I believed her. There were stories of dragons helping, healing other supes. But those stories were old, almost more like legends and fairy tales than truth.
But they had been enough to draw Bryce in hopes he could gain his legs back.
The sun rose at my back, but the rain didn’t slow a single drop from what I could tell. I grimaced. I was nearly soaked through, yet again, but at least my head had stopped hurting and my cracked ribs were healed.
Batman tugged on the reins, nearly pulling them out of my stiff fingers. I clamped my hand closed at the last second and he instead jerked me halfway out of the saddle. I yelped and pushed Balder closer to the big horse.
“Close, are we?” I asked softly.
Batman blew out a big breath and pawed at the ground. He really loved Maks, that much had been obvious almost from the beginning. Something that didn’t fit with the Jinn.
Animals hated them.
I frowned, wondering why I hadn’t thought of that before.
“I think there is something ahead.” Lila was above me, using her height advantage to get a lay of the land. “Maybe your eyes are better than mine, though. I could be seeing things.”
I nodded and tied Batman’s reins to my saddle before I took my feet out of the stirrups. The cold had seeped into my bones and made me stiff, like a two-hundred-year-old woman, and I grimaced while I worked to get the blood flowing again. With a groan, I pushed my feet up onto the saddle, then carefully stood, balancing on Balder’s back.
That bit of extra height made the difference. Ahead of us on the flat plain, I could see a small group of figures moving about. Maybe three miles away. I dropped to the saddle and turned the horses north.
“We need to keep a low profile until tonight,” I said. “There’s no way we can go in the light of day to check on him.”
“They’ll move today, and if they go, we’ll never be able to keep up,” Lila said.
“Maybe. Maybe not. Jinn like the heat and the sun. They’re probably hunkering down against the weather,” I said. Though I was not altogether sure, it seemed a high probability.
I swallowed hard because a sudden swell of nausea flowed up and through me. Jinn. . . I did not want them knowing I was alive, or that any of my pride had survived. We’d lasted this long because they hadn’t known. I frowned. Then again, Maks had said he’d been sent to kill Steve and Bryce. Someone had to have blabbed about where we were.
I sighed. Another mystery for another day. “There’s a stand of boulders over there. We’ll duck behind them for the day.” Because while Jinn could be lazy, they were not stupid.
They’d notice us if we just stood there out in the open of the plain watching them.
We hurried to get to the boulders, which also stood out in the middle of the plain in a circle, but they were more cover than we had on our own. I should have thought about just what they were, and why they were there, but I didn’t. I only thought about getting out of sight of the Jinn.
The horses picked up a quick trot, and though Batman stared back toward Maks and the Jinn encampment, he kept up with only a slight limp. I’d have to look at his legs and feet and see what ailed him. I hoped it would only be fatigue.
“We’ll get you back to him, one way or another,” I said as we rounded the first tall standing stone. I stared up at the gigantic black boulder, the grooves drawn into it anything but natural.
“Lila,” I said. “This might have been a bad idea.”
“Why?” She was just ahead of me, her wings cutting through the air.
“These are standing stones.” I expected her to understand, to get exactly what I was saying. Standing stones were known to appear on this side of the wall and they were usually connected to a supernatural of great power.
As in the Emperor himself.
But they had not been seen in my lifetime, though my father had taught me about them.
I swallowed hard, halted the horses and asked them to back up. Lila swept out from between the stones and the sense of foreboding that crawled over my skin eased off.
“The Emperor is. . . he must be waking.” I breathed the words and a low rumble of thunder seemed to laugh at me and my fear.
Lila squeaked and shot to my shoulder, burying herself inside my cloak. “Sweet goddess, we were right in there. Why didn’t he steal our lives?”
Apparently, she had heard the legends and rumors too. The stones were a place of sacrifice for the Emperor’s acolytes. They’d used the stones to hand over the lives of their enemies. At least, that was how the story went.
I turned the horses so we rode around the outside edge of the stones until we were behind them. They still blocked us from the Jinn’s sight, but they would give us no shelter from the cutting rain. Which was fine. We’d all survived worse.
To be fair, though, that was probably one of the most horrendous days of my life in terms of sheer discomfort and length of each minute. The rain slashed through every layer I had. I might as well have been naked. There were moments I considered shifting and standing under Balder as Lila was so smartly doing, but I needed to hold myself ready for a shift later.
The hours passed slowly, and the horses huddled together, but even they didn’t get too close to the black standing stones behind us. I kept turning around to make sure they were still there. Or more accurately that they hadn’t drawn any closer. There were stories about the stones appearing, but like with dragons healing those in need, I’d thought they were just stories with no basis.
“Lila,” I needed to break the silence, “you know about the stones?”
“You mean how the emperor uses them to gain his strength back so he can rule us all again?”
I nodded. “Something like that.”
“You mean like how they suck the life and soul right out of you?”
“That too.” I breathed the words and peered down at Lila who was peering up at me from under Balder’s belly.
“What are you thinking?” She flicked her wings several times, flinging water droplets every which way.
“That the stones are waiting for something powerful to come along, and neither you nor I are that.” I smiled, though I knew there was a sour twist to it. “Score one for the weaklings.”
Lila laughed, but there was a bitterness to it that I did not miss. “Yeah, score one for us.”
After that, we fell into silence again for hours more, and finally the sun began to drop. I slid from Balder’s saddle and ground tied him. “I’m going to shift, Lila. Can you climb high enough that they won’t notice you, but you can still see in the dark what is going on below?”
She bobbed her head. “Yes, I think so. What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to see if Maks needs rescuing,” I said. “If he does, I’ll do what I can. If he doesn’t, then we book it out of here as fast as we can.”
She gave a single flick of her tail and shot into the sky, startling the horses after so many hours of inactivity. For just a moment, I wished I was with Marcel and Kiara in that mud hut with the roaring fire. But then, I’d be back with Marcel and Kiara and the mud hut, and have no way of slipping away from them.
I sighed and let my body slide from two feet to four, barely blinking, and it was done. Faster and faster, I was getting better at the shift after so many years of ignoring that side of me. I should have been using the gifts I had instead of ignoring them all these years. I startled, my tail twitching. That was the first time I’d ever considered the shifting ability I did have to be a gift.
I jogged around the standing stones, giving them a wide berth. Just in case the Emperor changed his mind and decided any power was worth a grab.
A shudder slid through me.
The sun was ahead of me and I watched as it dipped below the horizon; the clouds blocking the light worked in our favor. And miracle of miracles, the rain eased off to a light mist that was damn near heavenly after the pounding rain we’d sat through for the day. But it could mean that the Jinn might be ready to leave.
I ran toward where I’d last seen the encampment. When I was a mile away, I heard them, their voices carrying across the flat ground.
The laughter, the raucous talk, the clink of plates and such. I slowed, dropping my body so I was less noticeable. The whoosh of leathery wings high above me made my ears twitch. Lila had my back, there was that, and it gave me a boost of courage.