Battle Bond: An Urban Fantasy Dragon Series (Death Before Dragons #2) - Lindsay Buroker Page 0,98
and he wants to purchase one.
Is he the reason the shifters aren’t checking out the magic that flowed from their vault? I reminded myself that it was a good thing that the door had shut, insulating that magic inside again. Maybe, distracted by Dob, they would forget they’d sensed it.
Yes, I think so. Two of them were on their way to check the orb—that’s what they said—but everybody is in the front room now. They’re very wary of Dob.
As they should be.
Orb? I eyed the tunnel. Was that what was back there, calling to me? Not with words but with pure magic that promised something good if I came to visit it. My curiosity almost pulled me away from the dwarf to investigate, but I remembered my mission, to get the shifters to leave Nin alone. If I took away their dwarf slave, they wouldn’t be able to create magical weapons or ammo anymore.
Besides, this poor guy needed to be freed.
“I’m going to let you go, all right?” I patted his shoulder, but again, he didn’t react.
An uneasy thought stirred, and I moved my hand to his throat. What if he wasn’t alive any longer? What if he’d died here and his undead body was chained by magic to forever carry out the whims of the shifters?
But his skin was warm, and a slow steady pulse beat under my fingers.
“Good.”
I reached for the glowing shackle on his ankle, thinking I could unlock it with my charm. I’d barely touched it when a surge of power slammed into me. It hurled me across the chamber like a cartoon character who’d stuck his finger in an outlet. I tried to twist in the air to make sure I didn’t break anything landing, but I struck the wall first. Hard.
My breath whooshed out of my lungs as pain struck me like a lightning bolt. Groaning, I slumped to my hands and knees.
“You could have warned me,” I growled between gasps for air.
The dwarf hadn’t moved. He still wasn’t reacting.
It was a long moment before I could climb to my feet and pick up Chopper, and the ache that remained after the initial burst of agony worried me. Since I didn’t see a way I could escape the night without fighting, I worried about cracked ribs making everything even more difficult.
I shambled back over to the dwarf, careful not to bump the chain with my boot.
What’s going on out there, Sindari?
Since the door had shut, I hadn’t heard any noises from above. It was almost as if I’d been transported to some other dimension. I didn’t get an answer, and that worried me, but he probably wasn’t monitoring my thoughts because the shifters and the dragon were having an interesting conversation.
“Wait here,” I told the dwarf, as if he was going anywhere. “I’m going to explore.”
Maybe I could turn off the source of the magic powering the chain and keeping him in zombie mode.
I padded down the tunnel, rounding bend after bend, careful not to touch the chain that ran along the wall the whole way. The passageway sloped slightly downward, and I lost track of where I was in relation to the neighborhood above. Definitely not still under the shifters’ house.
The lavender light grew brighter as the tug on my mind grew stronger. Whatever was trying to get me back there seemed… hungry. But it was full of promises too. Images started to pop into my mind of me and my daughter skipping rocks into a lake, of me sitting out on a sunny beach with no weapons in hand and nobody trying to kill me, of me dragging a handsome and laughing version of Zav into bed with me. All the things I wished I could have? I grunted skeptically at the last.
By the time I reached a chamber about twenty feet by twenty feet, the lavender light was so intense that I held up my hand to protect my eyes. An orb hung in the center of the chamber, not suspended from anything, simply floating in place. Dark purple veins were visible on its glass-like surface, overshadowed by the brilliant light it exuded. The orb throbbed, reminding me uncomfortably of a beating heart. I could even feel the faint pulses emanating from the walls and floor around me.
More images flooded my mind, these more intense than the first. They were carnal and erotic and promised great pleasure if I came forward and touched the orb.