“Oh, you tricky cat!” she shrieked, laughing, as she pulled up for another round.
I twisted sideways from there, shifting into my four-legged form, then turned on another burst of speed, as I raced across the still-barren, cold ground.
The plains of the northwest side of the Caspian Sea were rocky and empty of life this time of year, leaving very few places to hide. But the small forested area ahead would work for what I wanted—a quiet place to settle my mind and connect with my pride. Assuming I could. The cat and mouse game with Lila was just a bonus that woke up my muscles and gave me a sense of freedom for a few minutes.
In my four-legged form, I was not much bigger than her, topping the scales at a whopping six pounds. My black fur rippled as I raced flat out for the trees, as low to the ground as I could get, zigzagging my way there as if avoiding a burst of rapid-fire bullets.
Not that I knew what that would feel like, but my dad had told us of fighting in the human wars. Of being hunkered down while the bullets flew, of not being able to shift into his lion form and give himself away if he wanted to protect the men he fought with. He’d had to play by the human rules all those years. A marine to the very end, he’d never stopped trying to protect those who needed him.
Strange to think that here, behind the wall, we were so stuck in a strange mix of times, a blending of the old medieval relics with bits of technology and current weaponry thrown in for good measure that had made it over the wall over the years. How long had it been since I’d even thought about the year it was now? Years. We had to be well into the 2000s by now. My thoughts distracted me and I got nailed for it.
A pair of talons wrapped around my middle as Lila hoisted me into the sky. “Gotcha!”
Laughing, I relaxed in her hold and turned my head and let my tongue hang out. “I’m dead.”
“Yeah, you are!” She barrel rolled, still holding me, and my stomach turned in the opposite direction.
“Ugh, knock that off,” I gasped.
Her talons tightened and she snaked her head around to stare at me, her eyes wide with horror and her face coloring a deeper blue. “Oh, my goddess, I’m sorry! I didn’t even think about how insensitive that was!”
I shook my head. “That’s not what I meant, and don’t be sorry. Bryce actually had a decent sense of humor when he wasn’t being a dick. Underneath all that bossy alpha nature of his.”
She smoothed out her trajectory and quickly changed the subject. “The trees, that where we’re headed?”
“Yes, that will work,” I answered. She plummeted out of the sky, giving my guts another good drop and roll. I didn’t have to point her to a clearing. She circled around a spot where we could land and let go of me when we were ten feet in the air.
I landed lightly on all fours and shifted back to two legs. For years, I’d avoided shifting, ashamed of my small form when the rest of my family were massive golden lions. But I’d found that my size, such as it was, had its benefits, too, if I let myself see it.
Shifting too much one time right after the other weakened me, but two or three shifts were easy enough now that I was doing it more.
A wry grin twisted my lips as I stood and walked farther into the copse of half dead, partially burned trees. Not exactly a fairytale garden. I lifted a hand and touched one of the branches, frowning at the brittle texture. Even for the plains, this was not what I would call normal.
“Lila, you seeing this? Does it look weird to you?” I asked as I walked among the bushes and trees. They were thicker now and tangled with some vine I didn’t recognize. The stem was a deep red and it reached out with thin tendrils that curled and floated in the air as if testing it, or maybe even . . . tasting it. My feet slowed on their own.
Lila hopped into the air, flapped her wings once and was on the back of my neck, using my head to lean on. “That’s very strange. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
The vine shivered in the wind . . . only there was no wind. I took a step back. A tendril of the vine dipped to one side and then the other, circling around as if that creepy little fucker knew we were there. As if it were scenting the air, almost.
A voice whispered along the vine. “Bow to me, Zamira.” Oh, shit.
“Well, that’s a whole lot of nope,” Lila whispered. “We should go.”
I turned to do just that.
The vines had encircled us as we’d stood staring at the one that moved in front of us.
I reached back for the flail I carried, only I’d left it off to sleep and hadn’t put it back on when I’d gone on this walkabout. The vines shivered and a low snicker rolled through them. “Bow to me, or die.”
Laughing, talking plants? Yeah, that was a hard pass.
“Not the time to panic,” I said softly, reaching for the kukri blades I carried on my thighs. The light around us deepened as a cluster of clouds crossed in front of the sun. “If we have to, I’ll shift, and you carry me out.”
Lila squeaked, her tiny claws digging into my scalp. “Yes, it’s time to panic.”
She yanked my head back so I looked straight up at a perfect canopy of blood-red vines blocking us in.
“Well, fuck, that is not going to help,” I muttered.
I tightened my hands on the blades. If the Emperor thought I was going down in a bunch of weeds, he was about to be proven sorely wrong.
Chapter Three
The vines tightened around us, the tendrils reaching slowly as they unfurled, revealing more and more tendrils. Lila wrapped herself around my neck so snugly, I saw spots and stars dance across my vision.
“Too tight,” I gasped, but I wasn’t mad at her—if I could have clutched at someone I would have done it too.
She eased off and I dropped to a crouch. The vines continued to make their steady approach. “I’m going to start chopping. Unless you have the sapphire with you?” Oh, please let her have it with her.
“I took it off,” she whispered. Which I could see just by looking at her. The stone was no small thing. But it would have been really fucking handy right then. With the sapphire, she could have turned the vines to ice.
“Bow to me, and I will let you live,” the voice that I was sure was the Emperor’s said again.
“You see, this is why people think you’re an ass,” I snarled.
Lila shivered. “Do I want to know who that is?”
“Nope, you don’t.” I pulled both curved blades from their sheaths on my thighs and rolled them in my hand. One deep breath in and I lunged forward, still in a crouch, slashing with the kukris as hard as I could. They were designed to stay perpetually sharp and they cut through the vine in front of me, which was a relief. The bits of plant dropped to the ground, leaking juice in a spray that left droplets all over the ground and my clothes.
Lila screeched. “Blood, they’re full of blood!”
I gritted my teeth and swung again. What was this madness? Was I still dreaming? Because this nightmare could not exist in real life—there was nothing like this that I’d ever come across. Unless it was a trap.
But for whom, for me or someone else? Hell, if that really was the Emperor we’d heard, then how did he know I’d come here? There was no way he’d have been able to predict this.
I cut through the vines in front and above us, my clothes slowly covered with sprays of the blood of the vine, more with each pass of my blades.
“Above!” Lila yelled as she ducked down, sliding partway down my back.
I dropped to a knee and swung above my head without looking. My right blade met some serious resistance and I tried to yank it free with no result. I looked up. The vine that had worked toward us was as thick as my arm and covered in a dark red bark that shimmered in the dull light. I jerked my blade out of it and a tiny drop of blood followed.
With my eyes up, I didn’t see the vines coming for my feet. One of them wrapped around both my ankles and snapped them together, then pulled me down to my butt. I hit the ground hard and the shock ran up my spine, s
ucking a gasp out of me.
“Fuck you, asshole!” I leaned forward and cut through the vines holding my feet.
“Zam!” Lila screeched. I spun to see her fighting with teeth and claws as the vines pulled at her feet and wings, dragging her from my shoulder.
I reached for her, snagged the end of her tail and yanked her to me. She fought me until she saw it wasn’t a vine that had yanked her. “Acid, Lila. You got any?”
She shook her head. “I used it all in my fight with my dad.”
Sweet baby goddess, we were in trouble.
The vines laughed again. “Claim me as your master, Zamira, and I will let you live.”
“Hang onto my front,” I said, ignoring him. He didn’t know me at all, so he had no idea what kind of shit he’d just stirred up. She dug her claws into the front of my shoulders and buried her head against my chest.
“If I was big . . .” she whispered.
“We’d have been caught already if we were any bigger,” I said. “Call this a win for the small kids.”
We had to get out of here, and out now. We had less than a minute if the vines kept up their creeping nature. The ground rumbled below us and I could only imagine just what other catastrophe was coming our way.
I had an image of the Emperor himself flash through my mind, his disarming smile, the way the laugh lines around his eyes crinkled. A mask for the monster? Suddenly I wasn’t so sure.
There was no time to think. I slashed the vines in front of me, snarling as I fought my way through the mass of writhing things. Not vines. I would not call them vines as they bled, as they fought to get their tendrils wrapped around us. The ground rumbled again and the rocks and pebbles danced up and down with the vibration.
Lila clung to me and I pushed through everything. As the vines dropped onto me, I cut them off. As they reached to block our way, I sliced through them. Sweat dripped off my chin as I worked, slashing through everything that was even remotely in front of me.
The vines were there and then suddenly gone as I stumbled into the open plain, out of the copse of trees. I scrambled on my hands and knees to get farther away.
“We have to go,” I said. “That thing will keep coming.”
Lila crawled up far enough that she could peek over my shoulder. “Zam, the vines are gone. They aren’t there.”
I spun around, still on my hands and knees. All that was behind us was the same bush and scraggly trees that had been there when we’d landed, not a vine to be seen.
“That’s impossible.” I looked down at my clothes, half expecting them to be clean as when we’d gone in.
Blood splattered them, and I reached up to touch my face. My fingertips came away wet, covered in blood. I sniffed at it to be sure. It was blood . . . and not just any blood. I wrinkled my nose.
“Lila, this is . . . the blood is from someone who carries magic. Like Jinn. Or witches. Or mages,” I said softly.
She shivered. “I’ve never heard of anything like this before. Have you? And who was that voice?”
I shook my head. “No, I’ve not heard of it either. And I don’t want to ever deal with it again. If we’d gone even a few feet farther into the copse . . . I don’t think we would have gotten out.” My first thought was to burn the place down. “As to the voice, well, that’s a big fucking mess.”
She shivered again, all the way down to the tip of her tail. I put a hand to her back.
“Why did you want to go in there?” she asked.
“I wanted to see if I could connect with the others in my pride, like my dad used to.” I rubbed a hand over my face, wiping off the worst of the blood onto the sleeve of my shirt. “It would make it easier to find them if I could.”
“You mean like you did with Bryce.” She slowly pulled herself to my shoulder, but like me she didn’t take her eyes from the seemingly innocuous bush.
“Yeah, that had been the plan.” I made myself take a step, then another and another toward the bushes.
Lila scrambled back and launched into the air, flying ten feet above me. “Are you out of your gourd? Why in the world are you going back?”
I shook my head and then nodded. “Maybe I’m out of my mind, but it calls to me.” I just couldn’t walk away from this place that had tried to kill us without at least making an attempt to figure it out. I mean, let’s get real. The bush hadn’t been about cuddling up for warmth. The plants didn’t change as I drew closer, but there were spots of blood here and there on the ground where I’d fought my way out. I frowned and crouched while Lila groaned above me.
“Seriously, why are you doing this?” she yelled.
“Because it’s not natural, even for our world of crazy.” I touched the ground, brushing a thumb through a drop of blood. The ground rumbled and I lifted my eyes to see the dark red vines just suddenly there in front of me, tendrils unfurling as they reached for me. As if they had never not been there. I lifted my blades to my eye level. “I don’t know what you are, but unless you want me to uproot you and salt the ground you live in, you’d better back the fuck off.”
The vines wavered and slowly pulled back. Sentient, bloodthirsty plants with a taste for magical blood that were obviously connected to someone powerful. Most likely the Emperor.
Lila and I didn’t have magic, though, so part of that made no sense. Maybe that was why the vines had taken their time in attacking us. Maybe we weren’t the ideal food.
I stood and backed up, still holding my blades up until I was a good twenty feet back. “Lila?”
“Yeah,” she called to me from above my head, “I’m up here, far enough away.”
“Can you see any marker we can watch for in the next bit of bush we stumble on? A pattern or anything?” I wiped my blades on a scraggy tuft of grass and then stuffed them back into their sheaths as I circled to one side of the copse. The plants just looked like plants.
“Nothing.” She dropped through the air, winging beside me as I started back toward the campsite. My stomach rumbled, reminding me I’d not been eating much the last few days.
But even with that, I couldn’t help but look back more than once at the bushes. As if there were eyes on me still. I crinkled up my nose. “You feel that, Lila?”
“Yes, something is watching us,” she said. “From the bush?”
I gave a quick nod. “Maybe Maks or Shem will know what it is.”
She didn’t answer, and she didn’t have to because we both knew that answer. The plains and desert were my home stomping ground. If I didn’t know what that freak of a bush was, there was no way Maks and Shem would know. The urge to go back and burn it down was strong.
I turned one last time, right before I stepped into camp.
For just a moment, I thought I saw movement, a figure walking toward the bush and then it—he—was gone. On my own, I would have gone back again and lit the vines on fire.
I was certain the figure had been the Emperor, as impossible as that seemed. The desert clothes, the hood covering his head. Who else would it be?
Who else had asked me to bow to him recently? Yeah, that’s right, nobody.
But this wasn’t about me anymore. I had a pride to take care of—to rescue from the Jinn before I could go after Merlin, before I could find a way to bring Bryce back. And that meant being more responsible than I had in the past.
Like a stick in the mud.
Shem cleared his throat as I turned back to the camp. “So, your walk went well, did it?” He stared hard, then fluttered his fingers on one hand at me. “Blood splatter already? Is that allowed before noon?”
Maks spun around and stood stock still, his eyes going to my once-white shirt. “Zam? What happened? Are you okay?”
I raised both hands. “I’m fine. Lila is fine. It’s . . . weird is the closest word I’ve got for it.” I quickly told them about the bush with the thick red vines, oozing blood, and our narrow escape. I did not mention the voice.
“I warned it I would salt the ground if it tried again.
” I sat against Balder’s saddle on the ground and took a plate of food Shem offered me. “It backed off. Like it had a brain inside all those twisty vines.” I took a bite of the eggs and grimaced. They were dry as the desert sands. I would lay money Shem had done it on purpose.
Maks stared hard at me. “If not for the blood, I would ask if you were seeing things.”
I snorted and took a bite of the meat on the plate. Bird of some sort by the taste, maybe desert pheasant. “You and me both. I wondered if it was a nightmare and I was still asleep.”
Shem was quiet as he made up a plate for Lila and then one for Maks and himself. Too quiet. I narrowed my eyes. “Shem, you know something about that bloodthirsty bush?”
He sighed as he lowered himself into a crouch, easily balancing his plate on one knee. “I do. It’s something of the Emperor’s. Not unlike the standing stones, if you remember those from the stories I told you as a child.”
I stopped chewing, the food in my mouth turning to dust. I shot a look at Lila and gave the subtlest of head shakes. We were not mentioning the voice. Not yet.
“We saw a set of the standing stones farther north. They ate two Jinn,” Lila said.
Hell, they’d almost eaten Maks.
Maks paled, obviously remembering. He twisted around to look in the direction Lila and I had come. “And this bush, it’s the same thing? Will it call to Jinn and others who have magic?”
Shem went from a crouch to sitting on the ground, his long legs out in front of him, crossed at the ankle. “The standing stones are the first marker the Emperor is awake. The blood vines, they are the second. While the standing stones take the magic and soul of those who carry that type of ability, the blood vines take just that. Blood.”
I made myself keep eating though the food tasted like dirt. I swallowed with difficulty before I spoke again. “Two questions. One, the Emperor needs blood? And two, are there more signs like this we should be on the lookout for?”
“Yes, to the first. He needs blood to fully revive himself.” Shem nodded. “And he needs a great deal of it. The vines are indiscriminate. The blood can come from any creature, though I suppose he might prefer one with magic humming in their veins. That would make more sense in terms of giving him strength to break the spell he’s under.” He looked past me in the direction where the bush was. “The signs are shadowed with his power so that you walk into the trap unknowing. That you escaped . . . that is surprising, to say the least.”
Jinn's Dominion (Desert Cursed Series Book 3) Page 3
