In the Shadow of Dragons (Aftermagic Book 1) Read online

  “Yep. Just make sure you replace the toilet paper if you use the last of it,” he said. “Paper’s stocked in the cabinet.”

  “Got it.”

  Blake started walking again, and before she could nudge things back to Diesel, he picked it up. “Anyway, your roommate won’t hurt you,” he said. “I wouldn’t expect a lot of interesting conversations, but he’s safer than he looks.”

  “But not friendly,” she said.

  “Well, it’s more that he doesn’t have a lot to talk about.” He looked over his shoulder. “Diesel has amnesia, or something. He has no idea who he is or where he came from.”

  She frowned. “Amnesia or … something?”

  “That’s the thing. No one knows what happened, because he doesn’t remember, so he couldn’t have told anyone so they could tell him. It’s one of those vicious-circle deals.”

  “When did he get amnesia?”

  Blake shrugged. “He says meeting Noah is the first thing he remembers. That was four years ago, before I got here. Hey, we’re coming up on the hot springs. You hear that?”

  She did hear something. A distant, bubbling whisper. The air smelled damper, felt heavier. The tunnel bent sharply to the right ahead, and when they turned the corner, she could see the end where it opened up.

  Blake stopped at the mouth of the tunnel and gestured. “Ladies first,” he said.

  She raised an eyebrow, shrugged and walked past him. Into something magical.

  They’d built a wooden platform flush with the tunnel, roughly twelve by twelve feet with a walkway curving off to the left and down. Lawn chairs lined the edge along a double railing, looking out on a glass-smooth expanse of water, deep blue in the spotlights from the deck. A fine mist of steam hovered above the surface, and the only place the water was disturbed was the far side of the cave, where three small jets of water arched from the rock wall and bubbled into the pool below.

  Two irregular breaks in the cave ceiling showed swatches of deep black sky, spangled with stars.

  “It’s pretty when the sun’s up, too,” Blake said from behind her. “Makes the water more of an aqua color. And you can see clear to the bottom.”

  Teague turned to smile at him. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” she said. “Thank you.”

  “Hey, no problem. Welcome to the gang.”

  She tried not to show it, but the casual remark made her feel kind of awful. She wasn’t part of the gang, never would be. Just marking time until she could contact her knight in tarnished armor.

  If she didn’t keep in mind that these people were enemies, and control her emotions accordingly, she could be in real trouble here.

  CHAPTER 29

  The Badlands

  August 9, 10:59 p.m.

  Diesel’s screams sounded particularly tortured tonight. Either that, or Noah was amplifying them through his own guilt.

  He stood at the cavern entrance above the ravine, waiting for the long seconds of his friend’s nightly torment to drag by. He felt bad for not being here last night, and worse for saddling Diesel with the high-tempered new girl. But there was nothing else he could do.

  The magic she’d used in the sparring room hadn’t even been full-bore, and it was stronger than anyone else’s, except Diesel. If she went off the rails, he was the only one capable of overpowering her.

  When the big man finally fell silent, Noah ducked inside and turned the flashlight on for him, then went back out to wait. After a moment he heard plodding steps, then rustling fabric. It seemed like Diesel struggled a bit longer than usual to get dressed.

  Then he was standing beside him, quiet as a shadow. Looking at the sky.

  Noah nodded an acknowledgment. “You know, maybe we should consider a different strategy,” he said. “I don’t think the water is helping.”

  Diesel shrugged. “Keeps me from using the springs much, anyway.”

  “True.” The man was incredibly self-conscious about his Magesign. Even among a vast subset of people with a wide range of markings and features, his were distinctive. Utterly unlike anything else. “Listen, I am so sorry about Teague,” he said. “I know she’s going to be a handful. Soon as she calms down, I’ll move her to a different room.”

  “It’s fine. Darby was a hothead when she got here, too.”

  “Seriously, man, you have no idea. You didn’t see her in the Warrens.” Noah tensed, recalling that spiteful look, the absolute contempt in her eyes — and that was her reaction to him saving her life. He couldn’t imagine what she’d do to someone who crossed her.

  Whatever it was, she definitely wanted to do it to Julian Bishop.

  Diesel eased out a careful breath and gazed across the ravine. “It was bad tonight,” he admitted softly. “Worse than it’s been in a long time. Wish I knew why … it’s …”

  When he didn’t finish the sentence, Noah looked at him. His eyes were half-closed, his shoulders slumped, muscles relaxing in quick spurts like a wind-up toy running out of steam.

  “Oh, shit.” Noah threw his arms around the man’s waist and hauled him back from the edge of the narrow lip, partway into the cavern. He knew what was coming — the trance-like state, the Diesel with the booming voice and the strange speech pattern. Sometimes when it happened, he paced and roared blindly wherever he was.

  He could’ve tranced himself right off the ledge, thirty feet straight down to the unforgiving rocks below. Right then, Noah decided he was never leaving Diesel alone at this time of night again.

  Diesel snapped straight, his eyes wide open and glowing pure white. Noah shuddered — he’d forgotten about that, and the way light danced around him like smoky mist.

  “The Bishop.” The hollow roar of his voice echoed and pulsed in the cavern. “We have seen the Bishop, seen his false shield. Thin it is, and yet we cannot pierce it, yet with all power and might. And still the blood. The great blow fails, yet in failure, the scratch. The might of the small. There is a way. The Orrin, the stave, and restored. The stave the Bishop’s mighty false shield. Take it. Restore the Orrin. The stave, the shield, is.”

  As fast as it came, the light left Diesel’s eyes and he slumped toward the ground.

  Noah grabbed him again, grunting at the near-dead weight. He managed to settle him against the cavern wall and crouched in front of him. “You done, man?” he said, trying to keep his tone light in spite of the way his gut still shivered.

  “Mm-hm,” Diesel groaned. He lifted his head slowly. “Orrin again.” So it was one of the times Diesel knew what he was saying, though he had no understanding. “And Julian. That’s about all I got. Did you figure any of that out?”

  “Maybe.”

  “That sounded confident.”

  “Actually, it might be cautiously optimistic.” For once, he thought he had figured it out. At least some of it. “Today was the first time you saw Julian that you can remember, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay. So whatever part of you does that, it sees what you see. ‘We have seen the Bishop’.”

  Diesel’s mouth flattened. “Great. So I’m schizophrenic.”

  “I don’t think so.” Noah didn’t want to get into the split-personality discussion. He couldn’t explain it, but he sensed that wasn’t it. “The more important thing is ‘stave’. It’s another word for staff.”

  “Huh. Never heard that word before.” Diesel looked slightly relieved. “So, the bishop’s mighty shield or whatever…”

  “‘The stave the Bishop’s mighty false shield’. That’s what you said.” He could actually remember most of the words, because they’d started to make sense. “You hit him full blast, but it didn’t do anything. I was watching. And I think his staff soaked the blow.”

  Now Diesel was nodding, heartened. Almost hopeful. “So if we take away his staff…”

  “Exactly.”

  “‘And still the blood’. We made him bleed,” Diesel said. “He’s vulnerable, and we can take him down without his shield.”

&nb
sp; Noah decided not to mention the downside. He might be vulnerable without the staff — but with it, he was pretty much invulnerable. Untouchable. They wouldn’t have all day to throw rocks at him until he died.

  And they couldn’t exploit a weakness if they never got close enough to make him weak.

  CHAPTER 30

  The Badlands

  August 10, 9:03 a.m.

  Teague had managed to fall asleep last night before Diesel came back from wherever he’d gone. And when she’d woken up an hour ago, he was already up and out. At least she thought that was what happened. She couldn’t tell if the mattress on the cave floor had been slept in or not, so maybe he’d never gone to bed.

  Besides the mattress and the cot she’d been assigned, the room contained little else. A small end table next to Diesel’s bed with a few candles and a lamp, which had been turned on at some point this morning, an old-fashioned wooden folding rack with Diesel’s clothes draped carelessly over it. Nothing more.

  The man was a blank in every way. An angry blank.

  She hadn’t even thought about how they would feed everyone around here until she went out to the main cavern and found most of them at the long table, eating breakfast. Noah wasn’t there, or Oscar and the blonde girl, Peyton, but the rest of them were. Including Diesel. He didn’t look like someone who’d stayed up all night, but she didn’t know him well enough to tell.

  No one acknowledged her until she sat down cautiously at the far end, with an empty chair between her and Darby. The small conversations at the table ceased, and the short woman fixed a plate and put it in front of her without a word. Then everyone picked up where they’d left off.

  She’d eaten some kind of meat, some kind of fruit or vegetable, and some kind of bread. No idea what any of it was. She couldn’t even guess where it came from — it wasn’t like there were any grocery stores or restaurants out here. But it tasted good, and it filled her stomach.

  They continued to ignore her when she got up from the table, headed for the front of the cavern, and went out the way she’d seen Noah leave last night, at one end of the draped layers of fabric and netting that covered the cave.

  Outside, she walked several steps away from the entrance before she stopped to take a calming breath and look around. She hadn’t seen any of this yesterday, since she woke up already on the inside and Noah had told her she couldn’t leave. In fact, she was surprised no one tried to stop her from coming out here.

  It was a deep ravine that could’ve been anywhere in Hell’s Half Acre, wide at this end and tapering gradually to a narrow point that disappeared into shadows around fifty yards ahead. Craggy, nearly vertical stone walls, dusty gray with horizontal brown stripes and the occasional patch of moss yellowing in the sun. If there was a way out, other than somehow scaling those walls, she didn’t see it.

  No wonder they hadn’t stopped her. She couldn’t leave if she wanted to.

  She walked along the ravine a bit more, away from the cavern, listening to the wind whistle through the rock formations and the fine grit of stone crunch beneath her feet. This wasn’t going to work. She would never last weeks out here pretending she was one of them, trying to win their trust by touring the bathrooms and being ignored. She needed a way out, now.

  Julian would just have to come up with another genius plan. One that didn’t involve her.

  She’d wandered maybe twenty or thirty feet when she slowed to a stop, sighed and started to turn back. For now, she had to try something. Strike up a conversation, with Darby or maybe Blake again. Find out anything she could to win trust points — or escape.

  A small gasp escaped her when she realized she couldn’t see the entrance.

  “How the hell?” she murmured, walking rapidly toward the wall. Whatever they were using, the camouflage was impressive. Must be part of the reason they hadn’t been found out here. Grudgingly, she had to admit the policy on not talking to people they didn’t know was another reason. She probably would’ve done the same thing if she was a rebel.

  Especially knowing some of them, like Darby and Indigo — maybe even Oscar, who looked about halfway to dwarf — would be killed on sight if they ran into patrols or a Knight, no questions asked. She’d done it herself more times than she could count.

  She was ten feet from the wall when the camo flap drew back and Diesel emerged. Of course it would be him. He moved aside, folded his arms and glared at her. “Going somewhere?”

  She stopped. “Obviously not,” she said, sweeping a two-armed gesture at the sheer rock walls. “Are you?”

  “Yeah. Wherever you are.”

  “Excuse me? I don’t need a babysitter.”

  He smirked without a hint of amusement. “Not babysitter,” he said. “Drill sergeant.”

  Before she could process that, the flap opened again. Darby, and then Blake. “Did you start her yet?” Blake said, pausing to make a minor adjustment to the covering. “I can’t wait to see this.”

  Diesel grunted. “Does it look like we started?”

  “Hey. Slingshot boy,” Darby said. “Shouldn’t you be replenishing your rock collection?”

  “Did that last night.”

  “Well, go do it some more. The grownups are busy.”

  “Bite me, Bliss.”

  Teague huffed loudly. “Is anyone going to tell me what I’m doing, or should I guess?”

  “Shit. Sorry, Teague.” Darby’s grin went a long way toward breaking up the grim vision of spending the next few weeks afraid and ignored. “We’re not trying to be rude,” she said. “We’re just kind of rusty on the whole procedure thing. It’s been a long time since we had a new recruit.”

  Blake raised a hand. “Don’t worry. They were dicks to me, too.”

  “Yeah, but you deserved it.” Darby flashed a fond smile. “Make yourself useful and go grab some gear.”

  “On it.”

  Blake started across the ravine, waving a little as he walked past Teague. She watched him a moment, then turned back to Darby. “I still don’t know what I’m doing,” she said.

  “Showing off,” Diesel said. “Or not.”

  “We need to see what you can do, combat-wise,” Darby said, lobbing a quick eye-roll at Diesel. “For your training.”

  “What training?”

  Darby smiled. “Okay, there’s three things we do around here. When we’re not running around terrorizing the population, of course,” she added with a snort. “We eat. We sleep. And we train. Everybody’s got a specialty, so whatever that is, we help everyone else get better at it. Make sense?”

  “I think so,” she said. “What’s your specialty?”

  Grinning, Darby put an arm behind her back and came out with a gun. “Firearms,” she said. “I’m aces with my babies. This one’s Little Betty.” She kissed the barrel and made the weapon disappear again. “I’ll have to introduce you to Big Betty sometime. She’s a beaut.”

  Teague nodded along, trying not to think about what Darby used her guns for. She’d forgotten what these people were for a minute. “How about yours?” she said to Diesel.

  He only glowered at her.

  “Diesel doesn’t need to specialize,” Darby said, patting the big man’s arm.

  She didn’t elaborate, and Teague didn’t bother asking. There might be an opportunity here to get some information, even get out of camp. And maybe she could make a break for it. “I’m best with a bow,” she said. “But I don’t have mine. Do you think someone could bring me to my place? I could grab my gear, maybe some clothes. All I have is what I’m wearing.”

  Darby’s brow furrowed. “Didn’t Noah tell you about the old-life policy?”

  “The what?”

  “He didn’t. What a moron,” Darby said, laughing a little. “Everything at your place, everything you had or were before, that’s old-life. You’re someone else out here. It’s a fresh start, no old-life baggage allowed. A chance to be better.”

  Okay, Noah had mentioned that. But he didn’t put it as
nicely as Darby — he basically said forget all your shit, you’re not leaving here until I say so. Which will be never. “All right,” she said. “But I really don’t have any other clothes.”

  Darby eyeballed her. “You’re about Peyton’s size. I’m sure she’ll share until the next supply run, and somebody will grab stuff for you,” she said. “Don’t worry about your gear, either. Ours is better.”

  She seriously doubted that. Everything she had for combat — the custom bow, the Dyneema-carbon arrows, the Damascus steel sword, the armor — was designed and built exclusively for the Knights, individually tailored to each of their styles and abilities. But she nodded and smiled, made the appropriate noises, and waited for Blake to return.

  Darby was right about one thing. She might as well train, since she had nothing better to do while she waited to escape.

  By the time Teague finished beating Blake in a swordfight, nearly everyone had gathered outside to watch. Except Noah.

  Blake had returned from the armory and motor pool, wherever that was, with a wheelbarrow full of weapons and targets. When they started this, Teague considered underperforming to ensure she got a lot of training, and just to be spiteful. But she’d changed her mind. If they knew she was a combat asset, maybe they’d let her join them in fights sooner.

  She’d breezed through hand-to-hand combat, knife throwing and spear tossing, and blown them away with her arrow performance, despite her reservations about the crossbow. The weapon had no brand name or model number, nothing identifying on the stock. It looked like a pump-action shotgun with a bow slapped on the end. And it shouldn’t have worked at all.

  But when she tried it, she was highly impressed. She refused to go as far as better than hers, but it was exquisitely made — the draw was smooth and took only seconds, the revolving barrel shot held six arrows, and there were extra ‘clips’ to speed reloading even more. Truthfully, she’d never seen a weapon like it.