Wyvern's Lair (Desert Cursed Series Book 5) Read online

  He lifted a hand, palm to her in a sign of peace. “Daughter of Ishtar?”

  Flora gasped but otherwise remained silent.

  The other woman’s glare did not ease. “How do you know me?”

  “Well, to be fair, I do not know your name, but I can see the stamp of lineage on you as clearly as a nametag.”

  Her frown deepened and again he was struck by the likeness to her mother, and distantly to her father. His stomach rolled. “Do you have a name?”

  “Shara.”

  “Princess,” he laughed and she bristled. “I mean, it is suiting, to be the lineage of the Emperor and all.”

  She flipped her hair over one shoulder. “And you are my half-brother. Merlin, the mediocre.”

  Flora burst out laughing. “Oh, that’s funny, if untrue.”

  A little bit of warmth fuzzed down his spine that she would defend him.

  Shara looked down her nose at them both. “Why are you following me?”

  Merlin shrugged. “You look like you are on a mission, headed for somewhere important. Perhaps we want to come with you.”

  Her eyes popped wide. “You can’t.”

  “Why not?” He shrugged. “Perhaps I want to get to know someone in my family.”

  “Bother someone else then. You are below me.” She turned her back on him.

  He looked at Flora. “I think I’m going to have to bring out the big guns.”

  “Oh gods,” Flora drawled. “What now?”

  Shara spurred her horse forward and Merlin followed, cutting her off. “I think perhaps I should make this clearer. You are on a mission for the Emperor. A mission that is likely dangerous and could end with you dead, him free, and the world in danger. For a man who isn’t your father, seems a pity and a waste of a good life and talent.”

  His words hauled her up short like nothing else would. He’d timed that right and gave himself a pat on the back. She turned her horse and stared at him. “And just who do you think my father is? I carry the Emperor’s bloodline, and Ishtar’s. It is proven in the prick of blood in the scrying mirror.”

  Merlin cleared his throat. “How many sons did the Emperor have again? I forget, with all the women he’s spawned over the years.”

  Flora drew in a breath slowly, but it was the closest thing to a gasp she was going to give him. She didn’t like being shocked. To be fair, neither did he, but he found a perverse pleasure in making her realize she didn’t know everything. Even if he was in the same boat, Flora didn’t have to know that.

  Shara stared at him, the blood slowly draining from her face. “No.”

  “Well, you can say no all you like, that doesn’t mean the word applies.” He shrugged. “To be fair, I had no idea. Ish and I haven’t been close for some time. If you get my drift.” He winked at her. She shook her head.

  In hindsight, he could have handled the situation better, maybe with less desire to “drop the bomb and shock and awe” the two women. Maybe a gentle discussion over a nice hot tea would have been better.

  Shara let out a scream and slammed her hands together. He should have expected it, really, but he’d been stupid to think she’d be happy to meet her real father (who she considered mediocre) over the Emperor himself. But that meant, at least for some reason, she believed him. A burst of power rippled out from Shara’s hands, which sent Flora, Merlin and their two horses hurtling backward.

  End over end, they went until the four of them crashed against the ground, sliding to a tangled, bruised and amazingly still alive heap.

  Merlin was the first to his feet and he reached for Flora. She pushed his hand away. “That was poorly done, even for you. Why didn’t you tell me you had a child?” There was hurt in her voice he didn’t like.

  She went to the horses first and helped them up to their feet. They stumbled a little, shaking, but there were no broken legs. Merlin dusted himself off.

  “Yes, well, I foolishly thought she’d be happy to meet me. I mean, as soon as I realized that she was mine and not his . . .”

  “And when was that?” Flora barely spared him a glance.

  “Oh, about two seconds after I met her.”

  He rubbed at a bruise blooming on his side. That was going to hurt later something fierce. “He took her, to use against me,” he said softly, the ramifications settling in.

  “He thinks you won’t hurt her.” Flora tossed him his horse’s reins.

  “I won’t,” he whispered. He’d never had a child, never had a desire for one, mostly because his family was so damn messed up. Who wanted to bring an innocent into that god-awful cluster of bad behavior? He’d always known that a child could be used, and his father knew that he had a softer heart than most.

  Flora sighed. “I do understand that, and while she might very well be your . . . daughter . . .” she shook her head as if she was having as difficult a time as he was believing what she’d seen, “you can’t assume that she won’t try to kill you. Or me.”

  She was likely right, and Merlin wasn’t fully sure that Shara was even his daughter. There was a definitive likeness there, but that could be because they were siblings. But even that half fib didn’t stick with him. Ishtar had never had a child with the Emperor. He would have known. He did his best to keep tabs on all his father’s women. “We have to go after her, regardless. She is working for the Emperor, doing his bidding. That is enough to stop her.”

  “And how would you like to do that? Do you have any idea of where she might be going?” Flora had her hands on her hips, ready for an argument. He went to his saddlebags with a slight limp of his left side. Yes, that was going to be tender for a few days. Rummaging around his bags, he breathed a sigh of relief as his hand slid over the cool-as-glass crystal ball he used for scrying.

  “I think we can assume her direction is to the east, and for some reason she is going hard. Being drawn away from the Emperor. Enough that she wouldn’t even bother to fight us.” He held the scrying ball in his left hand and slid his right over it in a quick wave. The image wavered and the Stockyards came into view.

  “What is that place?” Flora asked.

  “Ishtar’s home.” He frowned, wondering why the scrying ball had shown him this when it was the girl, Shara, he’d been scrying for. He tried again, forcing a little more of his magic through the clear crystal until it shivered in his hand, the sound of it cracking singing through the air.

  “Not so much,” Flora said softly, putting her hands over his. “You’ll break it.”

  She was right. Merlin tried to breathe through the desire to shove his magic deep into the crystal ball to force it to hurry up. He softened his hold on it and eased back in his power. It occurred to him, briefly, that he’d never been strong enough before to even come close to cracking a crystal ball. That should have tipped him off to some rather important changes in himself, but his mind was focused on one thing. Finding the young Shara. But again, the image that appeared seemingly had nothing to do with her.

  As the image cleared, it showed them the Stockyards again from another angle, as a set of four horse and riders came into view, a prisoner in the center of their group.

  A rather large black lion as said prisoner, his head down and feet padding along as if he were drugged.

  “Oh, dear,” Merlin said. There was no way this was good.

  “That’s Ford!” Flora gasped, her hands cupping the crystal ball around his fingers. “What has happened? Is Zam . . .”

  “No, we would feel the repercussions of magic being loosed from her death if she had been killed.” He was at least fairly certain of that fact. If again, not fully certain.

  There was a flash across the crystal ball and the image of Shara riding hard to the east. Merlin sighed, exhausted already, as he saw the head-on collision long before it even happened.

  “What is it? What do you see?” Flora stared up at him and he sighed again.

  “The Emperor has sent her to Ishtar.” He smoothed his hand over the crystal orb and the imag
es slid away.

  “But why?” Flora frowned, and then her face cleared with understanding before he could answer her, and she gasped. “To retrieve the stones. Zeus’s thong in a wicked twist, that is going to put her on a head-on collision with Ishtar. Ishtar will kill her. She won’t care that Shara is her child, not with the state she’s in.”

  “Yes. The stones that Ishtar took into her body to keep them from being stolen again are what she’s after. I’m sure of it.” He put the crystal ball into the saddlebag and mounted. “We need to get there before Shara.”

  Flora nodded, her face grim as they turned the horses east and rode as though the devil himself was at their heels.

  The thought crossed Merlin’s mind as he turned his head to look back toward the prison he’d created for his father, a distant laughter curling toward them, that perhaps that was exactly the case.

  11

  Zamira

  The hard ground below me was far from comfortable with the points and jags of the stone jamming into my ass, reminding me that I didn’t have a ton of cushion there. I opened my eyes, my arms still locked around Balder’s neck as he lay with his head across my lap. Another set of arms were still around me, hands that I knew all too well. I blinked once, drew a breath and found Lila staring back at me, her violet eyes wide.

  “Marsum is still asleep. Maggi wandered off, and I don’t know where she is,” she whispered and then shoved the sapphire back at me. I took it and tucked it under my shirt. She went on. “We have to talk about this situation. About him.”

  The him in question was slumped against my back still, his breathing in and out smooth and even. All of us—the two horses included—had passed out after the massive amount of magic we’d run through our bodies to heal Balder from the ophidian’s killing venom. I sat up a little straighter and Marsum’s arms tightened around me, but otherwise he didn’t stir.

  With a bit of a wiggle, I slid his arms down around me and stepped out of his hold. Again, he stirred but settled back to leaning against Balder’s neck. By the set of the sun, we’d been out for a few hours, nothing more. Good, we couldn’t afford to lose more time. It would be dark soon and we could keep going—albeit slowly. Much as I’d like to lie down, the nights had proven restless for me, my dreams full of Maks.

  Batman lifted his head and gave me a big yawn and a sleepy blink as I took a few steps away from the three males of the group.

  Lila flew to my shoulder and put her mouth close to my ear. “I know we can’t really trust him, but . . . it was Maks in there, helping, wasn’t it? Marsum wouldn’t have helped, he said he wouldn’t and then he did. Maks came through, I think. I’m sure of it. It felt like him, didn’t it?” As quiet as she was, the words were still rapid fire. Fueled by excitement and hope, no doubt.

  I nodded. “Yes, that was what I got too. But . . . I don’t think Marsum realized he was being manipulated by Maks.”

  “I thought Maks went to sleep. Isn’t that what he told you?” Lila’s question was not unwarranted. When I’d last seen Maks in a vision, after we’d visited the Oracle’s Haunt, he’d told me he was putting himself into a deep sleep so Marsum couldn’t use his love for me against me. So there was less attraction there, less desire to be with him. We’d said goodbye and I’d thought I could turn to Ford to be the rock in my life.

  Look how that had turned out.

  And now, Maks was coming through without Marsum noticing, trying to help me still. “I think we just take this as it comes each day. I can’t fully trust him, and neither can you.” Maybe never really, if I was being honest with myself. Unless there truly was a way to remove Marsum, there was no way I could ever trust the person running Maks’s body.

  “Do you think this is a ploy of Marsum’s to get in your head? To give you what he wants? Could he be faking it?” Again, her question was a good one, and I had no solid answer.

  I looked over my other shoulder at the sleeping form of Marsum. “I don’t know. We have to be ready for that to be a possibility. Maggi might know; if she were here, I’d ask her.” I did a slow turn, sweeping the horizon for the Ice Witch. She was nowhere, like she’d just disappeared. Had she taken the opportunity to run away? Wearing the necklace that blocked Ishtar from taking energy from her, she could have done just that and been free of us. But I had a feeling she wasn’t done with her meddling, not yet.

  “For now, we need him to help me survive this mess.” I touched my chest where the magic coursed through my veins, too much power for me to hold on my own. Even just standing there, a shiver of nausea caught me off guard and I wobbled where I stood. I swallowed hard.

  I was no magical vessel to hold the magic within me, no mage like Merlin or Ishtar to use the power in its rawest form. The fact that Marsum and Maggi had come upon me when they had and saved my life was nothing short of pure luck. Good luck for once. “It’s amazing that Ishtar can hold all this magic from so many stones without dying,” I said.

  “She can’t.”

  We turned as Marsum stood and stretched. “The power was hers originally, and if it was still in that form as when it was taken from her, she’d be fine. Or at least not losing what sanity she has left.”

  “What do you mean? What happened to it?” I asked as I went to where the horses lay. I urged Batman up first and then Balder.

  Marsum spoke while I rubbed Balder down, currying off the worst of the dirt and sweat, beyond grateful that he was still with me.

  “The power of the desert goddess was within her in all its forms, from the rawest of elements to the most ethereal powers. Merlin convinced the other lesser powers of our supernatural world that if we all had a piece of her magic, we could contain the Emperor, stop him from his rampage.

  “Ishtar even agreed to it, according to what I recall, but none of us really understood. Not even Merlin knew what would happen when we stripped her of most of her abilities. In many ways, he was right; we contained the Emperor, but the cost of that was a ripple effect that is even now being seen and felt.”

  I carefully checked Balder’s leg where he’d been bitten, feeling for any swelling or residual reaction to pressure. He was fine, though, as if he’d never been bitten.

  Marsum crouched beside me and ran a hand over Balder’s leg as if he cared that the horse was well. “So, with Merlin’s help, we took Ishtar’s power and split it into—”

  “An even ten stones,” I said. “I know this part. The stones went to the giants, Swamp Witches, Jinn, dragons, Ice Witch, Northern Shrikes, Southern Trolls, hyena shifters, Middlings, and the Tribe of Death.” That last had been one of my first hunts for stones, quite the scene trying to get away from them without an extra couple of curses laid on my head.

  I looked around again for Maggi. “Lila, do a loop around. See if you can find her.”

  Lila launched into the air. “On it.”

  “Ah, but that’s where you’re wrong.” Marsum smirked and mounted Batman. I took Balder’s reins and led him forward, walking at his side. “There were three other stones created from her to hold the most dangerous of her power and abilities. The power of creation was one of them. The ability to make new monsters.”

  “You have that ability,” I pointed out. “You made the gorcs.”

  He waved a hand as if dismissing me. “No, I didn’t make them. I bred them out of two species that were compatible. Very different than actually creating something new from nothing.” He looked down his nose at me, easy to do when he was on Batman.

  “Three more stones?”

  He shrugged. “That’s what my memories tell me.”

  His memories were not something Marsum would share so easily. There was no way he would be so casual about information like that. It had to be Maks coming through. Didn’t it? Or was I just being hopeful? Or it could be lies, that was a possibility too.

  He continued on ahead of me. Lila swept back to me a few minutes later, landing lightly on the pommel of the saddle. “Maggi is up ahead of us. She’s found something
to ride.”

  I jogged to catch up to Marsum and Batman. Balder trotted with me, the cadence to his hooves steady and even.

  “Tell me,” I said, “what are the other stones capable of?”

  He grunted. “Destruction is the second, and it is enough to tear the world apart in the wrong hands.”

  Lila looked up at me, eyes wide as she mouthed his name. Maks. I’d asked Maks to answer me and he did. “And the third?”

  “That one is more complicated. It has the ability to bestow gifts on others. Like creation and destruction, it has the power to be incredibly dangerous in the wrong hands. Before you ask, I only know where one of the three is.” He glanced over his shoulder at me. “The Wyvern carries one of those final stones.”

  My stomach tightened into a hard lump. “The Wyvern holds the key to bringing my brother back.”

  He shrugged. “That’s what you’ve been told, but who was the one who gave you that information?”

  The Emperor had told me the Wyvern held the answers. But the Oracle had spoken the same words to me. “Two sources.”

  “Either one trusted?” He raised an eyebrow. As if he really cared. But was it Maks or Marsum making a play for my sympathies? Damn it, I hated guessing games.

  Ahead of us, an image wavered, and Maggi trotted toward us on the back of a camel. I grimaced. Faster than a horse in many cases, sure, but they stunk like rotting food and had a tendency to spit, not to mention they could be stubborn as a freaking mule on steroids. “Really?”

  She tipped her face and gave me a cold look. “It’s all I could find on such short notice. So unless you wish to continue riding double with me or our prisoner, I suggest you be grateful.”

  I wanted to ask her where she’d found the camel with all its gear, but I noticed her silver bracelets were missing. She found a trader then. At least she hadn’t stolen the beast.

  Marsum choked as if she’d punched him in the belly. “Prisoner? I thought I was a slave.”