To play for the sake of play, to laugh for the sake of the way the sound lifted my spirits.
Losing Bryce . . . I’d lost something vital to who I was, and I could feel the truth of that inside me. And I feared that without that vital spark, I’d be in trouble. Worse trouble than I normally dealt with.
I glanced behind me.
No Lila, so I slowed.
The whoosh of wings was the only warning I had—she was in a dive bomb. I did a limbo backward, not quite touching my ass to the ground, as she swept through where I’d been only a moment before. The balance was tough considering my momentum had been forward only a split second before, but I could pull it off. All my muscles tightened as I found that sweet spot of balance and held it just long enough to watch her swoop by.
Lila reached for me with open talons but missed by inches.
“Oh, you tricky cat!” she shrieked, laughing, as she pulled up for another round.
I twisted sideways from there, shifting into my four-legged form, then turned on another burst of speed, as I raced across the still-barren, cold ground.
The plains of the northwest side of the Caspian Sea were rocky and empty of life this time of year, leaving very few places to hide. But the small forested area ahead would work for what I wanted—a quiet place to settle my mind and connect with my pride. Assuming I could. The cat and mouse game with Lila was just a bonus that woke up my muscles and gave me a sense of freedom for a few minutes.
In my four-legged form, I was not much bigger than her, topping the scales at a whopping six pounds. My black fur rippled as I raced flat out for the trees, as low to the ground as I could get, zigzagging my way there as if avoiding a burst of rapid-fire bullets.
Not that I knew what that would feel like, but my dad had told us of fighting in the human wars. Of being hunkered down while the bullets flew, of not being able to shift into his lion form and give himself away if he wanted to protect the men he fought with. He’d had to play by the human rules all those years. A marine to the very end, he’d never stopped trying to protect those who needed him.
Strange to think that here, behind the wall, we were so stuck in a strange mix of times, a blending of the old medieval relics with bits of technology and current weaponry thrown in for good measure that had made it over the wall over the years. How long had it been since I’d even thought about the year it was now? Years. We had to be well into the 2000s by now. My thoughts distracted me and I got nailed for it.
A pair of talons wrapped around my middle as Lila hoisted me into the sky. “Gotcha!”
Laughing, I relaxed in her hold and turned my head and let my tongue hang out. “I’m dead.”
“Yeah, you are!” She barrel rolled, still holding me, and my stomach turned in the opposite direction.
“Ugh, knock that off,” I gasped.
Her talons tightened and she snaked her head around to stare at me, her eyes wide with horror and her face coloring a deeper blue. “Oh, my goddess, I’m sorry! I didn’t even think about how insensitive that was!”
I shook my head. “That’s not what I meant, and don’t be sorry. Bryce actually had a decent sense of humor when he wasn’t being a dick. Underneath all that bossy alpha nature of his.”
She smoothed out her trajectory and quickly changed the subject. “The trees, that where we’re headed?”
“Yes, that will work,” I answered. She plummeted out of the sky, giving my guts another good drop and roll. I didn’t have to point her to a clearing. She circled around a spot where we could land and let go of me when we were ten feet in the air.
I landed lightly on all fours and shifted back to two legs. For years, I’d avoided shifting, ashamed of my small form when the rest of my family were massive golden lions. But I’d found that my size, such as it was, had its benefits, too, if I let myself see it.
Shifting too much one time right after the other weakened me, but two or three shifts were easy enough now that I was doing it more.
A wry grin twisted my lips as I stood and walked farther into the copse of half dead, partially burned trees. Not exactly a fairytale garden. I lifted a hand and touched one of the branches, frowning at the brittle texture. Even for the plains, this was not what I would call normal.
“Lila, you seeing this? Does it look weird to you?” I asked as I walked among the bushes and trees. They were thicker now and tangled with some vine I didn’t recognize. The stem was a deep red and it reached out with thin tendrils that curled and floated in the air as if testing it, or maybe even . . . tasting it. My feet slowed on their own.
Lila hopped into the air, flapped her wings once and was on the back of my neck, using my head to lean on. “That’s very strange. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
The vine shivered in the wind . . . only there was no wind. I took a step back. A tendril of the vine dipped to one side and then the other, circling around as if that creepy little fucker knew we were there. As if it were scenting the air, almost.
A voice whispered along the vine. “Bow to me, Zamira.” Oh, shit.
“Well, that’s a whole lot of nope,” Lila whispered. “We should go.”
I turned to do just that.
The vines had encircled us as we’d stood staring at the one that moved in front of us.
I reached back for the flail I carried, only I’d left it off to sleep and hadn’t put it back on when I’d gone on this walkabout. The vines shivered and a low snicker rolled through them. “Bow to me, or die.”
Laughing, talking plants? Yeah, that was a hard pass.
“Not the time to panic,” I said softly, reaching for the kukri blades I carried on my thighs. The light around us deepened as a cluster of clouds crossed in front of the sun. “If we have to, I’ll shift, and you carry me out.”
Lila squeaked, her tiny claws digging into my scalp. “Yes, it’s time to panic.”
She yanked my head back so I looked straight up at a perfect canopy of blood-red vines blocking us in.
“Well, fuck, that is not going to help,” I muttered.
I tightened my hands on the blades. If the Emperor thought I was going down in a bunch of weeds, he was about to be proven sorely wrong.
Chapter Three
The vines tightened around us, the tendrils reaching slowly as they unfurled, revealing more and more tendrils. Lila wrapped herself around my neck so snugly, I saw spots and stars dance across my vision.
“Too tight,” I gasped, but I wasn’t mad at her—if I could have clutched at someone I would have done it too.
She eased off and I dropped to a crouch. The vines continued to make their steady approach. “I’m going to start chopping. Unless you have the sapphire with you?” Oh, please let her have it with her.
“I took it off,” she whispered. Which I could see just by looking at her. The stone was no small thing. But it would have been really fucking handy right then. With the sapphire, she could have turned the vines to ice.
“Bow to me, and I will let you live,” the voice that I was sure was the Emperor’s said again.
“You see, this is why people think you’re an ass,” I snarled.
Lila shivered. “Do I want to know who that is?”
“Nope, you don’t.” I pulled both curved blades from their sheaths on my thighs and rolled them in my hand. One deep breath in and I lunged forward, still in a crouch, slashing with the kukris as hard as I could. They were designed to stay perpetually sharp and they cut through the vine in front of me, which was a relief. The bits of plant dropped to the ground, leaking juice in a spray that left droplets all over the ground and my clothes.
Lila screeched. “Blood, they’re full of blood!”
I gritted my teeth and swung again. What was this madness? Was I still dreaming? Because this nightmare could not exist in real life—there was nothing like this that I’d ever come across. Unless it was a trap.
But for whom, for me or someone else? Hell, if that really was the Emperor we’d heard, then how did he know I’d come here? There was no way he’d have been able to predict this.
I cut through the vines in front and above us, my clothes slowly covered with sprays of the blood of the vine, more with each pass of my blades.