“Fuck off!” I yelled as I scooted across the sand, suddenly the hunted instead of the hunter.
As I passed the desert rabbit I’d been hunting earlier hunched under a tiny bush, watching me run for my life, the irony was not lost on me. Stupid fucking rabbit.
The oversized talons reached for me again, cutting through the air like knife blades, whistling as they came for me. I flattened my belly to the ground at the last second, breathed out and that last exhale kept me from being snatched. I spun and headed for a narrow section of dunes that wouldn’t allow for the big bird to swing in and scoop me up. The sides were steep and narrow enough for an escape. I hoped.
“I thought we were friends!” I yelled, and the Raven just cawed loudly, shattering the air.
I turned on the speed as best I could, wishing once again that I had a more robust frame, one with longer legs and enough power within me that I could tackle what life threw in my path.
My thoughts scattered as the sound of a dive-bombing bird tugged at my ears. I dared a glance back, and that was my mistake.
As I turned my head, my feet caught in a dip in the ground, and that fucking exhaustion dogging me made me sloppy. I flipped over myself, literally head over ass, and that was that. Talons closed around me and tore me away from the ground. Trapped, I was trapped and there was no way out of this.
With my legs pinned to my sides there was nothing I could do. Well, there was one thing I could do.
“What the hell is going on? I thought Maggi was on my side?” I snarled the words as I wriggled to get a leg free. Just one front leg loose and I could shift and grab my flail. Maybe.
“I do not ask her opinion or why she does what she does, Wall Breaker. My job is to only do as I’m told. That is the calling of a slave.” Her words were bitter and sharp and followed up with a clack of her razor-sharp beak.
I grimaced.
“I’m sorry you are her slave, honestly, I am—”
“Yet, you did nothing to free me.” She clacked her beak at me again and I sighed.
“I can’t save everyone, you oversized bird brain. I can’t even save myself, if you’ve noticed.” To emphasize my point, I tried again—futilely—to free myself. Her talons tightened over me and I grimaced as my bones ground against one another before she relaxed again.
My words produced a laughing caw from her, surprising me. “True, you are the least likely to survive the coming storms, yet here we are, asking you to navigate what is in the cards for our world. Ridiculous, really.”
I didn’t like the sound of that, but I slowed my struggles. I was too tired to fight if I didn’t have to. “So, she wants to talk again? That’s it?”
“I think she wants to play fairy godmother,” the Raven said as she circled down from the higher air currents. I looked to where we were headed, taking in the odd scene. Below us lay a tiny oasis that had been turned into an icy patch of winter in the middle of the desert.
Maggi—or the Ice Witch as most knew her—was a weather mage as best as I could tell. She’d held one of the stones that increased the power and magic of the user and had gone mad with it. Cray-cray mad. I’d fought her, taken her stone, and that removal of the blue sapphire allowed her to regain some of her lost sanity and humanity. Sort of.
Like most mages, she had her own idea of how things should be done.
This was the second time she’d snagged me from my journey and taken me to where she was to “talk” with me. The White Raven slowed her descent and landed with a single foot, flinging me away from her across the snow. The cold air was bracing and welcome after the heat of the desert, and I breathed it in as I tumbled through it. With a final roll, I came to my feet, shifting forms as I did, clothes intact.
For me, shifting was like walking through a doorway. Human on one side, cat on the other. It used to take me time to shift, but now I was quick, faster than any of the bigger shifters, with no pain unless I tried to shift multiple times back and forth in a row. And those bigger shifters always ended up naked as the day they were born, having their asses slapped.
So, maybe there were some benefits to being a smaller shifter.
The snow crunched under my boots as I did a slow turn, my hands out at my sides but ready to grab a weapon. The palm trees hung heavy with icicles, and the small watering hole was a solid sheen of ice, much to the consternation of several desert animals that crept toward their normal watering hole. A small herd of gazelles pawed at the ice. Their lean bodies didn’t have the strength to even put a dent in the edges of the ice.
“Maggi?” I called the Ice Witch’s name. “You here or just throwing around a snow fit for shits and giggles?”
Behind me the White Raven took a few steps back so she stood on sand instead of snow, her talons digging into the heated grains. I tried to put a reason to why she would step back. Was there truly that bad of blood between her and her master? Or did she just dislike cold feet? Either was possible, the latter the more likely answer. At least, that’s what I told myself.
Muscles aching, head throbbing with a growing headache and my tongue dry from all the running in the sand, I made myself take a few steps deeper into the frozen oasis, a hand going to the tip of the flail. Just in case. “Maggi? You here or should I just leave?”
“I am here,” she answered softly. I did another slow turn to find her sitting within a clump of frozen smaller palms that acted like a small throne, appearing as if she’d been there the whole time, but I’d looked there, and she hadn’t been.
Her eyes were dull and no longer the vibrant icy blue they had been the last time I’d seen her, her skin gray and ashen. No longer did she look like a witch in her prime, but a hag in her final days.
“You look like shit,” I said. The Raven cawed, that sharp laughter hard on the ears. I grimaced. “Sorry, but you don’t look well.”
Maggi smiled but it was sad, pain-filled, as she adjusted her seat, like a hundred-year-old woman trying to find a position where her bones didn’t ache. “You do not look so well yourself, Zamira. Rather like something the cat dragged in.”
Another cawing laugh from the Raven.
“Touché.” I gave her a careful nod and fought the roll of nausea that climbed my throat with that slight movement. She was not wrong. I felt about as bad as she looked, and worse by the second. “Why did you bring me here? I assume not just to exchange pleasantries about how we both look terrible and could use a spa day with a cute pool boy bringing us drinks.”
“No, not that. We have business, you and I.” She drew a slow breath and closed her eyes as her hands fluttered in the air between us like captured birds, right down to the too-long nails. “Ishtar is drawing my life away. I . . . am not long for this world.”
I could believe it, based on how she looked. I wasn’t sure how I felt, though, about her dying in front of me. We had been enemies at first, then she’d tried to help me. Now . . . was she was trying to help me again?
“Are you sure?” I asked the question even though I could practically see death at her shoulder, looming over her, waiting to snatch her last breath away.
Her icy blue eyes opened, faded but as sharp as ever despite the rest of her body failing. “I am sure. I’ve used the last of my power to make you two things, Zamira, the reckless one, the Wall Breaker, alpha of her pride and jungle cat of the deepest hidden forests. I wish I could stay with you and help, but I cannot do both.”
I swallowed hard as her words made me shiver. “Why? Why would you help me?”
Around us, the ice cracked, and the temperature rose, blowing the cool breeze away. I looked around to see the edges of the oasis melting as her power faded. As she faded.
“Because, despite what so many tell you, there is no certainty that you will accomplish anything in regard to the Emperor. The seers that tell prophecy, they do not truly know. At best, they guess. Even your mother was making guesses.” She clasped her shaking hands in her lap. “The only certainty is that things are changing, and you
are a pivotal player in those changes. One with a heart and a mind that would do well to help direct our world’s new path. At the very least, you have the best chance of stopping all this madness, and more than that, stopping my sister.”
“Ish.” I shuddered. “I do not want to face her.”
“You won’t. I don’t think, not yet.” Her hands trembled, fluttering again. “That time will come soon, but it is not now. I will, no I must, give you two things that will help you. They have the last of my abilities and strength poured into them. The last of all I am.”
From her side, she pulled out a silken, icy blue purse—the fabric the same color as her eyes. Understanding rushed over me. “If you hadn’t made these two things, would you be able to fend off Ishtar?”
Her smile was fleeting, gone in an instant. “Too smart. You are too smart for your own good, I think, but perhaps that will save you in the end. Perhaps that will help you survive. Or perhaps, you will outsmart yourself.”
Maggi held up the silken pouch. “Here. This is yours now.”
I stepped forward and took the pouch from her, staring at her while I did so. “What is it you’re giving me?”
“One of the items is a ring,” she said softly, “woven to hold a curse at bay, the spell woven within it nearly identical to the one you wore from Ish most of your life, only this one has no backlash found within it. There is no pain to taking it off.” She grimaced. “My sister is truly a bitch. That was dirty pool, what she did to you and your brother. I’d have just killed you and been done with it.”
Her words were sharp and sweet at the same time. She recognized that what had been done was wrong. But that it had been done at all was a true burn along the edges of my heart. I shook the bag, whatever in it clinking, metal on metal. “I am not cursed any longer, at least not with being condemned to fail at everything. And why would you care anyway?”
“You are not the only one who has carried a curse. Even what my sister is doing to me,” she touched the center of her chest, “can be considered a curse. And perhaps you could use more help than you realize. That is what happens when you are put on a pedestal to be a hero but are nothing more than a mere house cat.” Her tone and eyes were not unkind, but I bristled anyway, feeing the sting of her words.
She wasn’t wrong, and that was always the issue for me. I was not meant to be much of anything, not meant to be anything more than a house cat.
No matter how hard I fought, no matter how many battles I survived, no matter how many jewels I’d brought back from impossible odds, I was and always would be the bad luck black cat. The one everyone underestimated. Just like Lila.
Just like . . . Lila. My mouth dropped open and I stuttered the words as my brain caught up. “Lila is cursed. This could free her?”
Maggi tipped her head to the side and frowned, but the frown was put on. “Is she? I had no idea. But yes, it does block a curse on someone, for a period of time.”
A slow smile slid over my face. Lila could hold the ring. She could be the dragon she was meant to be. We could get to the crossroads where Ollianna and Trick waited, break the curses on us both and stop the Emperor. We could do this; we could survive what was laid out before us with Lila in her full size.
Lila would finally be what she was meant to be, and there wasn’t an ounce of jealousy in me. For her, I would never feel like she didn’t deserve to fly on wings that spread across the sky and darken the sun’s light.
Lila would finally be a dragon of power and size—a force to be reckoned with.
She was totally going to shit herself when she saw this.
2
Merlin
“We have to send Marsum away from the Emperor. If those two get their acts together and start working in tandem, we won’t be able to stop either of them.” Flora was ahead of him, her shapely ass swaying as she strode across the rocky beach. Merlin sighed. He was never going to get a shot at seeing what was under her skirts at the current rate of his epic screw-ups.
Behind them lay the island where the Emperor—his father—was bound. Or sort of bound, if he was going to be accurate. The truth was the chains that held the Emperor tightly were weakening, and his touch on the world grew more and more with each passing day.
Worse, Merlin was not sure if all he’d been doing had been the correct path to keep his father bound and the world safe. Initially he’d thought that having Zam take down the wall was the first step. That would have freed the Emperor, but with Ishtar having the stones back, Merlin had thought that would be enough power to face off with the Emperor once and for all.
Then when he saw that the stones and their cumulative power and violence were making Ishtar a true-blue psycho, he thought that perhaps his plan wasn’t quite on point. Zam seemed to be unaffected by the violence in the stones, but she was not strong enough to carry that kind of magic and face the Emperor. Then there was the Falak, the monster that had brought the Emperor to his throne in the first place. If that big bastard was set free, and the Emperor was dead, who would face the serpent that could destroy a continent?
Merlin rubbed his face, wishing there were better answers. Wishing for so many things. Like a latte. A latte right then would have been nothing short of amazing.
“Yes, I know we have to send him away, but if you haven’t noticed, Marsum is powerful with the stone he holds. And while I am good at what I do, I’m not sure how to stop him without killing him. Killing him and the body that he holds would destroy any hope Zam has of bringing Maks back from the deep. Not to mention, I could end up becoming the bearer of all that Jinn nastiness.”
Flora paused and looked over her shoulder, bright green eyes flashing. “Then we have to kill him by some other means and not tell her.”
“Did you not hear me? One of us would end up becoming the new master of the Jinn! The power of that stone and the memories that come with it would drive either of us mad.” He blew out a breath as he hurried to her side, tugging his horse behind him to keep up. They’d slipped out of the Emperor’s prison, crossed the water to the mainland, and now were hurrying to intercept Marsum, master of the Jinn, before he arrived to join forces with the Emperor.
The Jinn had always been tied to the Emperor in some way, but Merlin wasn’t sure exactly how deep those bonds went. Or how the two parties benefited. What he did know was that if they truly decided to work together, then the world as they knew it was done. There would be no stopping the two of them, not with Ishtar, and not with Zam.
“Marsum said he was drawing power through the standing stones that the Emperor created,” Merlin said. “That’s enough to piss the old man off and make him kill Marsum.” But that would mean allowing the two powers to meet, and that was a very dangerous gamble.
“You don’t want to get your hands dirty?” Flora shook her head. “There are hard decisions ahead, Merlin, and dirty hands are going to happen whether you like it or not.”
“I like the boy,” he said, hands tightening on the reins of his horse. “And he is a match for Zam, a match she needs. And again, the Jinn master issue.” It was like she wasn’t even hearing him.
“She wants Maks. What she needs is Ford,” Flora said. “He’s solid. He won’t argue with her. He’ll follow her lead completely.”
He snorted. “That does her no favors. She needs someone to challenge her, to push her out of her comfort zone and help her be her best. Maks is the one who showed her how strong she was by being her friend and partner, but by holding her accountable too.” He snapped the words, irritated that she could be so blind to the love those two unusual shifters had for each other.
Her feet slowed and once more she looked at him. “Is that what you think? That he’s good for her?”
“I think that love is more than just giving in to the other person, making yourself what they want you to be. Zam . . . that would kill her in the end to realize she’d become what she hated in Steve. It wasn’t his cheating that burned her the most, Flora. I can almost guarantee it. I
t was his desire to make her something she wasn’t. A doormat.
“Someone who took orders and didn’t question him. She tried to be that for him. You can see that in her indecisiveness even now. And when she didn’t fit into the mold he wanted, that was when he cheated on her. When he thought he could get what he wanted from another woman.
“I can’t . . . no, I won’t do that to her. I won’t make her into what she hates by taking away the man who is the best for her. At least, not if I can help it.” A huge breath slid out of him and he found himself in a staring match with Flora. The woman he wanted in his bed more than any other. She challenged him the same way Maks challenged Zam. And he’d walk away from her if she asked him to do this, to compromise what he truly believed when it came to matters of the heart.
He knew it was his downfall, always had been.
“Well, well, Dr. Phil, what do you think we should do then? How do you propose we deal with this new conundrum of helping Maks—who, by the way, has voluntarily put himself to sleep to keep her safe—come back to her side without having Marsum, who is currently in control of Maks’s body, destroy her body and soul?” Her tone was drier than the desert in the middle of the summer and he didn’t miss the sarcasm lacing every word.
What he wouldn’t give to put her over his knee and spank her till she begged for more. His lips twitched. “I have an idea.”
“You have an idea?” Her eyebrows raised. “Truly, fill me in. Your ideas do always work out so well.” Again, he didn’t miss the sarcasm.
Merlin smiled at her. “I had a chat with Maggi while I was trapped in the dreamscape with my father. She’s going to help. She was there when I put the Emperor to sleep. She knows what is at stake now that her mind is not consumed with power.”
He walked past Flora, forcing her to hurry to catch up to his side. The farther they got from the Emperor’s prison when they fought Marsum, the better. On a flat stretch of ground, he mounted his horse and held his hand out to Flora. She took his offer and he pulled her into the saddle behind him, enjoying the way her arms went around him, holding him tightly.
Wyvern's Lair (Desert Cursed Series Book 5) Page 2
