What everyone didn’t know was that Warthor hadn’t become a Dragon Knight for the power. He had deliberately assumed the role of human target to play a game. That was why my former master was meddling in the affairs of dragons. He saw it as a great big game. To him a dragon, even Trius, the drake he had sworn to protect, was nothing more than a chess piece to move around. That was just another reason why I, along with countless others, wouldn’t want to take on Trius. No one wanted to be up against Warthor Ein. That was really saying something if you think about it. No one wanted to attack an ancient, unstoppable drake because they were scared of the human protecting him.
Unfortunately, I had grown rather fond of living, and thus I was going to have to find Warthor Ein. Not only did I want his help, I also wanted to keep him from doing something crazy. While completing ridiculously insane tasks was something my former master did for fun, that didn’t mean his methods were all kittens and sunshine. I was fairly certain Warthor had a plan. Warthor would have come up with one before he had even become a Dragon Knight. I was equally certain I wouldn’t like his plan. Not one bit.
I glanced back at Voln and swallowed. The damn vampire had a point. That was something I couldn’t ignore. I didn’t have to do this alone. I could go to my mother for help. I could go crawling back to her and… I stopped for a second and eyed Voln suspiciously.
“What would you have me do then?” I blurted out, and immediately clamped my hand over my mouth.
“Good, then we’re in agreement. You will perform this tiny, insignificant task for me, and I will lead you to Joshua.” Voln’s smile reminded me of a crocodile’s, full of wicked intentions and sharp teeth. Just like that he’d tricked me into offering my services. I could probably weasel my way out of it if I went to the Dioscuri, but dealing with my mother would be more trouble than it was worth.
Of course, the backlash from reneging on a promise to a vampire founder would probably start to chip away at my soul. Promises, after all, had to be paid, one way or another, and when they were broken, they took small parts of your soul away with them. Even though there was a drake on the loose, I couldn’t go after it now. I’d promised a caste founder a favor. I would have to at least attempt to fulfill it before I could do anything else. That drake was going to have to wait.
“Goddammit!” I cursed and wondered if I could glare the vampire to death.
“There is a clan of werewolves,” Voln said as he psychically forced the image into my head.
“I know the place,” I murmured.
“I know. I just showed you.” Voln smiled for a moment. “Go there and retrieve a box for me. If you gain possession of the object before the other vampires do, a very bloody border dispute can be avoided.”
I took a deep breath as I stared at a box in my head. It resembled a golden cradle. If what he was saying was true, and it probably was, I really should step in and help. If a bunch of vampires raided a werewolf camp and stole a prized object the consequences could be all out war. If I did it, it’d be more like the USDA raiding a small Amish farm over some bad milk. People might complain, but in the end, the repercussions were going to be minor. Going after the dragon was going to have to wait. Besides, I was all about stopping vampires if I could.
“Yeah, I suppose I can do this. However,” I said just as my stomach grumbled. “I’m going to need some monetary compensation as well.”
As long as you remembered to ask, supernatural beings tended to have no problem throwing in money. A lesson learned.
“Of course you do.” Voln made a gesture and a pouch materialized in front of me. “One does not often find a Hyas Tyee who sells herself so… easily.”
“A girl has to make a buck.” I scooped up the pouch and turned to walk out. I knew this time I’d be transported to the location he had shown me. Collect a box? How hard could it be?
Chapter 5
Apparently, getting a treasure box from a bunch of werewolves could be very hard. The snow-covered plain in front of me was filled with like a million log cabins. In the very center of the village was the building Voln had pointed out. It was the only structure that seemed to have been made from stone. Even from my perch at the top of a giant pine tree it looked enormous, as though someone had built it with the intention of rivaling the very planet.
If those cabins were filled with humans, I could hide myself with magic. Werewolves were a different story altogether. They could find pretty much anything if they put their noses to it. If they caught me stealing a precious object from them, I’d have one hell of a fight on my hands. Sure, I could take a werewolf or three, but they were fast and healed almost instantly. So unless you could kill them outright in a single blow and then say, burn them to ashes, well, they tended to not stay dead. To make matters worse, it was getting close to dark, when they would be strongest. Then again, they were mostly nocturnal so perhaps now, during the waning hours of daylight, they would be groggier than normal.
I ground my teeth together and took a couple slow breaths. This entire task was taking up valuable time that could be spent tracking down Warthor. At this rate, not only was I going to be very late to the party, but by the time I got there, they were totally going to be out of cake.
“Be careful, Lillim.” Mattoc’s warning made me jump.
I turned and glared at him, narrowing my eyes until they were almost slits. “If you are so concerned about my safety, why didn’t you warn me to shut my mouth around the vampire?” I sighed and let my face relax. “Of course I’ll be careful. You think I’m going to go strolling mindlessly—”
“Shut up and listen to me. They have ghost wards. I can’t go through them. If they have barriers set up strong enough that a soulbound ghost can’t pass through, they’re really trying to protect something, and my guess would be that something is what you’re trying to steal.”
“Noted.” My head hurt. This was going to be harder than I’d thought. God how I wished I had paid better attention in class. Maybe then I would be able to turn into mist or something. I sighed. I had to rely on speed, and the hope that my magic kept me hidden enough that they wouldn’t notice me. That was my brilliant plan: run and hope.
I leaned forward, testing the hang glider I had strapped to my back, and felt the resistance of the barrier around their town. “Damn,” I muttered as a shrill siren pierced the air. My blood began to burn as I leapt from my tree, trying my best to ignore the fact that I hadn’t even entered the town before an alarm had stripped away my camouflage and alerted the townsfolk to my presence. This was already going splendidly.
The tower loomed in front of me, growing bigger by the second. I released my harness and dropped to the ground, landing in a roll that brought me to a stop a few inches in front of the door. The door was at least three times my height and so wide that I could have walked through it with my arms fully extended and still had room left over. The wrought iron handle in the center glimmered in such a way as to suggest that the door would open very easily if only I just took hold of it. As I reached forward, a spark of energy leapt from it.
“Yeah, it figures,” I grumbled and whipped out both my swords, Isis and Set. When used in unison, Dirge, and most everyone else, had referred to them as Shirajirashii. I glanced around as I moved to the face of the wall. Why had no one accosted me? Was it just good timing on my part?
I shook away the thought and slashed outward with my twin blades. They struck the stone, cleaving twin gashes into the wall so loudly it had to have alerted the entire universe to my presence. I placed the tip of my wakazashi against the stone and concentrated. Power flowed out of me and into the rock, smashing against it like waves against a cliff.
It was like watching a sheet of ice fall apart as cracks snaked across the wounded stone. Fissures splintered outward, causing great chunks of rock to slough off the surface and crash to the ground. I threw one last burst of power into the wall. The obsidian shrieked in agony and exploded inward in a cloud of black dust that covered me from head
to toe.
I sighed and tried to brush myself off, but it was hopeless. Thankfully, people never seemed to enchant the walls. They always enchanted doors but never the walls… at least not against magical weapons. It was a good thing, too. The ward on that door looked like it could have reduced me to little more than a distant memory.
Besides, it wasn’t a large hole, only a few feet across, but it was large enough for me to clamber inside. I didn’t want to try and make it bigger anyway. If I blew too big a hole in the structure it might just come down on me. That was not something I was keen on experiencing.
There were too many shadows looming inside the hole for me to see anyone. Not that it mattered. I’d made so much noise that everyone had to be onto me. I stepped inside and was surprised to see an ornate, dark-mahogany stairway to my left. It circled upward inside of the spire like a snake coiled against the wall.
Pale flickers of torchlight illuminated the rooms. What, could they not afford electricity out here in the sticks? I tried my best to take in the room as shadows moved and danced across the walls. Any one could be a werewolf sneaking up on me, and the light was just dim enough that I couldn’t be sure.
I swallowed and wiped my hands on my skirt. This was no time to be entertaining second thoughts. This was the time for moving. So why wasn’t I? Why couldn’t I dismiss the nagging feeling that something was not quite right?
Either way, I needed to get moving. I took a step toward the stairs, then another, listening as hard as I could. When I reached the stairs, I took off running, sprinting up the steps two and three at a time. I was nearly breathless by the time I reached the third floor and found the room Voln had shown me.
It was bright, blindingly so. Torches lined the walls so closely together that they banished every shadow from the room. Red and black drawings of werewolves killing all sorts of other monsters covered every square inch of the stone. The box stood atop a marble pedestal in the center of the room with a wind chime hanging over the top of it.
As I approached, the true brilliance of the box became clear to me. Golden filigree designs intricately depicting battle scenes stretched across its entire length. On the back of the box, red and blue gemstones the size of my fist were set in a circular pattern. The more I looked at it, the more interesting it became, and as I searched for somewhere to sit and ponder it, I realized the damn thing was trying to charm me.
I blinked several times, trying to shake the overwhelming desire to kneel before the box and behold its magnificence. That bloodsucking leech Voln wanted me to take a siren box and unless I knew the way to magically disarm it, I’d be under its spell the entire time I was within sight of it.
I struggled to ignore as much of the charm as possible and grabbed hold of the air. Have you ever tried to grab air? It’s no easy task, let me assure you.
“Spirit pouch,” I began, and found that it was much harder than normal to focus my will. “Where the air splits, I cause you to tear and keep an item in your care.”
There was a soft whistling, like a summer breeze, and the air ripped itself asunder. While the ragged edges of the hole looked like torn wrapping paper, the insides resembled a black gelatinous pustule of space. I shut my eyes for a moment and inhaled, just looking at it was so unreal that it gave me a headache.
“Okay, Lillim, you can do this,” I told myself as I moved to the other side of the siren box and kicked it with all my strength.
The stupid box sat there unmoving as I fell backward on my ass like an idiot. My leg throbbed, and for a moment, I was worried I might have broken something. I stumbled to my feet, and if my mother had been here, I’d have definitely had to put a few bucks into the swear jar. Fortunately, she was not here, and therefore the pain in my foot could be derailed by righteous cursing.
I glared at the siren box and snarled. The sound seemed to echo across the empty room as I called upon my power. It welled up inside me like white-hot rage as I reared back and kicked the object again. My power exploded out of me in a geyser of force, catching the metal in the center and flinging it haphazardly into the spirit pouch. It hung there for a second like it was sinking into jelly. The box twitched once and vanished in a burst of purple light.
With its sudden disappearance the strain of the charm dissolved. I smiled to myself and stretched my arms toward the ceiling. It felt like a thousand-million pound weight had been lifted off of me. With an absent flick of my wrist I banished the spirit pouch back to wherever it was in the nether that it lived, and I turned toward the door. A bare-chested man who had clearly spent a great deal of time in the sun stood in front of it, blocking my escape.
His chest was covered by a tattoo that looked like a diamond with peacock feathers. It was the mark of a werewolf shaman, and a high ranking one at that since he had what looked like nearly a billion feathers on his diamond. That was bad, very, very bad.
When most people think of shamans, they think of weaklings who rely solely on magic to get things done. Werewolf shamans come only from leaders of the war pack, which means that they are the strongest, toughest warriors in the whole clan and they know magic. Awesome.
“Give the box back, or I will kill you and take it back.” His voice was so cold and hard that it made my legs shake. His yellow eyes drilled into mine and made me swallow unconsciously.
Killing me would do the trick. If I died all objects in my spirit pouch, including the box, would spill to the floor. Even if he didn’t actually know that, he was seven feet tall and had one of those bodies that screamed, “I bench press whales for fun.”
His hair was pulled back in a long braid that swooshed back and forth behind his ankles as he walked toward me. His sun-kissed skin glistened under the torchlight as he moved, etching his body in shadows that accentuated each muscle. I wasn’t sure if he was doing it on purpose or if it was just one of those natural werewolf things, but the way he moved would have made him look really attractive if rage hadn’t painted his face in hostility. I mean I don’t usually use the word smoldering to describe people, but in this guy’s case, I was willing to make an exception.
“No, I want it. It’s purdy.” I shook my head allowing my hair to flutter back and forth, in what, I’ll admit, was an embarrassing attempt to use my feminine wiles to distract him. I really should have paid much more attention in charm class. It definitely wasn’t something I’d learned how to do from my mother. Her lessons were more along the lines of, “I’m going to tie you to a tree and hope you escape in time to stop the bloodthirsty vampire from tearing out your throat.”
To say my attempt didn’t work would be like saying the Grand Canyon was a tiny hole in the ground. His form shifted into a hulking creature with huge fangs and claws. He was still man-shaped, evidently preferring that half-man, half-wolf form that had made the wolf-man so popular.
For a moment, I wondered why his clothing hadn’t been ripped to shreds by his sudden increase in bulk. Then again, if you transformed regularly and hadn’t developed some kind of magical clothing, you’d be going through pants pretty quickly. That would get expensive fast, I’d imagine.
“My, what big eyes you have, grandma.” I smiled and reached for the hilts of my swords. My hands shook so badly that it took me two tries to actually grip them.
His feral eyes narrowed, and he took an ominous step toward me, claws clicking against the stone floor. I don’t know how I stopped myself from running; every single instinct in my body, right down to the last nerve ending, was telling me to run. If I did that he would chase after me. It would make me prey and I most certainly did not want to be prey in the middle of a werewolf camp. I settled for backpedaling in the toughest way I could. My back struck the wall, and I shuddered. I had nowhere to go.
“Look, I don’t want to kill you and you don’t want to be dead,” I said as menacingly as I could under the circumstances.
“But, I very much want to kill you!” the beast snarled. His lips curled back when he spoke, revealing a set of fangs so large th
at I wasn’t sure how they fit into his mouth. It was like hearing a voice that seemed totally disconnected from the mouth that had made it. In fact, I wasn’t even sure how he could make human sounds with a mouth and tongue like that. Oh forget it. If I went on wondering how supernatural creatures did things, I’d probably go batty.
I ducked as one of his massive claws cleaved through the obsidian wall behind me like it was made of wet paper. The blow had come so suddenly that I don’t quite know how I managed to dodge it. Instinct I guess. I dove past him and tucked my body into a roll, which turned out to be a horrible idea. I came up from the roll on the edge of the stairs and my momentum sent me tumbling down the steps and crashing into the landing for the floor below. I swallowed, thanking my lucky stars nothing seemed to be broken as I scrambled to my feet.
The beast slammed into the ground in front of me. Evidently, he had just leapt the guard rail in his haste to get to me. I wondered if it had hurt. The floor swayed under his bulk as he took a step toward me.
He pounced, and I drove my fist into his midsection. The bones in my hand shuddered, and I bit my lip to keep from screaming. I wobbled a bit and tried to swallow my fear. I was reasonably sure that he wasn’t made of iron, despite what it had felt like.
The werewolf grabbed me by the hair with such speed that I barely saw him move. Froth dripped down his muzzle as he lifted me idly in the air. I screamed and lashed out with my legs like a troublesome infant. That was when he flung me over the second floor railing.
Thud!
Pain shot through my body as I began to crawl sideways, trying to shake my blurry vision back into focus.
Kill It With Magic: An Urban Fantasy Novel (The Lillim Callina Chronicles Book 1) Page 3
