Embrace the Wind (3 page)

Here was the poorest section of the city, where Invictus often preyed on prostitutes and drug addicts, usually drinking them to death. Drugs in his realm had become as much of a problem as they were in the U.S., especially with the introduction of cocaine into the Nine Realms.

Every major city seemed to have an area like this one, full of druggies, women working for their abusive pimps, and the homeless.

Three vehicles had crashed, one of them torched by laughing bystanders. At least a hundred Realm-folk were enthralled by the wind, most of them either fist-fighting with each other or breaking the windows of nearby stores and offices. The rest were too drunk to do much moving around.

A golden glow lit up the north end of the club strip. As he drew within a hundred yards, he saw that the gold light surrounded a beautiful fae woman. And there she was, the scourge of the Nine Realms: Margetta.

His instincts had been dead on: the Ancient Fae had come to Swanicott.

Several Invictus pairs were already feeding on a group of drunken trolls, draining them. And the Realm-folk in the area, enthralled by the wind, seemed oblivious to the presence of the vicious wraiths and their bonded mates or to Margetta.

As he drew closer still, what he saw next distressed him more than anything else he’d seen. Several wraith youths were under the spell of a powerful Invictus wraith, the kind that could help create the dreaded pairs. The young wraiths had probably snuck away from Wraith Island to have some fun on the mainland, not understanding how quickly Margetta and her troops could enslave wraiths to do their bidding. In truth, these innocent wraiths were as much victims as the Realm-folk with which they forged the heinous bond.

Margetta was training her forces well.

Needing to keep his hands free in order to do battle, he used telepathy to contact his Communication Center.
Hey, Marian, you there?

Yes, Mastyr,
came back at him quickly.

We’ve got a bad situation on the ground.
He told her about Margetta, the number of Realm-folk in the area, and the looting.
And I’m also watching three wraith youths turning Realm-folk into bonded pairs as we speak.
Zane looked into the night sky.
Contact Chase and see if he can get any closer. I was able to use my battle energy to break through Margetta’s spell.

Will do.

He waited until Marian’s telepathic voice flowed through his head once more.
Chase says he’s a half mile away but he can’t move past the barrier. He wants to know if he should try his battle frequency.

Tell him yes.

He hovered in the air, waiting, but his mind filled with sudden fury at what he saw. He’d lost so many Realm-folk from Invictus depredations, including his wife. And now Margetta had just turned up the heat.

Marian returned.
Chase said he tried his battle energy but nothing happened. The resistance remained.

So Zane was on his own.
Okay. Let Chase know that I’m going in right now. Maybe I can do something to break up the spell.

Marian pathed,
Chase will want to know exactly where to move in should the spell give way. What’s your location?

He gave the major cross-streets.

Got it. Now, go get ‘em, Mastyr.

Ramping up his battle energy, Zane knew what he needed to do. He levitated, extending himself facedown, then angled to fly straight at an enthralled wraith youth engaged in forging an Invictus bond with one of the female trolls. The wraith was draining some of his blood into what looked like a beer can, probably now empty. It was an inelegant approach, but Zane knew it would get the job done. All the wraith had to do was extract some of the troll’s blood, add it to the can, and blend the both together. Each would take a few sips of the combined blood and the bond would forge quickly. Within moments, the Invictus bond would be complete.

The simplicity of the process had been one reason the number of wraith-pairs continued to advance steadily.

When he got close, he flipped in the air and slammed his feet into the back of the male wraith. The troll flopped sideways, falling to the ground, but the momentum of his strike forced the wraith headlong into a bonded shifter and another wraith.

And the battle was on.

He erected his blue battle shield and let heavy pulses of his hand-frequency fly at the enemy. The already bonded wraith fell, the shifter with him, both dead.

He turned around and saw three incoming wraith-pairs. He gathered his energy and in a new set of quick pulses fired at each of the wraiths in turn.

Red streaks of energy came back at him, swift and heavy. But he wasn’t a mastyr for nothing and his shield held so that the wraith frequencies ricocheted off harmlessly.

The pairs surrounded him, trying to gain the advantage. He spun swiftly as he fought since his back was unprotected.

A wraith went down and as usually happened, the bonded mate fell at the same time.

Managing two pairs was easier, but the street was very open. It was hard to keep from taking a hit with no other Guardsmen to protect his vulnerable backside.

But he moved fast and at times flew straight up, disrupting the enemy’s game plan.

The second wraith went down, his female shifter mate with him. Knowing that Margetta was nearby and that the chaos wind still blew, he battled hard to bring the last pair down.

At the same time, he heard shouting, breaking glass, and loud whoops that had more to do with looting than anything else.

When he dropped the last wraith, he turned toward the wind and a terrible sight met his eyes: At least a dozen wraith pairs headed straight for him and he had no backup in sight.

And Margetta’s wind still kept his Guardsmen at bay.

~

Olivia didn’t want this to be on her, but something had gone wrong at Britchett Falls that she didn’t understand. Where were the rest of the Guardsmen? Zane was strong, but he could hardly battle so many Invictus pairs by himself.

She sensed he’d communicated telepathically with someone, maybe gaining an understanding of the situation. But she hadn’t been privy to the conversation. Though she had a number of powers, intercepting telepathy wasn’t one of them.

As much as she didn’t want to get involved, or even to show herself to Mastyr Zane, she couldn’t remain by and let him perish. She had to turn wolf and do what she could to rescue him. But would she reach him in time? Though her ‘ghost’ was with Zane, her body was still in Barker’s Bend a hundred-and-fifty miles away.

She withdrew from her tracking position so that now she was once more consciously on her porch. She never shifted in public and wasn’t sure if her cloak would hold so she ran through the house to the backyard. Extending her arms, she let her shifting vibration flow. The moon was on the horizon, full and beautiful, and a howl left her throat.

The fur on the back of her hands and on her chest and lower abdomen began to spread, absorbing her clothes and transforming her. The experience of becoming wolf was erotic and thrilling. As her hands became thick padded paws and her shoulders grew in mass, she slowly lowered herself to the lawn.

Already, her nose sniffed out the different scents, separating them like a very fine comb. Because Zane had been at the bar so recently, his grassy scent rose to the forefront.

She could sense him as well, feeling with every shifter bone in her body exactly where he was and that he was still alive; he’d been captured in Britchett Falls and was being moved to a different location. And whoever had him was moving fast.

She had to get to Zane, to protect him, to save him if she could.

Once completely transformed, she leaped over the fence of her yard, but didn’t land on the street. Instead, power flowed through her as never before and she remained bounding in the air for at least a half mile.

She’d traveled Swanicott many times in shifter form, but not like this, with a vibration taking her over, giving her distance and tremendous speed.

She finally landed with a strong slam of paws to earth, then another massive bound. She flew above the treetops, this time extending farther than a mile as she sailed through the air.

In that way, she began to gather up the miles quickly, so that even the wind couldn’t touch her. Her bounds lengthened, until they were two miles long and faster than a Harley gathering speed.

On she ran, her entire being fixed on Zane’s location from moment to moment. His captors were moving incredibly fast, which probably meant that Margetta had control of him and somehow was using her power to whisk him to another part of the realm. Very few in the Nine Realms could move at that speed. Zane could; Olivia as well. But wherever the Ancient Fae was taking him in Swanicott would be akin to a stronghold.

Olivia sensed the moment Zane was spirited across the Arundel Mountains.

She’d also reached the mountain range and bounded from one clear spot of forest, to a gathering of boulders, to a shallow valley, to another forest clearing and on and on until she was on the western slopes. She kept moving, especially when she felt that Zane’s position finally grew static. Now that Margetta had control of him, Olivia could only imagine what the Ancient Fae intended to do next.

Extending her senses, she could feel that he’d been taken to a rugged coastal area where few farms and no towns to speak of existed: Angler’s Cliff.

She raced along, knowing that the lengthening of each bound and the speed she traveled was beyond what any shifter in the Nine Realms could do. Or even vampires since she’d covered two hundred miles in barely twenty minutes. She’d moved like the wind.

For a brief moment, though, her heart sank. She’d been different her entire life and it seemed even in the Nine Realms, she wouldn’t be normal either.

She only slowed as she drew within a quarter mile of an enormous Invictus encampment a few miles east of Angler’s Cliff in an area known as the Dead Zone. Still cloaked, she drew close to the edge of the camp where a wall of red, wavy lines indicated the boundaries of a serious, complex fae spell. It was clear to her that Margetta had constructed a spell designed not just to keep intruders out, but to hide the encampment from most Realm-folk as well.

In the same way, she supposed, that she could ‘ghost’ Zane, and travel across an entire realm in the space of a few minutes, she could see a hidden spell. She bumped the wavy lines with her nose and sniffed. She could smell the sickly sweet redolence of the Ancient Fae.

Once more sniffing, she caught Zane’s scent coupled with the sharp metallic smell of his blood. The mastyr was hurt and she barely repressed a need to howl long and loud in response.

She paced back and forth, whining softly. Zane was being held inside, but how to get past the spell?

She loped fifty yards away from the encampment and saw that the wavy lines ceased another hundred yards high up in the air.

She smiled a wolf’s smile, because she knew she could bound over the wall. That kind of leap would also take her well into the encampment on the opposite side.

Before she attempted to breach the wall, she checked her cloaking frequency and found it fully intact, thank God.

She pawed the dirt and felt the bounding frequency flow once more through her chest, spreading to her hind quarters, her shoulders, and down all four legs. When the vibration covered her head, she took off running.

Soaring into the air, she cleared the spell and landed not thirty feet away from a beautiful woman surrounded by a golden glow of light.

She’d read blogs about Margetta and knew she was looking at the Ancient Fae. She had long blond hair, very similar to Olivia’s, but the woman’s eyes were an unearthly violet. Her skin looked like porcelain; it was so smooth.

She was talking to her army, toasting them with an ornate silver goblet. The Invictus roared their approval in response.

Margetta continued, “And now we have our first real prize of the war, one that I have foreseen, and which marks the beginning of the fall of the Nine Realms. Tonight, we execute Zane of Swanicott!”

Another deafening cheer.

Knowing she couldn’t be seen, Olivia lifted her muzzle and sniffed the air again. Her clever nose sifted through thousands of scents and found the one she needed to follow.

Zane wasn’t far away at all.

She quickly retreated to the edge of the camp in order to avoid an accidental encounter. She didn’t want to give warning of her presence by stumbling on some object or other, or by bumping into anyone.

Well beyond the general gathering of Margetta’s forces, she trotted quickly between the tents until she reached the one she knew housed Zane.

Guards surrounded the tent, two powerful shifter males and their female wraith mates. As she drew close, both shifters sniffed the air and growled, maybe smelling Olivia, she wasn’t sure.

Pushing the tent flap with her nose, she glided inside.

The sight of Zane face down and unconscious tore at her heart. Deep cuts crisscrossed his back. He’d been whipped badly and blood still oozed from the terrible wounds.

She drew close to his face, stretching out on her stomach and began to lick his cheek, whining softly the entire time.

In between, she called to him telepathically to wake up. She needed him conscious otherwise she’d never be able to get him out of the camp. Wolves might be good at many things, but not carrying out their wounded.

~

Zane awoke slowly to the strange sensation of a tongue swiping at his face repeatedly and an unfamiliar voice inside his head.
Zane
,
can you hear me?

A few more licks, and he asked,
Who are you?

Olivia. My name’s Olivia and I’m here to help, but I need you on your feet. I’m a shifter and female, and I can’t possibly carry a man like you out of this camp alone.

Slowly, he opened his eyes and saw a beautiful silver wolf staring at him from inches away, her muzzle resting on her front paws. She had exquisite green eyes, full of intelligence. Her ears twitched.

Olivia?

That’s right.