Djinn Justice (The Collegium Book 2) (15 page)

But Tarik wasn’t sane. That knowledge pushed at Fay. A madman could do anything. A madman with poisoned claws and a shrunken heart could torture and kill.

Fay needed help. She needed to know where Steve had been taken, and fortunately, she had a porter she could trust to help her: her stepfather, Jim. She just had to get to the nearest portal, in Vladivostok, fast.

She crossed the line of salt, breaking the truth spell, and seized Narelle’s wrist. The woman wasn’t a hostage, but she could still be a source of information. Fay wasn’t leaving her behind.

A thought, and the amulet in its mesh containment, floated behind Fay like a bobbing, obedient balloon. The bear- and tiger-weres waited on the porch. “Can you drive me back to Magadan, fast?” she asked the bear.

He nodded and threw a set of keys to Victor. “I borrowed the car from Katya.”

From Magadan a flight to Vladivostok, and then, portal to Fremantle, her stepfather’s home.

“Human travel is so tedious.”

Fay’s head snapped around, snake-fast, at the sound of the drawling male voice.

Warning growls rumbled from Victor and the bear, indicating that they, too, were shocked at the suddenly-appearing visitor.

But then, it was of the visitor’s nature, that no one would expect him.

He strolled forward, elegant but neither Japanese nor French. His accent was Iranian and his features matched. He wore summer-weight clothes, but didn’t shiver.

“Uncle,” Fay said.

The djinn strolled from the stand of trees that sheltered Victor’s house. “Must you really travel as humans do, my Fay?”

“Not if I have help,” she answered his challenge, keeping back her anger and fear for Steve. Whatever game the djinn played, she had to learn its rules. “Narelle comes with me.”

“And her bundle of tricks?” Uncle looked at the amulet, floating over Fay’s left shoulder.

“Until I can release the dream essences safely, yes.”

“Very well.”

The blizzard came out of nowhere. It howled and blinded and tried to scour the flesh from their bones with ice pellets and cyclonic winds. But when Fay opened ice-encrusted eyelids, Siberia was a melting memory.

She stood in a clearing in a cloud forest, a high altitude rainforest. Birds called, monkeys hooted and the wind carried the rich, earthy scent of trees and leaf mulch. “The Mountains of the Moon?”

Disembodied laughter answered her.

Uncle had interfered; for good or ill, she was yet to discover.

If he had translocated her here, here she’d find Steve.

Or, would she?

She felt sun on her arms and looked down at herself. Uncle had done more than merely translocate her. Her cold weather gear was gone and she wore clothing suitable for the new environment.

Not so Narelle. The woman was still in her coat and heavy clothes, and sweating. Fay released her arm and Narelle tore out of her coat. “What was that? What brought us here?” Perhaps some of the sweat was caused by fear, rather than heat.

“A djinn.” Fay stared up the slope. There seemed almost a path. No point questioning Narelle. The woman was no longer compelled to answer truthfully. It seemed Fay had to take just as big a risk and trust Uncle. Where the path vanished above the tree line, there seemed to be a shadow on the snow-covered ground, a shadow that could be the entrance to a cave.

Disregarding the unpleasantness of it, Fay grasped the amulet and stuffed it into a pocket of her combat trousers. She had to find Steve.

He found her.

Whether Uncle meddled or simply timed his intervention impeccably, Steve burst from the high shadows of the mountain and raced down it. He was in his leopard form, far larger than a true leopard. More the size of a Clydesdale horse, but sleek and agile. He ran, silent, lethal and unstoppable towards Fay.

Narelle screamed and fled, blundering down mountain.

Somehow, still running, Steve changed to human. “Run, Fay!”

He’d fought demons with her. If he wanted her to run, this was beyond bad.

Knowing he’d catch up with her, she turned and ran, finding a faint path through the thick undergrowth of the rainforest that Narelle—in her panic—hadn’t followed. Still, the path was narrow, more suggestion than thoroughfare, and Fay had to concentrate not to trip or careen into twisting branches or moss-encrusted tree trunks.

A feral leopard snarl indicated Steve had returned to leopard form. Why? He’d struggle to fit the narrow path.

An answering howl answered her. A wolf-were, a call to hunt.

“Oh, hell no.” Fay put out a hand, grabbing a branch and halting her flight. Moss and lichen squidged green. Her hold slipped, but she was already pushing away.

If Steve and she were being hunted by the weres Tarik had enslaved, Steve couldn’t fight them all alone. And she wouldn’t allow him to be captured. He’d rescued himself once. But Uncle had brought her here for a reason.

She mightn’t be able to directly magick even an enslaved were, but she had techniques for working around that. But the bigger issue was Tarik’s use of their dream essences. How might he use that energy against Steve?

The amulet was securely in her pocket as she raced back up the path, drawn by the sounds of combat.

A mongoose-were leapt at her from the left. Fay didn’t bother with finesse. Her magic lashed out, seized an old tree and swatted the mongoose into unconsciousness. She strengthened her personal ward.

As she approached the rainforest clearing where Uncle had translocated her and Narelle, Fay choked and dropped to her knees.

This wasn’t magic. This was despair and evil, a miasma not even demons emanated. Demons were at least true to themselves. This was perversion and it ate through her ward.

She staggered up, forcing herself forward, even as she fumbled to open her pocket and withdraw the amulet. No mage could translocate a person or even a living thing. The process killed it. But she’d gamble on translocating the amulet with its cargo of dream essences if she had to. Tarik couldn’t be allowed to claim it.

In the clearing, despite the miasma of evil that overwhelmed Fay, Steve fought with speed and aggression. He fought to disable, though, which ought to have handicapped him. Except, the seven weres circling in front of him were hampered by lack of space in the crowded clearing and, it seemed, by a command to capture rather than kill Steve. A large gray wolf-were bled heavily from his right flank. An elephant-were, monstrously large, stomped and sidled uneasily in the background.

And all the time, the horrifically wrong energy pulsed at Fay and Steve. Nothing had ever weakened Fay as this did.

Poison.

The Ancient Egyptian spell had warned of claws tipped in poison. What if the poison wasn’t physical, but psychical?

Fay stared at the amulet she held. She dissolved her containment spell and the leaking dream essences poured over her hand and down to pool on the rainforest floor. It was so hard to think.

If she destroyed the amulet, then surely Tarik’s control of that energy would cease. Wouldn’t it? On the other hand, she could almost guarantee that released so suddenly and catastrophically into this unstable environment, the enslaved weres’ dream essences would never return to them. The channel of their essences had been twisted and eroded. In effect, she’d kill them.

Barbara had been freed quietly, carefully and with her home territory sustaining her. A violent dissolution of the spell would be very different.

And what if the perversion of Tarik, the “bloated toad” with the shrunken heart that the ancient spell warned of, remained even after the amulet was destroyed? What if the amulet were no more than an unnecessary prop used by an untrained rogue mage? The containment of Narelle’s magic hadn’t affected it. What if the pattern of the spell truly self-sustained? There were a few rare spells—used only in extremis by reputable mages—that only ceased with the spell caster’s death.

The elephant-were charged.

Steve sprang sideways, but the wolf-were was there, forcing him back. Steve twisted and jumped. The elephant-were’s tusk sliced his right side. The wolf-were attacked. Two jaguar-weres pounced.

Fay was out of options. Her own magic felt pitted, attacked in the way saltwater rusted iron, but faster. She had to use it now before the perverted energy drawn from the weres’ dream essences weakened her further.

No second chances.

She called the weather to her. A whirling tornado tore up trees, grass and dirt, filling the clearing with chaos. In the middle of it—and holding her concentration against the perverted energy pulsing at her was as hard as banishing a demon, and at least with that, she’d had practice—Fay shimmered a protective shell around Steve and herself, one that sheltered them from the whirling debris and turned them invisible. She wouldn’t be able to hold it for long.

Along the mate-bond, which remained amazingly clear amid the chaos, she sent a mental call to Steve, praying that he wouldn’t be stubbornly heroic. “Run. Run with me.”

They hurtled through the rainforest, Steve running before her, choosing and securing their path, ignoring the plants that tore at his leopard-were form. She flung her magic into intensifying the storm behind her. Its chaos and the damage to the rainforest were terrible, but it blocked pursuit.

And as they fled down the mountain, the pressure of the twisted energy Tarik commanded lessened. Despite bruises and scrapes, and her worry for the blood Steve was losing, Fay felt better able to cope.

Steve shifted to human. His clothes were torn and swiftly soaked with blood. He pressed a hand to his side. “There’s a compound. They’ll expect us. A portal exists in the third hut.”

She nodded. “We’ll be invisible and warded. The bullets will bounce.” She had enough strength for one last major magic.

“Physical attack?” Blood seeped from between his fingers. He’d fight, but he knew his ability to defend her was compromised.

“I’ll burn them,” she said grimly. For a demon summoner—and that was her strongest talent, even if she used the reverse of it to banish demons—fire was the easiest element to call.

She cloaked them as Steve moved off. There was no time to waste. He needed a healer. Her magic couldn’t touch him, a were.

The compound had razed the rainforest around it. If she hadn’t been able to cloak herself and Steve, they’d have been instantly visible—and dead. Alerted no doubt by radio contact and the storm trailing down the mountain behind her, the compound’s residents raked the mountain-side perimeter with gunfire.

It was freaky to watch bullets bounce off the air around you. Collegium guardian trainees first experienced paintball attack, then rubber bullets, before advancing to live fire. Fay held her magic under the assault.

But the bouncing bullets served a purpose for the enemy. They revealed Fay and Steve’s presence. Someone shouted. Smart, very smart. A hose came on, the water hitting the warding and pinpointing them. Nonetheless, Fay held onto the invisible spell.

The gunfire ceased and weres emerged in animal form from the concrete block buildings of the compound. They ran at Fay and Steve.

“Third building.” His reminder came from behind gritted teeth. He was weakening despite his steady run. “They’ll be protecting it.”

“More fool them.” Fay had nothing left to lose. She called fire, and it ringed her and Steve, flaring high despite the hose stream of water.

The weres recoiled.

And then, the fire vanished.

Except, it hadn’t. This was a trick from her teenage years. One practiced in private and safely distant from everyone. She compressed the fire. Slammed it tighter and tighter before releasing it suddenly—inside the third building.

A muffled boom echoed from within the third building. The fire had exploded. Its sudden release would have rendered everyone waiting inside unconscious, even as it extinguished the flames for lack of oxygen. It would have been a problem if she and Steve needed a porter to help them navigate the in-between, but she had a token.

She clasped Steve’s hand as they entered the ruin of the third building. They jumped around and over fallen bodies, not slowing as they reached the portal. With weres in pursuit, growling and menacing, they ran into the circle of the portal and the in-between claimed them.

There was no up or down, no right or left. No direction or path. Everything spiraled.

Fay hated the in-between. Being handed from porter to porter made traversing it a thing of seconds. Without porters to courier them, they could be lost forever. Although a few portal-less porters did provide retrieval services.

Conscious that Steve didn’t have time to spare—his wound needed tending now—Fay withdrew the seashell token her stepfather had given her. In the in-between, tokens would bring a non-porter safely to the portal from which the token had been charged. Fay didn’t understand the magic, but she didn’t need to.

The pull of the shell token brought her and Steve to Jim’s Australian portal within a minute.

Jim, himself, was still hurrying down the ladder to his cellar-located portal. “Fay? Bloody hell, Steve.”

“Explanations later,” Fay said. “We need to get to Alexandria. Can you hand us on to Faroud?” At the fortress there’d be healers for Steve, people who knew how to treat weres. Nor did she want Tarik and his evil coming through to Jim.