Kicking desperately, Lillian dragged
herself out from under the crazed woman. With a last desperate strength, she
crawled up the pedestal and over the gargoyle’s stone leg. Protected on three
sides by his body and wings, she collapsed forward onto his lap. She wanted to
close her eyes and know no more pain or suffering—to know the peace of cold
stone.
Again, those strange instincts stirred
within her. All she could think to call it was power: old power, deep and
familiar. Her body tingled.
Was this what dying was like? Was this her
soul preparing to leave? Such a strange sensation. It didn’t seem right, dying
like this. A useless death. Never to know why her world had been turned on its
head.
Sleep called, wooing her into darkness. All
she wanted was to answer that summons, but that old power within her insisted
otherwise. She lifted her head and gazed at the gargoyle. There was something
different. Her eyes focused on a mark upon his chest. Someone had painted a
symbol on her gargoyle. A small part of her mind took affront to that. Why
deface a statue? Her mind fuzzed in and out of focus. Her grandmother wanted
her to . . . wake the gargoyle?
Her attention drifted back to the strange
symbol on his chest. On closer inspection it glowed, and it wasn’t painted on
his chest like she’d thought, but hovered an inch above it. She reached out
with her blood-covered hand and probed the symbol. Her hand passed through it
and touched the cold stone behind. A flash of light seared her retinas, and
then it was like she’d touched a high-voltage wire.
Her hand fused to the stone as it turned
hot all around her. She screamed in pain and terror. Both her body and the
stone now glowed with a blue light.
Power danced and pulsed between them. A
wave grew, about to crest. She screamed again, instinctively knowing she would
be consumed if she didn’t direct it in some way.
Ancient memories sparked to life and
flooded words and thoughts into her mind. With nothing else to do, she screamed
the words flooding her mind.
“I trust to the Mother’s choice. Dark
Watcher, immortal servant of the Light, with my power I summon you to wake.
With my will I do claim you. Hear me and awake. Evil walks the land. Your
Sorceress has need.”
Darkness crept across her vision, stealing
the sights of the world from her until only the gray-edged image of the
brooding stone gargoyle remained.
At her cry the power surged into the stone.
It softened under her hands. The shadow of his wings moved up and away as his
muzzle dipped down.
A warm, wet tongue brushed her cheek as she
collapsed forward against his warmth.
Stone no longer, he answered his lady’s
call. The dark world came alive around him as his senses awoke one by one. The
thump of many hearts hummed in his ears. One fluttered rapid and weaker than the
rest, on the edge of death. He inhaled a deep breath and three things became
apparent.
Air tainted with blood and death-scent
filled his lungs.
A warm weight slumped across his lap.
Blood covered him in a sticky coating.
He opened his eyes for the first time in
many years as his mind slowly sorted order from the chaos of his senses. A
woman lay sprawled across his lap. Surprise melted away, replaced by cold dread
as his soul recognized her.
She lay still, her pale skin gray-tinted. A
sheen of sweat covered her face. The only color was the bright splash of her
blood.
His lady’s blood. Horror clamped his
stomach and unleashed a churning void in his middle. He dragged in another
great lungful of air, the lingering scent of her desperation and fear strong on
the back of his tongue. Blood and burning fury rushed through his veins with
each beat of his heart. Pointing his muzzle at the nearest enemy, he roared.
But it didn’t expel all the hate and helpless rage trapped within. Again and
again, he howled out his agony until it echoed across the width of the glade in
a deafening wave.
Rage destroyed reason. Muscles tensed for
battle as talons sprang from his fingertips. He gathered his lady into his arms
and fed her power while he straightened from his crouch to face his enemies. At
the sight of them cowering away, another low rumble built within him. His lips
curled back from his teeth, the need to rend and destroy overwhelming.
The invaders fell back as they retreated to
a safer distance. By the scents which permeated the meadow, his enemies were a
mix of fae-bloods. A breeze picked up and blew the weakening essence of evil to
his nostrils.
Silent now, he curved his wings around his
shoulders and cupped the escaping scent closer to him. He’d nearly missed it:
the corruption of a demon-touched corpse. A Riven.
One of his lady’s attackers knew what he
was, and the Riven had run to save itself. He lowered his lady to the ground
with gentle care as he whispered spells to staunch the flow of blood. While he
unfurled his wings, he gathered power. Using his soul-link to the Spirit Realm,
he tapped into the torrent of creative magic.
The cold power from the Spirit Realm mixed
with the warm air of the Mortal Realm, creating lift. Magic whirled around him
like gale winds before a thunderstorm.
A fae-blood shapeshifter with a gaping hole
in her stomach growled and started to back away from him while three of her
comrades advanced. By her unmistakable wolf-musk scent, she was dire wolf. With
the flick of his tail, he decapitated the female. Before her body toppled to
the ground, he was moving.
He swept out a talon-tipped hand, ripping
out the throat of one of the males and then gutted a third with a kick from his
hind legs. He pushed the body over backwards, and lunged at the next creature
within reach: a silver-skinned female with pointed ears. A snapped neck freed
her soul from the anchor of her body.
He was winning, but there were too many to
fight his way free, and half his attention was trained on his lady. She was
losing her battle to live. Why was her magic not healing her as it should?
Another dire wolf female darted at him. His
tail snaked up and speared her in the throat. He didn’t have time for a
prolonged battle. This needed to end, now. He directed his magic at the encircling
horde. Threads of power condensed in the air and the silvery wisps latched onto
any warm-blooded creature near enough to touch. The scent of burning flesh
filled the air and the screams of his enemies echoed in his ears.
Seeing he had devastated half their
comrades, the other creatures vanished into the shadows of a surrounding maze.
He curled his lips and caught their individual scents on his tongue, committing
each to memory. When he had them all, he sent his magic to hunt them.
Back at his lady’s side, he lifted her into
his arms, gathering her closer so he could share some of his heat. She was far
paler than she should have been. Her magic should be healing her, and yet it
wasn’t. Why?
While she’d been injured by creatures of
darkness, her injuries didn’t look great enough to cause this kind of weakness.
For that matter, her attackers shouldn’t have been much of a threat. Even
without her memories or the knowledge of her powers as the Sorceress, she
should have had power and instinct enough to destroy what he had dispatched
with ease.
Detaching a portion of his consciousness
from his body, he sent it into the woman lying senseless in his arms. Her power
still drained away.
He checked the weavings he’d placed over
her wounds, but they were holding. No power hemorrhaged from those points.
Elsewhere then, but where? His consciousness stretched beyond his body,
following the scent trail of magic back to its source. A tree. Two long gashes.
Heartwood deep.
By the Light, his lady was a dryad. How had
he missed that fact?
Blood leaked down the tree’s majestic trunk
and saturated the ground at its roots. Instinct jerked him into motion and he
summoned wards to shield the wounds. The prickle of power danced along his skin
a moment before he directed the spell. An insubstantial webbing spun out
between his outstretched hands, like a delicate blue lattice. It adhered to the
bark and sealed the wounds, preventing further loss of the hamadryad’s blood.
A hamadryad in the Mortal Realm.
Impossible. A dryad’s spirit tree required magic to grow.
Yet here his lady’s young hamadryad grew,
defying everything he knew of magic. She must have had a small cutting with her
when he’d rescued her from the Battle Goddess’s kingdom and brought her here.
Her soft moan brought him back to the
present. It didn’t matter how her spirit tree came to be here. Here it grew,
and here it bled its lifeblood upon the ground. He dropped to all fours and
padded over to the tree. Circling, he sniffed at the ground until he pinpointed
the area where the greatest concentration of magic saturated the loam. The
scent of sap and blood triggered instincts and dragged him back to memories of
his infancy.
He had first come to awareness hearing
his mother’s deep slow heartbeat and the sounds of wind and lashing rain in her
branches as he grew within the heart of her tree.
There was something here he needed.
Safe in his watery cocoon, deep inside
his mother’s wooden heart, he’d grown strong.
Ah, yes.
Along with the food and water of the
earth, he had absorbed his dryad mother’s memories.
There it was—the knowledge to heal his
mistress. More of his memories returned, both recent and ancient. Heal her
hamadryad and the dryad should live.
Tonight, the second time his lady had
called to him in this life, had been as chaotic as the first. Worse. Now she
lay dying along with her tree. If her hamadryad had been older, he could have
put her in the tree to rest and heal, but such an attempt in this magic-less
place might kill the tree. He scrounged his mother’s memories for other healing
methods. He needed to find another way, something that would work in this
realm.
And quickly. The power was dissipating,
sucked up by the earth like water on drought-cursed land. He dropped into a
trance and summoned his power for the delicate work of separating his
mistress’s magic from the magic-starved land.
The greatest concentration of magic pooled
just below the grass, in the layer where small fibrous roots sought food and
water. With one hand pressed against her trunk and the other on the ground, he
flexed his talons. After he absorbed the magic from the ground, he drew it up
into his body, purified it, and returned it to the spirit tree. He drained the
small pool and reached deeper. His mind rushed down into the earth, probing for
the smallest tendrils of power. He continued until the smallest scrap, every
little fragment, no matter how small, was returned to the hamadryad.
After he reinforced the wards on the
hamadryad’s larger wounds, he healed the small punctures his talons had made.
Those larger wounds would need intensive healing, but must wait for now.
Mending the tree would be useless if…
No, he would not permit failure.
Returning to the prone dryad, he sat on his
hunches and lifted her into his lap. He licked at her face. Feeling her skin’s
clamminess and noting her pale coloring, he knew he didn’t have long to prepare
for healing.
Before he began the arduous task of healing
her, he’d need to find a shelter more defendable than this maze. He
repositioned the small dryad in his arms and broke into a ground-eating stride.
He navigated his way free of the leafy corridors and emerged into a lush
garden. The serene shadows beckoned to him, offering a way to hide from the
sun’s revealing rays, and he summoned a weaving of invisibility.
He exited the gardens and encountered a
stone home, large and spacious but surprisingly empty of people. He wondered
where the servants were, and the guards. There should have been some defenses
guarding this house, yet he detected nothing.
After one more probe of the house and
surrounding lawn, he tightened his hold on his lady and entered the stone
cottage by a back entrance. As a precaution, he placed a ward around the entire
structure and keyed it so only he could pass. Then as an added measure, he
mentally scanned the area immediately around the building. Still no one.
With the house as safe as he could make it,
he turned his attention to the inside of the dwelling. A stone-tiled floor
stretched out under his talons. He made a soft clicking sound with each step. A
large table of polished wood sat at room’s center, and a counter stretched
around two sides of the room in an
L
shape. The table held a loaf of
freshly baked bread and a basket of sweet-smelling fruit. It lacked a hearth,
but if he were to guess, this was a kitchen of some sort.
He laid his burden upon the table. The
rapid beat of her pulse worried him and her breathing was too shallow. Dropping
into a deeper trance, he summoned his magic. At his silent command, the magic
flowed out from his body. It was less than he’d hoped, lacking the wild
turbulence he was accustomed to, but it would be enough to heal the Sorceress.
It had to be. He bowed his head until his muzzle touched her breastbone and he
breathed more power upon her.
Nothing happened. His magic didn’t even
penetrate her skin. What had the Battle Goddess done to her when she was a
helpless child that his power could not now meld with hers?
Panicked, he leapt upon the table and
hunched closer, willing the power into her. She jerked awake, her chest heaving
as if a nightmare suddenly gripped her. Her eyes focused on him and her
expression softened in recognition.
A shaky hand caressed his muzzle, then
reached back into his mane, circling his neck. Still she didn’t take what he
offered, power she desperately needed. He bumped her face with his muzzle and
licked at her skin, but was careful not to sip the smallest drop of her dryad
blood for fear of losing his concentration.
She moved. Her arms tightened around his
shoulders as she nuzzled the underside of his jaw. Her fingers grasped his
shoulders and clung there a moment before sliding down one arm, grazing the
slashes from one of the dire wolves. Gentle fingertips paused in their downward
descent and reversed, gliding back over the broken skin. Light caresses turned
to a savage prod, and he grunted more in surprise than pain, but her hand
dropped away in the next moment.
Slowed by his shock, his reflexes didn’t
spur him into action until her bloody fingers were halfway to her lips. She no
longer looked at him. Instead her gaze riveted to the bright smear on her
fingers. Before they reached her lips, he snatched her wrist. She hissed in
frustration, struggling weakly before falling back against the table, her
energy spent.
Trying and failing to understand her
bizarre behavior, he reared away from her and dropped to all fours and began to
pace with his wings mantled, tail whipping with agitation. He froze at what his
mind tried to tell him. She craved his blood, hungered for its power like a mate
would. Yet they were not mates.
They could never be mates.
Sacrilege.
A soft sound, followed by a watery gasp
dragged his attention back to the table. She was paler than before, gray, and
her breath came in a death’s rattle. Gathering her into his arms, he carried
her over to a corner and sat with his back braced against a wall, her slight
form resting in his lap.
She was so light, so fragile. What if he
could share blood without shattering his oath and forging mating ties? If there
was even the slightest chance, he had to try. He slid her hand closer to the
warm dampness he could feel making its sluggish way down his arm, but her
fingers didn’t tighten upon the wound as they had before. She was too weak even
for that.
His talons rested cool against his
breastbone. Then, uncaring of the consequences or that he was breaking one of
the sacred laws binding them, he dragged the point of one talon down his chest
a finger’s length. With his other hand, he lifted her head to the wound.