Home > Jinn's Dominion (Desert Cursed #3)(12)

Jinn's Dominion (Desert Cursed #3)(12)
Author: Shannon Mayer

“Mistress, is that the cat you want caught?” He snickered and his body shivered.

Ish’s eyes locked with mine and I refused to back down. I lifted my chin. She lifted hers. “It is.”

I took a step back, snarling as the hyena scrabbled toward me, its claws digging hard for purchase on the tile. “Oh, I’m gonna like this,” he yipped.

He leapt at me and I held my ground until the last possible second. The rancid hot breath was all over me as I twisted out of the way. I kept my eyes locked. Pain rocketed through my collarbone.

Blink.

A tiny pair of claws dug into my collarbone. “Zam, what are you doing?” Lila screeched.

I stared down at her and realized we were in the water, Balder lunging forward, fighting the waves and my legs as I turned him into the Caspian Sea.

“Fucking hell!” I yelled as I turned him back to shore. To my left, deeper out Shem still swam out ahead of us. Doing the same thing I’d been doing. His horse floundered, chest deep in the water as the waves built up alongside the wind, shoving us deeper and deeper.

“Shem!” I yelled at his back. He didn’t so much as flinch as he let go of the reins and fell sideways into the water, his body stiff as a damn board.

His horse took its now riderless back as its cue to leave. He bounded out of the water and raced south down the shoreline. I pulled Lila from my shirt and wrapped Balder’s reins around her. There was no time to think about what just happened with Ish. Shem needed help.

“Stay here!” I yelled at her. I dropped my stirrups and dove into the water after Shem as she sputtered. The water was not quite glacial, but close, and my skin seemed to shrink three sizes over my bones making it difficult to swim hard. If I hadn’t had the same pull on my mind, I would have been cussing him out, but the truth was, I knew it wasn’t his fault. Ish was fucking with us.

“Where the shit am I going to go?” Lila snapped her teeth in my direction as I came up, but I was already swimming—as it were.

Now, I wasn’t the strongest in the water. Being raised in the desert will do that to you. But the water was not so deep yet that I couldn’t touch bottom if I needed to. I swam hard for him, pushing off the bottom with my feet here and there to help propel myself forward. Moments later, I grabbed one of his feet, turned and headed for shore, dragging him behind me. “Come on, man. Help me out here!”

A bolt of lightning danced through the sky. I flinched but didn’t let go of Shem. That was how this worked. My feet found the bottom again as the water grew shallower, and I pulled harder. “Shem, snap out of it!”

He is mine. The voice boomed out of the sky and rattled my bones. I clenched my hand over Shem’s leg. That was not Ish.

That was the Emperor.

“Fuck off, he’s part of my pride and I’m the alpha so he’s mine!” I roared the last word into the wind and kept dragging Shem with me until we were on shore. The wind slashed at us, swirling faster and faster, building with each pass.

“Hurricane!” Lila screamed from Balder’s back. I looked to her to see her clinging hard to the saddle, all four legs and sets of claws dug in hard and deep, her wings tucked tightly around her body.

Maks galloped up to us, Shem’s horse in hand. He jumped off and helped me shove Shem across the saddle, lashing the bigger man down as best we could, considering the situation. He was going to have a bloody big headache when he woke up, but there was no other way to move him.

Balder and Lila joined us and I leapt onto my saddle, ignoring the cold as it sunk deeply into my bones. We had to get free of this storm or it wouldn’t matter how cold I was—we would all die.

Maks and I moved in tandem, pinning Shem and his horse between our two horses. I reached up and braced Shem on one side. Maks did the same on the other. We galloped along the beach as the wind and weather snapped and howled. Lila shivered against me and I wasn’t sure that it was all the cold water that poured down my body, or the fear of the storm and what drove it.

Ten minutes passed, and I knew because I was counting in my head. The storm kept pace with us, biting hard on our heels. A huge water spout shot up out of the sea, swirling and bobbing as it curled toward us. Because the hurricane-force winds weren’t enough to convince us we were in trouble.

I looked across at Maks and shook my head. We couldn’t keep this up. We had to do more than just ride south and hope to outpace this thing Ish or the Emperor had created.

A thought hit me. They’d been consorts once. What if they were working together again?

As if one of them wasn’t bad enough.

Maks tipped his head to the west and I nodded. If we changed directions fully, we might lose the storm in the hills. Or at least find shelter.

Maks took the lead and I stayed next to Shem, keeping a hand on him where I could. We’d lashed him down good but if he started to thrash as he woke up shit was going to get real, quick.

The horses galloped over the first hill to the west and into the shallow valley below. Over and down, over and down. The foothills did help with the gusts of the wind around us. At least within the valleys.

Part of my brain said Merlin would surely show up with some magical shack we could crawl into and find safety. But my gut said that wasn’t going to happen. Wherever he was, it wasn’t here and we were on our own.

The wind shifted with us again, and this time shards of sharp rocks shot through the air, bouncing off our heads and shoulders, the horses’ rumps taking the worst of it, making them leap and bolt in all directions.

“Hail!” I yelled. And no small amount, but large chunks of ice the size of my fist. One on the top of the head and you’d be sent flying. I leaned over Balder’s neck to protect him and Lila as best I could.

The hand I had on Shem grew numb. Between the bath in the Caspian and the wind and hail, my body temperature had dropped to where I didn’t feel the cold anymore. Warmth was going to be necessary in a matter of minutes if I was going to be of any use.

Or alive. There was that too.

Lila shivered against me. “Where are we?”

“Don’t know.” My teeth chattered, my eyes were locked on Maks’s back. It was all I could do to keep him in front of me, to keep the horses moving. My focus was such that I didn’t notice when the wind began to slowly, painfully slowly, abate.

Maks slowed Batman and circled around for us. “Up ahead in the foothills are some old caves.”

I nodded, my teeth chattering. He led the way and a few moments later in the base of one of the rock-strewn hills, a cave appeared out of seemingly thin air. The mouth of the crevice was narrow and tall, but it looked like the horses could fit through if we pulled their gear off.

Maks leapt off Batman and handed me the reins. “I’ll check it out.”

He was gone before I could say otherwise and was back just as quickly. “It opens wide inside, so we can turn the horses around.”

How the hell had he even known it was here? I realized that he’d led us straight to it and the understanding hit me.

It was a Jinn’s hidey hole.

I forced my body to obey me as I dismounted. “Get Shem inside. I’ll bring the horses,” I said.

He nodded and helped Shem off his horse. Though ‘helped’ would imply that Shem was of any use. My uncle just kind of flopped into Maks’s arms, forcing him to take all his weight.

I worked my fingers over Balder’s gear first, breaking a nail in the process but hardly feeling it. Saddle off, I slid the reins over his head and sent him toward the cave. He went, good boy that he was, and I moved to Batman. Lila hovered around my face.

“What can I do to help?”

“Go sit on Shem,” I said through clenched teeth. “We don’t need him wandering off if he wakes up and is out of it.”

The wind smacked me in the face with sand brought from the coast. I closed my eyes against the grit until it passed.

“You think he might?” she asked.

I nodded. “Yeah, he might.”

She turned and was gone before I finished getting Batman’s gear off. Like Balder, I flipped his reins over his head and sent him through the cave. I trained both horses and they trusted me when I asked them to do scary things. I eyeballed Shem’s horse who danced at the end of his reins, neighing after his new friends.

   
Most Popular
» Nothing But Trouble (Malibu University #1)
» Kill Switch (Devil's Night #3)
» Hold Me Today (Put A Ring On It #1)
» Spinning Silver
» Birthday Girl
» A Nordic King (Royal Romance #3)
» The Wild Heir (Royal Romance #2)
» The Swedish Prince (Royal Romance #1)
» Nothing Personal (Karina Halle)
» My Life in Shambles
» The Warrior Queen (The Hundredth Queen #4)
» The Rogue Queen (The Hundredth Queen #3)
fantasy.readsbookonline.com Copyright 2016 - 2024