Was this really happening? We were getting the help we needed without asking. My hand went to the necklace I wore, and I wondered just what Maks had done to it.
Lila let out a big breath. “Thank you, Fink.”
He jumped into the air. “I still believe you have it in you, Gnat. For what it’s worth.”
She ducked her head into my hair and let out a tiny sob. There were no words I had to comfort her because I knew that pain. I lifted a hand to her side, giving her a small amount of comfort.
“How is this going to work?” Maks asked. I turned to him.
“I don’t know.”
The three large dragons lifted into the air and hovered, their wings sending our hair and cloaks swirling around us. The horses whinnied and then everything kind of happened too fast to stop it even if we wanted to.
The three dragons swooped down and scooped us and our horses into their big talons. Fink took Bryce and his big girl Ali, Draken took Maks and Batman, and the gray dragon took Balder and me.
I sucked in a breath as the scaled talons closed around us, just hard enough to keep Balder and me from slipping. My legs were pinned to his side as we rose into the air with a few jerking beats of the gray’s wings.
Lila shot out of the scaled cage we were in. I stared down at the tops of the trees as we swept over them. “You got a name?” I shouted up at him.
“My mother wanted to name me Blaz for a legendary hero of our kind, but she settled on Trick.” He bent his head around to grin at me. “And you are?”
This was the weirdest introduction I’d had to date. “Zam.”
“Nice to meet you.”
Balder gave a whinny and struggled against his bonds. “Easy, easy, my friend.” I soothed him, rubbing a hand along his neck. It would have been better to blindfold him but there had been no option.
“How far?” I shouted over the rushing of the wind and the snap of leather wings through the air.
“Not too far. Maybe an hour,” Trick said. “Amalia is not a kind dragon, you all know that, right? She’s. . . difficult on a good day. And she hasn’t had a good day since before Lila was born.”
Lila zipped around Trick, and I realized she was showing off.
It hit me in a flash. Lila had a crush on the big gray dragon. I grinned. Oh, this was going to be too much fun. “Lila, weren’t you telling me about a handsome gray dragon you knew growing up? Is this him?”
She let out a strangled squawk and shot to where she could give me a look that said it all. I’d hit the nail right on the head. I grinned back at her. “Fair’s fair, don’t you think?”
Trick laughed. “Lila, you crushing on me, little Princess?”
“No.” She blurted out the word. “I am not. You. . . you were kind to me.”
His laugh was not mean in the least. “Oh please. We grew up together. I call bullshit.”
She groaned. “I am not crushing on you. I’m happy that you are helping, yes. I appreciate it. Nothing else.”
I didn’t have to say anything else really, but she’d teased me enough about Maks that it was indeed only fair.
“But what about all the barrel rolls?” I couldn’t see her. “I mean, showing off is a sure sign of—”
“Oh, my gods, you are killing me!” Lila started to laugh. “Fine, I won’t tease you about Maks anymore. I get it. Okay?”
“Who’s Maks?” Trick asked.
“The guy she’s hot for, but they can’t be together,” Lila said loud enough that I was sure Bryce and Fink who were to my left had to have heard. I groaned.
“Damn it.”
Trick tipped his wings, and we dodged sideways to avoid a particularly tall tree. “Cross-species love, it is a temptation. But no bueno.”
I snorted at his use of Spanish. “You have no idea.”
“Oh, I do. I fell for a wood sprite once.” He laughed. “I was only five, but damn she was a saucy little spice pot, all legs and this gauzy pair of wings that were too lovely for words.”
I laughed and realized that he was a pretty cool guy, uh, dragon. “I like him, Lila. You should work on this relationship.”
Trick rumbled. “I don’t come from good stock, Zam. A dragon born from a pair of criminals so there would have been no chance even if Lila was not booted out of the grounds.”
Lila swept by me, shaking her head. “That wasn’t your fault, Trick.”
“Not anymore than you being born as you are is your fault, Lila,” he pointed out.
Yeah, I liked him.
Ahead of us was a change in the topography. The trees thinned until there was nothing but a bare strip of ground that ran north and south. Excitement snapped through me. I’d never actually seen the wall. It ran from the Witch’s Reign down through to the deserts of the Jinn’s dominion. But it had been strictly off limits when I was younger, and I’d never gotten close in all my journeys since then.
I stared hard at what I thought might be the wall. A line of rocks, yes, but they probably weren’t even three feet high. This was no mile-high fence that we’d been led to believe. Shit, I could have galloped Balder at it and leapt over in a single bound. “Is that. . . it? Is that the wall?” I couldn’t keep the disappointment out of my voice. Because my whole life I’d believed I’d been trapped, and what I was seeing was that I’d not been trapped but tricked.
And that fucking pissed me off.
Chapter 20
“Piddly, isn’t it?” Trick tipped his wings so we had a better look at the so-called wall. Three feet high, I was sure, and crumbling in places, making it even smaller. Here and there I even saw gaps. Fucking holes that I could have walked through with ease.
“That’s keeping us all in?” I yelled.
Lila swept around in front. “Have you never seen it?”
I shook my head slowly. “We lived a hundred miles inland when we were in the desert. It was considered bad luck to see it.” Now I was wondering just why it was bad luck. I mean. . . all the time we were trapped between the wall and the Jinn was a pile of horseshit. We could have escaped.
Why had my father kept us bound to a desert, a place that had stolen his life, a place where our world was destroyed when we could have gotten away?
I was caught in the snare of emotions that I couldn’t slow down. Anger, frustration, and confusion trampled through my heart, leaving it aching with this new twist to a story that I had thought I understood.
“It’s not just the wall,” Lila said, and then she dropped away. Trick followed her at a distance.
“I do like her, Zam. Her size isn’t an issue, but her father is.” His eyes caught hold of mine, the lightning in them dancing. “He’s dangerous. He’ll kill her if he finds her here.”
“I’ll keep her safe,” I said over the wind as it rushed around us in a headlong drop. I held my breath, and then just like that, we were on the ground, Trick releasing us.
Balder stumbled a few steps and then righted himself. The other two dragons dropped off their packages. The horses all seemed to struggle with standing on solid ground, but it didn’t take them long to get their legs under them.
I raised my hand. “Thank you.”
“Be safe.” Trick flapped his wings, shooting into the clouds that had begun to form over us. They deepened in color and lightning crackled through them.
Lila came to my shoulder and sat, her feet clenching at me. “He’s going to give us some cover, but we aren’t going to like it.”
Even as she spoke, the rain started, and the temperature dropped. The wet droplets hit us and within seconds froze. “Freezing rain, that’s fucking awesome.”
“The other dragons will hide. They hate freezing rain.” Lila crawled into my hood. I didn’t blame her and wished I could do the same. I glanced at Maks and found him looking at me, his eyes full of a heat that could’ve been anger, or maybe he was thinking the same thing as me. How nice it would be closer to him.
No, bad, bad Zam. Maks is a Jinn. A Jinn who was at the Oasis.
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I cleared my throat before speaking. “Bryce.”
“You shouldn’t be here,” he snapped. “I don’t need your damn help.”
I directed Balder closer to Bryce and his big mare. “Look, you wouldn’t have left me to go it alone, would you?”
“Yeah, I would. Because it’s a choice, Zam. That’s what you don’t get. We all have choices and I made mine. I didn’t want help. Go home.” He snapped his reins against his horse’s neck and she started off at a stately plod.
I stared after him, unable to move. Lila clung to my neck with her forelegs, hugging me. “He’s right, it is a choice. But you have a choice too. You don’t have to do what he says.”
She was right, but that wasn’t what was holding me there. No, the lies between Bryce and me were too much, and I knew it was time to tell him the truth of his injury.
I swallowed hard. “Bryce. It’s my fault you’re a cripple. I pulled the spear out. I thought I was helping. I thought you’d be able to heal. I. . . didn’t know it would do this to you.”
He slowed his horse and turned her around. His face was a mask, hiding his thoughts from me. “And becoming a thief for Ish?”
“She said she’d heal you if I helped her,” I whispered, knowing he’d hear me over the rain.
He stared at me and I wished to every god and goddess I’d ever called upon that he’d give me something, anything but that stone face I knew all too well. “You blame me for you being a thief then?”
“Goddess, no!” I urged Balder forward, but Bryce held up a hand.
“No. You are not coming with me,” he snapped.
“Are you not hearing me? It’s my fault, Bryce! It’s my fault!” The words were too loud, I knew it by the way the horses flinched and the animals in the bush on our one side fluttered away. “You should have been the alpha of our pride. You should have had a better life than this.”
“Then you should have let me die on the sand with Father.” His words cut into me sharper than any knife. “If this healer can’t do what she claims, you will finish what you started, Zamira. You will put your kukri to my throat and you will end my life.”
He turned his horse and gave me his back. “And for that reason, I will allow you to come with me.”
I was shaking so hard I had to put my hands on the pommel of the saddle to keep from falling out. A hand reached for me, balancing me, and Maks’s voice was solid, a rock to hang onto in this storm of the past and present.
“Zam, none of this is your fault.”
“Well, one of us has to take responsibility for this shit,” I snarled and jerked my arm away from him. “Because you sure as hell aren’t.”
I gave Balder the cue to move out and he trotted after Bryce and Ali. Behind us, Batman limped his way along. Damn it, I needed to tend to him, whatever was ailing him. I wasn’t even sure if it was a cut, or a pull of the tendons or what. I made myself breathe slowly to ease the racing of my heart. But even that didn’t quell the swelling anxiety and fear that coursed through me.
The truth was out there, and it had not set me free. It had bound me in ways I could not have imagined. There was no way I could do as Bryce asked. No way that I could kill him, the last of my family, the brother who’d been my hero my whole life.
But if he commanded me as my alpha. . . I wasn’t sure I wouldn’t do it. The cat in me would want to buckle to his demands. Just as Kiara had bent to my will, so would it be the same between Bryce and me?
And I wasn’t sure which scared me worse.
I made everyone stop after only a short time and silently tended to Batman. His right front knee was swollen and there wasn’t much I could do for it. Soft tissue damage was the worst. Best I could do was make Maks walk.
After that, we walked for hours with the wall to our left and the thick covering of the forest to our right. The swath that had been cleared between wall and forest was about two hundred feet wide. Wide enough that any number of creatures could have tromped along its path.
The freezing rain coated our gear and our clothes, and every ten minutes, we were forced to shake it all off. The upside, I suppose, was we weren’t really getting wet, not like we could have been.
“Lila, this Amalia, is she very old?”
“Oldest dragon alive,” Lila said. “She was around when the wall was built, or at least that was what I was always told. She remembers our history and is our greatest healer. My parents took me to her when I was a child. You know, to see if she could fix what was wrong with me.”
“There is nothing wrong with you,” I said softly.
“Then you think there is nothing wrong with you?” she offered, and I shrugged.
“That’s different. You’re amazing.”
She butted her head against me. “So are you.”
Yeah, we were a messed-up pair, but I knew in my gut we’d been brought together for a reason. Maybe the world was trying to tell us something.
That a pair of useless supes were better than we thought? Maybe. . . maybe.
I glanced at the wall to our left. “I can’t believe we’ve all been so fucking stupid as to stay in here.”
Maks grunted and shook his head like I was a fool. “The wall is spelled, Zam. The closer you get to it, the more pain rockets through you until you pass out. Then the guardians can come and pick you up easily.” He made a sweeping motion at the swath we walked on. “That’s why this is so wide. The dragons can pick up those stupid enough to think the wall is easily crossed.”
It was the most he’d spoken to me since the battle with the gorcs. It was also an insult, seeing as I had been stupid enough to think it could have been easily crossed.
Bryce twisted around in his saddle to look at us. “If you’re trying to impress her, insulting her intelligence won’t work. I mean, it worked for Steve, but she was a lot younger and dumber then.” Apparently, he’d heard what Lila had said to Trick as we’d flown. Just awesome.
“Hey, it did not work for Steve!” I yelled at his back.
“It did. He called you smart for a pretty girl, which is basically ‘you aren’t quite as dumb as you should have been,’” Bryce fired back.
The flush in my skin was instant and I urged Balder to catch up to Bryce. When I was right beside him I reached over and punched him in the arm. “Then why didn’t you say something? I was sixteen! I didn’t know any better.”
He didn’t look at me. “I was in no place to protect you, Zam. You might think you failed me by pulling that spear, but I know I failed you. I should have driven Steve away, kept you safe from his cheating ass.”
His words were not what I expected.
We were quiet a moment before I pulled up the courage to speak again. “I would have listened to you. If you’d told me Steve was bad for me. I would have listened.”
“Would you’ve?” He shot a look at me and I didn’t hesitate.
I nodded. “Yes, you were always my hero, Bryce. Even after the Oasis.”
Lila stuck her head up and let out a soft snort. “Hang on, you two, we’re close.”
Our conversation stumbled to a stop as the horses slowed without being asked. The air around us seemed to tense; the freezing rain had let up and animals should have been coming out of the woods to forage.
Except there was no movement, no animals, and no noise.
It was as if we’d been stuffed into a vault that muffled everything around us. Even my sense of smell seemed to be affected. I drew a breath in through my nose, holding the air in the back of my throat, but I couldn’t identify any dragon.
“Lila, are you sure?” I found myself whispering without meaning to. The sense of trepidation was so heavy, I wasn’t sure I wanted to break it.
Ahead of us, the ground rumbled and shook. I watched in fascination as a depression sunk into the soil, showing the impression of a dragon’s foot, then another and another. Amalia was a chameleon dragon, which in and of itself wasn’t something all that out of the ordinary.
It was
the size of her feet that had my eyes glued to each print in the ground as she moved toward us.
Each foot was easily ten feet across.
We were fucked.
Chapter 21
Maks had caught up to us as I watched with fascination and horror as the healer dragon Amalia drew closer. Not far from the fabled wall, her steps were so close now that I could feel the reverberation of her size up through my seat in the saddle, but there was still no smell of her, no sound from her steps or from the breath curling out of her mouth.
Lila flew up so she was between us and the much, much larger dragon. “Healer Amalia, we come seeking your help.”
“Little Lila.” The voice was distinctly feminine despite the depth of it, and the words echoed around us as if we were in a box canyon instead of a wide-open strip of land. “I see you, and I see you have brought me something to eat. A lion shifter, a Jinn who is not a Jinn, and a shifter who is not a shifter. . . well, well, you have made some interesting friends.”
Bryce stiffened at the word Jinn and I cringed. Assuming we got out of here alive that was not going to go over well. I’d deal with it later, though, again assuming there was a later for any of us.
Lila kept her position. “They are my friends. All of them.”
“Then what would you pay me with for my help?” There was no malice in the voice, just genuine curiosity. “You know the way this works, little one.”
Lila dipped and rolled, showing off the sparkling blue sapphire. “This. The Ice Witch’s sapphire. Is it worth something to you?”
Amalia came into view as suddenly as a bolt of lightning. Her body was white, as white as the driven snow, and her pearlescent scales caught the light of even the weak sunlight and reflected it back in rainbows. But it was her eyes that caught my attention as strange as that would seem. Her eyes were as violet as Lila’s, though on a much larger scale.
Dragon's Ground (The Desert Cursed Series Book 2) Page 17
