“Above!” Lila yelled as she ducked down, sliding partway down my back.
I dropped to a knee and swung above my head without looking. My right blade met some serious resistance and I tried to yank it free with no result. I looked up. The vine that had worked toward us was as thick as my arm and covered in a dark red bark that shimmered in the dull light. I jerked my blade out of it and a tiny drop of blood followed.
With my eyes up, I didn’t see the vines coming for my feet. One of them wrapped around both my ankles and snapped them together, then pulled me down to my butt. I hit the ground hard and the shock ran up my spine, sucking a gasp out of me.
“Fuck you, asshole!” I leaned forward and cut through the vines holding my feet.
“Zam!” Lila screeched. I spun to see her fighting with teeth and claws as the vines pulled at her feet and wings, dragging her from my shoulder.
I reached for her, snagged the end of her tail and yanked her to me. She fought me until she saw it wasn’t a vine that had yanked her. “Acid, Lila. You got any?”
She shook her head. “I used it all in my fight with my dad.”
Sweet baby goddess, we were in trouble.
The vines laughed again. “Claim me as your master, Zamira, and I will let you live.”
“Hang onto my front,” I said, ignoring him. He didn’t know me at all, so he had no idea what kind of shit he’d just stirred up. She dug her claws into the front of my shoulders and buried her head against my chest.
“If I was big . . .” she whispered.
“We’d have been caught already if we were any bigger,” I said. “Call this a win for the small kids.”
We had to get out of here, and out now. We had less than a minute if the vines kept up their creeping nature. The ground rumbled below us and I could only imagine just what other catastrophe was coming our way.
I had an image of the Emperor himself flash through my mind, his disarming smile, the way the laugh lines around his eyes crinkled. A mask for the monster? Suddenly I wasn’t so sure.
There was no time to think. I slashed the vines in front of me, snarling as I fought my way through the mass of writhing things. Not vines. I would not call them vines as they bled, as they fought to get their tendrils wrapped around us. The ground rumbled again and the rocks and pebbles danced up and down with the vibration.
Lila clung to me and I pushed through everything. As the vines dropped onto me, I cut them off. As they reached to block our way, I sliced through them. Sweat dripped off my chin as I worked, slashing through everything that was even remotely in front of me.
The vines were there and then suddenly gone as I stumbled into the open plain, out of the copse of trees. I scrambled on my hands and knees to get farther away.
“We have to go,” I said. “That thing will keep coming.”
Lila crawled up far enough that she could peek over my shoulder. “Zam, the vines are gone. They aren’t there.”
I spun around, still on my hands and knees. All that was behind us was the same bush and scraggly trees that had been there when we’d landed, not a vine to be seen.
“That’s impossible.” I looked down at my clothes, half expecting them to be clean as when we’d gone in.
Blood splattered them, and I reached up to touch my face. My fingertips came away wet, covered in blood. I sniffed at it to be sure. It was blood . . . and not just any blood. I wrinkled my nose.
“Lila, this is . . . the blood is from someone who carries magic. Like Jinn. Or witches. Or mages,” I said softly.
She shivered. “I’ve never heard of anything like this before. Have you? And who was that voice?”
I shook my head. “No, I’ve not heard of it either. And I don’t want to ever deal with it again. If we’d gone even a few feet farther into the copse . . . I don’t think we would have gotten out.” My first thought was to burn the place down. “As to the voice, well, that’s a big fucking mess.”
She shivered again, all the way down to the tip of her tail. I put a hand to her back.
“Why did you want to go in there?” she asked.
“I wanted to see if I could connect with the others in my pride, like my dad used to.” I rubbed a hand over my face, wiping off the worst of the blood onto the sleeve of my shirt. “It would make it easier to find them if I could.”
“You mean like you did with Bryce.” She slowly pulled herself to my shoulder, but like me she didn’t take her eyes from the seemingly innocuous bush.
“Yeah, that had been the plan.” I made myself take a step, then another and another toward the bushes.
Lila scrambled back and launched into the air, flying ten feet above me. “Are you out of your gourd? Why in the world are you going back?”
I shook my head and then nodded. “Maybe I’m out of my mind, but it calls to me.” I just couldn’t walk away from this place that had tried to kill us without at least making an attempt to figure it out. I mean, let’s get real. The bush hadn’t been about cuddling up for warmth. The plants didn’t change as I drew closer, but there were spots of blood here and there on the ground where I’d fought my way out. I frowned and crouched while Lila groaned above me.
“Seriously, why are you doing this?” she yelled.
“Because it’s not natural, even for our world of crazy.” I touched the ground, brushing a thumb through a drop of blood. The ground rumbled and I lifted my eyes to see the dark red vines just suddenly there in front of me, tendrils unfurling as they reached for me. As if they had never not been there. I lifted my blades to my eye level. “I don’t know what you are, but unless you want me to uproot you and salt the ground you live in, you’d better back the fuck off.”
The vines wavered and slowly pulled back. Sentient, bloodthirsty plants with a taste for magical blood that were obviously connected to someone powerful. Most likely the Emperor.
Lila and I didn’t have magic, though, so part of that made no sense. Maybe that was why the vines had taken their time in attacking us. Maybe we weren’t the ideal food.
I stood and backed up, still holding my blades up until I was a good twenty feet back. “Lila?”
“Yeah,” she called to me from above my head, “I’m up here, far enough away.”
“Can you see any marker we can watch for in the next bit of bush we stumble on? A pattern or anything?” I wiped my blades on a scraggy tuft of grass and then stuffed them back into their sheaths as I circled to one side of the copse. The plants just looked like plants.
“Nothing.” She dropped through the air, winging beside me as I started back toward the campsite. My stomach rumbled, reminding me I’d not been eating much the last few days.
But even with that, I couldn’t help but look back more than once at the bushes. As if there were eyes on me still. I crinkled up my nose. “You feel that, Lila?”
“Yes, something is watching us,” she said. “From the bush?”
I gave a quick nod. “Maybe Maks or Shem will know what it is.”
She didn’t answer, and she didn’t have to because we both knew that answer. The plains and desert were my home stomping ground. If I didn’t know what that freak of a bush was, there was no way Maks and Shem would know. The urge to go back and burn it down was strong.
I turned one last time, right before I stepped into camp.
For just a moment, I thought I saw movement, a figure walking toward the bush and then it—he—was gone. On my own, I would have gone back again and lit the vines on fire.
I was certain the figure had been the Emperor, as impossible as that seemed. The desert clothes, the hood covering his head. Who else would it be?
Who else had asked me to bow to him recently? Yeah, that’s right, nobody.
But this wasn’t about me anymore. I had a pride to take care of—to rescue from the Jinn before I could go after Merlin, before I could find a way to bring Bryce back. And that meant being more responsible than I had in the past.
Like a stick in the mud.
Shem cleared his throat as I turned back to the camp. “So, your walk went well, did it?” He stared hard, then fluttered his fingers on one hand at me. “Blood splatter already? Is that allowed before noon?”