I held him there. “Talk to me, Toad.”
His body began to shake, and I held my breath. Goddess of the desert, what now?
Laughter spilled out of him and he slowly lifted his hands to mine. “Toad? Really?”
I yanked him to me and kissed him for all I was worth. All the hope and fear, all the worry and belief that I’d lost him were wrapped up in that one touch of mouth on mouth. Love, love was something I’d had so little of in my life, and I knew its touch like a woman dying of thirst knew the first brush of water on her tongue.
Everything, that kiss and Maks were everything.
“I’m here. I’m here.” He whispered the words between touches, between kisses peppered across my mouth. Frantic, we clung to each other. How many times had we had a moment like this only to have it ripped away?
Too many to count.
Too many to not believe it might happen again.
It was my turn to shake, to tremble, with a fear of what could come next.
I shouldn’t have been worrying about Maks, though. He brushed his hands over me. “Where is Lila?”
It took me a moment to realize that in the whole fight, she’d not been there. She’d not even done a flyby to buzz us and check in.
My fear for Maks shifted into instant horror. “I don’t know.”
25
While I would have loved for my reunion with Maks to be one consisting of stripping off clothes and rolling around in a huge bed for hours on end, it was decidedly less romantic and far more practical.
I helped him stand in the middle of the street in the Blackened Market as we both scanned the night sky for some sign of Lila.
“Can you find her?” Maks held onto my hand and I was not about to pull away.
I opened myself to the bond I had with Lila and found her to the south. “You get the horses, and your weapon. I have one more person to grab.”
He let me go and turned toward the weapons merchant’s stall, our fingers sliding across one another, leaving behind a tingle on my skin. Yeah, at some point we were going to have that rolling around a big bed naked scene happen. But not tonight.
And probably not tomorrow either. We were down to a single day before the golden moon rose. Two days was not enough time to make anything happen.
I ran back the way we’d come, sliding to a stop in front of Bryce’s cage while I kept a bead on Lila’s location. She wasn’t hurt, but she was damn well terrified and her fear infected me, making me jittery and sharp in my movements.
“Out of the way!” I motioned at Bryce with one hand, waving him back.
He took a few steps back, as much as he was able in his too-small cage, and I swung the flail, smashing it through the bars that held him. The iron melted away as if the flail was hot, and the iron puddled to the ground. Bryce leapt out but didn’t shift.
“Later,” he said, “when we have clothes.”
Like with Maks, I wanted this moment to stretch, to hold and be grateful that my brother was back with me. The two men I loved the most in this world were alive and well. And they were damn well with me.
But Lila was in trouble and there was zero time to be all lovey-dovey. “Let’s go, trouble is coming.”
“Surprise, surprise,” he drawled and bounded along at my side.
I found my feet skidding to a stop in front of the slave traders’ wares. Hollowed-out cheeks, eyes full of despair. I had a moment, just a single moment, and the White Raven’s voice spoke as clearly as if she were there: “You never even tried to help free me.” And I made my decision. I swung the flail, catching the chains that held the slaves, shattering them like glass. “Run.”
They scattered, a tiny puff of magic around several of them and then they were going for it. Their slavers came out of their homes yelling, took one look at me and Bryce and slowed. I grinned, wondering just what they were seeing in me, in us. Covered in blood, maybe with the glow of magic still on me and the flail swinging loose at my side. It was all the time I could buy the slaves.
“One more stop,” I said as I ran down the street, finding the dragon egg shack easily. I kicked down the door and stepped through into a dim room. A man and woman looked up from some rather frisky behavior, the pimples on his ass all but staring me down as he thrust into her. “Where are the fucking eggs?”
He squealed like I’d stuck a pin in one of those pimples of his, then rolled so the woman was on top of him, essentially shielding him. She whacked at him repeatedly as I stared him down. “The eggs.”
“All sold!” he shouted. “They’re gone already, they never last long.”
I should have killed him, but I had a feeling he and I were not done. “I’ll be back to have a chat with you, pimple ass. Not tomorrow, but soon.”
I turned on my heel and ran out of the room. Bryce gave me a look and I grimaced. “I made a promise.” I might not be able to save the dragon babies yet, but I would. I would come back, and I would pick up the trail. They were jewels of a different kind.
“Of course you did,” he muttered. “Too big of a heart.”
He loped along at my side until we caught up to Maks and the horses.
Maks shot a look at Bryce and his eyes widened. “Bryce?”
Bryce looked up at him. “It’s a long story, man. Another time.”
I hopped onto Balder and led the way because my brother was right—we were out of time. We ran past where Maggi’s body was already being picked apart by the merchants, taking her bones for goddess only knew what. I shot them a look, but didn’t slow Balder’s feet. That was her penance for double-crossing us—I had no sympathy in me for her anymore.
Thoughts of what was coming bit at my heels like a dog herding goats. We had to be at the crossroads tomorrow night and we were a solid two or three days away for travel. The place where a curse could be broken and we had to be there. But whose curse? Mine? Lila’s? Or someone else’s? And only there could we find the power to stop the Emperor. To dethrone him.
Something we needed even more now that I’d agreed to hand over the flail.
In person, no less. I grimaced, knowing that the cost of what I’d offered was high, but what I’d gotten in return was worth it.
“Hurry, we need to get Lila and ride like our lives depended on it,” I said with a quick glance back at them. Only my eyes were drawn up by a flicker of motion across the stars, the blotting out of light by a body far too big to be a bird, or even one of the desert hunting falcons.
“Dragon.” I breathed the word and knew then why Lila was afraid.
Her father had found us.
Corvalis, leader of the dragons and legendary monster, let out a bellow that shook the rafters of the shops around us. I leaned into Balder, urging him faster. We raced across the cobblestones and hit the sand at full speed. As we crossed the southern border of the market, Lila dashed out to our side as we raced away from the Blackened Market. I held out my hand to her and she shot to me and burrowed herself in my arms.
“He saw me. He knows I’m here,” she cried out.
I looked at Maks, thinking that we had four stones, four powerful stones, and maybe one of them could stop Corvalis. He shook his head. “We have to run. The stones are too unpredictable and we are both exhausted.”
Bryce galloped along my other side, keeping up, a grin on his face. “I agree. We run.”
Another bellow came from behind us and the guttering of flames as the night lit up with dragon fire. Screams lit the air and I found myself staring over my shoulder as the market exploded with dragon fire.
Literally.
“Maybe he’s here to save the eggs?” I said. Not that they were there, but maybe that was why he’d come.
Lila shivered against me. “No, he’s after me. I’m sure of it.” I held her a little tighter, fearing for her. Fearing for us all.
We’d survived Corvalis once, but I wasn’t sure we could do it again.
We were miles away before I would let the horses slow, and even then,
they rooted their heads forward, digging at the bits, wanting themselves to keep going. They danced and jigged and I struggled to shush them.
Until I realized that we were far from out of the dark, in dangerous sands.
“Oh, shit.” I spun Balder to look behind us, to see the telltale spray of sand into the air caught only by the light of the moon as the ophidians raced toward us, nearly silent and far more deadly than Corvalis in that moment.
“Go, go, go!” I yelled and the horses took off with my voice, before we could cue them. Bryce kept up, running flat out, but not for long and I knew it.
“We have to do something. There is no hard ground, and no way to keep this pace up!” Maks yelled across to me.
I nodded, and my hand went for the sapphire stone. Lila stopped me, shook her head. “No, it will draw my father. He’ll sense the power and he will know. He will know it’s us!”
I wanted to tell her there was no other option, but that wasn’t right. That wasn’t right at all.
“Lila, what if we could make you big? You’re strong enough to carry all of us, aren’t you?”
She stared at me. “What are you talking about?”
I pulled the chain and ring out of my pouch, showing it to her. “Maggi made this to hold a curse back. It could be used for you, on your curse. You could fly us out of here.”
She cringed against me as if I held a hot poker to her. “You would trust Maggi?”
“She wore the ring. She didn’t die because of it,” I said. “Lila, it might be our only chance to get to the crossroads, to break the curse on you for real.” Because despite wanting to believe that my own curse could be broken, I knew in my heart that it would never happen.
I was what I was for a reason.
She shook her head. “I’m afraid, Zam. That other one, it almost killed me.”
“I remember,” I said. “But this isn’t then, this is now.” I tied it into Balder’s mane. “Take it when you’re ready, Lila. I know you can do this.”
She stared at it, eyes wide. “I can’t.”
“I can’t keep up!” Bryce hollered, out of breath and slowing rapidly. I spun Balder and hopped off, pulling my flail free.
“Then we fight,” I said, even though I knew that this was the worst idea possible. There was no way I was going to leave Bryce behind.
And for once, he didn’t argue. He slid to a stop and turned to face the oncoming pack of ophidians.
“What has their queen got against us?” Lila asked.
“Question of the day,” I muttered.
The flail all but hummed under my hands as I held it out to my side, and a single word reverberated through me.
Stones.
I spluttered. “The stones?”
“Shit, that makes perfect sense. Everybody wants the stones and their power. Why wouldn’t she?” Maks took up a position beside me, the bladed spear in both hands. He’d have good reach with that at least.
My mind, though, was reeling. The ophidian queen wanted the stones.
But how the hell had she known we’d had them in the first place? “She drove us to the Wyvern’s Lair,” I whispered. “We’d talked about not going. She pushed us there to get the stone for her.”
But we hadn’t gotten it, and so she chased us down?
The ophidians slowed as they drew closer, the sound of hissing and sliding sand the only indication that they were still there. The sand around us moved and shifted, but nothing came closer than about a twenty-foot radius.
Until an ophidian slid to the top of the desert, coiled itself and raised itself into a strike position. Mouth open, a voice came from it. Not its own . . .
Its queen’s.
“The stonessssssss.”
“We can’t,” Maks said softly, “it will be the same mess all over again. We have to see this through, Zam.” I didn’t know how he knew that, but I trusted him completely.
“Listen up, Queen whatever-the-hell-your-name-is. You don’t get the stones, not even one of them. We’ll kill your snake friends here, and then you if we have to.”
“You will die,” she said, the ophidian’s head weaving side to side, hissing violently. Lila rose into the air, her wings shaking. “You may kill some of my pets, but more are coming, and even if you escape these, you will have to face more, and more. You cannot kill them all, not even you, Zamira.”
If I didn’t know better, I’d have thought there was a tone of sorrow in the words. But what reason did she have to be sad?
“Fuck off, you forked-tongue bitch!” I snapped, fear making me angry.
Anger making my brain tick.
Forked tongue.
Forked . . . I’d seen a forked tongue. But where? My memory wrapped around me and I stood with my jaw hanging open.
From where I was, the curl of a red skirt was the first of the witches that I saw. A flash of bare toes under the edge of a skirt that swirled around within the mist and on top of the water. I let my eyes drift upward, careful not to move any other part of me.
Fine-boned, dark-haired and dark-eyed, the first witch looked to be about fifteen at the oldest, though I knew that was a lie. They all looked like teenagers when I was here last too, but they were anything but. Her ruby-red lips matched her dress and she cooed softly as she walked daintily toward me, lifting her feet over the logs she encountered, her hands clutched in the material of her skirt. “Oh, there is something here, I think. Yes, Ollianna, do ye feel it?”
A second witch in a dress as black as the muddy water stepped up next to her. Auburn hair flowed around her as if held up by a thousand tiny strings. As fine-boned and beautiful as the first witch, she tipped her head to the side and ran her tongue over her lips. Check that, she ran her forked tongue out and over her lips as if she were tasting the air. I shrank into the water farther, slow and smooth, not even a single ripple giving me away.
“Ollianna?” I gasped. “You’re the traitor?” How could I have been so stupid not to have seen this? She’d been driving us, pushing us in the direction she wanted. Forcing Marsum and me to work together. Because he had a stone. And she thought I’d take it from him. Just like she suggested I do.
The snake hissed, its mouth as wide open as it could be, flashing fangs.
“I gave you a chance to live, Zamira,” Ollianna said through her pet. “And now you die. For that I am sorry.”
The ophidians came at us en masse.
Lila flew above us, circling, a flash of something bright catching the light.
“My friends are not going to die. And we are not giving you the stones, you traitorous bitch.”
Dangling around her neck was the chain and ring.
My father’s ring, the curse breaker.
26
The ophidians took no note of Lila as she flew above us. They kept on coming.
“We just have to hold them off!” I said as I stepped into my first swing, slamming the flail through the sand and into the ophidian’s skull. Maks used his hooked pike to drive through the sand and into the snakes over and over.
“What about me?” Bryce yelled.
“Saddle, shotgun, protect the horses!” I yelled back.
He’d have to shift and fight naked, but it wouldn’t be the first time for him.
A second later, the boom of the gun went off and the ophidians slowed their attack. Only it wasn’t the gun that slowed them.
It was the fast-moving river that raced toward them.
Screeches went up amongst the ophidians caught by the flow, the sand around them bubbling hot with the liquid acid as it raced toward us, flowing from a bigger than life Lila.
“YES!” I punched a hand into the air, then brought the flail down as an ophidian snaked toward me. The flail shivered, giddy with bloodlust that leaked through to me. I wanted to stay, I wanted to put these bastards into their graves and watch them die, but they weren’t the real problem.
No, that would be Ollianna.
She’d hugged me in the dreamscape . . .
hugged me, and that had to have been when she snagged the emerald stone. “You’re a buggering pickpocket, Ollie!” I yelled as I smashed another ophidian. That was why the emerald hadn’t done a thing, why it wouldn’t work for me. She’d switched them out, stealing the real one.
That two-faced, two-tongued liar was about to get her ass handed to her. The only jewel thief here was me.
The acid rolled around us in a circle and the ophidians were gone. “Ah, Lila?”
The ophidians outside the acid fled, but we were as trapped as before, if not more so. “Lila, little help!”
Closer and closer the liquid death crept through the sand, bubbling and hissing.
“Get on the horses!” she yelled, her voice a hell of a lot louder than before. Bigger. Everything in her was bigger.
I scrambled up with Maks onto Batman, giving Balder over to my naked brother. “Don’t take this the wrong way . . .”
Bryce laughed. “Yeah, I don’t want to snuggle up to you right now either.”
I looked up as Lila’s talons scooped us with ease, wrapping around the horses’ middles.
With a whoosh of her wings, we were in the air and headed south faster than the horses could have managed on their own, even pushed as hard as we could have pushed them. I laid a hand on the closest part of Lila’s talon, feeling the trembling there as she shook.
“We’re going to figure this out, Lila. You will be okay.”
“I just . . . it’s too good to be true.” She glanced down at me, her violet eyes the same as before, just bigger. Damn, I was struggling to wrap my head around her size too.
“Maybe you deserve a little too good to be true,” Maks said. “Maybe we all do.”
Lila snorted. “Toad, I did not take you for the dreamer.”
He grinned and slid an arm around me. “Me either.”
I leaned into him and just let him hold me. Maybe it wasn’t rolling around on the gigantic bed with satin sheets, but he was with me. I had him back. I found myself looking back the way we’d come, searching the skies for Corvalis. Whatever was keeping him busy was fine by me, it gave us more time to get away.
Wyvern's Lair (Desert Cursed Series Book 5) Page 22
