someone, or something, else working here?
As I watched, four pale orbs shot up out of the ground, so fast and so faint that if I hadn’t been watching, I’m not sure I would have seen them. And then they were gone, flying to the east. I blinked a few times.
“Did you see that?” I asked.
“What?” Lila tucked her head, bumping it against my cheek. “What do you see?”
I shook my head and shifted back to two legs, Lila clinging to me the entire time which told me just how upset she was. “It’s gone now.” I quickly described the orbs to her and Maks.
“I’ve no idea what they could be,” Maks said. “Nothing that I know of fits that description.”
“Hey, why don’t you ask the old boys?” Lila said.
One of the other things that had saved our bacon was the fact that while the old Jinn masters had left off possessing Maks, much of their knowledge had stayed in his head. While it wasn’t always at the front of his mind, he could access what they knew, and that knowledge was a gold mine. Kind of like his own personal library, though there did seem to be a few holes here and there.
Knowing our luck, this would be one of those holes.
Lila and I watched as Maks closed his eyes, and his breathing slowed.
He was quiet for a good minute before a low groan escaped him. “They have nothing on this sort of an event. It’s like everything we’ve gained, everything we’ve fought for, was just snatched away. But by whom?”
Lila growled. “Yeah, I’d like to know who is doing this? If Merlin wasn’t dead, I’d say it was him. Or the Emperor.”
She wasn’t wrong. Except Merlin was dead, and the Emperor, my grandfather, without any power so much as in his pinky finger left to him after I’d finished with him.
“This is a fucking mess,” I muttered. No weapon, no direction for the dragon eggs, and now no magic or abilities we’d worked so hard to gain. I frowned. “The hyena, she said something like the power would be stripped? Shit, she was literally telling us to watch ourselves and we still walked right into it!”
“I feel like saying all the things we had in our arsenal out loud cursed us to lose them.” Maks stared up at the bright blue sky as if the answer would be there.
I wasn’t sure that was the case at all. But as that place between my shoulders began to itch, I had no doubt someone was watching us. Waiting to see if we’d run away or keep moving forward on our path.
“The hyena warned us. Warned us and we came here anyway.” I grabbed Balder’s reins and mounted. “We need to continue on. The dragon eggs and hatchlings aren’t going to save themselves.”
“We have no magic! I’m a shrimp again!” Lila yelped, hopping to stand on Balder’s neck so she could glare at me, her big eyes watering with tears.
“How is that different from when we went to the Witch’s Reign? We did that as little shits, with no magic, and we beat her. Maks wasn’t using his Jinn magic then for fear it would bring his father down on us. And we survived. We survived the Dragon’s Ground the same way. So we go on, we find the eggs, and figure out along the way who the hell stole our abilities. And we get them back. That’s the plan.”
Maks pulled himself up onto Batman. “I agree. We have no choice but to go forward now. Anything strong enough to take our magic with such subtlety won’t be satisfied with that. Now with the Emperor and Merlin gone, there is a wide open desert for any other power that might come along. What if . . . what if whoever this is knows about the jewels? Sure, we destroyed them, but they might not know that.”
My stomach clenched. Yeah, that would be bad. No magic, moving forward, and headed to the east where some unnamed beast awaited us.
Awesome, just fucking awesome. But maybe I grinned a little. Because I was, if nothing else, comfortable in the position of underdog—undercat. Better to be treated as if we weren’t capable and then come out on top. Better to be underestimated yet again. And hope it was enough to slink by the radars out there.
We rode east, leaving the Blackened Market behind, but not without looking back several times. Those orbs I’d seen, they’d been