He’d hoped that he could spare the young woman he was coming to admire that same loss.
“How bad is it?” Flora asked softly, those green eyes of hers sucking him in with the sincerity in the depths. From hard to understanding in a flash, she was like lightning in a bottle.
“It is very bad, Flora. The Emperor is waking. We have maybe a week at best before he is fully aware of the world once more.” He rubbed a hand over his face. The Emperor was the strongest mage the world had ever seen, stronger even than Merlin. And he’d gone batshit crazy with that power.
Flora slumped to the floor, her legs buckling. “I could call on Zeus and the pantheon. Alena would come; I know she would.”
“No.” Merlin shook his head. “Do not bring them into this unless there is no other choice. And only if Zamira fails the tasks in front of her. They. . . are not stronger than the Emperor.”
Flora approached him slowly, taking his hands in hers. “You put the Emperor to sleep once. You can do it again. I know you could.”
He closed his eyes and tightened his hands on hers. “The humans believe I put the barriers up to keep them safe, and I did. But not from the supes, Flora. From him. I did it to keep them safe from him. And I tricked him. That’s how I got him to drink the draft that knocked him out. He won’t fall for it again.” He grimaced. There was more to putting the Emperor to sleep than even that, but he could not say that to Flora. The steps taken had been many, and he knew in his heart there would be no duplicating them. Much as he hated it, they needed Ishtar to regain her power.
He opened his eyes, expecting to see anger flashing in those green jewels of Flora’s.
Compassion was written clearly in her eyes and the lines of her face, taking him back to the woman he’d known the longest, the older, wiser Flora. “We’ll find a way, Merlin. While Zamira lives, there is hope.”
He looked at her, wishing and hoping she was right but knowing the truth of it already. “That’s just it, Flora. In creating the wall as I did, I am bound by my own spell, and it forces my hand. I am bound so that I cannot fight my father if he breaks free. It is the balance of creating a wall like this one and holding him back for so long. It is the price I had to pay.”
Her fingers slid from his. “What are you saying?”
He drew a breath, opened his mouth, paused, and then finally spoke. This was not going to be an easy sell. “Either Zamira finds a way to break the wall and stop the Emperor, or the world—human and supes—will become his slaves, and you and I will be among the first to be killed.”
Flora raised her eyebrows. “Oh, is that all? Good thing you picked the strongest of all the supes here to save us then, right?”
Merlin turned to face the spinning orb, and it zoomed in on Zamira’s face. On the sharp lines of her cheeks, and the determined turn of her mouth, but more than that was the fire in her eyes that reflected the strength in her soul.
He nodded, feeling the certainty flow through him. “She may not be the strongest in body, but she is the one, Flora. She has the strength of a hundred lions flowing through her veins and driving her heart. She only has to find it.”
Flora cleared her throat. “If she hasn’t found her strength now, after all she’s been through, she’s not going to, Merlin. She’s faced the death of her family, the loss of her marriage, injury, betrayal, and hardships that most will not face in their whole life, never mind within the short span she has seen it all.”
While he didn’t want to agree with Flora, her words struck a sharp slice of fear through his heart and the hope that had been building there.
The fear that the things she said were exactly what would happen.
That Zamira was too hardened by what she’d faced already, and instead of strengthening her, had cut her off from her own power.
“Then we must help her, Flora. We have to help her break through those barriers and find the reasons to fight for this world. To fight for us all.”
Chapter 5
Riding through the desert plains alongside my ex’s pregnant—what was she? fiancée, mate, girlfriend? I wasn’t sure what to call her—I tightened my jaw to keep my mouth from running away with me, and kept my eyes forward, sweeping the path in front of us. This was not how I’d planned to leave the Stockyards. And because she was pregnant, I was taking it slower than I would have on my own even though I said I wouldn’t. That and her horse, Lacey, was slower and out of shape compared to Balder.
That first bolt of speed had knocked the piss out of the black and white mare. We’d turned north about three miles back at the stone marker and were now making the long, slow route around the Stockyards. Out of sight, out of mind, was what I was hoping.
To our left was an expanse of hard-packed desert plain dotted with a few buildings here and there left over from the human civilization. The humans had stayed as long as they could but eventually most of them died or migrated to the east, away from the hotbed of action this western wall had going for it.
To our right were the foothills covered in broken rocks and boulders leading up to the mountains. The issue was all those boulders and dips gave lots of places for an ambush to be set up.
Kiara shivered, and I knew why without asking. About twenty miles north of our position was where the gorc territory officially started and where we’d found her stuck in the mud so many years before. She was from a lion pride that had left the southern desert and had wandered out on their own months before the Jinn attacked us. What we didn’t know—those of us who’d survived the attack on the Oasis—was that the Jinn had made a coordinated attack on Bright Lions everywhere. They’d killed not only our pride, but every pride of Bright Lions they could find from the south end of the wall all the way through the north.
The Jinn had split up and roamed the lands looking for every lion they could in a blow that would have wiped us all out completely if not for the few survivors that had dodged the death squads. Kiara had been young, a brand-new cub, and her mother had run with her when the attack had come. They’d survived for a few years on their own before the gorcs caught them.
There had been too many for her mother—lame and weak from years of living hand to mouth—to fight off. And Kiara would have died too if we’d not heard her screaming on a routine sweep of the area.
I’d found Kiara in a mud bog, just like she’d said. To be fair, Steve, Darcy, Richard, and Leo were with me too, but I’d been the first to Kiara, scooping her out of the sticky mud and running my blade down the gullet of the gorc who’d had her in his sights. I’d been a teenager full of rage at the unfairness of the world, and certain I could conquer anything.
I glanced at her again, watching her react to the cool gusts of wind. “You aren’t a cub anymore, and now you have your own to protect. Don’t show the gorcs weakness. Don’t give them that power over you.”
Her back stiffened. “I do not need you telling me how to feel.”
“You look like you’re about to fall out of the saddle from fear, so yeah, I think I do need to say something,” I said.
She flashed a snarl at me and I laughed at her. “That ain’t going to work, not on me. You are no alpha, Kiara. So don’t try to put me in my place with a curl of your lips.”
“That’s right, you respect no one,” she snapped, her words thick with the fear that had to be humming through her veins.
I shrugged, but she was wrong. Maks had bested me in a fight, the first time since I’d been a child wrestling with my brother that a man had actually taken me down. I might not be the strongest supe out there, not by a long shot, but I had a mean streak about a mile wide down the middle of my spine, and I depended on it for my survival. That and I was fast, faster than the bigger lions that I often trained with.
Such was the nature of being the smallest in a group. You learned to bite hard and fast before anyone took a shot at you.
“I respect those who deserve it. Not a child who’s not yet figured out how to be brave.” I didn’t look at her, but kept my eyes roving the rolling hills around us. My skin prickled here and there, as if eyes had come to rest on us, and I didn’t like it. Gorcs were. . . difficult to kill in large numbers. One or two, even three, I could handle without too much effort. Many more than that, and we’d have to outrun them. I patted Balder on the neck and he tossed his head, his mane flipping this way and that, tangling with the breeze that cut through the rolling hills, whistling between the boulders. I tried to scent the wind, but there was nothing out of place, no smell of gorc that I could pick up.