She had to believe I was going to use it for this to work.
And at the last second, I jumped, and shifted in midair. Her eyes widened as I landed on her face, biting and scratching, going for her eyes as the room dropped into sub-zero temperatures. Her blood tasted like fire and death, but I didn’t quit. I clawed and bit, and for a moment, I was back in the desert and it was Marsum, the Jinn who’d cursed me, under my claws and fangs. Tears leaked from my eyes as I found a strength and speed in my tiny body I’d never known. I was still nothing more than a house cat.
But I fought like a lion who’d lost her mind, a lion whose pride was in danger of being wiped out.
The queen’s scream lit the air, but I didn’t slow. I went for her jugular as her hand dropped onto my back. I bit in as she grabbed me, her fingers digging into my soft sides and pressing on my rib cage threatening to crush me, to break through to my heart. The vein pulsed under my tiny teeth and I held her there. If I pulled her vein apart there would be no healing it. Whatever added strength came with carrying the flail gave me that understanding. My bite, tiny as it was, was deadlier than any spell.
“Zamira,” she whispered my name with as much hatred as she seemed capable of, “this is a draw. You cannot survive, and you have me in a checkmate. I am no fool. I know the power the flail gives you even in this form, but it will drain you of your life here, as it would if you stood with it in your hand.”
I didn’t dare let go because the second I did . . . I would be done for.
With a snarl, she tightened her fingers again and I clenched my teeth over the vein, blood trickling past my lips.
“I will speak for her,” Lila said, though her voice was broken and laced with pain, which only sent my fury higher. A growl slid out of me while Lila spoke. “Let the three of us go, give us the jewel, and we will let you live.”
“Never.” The Ice Witch growled the word.
“Then you will die. I see it in every line of Zamira’s body. She is committed to this, ready to die to stop you so Maks and I will live.” She choked on those words. “Even if we don’t deserve it. She is better than us. She will protect us with her body and life. Her loyalty is true.”
I flexed my front claws in the Ice Witch’s shoulders and my back claws against her arm. I wanted so badly to bite through, to see her life spill out around her. For imprisoning Darcy to give her to the Jinn, and then for hurting Lila . . . and maybe even a little for hurting Maks. She was ready to kill us. She’d been drawing us in to trap us and I didn’t understand it, but really, I didn’t need to.
The sound of a horn blasted through the air, a horn that made my hair stand on end, a horn from the worst of my childhood memories, of the Oasis and my family being wiped out.
Maks let out a low groan. “The Jinn are nearly here, Zam.”
“I will kill her now.” The Ice Witch shouted the words though they cost her my fangs digging in deeper. But her hands didn’t move. I could feel her waiting . . . for something, but I didn’t know what she could possibly want to wait on. And for that alone I held still, waiting with her for the unknown moment.
Lila let out a tiny roar. “NO!”
There was a whoosh of wings and then Lila was flapping in the Ice Witch’s face, snarling and snapping her teeth, but still the hands holding me didn’t lessen or tighten further. What the fuck was she waiting for? The Jinn? I didn’t think that was it at all. What was I waiting for?
Anticipation tightened around us in a strange net.
“Enough!” she roared and once more Lila was thrown back. “I thought my sister would come for you,” the Ice Witch whispered. “But I was wrong. She does not care for you as she claimed. In that, we are the same.” Slowly she lifted her hands from me. I let her go and dropped to the floor, shifting so I landed in a two-legged crouch.
I had the flail in my hand and I snapped it forward, curling the twin spiked balls around the bottom of the Ice Witch’s staff and yanking it toward me. It skittered across the floor, the sapphire striking the ground which sent a ripple of energy blowing out around us. The Ice Witch stumbled back and Maks was released from whatever spell had been holding him down.
He rolled to the side with a groan, his body shaking as the cold seemed to take hold of him. The Ice Witch stared hard at me and her body seemed to fold in on itself. “You are no safer now than you were. You might have my staff, but there are others who come to take my place.” Her eyes were sharp and they reminded me of something I couldn’t quite put my finger on. “You are to be the death of this world, Zamira the Reckless. I’ve seen it. I tried to stop it, but you are . . . not what I expected. However, you will not escape the Jinn. They know you are here now.”
She took a step, then another and another toward the wide-open balcony. I watched her go as she stepped up to the edge and then . . . did a complete and total nose dive. I ran—limped really, with a hand clutched to my bruised ribs—to stare down as she fell in a fluttering array of her white dress, and then she shimmered and feathered wings spread out around her.
The Ice Witch was a shifter. An owl, snowy white, flew away from the castle.
The silence battered at my ears as loud as any battle. I slowly turned to see Maks standing behind me. His eyes were still the pretty blue they had been before.
“Jinn.” I threw the word at him like a curse. He nodded.
“I am.”
“Not the time,” Lila barked at us. “Like, really, really not the time. You know how the Ice Witch said others were coming? She wasn’t kidding.” She winged toward me and then landed on the side railing. “There. Do you see them coming? They’ll kill us all. I’m sorry. I thought they would take me back.”
I looked into the dark night, the edge of the horizon turning pink with the rising sun. Black shapes winged toward us, flame curling out around their mouths as they came for their prize, as their enemy was driven from her home. As if the Jinn weren’t enough, we had dragons to contend with too.
I blew out a breath. “Then we run.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
There were no words I could give to Maks right then even if we could have sat around and had a discussion regarding his lying to me about being a Jinn. Or just why Lila had thought her family would forgive her or how the hell she’d gotten all the way to her family and back to the castle so fast.
Later, the questions would have to come later.
We bolted down the stairs and ran for the main set of doors. I clutched the staff in one hand and the flail in the other but they threw my balance off. With a growl, I jammed the flail into the back sheath and took the staff in both hands.
I slid to a stop and snapped the staff across my knee so that I only had twelve inches of length to deal with instead of six feet.
I almost tossed it up to Lila to carry, but hesitated at the last second. She shook her head, sorrow in those jeweled eyes of her. “Don’t give it to me. I would be bound to carry it to the dragons. Even in exile, I am still a dragon and they will always come first no matter what I want.” Her words were full of sorrow. “It is in my blood, Zam. I can’t help it.”
I ground my teeth and clutched the wood. I didn’t even bother to look at Maks. There was no way he was getting it from me.
Out the front doors we ran as the first dragons came into view. Below them and to the south was a growing glowing golden aura that could be only one thing. Maks grabbed my arm. “The Jinn, they will kill us all.”
“Fast as you can!” Lila shouted. “The dragons are here for the hold and the jewel. They won’t bother with us if we get out of range.”
I wasn’t so sure that would hold true for the Jinn too. I could almost feel their eyes turning to me. A daughter of an alpha, a princess of the desert prides.
Shit. Fuck. Damn.
The stairs leaving the castle were almost vertical, but I didn’t slow. I raced down them letting gravity take hold of me. A burst of bright red and orange flame erupted over our heads followed by a roar that rattled the
inside of my brain.
I didn’t look back to see if Maks was with me, I didn’t need to. I could feel his presence now and I wondered how he’d hid what he was from me so well. How had he hid it from Ish? Or Bryce, who’d fought the Jinn so many times? From Steve or Darcy? Or was he letting me in now that I knew?
Goddess, I’d kissed him, almost gone to bed with him! I stumbled on the next step and a hand shot out and grabbed my arm, steadying me from a straight out fall to the bottom. Which would have slowed us up more than I wanted to think about.
I jerked my arm from him and kept my eyes forward. A Jinn. He was a fucking Jinn! Another roar above us and Lila screamed.
“DUCK!”
I didn’t think it could get any worse, but I was wrong. It could. There was the screech of a rather large, rather angry bird.
The Ice Witch had left her Raven behind, and I had a feeling she knew who had the jewel.
I dropped, the wings brushed to either side of us, and there was no time to think through what my instincts were screaming at me to do. I leapt with all my might, pushing off the stairs and into the air toward the White Raven’s back.
The Raven would track us, bring the Jinn right to our doorstep. Which meant the only way we had a snowball’s chance in the bowels of the desert of surviving was if we killed the Raven.
I landed on the back end of the bird, dragging her down a bit with my weight. She shot into the air and I clutched at the feathers with my fingertips, dangling from her body while Maks yelled for me below.
To let go. That he would catch me.
Another time I would have snorted, but I was saving my breath for what I had to do.
My friends were depending on me. And maybe I couldn’t fully trust them, but they could trust me.
I worked the words through my head that would reverse the curse. I did not want to hurt the Raven. I wanted the bird to live a long, long life.
She flattened out and I realized we were so high above the ground that I could no longer see the specks of Maks and Lila.
“You are a fool to challenge us,” the White Raven cawed into the wind, her wings flapping as though she had no concern in the world. I pulled the flail from my back.
“Probably you’re right about that. My friends betrayed me. My husband betrayed me. I’ve lived my life under the assumption that I’m not capable, that I’m too weak to be of any use. Yet here I am, still standing. Or flying, as the case may be.”
She tipped her head so one large dark eye peered at me, intelligence flickering through it. “You are not what I expected.”
“Well, I’ll be honest,” the cold wind pulled at my hair and I suppressed a shiver, “I wasn’t really expecting a long conversation up here.”
She cawed and I thought it might have been a laugh. “If you’d killed the Ice Witch, I would have been free. As it is, I must follow her commands.”
She barrel rolled without any warning and I fell to the side, stopping my fall only by thinking I wanted to fall. Her clawed talon shot out and grabbed me in midair. The Raven squawked in surprise.
“What spell is this?”
“A freaky-assed one of the Jinn’s. I don’t suppose you’ll let me go knowing that the curse on me will reflect on you and I can guarantee you’ll die? I don’t suppose you’d just fly off and not help the Jinn?”
Her grip on me tightened and I held my breath. Fighting I was good at, negotiating not so much.
“I’ll give you the flail of Marsum if you let me go and swear you won’t follow,” I said.
“On the souls of my ancestors, I swear it.”
This was too good to be true. I lifted the flail and stuck it out so she could take it in her other talon. The second she grabbed it, she let me go, cawing, laughing at my stupidity.
Oh, I really should have worded that better.
I dropped through the sparse clouds, the icy wind battering at me as the sounds of the dragons below grew louder.
Maks had said he’d catch me.
Lila had said she’d catch me.
I closed my eyes. Not thinking of anything, not wanting to be caught, not wanting to die, just floating in a state of near nothing.
A roar right in my ear snapped my eyes open as a dragon swept in and caught me in his talons when I was only fifty feet from the ground. I yanked a kukri blade out and drove it deep into the scales.
He flung me away and I shifted in midair. Maybe I wouldn’t hurt as bad if I hit in my cat form.
“I got ya!” Lila swept in from the side and caught my hurtling form, but she was not any bigger than me and we were suddenly spinning through the air. Slower, but still headed for the ground.
“Lila, drop me!” I screamed.
“No, you’re my friend!”
And then we were both caught in something black and inky, a mist that belonged to a Jinn.
I blinked and Maks was there, crouched on the stairs, his hands held out, and from them poured the mist that had caught us.
A Jinn had saved me.
A cry went up to the south, and I spun. The rest of the Jinn had taken note.
“Look out!” cried Lila. This time I heeded her warning a little better.
I flattened myself to the stairs and the brush of wingtips made me hold my breath. I stared up at the enormous black dragon that looked back at us, predatory hunger in his eyes. He opened his mouth and the curl of flames licked over blackened teeth. I didn’t wait for Lila to suggest I move my ass. I shot down the stairs, so close to them now that they brushed my belly fur.
There was a grunt behind me and then Maks was at my side . . . as a caracal. His blue eyes were the same, but the rest of him was a forty-pound cat with black tipped ears and a tawny hide.
I knew the Jinn could shapeshift. I’d just never seen it. Suddenly there were pieces of our journey that made sense. The moment that Batman had kept up with Balder, how the horses had run much farther than they should have, well past exhaustion, how he’d stopped to lift his hand to the dragon that first time as if to fire off a spell, his animosity with Merlin. It all fit.
Side by side, we raced down the last of the stairs with Lila close above us. “Hurry, across the river you have to go, the horses are waiting for you there as Merlin said they would be.”
Something in her words slowed me. “Wait, you’re coming too.”
“No. They’ll come for you harder now that they know I’m alive and with you.” She stalled out above us. “I’ll do what I can to lead them away. I thought . . . I thought by telling them that the Ice Witch was going to be overthrown they would let me back in, but . . . I was wrong. They hate me still and everything I represent.” She glanced over her shoulder at the biggest dragon, the solid black one now perched at the top of the castle. “That one there . . . he hates me more than all the rest and will hunt for me now because I’ve escaped so many times. I must go. Thank you for being my friend, Zam. I’m sorry I wasn’t a better friend to you.”
Before I could say anything, she shot off to the south and east. I called after her but she didn’t turn.
Which left me alone with Maks.
“I must go too,” he said, shifting back to his human form. “The Jinn will hunt you for the same reason the dragons would hunt you with Lila riding at your side.”
I still couldn’t look him straight in the face, but our horses—check that, my horses—waited for us.
“Then go, Jinn. Be with your real friends.” I had nothing else for him. There was nothing else to say.
I bolted across a tiny footbridge and lifted my nose. The smell of Balder and Batman was faint but there and I ran toward them. And then got a whiff of goblins.
I turned on the speed, leaving Maks behind, leaving all the questions I had behind. I was pissed enough that when I rounded the copse of trees that hid the two horses and saw the goblins trying alternately to stab them and mount them while they reared and fought to keep clear of the fucking little monsters, I may have lost what was left of my cool.
I shifted while still running which means I basically appeared out of nowhere, screaming bloody murder, a kukri blade in one hand and the Ice Witch’s sapphire in the other. I hit the goblin closest to me with the knife so hard, I sent him twenty feet into the air. He landed with a lifeless thud. They scattered and I stood, shaking and breathing hard enough that I wasn’t sure it was a good idea to approach the two horses. They on the other hand had no such qualms. The two horses trotted to me, both sticking their noses into my belly, demanding attention. I breathed in and out slowly, trying not to think about everything that had happened. About how messed up my life had become in such a short time.
I made myself pull my extra cloak from my saddlebag and slid it on. It smelled like Maks, of the desert and the hot sun, and I knew now why he smelled like that—because he was born and bred there, the same as me. As much as I wanted to rip it off and toss it to the ground, I also didn’t want to freeze. I slid my knife into its sheath and strapped the sapphire still on the staff to my chest under the cloak.
What I didn’t realize was that Maks had caught up to me. I turned to see him standing there, sorrow in his eyes.
“Go where you need to go, Jinn.” I reached for Batman’s reins and tucked them into my hand. Maks was no longer a caracal, but a man once more. A Jinn, I reminded myself. Not human at all.
“Will you not even let me explain, Zam?” His blue eyes were earnest and part of me did want him to explain. But I’d heard that line before.
“You mean like Steve explained why he couldn’t help himself? That he just had to fuck Kiara? You want to explain why you—a Jinn—have been using me to escape your family? You think you’re the only one who wants to escape them? You think the rest of us wouldn’t like to get away?” I might have been yelling, but at that point it all bubbled over. A mess of words and hurt. “I’ve been lied to enough in my life, thank you very much.” I started to turn away when he held up a flashing silver chain.
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