She rolled up to her feet and flew to me, blowing him a wet raspberry as she went by. “Fine. Mock my pain, Toad.”
I caught her with one hand and tucked her in close. While she was making fun by being ridiculous, she was also shaking hard. Because once more, we were at the mercy of the world with no big guns to back us up. And she more than any of us would feel that pinch.
“It will be okay, Lila,” I said softly, squeezing her to me. “We’ll figure this out. I promise.”
Her big violet eyes stared up at me. “I don’t want to figure it out. I want for life to not be so damn hard. I want us to have a break for once.”
“That’s the problem, nobody gets an easy life,” I said. “And honestly, those few who do, how often are they the ones that cause more problems? Self-serving assholes. We at least solve problems.”
She curled up in front of me and closed her eyes. “I hate problems. I want to kill them and bury them in a stinking bog. And then go drink a bottle of țuică until I can’t see straight.”
I didn’t blame her. Part of me wanted to curl up and ignore the world, too, especially after all we’d been through.
“It will be okay. We aren’t dead, and we are still together, so it will work out in the end.” I held her a little tighter, knowing the words weren’t just for her. They were for me too. I had to believe we would face this new challenge together.
Sweat dribbled down my arms and spine, and Balder and Batman glistened with moisture as the sun beat down on us. Moving during the day was not ideal, but until we found a place to rest, this was the plan.
I drank from the waterskin regularly, offering it to Balder and Lila too. Maks did the same for him and Batman. We had to keep moving until there was somewhere to stop; no point in stopping out in the middle of the heat.
At the apex of the day, when the heat was the worst, I thought my eyes might be fooling me. The shade of a small cluster of rocks beckoned in the distance. I pointed at them. “Maks, there, that would work, I think.”
“Yeah, that should give us enough cover. Looks like we might not be the only travelers out here, though.” He pointed to the left of the rocks at the subtlest of movement from a cluster of smaller bodies.
Good people or bad, good monster or bad. Which would it be today? With how the day started . . . “I’m putting money on two assholes, a whiny sidekick, and too much loot to carry from the other people they robbed.”
Maks looked across at me, his eyes sparkling as he deadpanned. “That sounds like us. Minus the loot, of course.”
I couldn’t help it, I laughed way harder than I should have—yeah, I knew I could be an asshole. Lila, on the other hand, shot across to him. Apparently, she’d not been sleeping all that deeply.
“I am not whiny! I’m pissed off!” She took a swing at him that he barely dodged.
Maks caught her and pulled her into a hug. “I know you’re not whiny. I’m not happy either, but until we can get some information, what are we to do? Wallow? No, that’s not our style, Lila. I was teasing. I was just teasing.”
She relaxed in his arms and then patted his cheek with one claw. “You’re lucky I love you, Maks, or I’d claw your eyes out and pop them like grapes.”
He kissed her on the nose. “I know I am.”
Lila flipped herself out of his arms and swooped down low between the horses, her wings stretched wide. “I’ll go check it out. Might as well make my whiny ass useful for something.”
I watched her go and then looked across at Maks. He winked at me. “I figured she’d take offense.”
“Oh, I knew what you were up to.” I sobered quickly. “But I’m worried, Maks. I mean. I can live without my magic. I have for most of my life. But who the hell could snatch it like that without us even feeling it?” We hadn’t talked much about it, the three of us lost in our own thoughts.
He nodded. “That’s my concern too. That and the fact that the Jinn masters’ knowledge on that area is like a giant blank, which is more than worrisome. If you had the world divided into pages, each page giving you information on different parts of the world, the page for the east . . . that page has nothing on it. They even knew some stuff about the new world before the walls went up. But the east? Nothing.”
I didn’t like the shiver that cut through me. “That cannot be good. This beast from the east must be some seriously bad mojo.”
“Agreed. I can’t help feeling like . . . like this might be a game. And that was the first move. But to draw us in, or scare us away? Neither is good, and until we know, we are playing blind.”
I nodded, and Balder matched me, bobbing his head up and down rapidly. Watching Lila fly ahead, I kept my eyes on the small figures around the rocks. They seemed to be . . . “Are they dancing?”
“Looks like it to me,” Maks said. “But is it happy dancing, or the kind of dancing when you stub a toe?”
Or the kind of dancing some species did before they attacked?
That was the question, wasn’t it? I asked Balder to pick up speed. A faster trot really was all I wanted, but he tried to bolt into a gallop. I slowed him down. “Yeah, how about we don’t break our legs today in the loose sand and burn ourselves out of the last of our reserves?”
He blew out a snort and settled into a ground-covering trot, extending his legs out as far as he could without breaking into a gallop. Fair enough.
The air felt good on my face, drying some of the sweat, so I let him have a little more leeway in the speed department.
Batman slowed as we scooted forward. I looked over my shoulder and cursed. Batman had been given more speed and more stamina as a gift from Balder during our travels, because Balder was a horse that wasn’t truly a horse, and no other true equine could ever keep up to him without help.
That gift to Batman was apparently gone too. “Damn it,” I muttered. “Whoever took all our goodies is going to get nut sacked. Hard. At least three times.”
A cry from Lila whipped me around as she plummeted to the ground, lines of black wrapped around her. Anger snapped up through me. Who the fuck did these creatures think they were messing with?
“Okay, now you can run.” I gave a low hiss to Balder and he leapt forward, his legs eating up the distance between us and the dancing-whatever-they-were and a falling-from-the-sky Lila.
Balder stretched out and I leaned over his neck. As we drew close enough that I could see the creatures, my brain struggled to make sense of what they were.
Three feet tall at best, they were dressed in bright red robes, had hair the color of corn silk, and huge blue eyes that dominated their faces. They looked almost like cherubs. Minus the wings.
“Hey!” I hollered as I got close enough to see that they had netted Lila but hadn’t hurt her. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
The group of them—thirteen on a quick count of their bright shining gold heads—turned to me as a unit. And bowed.
“We have waited. Our mistress told us to wait here. And you have come.” They whispered together, but not together. Like they were a little off so the words reverberated around us like a weird echo that made my skin crawl and called up the urge to reach for a weapon I no longer had.
“Waited for what?”