Shifting marginally, I positioned the potentate and Grant in the same shot. The captain’s muscular frame accentuated the delicacy of the dryad, his folded height emphasizing her short stature. A shot of the potentate alone would be a journalistic triumph, but the two of them juxtaposed, the ultimate human warrior kneeling in front of the regal dryad leader, his coiled strength and raw power displayed in an almost vulnerable offering to her, was solid newsstand gold.
“Drop your shield, Nathan,” Grant whispered. “We’re on the same side here.”
Nathan hesitated before letting his ward unravel.
When the last dryad had licked the final drops of the liquid from the oak leaf, the potentate returned it to Grant. He accepted it with a bow of his head, then rose and tucked the leaf back into the pouch at his waist. Only then did he address the dryad leader.
“Please, tell me what has scared you.”
“A spriggan.” Her voice rustled like dry leaves shaken together, and it took a moment for her words to register.
Cold dread plummeted through my stomach. Beside me, Grant turned to stone, his captain’s mask sliding into place.
“A spriggan? Here? How close?” Nathan spun, as if expecting to find one creeping up behind him.
“Stay calm,” Grant ordered.
“Maybe you don’t understand the severity of the situation.” Nathan’s voice escalated in volume. “A spriggan will kill everything in its path. There’s no stopping it. This entire grove, the forest, the city! The only option is fire, but even that might not kill—”
Grant clapped a patch of air over Nathan’s babbling mouth. The writer’s eyes bulged, then darted to check our surroundings. A forest of spears had been primed, each aimed at Nathan’s throat, and trickles of wood element seeped from the oaks, coalescing into ominous magical clubs.
“I am well aware of the severity of the situation,” Grant said, though nothing in his tone or body language indicated he felt threatened by the dryads. He turned to address the potentate. “Fire inside the dryads’ grove is not the answer. I have another way of stopping a spriggan.”
“You do?” I blurted out.
Ferocious, resilient, and bordering on unstoppable, spriggans demolished any living creature or plant in their paths. The dryads wouldn’t be able to flee either; they couldn’t abandon the trees to which their lives were bound. If a spriggan lurked close enough to the grove for the dryads to identify it, it was close enough to wipe out the entire Emerald Crown population. The last reported encounter with a spriggan had been a decade earlier on the East Coast, and it had decimated over a thousand acres before being stopped. Destroying it had required the combined efforts of three FPD units. Spriggans were also so rare their race teetered on the brink of extinction, and yet Grant miraculously possessed a mysterious weapon powerful enough to bring this monster down.
“You, alone, can stop a spriggan?” I couldn’t disguise my disbelief.
Grant didn’t look away from Potentate Heartwood. “I know of a way.”
Nathan finally had the wherewithal to detach Grant’s silencing spell using a flick of earth magic, and he pushed forward, stopping just short of getting in the captain’s face. “Show us.”
“I don’t have it on me.” For the first time, Grant’s confidence cracked. It was only the flick of his tongue across his lips, but the tiny gesture betrayed him.
“Where is it?” I asked.
“In Beldame Zipporah’s clutches.”
My heart sank.
“The harpy?!” Nathan jabbed his fingers through his dark hair and fisted them, tugging hard enough to jiggle his ears. “She won’t give anything to anyone. Not without exacting her fee—usually a body part or two. Shards and splinters, we’re in deep trouble!”
“I could use your help,” Grant said, surprisingly addressing Nathan and me.
“Oh no, that’s way outside the parameters of this—”
“I want you both to return to Terra Haven and contact my squad,” Grant said, overriding Nathan’s protests.
“Done!” Nathan turned as if expecting to immediately escape the clearing, but the dryads surrounding us pulled short his retreat.
“It doesn’t take two people to send a message,” I said. I wasn’t going to miss out on meeting Beldame Zipporah. I’d never chance a solo pilgrimage to the notorious harpy, and I’d never get a safer opportunity than in the company of the strongest elemental I knew. Plus, I was determined to go wherever the story took me.
“Have your brains been addled?” Nathan hissed. “You’re a reporter, not a fighter. This is the problem with your lack of experience in the field. You’re so intent on the story, you haven’t figured out how to keep yourself separate from it. Leave the dangerous stuff to the professionals. Don’t forget the first rule of journalism: Don’t make yourself a part of your own story.”
“I thought the first rule was to follow every lead.” I folded my arms across my chest and switched my glare to the captain when he looked as if he would support Nathan’s protests. “We’re wasting time.”
Grant studied my face. “Fine. Nathan will go alone.”
Nathan shrugged, the gesture saying he’d done his part to save me from myself, and he would walk away with a clean conscience. Grant gave Nathan the communication signature of the base where his squad could be contacted, then sent the writer on his way. The dryads parted, and Nathan minced through the narrow opening, then bolted down Wicker Road toward Terra Haven without a backward glance. The trees lining the road quietly observed his passing.
“Will he follow through or just run?” Grant asked.
“He’ll follow through. He wants the story.”
If I’d run away with so much riding on this story, I never would have been able to live with myself, but the thought of encountering Zipporah—and then a spriggan!—made my knees quiver. I corralled my anxiety and buried it beneath a heaping pile of curiosity, pulling to the forefront the question that guided every story I wrote: What would my readers want to know?
“Why didn’t you send an air message? It would have been a lot faster.” For anyone else, catapulting an air message across several miles would have been too taxing for their magical abilities, but I’d seen Grant’s power in action. If he had wanted to, he could have gotten a message straight to his squad.
“Because at least this way one of you is getting to safety.” He turned away to confer with the potentate.
I snapped my mouth shut and concentrated on collapsing my camera and tucking it safely back in my bag.
“Why does Grant think Beldame Zipporah will have a weapon to fight the spriggan?” Quinn whispered. “And why did Nathan act like she’s worse than a spriggan?”
I crouched next to him to keep our conversation private. “Zipporah’s an elemental harpy. Unlike most of her species, all the powers of her human half are intact, and it’s said she’s horribly powerful. She lives deep in the forest, far from anyone, but her reputation is near legendary. She’s a trader and collector of unique and illegal objects, and she preys on the desperate. It’s rumored that whatever you want, she can get it for you, but Nathan was right: She always exacts a price.”
“How dangerous is she?”
“Deadly. But we’ll be with the estimable captain, so no harm will befall us.” I hoped I wasn’t lying to Quinn.
“A direct assault will be suicide.”
Grant’s firm declaration snapped my head up. A cluster of larger dryads had gathered behind the potentate, the true warriors of the gentle race. They formed a half circle in front of the captain.
“The spriggan will reach Colden Creek before nightfall. We will not stand aside while our young are murdered,” Potentate Heartwood said.
“I’m saying your strategy is flawed, not that you should give up. The spriggan is stronger than all of you combined. If you insist on a straightforward attack, you will perish and it won’t even slow the spriggan. Your sacrifices will mean nothing, and your children will die.”
“What do you propose?” she finally asked.
“Allow me to defeat the spriggan,” Grant said.
“We cannot wait—”
“I wouldn’t expect you to. I need you to keep the spriggan occupied and prevent it from advancing. Hassle, harry, and distract it until I come back from Zipporah’s, but don’t try to attack it directly.”
The potentate took her time mulling over his words before nodding. “We will try your method.”
She signaled the dryads clustered around her, and they departed, melting into the forest beyond the meadow. More than half the dryads remained, each clutching a weapon. How many of them would pit their lives against the spriggan?
“Thank you, Potentate Heartwood.” Grant’s diplomatic serenity hardened into a granite mask as he turned to me. “We need to move quickly, Kylie. Link with me.”
From my crouched position, Grant looked like a giant. I stood and straightened my bag on my shoulder. Grant and I had linked our magic before, but only as part of a larger group. A two-person link was far more intimate, and I collected my magic self-consciously. A person did not make it into the ranks of the Federal Pentagon Defense without being a full-spectrum pentacle potential, meaning Grant could wield all the elements at full strength. My skills ran toward air and to a lesser extent wood and fire, but my abilities with earth and water were limited. Compared to Grant, they were downright pathetic.
“Any day now, Kylie.”
I glanced around at the dryads’ anxious nut-brown faces and stopped dithering. Linking required collecting an equal level of each element into a single cohesive bundle. It would have worked with a thimbleful of each of the five elements, but pride made me draw as much water and earth as I could hold, then match their levels with air, fire, and wood. I passed this knot of magic to Grant, and he absorbed it into his own, bridging our magic into one.
As if I had linked with a gargoyle, his magic opened vast and powerful between us, as accessible to me as it was to him. However, unlike the pure enhancement of a gargoyle, Grant’s magic contained the flavor of his personality and abilities all blended into a riveting magical signature. The sensual, crackling energy of a powerful thunderstorm rolled across my senses, sparking down my nerve endings. I muffled my gasp. His magic was everything that the man himself promised, and it was breathtakingly sexy.
When Grant opened himself to Quinn’s enhancement, the sensation doubled, and I closed my eyes, basking in the midst of a wild storm, safe and supercharged at the same time.
“Anchor yourself,” Grant said, his voice oddly loud. “Find your magic within the link, find your signature, and steady yourself. Just like in a group link, you need to remain separate while being part of the whole.”
I suppressed a smile, grateful that he had mistaken my foolish indulgence as a loss of magical control, not an unfurling of my libido. Our magic was remarkably compatible but in no way mirrored, and I had no trouble separating myself from him. Nevertheless, I pulled back a smidgen on the link, pretending to collect myself before I opened my eyes.
Grant stood so close I wondered if he had thought he might have to prop me up. I gave him a bright smile and stepped away from him, throttling the split-second impulse to fake a faint just to have him catch me.
“I’m anchored.”
Grant narrowed his eyes at me, and I wondered if he suspected the truth. Then he turned to the potentate. “We will need the most direct path possible to Zipporah’s nest. Time is of the essence.”
The trees rustled and creaked, branches shifting and twisting to open an almost arrow-straight line due east.
“Wow!” Quinn whispered.
I wished I hadn’t already packed my camera. I’d known the dryads controlled all the trees in Emerald Crown Grove, not just those to which they were bonded—the violent, restless oaks along Wicker Road had proved as much—but I’d had no idea the extent of their authority.
Grant seemed to have expected nothing less, and while Quinn and I had gaped at the forest’s transformation, he had been busy creating a platform of air. Hardly larger than the rug I had flown through the city on, it hovered a few inches above the ground. However, it supported the captain’s weight without flexing when he stepped on it.
“Let’s go.” Grant held a hand out to me.
“Couldn’t you make it a bit bigger?” Even with us both standing, I would have to be pressed up against him to fit on the platform.
“I could, but I’d rather conserve my strength. If you would prefer, you can wait here.”
I slapped my hand into his and climbed behind him onto the see-through platform.
5
Situating my feet behind Grant’s, I wrapped my arms loosely around his waist and vacillated over my hand placement: Gripping his belt seemed logical until I realized how low that positioned my hands, but anything else made me feel like I was copping a feel of him through the supple material of his uniform. Grant solved the issue by pressing my fluttering hands against his rock-hard abs. His muscles bunched beneath my fingers and I stilled. Our feet had to touch for me to fit on the platform behind him, and I held myself stiffly so my chest didn’t brush his backside.
“Stay close and keep us boosted,” Grant instructed Quinn.
The gargoyle nodded and launched into the air. This time the oaks let him pass freely, and when he cleared the shade of the meadow, the sun made his citrine body almost too bright to look at.
“Have you ever flown on an air platform?” Grant asked.
I shook my head, then realized he couldn’t see, but he must have felt the movement, because he added, “Bend your knees and sink into your center of gravity. Hold on.”
The platform shifted beneath my feet, and I clutched Grant’s shirt to save myself from tumbling off the back. I settled into my stance and loosened my grip, reestablishing the gap between our bodies. We glided through the crowd of dryads, who parted like the trees to let us pass. Grant tugged magic through the link, drawing on my power as he increased our speed. I followed the lines of his magic down to the platform, studying how he had created the solid sheet of air beneath us and how he maintained it as we traveled. The weave was ridiculously complex, but I thought I might be able to re-create it, if on a much smaller scale. I’d never be able to support myself, let alone two people, with just my own magic.
On the back end of the platform, spiraling turbines of air laced with delicate strands of fire propelled us, similar to those on Jolene’s flying carpet, but far more sophisticated and efficient.
Grant revved up the turbines and the platform jetted forward. I cinched my arms tight around him when my balance tipped backward, plastering myself to him for stability. We rocked in unison, but Grant’s sturdy legs stabilized us, and I didn’t dare relax my grip again. In my peripheral vision, oaks flashed past faster than shutter clicks. My loose hair whipped in the wind, stinging my cheeks and eyes, and I pressed my face into the subtle hollow between Grant’s shoulder blades, using a trickle of air to wrap the blond strands behind my ear and hold them in place. When I looked for Quinn, I found him gliding above us, keeping up as easily as if he were attached by a kite string.
Grant’s scent swirled around me, a delicious aroma of sun-warmed skin spiced with subtle notes of energized ozone, the by-product of his magic. I inhaled a second, heady breath, and my thoughts stuttered. I’d entertained a fair share of foolish fantasies of being this close to Grant, but in them, I’d always been held in his arms, not the other way around. I hadn’t known what I
was missing. Though I’d seen the outline of his figure through his uniform, I hadn’t realized quite how solid he was until now. His stomach flexed underneath my hands and his backside bunched against my stomach each time he made a minute balance adjustment, every inch of him enticingly firm.
What I wouldn’t give to see this man naked.
I mentally shook my head at myself. Not only was Grant well out of my league, but also I had more important things to do than contemplate his delicious body against mine.
Keeping my movements to a minimum and corralling my thoughts back onto a professional track, I tilted my head up and shouted into the wind, “When did you become aware of a problem in Emerald Crown Grove?”
His ribs expanded in a sigh before he answered. “An hour before you showed up.”
Considering it’d taken me a half hour to get to the forest, my scout had been recording the merchant’s frightened words around the same time Grant had learned about the riled dryads. Not too bad, though I made a mental note to expand the range of my scouts beyond the borders of Terra Haven. If not for the merchant returning to town, I would have missed this story completely.
“The dryads chased at least one person from Wicker Road, and I nearly got trampled by another wagon on my way in. If they were trying to get everyone safely away from the spriggan, that doesn’t explain why they looked ready to kill us.”
Grant didn’t respond, and I realized I’d failed to present an actual question. Rolling my eyes, I added, “Why did they treat us like the enemy at first? What did you mean when you said they were ‘frenzied’?”
“It’s their defense. When their grove is threatened, it triggers a berserker response in the dryads. Once frenzied, they perceive every outsider as an enemy, and they can be shockingly vicious. We’re fortunate the potentate held them in check long enough for me to calm them.”
“How did you know to bring the herbal theriaca?”
Deadlines & Dryads Page 4