Oracle’s Haunt: Desert Cursed Series Book 4 Read online

  I shook my head, fighting the tears. “You weren’t afraid when you were with me.”

  He threw back his head and laughed so hard, I thought he’d fall over if not for our still-tangled fingers.

  Irritation flowed through me. “I did not make you afraid.”

  Maks shook his head, laughter still spilling out of him, and for just a moment, I knew he was there with me, wholly himself, with none of Marsum’s evil tainting his eyes, his face or his heart. “Sweet goddess, you don’t think I was afraid facing the Ice Witch? Or the dragons? Or anything in between?”

  “Not afraid like you were of Marsum.” I tried to tug him to me. “Please, Maks, you’re stronger than him. Your heart is stronger than him. Better than that messed up piece of—”

  “You’re wrong.” He yanked me hard so our chests slammed together. He stared down at me, the heat between us as it always had been, consuming, a fire burning so hot, it was a surprise our clothing hadn’t melted off. “You’re wrong,” he said again, softer this time, his head lowering, his lips so close, I could lean in and taste his mouth. His tongue flicked over my upper lip, curled downward—

  “Seriously, Zam, pay attention!” A sharp slap followed the words and my jaw dropped open. I just stared at Flora, the irritation on her face, the way she pursed her mouth. Stared and lifted a hand carefully to my cheek. She had a mean right hook.

  “What the fuck?” My words were breathy, as if I’d been running. Or panting.

  Yeah, I was betting on the second bit.

  “I’ve been talking to you for a solid three minutes and you’ve just stared off into la-la land as if I weren’t even here! I am trying to help you!” Flora’s words were sharp, pointed like little needles.

  “Maybe I wasn’t here,” I mumbled, half wishing I could close my eyes and go back to wherever that was. If that was a dream, I wanted more of it. I wanted Maks back. The ache of wanting him back and wishing he were at my side was a physical need, as if my own body would be a traitor to me and run to him if I let it.

  Lila snickered. “I know that look. That’s your I’m-all-hot-and-bothered look.” Her snicker died as if she realized just who I’d be hot and bothered by. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’m so sorry, Zam. It’s the Toad, isn’t it?”

  That made me smile, even if it was a sad smile. “Yeah, the Toad.”

  Flora looked from Lila to me and back again. “You mean Maks?” Her head whipped around so she could stare at me, her green eyes wide. “You saw Maks?”

  I didn’t see the point in lying to her; everyone knew there was something between me and the new leader of the Jinn. “Yes. But he just . . . it was like a dream.”

  Flora took a careful step toward me and placed a hand on each of my forearms. “He is the master of the Jinn now, Zam. There is no telling what he is capable of. Especially where you are concerned. For you, I believe he would bend all the rules he can.”

  I shook my head. “He would never hurt me.”

  “No, but he would steal you away, I think. And that would hurt everyone else. The whole world,” Flora said. “Everyone needs you, Zam. Far more than he does.”

  A burst of anger snapped through me and I flipped my hands sideways to knock her arms from me. From my fingertips shot tiny little flecks of . . . something like a cross between the Jinn’s black mist and magic I’d seen somewhere else, but where? Glittering, dancing magic that was hypnotic as it wove through the black curl of the Jinn’s magic.

  One thread of it reached out as if alive and snapped Lila in the ass, just hard enough to make her yelp. “Zam! Ow to hell in a handbasket, that burns like a dragon in heat! Ack, my stomach!” Her face tightened and if a blue dragon could go green, she did.

  “I’m sorry!” I tucked my hands under my arms, holding them tightly to me. She spun away from us, toward my saddlebags on the ground. Her tiny body heaved and convulsed as she wobbled, her mouth open as she gagged hard. “Lila, away from the saddlebags! Don’t you dare vomit acid on them.”

  Too late. Her body retched hard and a spew of green acid that glittered not unlike the magic that had shot out of my hands landed on the edge of the leather. I bolted forward as Flora yelled.

  “No, don’t touch it, Zamira!”

  “I fucking well know that!” I snapped over my shoulder as I slid to a stop next to the bags. Lila still heaved so I grabbed her around the middle and turned her away from the leather saddlebags. I grabbed one of my smaller knives from my boot and used the tip to open the bag. The papers were still in there. Holding the leather open while the acid ate away at it, I used my other hand and carefully pulled out the papers.

  “Just like Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom,” I said. “Nice and slow.” One drop of the acid would eat all the papers and I still needed them, or at least, I thought I did. As I cleared the edge of the leather, the tip of the knife got caught up in the acid. Smoke curled from the fine steel as the green sparkling puke did its job, devouring the metal like it was butter and not the knife.

  I dropped the blade and stepped back.

  “Drop the papers,” Flora said, calm as could be. “Some are touched.”

  One look at the papers was all it took to show me the truth. “SHIT!” I dropped them and Flora lifted her hand, a wind swirling the papers around. The papers . . . they were the only connection I had to my long-dead mother, and her writings the only hope I had of ever dealing with the Emperor. Because within their words was the way to kill him, maybe even kill him and not free the monster he held back, the falak.

  I dropped to my knees and held one hand up as if I could catch the paper as it was eaten by the acid. Lila still retched to the side, whatever the snap had done to her not slowing down. My eyelids fluttered once, and then the paper blew into a whirl around me, not unlike the whirl of sand that Maks had created . . . only this time the paper erupted, the glyphs on it escaping the surface as if they were alive.

  Images smashed into my brain. The Emperor standing over a body I was sure was Merlin. A pyramid that spun on its point. A glyph of a small house cat wrapped in chains. My mother’s curse. “Unbreakable,” I whispered to myself, understanding the pictures far more clearly with each passing second. They were the glyphs still but I was seeing them, reading them as never before. A caracal bleeding in the sand. A flail like my own only made of shimmering black crystal. Lions. Horses. War. Death. Famine. The falak—the twisting oversized serpentine creature writhed as if alive, even within the pictures. I took a step back. I’d hoped in my heart of hearts that the creature wasn’t real, that it was a monster drummed up to keep the world compliant and accepting of the Emperor’s rule. Apparently I was wrong.

  “What do you see?” Flora asked, her voice to my left.

  “I see the glyphs as they were meant to be, but what happens when I stop seeing them?” I thought I already knew the answer, feeling it in my bones. They would be gone forever, my mother’s words and knowledge lost.

  “The paper they are on, it is special. And rare. It held those glyphs and now it releases them to you. I’m so sorry,” Flora said.

  Her words tipped something inside my head and I snapped my fingers at Lila who’d finally pulled herself together. “Lila, the other papers, the ones we pulled off the Jinn.”

  “Yeah, the blank ones?” Her voice was hoarse. “I’m so sorry about the bag, about your mother’s notes—”

  I didn’t dare look away from the floating images. “The other papers, they were in the bags on Ford’s horse. Go, quickly, get them and bring them here.” Some of the first glyphs faded, to be replaced by others. A flower of deepest red. A book so old and wrapped in metal. Dragon’s eggs.

  Lila didn’t waste another breath, but shot into the air, gone in a flash of blue and silver scales. The images flicked and danced, some staying, some fading.

  The desert, a swamp, the queen of the giants. “She’s dead,” I said.

  “Who’s dead?” Flora asked. “Someone is going to die?”

  I he
ld perfectly still. “No.” I held my breath. “Flora, how do I get the glyphs I see onto the clear pages?”

  “How in Hades would I know that?” she said. “This is magic beyond what I understand, Zam. I can help you in some things, but not with this, cupcake.”

  Something in the way she spoke made me smile. Maybe it was the sudden new nickname. Maybe it was her honesty. Part of me didn’t want to like her, really. She seemed too good to be true and I’d learned the hard way that too good usually was.

  An image of Maks standing over a black lion with a spear through its back made me suck in a sharp breath. “No, not that.”

  Flora stepped closer but didn’t touch me. “No matter what you see, know that it is not all set in stone. Your mother could see some of the future, but not all of it.”

  “Sweet baby goddess, she was a seer?” I spit the words out, and two of the glyphs disappeared as if they were offended.

  The rush of Lila’s wings was a welcome distraction from that last thought. “Here, there aren’t as many, I think.” She landed on my shoulder, papers clutched in her front claws. I took them from her without breaking eye contact with the swirling glyphs. I took a step and held out a sheet of the paper. The glyphs it touched disappeared from the air and were instantly rewritten on the page. Holding the papers in the air as if they were a butterfly net, I carefully chased the glyphs as they floated. And as many as I could, I gathered them until the papers were all full. The glyphs left were the ones I wasn’t sure of, or at least didn’t look as bad as those I’d caught.

  I would have stood there longer, staring at them, memorizing them if not for one small thing.

  The bellow of a pissed off, oversized pussy shattered the quiet. The roar was from Steve. I’d know his voice in either of his forms anywhere, much as I hated it. “Lila, were the boys at each other?”

  “When are they not? Couple of testosterone-infected idiots,” she muttered. I was going to ignore Steve; that was usually the best answer.

  Until Ford answered him, and the challenge was laid out in the syllables of the deeper, angrier bellow.

  They were going to fight.

  To the death.

  3

  “Fucking boys and their heat-addled brains thinking a fight to the death is a good idea after we all just barely survived the Jinn.” The words became almost a mantra as Balder—my horse— and I galloped the mile or so back to camp. Though I’ll admit, I dropped the mantra down to just “fucking boys.”

  Those two words said it all. Because real men didn’t behave like this, like a pair of overstuffed roosters fighting for a coop of hens. Unfortunately, I couldn’t wring either of their necks. I had to find a way to make peace between them because, apparently, I needed them both. At least for now.

  The only reason I hadn’t sent Steve packing was that I needed him to stop the Emperor. He had to carry one of the stones. Not that I’d given him the clear diamond.

  The bellows of the two male lions were clearer with each stretch of my horse’s long legs. Lila clung to Balder’s neck in front of me. Her violet-colored eyes searched my face as she looked over her shoulder. “We really should let Ford kill Steve. That would solve a lot of problems.”

  She wasn’t kidding. Steve had, remarkably enough, agreed to come with me and the others as we headed out to find the Oracle. We needed her help, we needed her knowledge . . . and we all knew it was going to be dangerous as anything we’d done so far. Maybe more so because of the blasted lands we had to cross. And as I mentioned, I needed him. Apparently. Really, the only reason I kept him with us was simple.

  Lila’s grandmother, had said we’d need a golden lion to hold one of the stones I was unintentionally collecting. With Bryce dead, and Shem missing, Steve was my only option.

  But while Steve had agreed to me leading the pride, he’d also been nothing but a massive pain in my ass.

  “We can’t let Ford kill him,” I muttered.

  “Even after the caravan we came across?” Lila prompted.

  I cringed. We’d come across a caravan with its people wiped out by a rogue supernatural of some sort. It was hard to tell by the marks in the sand and on the flesh. And the stench was horrific, like the bodies had been dead for weeks in wet, humid weather, but that wasn’t the case. The bodies were still warm when we found them, their stores of food still edible, the horses still there, if terrified. We’d gone to take what we’d needed—that was just how it worked in the desert.

  What I didn’t know was there had been a survivor hiding under one overturned wagon. An older man, partially bald, one leg broken. Injured, but alive.

  “We don’t need this.” Steve had reached down and killed the man with a twist of one hand around the man’s neck without even questioning whether he should or shouldn’t. He’d taken back the idea of being an alpha asshole in less than a week of agreeing to be part of my pride.

  The shock was still there, the disbelief that Steve had slid so far into whatever dark spot held him that he could kill someone just because . . . well, there was no reason that I could see. There was no reason to kill the man. We could have set him up on a horse, sent him on his way with some food and supplies and taken the rest ourselves. We could have asked him what happened. Find out what had attacked them and how it might be avoided.

  And that, more than anything else, kept me from giving him a stone that held power in it.

  Which was all the more reason why we had to find the Oracle, and I had to find a way to bring my brother back from the dead. Because I needed a male golden lion to stand with me against the Emperor, and there was no way it was going to be Steve-O. I’d keep the camel douche around only as a backup. And even that was reluctantly.

  “I know, Lila, I know,” I said as I pulled Balder into a sliding stop, the sand spraying up around us in a shimmer of golden grains. The two lions circled one another about thirty feet ahead of me. I slid off the saddle and approached them as I pulled my flail from my back. The handle warmed immediately and I spoke under my breath. “No blood today, just intimidation.”

  The handle cooled. Though it was not sentient, the weapon was close, and so fucking deadly, it had nearly killed me on multiple occasions. Now, though, it was mine through and through. The bond that had been forged between us was made when Marsum had cast it aside. And I’d picked it up.

  I swung the flail in a slow, looping circle to my side. Traditionally a flail was a heavy bitch of a weapon, meant to break shields and armor, to bash in heads with sheer force and wicked iron spikes. Magic, though, had a funny way of changing things. This flail was light in my hand, which allowed me to fight with it in ways that I otherwise couldn’t. It didn’t hurt that the weapon hit with the force of hundreds of pounds, and that the twin spiked balls at the end had a weird habit of sticking into my enemies and drinking their magic and blood.

  Creepy as fuck? You bet. But the weapon was mine and no one was going to take it from me.

  The handle warmed a slight bit in response to my thoughts.

  The bright gold lion—Steve—launched at the taller yet leaner black lion—Ford. Steve’s jaws worked to clamp on Ford’s neck, but Ford dodged him, slid under, and slashed at Steve’s back legs, missing him by inches. They both had their lips curled back, ears pinned and tails lashing as they swept at each other with their huge front paws. Darcy, my former best friend and lioness shifter, ran to my side.

  “You have to stop them! One of them could get hurt.” She grabbed at my arm and I slowly turned to look to her.

  “You mean Steve could get hurt?”

  Her mouth snapped shut a moment and she swallowed hard. “I thought you were the alpha.”

  Oh, low blow right off the bat? I made myself smile at her. “I am the alpha, which means I choose when and when not to step in.”

  Her golden eyes narrowed. “You . . . you want him dead?”

  I laughed at her. “If I’d wanted him dead, I would have left him in the Jinn’s care. Remember last week? When I rescue
d you all with Ford’s, Lila’s and Maks’s help?”

  That at least got to her. She lowered her eyes. “I know.”

  “Then why would I want him to die now? Do I hate him? Not really, not anymore. I don’t like him. I don’t trust him, but the hate has faded some.” That wasn’t entirely true, but she didn’t have to know that. After all, she thought he was amazing. She was fucking him now. Or again was the more correct term. I turned back to see the two lions tangled up on the ground, rolling through the sand as they fought for dominance.

  “Why are you just watching then?” Lila asked from my shoulder. I’d not even noticed her land there.

  “Because if Steve starts to lose, he’ll cheat,” I said.

  “He would not!” Darcy snapped. “He’s not like that.”

  “You mean he has honor?” Lila asked, all innocence and sweetness. “Is that what you mean?”

  I had to bite back a laugh. Honor was not a characteristic anyone would match up with Steve. Darcy had the audacity to flush and shake her head.

  Ford backed off Steve and shook his head. “Enough. This is stupid. I don’t want to fight you. You are not the alpha here.” Ford spoke as he shifted to two legs, which signaled to end a fight between two lions. But he didn’t know Steve like I did. I tensed, feeling the shift in the air a split second before Steve made his move. And I made mine.

  “Coward!” Steve roared as he rolled and came up at the end of his shift from four legs to two. Through the roll, he grabbed a sawed-off shotgun the bastard had obviously buried in the sand in preparation for the fight. He whipped it around and pointed it at Ford.

  Only I was already there, and Steve ended up shoving the rough muzzle of the gun into my chest. For just a split second, I thought he’d pull the trigger. His eyes dropped to my face, surprise written all over them, followed quickly by anger.

  “You’d better put that away before I ram it up your ass and pull the trigger. Maybe we can make you an even bigger asshole than you are now?” I kept my voice as calm as I could when all I wanted to do was rage at him that he was being a fucking coward.