Exile: Sídhí Summer Camp #3 (13 page)

Jared darted forward only to have Emily jump
on his back, screaming in his ear like a banshee. Fangs flashed and
she bit her brother’s shoulder.

Sarah glared at Mac. A menacing growl started
deep in her chest. Clenching her hand in a fist, she choked back
the urge to kill one of her best friends. It wasn’t easy, not when
his hand wrapped around Nick’s throat, holding him a foot off the
ground.

“I thought they were fighting the Dyrst’Lye?”
she demanded through clenched teeth.

“Yeah, well, the winged guy showed up nearly
immediately and flung a ball of white-fire at the dragon. The
dragon took off with its wings on fire but the winged man didn’t
follow him.”

“Phoenix,” Sarah said quietly, watching Mac
single-handed - literally, single-handedly - beat the crap out of
her cabin mates.

“Phoenix?” Katie asked.

“The winged man is a phoenix, a fairy within
the military caste,” Sarah said, trying to calm her growing anger
before she did something she might regret. “The white-fire is
actually a mixture of fire and lightning, very unique to the
phoenix race.”

Head held high, she started forward, ignoring
the teens around her. “Mackenzie!” she snapped, stopping in front
of him. Nick dangled bare inches from her.

“Liege,” Mac greeted her, striking his free
fist to his chest in an age-old show of loyalty.

“What the hell do you think you are doing?”
she snarled so quietly, with such menace, that the other teens
halted their attack.

“He has destroyed you. So, I will destroy
him,” Mac said matter-of-factly. The icy expression on the normally
cheerful face sent a shiver of warning down her back.

“Do I look damaged?”

A muscle twitched in his jaw. “Not yet, but
you will. As head of your guard, it is my right to be the one to
kill him.”

“No,” she said softly, yet emphatically. She
refused to show him the terror gripping her throat. A single slip
in his concentration and Mac could kill Nick with a burst of
lightning laced fire. More than once, she’d seen accidents happen;
a singed body part during training sessions was nothing new.

“He hurt you,” Mac said. Glaring at her, his
eyes turned silver.

“Mac, bring it down a notch, now,” she
ordered. Staring him in the eye, she waited until his emotions
calmed and his eyes returned to their normal pale green. The
electricity racing through his body made his sun-touched hair move
restlessly. “Perhaps you do not remember my standing order from
several months ago. No one, including you, will harm him.”

“I remember,” he snarled, “but that was
before he pushed you into destroying your entire future.”

“So, you intentionally disobeyed a direct
order?” she asked in a lethally soft tone.

He glared at her. Molten fire flared through
his eyes, once again turning them silver, he snapped, “Yes.”

“You will release him, harming him no more
than what he already is, or I will name you Oath Breaker.”

The calmly worded threat was not a simple
one. For a Sídhí, especially one bound by blood like Mac, to be
named Oath Breaker was worse than death.

All the blood drained from Mac’s face. His
hand tightened before snapping open. “My honor, my loyalty, is
forever yours, my Liege. Please, forgive my transgression,” his
said stiffly, formally. His voice held a note of alarm, reflecting
the near panic in his eyes.

“Forgiven and forgotten,” she said quietly,
skimming the tips of her fingers down his arm. He froze and his
eyes widened in alarm, but she had already turned toward the cabin.
Intent on ignoring Nick as he knelt on the ground, she kept her
gaze straight ahead.

“Sarah,” Nick rasped, struggling to
breathe.

Emily hurried around his fallen body,
grinning from ear-to-ear. “Mac,” Emily said eagerly, “oh my, gosh!
You have gorgeous wings. My name’s Emily. I’ve never been more
excited in my entire life!”

With a word of warning on her lips, Sarah
turned. Phoenix didn’t welcome questions or touch, except very
briefly by a friend or family member. Like many fairy, they were
rude and insular to other races.

Adjusting their attitude had been an uphill
battle when she started adding phoenix to her original guard unit.
She remembered one of their first mixed training sessions. A
trainer’s fingers had been burned nearly black when the man refused
to release Mac during an exercise drill.

“Come on, let’s go someplace and talk,” Emily
said, reaching for his arm.

The calm expression Mac had maintained during
the fight shifted. Baring his teeth, he growled at Emily. The
lethal sound filled the air.

Emily froze mid-step. “Mac?” she asked
uncertainly, confusion clouded her eyes.

“I’m not going anywhere with you,” he said
disdainfully. “For future reference, do not ever touch me. Do you
understand?”

“You’re refusing?” she asked hesitantly. The
dismayed words sounded hurt, horrified. Her solid black eyes filled
with tears. “No, I don’t understand. Why? You don’t even know me.
Why would you reject... oh!”

Going In Between, Mac disappeared, cutting
off her rapid words.

“
Call if you need me, I’ll be near,”
Mac mentally said to Sarah.

A dozen people started talking at the same
time, asking a multitude of questions. Emily looked lost, nearly in
tears as she searched for some sign of Mac.

Sarah looked around and realized the area was
filling with curious teens from the nearby beach. She slapped her
ice-queen face on and ignored them.

The teens from her cabin dispersed, going in
different directions. Most of them limped up the cabin steps. Poor
Emily circled the clearing, obviously seeking Mac’s scent. Brianna,
who appeared after the fighting was finished, stalked down the main
path, going toward the commissary.

Sarah skirted the cabin and headed toward the
lake. The curiosity seekers quickly stepped out of her way.

Nearing the lake, she angled right, into the
trees surrounding the tranquil body of water. If she cut through
the forest, her destination would be a short thirty-minute
walk.

“
Liege?”
Mac asked politely in her
head.

Knowing no one could see or hear her, she
snorted.
“You call me liege one more time and I will pluck all
your feathers,”
she said with a fleeting touch of humor.

He chuckled in her head.
“I always call
you liege.”

“
Only in serious situations, not when it’s
just the two of us. Stop being a horse’s butt and walk with
me.”

“
You’re not alone,”
he said
cryptically.

“
Nick? Yes, I know he’s back there. I’m
ignoring him,”
she said firmly, hoping her words would
reinforce her belief.

A soft thump sounded behind her. A moment
later, with his midnight wings folded tightly at his back, Mac
walked-up beside her.

“What happened?” he questioned.

Her silence was its own answer.

“I’m not leaving until you tell me why you
did it,” he insisted, ignoring her death-like glare. “You put up
with his nonsense for months. Then you up and have your lifeBud
burned out. Blast it all, Sarah, you’re not simply my liege, you’re
one of my true friends.”

Refusing to let angry tears spill down her
face, Sarah clenched her teeth together. She didn’t want to talk
about it, but Mac could be as persistent and irritating as a swarm
of gnats.

Not wanting Nick to overhear, she spoke in
hushed tones, quietly telling Mac everything that had happened over
the previous week.

From the growl Mac uttered, she wasn’t
successful in hiding her distress from him.

“Camp is for having fun. I could capture a
member of the dragon council then we could have some fun. I
guarantee we would have the details on how to open and shut a
gateway by the end of the week,” he said solemnly without a hint of
humor in his grim expression. He meant every single word.

Part of her charade was kidnapping and
torturing people, but she had never harmed an innocent party, at
least, not without permission. He knew that. She looked at him as
if he was crazy. Oh, he pretended to be certifiably insane, but
over the years, she had arrived at another conclusion. His crazy
attitude was a mask, much like the one she herself wore.

“When your lunatic suggestions start sounding
like a good idea, I know I must be tired.”

He chuckled, breaking his unusually somber
mood. “At least I helped you take your mind off the moron following
us.”

“He’s not a moron,” Sarah snarled. “While
we’re on the subject of morons, where were you yesterday? If you
had been near enough, you would have witnessed the mite
attack.”

His face tightened with remorse. “I was
trying to stay far enough away so you wouldn’t see me and send me
home. Then, the one time you call for help, I wasn’t there,” he
said guiltily.

She didn’t doubt his regret, but she knew he
wasn’t telling her the entire story. “In other words, something
caught your attention and you wandered away,” she said, snorting at
his look of chagrin. “You are worse than Emily. Your curiosity is
going to be the death of you.”

“Maybe so, but yesterday was work related. I
caught one of the dragon guardians shooting cadets with
tranquilizer darts. After drugging them, the guardian
electronically tagged them and called in a pack of trolls for
retrieval.”

“Trolls?” she asked. Shock sharpened her
voice.

“They had a gnome trainer that was using
those little ear-bud transmitters that Garrick suggested we use
with the sasquatch. If I had thought, even for a second, that you
might need me, I would never have followed them.”

She brushed her fingers against his,
forgiving him of any wrongdoing. “I know that,” she said quietly.
“Now, tell me what you found.”

“While I was at the troll facility, waiting
for the one they called Mistress, I slipped out of the In Between.
I wasn’t sure which valley I was in and I wanted to see what other
valleys might have the same dimensional footprint. I moved through
several layers, including Haven Valley and Earth.”

Sarah glanced up at him, eyebrow arched. “I
take it some poor soul had an angel sighting?”

Mac snorted. “I checked. The area was a small
hay field. There were mountains on either side. There were no
people, no buildings, nothing of humanity anywhere near.”

“But?” she prompted.

“A group of children were playing amid the
stalks of grass,” he said with a pinched look.

“Children? In the middle of nowhere? How do
you manage to attract such, such...” she held her palm up in defeat
as she searched for the perfect word.

“Bad luck?” he asked mournfully.

“I was thinking chaos, but bad luck works.”
She sighed. “So, did you find out where the troll facility is at?
And, who is the Mistress?”

“Yes to both, the trolls are in Dragon
Valley, northeast of the main campground in a very small, secure
area. Mountains surround the little valley. As far as I could tell,
unless you want several days of hard climbing, the area is only
accessible through a single connecting gateway. After I realized
the location, I wanted to return to you so I called General Cory.
He sent Jarvis and Lambert to keep watch. I was ready to leave when
Guardian Clara showed up,” he said with a snarl, eyes going silver.
“She’s been on our terrorist watch list for years, and when the
gnomes called her mistress, I got all the confirmation I needed. I
would have been happy to maintain a silent presence and let the
evidence build-up against her, but that bloated witch started
torturing those kids.”

His eyes turn silver, flickering with wild
flames. A harsh, white glow formed around Mac’s hands. “At first it
was pretty basic, ripped-out fingernails and such, but then she
started spewing short burst of dragon fire at them. Just far enough
away that their skin burst from the heat,” he said in a furious
voice.

Sarah continued walking, keeping her voice
calm, she asked, “Did you kill her?”

“Tried,” he said, baring his teeth as he
growled. “An older dragon showed up and we fought. I think I know
who he was, but I need to confirm. The damn dragon just kept
healing every time I hit him with white-fire, and I wasn’t using
the low volt version I used back at the cabin. The fight wrapped-up
pretty quick, because Jarvis and Leo cornered Clara and managed to
hurt her.”

“And the dragons ported away,” Sarah said
when it appeared he wasn’t going to finish.

“Yes,” he agreed with a snarl.

Sarah’s eyes narrowed in thought. Clara was
extremely similar to Clarabelle. Harry, Clarisse’s dragon mate
must’ve been telling the truth when he spilled his guts about the
Khr'Vurr. “Was Clara a gray dragon with black spikes?” she asked,
sending him a mental image of the dragon she skewered in the
cavern.

“She didn’t have spikes,” he said
thoughtfully, “but on Sídhí, long before the Great War, there was a
dragon clan called Vürst that had retractable spikes. I’ll check it
out.”

Without warning, he sucked in a breath and
blurted. “That girl, the clan vampire with long, black hair, who is
she?”

His abrupt change of subject nearly gave her
whiplash. “Her name is Emily. She is Nick’s younger cousin, and she
is off limits. If she corners you with her constant questions,
don’t even think of hurting her. She doesn’t see anything wrong
with touching.”

“I would never hurt a child,” he said with a
curl of his lips.

“That girl is nearly eighteen. She’s gone
through puberty. In the eyes of the Sídhí, she is an adult.” Sarah
snorted with real laughter. “And from the way your eyes silvered
when you talk about her, you most definitely do not see a
child.”

“Fine,” he snapped, “I noticed her. That
doesn’t mean I like her or anything.”