The Emerald Dragon (The Lost Ancients Book 3) (4 page)

Chapter Six

I was too shocked to scream, and I think it felt the same.

Its tail hit me in the face as it tried to turn around. However, it was now trapped between me and a group of pissed-off faeries.

At first I thought they were the wild faeries come back, but a closer look as they buzzed around blocking the flying snake’s escape showed me they were all wearing tiny overalls. I was saddened that the wild ones hadn’t come back, but glad to see the domesticated ones actually doing something. The sceanra anam had vanished, or so we thought. But if the faeries were hunting down the last of the vicious killer flying snakes, I wouldn’t try to dissuade them. I still had nightmares about one of their victims who had ended up on my doorstep.

Garbage Blossom, still riding Bunky, came up from the rear of the flying mass. “We hunt it.” She waved her war stick in the air and the other faeries mimicked her even though only some had sticks. Bunky seemed more interested in coming to me, and wasn’t watching the sceanra anam.

It watched him though.

With a lightning fast move, the sceanra anam dove up toward Bunky’s middle. I knew if they lost their head, the chimera constructs would effectively die, and I was fond of my little flying goat. I jumped forward to smack the sceanra anam aside, but twenty faeries beat me to it. With war cries they had to have learned from Garbage, they charged forward and started stabbing the thing.

The sceanra anam must have already been injured by the way it turned around when it saw me instead of just eating its way through me. It was hard to read emotions on its snake-like face, but it had seemed as terrified of me as it had been of the faeries.

However, even injured, I would have thought it would have been able to fight off more than twenty faeries. The swirl of bright colors and madness that were the faeries quickly engulfed it.

In under a minute, nothing but shredded bits of sceanra anam drifted to the ground.

I motioned Crusty Bucket over to me since all of the others were focused on the dead creature. Crusty had been looking at a bright light down one of the darker hallways. She was always easily distracted.

“We bring gift.” She waved her arm toward the rest of the faeries.

“Um, thank you? Where did you find it?” The rest of the attack squad surrounded the twenty ‘warriors’ and gave rounds of cheers.

“Out. Out, out, out, very far out.” A scowl flittered across her face at the number of ‘outs’ but she shook it off.

I could ask the others where they’d found it, but I doubted I’d get a better answer. We hadn’t seen the sceanra anam for two months and the hope was they were dead. If not dead, then maybe back into hibernation. The academics had been trying to find any reference to them, to find out how they came out of the ground, and from where. Not to mention how many there were. I’d seen five originally, but we’d already accounted for more than that just by sightings. But aside from them mentioned almost as a grim elven fairy tale, there was nothing to find so far.

Garbage, Leaf, and the rest of this hunting party surrounded me at that point. “We train, we fight!” Garbage waved her war stick in the air and I was immediately in the middle of a faery war cry.

If they yelled like that to the sceanra anam, the thing had been fleeing the cries more than the sticks.

“That’s great.” I looked around; luckily the hallways were still empty. “Uncle Harlan and Alric are in Covey’s office.” I pointed to the gruesome pile of former sceanra anam on the ground. “You need to go get them and tell them to collect this; someone may be able to use it. Oh, and try to tell them where you found the thing. In detail. Give them lots of detail.”

I smiled as I walked away. I did my good deed. They
should
try to see if the academics could do anything with the remains. That I’d instructed Garbage and the others to drive Alric crazy while trying to explain where “out-out-out” was, was simply a bonus.

I stood at the edge of the campus, put my hands on my hips, and tried to figure out exactly how my finding her would help Covey in any way. There was no way I was ready to admit Alric was right about not going after her, I was still too upset about his duplicity. However, there also wasn’t anything I could do to help her. My burgeoning magic was more likely to hurt her than help her. And my weapons training hadn’t gotten much further than my magic.

I surrendered that idea and headed for The Shimmering Dewdrop. It was technically too early in the day for drinking, just a little over two hours had passed since I’d been sitting there drinking tea, but that was my place. No matter how weird life got, that one place was always there for me. That, I could count on.

Unless it was closed?

I was surprised to see no one sitting outside in the café as I approached, but thought maybe folks had wised up to the superiority of a dark pub. Nope, a rarely used sign hung on the door: ‘Closed-gone to shopping’.

“Gone to shopping?” I hadn’t meant to say it aloud, it just happened that way.

“Aye, sorrowful, ain’t it?” The voice was so low; literally, I had to look around for the speaker. One of the daytime bar gnomes sat against the wall. He didn’t look like one of those who had joined us in the fight for the glass gargoyle, but they all sort of looked the same so it was hard to tell.

“They be off to a wedding person.” He waved one small hand in the air and a whiff of stale booze hit me. “Disgusting.”

I shook my head. I knew the two of them were getting married, but a wedding person? That was a new trend come down from the big city of Kenithworth a few weeks’ ride north of us. I knew it wouldn’t have been Foxy’s idea.

I could either sit here with a drunken waste of a gnome, commiserating life’s cruelties, or go home where a repair crew finished fixing all the damage caused by Glorinal and his henchmen while they were looking for the obsidian chimera a few months ago. Going to another bar wasn’t an option, as I didn’t want to drink; I just wanted to whine a bit.

When Amara got stressed, she climbed into a tree. Not the replacement clone of her original tree—he wasn’t big enough yet even if the seedling they used to grow him was fed magic spells along with his water every day. But any of the larger trees out near the ruins. Amara was a dryad, and being in nature, especially a tree, helped calm her down.

Growing up, my mother had told me we had dryad somewhere in our family line. Hence my hair picking up an odd shade of green in the summer. Now was as good a time as ever to test that.

I turned and headed off toward the trees. Ten minutes later, I found them. No idea what to do next.

I stood in a clump of seven trees, all more or less looking the same. “Should one of you be calling to me?” I kept my voice low. Even though no one was around, I didn’t want it to get back to anyone that I stood in a clump of trees talking to them.

The trees gave no response.

“Fine.” I marched up to the first one, and scrambled up it with only one scratch. Not too bad since I didn’t even have memories of climbing trees as a child.

This one seemed nice enough, even had a few branches higher up that looked relatively seat-like.

I climbed up onto the largest and steadiest, and settled in. Nothing. Maybe I needed to touch the tree more. I leaned in so that my entire forearm touched the tree. Still nothing. I seriously wouldn’t strip to come to peace with this tree.

Voices interrupted my musing about tree bonding.

“I tol’ you, I ain’t paying that.” The voice was a bit whiney and high, although slurred. And familiar. Grimwold hadn’t had the same length of jail time as his boss, but I was sure he wasn’t supposed to be out yet.

“You want out of town or ya want folks questioning why you’re out drinking in the woods instead of locked up where you should be?”

I carefully peered down below me. I didn’t recognize the other voice, but now that I was no longer forced to bounty hunt for a living, I made it a point to avoid staying up to date on Beccia’s criminal element. The man was close to Grimwold, but his hat was too broad for me to see his face.

Maybe if I moved closer. I froze the moment after that thought hit me. I could see them well even if I couldn’t see who the other person was. Which meant all they had to do was look up and they’d see me just as easily.

I really needed a faery. One of their more recent new powers was the ability to make a stationary person invisible by landing on them. But since there were none about, I held my breath and prayed to any deity I could think of that neither of them would happen to look up.

“Take this,” Grimwold shoved a small bag at the other person. “Just get me out. Now.” There was a terror in his voice I’d never heard in all the years he annoyed me. Unless the faeries were chasing him. That was a nice memory.

“Not enough. If you want to get to Kenithworth, you are going to need triple this.” The voice was cold.

“I can pay your people more when I get there, I promise. I need out of this place.” Funny how terror had chased away his drunken slur.

I was caught up eavesdropping and shifted a bit without thinking. I swore as a few tree bits drifted down to the heads below. I knew I couldn’t jump out of this tree and get away from them. And climbing higher wasn’t an option. Those branches might hold Amara, but they wouldn’t hold me.

I felt a thunk hit my head and for a second was afraid the man below had seen me and shot me. The second thunk, and a flittering of faery wings to the side of my face, told me it was my faeries.

Just in time. Both Grimwold and the mysterious hat man looked up when my falling tree bits hit them.

“Who’s there?” Grimwold sounded much older and more frightened than he had before going into jail.

“No one, you idiot.” The man with the hat quickly looked back down, but he wasn’t anyone I knew. “It’s the wind. Leaves fall off.”

Grimwold was rattled now. “We need to move, somewhere deeper in the forest.” Without waiting for the second man, he turned and stumbled deeper into the trees. Fear may have sobered his speech, but it didn’t help with his walking.

The man with the hat looked up to where the faeries hid me one more time, swore, and then went after Grimwold. “Wait, I know another way for you to get there, a job.” The rest of their discussion was lost as they moved out of range.

I had never been so happy to see my little flying maniacs in my life.

Crusty and Leaf had been the two who landed on me. Garbage flew surveillance over us.

“Thanks, girls. You have great timing.” Although I doubted they’d been annoying Alric nearly long enough if they were out prowling the forest now.

“We hear you,” Crusty said from her perch on my head. “You call, we come. Boom.”

Now, that was weird. I had no way of calling them, not to mention they used ‘boom’ for a lot of things, most of which were not healthy for any living being.

I reached up with one hand, keeping the other securely on my branch, and pulled her off my hair. It was sometimes easier for Crusty to focus if she looked right at you.

“Honey, how did you hear me?”

“In here, silly.” She tapped the side of her head and laughed.

“Garbage? Leaf? You all heard me in your head?” They both nodded. “But I didn’t call you.” I was happy they’d come by, caught spying in a tree by any criminal element wasn’t a good thing. But how they did it was starting to weird me out.

“You think us, we hear you, we come.” Garbage was obviously quite proud of her explanation and the other two faeries nodded enthusiastically.

I thought
them
? “You mean when I was thinking I needed you, you heard that? Can you hear everything I’m thinking?” Weirded out factor went a few levels higher now. The idea of having those flying loons inside my head all the time? Shudder.

Leaf looped in front of my face and landed on my hand. “No, you think
us
we hear we come. It always this way.”

I almost fell out of the tree as I tried to grab her in shock. “How about we get out of this tree, then you three explain this?”

Garbage rolled her eyes, but all three faeries lifted off me so I could scramble out of the tree.

They flew around near the bottom until I joined them.

“Faster if you boom.” Crusty shook her head after I finally reached the ground. Climbing down was a lot harder than going up. No wonder so many cats got stuck in trees.

“Boom?” I didn’t like the sound of that.

Crusty made a tiny fist, held it high, then dropped it. “Boom.” The maniacal grin on her face was disturbing.

“Uh, yes.” I turned away from her and faced Garbage. “How long have you been able to hear me in your heads?” I waved my hands as I noticed all three about to give me a useless answer. “Without actually hearing the words come out of my mouth with your ears.” I tried thinking back to any time they’d done something like this, but while sometimes they did show up about when they might be handy, plenty of times they didn’t.

“Always hear.” Leaf drifted down to try to communicate, since obviously I was dafter than the rock Crusty stared at. “Then we didn’t.” She frowned and shook her head. “Then we did.” Big grin on this one.