by Tiger Gray
Of course Kiriana caught him with his hand on the latch, just as he was about to make his escape. He swallowed his emotions and turned to her.
"I told you. I have to go pick someone up."
"For that special project of yours."
Kiriana had her arms folded across her chest and she looked none too pleased. He got the impression that she'd regretted moving almost immediately. Maybe she thought Malkai had too much power over him. He knew, also, that she did not approve of his new position in Randolph's Order. She would have preferred to keep him ignorant of magic forever, or so he guessed.
"Yes. You know I can't tell you much. It's the same as it was back in the military."
Kiriana tried to give him a reasonable look but it just made her look tight lipped and strange. Knowing that she was a mage didn't help, because now he could sense the pyromancy potential simmering away within her at all times. He wished Randolph had left him ignorant on that particular point.
"Take the car."
"Are you serious?" She hardly ever let him drive it, and he usually ended up relying on one of the Order vehicles whenever he needed to get somewhere that couldn't be reached by other means.
"Why wouldn't I be?"
He bit down on that answer fast. He weighed his choices. No one should have reason to know who he was or what his purposes were. He would just be another person meeting a friend at the airport. Besides, he didn't want to know what the consequences might be if he turned down such generosity.
"All right. Thank you."
"Of course." She went and fetched the keys. She pressed them into his palm and stood on her tiptoes to kiss him.
He shivered and went outside.
* * *
"Monsieur Pinecroft!"
The voice belonged to Lizbet Astley, a woman who had given her species as dryad through their secure communications. Now, as she came towards him across the airport, Ashrinn had a face to put to the dry details. Her pale features, brightened by her rose pink lips, had the fine-boned quality he tended to associate with the French. He considered himself a good judge of character, and he felt that the bubbly, excited look was genuine. Not what he expected from a woman who wanted to join a strike team.
She had medium-length hair the color of red berberis berries, hair that had a permanent wind-blown quality. The sharp look in her clear blue-grey eyes told him that she missed very little. Well, there had to be more to her than beauty if Randolph felt her worth interviewing. She wore a blue coat and a purple silk scarf wrapped around her slender neck. Ashrinn knew enough about fine clothing to know that the item had to be hideously expensive, and by the intricate burn out work in the rich velvet it had most likely been made by a master. A slender gold bracelet clasped her thin wrist, and he could see a link or two of its match around her neck.
He wanted to delve beneath the human wrappings to see her magical self, but doing so in a crowded airport might be a bad idea. She stepped into his personal space, though, and he could feel the life-magic radiating off of her even without using his other senses. Normally such closeness from an unfamiliar woman would have made him nervous, to say the least, but her aura left him flat footed and stupid with sudden arousal.
"Thank you for meeting me!" She continued, voice thick with a Lyonnaise accent that took him a few seconds to puzzle through. "I have heard much about your roses. Prize winning, aren't they?"
Ashrinn felt himself blush. Great. Perfect way for the team leader of a top secret elite strike force to present himself to potential recruits. "You've..."
"Oh yes!" Lizbet said as they walked together through the crowded terminal, her elegant fingers looped through the handle of a set of rolling luggage. "I am sure all the little old ladies wish you did not come to their garden parties."
"Are you telling me you're volunteering for this because I grow nice roses?"
She shot him a disapproving look. "They are not just nice, Monsieur. There is more to your flowers than most plants humans try to cultivate. And I have heard I may be given access to the Arboretum. I know it is only a garden for mundanes now, but..."
She spoke in a soft voice and he didn't think anyone had heard. Still, it made Ashrinn nervous and he hurried them outside to where he'd parked Kiriana's car. He was eaten alive by curiosity and now that they were in relative isolation he let himself look at her real self. The desire he'd felt when he had first glimpsed her at the gate only intensified. Her hair became a drape of lilies, each one bursting into a shower of petals, gold, then purple, before disappearing and being replaced by a carpet of writhing vines. Her body was clothed in nothing more than leaves that crept and crawled in eye catching patterns. Her skin was the white shade of his favorite roses, dusted with fuchsia. Being in her presence made him feel alive, a feeling he couldn't say he had more than a passing familiarity with these days.
He did an admirable job of getting her in the car without betraying his feelings, as conflicted as they were. There was a moment of wrangling with all of her things. "Ah, I always over pack!" she admitted, tittering as she fastened her seat belt.
Don't make this decision based on your bollocks, man. She has to be useful, too.
He eased the car out of the parking garage. "All right, Astley," he said once they'd left the airport behind, "tell me about your skills and talents. And your species too. I've never met a dryad before."
Lizbet cocked her head, a little frown bowing her mouth as she tried to figure out where to begin. "Dryads are and are not as the stories," she said, tentative. "Our society acknowledges both perfect and imperfect dryads. The perfect ones are both what you would think of as male and female. They..." She made an abortive gesture and Ashrinn guessed she couldn't think of the proper word in English. He couldn't help her, though, mind reeling from the idea of a thing with both male and female traits. "Make themselves over and over again?" she tried, making a shape with her hands that made Ashrinn think of the rising sun.
"You mean, they clone themselves? They're all the same?"
"Yes! But me, I am imperfect. I cannot create others like me. What I must do, what I did, is call a cultivator."
Ashrinn glanced at her, so amazed by her tale that he came close to sideswiping another car. He swore under his breath, twisted the wheel and put them back on track. He thought Lizbet looked nervous, so he focused on the highway to reassure her. "What is a cultivator?"
"A human, that comes to the dryad's call and merges with her, so that she might have a physical body instead of being just spirit."
"Only imperfect dryads do this?" He stumbled over the sentence. It was hard to think of Lizbet as imperfect.
"There have only been two cases of a perfect pair calling cultivators," Lizbet told him, "so it is possible. But most perfect dryads care not for the human world."
He started towards the training grounds, since he favored it for interviews. The magical circle protecting it let very few things through that didn't have positive intent. Highway Nine unfurled before him. The fields to either side lay fallow under a scattering of frost, and what few distant buildings he could make out became hazy and indistinct as twilight fell. While in Seattle proper he would have been hemmed in on all sides by vehicles, here one could go for miles and be totally alone.
"Tell me what good you'd provide me and mine," Ashrinn said, letting a little steel creep into his voice.
She swallowed hard and the flowers in her hair went dark purple. He could see she wasn't used to being spoken to in that manner, but she wanted to impress him; she wouldn't have flown all the way from France if she weren't serious. "I can heal."
His hands tightened on the wheel, the only outward sign of his fierce hope and joy. A healer. The paladins had yet to attract anyone truly gifted in that area. Not yet, anyway; he prayed divine providence would yet make itself known in that area. "Healing is dangerous for paladins," he made himself say in a measured tone, "What about for dryads?"
"Dangerous? I am not sure what you mean. But no, not really, unl
ess I use all of my outside energy and begin to give from myself only. A dryad must have her gardens to work magic outside of her glade. That is why I am hoping to take control of the Arboretum here. It is a very impressive collection of plants and trees and I could protect it as well as draw on it. If I make a garden my own it is bound to me, you see?"
Something made faint alarm creep up his spine and he didn't answer her.
"Monsieur?"
He peered in the rear-view mirror. A dark shape?
The impact on the passenger's side answered his question. Lizbet screamed as her door buckled. Ashrinn fought to keep the car on the road. He could glimpse the other vehicle, running without its lights, as a ghostly shape darkly outlined against the deep blue dusk.
Another slam against the passenger door. They were going to kill Lizbet if they kept that up, and themselves; whoever was in control of the other car must be damned near suicidal, willing to risk his own hide like that.
He was ready for the third slam. Instead of fighting to stay on the road he let his as-yet-unknown enemy force them into the deep ditch on the side of the road. He put his efforts into controlling their descent, but he couldn't keep the car from rolling on its side, his door crunching on impact. Mud splattered his window and he felt a moment of panic as vertigo took him. The seat belt cut into his chest and for a moment he couldn't think past the pain.
Lizbet's sobbing moans broke his confusion, and he fought to get his knife free. He felt the handle brush his fingertips and his body shook at the shot of adrenaline it caused.
Yes!
The knife came free in his hand, and he sliced at his restraints with desperate strength. Free, he clambered over to Lizbet. Blood oozed from her hairline, and she looked at him as though she couldn't see him. Shit. He freed her with two precise strokes, knowing they had only seconds before their attackers came after them again.
"Lizbet," he said, and to her credit her eyes focused and she looked at him, "Listen, soldier. I need you to pull yourself out of here or we're both dead."
For a moment he thought she would pass out, trapping them both in the ruined car to be shot, or whatever the people in the other vehicle wanted to do with them. He felt confident, given how they'd introduced themselves, that it wouldn't be anything pleasant.
Her eyes brightened then as she began to manifest, tearing away her human disguise. Vines shot from her hands as she held them out, wrapping around the car door and ripping it from its hinges. She flung it outwards as she surged to her feet.
Ashrinn hauled himself out after her, going for the gun pressed cold and hard against his side. He could see the enemy now, almost on them. His mind flashed, scanning. Six men, each carrying what looked like an electrified nightstick. That old familiar sickness washed through him at the idea of being shocked, and he manifested a burst of holy power. His spirit blade dropped into his free hand, and in its light he could see them clearly. A nasty spike of fear went through his soft parts. The men had nothing to distinguish them. Nothing but their eyes, glittering in the darkness.
Snake eyes.
He took refuge in the energy Lizbet put out in waves, in her real form which he could only glimpse over his shoulder as they stood back to back without having to speak about it. She had to be as tall as a small oak now, her skin covered in iron-hard bark. The men lunged and Ashrinn fired into the group, the crackle of gunshots deafening in the relative quiet. The man in the lead rolled to the side and Ashrinn felt his gorge rise; no normal human moved like that, as though they didn't have bones to get in the way.
That man pulled a gun of his own and aimed at him. Lizbet turned and slapped the weapon out of his hand with a vine wielded like a whip. The man howled and stumbled back, but he grabbed after what amounted to, Ashrinn realized, Lizbet's limb. Corruption crawled up the length of the vine just from his touch, and Lizbet's howl ripped Ashrinn's emotional guts out. He spun towards the man hurting her, but the other three descended on him like a pack of rabid dogs.
Stupid Ashrinn. Stupid, stupid.
Agony rocketed up his arm, fired bright white into his body. The sticks felt like stun guns when they struck, and any one of them should have brought him down. The pain threatened to blind him. God, it was terrible. Awful.
Good.
He heard Lizbet shout in no language he knew, felt the ground ripple beneath him. He lost his grip on his enemy, and the man turned and hit him in the chest with his stun gun. He dropped his .45.
Anger. Agony.
Pleasure.
Ashrinn's head swam as he fell to his knees, the crude features of the enemy blurring together into meaninglessness. The pain stick came down again, across his shoulders. He came close to dropping his spirit blade, but he clutched at it with fingers that jangled with sensation.
"Don't kill him." Another voice. "He's not the target."
Ashrinn caught a glimpse of Lizbet, lighting the field as bright as day with her ambient magic. She stood in a whirling storm of petals and leaves that would never be found in a botany book, and her eyes glowed with golden fire. The earth twisted, shifted under her, cracks rippling towards him and his attackers. The fourth lay dead at her feet, crushed.
The ground opened at Lizbet's command. The creature that burst forth had a vague resemblance to a Venus fly trap, except this thing had rudimentary arms formed from twisted, thorny branches. Its head, if it could be said to have a head, was a bulbous mass split open by two rows of dripping fangs. The men who had thought to attack Lizbet stood before it, comically tiny when faced with its unnatural bulk. It opened its maw wide.
Ashrinn's knees buckled and he hit the ground hard. One of his attackers turned and ran. The monster ripped Lizbet's foes apart and ate the pieces.
Ashrinn's powers rose up, as if strengthened by hers. He could feel the pure divine energy within him, as riotous and compelling as a firestorm. It would be so easy to unleash it, to scourge the field around him to the very bedrock, to be swept away forever in pure holiness. He reached into the blue-white swirling possibility of the astral, and his familiar sprang forth into the real world like a dragon, striking at the three men tormenting him.
To Ashrinn's bafflement they backed away. The snake locked its jaws on one man's arm but he didn't fight it. He died without flinching. Ashrinn leapt at one of the men still free, not willing to let them escape. Ashrinn took him down, drove the blade home in his chest as the man pawed at him in an effort to save himself. He grabbed at Ashrinn's shirt, tore it, but he died under Ashrinn's hands before he could truly fight.
Ashrinn got to his feet, but the only remaining man turned and pounded away over the field. Ashrinn knew he couldn't manage running after. His body buzzed with sickness and his brain drowned in a sea of endorphins and adrenaline. He swayed, dropped, and as he passed into gray nothingness he felt only the faintest alarm that his scars could be seen under his ripped shirt.
* * *
Lizbet's hands on his chest brought him around. It took him a moment to become aware of the fresh burns, left by the stun weapons. By Lizbet's careful touch, tracing them, he knew they crisscrossed his flesh from neck to belly, and he prayed they would obscure the old marks. He knew it ought to hurt like hell, but he felt only a dull throb.
"Let me heal you, monsieur," Lizbet said, and he could hear how spent she was in her colorless voice. "They have hurt you badly."
Before he could protest, tell her she'd done too much already, vigor and health went through him exactly like a glass of refreshing cold water, spreading from his throat to his stomach to his extremities. He sighed, relieved. For a long moment he just laid where he'd fallen and watched the sky, now starry.
My god, the car. Kir is going to be so angry.
He opened his eyes and looked up at Lizbet, back in her human form. She smiled at him, her hair in charming disarray. He couldn't help but smile back, even in his current state.
"You're in." He coughed and laughed a weak little laugh.
"Very good, Monsieur Pinec
roft!" She said, getting up and making a show of helping him to do the same, even though she couldn't support his weight. He looked around, anticipating having to deal with bodies and vehicles, but he saw nothing. He must have had a question written on his features because Lizbet said,
"They have gone to feed the earth."
"What the hell was that thing you summoned?"
"A friend."
"Some friends you keep."
"I cannot do it very often," Lizbet told him as they limped back to the car, "It costs me so much, and it must be from my personal reserves. But sometimes, there is no choice. I am grateful that we were attacked on natural ground."
Without being asked, she caused the earth to undulate and the ditch spit the car back up on to the road, rolling it on to its wheels.
As Ashrinn turned to thank her, she collapsed. He barely caught her, distressed by how small and fragile her body felt in his arms.
"Oh Monsieur, I am so sorry. I am very embarrassed."
He put her in the car, alarmed by how she felt as though she weighed next to nothing. He stroked her hair as he did so, without thinking. She didn't seem to mind, already half asleep in the vehicle.
No seat belts.
The thought had such an absurd quality that he put his head on the steering wheel and laughed until tears rolled down his face.
He got a hold of himself soon enough, though he wanted a taste of whiskey so bad he trembled. He felt around under his feet and came up with the keys. He stuck them in the ignition, turned, and prayed. The engine turned over and purred as it came to life. The damn thing really was worth the price, after all. He poured the gas on this time, eager to get under the shields that protected the training grounds.
CHAPTER EIGHT
"I know you don't want to be here, Liucy."
You've got that right, lady. Sharp insights like that must be why you get the big bucks.
Sarah Reed, the school counselor, had been part of her week for a few months now. Ever since she'd flunked out of the Clockwork Collegium, failed at being a mage. The locks on her powers pulsed and did nothing to improve her mood.
