He looked at Saff and Nehemaiah then to Minerva.
“Oh, I’m just a measly human,” Minerva said.
His lurid green eyes were fixed just over Minerva’s head. There was nothing there… or… wait. Saff frowned and raised a hand, causing a puff of cold air in the direction. The man chuckled and pointed, as though he were watching something none of them could see.
And they could not, but Saff’s senses told her that something indeed had been near Minerva.
“Um…”
“Oh, take that, worm-face!” he exclaimed.
“Rude.” Minerva crossed her arms.
“There are other things here, Nerv. They are drawn to the magic, but they are not on this plane of existence.” Saff felt her stomach growing tight from the tension in the room. “My name is Saffyranae, and you know what we are, so let us drop pretension.”
“That’s fine. I’m Clay Jorgenson.”
Minerva’s brows shot up.
“You should… You should leave our house now,” Clay said flatly, looking irritated and unsettled.
“Let us help you,” Saff pleaded. “The damage done to you cannot entirely be undone, but I can help you heal.”
“You aren’t… I don’t need…” Clay blinked and screwed his brows together.
“Our shamans can help you, too. Our people can help you control your powers, perhaps find whatever has done this to you.”
“Keep your pity! My brother has plans.”
“What’s wrong with him?” Nehemaiah asked her.
Saff could have explained, but it would have taken too long, and she didn’t know if she could encourage Clay to help the while talking so blatantly about his magic-induced impairment. She didn’t know if she could convince him at all, and not only did she not want to hurt Clay, there was a strategic flaw in having both her and Nehemaiah go into battle at the same time.
She never settled on a plan.
Clay reached for his watch, and suddenly, a blaring alarm sounded trilling and swelling as a secondary security system sprung to life. Magic rose all around the house, shaking the ground and causing lights to flash all around the windows.
A thunderous wave rolled over the outside, knocking them to the ground. And Saff felt it: Over a dozen of their warriors in blinding pain, and then, nothing.
Nothing.
Three soldiers left in agony, and the rest dead.
Saff couldn’t think. She couldn’t breathe.
38
Minerva
Minerva had been able to tell that Clay had stopped processing everything Saff was saying. It seemed like he could only focus for a little bit, and probably, knocking them on their asses had taken a bit of strength, even if Saff and Nehemaiah seemed to think of him as some kind of powerhouse. He looked more like a wilted orchid.
Not a shocker that the guy would pull an alarm on the three interlopers who had made it clear that they’d taken out the guards. Guards who were probably awake by now, thanks to the damn loudest security alarm she’d ever heard.
But something else was happening. Something she couldn’t sense or comprehend. After a rumbling in the ground, Saff had let out a shriek of anguish, turning this way and that.
“Saff! What is it?” Minerva tried to grab her arm, but Saff jerked away and shrieked again. “Saff!”
“Calm yourself, Saffyranae!” Nehemaiah ordered.
“They’re dead! They’re dead!” Saff screamed. She folded over like a flower closing in on itself at sunset and hugged her arms. “Oh, gods!”
“Who is---” Nehemaiah was cut short as Chuck ran into the room, likely drawn by Saff’s cries.
Nehemaiah swept his arm around and backhanded Chuck so hard that he hit the ground unconscious.
Team! Come! Nehemaiah called. Then, he stilled. Blinked. He reached out for Saff. “Rise. We must retreat!”
“What is going on?” Minerva demanded.
She received no answer and threw her hands in the air when Nehemaiah turned instead to lay out two other guards. Clay rolled backward in his chair, putting as much distance between himself and the intruders in his home.
Minerva didn’t feel like dealing with these guard again, and she bet that Clay didn’t have as much power as he let on. She rounded on him.
“What did that button do?” she demanded. “Someone in this fucking room is going to answer me.”
“Security,” he muttered, looking away from her.
She clamped her hands on the sides of his chair. “I know security systems. We disabled that.”
“Not that kind.”
Minerva looked up. Saff was still shaking, though she kept trying to rise. The room had grown so cold that there was frost on the windows, and Clay shuddered.
“You’re gonna kill us, Saff!” Minerva shouted.
“And I cannot use magic while you are doing that,” Nehemaiah snapped. “Get a hold of yourself. We will mourn our dead later.”
Our dead. It could only be…
“The security took out all of those soldiers outside?” Minerva asked Clay.
“No soldiers, just magical creatures.”
“Dragons are magical creatures! It just murdered all of their friends!” Minerva said.
Clay flinched backward.
Shit. Between these three, it would be a miracle if they managed to get anything done.
“We aren’t going to hurt you. I’m human, like you, and clearly you care about this little boy, and I care about them too! I just want to make sure they get to survive!” Minerva let his chair go and stood over him. “But I think that asshole over there might decide to kill every one of your guards, and Saff is definitely going to freeze us with her grief if we don’t do something.”
“Why should I?” His eyes were flickering around again. He reminded her of a kitten distracted by a gnat. In this case, an extra-dimensional gnat?
“Because you’ll die? Because the egg might die?” Minerva looked over him curiously. “Do you care if you die? Look, I know Saff can be shitty with the human interaction thing, and both of them treat us like we’re pets or something. Like we’re disposable and we don’t matter, and they can talk about us like we’re not even there. But Saff is so much more than some inscrutable, superior Amazon magical creature! She cares with every inch of her body, and she feels everything.”
Clay’s eyes drifted over to Saff. He swallowed and pressed the button on his wrist. The alarm stopped, but of course, Nehemaiah was still struggling with the guards. Four were out cold on the ground, but the two at the doorway were giving him trouble.
“Thank you,” Minerva said, touching Clay’s scrawny hand before rushing over to Saff and wrapping her arms around her. “Saff, please, you’ve got to calm down.”
“Rara, Minerva,” Saff gasped. “He died. He died, and Yuffy is at his side in so much pain…”
“Can you go to, Yuffy? How many are alive? Can you heal them?”
“Could one of you help me?” Nehemaiah said, shoving one black-eyed man back.
“Stop,” Clay ordered. “Stand down, for now.”
Neither man even glanced at Clay.
“They don’t listen to me,” Clay told Minerva.
Minerva shook her head. “I know the feeling, buddy.”
39
Clay
He could feel the dragon woman’s pain. He truly hadn’t thought about anything other than getting them out of here when he’d hit the panic button. Her agony was palpable. And the rest of the guards were shuddering masses of black goo and rage. Even if the guards had ever listened to him, they wouldn’t now.
Clay had never done anything like that mental shove before. Like the button, it had been an action of panic. But now, he held his hand up and focused on the guards. There were three of them now. Together they had cornered the dragon man and held him against the wall.
“Turn off the ice, Saffyranae,” he roared.
Clay could see the creatures stalking along the ceiling. They’d steered clear of Miner
va, unlike the other fluttering creatures that had no sense, but their eyes flashed hungrily. They’d been watching for a while, since they’d gotten a taste of Roger. Then, they’d fed of their own will, but they looked interested… Did they follow him for a reason?
Clay pointed at the guards, one was now holding a gun to the dragon’s head. “Stop them!”
Shadow heads twisted around, looking at Clay curiously. They almost looked funny that way, frozen mid-movement, looking to him with their smoldering eyes.
“Go! Get those three!”
The movement was so fast that even Clay could barely follow. They were on the men in a second, their fangs on throats, sucking out black magic and scratching at their bodies. Eerily, the guards didn’t scream. Not in that condition, they wouldn’t. So blissed out on magic and power, they wouldn’t feel a thing.
But they were dead in moments.
Nehemaiah curled his lip and looked up at Clay in disbelief. Minerva bobbed her head in approval.
Clay sunk his head into his hands. He was so tired. He shook, uncontrollably, from his exertions over the last few minutes, and he still wasn’t sure these people wouldn’t kill him. They might. They ought to, really.
However inadvertently, he’d killed their friends.
The noise and scents of the creatures around him seemed amplified in his exhaustion. He could feel the egg reaching out to him, calling, in its way, to check on him. And now he could feel the pain of the survivors outside, too.
He curled over in his chair and tried desperately to block out everything.
40
Saffyranae
Saff reached for Minerva’s hand and squeezed tightly. Minerva leaned over to look her in the eye. Minerva was crying the tears that Saffyranae could not. Even Nehemaiah seemed to ache now. With the rush of the fight fading away, and the guards either dead or concussed, he seemed to acknowledge the pain of the deaths she’d felt long before him.
They were his soldiers, after all. He had trained many of them.
“’Maiah,” Saff said in a near whisper. “Could you go tend to the warriors outside? There are only three left, and Yuffy is fading. She won’t survive without help, grieving her twin as she is.”
Nehemaiah, not normally one to take orders, rose from the floor and loped out of the door. Saff leaned on Minerva a little as she rose to her feet. Clay couldn’t see her. He was balled up. She could almost hear the chaos in his mind. He’d used so much to fight them, and then to save them, that he had no resources, and she could barely see the dark creatures that had brutalized and then drained three of the guards, but their energy was clustering around Clay now.
“Shoo,” Saff ordered, holding both hands up as she approached Clay. “You have fed. Go about your business now.”
She didn’t know if that would work. They were beyond her kin. Regardless, she knelt by Clay’s side and cupped his head in both of her hands. At the very least, she could clear away some of his confusion.
Do you hear my voice, Clay? I am here, and I am not angry. Simply sad. Let us not war. Let me help you, Saff pleaded.
He shuddered again, violently, and she could feel the whirling senses of so many worlds that he could perceive colliding. She pushed harder.
Let me help you, Clay. Please. This is more of a favor to my kind, than to you. Let me help you. She pressed a kiss to his cold, sweat-soaked forehead. You have saved this child. It is a gift we can never repay you. Let me help you.
The block inside him began to fall away. Slowly, he opened his eyes to hers, and she flooded his body with warm healing magic. Healing his insides was not the same as healing a laceration or a burn or a bruise. It took more, and it was complicated, and she leaned on his best guesses of what he felt like he should feel like.
In the end, his eyes looked on her, wet with tears and full of confusion. This time, however, it was not the confusion of the chaos inside him. He was responding to her, and he was very, very torn.
This made sense. Saffyranae knew for a fact that if her loyalties were suddenly split between her kind and another, she would have a very hard time of it.
“Thank you,” Clay said. The words were small and hindered, as if even that much had to be torn from his throat.
Saff was not surprised. He’d used what magic he had already to save their boy and gone beyond his limits to throw them against the wall and beg the shadow things that followed him on their attackers. Clay Jorgenson had been weakened, it seemed, for years by his affliction. Tonight had probably drained him in more ways than even a nascent shaman could determine.
Patting his hand, Saff stood up and offered him a small smile. “Rest, Clay, just rest,”
She looked to the guards on the floor. These men, who Nehemaiah had taken care of readily, were unaffected by magic, though they might not wake for some time. She went to the first and placed her hand on his forehead. When his eyes opened, she pinned him down with the same hand.
“You will go to Clay and do as he says to help him,” she ordered.
“I, um…”
“Go.” Saff looked up at Minerva, who was tying up the others.
The guard glanced to Minerva in confusion and a look passed between them. Then, he went to Clay’s side as instructed.
The next few minutes passed in a blur of suffering. She struggled with every breath, every motion. The deaths tore through her, into the depths of her soul. It wasn’t just that they’d lost dragon warriors, but that she’d lost a dear friend and had doubts that Yuffy would yet live. At the same time, Saff had to take some time in a side room to breathe, to focus her emotions. The last thing she wanted was to push how she felt away, but if she couldn’t control her feelings then she’d freeze everything in her path, which would literally kill Minerva and keep Nehemaiah from being able to access his abilities. Gods, it had almost gotten them killed by the guards earlier.
But everything ached.
She’d brought information, and it had been wrong. She’d brought it in good faith and, yet, over a dozen dragon warriors—friends some—were still gone, snuffed out in one of the most painful ways possible by a magical trap she couldn’t have foreseen.
Slipping from the side room, confident (mostly) that her power would not escape and leak from her, that she would not hinder Nehemaiah’s fire, Saff sought the old warrior out. He, Minerva, Yuffy, and the two other surviving dragons were huddled in a modest sized roomed lined with TVs. Most were turned off, but a few showed the interior rooms of the estate. Saff’s throat clenched. Of course, Nehemaiah or Minerva (most likely Nerv) had figured out how to shut the screens off. They would have shown the grounds where the corpses of over a dozen honorable yet fallen dragon soldiers lay.
Saff breathed in deeply again and forced the pain away. She would not drain Maiah’s powers now, would control herself no matter what. “I’m so sorry.”
Minerva held a thick jacket—maybe something confiscated from the guards, who knew—up tightly against Yuffy’s side. Her friend was ashen and blood dripped still from a deep wound on her head. Saff’s heart fell into rhythm with her Yuffy’s, and she felt it flutter slower and slower. Sympathy would not kill her, but it allowed her to know exactly how close to the edge Yuffy was skirting, how deeply into dangerous and injured territory her friend was sinking.
Thank you, she broadcast privately to Minerva.
She would tend to Yuffy soon, but she had to confer with Nehemaiah now, had to figure out what their next steps would be. “I just… I don’t know what else to say, Nehemaiah. We had this from the guard’s information, his private schedule. We thought this was where the auction would happen.”
The old warrior nodded to where Lianeesa clutched the strongly glowing egg to her chest. She did it with only one arm as the other hung uselessly at her side, but the egg shimmered with a strong cobalt light, its health as vigorous as ever.
“We saved one,” Nehemaiah said, “and we know now who is behind all of this.”
Saff blinked. Conceding to
anyone was far from Nehemaiah’s nature. He’d especially been hard on her and Minerva both. “I don’t understand. You have every right to tear into me for the mistakes I’ve made.”
Not that she counted Nerv among them, just that she should have been smarter, done reconnaissance on this location before calling in an entire cavalry.
“We all were wrong,” he said. “The plan was mine at the end of the day. I made the choice to press ahead, and the fault from it is solely mine.”
“I…”
Maiah shook his head. “You have not been in war, child. You are a shaman and right now a Searcher in a time of crisis. There are signs I ignored. I wanted our children back so desperately that I ignored instincts that have kept me alive for centuries. We all have made mistakes, but I’m the general, and I assume the guilt.”
Minerva looked at both of them even as she tended to Yuffy’s wounds. “My grandmother used to say that blame doesn’t matter. It’s what you do after the mistake. We can take the guilt all of us, but what do we do next? We have a giant auction about to happen somewhere, and I’m betting it’s in Washington, D.C. and some place where Senator Christopher Jorgenson feels secure.”
Saff frowned. She did not understand much about human government. What she did know was that Washington was a huge center of power and that the president there had the literally power to end life on Earth with the touch of a button. But the term “senator,” she did not know. “Who is Senator Jorgenson?”
“I didn’t know much about him,” Minerva confessed. “Just that he’s one of our two senators, newer than the woman, but he’s been busy. A good old Google search says he’s worked his way onto the Armed Services Committee after the last election.”
Even Nehemaiah’s brows furrowed in probable confusion. “And?”
Sirens and Scales Page 134
