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“Just who I was looking for.” Roland’s smug voice sounded from the other end of the sword.
Shit.
50
Claire carefully got to her feet, sword still at her neck. The battle had been pushed away from her location in the time she was in the barrier with Henry Storm. Her mates were nowhere in sight but Claire opened her bonds back up, trying to reach them without tipping Roland off. She didn’t know if Roland knew she was fully bonded or guessed but she didn’t want to give him any advantage.
Relief and worry poured through them and Claire fought to keep her expression neutral as she turned slowly to face Roland. She allowed her mates to see through her eyes as she sent the image down their bonds. She heard Malcolm’s roar from the battlefield as he raced to her.
“Ah, ah,” Roland shook a finger at her as her fingers tightened around her daggers instinctively. “None of that. Drop your daggers.”
Claire smirked a bit as she dropped her daggers and they appeared in the spelled sheaths at her waist. Roland frowned softly. “Remove the sheaths and throw them that way,” he gestured. “Slowly and with no funny business. Unless you want one of your mates to lose a mother. On the other hand, maybe that would help them relate to you more.”
Claire froze at his words. They had one of her mates’ mothers? Who?
He pressed the sword closer to her neck, the steel biting into the skin there and she hurried to do what he had said. She had to play along until a better opportunity arose. She tossed her daggers away and Roland pointed sideways, away from the battle. He didn’t even glance down at Henry Storm’s body and a flare of anger shot through her but she swallowed it down. She needed to wait. She needed to make sure her mates’ mother was safe.
Roland moved her quickly, sword prodding at her back now as they moved over some rough terrain to drop into a small valley amid the rocks. She tried telling her Triad through their bonds that Roland had one of their mothers but nothing went through. She tried sending images down the bonds of where she was as well but nothing. Roland must be blocking it somehow.
The hair on her arms stood on end as they passed through a magical barrier. One second there was empty ground in front of her and the next second she stumbled over a body. Maxios’s vacant eyes stared back at her as she scrambled up to her feet.
“Unfortunately, Maxios decided to have second thoughts about gifting his Dragon Fire to our cause,” Roland said, moving around in front of her. “So we had to improvise instead.”
He laid a hand on a hooded figure’s shoulder and yanked the hood off. Mara’s furious eyes locked with Claire’s.
Oh shit.
At the sight of Claire, Mara started fighting her bonds even more but a different dagger to Claire’s throat had her stilling. Claire was getting pretty tired of the feeling of steel at her neck. She slowly turned to see Vanya holding the other end of a ceremonial dagger, his raven familiar eyeing Claire from his shoulder.
She looked past him to see a low table laid out with four piles of ingredients surrounding a long staff like object with a weird looking grip at the end. She recognized the Fortis plant laying in one of the piles. A few cylinders of a glowing liquid made up another pile. She tried to discreetly study the others but Roland caught where her gaze was.
He moved from Mara to the table. “Marveling at our creation? I admit it took us far longer than I would have liked to have found the perfect combination of ingredients. Some combinations can explode, don't you know? Well I suppose you do from your potions class.”
Just how long had the Council been aware of her presence at the Academy?
“Anyway,” he prattled on as if they were having a regular conversation instead of one where there was a dagger at Claire’s neck and one of her mate’s mothers bound next to her.
“It took time to find the perfect combination of ingredients. Lots of good witches and shifters lost trying to find the perfect combination and perfect binding ingredients. Even then we were limited by only being able to consume one person’s magic at a time. That was true until Vanya ran across an old spell book. In it, he discovered a legend. You see, we were not the first to come up with this idea. Others had it before us. And you know who had it last? The Mad King.”
Claire’s eyes widened. The Mad King? The same Mad King from the drawings in the cave outside her Triad’s hoard?
Roland seemed to take pleasure in her reaction as he continued boasting of their success like it was a sure thing. Until she got Mara free and away from here, it might be.
“Maxios’s hoard was good for more than just blackmail over the uncooperative dragon. It held the key to our success. We had been missing just one thing. Power. We tried using your mother’s blood but it didn’t work. That’s when we knew. The only thing that could create a weapon like this, was you. So we watched and waited for a child of enormous power to enter the Academy. And then you did. Serving yourself to us on a silver platter.”
It did look like she had played right into their hands, didn’t it? Claire hoped her mother had foreseen that and there was a way out of here.
“Once the ingredients are bound together,” Vanya took up the story. “We’ll have a perfect tool to prevent another Great War from happening ever again. It’ll suck the magic right out of the troublemakers. The Realm will be perfect.”
“And under your control,” Claire interrupted. “Isn’t that what you mean instead? You’ll have a perfect tool to control people?”
“And you’ll be the one to create it,” Roland’s smile turned nasty. “That is if you want your mate’s mother to live. How do you think your people will feel when they learn you will have created the very tool we used to end their pathetic existence?”
Mara’s struggles caught Claire’s attention and it was clear on her face that she would rather die than let Claire create this weapon but Claire knew the pain of losing a mother. She didn’t wish that on anyone, especially not her mate Malcolm. The grief would wreck him.
Claire looked down at the ingredients and then to Mara and then to Maxios’s body lying there. His body reminded her of the man she had just killed. Yet another death for power. This Realm has had an obsession with power for a long time mainly because of the men behind her. What was it Henry Storm had said.All magic comes at a cost?The cost for this seemed too high.
Claire’s eyes widened slightly as Henry’s words flashed again in her mind. She thought he had meant them as a warning of the dark magic in his body. But what if he was reminding her of something else. Something her mother had been trying to tell her too.
