Alaskan Fury (42 page)

Eventually, ‘Aqrab lay down and
pulled her atop his big torso, allowing her to catch her breath.  As she panted
against his chest, his heat began to relax her, easing her into a state of
delicious exhaustion.  Within moments, Kaashifah felt her mind pleasantly
drifting, her thoughts and body warmed by the djinni beneath her.  One ear to
his chest, she listened to the bellows of his lungs, content to listen to him
breathe.

“So, ah, mon Dhi’b, about my
wrists…”  It was a deep rumble against her ear, vibrating through the ebony
flesh beneath her cheek.

“Ungh?”  Blearily, Kaashifah jerked
and lifted her head.  The djinni was giving her a nervous look, holding up a
wrist and the golden Realm-wall that held it.  She saw wariness in his violet
gaze, combined with a thread of fear.

Her eyes falling on his proffered
wrist, Kaashifah grinned sheepishly, reached out, and brushed her fingers
against the band, unraveling her spell.  The glimmering golden rings around his
forearms fell away like liquid light, dribbling to the stone of the cave before
they disappeared. 

The djinni let out the breath he
had been holding.  “Just like that?” he whispered, sounding stunned.

Kaashifah, who had collapsed back
to his chest and was already halfway back to sleep, grunted. 

In the long silence that
followed, she realized he was staring at her.  Probably, she knew, stunned by
the fact she hadn’t even considered using her advantage to try and force him
into any number of classic, unpleasant First-Lander ‘bargains.’ 

“I’m like Thunderbird,” Kaashifah
said tiredly.  “I’ve got what I need.”  Then she grimaced, remembering.  “Well,
for the most part.  You could make me some clothes.”

“Ah,” ‘Aqrab said, the djinni
apparently finding himself speechless.  Clearing his throat, he managed, “I
think I might be able to manage that.”

Kaashifah grinned and relaxed
into him, once more losing herself to the heat of his body.  “Good night,
‘Aqrab.”

Tentatively, he settled his big
hands upon her back, enveloping her in his warmth.  “Good night, Kaashifah.” 
She was almost asleep when she heard his whisper of, “Thank you.”

Chapter
16: The Dragon’s Den

Savaxian alighted on his front
stoop with a snap of his wings, a haunch of moose in his jaws, the rest of the
animal left buried under a snowbank.  Not that he couldn’t have
carried
the entire moose, of course, but a haunch would last him a couple days, and who
wanted a massive corpse stinking up the back of his cave when he was trying to
slee—

The scent of roast meat wafting
from the entrance of his home made him freeze.  Already wrapped in a dozen
different wards to evade the humans’ eyes-from-above, he now shot a taproot
into the well of his power and prepared himself for a fight.

Mudborn didn’t come this way. 
Not intelligent ones, anyway.  It was too far from any road, too high in the
mountains, too buried in snow.  Already, he had seven feet to flounder through
whenever he went outside to take a dump, and it only just past the solstice. 

Thunderbird, the annoying prick,
hadn’t come back since the last time they’d scuffled over which
side
of
the marker tree indicated the boundary Savaxian’s land, and Savaxian had sent
him home with an assful of fire and a bunch of missing feathers.

Another dragon, then?  All the
good territory to the north was claimed by elders, which was why Savaxian had
been forced to seek out lesser territory to the south in the first place.  If a
hatchling had discovered his home and moved in, he wasn’t too concerned, but if
it were an
ancient
…

Slowly, Savaxian lowered the
moose-haunch to the snow beside his cave and carefully padded forward, one foot
at a time, to get an idea of what sort of creature he was dealing with.

The first thing he saw around the
corner was a swath of food and blankets, and enough meats, fruits, and
delicacies to feed an army.  The second thing he noticed was the light in the
ceiling, the magic fueling it making his eyes hurt.  The
third
thing he
saw was the tangle of bodies stretched out on his floor in the back of his
cave, in post-coitus, one big and black, one small and tawny.

…and the black one was much, much
too hot.  He lit up like a thermal springs in the middle of winter.

A Fourthlander, of some sort.

Immediately, Savaxian’s scales
tightened to his back.  Fourthlanders—those who had the power to cross the
barriers of the realms—were dangerous.  He slunk to the shadows, circling
around the walls of the cave to get a better vantage point.

Upon closer inspection, the
smaller one smelled like wolf.  He whuffed in surprise, his head yanking back
in reflex.  How…
vile
.  Did the Fourthlander not realize that a single
bite from the creature could cut him from his powers forever, if he was caught
off-guard?  Indeed, when he got closer, he could see the silver spiderweb of
Thirdlander magic weaving through her veins, pumping through every inch of her
body.

“You hear something, mon Dhi’b?”  The
Fourthlander had not been asleep.  Savaxian froze against the wall, a foot up,
wrapping himself even tighter in magic.

The tiny, ignorant creature
sprawled on the Fourthlander’s chest moaned something unintelligible and
snuggled back to sleep.  Savaxian would kill her first.  Third
Landers—especially
wolves
—were intolerable.  Like cockroaches.  Savaxian
hated cockroaches.  He’d seen some, on one of his treks through the lower half
of the continent, and had accidentally carried some back home with him in his
luggage.  The vermin had quickly multiplied and taken over his cave in a matter
of days, and he did
not
want to repeat the experience on a larger
scale.  Wolves, as pathogenically social creatures, needed to die before they
could spread.

Once it was obvious that the
moronic Fourthlander wasn’t about to get up and investigate, Savaxian relaxed. 
Mon Dhi’b
.  A combination of French and Arabic meaning ‘My Wolf.’  So
the fool was emotionally attached to the cockroach.  Savaxian could use that. 
Further, the man’s accent had been
old
.  A few winters of humanity, at
least.  That would make killing him more difficult.  The older ones were…wily. 
Savaxian had gotten a very good lesson in that from his uncle Trellyn, who had
been crafty enough cheat half the countryside out of perfectly good territory
on bets and cards, before he’d gotten bored and given it all up to go to
Kentucky and get into real-estate.

And unfortunately, judging by the
tender way the Fourthlander was embracing the disgusting creature, the act of
cockroach-eradication was probably going to be unpleasant.  Savaxian slipped
closer, stepping over piles of food to get a better look. 
Yes,
he
decided, feeling the heat rolling off of the creature,
definitely
Fourth-Lands.
  And, though he couldn’t be entirely sure without getting up
close and inspecting, he was pretty sure he felt a few ongoing spells bound
between the two of them.  Was the wolf a slave, then?  A geas-bound servant? 
The Fourthlander was obviously a magus, judging by the brain-stabbing light
that was now violating the sanctity of his cavern.

But what kind of Fourthlander had
the ability to work magic in the First Realm?  He began combing through his
memories for myths and legends his parents had passed to him.  The Djinn,
obviously, but such lasting spells were beyond their abilities.  Besides, the
creature bore no cuffs and it was in
Alaska
in the middle of
winter
,
so it was obviously no djinni.  Dervishes, but it was too big and too black to
be a dervish.  Neither elementals of Fire nor phoenix had the ability to weave
magic beyond that of their natural inclinations.  Both the cockatrice and the
basilisk were too simple to work more than rudimentary magics, and surely
couldn’t have crossed the realms without help, much less taken mudborn form.  A
salamander could make the jump, but would be rather powerless this far north at
this time of year, with all the plants and most other life in the northern
hemisphere asleep and the sun barely cresting the horizon at midday.  An
efreet, as unpleasant as
that
buggering little red-skinned bastard would
be, was thankfully as unlikely as the rest of it.

Because, obviously, no
Fourthlander was going to willingly be on a
mountain
in
Alaska
in
the middle of
winter
.  The paradox was beginning to make his head hurt.

He supposed it could have been a
surtur, a very rare jötunn of fire and volcanoes, as described by the Norse. 
But were surtur Fourth Landers?  He’d assumed all jötunn, being creatures of
darkness and shadow, were Third Landers.  Yet he could
feel
Fourthlander
magics in his cave, and that pissed him off.  Further, jötunn were supposed to
be
huge
, not just large.  Twelve and fourteen feet, as opposed to
seven.  An infant jötunn, then?

Savaxian lowered his neck and
cocked his head beneath the tangle of legs and arms, until he got a good look
at the creature’s gonads.  Yes, he noted, they had dropped.  And yes, they were
covered in hair.

Humanoids were such disgusting
creatures.

Not a djinni, not an efreet, not
a jötunn…  Intrigued, Savaxian took up a pleasant, out-of-the-way spot and sat
down to begin puzzling it out, filtering through the memories that his parents
had passed to him, trying to locate the creature’s exact subtype.  It took
hours, and nothing really made any logical sense.  Further, if the creature had
changed
forms,
like the efreet or the salamanders could do, then he was
totally screwed and wasting his time.  But both the Djinn and the jötnar showed
up in his memories as rather large—for humanoids—and the Djinn, at least, were
rather black while the jötnar were generally pale.  But of course it wasn’t a
djinni, for the aforediscovered reasons.

Thus, he had a mystery on his
hands, and he wasn’t going anywhere until he solved it.  After all, he would
have plenty of time to kill them, once he’d satisfied his curiosity.  He
settled in, wrapping his tail around himself and settling his chin over his
back to watch them.  It could be a
phoenix
, he thought grudgingly,
though it would not account for the magic he felt.  But if it
was
a
phoenix, he was totally fucked.  He wondered if it had at least killed
Thunderbird on its way north.  The vain prick was due for another good
scorching.

The food was a clue, he knew. 
Great mountains of it, and it was utterly inconceivable that they had brought it
with him.  So it had been
made
.  That meant either a fey—and Savaxian
could smell those rat-bastard-hoard-stealing-fucks at a thousand miles—or
something with access to Fourthlander Law.  That meant…

A
djinni
stooping to sex
with a
wolf
?  That was just…barbaric.  Like a dragon downforming to
bugger a giant bat.  Reminded him of a rumor he’d heard from somewhere over the
Alaska range.  Some Third Lander succeeded in courting a phoenix.  A
wereverine, if he remembered correctly.  Disgusting.

Then something else occurred to
him, and he snorted in surprise.

A djinni could grant wishes.

He glanced at the lavish feast
strewn about his cave, mostly untouched, and twisted back to stare at the
djinni in shock.  The djinni
was
granting wishes.  To a
cockroach
.

Oh yes, the cockroach needed to
die.  But there was one other problem to this situation, something that was not
seeing, and until he understood it, he was not going to reveal himself and get
roasted like an idiot.

Djinni, in all their vast powers,
did not have the capability for time-sustained magics.  They could not make a
sword glow and make it continue to glow.  It simply wasn’t within their realm
of tricks.  Thus, the ball of light had not been made by the djinni.  Thus, it
had to have been made by the cockroach.  Thus, the cockroach was not a wolf.

That was annoying.  He hated it
when things did not become immediately apparent to him.  It gave him a
headache.  This was his first headache in a couple decades.  The last one had
been in an attempt to comprehend how a fucking bastard like Thunderbird could
mistake the
north
side of his marker-tree for the
south
side,
when taking his morning piss.  The absolute fucking retard.  The headache had
lasted several days, as he contemplated a thousand brilliant ways to get back
at the bastard.  His uncle Trellyn, however, had convinced him not to go
through with the best of his schemes, which had involved conspiring with one of
his brothers to cut off his fucking pony-tail for half Savaxian’s hoard.  The
only thing that had stopped him had been Trellyn reminding him that his brother
Uthmyrenn wanted to see Thunderbird humbled as much as
he
did, and why
give him half his hoard to do something he’d be glad to do anyway?

The argument that had ensued had
ended with neither Savaxian nor Uthmyrenn speaking to each other, and
Thunderbird continuing to piss on Savaxian’s tree.  Like a fucking dog.  He
would have electrified the tree with a gajillion volts of
rock-your-world-nasty, but he doubted it would’ve done much damage to the feather-puffed
fuckwad.

Savaxian shifted, finding the
thought of the pompous dickcheese unpleasant.  So.  He was dealing with a
djinni who was in the habit of granting wishes.  This was interesting.  His
hoard could use a few more rooms’-worth of gold…