Chapter 15
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Kit
What is this? The fae’s voice wasn’t airy like the smallfae but psychic thunder that made my muscles clench. An unexpected visitor, it seems.
The titanic predator calling me a visitor instead of a snack seemed like a good start.
With effort, I straightened my spine and steadied my voice. “I hope it isn’t rude that I stopped by unannounced. I’m not well-versed in fae etiquette.”
The fae’s lips pulled wide in what I assumed was a grin. What brings you so far from home, little mortal?
“I’m searching for something,” I said.
And what have you come to find?
I stared into the fae’s impossibly black eyes—like eternal voids that devoured light—and uttered a single word. “Power.”
The hyena’s ears twitched. Power?
Despite the heat pouring from the fae’s mouth, a chill crawled under my skin. I really didn’t like its tone. “Do you remember a man called the Sha’ir?”
Ah. Its tongue slathered its lips in saliva that hissed and evaporated. I do recall Sha’ir. I thought him an interesting mortal—once.
“Were you his familiar?”
The hyena stilled.
His familiar? It bared a legion of sharp yellow teeth. Me, a familiar?
Uh-oh. That might have been the wrong thing to say.
I held up my hands. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to offend—”
You think him powerful enough that I would bend before him? As the fae’s voice rose with fury, so did the pervasive buzz scraping the edges of my senses. Do you consider yourself so powerful that I might bow to you?
Oh shit. I needed to put the pin back in this conversational grenade. “No, not at all—”
The fae reared up on its hind legs, towering over me. You do not know the meaning of power.
It slammed its front paws down onto the ground. The sand collapsed inward, expanding into a sinkhole that rushed toward me. Before the courtyard under my feet disintegrated, I leaped into the air, levitating above the landlocked hyena’s reach.
The beast’s black eyes tracked my upward trajectory. Without warning, a geyser of sand erupted from the sinkhole. I tried to evade it, but maneuvering while levitating was more like trying to steer a helium-filled birthday balloon than a fighter jet.
Dust and wind engulfed me, yanking my entire existence into a violent spiral. Coarse granules of sand peppered my exposed skin. Blinded and battered, I thrashed against the storm, desperate for any sense of direction, but I might as well have been fist-fighting an avalanche.
Do you consider your power so great now? the fae mocked.
The maelstrom vanished and gravity took over.
I scarcely registered the sensation of falling before I crashed onto the unyielding desert sand.
The impact wrenched a rough gasp from my lungs.
I peeled open my eyelids, my eyes burning from the sandy assault.
The sinkhole had filled with dirt and debris, and I was crumpled in the middle of the mess, unable to do anything except try to make my abused diaphragm contract.
My ears rang in the sudden, unsettling silence.
The hyena appeared above me, blotting out the night sky as it planted a gargantuan paw on either side of my torso. Billowing heat scorched my skin as its inferno jaws snapped a foot from my face—a blistering demonstration of my imminent death.
Kit Morris, you overconfident idiot.
Why hadn’t I taken Zak’s warnings seriously? Why had I thought confronting a fae lord who’d killed an archmythic a hundred times more powerful than me was a plausible plan?
“I don’t think my power is great,” I rasped. “It’s actually very mediocre compared to the Sha’ir’s. And you’re even more powerful than he was. I mean, you killed him, didn’t you?”
Of course, the fae said. As I will kill you.
I pressed my arms against the ground, unwilling to risk any form of movement. “Why did you kill him?”
I thought him interesting, the hyena said, its open jaws so close that its breath burned my face. A mortal who was not a druid, yet sang to the earth as druids do. A mortal who was not my kind, yet called power into himself as my kind do.
Despite my panic, its words grabbed my attention. “He called power into himself? What do you mean?”
The fae drew back to peer at me. You do not know? You came before me unable to draw power?
“No, that’s why—wait, I’m supposed to draw it? From where?”
Another shrieking laugh pierced my ears and twisted my vision into a painful pirouette.
How very mortal of you, the hyena cackled. I will tell you, then, why I killed Sha’ir long ago. But first, you must listen.
Apprehension hitched my breath. “Listen? To what?”
To the land. You can hear it.
With its final word, the pressure of the white noise spiked.
This land is mine. The fae’s words detonated in the depths of my brain, the shockwaves rippling through my synapses. This power is mine. I killed Sha’ir for his arrogance, for thinking I would share this land and its power with him.
Another bout of dizziness sank its claws into my perception, and for an instant, I thought I’d been ripped away by another geyser of sand.
But no, I wasn’t moving.
That white noise—the invisible, electric haze—was surging around us.
I concentrated every scrap of psychic focus I possessed on it, desperate to comprehend what was happening.
That crackling buzz, that churning chaos, was sweeping through the courtyard.
It felt like it was twisting—arcing—spiraling …
Spiraling straight into the fae.
This was the power the fae had been talking about. The power the fae claimed belonged to it. The power I was looking for.
And now, little mortal, the hyena rumbled, I will kill you for your arrogance.
Its teeth pulled apart, its gaping mouth an infernal cavern ready to devour me whole.
“Ori te formo cuspides!”
A barrage of inky-black missiles bombarded the hyena’s head. They passed through its body, but where they struck near its fiery mouth, the white-hot flames receded.
Jerking its head up, the fae pivoted toward the brazen attacker.
Lienna stood in the vaulted doorway that had brought me into the courtyard, her Rubik’s cube spinning in her hands. “Stay down, Kit! Ori eradendi torrens!”
A wall of watery light surged from her cube toward me and the fae, but it was different—for one, it hovered two feet off the sand, and two, it had a distinctly greenish tint that I’d never seen in her abjuration before.
The hyena swiped its claws at the rushing barrier. Ripples exploded across its surface, but it didn’t slow, shoving the beast backward—and away from me.
The moment the barrier had passed, I scrambled to my feet and sprinted for Lienna. She stood next to the doorway, a hand extended toward me.
A bark of howling laughter burst from the hyena, shattering Lienna’s barrier and ricocheting through my skull. I latched onto Lienna’s wrist, refusing to let her go as we fell to our knees.
“Ori te formo cupolam,” she gasped.
Her dome shield formed over us, also tinted green, which made me think she’d enhanced her spells with some anti-fae components.
But it wasn’t enough. Another bark from the hyena and it disintegrated.
Insolent beetles, the fae snarled as it advanced on us.
I shoved myself to my feet, stepping in front of Lienna as she frantically spun her cube into a new configuration. Imagining a shield of ice spreading from my hands, I extended my palms toward the hyena. A peculiar glitter danced through the air, and my breath condensed into a foggy cloud.
That was new. Was my kryomagery doing that?
Before I could manifest more than a thin layer of frost on my fingers, the temperature in the courtyard plunged right past the freezing mark and into subzero territory.
Through the eddies in the mist, a faint azure glow leaked up from the ground. Lines appeared across it, swirling and swooping in alien, overlapping circles. The nearest of those lines was inches from my feet. Lienna and I backed away, forced farther from the exit.
The hyena’s ears swiveled, its nostrils flaring and steam rising from its body. It looked straight up.
Something small plunged out of the night sky—a pure white falcon. The speeding missile of feathers hit the hyena between its massive shoulders with all the force of a hummingbird dive-bombing a buffalo.
A magnificent flash of cool blue light flooded the courtyard, the magical array on the ground blazed, and a blinding blizzard swallowed everything. Lienna and I dove toward the closest corner, and I wrapped my arms around her, shielding our faces.
The storm calmed, and I cautiously lowered my arms.
In the center of the courtyard, a starburst of icicles had engulfed the hyena, encasing it in glistening pillars fifteen feet tall. Red heat burned from within the ice, and water ran down it in rivulets.
The white falcon, its wings trailing sparkles of azure magic, swept down to the sand.
A flurry of snow billowed around it. When the polar plume dissipated, a humanoid fae had replaced the falcon—the most fae-looking fae I’d ever seen.
He was tall and lean, every line of his body elegant, every span of his dark, argent-accented garments graceful.
Long silver-white hair fell to his waist, bound in a braid, and his bright eyes scintillated with ancient cunning.
Crack!
The ice around the hyena shattered, and frozen shrapnel pelted the courtyard walls. The beast snarled with such savage resonance that I felt like I’d inhaled a subwoofer.
Who dares attack me? the desert fae demanded.
“I am of no matter,” the white-haired fae replied, his voice smooth and cultured. “I am merely here to retrieve the two mortals. Would you be so considerate as to ignore their foolish meddling and allow me to remove them from your territory?”
Remove yourself, the hyena roared. Or I will—
The wintry fae cast a hand sideways. The azure array spanning the courtyard lit up, but fire ignited over the hyena’s body, and the sand whirled, tearing the spell apart.
Our arctic savior didn’t flinch. He conjured a long spear of ice in his hand and hurled it into the hyena’s face.
The opposing elements collided, and power ripped through the courtyard.
Lienna started to pull me toward the vaulted doorway, but a three-foot ice shard impaled the stone wall a foot in front of us.
Reversing direction, I parked us behind the wintry fae instead, trusting him to divert projectiles—if not for our safety, then for his own.
Another concussion split the atmosphere as arctic magic plowed into the hyena’s blazing defense. The earth trembled with each exchange, and the deep thrum of power in the land beneath us undulated and intensified.
With an earsplitting cackle, the hyena hurled itself at the wintry fae. Fire met ice one more time, and my vision went white.
When my sight returned, I saw a landlocked iceberg so thick that only the faintest shadow of the hyena was visible within it. The power in the crossroads had stopped its violent thrashing, and it now felt steady and cold, like a frozen lake in the Siberian wasteland.
The fae victor angled toward Lienna and me, keeping the popsicled hyena in his sights. “It seems Zak’s estimation of your temerarious intent was accurate.”
I blinked, mesmerized by his azure irises—and then I remembered the blue-eyed, pure white ferret I’d seen perched on Saber’s shoulder more than once. I also recalled Zak emphasizing the sheer power of Saber’s fae pal and warning me to never, ever piss him off.
“You’re Ríkr,” I blurted. “Did Saber and Zak send you? How did you know where to find us? How did you get here? How—just basically, all the hows.”
“They asked,” Ríkr said, “if I could divert your witless quest for your own death. Were I not so well traveled, I would not have known of this crossroads and you would be a corpse.”
I winced. Lienna’s fingers bit into my arm.
Ríkr pivoted back toward his ice sculpture. “I can hold this one long enough for you to flee—if you go now.”
“Wait, that thing is still alive in there?” I asked, my befuddled brain registering some key details for the first time—the tightness in Ríkr’s jaw, the way he wasn’t taking his attention off the ice-encased hyena, and the increasing liquification of the polar prison.
The ice was melting. Fire Mouth was going to be in a bad mood once he burned his way free.
“What about you?” Lienna asked Ríkr.
“I will leave through the crossroads, and he will not follow.” The unnatural gleam in his eyes brightened, and a fresh wave of brutal cold swept over the courtyard. “Now go.”
I didn’t need to be told again. “Thank you—and you can tell Zak he was right.”
Ríkr turned back to his frozen foe.
Lienna and I bolted for the doorway and through the hall beyond. Before I could worry about finding our way out of the mist-ensconced maze of the crossroads, we burst out of the short hall and into a familiar mud-brick room—the one with pillars where we’d first gotten lost.
We didn’t slow to marvel at the lack of fog, scorpions, or murderous fae. We sprinted straight back through the fort and didn’t stop until we were safely amid the dark, comfortingly human streets of Bahla.
Breathing hard, we ducked into a nook between a local restaurant and a travel agency, slumping against the wall. I draped my arm around Lienna’s shoulders, and she let the weight of it pull her into my chest.
“So that was Saber’s fae familiar?” she asked, her voice low and strained.
“Not her familiar. He’s her fae bestie. Her …” I snapped my fingers. “Partner. That’s what Zak called him. Her fae partner.”
That was probably the vocab I should’ve used instead of suggesting the hyena had been the Sha’ir’s familiar.
“Well, whatever he is, I’m glad he showed up.”
“Me too.”
We stood there silently for another minute as our adrenaline waned.
“Thanks,” I whispered. “For saving my stupid ass.”
“Anytime.” She tilted her face up. “Did you learn what you needed to know about archmythic power?”
I sighed. “I have no idea.”
And I’d rather bathe in shark-infested waters wearing swim trunks made of raw steak than go back into that fort to ask ol’ flame breath for clarification.
“We need to get out of Oman,” Lienna said. “And we need a new plan.”
I nodded. “Where did Teddy say his old cheat of an archaeological partner took Bodil and the Sha’ir’s grimoire?”
She quirked an eyebrow. “Barcelona.”
I tightened my arms around her, pressing her into me as I drew in a deep, fortifying breath. Then I let my arms slide down to her waist and stepped away from the wall.
“Let’s go catch our next flight, senorita.”