Battle Bond: An Urban Fantasy Dragon Series (Death Before Dragons #2) - Lindsay Buroker Page 0,1
to cut away the binding around my ankles, and I grimaced at the lost time. The kobolds had scattered as soon as Sindari leaped after them.
But I heard the one that had been in the tree jumping down. As soon as I was free, I sprinted after him.
The white-haired, two-foot-tall, gray-skinned creature darted into the next row of trees, a slingshot clenched in his small fist. I ducked branches and darted around trunks to follow.
My father’s blood gave me better-than-human agility, but thanks to my mom, I also carried the blood of ancient Norse warriors in my veins, and they’d conspired to make me six feet tall. Branches clawed at my hair and smacked me in the face as I raced after the kobold. I lost sight of him, but my senses kept me on his trail.
As I surged out of the trees at the edge of the orchard, he came into sight again, sprinting for the native evergreens on the property’s border. And the non-native, invasive blackberry brambles growing between those trees.
My long legs let me gain ground, and I urged them to even faster speeds as I saw his destination. A rabbit-sized hole in the dense wall of thorny vines.
I unstrapped Fezzik from my holster but hesitated to shoot him in the back. I wasn’t yet sure these kobolds were responsible for the trouble, and my mother’s words rang in my mind, that maybe the magical community would hate me less—would stop sending representatives to try to kill me—if they didn’t fear me, if I helped them.
A split second before I would have caught up to him, the kobold dove through the hole. It looked too small even for him, but he slithered into it like a greased snake. It was all I could do to halt in time to keep from face-planting in the thorns.
Vines and leaves rattled, marking the kobold’s passage as he found a route deeper and deeper into the brambles. Even my height wasn’t enough to allow me to see over them and guess how far back into the trees the patch extended. Probably all the way to Puget Sound. There was a reason the Himalayan blackberry topped the lists of the most noxious invasive weeds in the Pacific Northwest.
As I was eyeing Chopper, debating how effective my treasured blade would be at clearing a path through the thorny tangle, I spotted the property owners heading my way.
I groaned. Had they seen me failing to capture a single toddler-sized kobold? They better have not seen me getting pelted in the butt by him.
Embarrassment heated my cheeks as I imagined snarky comments about how they thought they’d brought in the legendary Ruin Bringer, not some self-proclaimed bounty hunter hired off the internet.
Sindari? I asked silently as the middle-aged man and woman approached. Any chance you’ve captured the rest of them and tied them up with a bow for me?
Surprisingly, Sindari didn’t answer. The cat-shaped charm on my necklace that could call him into this world warmed through the fabric of my shirt. Then it went ice cold, sending a chill through me that had nothing to do with physical sensation.
Sindari? I touched the charm.
Nothing.
2
“It got away?” the man asked as he and his wife stopped, glancing at the blackberry brambles.
Worried about Sindari, I struggled to focus on him. “Yeah. Sorry.”
The middle-aged couple didn’t look much like my mental image of farmers—or orchard owners. He wore a Microsoft T-shirt and glasses, and she was in yoga pants and a hoodie displaying a stick figure doing the splits under instructions to Stay flexible.
Ayush and Laura were their names, I reminded myself. Colonel Willard had given me information on them and their lavender farm/apple orchard/cider house/winery when she’d given me the job.
“I told you we should have cleared all this.” The woman pointed to the brambles and frowned at her husband.
“And I told you we’d need a hundred goats and a skidsteer with a brush-saw attachment to make any headway. It’s been an epic battle just to keep them from encroaching on the orchard.”
“I didn’t object to the idea of goats,” she murmured.
“Just the forty-thousand-dollar machine?”
“Yes. That’s not in the budget.”
“But goats are?”
“Goats are cute.”
I was barely listening, my gaze scanning the orchard for signs of Sindari, even though I suspected he’d been dismissed from this world. Usually, that was something only the holder of the figurine could do. But I’d once seen a powerful dark-elf mage force him away.