Her eyes narrowed, and she spun on her heel, throwing her command over her shoulder as if she didn’t even need to look me in the eyes to make me obey her. “You will not leave the Stockyards, Zamira Reckless Wilson. Not one foot will leave its safety.”
I watched her leave, anger and frustration vying for the surface of my emotions until I finally exploded.
“Bryce will die if he’s left out there alone!” I screamed the words at her retreating back, and she finally stopped, turned, and faced me.
“He was dead the moment I pulled you two from the Oasis. It’s only that neither of you realized it.”
Just like that, I was there again in the past, standing in front of the Oasis, the water lapping at my feet.
I’d run back to the Oasis after trying to warn the rest of the pride. The Jinn hadn’t stopped with our pride though, but had swept the area, killing as many of the Bright Lions as they could.
My father was dead; that was a truth I felt to the center of my bones. That he was no longer in this world. But Bryce . . . he’d been alive when I’d left him to warn the other prides. I’d been too late to save them.
Perhaps I could save my brother, though. Maybe his injuries weren’t as bad as I’d thought. Though I knew in my heart if he wasn’t injured badly, he would have kept fighting.
I raced across the sand in my cat form, leaping and bounding faster than I’d ever gone before. The sand was hot on the pads of my paws, but I didn’t slow. My eyes watered with tears and from the grit of the blowing wind sweeping across the dunes. Over the rise that preceded the Oasis, and then I was sliding down the slope toward the bodies strewn around. Bright gold fur stained with brighter red blood was everywhere I looked and the world swayed. I used a trick my father had taught me. On the field of battle, keep your eyes on your goal, nothing else.
I narrowed my eyes, staring only at my brother, and the spear that still rose out of his lower back.
I slowed as I approached him, fear taking me down more than a few notches. He wasn’t moving, and I wasn’t even sure he was breathing still. My ears flicked back and forth, but I didn’t dare scent the air too much for fear of all the death I would inhale.
“Bryce?” I whispered. He couldn’t be gone. I couldn’t have lost him too. I shifted and wobbled on two legs, grief making me weak in the knees. Carefully I knelt next to him and put my shaking fingers to his neck.
For a moment, I felt nothing, and then there it was, a heartbeat that, while it wasn’t strong, it was at least there. He wasn’t dead.
Breathing hard, hope giving me a burst of energy, I twisted around to look at the spear. There would be no way he would heal with the weapon still in his spine. As a shifter, he should be able to heal once the spear was out.
I stood and stepped over his back, straddling his wide hindquarters so I would have better balance. A clean jerk, that was what Father had always said about removing a weapon from a body. Clean, and as much at the same angle as the weapon went in. I let the spear rest in my hands, feeling the direction it needed to go. Toward me, toward Bryce’s head, which would be good for a clean pull. I could do this.
I bit my lower lip and put my hands on the haft of the spear. The haft rested against my palms. “Hang on, Bryce. This will hurt but then it will be done.” I tightened my hold on the spear and then pulled it as hard and as cleanly as my thirteen-year-old self could.
Bryce grunted, and for a moment, I thought he was going to get right back up. I tossed the spear to the side and knelt at his side again. “Bryce, come on, you have to get up.” I shook his shoulders. He didn’t move, and I wasn’t sure what was going on, but all the sound in the world singled down to just the breath in his chest moving in and out. “Bryce, get up!” Even my words echoed weirdly.
“He can’t, child.” A woman’s voice cut through the strange white noise buzzing in my ears. I gazed up at the stately woman with the raven-dark hair and the crystalline-clear eyes. Sorrow was etched into her features as deep as my own. “You should not have pulled the spear out, Zamira. You have broken him. He will never heal now.”
I put my hands to my mouth, the horror of her words bringing bile up the length of my throat. “No,” I managed and nothing else before I vomited to the side, unable to keep it back. I’d damned my brother.
“You have lost so much, little lion. Will you come with me? Let me protect you and your brother from the Jinn.” Her hands were on my back, soothing me as I retched, as I sobbed for what I’d done to Bryce. He would hate me forever and I would never fault him for that.
The offer from the woman was sincere. I believed her every word and the guilt that I’d hurt my brother rather than helped him overwhelmed any other sense I might have had in that moment.
“Yes. Please, I don’t want him to die. I . . . was only trying to help him.” I looked up at her through the tears.
“My name is Ish.” She held a hand out to me. “And your brother will not die, though there may be times he would wish he had.”
She bent and smoothed her hands over his head. I watched in fascination as deep purple lines spilled out around his hair, matching the throb of purple that emanated from a dangling bracelet. Magic, she was using magic.
“Are you a Jinn?” I’d never heard of a female Jinn, but there was a first time for everything.
“I am not a Jinn, child. There is no such thing as a female Jinn, you know that.” She spoke gently with only the mildest of rebukes. I would do whatever she wanted if only she could heal Bryce. She could scold me all she wanted.
“You can heal him, right?” I whispered. “You can fix him?”
She turned to me then. “If you help me, Zamira, I can fix him. But you must be strong enough. You must listen to me and do my will.”
I stared up at her. “I am yours.”
I swallowed hard though I could not seem to push the lump down my throat. Yet again I’d failed Bryce. The only blood relation I had left, I’d failed him because that seemed to be my lot in life. My chin touched my chest as the pain of the past curled around me, tightening its hold on my heart.
I’d never told Bryce I’d been the one to pull the spear, and as far as I knew, neither had Ish. How could I? He already hated me for being able to walk when he couldn’t, for being a thief for Ish and ruining our family’s honor as he saw it. But how could I not when she was the only hope he had of being healed? And now . . . he’d run off to Dragon’s Ground to find a cure on his own because it had taken too long.
What a clusterfuck this was.
I stood there, breathing hard, fighting the guilt and the sorrow doing its damnedest to choke the shit out of me. Finally, I lifted my head. Ish was gone, and I was alone in Balder’s stall, the past finally fading behind me.
For all that it was, I could do nothing about it now. I had to move forward. There was no choice for me now but to find Bryce and . . . tell him the truth. Then maybe we could find a way to heal him together. I drew a big breath, filling my lungs fully before slowly letting the air out, and then nodded to myself.
“I should have told him years ago, Balder. But I was too afraid to lose what family I had left,” I said softly. Which meant that now, I had to find a way out. I stared out into the desert, past the territory that was the Stockyards.
Whatever barrier Ish had put up around the Stockyards to keep me in was powerful magic; she was growing stronger with each gemstone we brought back to her.
Basically, I needed some powerful magic of my own to break through it. Because if she thought for one fucking second I would leave Bryce out there on his own, she had another think coming.
The real question was where the hell did I find magic that would offset whatever spell she had going on?
A cold spot centered on my chest and my hand shot to the sapphire dangling from my neck. The Ice Witch’s stone could have that kind of power, but I didn’t know how to use it. And if I did manage to use it, I would tip my hand to Ish, showing her I had the stone she so desperately wanted. That she wanted more than she wanted those in her charge to survive.
A stone that would give her greater power yet.
“You ain’t getting it,” I growled under my breath, my hand dropping from the stone hidden under my shirt. No, I couldn’t use it unless I could think of nothing else. In part because I wouldn’t know what to do with it. Throw it at the barrier and hope it did something was about all I had in mind.