable to get it back into the sheath as I fell.
A blur of sparkling blue and silver shot past me. “Shift!” Lila yelled. “I’ll catch you!”
I breathed out and tried to shift, I did. But it was too much. I had nothing left in me to give, there had been too many shifts of my body back to back. “I can’t!”
“Coming!” roared Trick.
Only he didn’t make it to me first.
Those wings he’d heard? Yeah, they were not figments of his imagination. I twisted around as the cry of a hunting falcon cut through the air. I looked up in time to see a blur of tawny and red feathers right before a set of talons wrapped around me, crushing my arm that held my flail to my side.
“Zam!” Lila screamed as more oversized turkeys dropped down on us. They were desert falcons, but not normal. Their beaks held teeth, and they had two sets of wings each, three eyes in their oversized heads and irises of solid white.
Trick dropped through the flock, smashing at them with his tail and snapping his teeth. But they were quick and maneuvered around him easily.
I reached up with my free hand to the belly of the bird that held me in its talons. “Listen here, bird, you better land nice and pretty or I’ll be eating roasted chicken for a week, motherfucker!”
The bird shivered and its beak opened. “I have her, Father. I will bring her to you.”
I stared up at the bird’s face and it glanced down at me, an image wavering within its eyes like the flash of lightning, burning into my retinas.
Merlin stared back at me. This was Merlin’s doing. I jammed my free hand up against the bird’s belly. “Merlin, you piece of shit, what are you doing? You said you would help me, not him!” I punched hard, snapping ribs. The bird breathed out and tried to breathe back in, but I drove my fist into it again before it could.
The talons tightened, piercing through my skin where they gripped. “Chicken noodle soup!” I yelled. “Spatchcock chicken! Barbecued drumsticks! Stuffed chicken roll! I can make all of that with you!”
Something slammed into the falcon’s back as I punched. Brown and golden feathers floated down all around me as Lila shrieked, ripping the bird apart with a ferocity that would make any dragon proud. The falcon stumbled midair and turned to the side, wings tucked close to its body as its eyes rolled into its head. I wasn’t sure it was even still alive, but it wasn’t letting me go either. If anything, the talons tightened on me.
Ah, fucking hell.
“Take the weapon when she’s dead if you must.”
That was the Emperor, and apparently he was still pissed about me turning him down again. But where was his voice coming from? In my mind? I didn’t like that one bit.
I twisted my head as the bird and I fell, trying desperately to see if the old asshole was loose from his prison somehow. “Lila, little help here!”
She was there in a flash, her claws digging into the body of the falcon, her wings beating hard against the combined weight. Too small to grab us both. Too small to help me as I tumbled through the air.
“I can’t stop you!” she cried.
With my free hand I tried to pry the talons off me, but the harder I pulled on them, the tighter they got until I could barely breathe. I clutched at the flail. The Emperor wanted it, and he was going to have to take it over my cold, dead body. Which, with the way the ground rushed up to meet me, wasn’t going to be very long. I gritted my teeth as I stared at the rocks that I could now clearly see below us. A hundred feet up, I wasn’t going to be falling much longer.
A whoosh of feathered wings and something grabbed onto the flail I still gripped. The new falcon screeched as the twin spiked balls dug into the bone and skin of its feet.
Energy pulsed through the flail and for the first time . . . I considered using it. Using it as it was meant to be used by a Jinn.
“Fuck!” I hated it but there was no choice. I drew the energy of the oversized falcon into me, taking its life force so fast that the big bird was just there, and then nothing but an empty bag of a skeleton with a few feathers on it in midair.
The rush of strength that flowed from it into me was just as instant. I flexed my body against the talons that held me, snapping them backward as if they were brittle twigs. I pushed out of the bird’s hold and leapt, shifting to my cat form. The energy from the bird gave me all I needed to shift, despite how many times my body had been shoved through it.
Lila didn’t hesitate, her claws finding me only ten feet from the ground. “Pull up, pull up!” I yelled as our momentum dragged us through the air too fast.
She grunted, her wings beating hard, the call of the hunting falcons above us, the screech and roars of Trick and then a sudden red rain splattering down all around us. Lila banked hard, our combined weight throwing her off and we hit the ground at high speed. I rolled, tumbling until I smashed into a pile of rocks, bounced off them and landed at the edge of a pool of toxic, bubbling waste. I didn’t let myself consider if I was hurt, or had broken bones. I just scrambled backward, breathing hard, wincing as my injuries caught up with me. Ribs again, damn it, back leg, back of my neck. All had taken a beating. But even as I thought of those injuries they faded, the energy from the flail absorbing power and strength from the falcon enough to heal me faster than ever before. I bounded up onto a pile of rocks.
Lila was at the bottom, unmoving, blood pooling around her. “No.” I could barely breathe the word around my shock.
No, no, no. This was not happening. I refused to let this happen.
I raced down, skidding, my heart in my throat. “Lila, Lila, wake up!”
I didn’t even think to look for more of the falcons, but I should have. Two dropped to the ground on either side of us,
their tawny feathers speckled with blood. They snapped their toothy beaks at me like some fucking dinosaurs dug up from the past.
I hissed and arched my back. What I wouldn’t give to be that jungle cat once more.
I got closer to them, putting myself between them and Lila. They cocked their heads side to side and a trill rippled out of them.
One of them lifted his talon, reaching for me. “Not today, you chicken shit.” I shifted to two legs as I stood, swinging the flail as hard as I could. It connected with the first one’s head, drew out its life and energy, and then I back swung it toward his friend.
Both birds were down in a matter of seconds and I took the energy for myself, holding it tightly. I would need it for Lila.
I turned and dropped to my knees, scooping her into my arms. There was a wound at the base of her skull where she’d rammed into the rocks at high speed. I closed my eyes and searched for her through our connection.
So faint, it was so faint, and I already knew that this was going to be too close. I pushed my energy into her, using the extra from the falcons to bolster it. “You can’t leave me, Lila, you can’t. You have to stay. You have to find a way to be who you were meant to be.” My lips were against her side as I followed the wounds with whatever strange magic I had in me, fighting to fix her.
There was a heavy thud behind me. “You should have seen the witch! Those birds exploded as if we’d stuffed them full of pop rocks!” And then Trick was over my shoulder. “What happened? Is she okay?”
I shook my head. “We fell. I managed to shift but our weight was too much and we crash landed.” The words tumbled out of me. Her heartbeat was stronger, but she was still unconscious. “Ollianna, why isn’t she waking up?”
Ollianna pressed her hands over mine. “She was too far gone. Remember what I said about Ford? You caught him before he went too far, but she . . . you have to let her go, Zam. She’ll drag you down with her if you don’t.”
Oracle’s Haunt: Desert Cursed Series Book 4 Page 19