Dragon's Ground (The Desert Cursed Series Book 2)

by Shannon Mayer

  The shriveled gorc lurched toward me, his teeth sticking out past his lips that had pulled back with the loss of his vitality.

  I shoved him with both hands, sending him back into one of his buddies. “Not with that, you aren’t.” I snagged the tip of the flail and the weapon released its hold on his hand and clung to me once more.

  Before the remaining gorcs could pull their shit together, I swept into them, going for their legs. Three went down with broken knees before the others snapped out of it.

  They circled me, and I moved with them, flowing like the desert wind, hitting, maiming, and then retreating. Strike, wound, retreat, repeat.

  “Get that flail from her!” roared the biggest of the gorcs, most likely the leader. If I could kill him, the others might scatter.

  I turned my back on him before I could stop myself. What the ever-living fuck was happening to me? The heat of my necklace was suddenly a blaze against my skin and I screamed as it burned into me.

  Run! Save yourself! A new voice, one that I almost knew, broke the belief in myself.

  And for a moment, I thought it was the sapphire.

  I fumbled for it with one hand while I sidestepped the gorcs in what was becoming an intricate and soon to be deadly dance.

  “Zam, out of my way!” Lila screamed from above and I knew what was coming.

  Fuck, she was going to spew.

  I dove to the left, hoping I was right, aiming straight between the legs of the gorc closest to me. He swept down and caught my right leg by the ankle and yanked me up so we were face to face.

  “Gotcha!”

  “Not yet.” I rammed the metal tip of the handle as hard as I could into his chest. It wasn’t perfect, but it did the trick, driving its way through his flesh.

  He roared and then there were other cries behind me, but I couldn’t see. I could only feel the way he twisted his massive hand around the bone in my ankle, could only feel the snap as he yanked it hard to one side, could only hear the tear of my flesh as the bone shot through.

  The scream that escaped me went octaves above the last. Fucking hell, if I didn’t keep my shit together, I’d pass out, and then I’d be done.

  Good. Come home to me, little cat.

  That was not my inner voice. Who the fuck was messing with me? I dropped the flail, shocked that it let me go, and fumbled once more for the sapphire. Except it wasn’t the sapphire that was heating my skin up. No, the metal that burned me had been given to me by Ish, a ring embedded with her spells to keep the worst of the two curses off my skin.

  I yanked the thing from me with a hard jerk and let it drop to the ground.

  If I thought things were bad before, I was about to make them a lot worse. But that was the only chance I had of surviving. If I let the curse Marsum had laid on me run free, it would do all it could to turn my life upside down. And I could use that to help me survive by making it think.

  “I want to die,” I whispered. “Just let me die.”

  The gorcs turned on one another, scrabbling to kill those closest to them, but they left me alone. For the moment.

  Batman slammed through them, Maks riding hard. He leaned so far out of the saddle his hand brushed the ground in a stomach-dropping move. He scooped up the flail, spun and slammed the weapon into two gorcs at a time. Tears streamed down my face.

  “I want to die,” I said again. My curse would give me the opposite of what I wanted, except this time I wasn’t sure I was lying. I felt it through to my bones, this deep loss of hope. Bryce was probably dead.

  Maks hated me for what I was. Using me, maybe. The hands on me tightened, grabbing at my other leg, and I knew the gorcs were stretching me out to use me as a shield against Maks and the rage he rained down on the gorcs with the flail.

  They were talking to him, telling him they would follow him.

  It might be our only hope, for him to take control of the gorcs. They belonged to the Jinn after all.

  I opened my mouth to tell him to do it, to claim them. His eyes met mine, and he shook his head, the meaning as clear to me as if he’d spoken out loud.

  He was done running too. I knew it in my belly. I felt his anger at his past. I felt the connection between us. He wouldn’t have come back if he hated me. Whatever lies I was being fed, from wherever they’d been coming, were just that.

  Lies.

  The hands on me began to pull. I faced the sky and the sapphire still lay against the skin on my chest. A jewel that was full of power, but I was no mage.

  Maks was a Jinn, though, a mage in his own right.

  “The sapphire! Lila, get the sapphire!” I screamed up at her, the words turning into a howl as the gorcs around me laughed, my joints stretching.

  She dropped from the sky and landed on my belly, sparkling acid still dripping from her mouth. I closed my eyes. “I trust you.”

  Lila clawed at my shirt and exposed the sapphire, a single drop of acid dropping on my skin, burning me like nothing I’d ever felt. I hissed out the words, “Take it to Maks.”

  “I can use it,” she said and then she was gone, into the sky.

  “You’re going to die, stupid cat!” the gorc nearest to my head, the one I’d stabbed, said.

  I rolled my eyes so I was looking up at him. “We are all dying. Just a matter of speed.”

  He grinned, flashing his teeth at me while the gorcs died at the end of the flail. I could hear them, could hear their bones snapping and their bodies falling to the ground, but there were so many of them. Too many.

  “Zam, hang on!” Maks yelled over the noise. “I’m coming, just hang on.”

  Hang on? “What the fuck do you think I’m going to do stretched out like a goddess-damned sheet on laundry day?”

  The gorcs around me laughed, and they loosened their holds on me some. I didn’t understand why my curse wasn’t working. Before, when it had been in full effect, I’d been able to manipulate it. But not now.

  I didn’t understand how it could be broken. The wind around us suddenly changed directions and I saw Lila sweeping through the sky toward us. Her eyes, normally violet, had shifted to a burning brilliant blue, and she screamed a high-pitched wail that made my skin crawl. She rolled through the air, the tips of her wings touching the gorcs as she flew between them.

  Each gorc she touched stopped moving, not in a slow-motion kind of way, but as in she’d frozen them in a split second, their bodies covered in a thick sheen of ice that captured them. Between Lila and Maks, the gorc numbers dwindled in seconds to only those who held me between their hands.

  I stared up at them. “You were saying about dying?”

  They dropped me all at once, but not before Maks drove Balder toward them. My brain wondered when he’d switched horses, but that was all I could come up with.

  The flail came down hard on the head of one gorc, released and swung to the next. Lila shot in and touched the last two, freezing them in mid stride so they fell over, their frozen bodies shattering as they hit the hard-packed ground next to me.

  I was breathing hard, unable to think straight through what had happened. The urge to die caught me off guard. I only had one weapon left to me, my last kukri blade. I went for it, scrambling to pull it out of its sheath on my leg, but my fingers were numb and slow from the brutal hold the gorcs had on me only seconds before.

  Maks leapt from Balder’s back and dropped to his knees. “Zam, what are you doing?”

  My words were my own, at least. “I don’t know! Something. . . wants me to die and I don’t understand!” There was more than a little fear in my voice, and I could hear it. Something that knew me well, that had known I’d be angry and wanting to strike back at the gorcs and the Jinn for taking Kiara, something that knew me well enough to know how to hurt me the most.

  Three, there were three voices battling inside my head. One believed in me. One did not. The last wanted to kill me.

  I shook so hard my teeth rattled. And it wasn’t the cold that Lila had produced that sent t
he shakes through me. What the hell had happened here? Where had my control gone?

  Lila dropped to the ground beside us and pushed the sapphire toward me. I held my hands up, palms out stopping her.

  “No, keep it from me. Something is wrong.”

  Maks touched my shoulder, and I flinched as if he’d struck me too. “You’re right, someone is trying to keep us all apart. I. . . I didn’t mean those things I said, Zam. I couldn’t figure out why I even said them.”

  “Because you hate me. I’m a lion shifter, despite what I look like.”

  “No, that’s not true. I don’t hate you. If anything, I’m trying to keep you safe. You’re important to me and part of the small hope I have of destroying Marsum. But I’m not doing a very good job of it, am I?”

  His words were soothing the anxiety that had taken hold of me and allowed me to see just how fucking idiotic it had been to charge the gorcs. Something I would have done in my younger years, maybe, but I’d learned a lot between then and now. I was not a child. And yet someone who still thought I was had used my past against me. I closed my eyes, feeling her touch even at this distance, and the thought that she’d tried to kill me cut me to the core. Just as she knew it would. At least one of the voices was known to me. I just couldn’t decide which she was.

  I looked up at him, my emotions rolling.

  “Ish did this.”

  Chapter 15

  The hard ground of the plains was not what I would call a comfortable bed to convalesce on, or in. But I had no choice at the moment. That and the words that had slipped from me seemed to have frozen time, the same way Lila had frozen the gorcs with the power of the sapphire.

  Maks and I sat there looking at each other when really we should have been dealing with the massive injury on my leg. The thing was, the realization that Ish had somehow set my heart and my mind against me was beyond horrifying. It went against everything she’d ever taught me to believe.

  She’d been the mother of my heart, the only one I’d known, and had never shown me a cruel hand. I stared at the glittering necklace I normally wore on the ground beside me. Could she have been manipulating me through it? She’d laid the spell on it herself.

  I turned my attention to my leg and grimaced.

  The break in my bone was far from clean, but it was still cleaner than the break between Ish and me. The blood wasn’t pouring out of me, which meant it had been pinched off somehow. All I could think were bad things like nerve damage and maybe enough loss of blood that I could lose my foot. Never mind the other tears in the tendons and ligaments of my limbs where the gorcs had decided to play tug of war.

  Lila danced around us. “Did you see what I did?”

  I gave her the best smile I could. “You were damn amazing, Lila. You should keep that sapphire. Not like I was doing anything with it.”

  “You sure you want to do that?” Maks said softly. “Not that we don’t trust you, Lila.” He held up his hands as her once-again violet eyes narrowed. “But how do you hide it? The stone is no small thing.”

  He had a point. Lila frowned. “You think someone would try to take it from me?”

  “Yes. I think if the gorcs knew it had any power they would have taken it from Zam first.” He sighed and shook his head.

  I made myself sit up though the movement sent a shock wave of pain up my leg to steal my breath. “Oh, that’s going to hurt tomorrow. Probably get a bruise from it.”

  Sure, it was a piss-poor joke, but I had nothing left to me but my sense of humor. And even that was stretched thin.

  Maks looked around. “I know you aren’t going to want to hear this, but we have to move. The gorcs. . . they will have Jinn attached to them, and the Jinn will know that they were killed with a powerful weapon. They will come looking to see who did it.”

  I groaned. “Of course. And now that my curse is in full effect, they’ll show up in three, two, one.”

  The three of us went very still, listening. But we had some small luck; there was no noise, except for the rumble of Lila’s belly.

  Maks’s hands were gentle as he probed a little at my ankle. “I can set it, but then I think you should shift. I can hold you easier and the jostling will be less.”

  I stared at him. “You want to set that mess of bone?” I pointed at the shattered end of my lower leg bone. I wasn’t feeling it unless I moved, which was quickly freaking me out. Shifters healed fast, but with an injury like this it would take a week or more. That was with the assumption it healed at all. If I was really lucky, it would heal crooked, and that would be it, I would have a bum foot. Or I’d lose it completely.

  Bryce’s hatred of his body slid home to me harder than ever before. He’d had further to fall too, being the strong lion he had been. “Bryce, fuck, I’m sorry I didn’t understand better,” I whispered.

  “Lila, find her a stick to hold in her mouth.”

  Oh, Goddess of the Desert, we were really doing this. Maks made his way to my shoulders and helped me lie flat on the ground. His blue eyes were too close. “What did she use to make you want to kill yourself like this? Ish had to have used something that would naturally motivate you, something you wouldn’t suspect until it was too late.”

  I could have lied to him, but I fucking well hated games of any sort. “I was protecting Lila. And you. Batman couldn’t outrun them. He has a limp that will only worsen if we push him too hard. I didn’t want either of you to die.”

  I made myself keep my eyes on his, so I didn’t miss the flicker of confusion.

  “Why would you want to save me?” he whispered. “I’m one of them, Zam. I’ve done things I am not proud of. I am your enemy.”

  Goddess, truth was the hardest thing to speak some days. “Not to me, you aren’t.”

  We just stared at each other, that is, until Lila cleared her throat. “Stick.” She threw it at me and it bounced off the side of my head. I turned to her, my eyebrows pinched.

  “You want to add to my injuries?”

  “Don’t make me tickle your catastrophe.” She winked, but I saw the strain in her face. She was worried.

  I took the stick and pointed it at her. “Henry the Fourth; not his best work, but he had worse.” I opened my mouth and put the stick in, clamping down until my sharp canines buried deeply into the hardwood. I didn’t know if I should close my eyes or stare up at the clouds above. I settled for staring. Maybe I could focus on the shapes, on the distinct grays that swirled and wove between each other with the push and pull of the wind.

  I breathed in, smelling the gorcs, their leather armor, the oil on their bodies, the blood soaking into the ground, the puddles of rain that lay here and there. The smell that was uniquely Maks. The leathery scales on Lila’s body that smelled a little like honey. The breath of the two horses, the stamp of their hooves, the creak of their gear as they shifted weight, the world narrowed to my senses and all I could take in to distract me.

  The touch of Maks’s hand on my lower leg, the strength in his fingers and the care he took to move slowly, the tremor in the split second before he would set the bone. He was afraid to hurt me.

  His hands moved fast and with more strength than even I realized he had. He had always been holding back with me even when he’d tackled me what seemed so long ago. He’d never shown me just how strong he was, and I let my brain go there and only there as the pain rocketed through me, the liquid fire that was agony making my gorge rise at a speed I couldn’t stop. I turned my head and puked, stars and black spots dancing across my vision as the world went in and out of focus.

  “Shift, Zam. Quickly,” Maks said, and I did as he wanted because I couldn’t think past the radiating waves of pain.

  But I’d not thought this through. The shift shattered what was left of my control on my voice and I screamed as my bones realigned to become the small house cat that was my other form. Every bone in me shook and rattled as I shifted with so much pain that I wasn’t sure I’d make it across to the other side of that doorway i
n my mind. What would happen if I got stuck? What would happen if my body got caught between forms?

  I’d be a fucking monster for real then. There would be no fixing that catastrophe. I forced my body to keep going, ramming it through the waves of pain until finally there was nothing left but a puddle of fatigue and me as a tiny black house cat shivering on the ground.

  I lay on my side panting hard, my eyes closed. “How’s it look?” I managed.

  “You aren’t going to believe this,” Maks said softly. “It’s healed.”

  I made myself push up with my front legs though they shook something fierce. Then carefully I pushed to three legs, holding the previously broken one high.

  “Seriously, it looks fine.” Lila drew close, sniffing. “There’s no cut in the skin anymore.”

  I swallowed hard and put my foot down, testing its strength.

  There was a shimmer of something, like a deep bruise, but there was no sharp pain that would indicate a major injury. I took a step, then another and another. “Holy shit, how is this possible? Wounds like that are not supposed to heal so well. Certainly not in a shift.”

  Maks shook his head. “I don’t know, but I think you should just let yourself stay in that form for a while. Don’t push it if we don’t have to.” He stood and turned away, gathered the horses and the flail and then mounted. He paused over something, bent and picked it up. I knew it was the necklace from Ish, the one that held my father’s ring. Something about it had brought me to the edge of being suicidal.

  “Lila,” I said softly while Maks got things together. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to put either of you in danger. I think. . . I think Ish did something to make me fight, to face the gorcs on my own.”

  She shrugged. “Shit happens. I won’t turn from you, Zam. I did that once and I felt the hurt all the way to the tips of my wings. For good or ill, we’re in this, I think, together for a reason.”

  I butted my head against hers and she dropped a wing over my back, sheltering me from the rain that had once more begun to fall. “Thank you, Lila.”