Corruption, page 2
My teeth elongated without my permission, piercing my cheek before I forced them to retract.
“We should go someplace else.” Frey’s voice was even and calm.
“Is this where…” Magnus trailed off.
I nodded as I focused on filing my more primal reactions into nice, neat little drawers in my mind. “TOM sent Starkad to me, hoping I’d kill him.” Starkad was a berserker, a warrior created distinctly for battle who could embody the spirit of a wolf. He wasn’t the same kind of wolf I was, and he wasn’t meant to have control when he was in his other form.
I took issue with some of the battles he’d chosen to fight, and I’d been here losing myself in the wilderness. Their hope had been that putting him in my path would lead to his destruction.
We were tentative allies now, instead, but the remnants of the firefight that ensued when I didn’t destroy him—memories of the way TOM hunted us—hung in the air and in my memories.
“I refuse to let them soil one of the few remaining places I can find peace,” I said.
We were taking a risk, coming here. Going anywhere out in the open, really. The organization that raised Dahlia was still hunting her, using technology she created to trace magical signatures. But Frey had the ability to mask places and people and take them off the grid. Make those spots invisible to the magical eye. While we were here, we should be hidden.
“So what now?” Magnus asked.
Always impatient. Always anxious to go now.
I didn’t blame her. “Dahlia, would you rather do this humanoid or in your full form?” I knew the answer.
Wings appeared on her back, their span twice as long as her body, and sunlight glinting off the iridescent purple and black. The same colors appeared on her arms and face, covering her in scales, and a tail grew from her very lower back, swishing lazily, wrapping around her ankles before flicking again.
Other than that, she was physically human. It was both adorable and sexy, that this was the form she preferred to shift to.
Magnus summoned wings as well, though hers were auburn and feathered, more like angel wings. “The part where your feet leave the ground is magic; it has nothing to do with the wings themselves.” She floated half a meter above the dirt. “But the wings make steering and fighting easier.”
She beat her wings and kicked up flurries of debris in the wind, then shot straight up and evened out, darting and weaving through the sky above the treetops.
Now we were having fun. I let my wolf form out. When I took my natural size and shape, I was about as large as a truck. I needed to run, so I chased Magnus, using tree trunks to bound higher and nip at her ankles before landing deftly on my feet again.
We circled back to the clearing, to find Frey lounged against a nearby tree, looking nonplussed.
Dahlia was scowling, though. Interesting effect, through the scales that covered her face. “Hello. Noob needing help.” Frustration undercut her words.
I lay next to Frey’s feet, to wait for the next round of play. My wolf wasn’t in control, but I was comfortable letting the lines blur between it and me.
Magnus touched down lightly next to Dahlia. “There’s not a lot to the first step,” Magnus said. “You think fly, and you fly.”
Dahlia closed her eyes. Seconds ticked away, and a frown crawled onto her face. More time passed, and she sighed heavily, looking at Magnus again. “Do I need to think of the happiest things? Any happy little thing? Did you forget a step? Do I need fairy dust?”
“I think you’ve already got the fairy dust.” Magnus tweaked the tip of Dahlia’s tail.
Dahlia jerked away, but her scowl was gone. “Okay. Think fly.” Nothing happened. “Fly.” She jumped and immediately landed on her feet. There was no lift. “Fly.” She jumped again, pulled her knees to her chest, and fell on her ass.
I whimpered with sympathy. I could still talk, though it was more of a voice in their heads than my using my vocal cords, but this was the best I could come up with.
Dahlia moved to the nearest tree, climbed to the bottom branch, about two meters in the air, and jumped. The jarring of her hitting the ground was visible, and her frustration was tangible.
“This is bullshit.” Dahlia pulled herself into the tree again. “I have wings. Dragons can fly. I want to fly.” She moved up to the middle of the tree, closer to seven meters up.
“Don’t do that.” Frey’s casual stance masked the tension running through his body.
“Too late.” Dahlia perched on the edge of the branch. “I need a jump start is all. A fall that’s a threat.”
Frey clenched his jaw. “What happens if you fall and break something?”
“I heal really fast.”
“Then falling isn’t a threat for you,” Frey said.
Dahlia shrugged.
Every muscle in my body tensed as I prepared to leap if I needed to catch her. I wanted what she was doing to work, but…
Dahlia squeezed her eyes shut tight and jumped.
Three
Freyr
My heart plummeted when Dahlia stepped off the tree branch, and the entire world slowed to a crawl. Without looking, I felt Fen tense, and Magnus was already in flight.
But Dahlia stopped a short distance above the ground and hovered in place, her eyes squeezed shut. She pried one eye open, then let out a loud whoop. “I’m floating. “
Magnus pulled up next to her and matched the hover. “You did it.” The two radiated excitement.
Even Fen was wagging his tail.
“Next step, follow me.” Magnus floated up higher.
Dahlia plummeted the rest of the way to the ground, kicking up a cloud of dust when she landed. Her scowl was back, etched more deeply into her face than ever. She climbed the tree again, moving easily with the proficiency of someone who’d been raised to get into and out of unusual spaces with minimal effort.
“You have to learn to fly without the tree,” Magnus said.
Dahlia stuck her tongue out. “I’ll do that after I learn to fly with the tree.”
When she jumped, she didn’t fall as far. But she couldn’t rise higher either. For the next couple of hours, the frustration level swelled in the forest as she tried again and again to take flight, and never managed more than to hover a meter or two off the ground before plummeting to the dirt again.
About halfway through, Fen had given up and shifted back to his human form and joined me in holding up our tree as we watched. I doubted this was the short getaway he hoped for.
When Dahlia’s responses came as much growl and bark as Fen’s wolf, I’d had enough. “We should go.”
“I’m going to get it.” Dahlia spoke through clenched teeth.
Magnus looked frustrated as well. “You can fall on your ass anywhere. Besides, I want breakfast. Lunch?” She glanced at a wrist with no watch. “Whatever. I’m hungry.”
“How do you do it?” Dahlia pushed to her feet and brushed the dust from her jeans. “How do you have this ability to run so far and fast, or fly, and willingly lock it away almost every day?”
I looked at Fen, knowing he had strong opinions on the matter.
He twisted his mouth. “It’s the cost of living in a modern world. Would you give up your phone, computer, and internet connection forever, to fly when you wanted?”
“I might.”
I knew better. “You wouldn’t.”
Dahlia puffed out her cheeks and exhaled noisily. “Fine, I wouldn’t. Let’s go eat.”
“You pick where,” I said to Dahlia. “And you drive.” It would give her practice with a different skill, and hopefully restore a little of her confidence after the lackluster flying attempts.
She scrubbed her palms on her thighs several more times. “Okay.” She held her hands out.
Magnus and I each grasped one and Frey took my hand. The forest vanished and a street in a small town appeared around us.
“Where did you decide?” I asked. It wasn’t European—the architecture was too new, but the street layout wasn’t quite American either.
Dahlia looked around with a faint frown.
“Australia,” Magnus said. “Perth.”
Fen raised an eyebrow and sniffed the air. “Fresh seafood?”
“And baked goods.” There was a hint of doubt in Dahlia’s reply.
“This is where—” Magnus bit the words off and gave Dahlia a questioning look.
Dahlia crammed her hands in her pockets and started walking. “It’s where I landed before TOM caught me. There’s a little shop around the corner with amazing food and I thought maybe now was a good time to thank the owner.” The longer she spoke, the more confident her voice grew.
She hadn’t meant to bring us here. Where did she intend to land instead?
It didn’t seem like now was the time to push the issue. We could talk through it in a more intimate setting, to keep her from feeling defensive and see what kind of ideas we could come up with to help Dahlia figure this out. The stumbling block we’d all run into was her coming into powers we’d all had since the beginning of our existence.
Except Magnus, who seemed to fall—or rise—naturally into being a Valkyrie.
There were new gods out there, but none that I knew of who could shift or had wings. When we were back home, I’d put out a call and see if anyone of the new gods could teleport. Maybe they had some advice for her.
This was a disadvantage to having distanced ourselves from most other immortals, and allying ourselves with the few others who had done the same—being out of the loop meant not knowing who was out there now.
Min may have a good idea. I made a mental note to call him when we got home.
“What are you—” Dahlia’s tone was panicked. She faltered in her step. “No.”
“Dahlia?” I rested a hand on her arm.
She shook me off and looked past me with a gaze that said she wasn’t here. “It can’t— What?”
“She’s seeing something, isn’t she?” Magnus sounded concerned.
Fen stepped behind Dahlia and gripped her shoulders, holding her in place. She tried to jerk free, but he held her tight and backed up out of the flow of foot traffic.
Taking her hand again, I grasped her chin with my other hand and tried to get her to look at me. Her stare was still unfocused and though she was fighting, she wasn’t responding to us.
“Dahlia.” I made my tone firmer. “Where are you?”
She continued to mutter incomplete thoughts.
“Dahlia,” I barked.
She turned to me, and seemed to sink against Fen’s touch. “Oh, fuck me.” She sounded drained.
“What did you see?” I assumed one of the visions of the future that came with being a dragon, but I was looking for details.
She shook her head. “I don’t know. It didn’t make sense beyond a really bad feeling. As in, I felt like I was channeling… someone?” She pressed her palm to her forehead and leaned more weight against Fen. “Fuck me.”
“Let’s go home.” I adjusted my hand to weave my fingers with hers instead of gripping tight.
Dahlia scrubbed her face and straightened up. “No. It’s okay. I’m okay. I need to get used to these stupid glimpses of potential futures, right?”
I didn’t know if that was the case or not. Maybe Urd and Artura had locked themselves away from the world partially because the visions were taxing. They didn’t talk about it, or much of anything, so it was difficult to say. But Artura had offered to teach Dahlia some things. “We’ll go get breakfast if you’ll talk to Artura about the visions.”
Dahlia worked her jaw, and I tried to anticipate what her argument would be.
“All right.” She yielded.
She must be very out of sorts if she was giving up without a fight.
As we started walking again, the feeling of residual magic slid along my skin. It was faint, like the scent of pending rain on a spring day, which made it difficult for me to determine if it was a fresh signature or lingered from a being who was here days ago.
“I wondered if I’d ever see you again.” The woman radiated kindness.
Dahlia’s smile was warm, but to someone who knew her, it didn’t mask the tension that kept her body coiled and on high alert. “I found my way home, thanks to you. But I wanted to do the trip right this time, so I brought my sister. My guys. They keep me out of trouble, you know.” Her tone was light and chatty, bordering on rambling, as she introduced us to Tania.
Which tended to mean her mind was racing but she had to be on for whomever she was talking to.
“She’s lying.” I matched my playful tone to hers, and slid in just enough magic-tinged seduction to make Tania feel at ease. “We all get in more trouble together.” I winked.
“Don’t listen to him.” Dahlia’s laugh was bright and the right level of amused and nervous. At times like this, her training to be anyone the situation required shone through. “We’re really harmless, especially as a group.”
I fed a little more magical suggestion into the air, helping Tania believe the words. She’d remember us, but not as a threat, regardless of who asked. I had to push harder than normal, as the mystical essence in the air was more potent now. It wrapped around me in an uncomfortably tight embrace.
“I believe it.” Tania grinned and pointed us toward a table. “Let me get you drinks, and you figure out what you’d like to eat.”
I lightly touched her arm. “What do you recommend? Tell you what—you pick for us, and we’ll take it to go.”
“You’re a brave lot. You’ve got it.” Tania sounded amused and at ease.
“To go?” Dahlia asked softly after Tania walked away. “So I’m not the only one whose skin feels like it’s going to crawl off.”
“No,” Magnus and Fen said in unison.
Most of the time I could forget I was surrounded by hunters, but at this moment I was grateful for it. I could fight, but I’d rather not, and having these three on my side made me feel better about any pending conflict.
Our conversation went dead while we waited for Tania to return with our food. The four of us were too busy watching our surroundings while trying to look like we were doing anything else.
Tania returned a few minutes later with two paper bags that looked ready to burst at the seams. “Here you go, all set.”
“Thank you.” I poured the warmth and charm into my voice. “For taking care of our girl.” I pressed two large bills into her palm.
“Oh no, I can’t. I did it because she needed help. No other reason.” Tania flushed.
“Please.” I pushed the godly charm a little harder. “We’d be lost without her and I’ll be hurt if you don’t. You wouldn’t want that.”
“Of course I wouldn’t.” Tania pocketed the money.
Fen nudged me hard in the back.
Maybe I was pushing a little too hard. Whatever was in the air was throwing me off. Fen took the food and we headed outside. I reached for people’s hands.
“We shouldn’t do this here.” Dahlia shook her head. “I know, I’ve been here before, but if TOM is looking for magical signatures…”
“We should go back to where we arrived. Maybe retrace our steps. Make sure we don’t send anyone looking for us directly to Tania’s doorstep,” Magnus said.
That made sense. The four of us retraced our path back to the spot Dahlia had ported us into, and the longer we walked, the more my uneasiness grew.
“Take Magnus back,” Dahlia said. “I’ll meet you at NEON.”
“Duckie.” Fen’s tone was warning, and if he’d pulled out the nickname, he was trying to soften the blow.
She scowled. “I need to get this right. I need to get something right. I’ll meet you back at NEON.”
I didn’t like this plan. It didn’t matter, because Dahlia had already vanished.
I took Fen and Magnus, dropped Magnus off with a few old friends. She’d refused to go home recently if Dahlia wasn’t there. I didn’t blame her.
Within seconds, Fen and I were back at NEON.
Dahlia wasn’t here. I’d feel her if she was in a different room. If she was anywhere within any of my spheres of protection. I’d be able to sense her if she was somewhere else in the world, and she’d just landed in the wrong place.
“What’s wrong?” Fen asked.
“Dahlia’s gone.”
“Gone where?”
“Nowhere.” It didn’t matter how far I extended my senses, across the entire world, I couldn’t find her aura.
Four
Dahlia
When my new location came into view, I was in a building, but it wasn’t NEON. My gut lurched before my brain caught up, and I summoned everything I’d learned so far to get me the fuck out of the current TOM training facility.
The problem was, I couldn’t see the outside world. I must be doing something wrong, because my magic didn’t think anything existed except this campus.
“On your knees.” The shout came from behind me, and I found myself surrounded by half a dozen TOM soldiers leveling assault rifles at me.
Instinct said to follow the barked order. Years of training that insisted I comply in an impossible situation until I had a way out.
Recent events reminded me I was a dragon and who the fuck did they think they were?
A dragon who didn’t know how to use her own power and who was facing off against a group of people with bullets that could kill some immortals. I wasn’t ready to be their dragon test subject.
“Now.”
I hid a jump at the barked order
“Dahlia.” Vidar’s smooth tone made my knees shake more than a room full of guns pointed at my head.
But I’d learned from a young age to never back down, even from a god. He’d been the god to teach me that. “Hello, Vidar.”
“Nice of you to visit. To what do we owe this pleasure?”
“I wanted to see the new place. See if you really made it nearly identical to the old one.” The campus I was raised on had been raised when the ancient god sealed underneath was released, but Vidar had brought most of the surviving members of TOM to a new location that closely resembled the old one.
