Alaskan Fury (3 page)

Eventually, after listening at
length to the phoenix’s ramblings about near-extinct livestock breeds and the rapidly
dwindling genetic diversity of humanity’s food supply, the brunette woman put
her pill-bottle away and glanced up at Kaashifah with curious, glacial-blue
eyes.  “I heard you guys had a staff of four.  Are we missing somebody?  My
friend said he was a real big guy.  Pro wrestler or something.”

Something didn’t seem right about
the question, and, cautiously, Kaashifah said, “He left on vacation.”

“Oh,” the brunette said,
scratching at her forearm.  “Then this is everybody?  You guys are all alone
out here?”

“This is it,” Jack said, grinning
proudly.  “What you see is what you get, ladies.  The Sleeping Lady.  Last
bastion of civilization out in werewolf territory.”

The brunette reached up and
fiddled with the sleeve of her shirt.  “Good.”

Good?

But even as Kaashifah was
digesting the strange taste to that, the woman flicked something forward in a
practiced gesture, and a tiny dart hit the wereverine in his muscular chest. 
His eyes widened and his mouth fell open in a wet wheeze, then he slid to the
floor suddenly, his heavy body hitting the hardwood beneath his stool with a
thump
that shook the lodge, not even sprouting fangs. 

Oh no,
Kaashifah thought,
stumbling backwards, trying to slam up a shield. 

“Jack?” the phoenix asked, moving
forward, frowning.  She obviously hadn’t seen the brunette’s gesture.

Kaashifah, who had seen it, was
nonetheless unable to stop it.  Her shield, having gone unused and unpracticed
for so long, fizzled in the face of her fear, leaving her staring at the
Inquisitors in horror.  Whereas she could have ended it all with a single
thought before the djinni’s curse, now all she could do was turn and run.

She felt a sharp pain in her
spine, then her legs collapsed out from underneath her.

“Got the bitch,” the blonde woman
chuckled.

Kaashifah’s vision dimmed, her
entire body going numb within a couple of heartbeats.

A steel-toed boot stepped within
sight, and the blonde woman in black leather squatted down in front of
Kaashifah, a sneer on her face.  She grabbed Kaashifah by the hair and yanked
back, so that Kaashifah was staring up into the woman’s pretty Nordic face. 
“Guess what, beastie?”  She yanked something out of Kaashifah’s back and held
it out where she could see.  A tiny hypodermic needle, connected to a silver
vial.  “Basilisk venom’ll put even a
wereverine’s
lights out.”

“I don’t think that one’s a
wereverine,” the unassuming brunette in jeans said.  “My guess is a wolf, but
something is off…” 
Spanish
, Kaashifah realized, ridiculously placing
the accent as her body failed around her.  The woman was a Spaniard.

“Save your
guesses
,
Imelda.  Once I get her on the rack, I will tell you what she is.”

Even as she heard the words, Kaashifah
found herself losing the battle with her eyelids, her world blackening,
swallowing her from the outside. 

Suddenly, like the fires of
heaven suddenly raining down upon her, the world came alive with heat and flame
and people screamed.  The last thing she saw, before she lost consciousness,
was the leather-clad Nordic woman above her stand up with a startled cry, eyes
wide, scrabbling for something on her gold-and-turquoise belt.

Damn
the magus.  He’d just
wanted to tell her his fears, to
warn
her, and she had called the
shadows down upon him.  It was taking less and less provocation to set her off,
nowadays, and his life had become a bitter waiting game.  Eventually, she was
going to call him for her final wish.  Whatever she decided that wish would be
would decide her fate.

Until then, she used him like the
damn slave the wereverine taunted him to be.  ‘Aqrab was so angry he was
shaking.  How
dare
she.  It was
vile
.  And
wrong
.  And
totally unprovoked. 
She
was the one who was being unreasonable.

He stalked from one end of the
tether to the other, his bare feet leaving a tread in the sands beneath him,
feeling the scorching winds of the Fourth Lands like a pleasant caress against
his skin. 
Damn
her.  All he wanted was to go
home
.  Couldn’t she
see that?

‘Aqrab looked to the east,
wondering what had happened to his village.  His family.  He’d had to leave it
all behind with his surrender, bound in servitude to an
immortal
who was
just smart enough not to make that final wish, but too stubborn to see that he
wanted, more than anything, to simply be free.  Time had worn him down, the
ages drying out his soul like the hot breeze of his homeland.  He no longer
cared about vengeance or retribution.  All he wanted was to be able to walk a
little further, to tread across the dunes and go
home
.

Damn her.  Damn her stubborn
soul.

He knew she wasn’t going to make
the final wish.  Regardless of what he said, no matter
how
much he
insisted he only wanted to be free, she would take that to mean whatever she wanted. 
And she accused
him
of twisting his words.  The obstinate wretch!  She
had sealed them both into a never-ending hell, from which there was only one
escape.

And he could see it in her eyes. 
She’d rather die than let him go.

Her spirit still burned for
vengeance.  She still swung that sword of righteousness, in her mind.  She
still waited for the moment she could lop off his head, offered in surrender. 
Three thousand years ago, she had been about to kill a helpless man, about to
seal
his
soul
to her in eternal servitude, for a misunderstanding.  ‘Aqrab’s
deeds
had
to have been utterly misunderstood by the small minds of the
First Lands.  It was the only explanation for this lunacy.  He had destroyed a
city, yes, but in doing so, had saved so much more.  The man’s wish had been
typical greedy, self-centered,
selfish
First-Lander fare.  He had wanted
riches, first.  Then women.  Then he’d wanted the world.

‘…the power to shatter
mountainsides with my step, to make the people of the world cringe before me in
awe as I summon tornadoes with my very breath…’
the man had wished.  And
‘Aqrab had given him just that.  And, in doing so, had gotten a divine bounty
put upon him as an ‘oathbreaker.’  The damn simpletons simply didn’t
care
about the weave he had seen, had he allowed that wish to play out as the man
had wanted it.  They didn’t
care
about the destruction that one fool
would have wreaked upon the earth, in his mortal grasp for the gods.  They just
saw a djinni step out of the rubble and assumed he had meddled in First Lands
affairs.  The hypocrites.

And now he was
tethered
to
the one sent to
kill
him.  And she still wanted to, with every ounce of
her soul.  He could see it in her pretty brown eyes, whenever she deigned to
look him in the face.  She hated him.  All of him.  She hated his very being,
his core, and wanted nothing more than to have put that sword through his
neck.  He’d tried to tell her what had happened,
why
that city had
fallen, but she had cut him off, every time. 
‘Twisted words’
she had
spat. 
‘Your kind are masters at it.’

Damn her.

He had learned quickly enough
that there was no talking to her.  Once his initial curse had worked—
worked
,
praise the gods!—she’d been forced to leave her sword at that oasis to be
swallowed by the sands.  She had been unreasonable ever since.  Utterly
unwilling to so much as
listen
to him.

Just thinking of her perpetually
rigid spine, her disdain, her
contempt
for him made his blood boil.  She
treated him like he was the slave the wereverine claimed he was.

Three thousand years was taking
an ever-more-unpleasant turn, and this morning was just another indication that
she was finally losing what little respect she ever had for him.  How long
would it be until she started forcing him to draw upon the power of creation of
the Fourth Lands by simply flooding him with shadow until he submitted?  It
had
to have occurred to her by now.  That she hadn’t begun using him to fulfill her
base desires, like every other First Lander he had ever met, still left him
baffled.

…but not hopeful.  Sooner or
later, she was going to do it.  He had seen it in her eyes.  And once she
crossed that line, once she
forced
a wish that had not been given to
her, then not even her precious Lord of War could keep the lords of the Fourth
Realm from utterly annihilating her and all of the weave-tearing ripples of her
ill-begotten wish.

But at least he would be free.

Three thousand years was much too
long to spend tethered to a beauty who would rather spit in his face than share
warmth by the fire.  Her nightly slight—where she would not even allow him to
rest in a
bed
because he might somehow contaminate it with his
presence—was a constant reminder that she considered herself above him, utterly
superior to him in every way.

Utterly superior…and proud of
it.  Proud of her hold on him.  Proud of the way she could make him grovel on
his hands and knees, with no more than a mental nudge.

If only the little beauty didn’t
set his damn loins afire every time he saw her slender form!  It was one last
humiliation, one last jab to prove that she was better than him.  She saw him,
looked him up and down like
chattel
, and sniffed—
sniffed
—as if
she smelled something foul.  And, what was worse, the longer he was around her,
the more he wanted her, and the
less
he found himself craving the other
women they happened upon.  It made absolutely no sense to him, and left him infuriatingly
flaccid on plenty of opportunities for merry-making over the years. 

The wolves, especially, had been
fond of breeding, yet for every moon-kissed woman who had so much as looked in
his direction, his loins had simply not cooperated, until he had received the
reputation of a damn impotent over the years.  A djinni. 
Impotent
.  It
was appalling and disgraceful and utterly humiliating.  …and yet time and
again, it was proving frustratingly true.  The little winged Fury, with her
snide comments and outright disdain, had somehow subjugated his passions,
until, recently, she was the only one that could inspire his ardor—and she did
it even when she was shoving shadows down his cord.

Never had ‘Aqrab been more
frustrated or humiliated than he was now.  It was almost as if the gods were
taunting him, dangling this forbidden fruit in front of him for so long that
now it was all his body seemed to desire.  A Maiden of the Sword.  A
virgin-priestess.  An angel of vengeance.  A warrior without equal, proudly
untouched by man…

…until one frightened djinni
brushed his fingers against her leg and whispered his final wish.

And he wasn’t even sure she
wasn’t bewitching him, either.  It had been so long since he’d had a woman, he
couldn’t tell anymore.

With the hatred he saw in her
eyes every time she looked at him, he wouldn’t have been surprised.  What
better way to bring a djinni to his knees?  A creature known for passion,
romance, lust, desire…the very forces of creation.  What better way to break
him than taunt him with what he so desperately needed, but could not have?

In despair, ‘Aqrab slumped to the
sand, staring to the east, where somewhere across the dunes, his village waited
for him around an oasis.  If it was still there.  Three thousand years and even
the Fourth Lands saw changes.  The sands shifted.  Leaders came and went. 
People moved, decided to try a change of scenery.

‘Aqrab had just dropped his head
into his hands to stare at the golden sand between his bare feet when he felt
the jolt of terror slam into him from the other side of the link like a titan’s
sledge to his chest.  He grunted, then twisted to the half-realm.

The sands disappeared, replaced
by glowing crystalline dunes in all directions, overlaid by a barely-translucent,
near-black forest of trees and a three-story mansion.  All of it in varying contrasting
shades of shimmering white and black.  He was in the backyard of the Sleeping
Lady Lodge, looking up at the second story. 

The winds were rank with danger,
now, like rot seeping forth from the land itself, chanting little thrumming
patters of
danger
and
flee
through his soul.  For some annoying reason,
the winds seemed to watch over the First Lander to which he was bound, though
the little magus had never had the knack to listen to them.  An irony, ‘Aqrab
thought, because he himself rarely ever received such a warning.  Hence why he
kept finding himself trapped in the First Lands, bound to some shadow-wreathed
object, waiting for his penance to be served.

Through the glimmering-yet-transparent
walls, he could vaguely make out the translucent bodies of eight women in the
kitchen of the Sleeping Lady, bent over three crumpled forms.

Recognizing his magus as the one
fallen nearest him, ‘Aqrab’s heart hammered suddenly, sending out concentric
rings of crystal luminescence over the dual-land around him in a glowing white
wave.  The translucent crystal forms of the First Lander grasses at his feet
wilted slightly, shriveling in the heat of his fear.

One of the eight women squatted
beside his magus and grabbed her by the hair, hefting her face from the floor.

Dead?
  ‘Aqrab thought,
horrified.  If she had died, he was lost.  Bound forever to her bones, waiting
for that final wish.

At any other time, ‘Aqrab would
have flitted inside and blasted them all with the full heat of the Fourth
Lands.  The winds, however, stayed his hand. 
Danger
, they kept
chanting. 
Danger.  Flee.  Danger…

Who were the eight women?  How
had they subdued the phoenix, let alone his magus?

Danger.  Flee.  Danger…
 
The frenzied chant kept gnawing at his panicked brain as he watched the
squatting woman lean down, pluck something from his mistress’s back.

Even from this distance, he
cringed at the roiling mass of shadow that seemed to rip tears in the very
fabric of the half-realm, a ball of black sunfire tracing pathways outward from
something the woman plucked from his magus’s spine.

‘Aqrab went cold.  He knew what
that blackness was.  He had seen it before, roaming the lonely dunes of the
Fourth Lands.  A basilisk, a single drop of whose venom could paralyze a
First-Lander.  …or kill a Fourth Lander instantly.

‘Aqrab fought down a rush of
terror.  Bounty-hunters, then.  Quite possibly a full Inquisitional retrieval
team.  Here for the phoenix, no doubt.

…but did they know they had a
djinni bound to remain a mere five hundred cubits away?  Or a Fury laying at
their feet, her powers hidden from her by the Pact of Realms until she could
find a way to remove the taint of the wolf from her blood?  Two top-tier
bloodlines, brought low and helpless to defend themselves?

His heart pounded like white fire
through his veins as he considered.  Gods, he had
known
it was a bad
idea to stay with the phoenix, but as soon as he had mentioned as much, the
stubborn little magus had done the exact opposite, to spite him.  Vicious,
arrogant little beast that she was.

Flee.  Flee.  Flee,
the
winds chanted, their urgency building, now.

I
can’t
flee,
‘Aqrab thought, frustration and terror building like an unwelcome rot in his
chest.  He was
bound
to her by a Fourthlander Oath.  There was nowhere
he could
go
. 

What was worse, if the
Bounty-seekers had any sense at all, it was only a matter of time before they
found that cord snaking out from his mistress, and followed it to its source. 
And then, the chronic humiliations and emotional torments that the little magus
had heaped upon him for the last three millennia would be
nothing
in
comparison to the way they forged his soul to their whims.

Then, suddenly, it was as if the
winds sucked into one spot, solidifying before him, a thousand angry faces of
mist and light.  Together, they grabbed ‘Aqrab by the throat and yanked him off
of the ground, leaving him to dangle by a crystalline hand. 
FLEE.
  The
winds screamed it, half man, half winged demon.