Page 75 of MidKnight
I nodded. “Well, I’m kind of pissed that didn’t work.”
I might have cut off the wrong hand,Quinn shrugged, undisturbed by that statement.
So … if we take Abbas out of that stein, we might be able to find the ring that controls that dragon?
If a ring ever did control that dragon. We assumed the ring was a djinni that had shape-shifted.
Donaloo tutted at Quinn and walked over to pluck the rings out of my knight’s palm. He took them and whistled for Blue.
Blue flew over and perched on the wizard’s finger. Donaloo put a ring around the bluebird’s leg and it magically shrunk to fit neatly against his leg, hardly visible.
I watched in fascination. The wizard didn’t chant. He didn’t use a huge handful of ingredients. The ring simply shrunk by power of will, or so it appeared. His magic was beyond anything I’d seen.
“What are you doing?” I asked the mage.
“Returning that which should not have been taken if morals were held and not forsaken,” Donaloo sing-songed as he picked up Shiter. He didn’t seem to notice that the rabbit dropped a number of pellets right onto his shoe.
“So, do these rings belong to them? Are they djinn?”
“Not in whole, they’re broken souls.”
I resisted the urge to grab Donaloo’s ear and shake him until he gave me a straight answer.
Declan saw my frustration and came over. He put his hand on my neck and gently massaged. “I think he means they’re part-djinn. That’s my guess anyway.”
Donaloo patted his nose and pointed at Declan.
I tilted my head, deep in thought. “We already believe Sultan Raj is involved in all of this.”
Declan’s fingers dug further into my neck as he caught my train of thought. He stared at the animals. “His sons are missing.”
“And there are three animals here.”
“He’s got five sons,” Ryan interjected.
Quinn added to all of us,There are four rings and only three animals here. The fourth ring could belong to the dragon. We could still be right.
“If the full djinn brother came disguised as Abbas … theoretically he’d know enough about his brother that he could act like him and the servants wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.” Declan moved his hands to rub my shoulders. I wasn’t certain if it was to help him think or for my comfort. But I didn’t argue. I was tense. And his hands were warm, smoothing out the knots in my shoulders until they were butter-soft. I leaned back into him.
“Did your brother do this to you?” I asked Blue.
Abbas was a shite piece of work. I didn’t put it past him to find someone to put an irreversible spell on his brothers and make himself the only heir.
Blue shook his head, side to side, a very definitive ‘no.’
“Your father?”
Blue stared straight at me. His head didn’t move. And I recognized the tell-tale signs of a geas. Under one myself, I knew exactly what it felt like.
“The sultan had a spell put on his own sons,” I breathed, “But not to hide them. He had them cursed. In a way that’s impossible to break.”
I crushed Blue to my chest, smothering him in a hug. No matter what my mother had done, she’d have never done that to me. My anger at Raj flared.
Declan’s voice was thoughtful. “Could Avia be part dragon? If the dragon isn’t the fourth brother … if the ring didn’t recall him … is the dragon we fought actually her mother or father?”
My chest tightened. Dragons had vicious instincts. Lady Agatha hadn’t been wrong when she’d suggested it was unusual that a dragon let Avia live.
Sarding hell. Is my baby sister a dragon? I wondered. I’d always considered dragons to be monsters. They’d stolen my birth father from me.
