There were no more words from Bryce, nothing but a salute. I gave him a wobbly one back, then flipped him off, which left him laughing in the courtyard of the stable. Sibling bonds were weird at the best of times. But more so when the roles reversed and the protector became the protected. I wanted to believe everything he said, the younger sibling in me wanted to trust him . . . but I just couldn’t. Not again. Not after everything that happened.
Maks and I walked beside the horses, and with each step of their hooves on the old pavement road that led out, I expected Steve or Ish to come flying toward us, telling us we couldn’t go. Then again, Ish had said she wanted me to go to Dragon’s Ground to check things out, so I could always cover with that. But there was no one, and just like that, we were on the hard-packed dirt road that led north, away from the Stockyards and the Caspian Sea, toward the Witch’s Reign and all that lay in wait for us.
“Are you familiar with where we’re headed?” Maks switched sides to the left of Batman, closer to me.
I gave him the side eye. Part of my distrust in the human was simple. Maks didn’t remember anything before he’d come stumbling out of the desert and all but fell into the horse’s water trough, sucking back water like he’d not drunk in days. He knew only that when he’d been in the desert, he was being chased and running for his life. The other part of my distrust was simpler yet. He was human—cut from the same cloth as the people who thought it a good idea to pen all the supernaturals into one area and let them slaughter each other. Ish had told us the full story when our father had only given us bits and pieces.
My father had always said the wall was meant to protect both kinds of people, human and supernatural. Ish had shown me the truth—that it had been a powerful political move to contain the dangers of the supernatural world so the weaker humans could thrive and pretend none of us existed.
Penning us inside the walls, there was hope we would all slaughter each other eventually. Or maybe that the emperor would massacre us all. I shivered. That was one story I hoped I never had to face in real life.
Finally, I answered Maks’s question. “I’ve not been into the northern clime, no. But I know of it.” Over the years, Ish had drilled us on the areas we would go into one day to reclaim the different jewels.
“Tell me what you know so I can at least grasp what we’re dealing with,” he said. I waited for him to continue with a please, but none came. Humans—seriously, they had zero manners.
I drew in a breath of cool air and held it for a moment while I thought where to start. “Dragons hold the middle part of the wall and we have to get by them before we even touch down on the Witch’s Reign. The dragons protect the wall from both the humans and the supernaturals who would work to tear it down. Far as I know, there are ten varieties of the lizard brains. Hopefully we don’t run into any of them and can head straight on through to the Ice Witch’s territory. She protects the northern portion of the wall for the same reason the dragons do.” That and power. The guardians of the various points of the wall were all about power. The jewels they held helped them in that respect, too, boosting their strength and magic.
“Details, what kind of details have you got on the dragons we could face?” he asked, and I glanced at him. His face had gone thoughtful and I realized he truly wanted to know what I knew, and maybe it had to do with loving Darcy and wanting to be able to understand her world better. Not that loving her was hard. She was sweet and kind and treated everyone with care. She was our peacemaker, and I knew why Steve had gone to her. In theory. I sighed and stepped around a hole in the hard-packed earth. The moonlight lit our path. We had that going for us at least.
“There are ten kinds of dragons. The largest four hold a connection to the four elements. Fire, wind, water, and earth. But they aren’t the ones we have to worry about. We’ll be skirting the edge of the forest, so we have to watch for the sap suckers.”
“Sap suckers?”
“Yeah, they eat the sap from the trees and then turn it into acid that can eat through anything—flesh, bone, metal . . . It’s nasty shit. And while the bigger dragons are bad, those sap suckers are friggin’ deadly.” From the corner of my eye, I saw him pale.
“How do you deal with them?”
“You talk to them. And give them a gift they might like.”
“Like what?”
I patted my bedroll. “Something I grabbed from the giants’ stash. I was going to keep it, but I can use it here.”
He was quiet a moment, thoughtful.
“Steve is going to be pissed that we took his horse,” Maks said.
I shrugged and then smiled, flashing my canines at him. “Yup, he is. But you’re big enough you need him to carry you. Steve can always shift and use his own damn legs to reach Witch’s Reign.” Because there were no other animals big enough to carry the two-hundred-plus pound shifter. I grinned again at Maks, and miracle of miracles, he grinned back.
“I like the way you think, Zamira. Steve is . . . not my favorite person.” At least on that, we agreed. No doubt Steve had been a right bastard to Maks too.
“Just Zam,” I corrected him. Zamira was what those who could boss me around used. The name my father had growled every time he caught me red-handed stealing from the cookie jar, as it were. The name Steve, Bryce, and Ish used to corral me into doing what they thought best.
I turned to see Maks talking softly to Batman, sliding his hands over the big horse, rubbing his neck then lifting the horse’s head so he could breathe into his nostrils, giving the animal his scent as they walked.
“They’re going to be on us fast,” Maks said. “We should hurry.”
I shook my head. “First off, Ish wanted me to scout the Dragon’s Ground so we’re covered. We’ll go slowly on foot the first few days. Both horses need the rest after that last run in. Steve will take at least two days to heal, possibly three.” It wasn’t much of a rest for Batman or Balder, but the movement would help them keep from stiffening.
“Even with the hacka paste?” he asked.
“Yes, even with the hacka paste. My knives are designed to cut deep and do serious damage to supes.” I didn’t feel like elaborating more, like how Ish had dipped the blades in a vat of something that made them deadlier than any other blade.
Maks and I walked through the last of the night, heading due north. The terrain was not particularly hard, and we were able to use the old roads the humans had built years before.
“You ever wonder what it would be like if the wall came down?” Maks asked me sometime around noon on that first full day.
“No.” I didn’t elaborate, but apparently, Maks was feeling chatty. Yippy skippy, a chatty human, just what I wanted on a six-week round-trip journey.
“You mean you never wondered what it would be like to live side by side with humans?”
I looked at him across Balder’s back. Batman had cozied right up to him, bonding with him so quickly, I would have sworn he was a true horse whisperer. Then again, it could be the treats he kept slipping the horse too. Mints, if the flash of white, sound of crunching, and whiff of peppermint I caught now and again was on point.
Exasperated by his foolish question, I sighed. “Seeing as we’re going to be riding together for a long damn time, I’ll explain. My father thought the wall should come down. I was raised on the idea that the wall was a blight on the world and should have never been built. Ultimately it cost him his life, and Bryce his body, and me most of my family. So, no, the wall can stay up until the fucking end of time for all I care.”
“You’re not like the other supes,” he said. “They all want to be free of this place. To be free of the threat of the emperor.”
He had a point. I decided to turn the tables on him. “Don’t you want to go back to your home, wherever that is?”
“America,” he said. “I’m from the West Coast near a little town called Seattle. I remember it in bits and pieces. Not my family or what I was doing out here, mind you. But old memories, like when I was a kid. I think my family traveled a lot or something.” He frowned and rubbed at the scar on his face with one hand.