Emma (Dark Fire) (35 page)

The gnome dropped to his knees. His loud, keening wail of terror pleased her.

Chapter - Haven Mystery

Sarah motioned toward the weird wall full of holes. Stone tubes with mud caps that held the mite's poisoned victims, a place to keep the creature's next meal alive and fresh. The odd tubes probably held dozens of mite-poisoned victims. Finding Clarisse might take hours.

“We might as well start,” Sarah said. Turning away from Brianna, she examined the mud-capped tubes. There were hundreds of them. She ignored the larger tubes that glowed with an inner layer of glow moss, focusing on the smaller mud-crusted tubes.

Her vision dimmed and the tubes blurred. Startled, she blinked several times before her eyes cleared.

She quickly smoothed the slight frown off her face, chalking the odd blurry sensation up to the lingering mite poison in her body.

Brianna shrugged her shoulders. “Yeah, sure.”

The two teens began the long process of breaking the hard mud cap off each tube, searching for their missing cabin mate. They found numerous fiber-wrapped animals including a werewolf and a bobcat. They did not find Clarisse.

They worked for hours.

Sarah paused from the boring task of breaking into the tubes and rubbed her sore knuckles. She frowned. The pain was unusual. She normally healed from small scrapes rather quickly, nearly instantly.

Glancing toward the girl, she wondered about the silent shifter and her best friend, Beth, Alpha Prime of Haven Valley.

Haven Valley had been under surveillance for years. The other Sídhí valleys had not known about the secretive valley, but Sarah and her people had known about them. Trellick Valley had numerous hidden gateways going into Haven Valley, gateways that gave her army of spies free access to the shifter dominated dimension. From all reports, Beth ran a tight ship. The young queen refused bribes, yanking wrongdoers up by the short hairs. She called it the way she saw it, maintaining an eye for an eye approach to her rule.

Brianna was a mystery. Sarah didn’t have a very thick folder on the girl, but she remembered one nugget of truth. Her spies believed the brooding blonde was Beth’s pet assassin-in-training.

She tilted her head in thought. Perhaps that was why Brianna volunteered to stay behind. No doubt, Beth saw Sarah as a piece of Sídhí scum that shouldn't be trusted, a killer that needed to be permanently removed from the world.

Sarah’s lips twitched with dark humor. The two teens had a lot to learn.

Beth had no idea of the danger she had just dropped her loyal little follower into. Given the time, if the girls lived through attacking her, Sarah might agree to teach them a small lesson or two.

The reports she received on Beth and her brother, Derek, had been very detailed. The two royals couldn't sneeze without her spies knowing when, where and how many times they sneezed.

Brianna proved to be a different story. Beth kept the young woman behind the scenes, away from prying eyes. She wished she knew a bit more about the girl.

“If we split up, could you find Clarisse by scent?” Sarah asked, determined to solve the mystery surrounding the sleek shifter.

“Why shouldn't I?” Brianna demanded, clenching her hands at her sides. Her chin jutted out in anger.

Well now, wasn’t that an interesting sore spot?

Sarah hid a smile. She needed a good workout, and if her reports concerning shifters proved accurate, the race had a horrible temper. Supposedly, their ‘hot-temper’ was as much a shifter characteristic as red eyes were for a blood-drinking vampire.

She studied the girl. What she saw only added to the mystery. Normally, through her synth-drenched blood, she could tell the strength of a shifter by the glow of synth energy surrounding them, not so with Brianna. For all intents and purposes, the girl smelled and looked like a mundane human with no power glow at all.

When the two girls first appeared, Sarah accepted Emily’s assessment that the girls were shifters. Perhaps that assumption had been a mistake.

Sarah inhaled, separating the individual scents until she found what she searched for. One minute Brianna smelled human, the next she smelled unique, unique as in extremely weird. Before puberty, all Sídhí smelled like a mundane human. A person’s base scent didn’t change, except during puberty, and then in very brief spurts. Brianna’s base scent changed.

The girl actually had a very slight scent that reminded Sarah of a fairy. The spring fresh scent wasn’t a bold fragrance. The scent shifted, confirming her theory that Brianna was in the middle of her twenty-one day puberty cycle. As the fresh scent changed, she caught the sharpness of electricity, like that of a spring lightning storm.

Sarah’s curiosity rose several degrees. It didn’t seem possible, but Sarah had seen too many impossible things in her life to discount the odd hint.

“There hasn't been a shifter around in several thousand years,” Sarah said quietly, her voice remained cool and distant as if discussing the weather, enjoying her decision to test a few theories.

“Yeah, it was great until the dragons stuck their nose into our business,” Brianna said irritably.

Hiding a calculating smile, she decided to take a page out of Mitch’s book. With luck, and a little extra prodding, the girl might be temperamental enough to attack. For better or worse, defending against an attack remained the age-old way to gauge the strength of a Sídhí.

“Until I learn your strengths, I'll ask questions. Only idiots make assumptions.” Sarah smiled, a slight tilting of her lips revealing the mockery her words implied. “You know, the whole ass-u-me scenario, but then remaining stuck in a restricted valley must have been mentally damaging for such a small society. I imagine the inbreeding after several thousand years has had a major impact on IQ and mental stability.”

Brianna hissed at the implied insult, but she didn't snap back. Her light blue eyes flashed with tiny spikes of silver. The effect lasted less than a split second.

Keeping her face immobile as Brianna's heritage flashed in the girl's eyes proved almost impossible.

The dragon's peace camp was turning out to be educational to say the least. Who would've guessed the girl was a phoenix?

“I can just imagine all the wolf shifters running around with khatt tails or vise-versa for that matter,” Sarah said, covering her slight pause as she absorbed the new turn of events. She wondered if Mac knew Haven Valley had a secret, a really big secret.

 She didn't think so. Mac, and his people, was fanatically loyal to her, more so than the pureblood elves within Trellick Valley that accepted her as Chi'Kehra.

No, if Mac had known Haven Valley had a group of phoenix, powerful winged fairy, in their midst, he would have told her.

The girl needed careful handling, very carefully indeed. Talk about a ticking time bomb. Thankfully, some races didn't gain all of their Sídhí abilities (or power) during puberty. Phoenix fell into that category.

Brianna's background was certainly something to look into, but not at the moment.

“Very funny,” Brianna said, baring her human teeth in a soundless snarl.

“It seemed like a very real possibility. So, while you’re in human form, can you follow a scent or not?” Sarah asked again, maintaining the girl's guise of being a shapeshifter.

Brianna turned toward another sealed tube. “What I can or can’t do isn’t in question since you’re the one who caught Clarisse's scent, you find her.”

Sarah gave the girl points for keeping her temper.

“Then let's finish and get out of here.” Sarah glanced at the discarded blue furble branches wrapped in mint. The teens had been creative when making weapons to use against the mites. “I guess you and Beth came back just in time.”

“Yeah, you could say that,” Brianna said. Her face twisted in a scowl of distaste.

Sarah motioned to the silly looking weapons the teens made. “All that mint came in handy.”

“Yeah, mites don't like it. It burns them,” Brianna said, a sharp glint appeared in her eyes. “You know Haven Valley cultivates mite poison. We use it for crowd control. Even diluted, it’s really nasty stuff. I mean, even if one of our elders got shot by a low dosage of mite juice he couldn't have gotten out of that tube without help, not like you did.”

Sarah kept her face void of emotion, refusing to show the slightest concern.

“You’re a halfling with silver on your wrist. You shouldn’t have the strength or the claws that you obviously used to free yourself. So, how did you get out?” Brianna demanded. Her legs spread, holding herself in a stance capable of attacking without warning.

Chapter - Gnomes

Hours after setting a fire under the gnome, Clarabelle relaxed against the soft, spongy bark of a giant furble tree. Some twenty feet away was a cabin, a small sanctuary hidden from the sky (and the occasional dragon) by a thick canopy of giant furble and pine trees.

Using the hidden, state-of-the-art cabin tickled her funny bone, especially since the carefully crafted cabin was a guardian safe house. What pleased her even more was the guardians had built the little cabin on her recommendation that the area was a restricted zone and away from prying eyes.

She hummed to herself in pleasure. Guardian Alexander would wet himself when he found out he assisted the Khr'Vurr even indirectly.

Movement within the cabin captured her attention. A female vampire stomped past the narrow window of the cabin. Her hip swinging form disappeared only to briefly reappear in the next window as she paced in a circle. With each turn around the room her short, red hair, matted from the yellowish fairy water, glinted orange in the beams of the setting sun.

Clarisse had been ranting for a solid hour. For once, Clarabelle felt a twinge of sympathy for Harry. No one deserved the girl’s shrill rants.

Wasn’t it enough the trolls delivered her without gnawing her up a little? No, of course not. The silly girl screamed non-stop after seeing the jagged claw marks running down her face. The marks would disappear soon enough. The girl was overreacting.

The young voice coming from the cabin grew louder and more agitated by the moment. “I tell you that gray dragon is setting us up,” Clarisse said, waving her hand around the room. “Why else would she keep us here in the troll’s hunting grounds? She had me change the warning signs, getting my scent all over the place then had those hideous trolls bring me here! This will be the first place the guardians search!”

“My sister would never...”

“Sister!” Clarisse shrieked. “That over-sized lizard is your sister?”

“Dragons are not lizards!” Harry bellowed, stomping toward the girl he glared down at her. “We are the most intelligent of all Sídhí races.”

Clarisse snorted. “Right, that's why – when you’re in dragon form – you can’t talk without setting something on fire.”

“I’m allergic to smoke,” Harry bellowed in the girl’s face, baring his teeth at her. “It makes me cough. That’s not my fault.”

Clarabelle turned from the theatrics going on in the cabin to properly greet the man who suddenly appeared at her elbow.

“Did either of them see you in human form?” Clarabelle’s mate asked worriedly, concern lashed her brain before she answered him with a small shake of her head.

He pulled her tightly against him, smashing his lips against hers. When he finally released her, his simmering arrogance swarmed her. “Well then, things are coming along nicely. Did Harry find the missing shifters?”

Clarabelle snorted. “No, I'll look for them myself this afternoon.”

“No, you've taken enough risks for one day,” he said quickly.

Clarabelle bristled at the order, but submissively nodded her head in acceptance. She hated orders. Even an order from her mate stuck in her craw, but she'd found arguing with him did no good. She took stock of the situation and changed strategies. “What about the Clan brat?” she asked, nodding toward the cabin.

The girl’s shrill voice continued screaming at Harry non-stop.

“I’ve had the portal near the olitiau nest recalibrated to exit into a rarely used portal within the Dhark Empire. Tell Harry to take the red haired brat to the portal and make sure she gets through safely.”

“The Dhark Empire?” she asked, surprised he was willing to give up a trump card that could be used against the girl’s high council father. “I thought we wanted to keep Councilman MuskLeke’s support.”

“We do, but Councilman MuskLeke and Duke PhńDick of the Dhark Empire have joined forces. It seems the duke is thrilled with MuskLeke’s genetic research. They are hip-deep creating a strategy to enslave the mundanes after releasing a genetic attack that will bring the population down to a manageable size. It will keep them busy for months. For my generosity in freeing MuskLeke’s eldest daughter, the councilman has given up the location of the Rshk’Garr ruins.”

Clarabelle sucked in an excited gasp. Now she understood why her mate was vibrating with excitement. Flooding the Rshk’Garr ruins with liquid synth would take them one move closer to returning to the home world. “That will make six Ancient ruins we’ve flooded. According to my calculations, we need a minimum of ten active ruins.”

“With one minor detail,” he added somberly. “I had one of my men do a quick survey of Clan Valley’s Rshk’Garr ruins. Numerous tunnels abruptly end.”

“End? What do you mean, they end?” she demanded.

He smirked at her rising panic. “One of the tunnels has a hidden gateway emerging into another valley. The ancient Rshk’Garr ruins continue, undamaged, in the next valley.”

They were getting two valleys for the price of one. She smiled at their incredible luck. “Which valley?”

“None other than Trellick Valley,” he answered. His dark chuckle sent a thrill through her. “I already gave the order to fill Rshk’Garr.”

Irritation tightened her lips. It was her plan. She was the one who figured out how to fill the ruins with energy. He knew that.

“Once Harry returns from delivering Clarisse, have him search for the shifters. With that prissy Alpha Prime dead, Haven Valley will fall into line with our plans.”