Page 23 of Bonds of Blood
But we had to do it for Satchel. It didn’t matter where this thing would take us. We’d improvised whenever necessary, adjusted to whatever the elements could throw at us. We’d made it through all of the four oriels together, my friends and I, in search of profit and power. For Satchel, I would gladly do it all again.
“Get ready, everyone.” I tightened my fists, lowered my chin, and breathed deep to steel myself. “Whatever we find on the other end, be prepared to defend yourself. Or to kill.”
I took another deep breath, as if preparing to enter deep water — because what if we were? The others went silent as they stepped through one by one, first Sylvain and Ember, then the ladies, and me in the rear. The tingle of magic danced along my skin, my vision filling with purest green.
The air smelled sweet, as fresh as air could be. The ground felt solid with the firm softness of packed, trodden earth. A warm breezed tousled my hair, caressed my skin. I blinked, and there we stood on the side of a tall hill. Not quite a mountain, and fortunately, not quite a cliff, either.
Namirah pushed her hands into her hips, frowning at our surroundings. “Well, that was anticlimactic. No one here to ambush us, either. Lucky.” She licked the tip of her finger and lifted it to the sky. “Hmm. Yes. The Oriel of Air. And a fairly safe patch of it, too.”
“Makes sense,” Bruna said, turning in a cautious circle, watching for danger. “Baylor still has Satchel’s mind under his control. He would have been commanded to take them to habitable, nonlethal places only.”
“Or maybe that’s just what he wants us to think.” I squinted down the hill, spotting another spinning green portal. “Make the first jump easy. The next one could be deadly.”
“You’re assuming he thought that far ahead.” Sylvain led the way down the hill toward the next rift. “And perhaps he did. Everyone, be on your guard. Cast your protective magics and — little human, didn’t I just say to be careful?”
Huh? But I was okay.
And then I wasn’t, tipping forward as my foot caught on something on the ground. Sylvain caught me by the arms, my big, beefy hero.
“What the hell was that?” I glared accusingly down at the grass. “A snare trap? Some vines?”
Ember hovered close to the ground, then flitted rapidly back up again. “No. Much worse. See for yourself.”
The thing that had tripped me was almost camouflaged in the grass. Such a similar color. Yet now that I’d seen it, I couldn’t believe I’d missed it only moments before. There it was: one of Baylor’s chains. It seemed to wrap around the base of the hill, one of its ends disappearing into the dirt, as if it had burrowed there. This was how he’d done it, claiming parcels of territory, somehow siphoning elemental power from the land itself. And no one was there to stop him.
“Come on,” I said, giving Sylvain a grateful squeeze on the arm. “We’re way, way behind him. It must have been an hour ago when he locked down the oriels. We have to catch up somehow.”
We raced toward the portal, destination be damned. Bruna made an excellent point about safety, the sensible choice to have Satchel only teleport them onto terra firma. Entering the next rift felt much the same, that familiar prickle, except emerging on the other side immediately broke my skin into a full sweat.
Oh, we got our lake of boiling lava, all right. But the good thing was that Satchel had once again created an exit portal on solid ground. The stony surface must itself have been molten magma at some point in the past, so porous it reminded me of skin, like standing on the back of a sleeping giant. Emerald chains surged like snakes out of the bubbling pit, unmolested by the immense heat.
And there, yet again, through a grove of the perpetually burning trees of the Oriel of Fire: a third spinning emerald portal. Not a single word exchanged as four sets of footsteps pounded across the volcanic plain, accompanied by a pair of buzzing wings and the jingle of tiny bangles. The portal hummed as we leapt through. Again my skin prickled.
I fell through the air screaming, my nostrils and lungs filled with the smell of the ocean. I fucking knew it. I fucking knew that Baylor was going to trap us at some point. Pain shot from my scalp as Ember yanked on a lock of my hair. Bless him for trying to catch me from falling. A hawk shot into the air, Namirah in one of her favored forms. Her piercing cry translated itself in my head.
“Summon your birds, you fucking idiot.”
Right, right. I threw my arm forward, unleashing a wave of essence. Feathers exploded beneath me. My beloved boys appeared in a cloud of silvery wings, empowered with just enough juice to keep me, Sylvain, and Bruna from drowning.
“Oh, gods,” Bruna breathed, hand on her head, panting as she tried to adjust to sitting on a pillow made of birds. “Oh, gods, I thought we were goners.”
“It was only water,” Sylvain said, reclining on our feathery mattress with his hands behind his head, like a jerk. A sexy jerk.
“Shut up.” I pointed toward a tiny rock island. “There! Another portal. Let’s go, babies.”
More of Baylor’s chains slithered there like serpents, restraining the very waves themselves. How their magic could hold onto the immaterial escaped me, but I’d already accepted that there were lots of things I would never understand about my father. Like why he was such an asshole, for example.
We touched down on the rocks, so slippery and sharp I almost wished I could have flown us straight into the portal. But my bird cloud wouldn’t have possibly fit into the rift. I didn’t like imagining the potential consequences of forcing ourselves through. Like forcing a square peg through a round hole. Like pushing a lump of clay through the eye of a needle. Like I said: best not to consider it.
Where was this thing even going to take us, now that we’d cycled through all four oriels? My stomach churned with the dread of not knowing, then of almost knowing, certainly within a matter of seconds. The rift hummed and sizzled four times as my friends passed through. The waves crashed at my feet, threatening to throw me from the rocks.
No time to waste. I took the deepest of breaths.
I stepped through.
13
Perhaps I’d expected an even deadlierportal, the dreadful possibility of emerging from a second rift that opened into thin air. Or worse, the heart of a volcano. Instead I stepped out into a meadow of verdant green, all rolling grass and whispering trees. We were back in the Oriel of Earth.
