Severed Read online

  “Your word means a lot to us, baby,” Drace murmured, from where he was sitting, already dressed in his desert gear. “We know you’ll see this through.”

  “I will,” I said. “And not just because of our contract. This is a matter of honor now.” It sounded kind of corny but it was true—I was determined to stick with them until I helped them get separated.

  Of course it seemed like you were doing your best to bring them together last night, whispered a snarky little voice in my head.

  Shut up, I told it, feeling guilty. That was all in our heads—we didn’t actually touch each other at all. That makes it all right.

  Didn’t it?

  “It is a matter of our honor to keep you safe,” Lucian said, breaking my guilty train of thought and trying to give me the boots again.

  I shook my head firmly.

  “Nice try but I’m not wearing those ugly-ass boots,” I told him. “You said we’d only be in the desert an hour tops, right? And we’ll only be on the fringes of it—not in the deep desert where you told us it’s really dangerous.”

  “It’s true that the danger should be minimal but it does still exist.” Lucian gave me a frustrated frown. “Even if there is only a one in a million chance you could be harmed, I don’t want to take that chance with you, ma 'frela. You have…come to mean a lot to me. To both of us, I think.” He looked over at Drace who nodded.

  “He’s right, baby,” he murmured. “You’re special. We don’t want to risk you.”

  “If anybody is risking anything I’m risking myself,” I insisted. “You said there’s no danger on the surface of the sand which is where we’ll be walking, so I’m going with the lighter and slightly less ugly shoe option.”

  Then I had put on the dune-shoes and that was that.

  Now, as I hiked through the sand in the much lighter footwear, I congratulated myself again. Those long, ugly boots Lucian had wanted me to wear must have weighed fifty pounds. My thigh muscles would be screaming at me right now if I had worn them. It was hard enough getting through the dry, unstable sand in shoes specially made for it, let alone wearing what amounted to extremely ugly fetish-wear.

  But even wearing the dune-shoes, walking through the hot sand under the hot sun was really no fun.

  “This is crazy,” I muttered as I slid and slipped my way through the sand dunes that led to the back entrance of the city. “First we’re at the bottom of the ocean, then hiking through the freaking desert. What’s next—mountain climbing?”

  “More likely we’ll be cutting brush through the jungle,” Drace grunted, keeping his sand-visor low over his eyes to shield out the brilliant sunlight.

  “Oh, yeah? I squinted and shielded my eyes as I looked into the distance. At least the city was getting closer—I could see the back gates rising like monoliths in the sand some distance away.

  It was a shame we couldn’t just fly Lucian’s ship right in but then he would have had to identify himself and everyone would know he was back in town and come looking for him. (Everyone, presumably, being his super-snobby parents. Not that Lucian exactly said they were snobby—it was just a feeling I got and the way Drace rolled his eyes when he mentioned their social status.)

  “Why do you say we’ll be going through the jungle?” Lucian, who was leading our little expedition, looked back at Drace, who was heading up the rear. They were, as usual, keeping me between them.

  “Been thinking about the prophesy,” Drace growled, adjusting his visor again. “That line about the Temple of Ganth. I thought the name sounded familiar so I looked it up—it’s an abandoned temple not far from Claw Clan grounds in the K’drin Jungle. So if we are able to locate this buyer and get the key from him, we’re headed for my home territory next.”

  “Ah.” Lucian nodded thoughtfully. “Another piece of the puzzle, as Rylee would say.”

  “Rylee would say she’s sweating to death and needs a shower,” I said. “So when are we going to get to—ahhhh!”

  My last words ended in a scream because just at that moment my foot slipped into some kind of a hole in the treacherous sand. For a moment, I pinwheeled my arms, thinking I was about to trip and go flat on my face. Instead, my entire right leg slid down into the hole, as though I’d stepped into a pocket of pure nothing.

  I cried out as I did an impromptu split. If I hadn’t been doing Yin Yoga once a week for stress relief for the past two years, I probably would have torn a tendon or snapped a hamstring or something. As it was, the split hurt, but I was still okay. Well, as okay as I could be with my leg jammed to the hip in the sand.

  “What in the Frozen Hells? You okay, baby?” Drace knelt beside me at once. He tried to pull me out, but I was stuck fast.

  “Rylee!” Lucian came rushing back, more graceful by far than either Drace or me on the hilly sand dunes. “We have to get her out, now!” he told Drace, a trace of panic in his deep, smooth voice.

  “I’m all for that,” Drace growled. “Here—you take one arm and I’ll take—”

  That was when I felt something sting me. Or else bite me. I wasn’t sure which it was—only that it felt like someone had heated two sixteen gage needles until they were red hot and then jabbed them into the tender flesh of my inner thigh.

  “Ahhh!” I screamed again—this time in pain. “Oh my God—something bit me!”

  Lucian swore, his dark blue eyes going wide with fear.

  “We have to get her out—we have to get her out!” he shouted at Drace.

  “Come on, then!” Drace snapped back.

  The two of them each grabbed me under the armpits and heaved as hard as they could.

  At first, it didn’t seem like they could budge me—I was really stuck fast! Then, just as I thought my arms were going to come out of their sockets, I popped out of the ground like a cork coming out of a bottle.

  Drace and Lucian staggered and we all fell over backwards in the sand. But the next minute we were up again and running for our lives, staggering and slipping over the shifting sands—because there was something coming out of the hole.

  Out of the blackness boiled a huge cloud of flying creatures, each as long as my hand from the tip of my middle finger to the end of my palm. They hummed and buzzed angrily but they were so big the hum was more of a thrumming sound—something you felt rather than heard—vibrating the air all around you.

  “Moratas!” Lucian shouted, urging us onward. “Death goddesses! Faster—run! We can’t let the swarm catch us!”

  I tried but the place where I’d been bitten or stung was aching and throbbing, making it hard to walk, let alone run.

  My guys saw the difficulty I was having and they grabbed me under the arms again and dragged me along like a rag doll, the wide toes of my dune-shoes making wavy patterns in the sand as we raced through the desert.

  “You didn’t say anything about any fucking swarm of killing things,” Drace roared at Lucian over my head.

  “I’ve never seen them this close to the city—they’re usually only in the deep desert,” Lucian shouted back. “Come on—we have to get clear of them!”

  “I thought you had immunity to anything out here,” Drace demanded.

  “I do, but that doesn’t mean their bite doesn’t hurt like fucking Hell!”

  I could certainly attest to that. The feeling of being jabbed by red hot needles had never really ended. In fact, it was getting worse. Now it felt like someone was twisting the needles, trying to cause as much pain as possible. My entire leg was throbbing with every thudding step Drace and Lucian took across the sand.

  Despite their best efforts, the humming, thrumming moratas—or “death goddesses” as Lucian had also called them, were getting closer. To my horror, one of them buzzed past my head and landed right on my billowing sleeve. I started to shake it off but I had to do a double take to be sure of what I was seeing first.

  The morata had a body that looked like a cross between one of those huge grasshoppers you see in the spring sometimes, and a palmetto b