Page 10 of Family Found

Chapter 6

Rory

Now

It was going to be fine, I told myself, everything was going to be fine. I dug deep to find my internal cheerleader. I could do this!

Once. I could do this once. But, like, not because I would die the first time. I was going to be brave this one time, because someone I cared about was in trouble and needed help, and starting right after we had Kinnek back, I would stop caring about people. Instead I would ask the presence if it would turn me into a shrub, a really fancy one with tiny berries and no attachments whatsoever.

And, naturally, when I wondered whether shrubbery was in fact a goal I could aim for, I wondered whether Inkiri would mind. If I were a shrub. With cute little berries he could eat off me.

The presence was mildly amused, because of course it was. It wasn’t going to have to do anything scary.

After Inkiri locked eyes with me and told me he would protect me, Vergis squeezed my hands to let me know I needed to do magic.

“Dispense,” he mumbled. It was what he’d started saying, since sometimes, I got distracted and didn’t…dispense right away.

Fudge it all, but if it had been anyone but Vergis’s dad we were going to save, I would have told Vergis that I was not an effing paper towel dispenser. Nor a soap dispenser. Magic was probably more like soap and less like paper towels.

I closed my eyes, acutely aware of everything around us. Charles and his guns. Luëris and the four bulky Raikengana, Lissir, and of course Ink, who stood close enough that I could smell his sun-warmed skin.

Get us close to where Kinnek is, I told the magic, even as I mentally waved it over to power up Vergis.

The presence—the land—acknowledged that, and we were off.

There were ten of us in all. Vergis, Inkiri, and Lissir were the ones the land cared about most, I felt that. It also cared about Charles, either because Charles was Vergis’s dad or because Charles had already come to protect me once during the raspberry incident that had ended with the revelation that there was a bunker in which the cola asshat now resided.

It is good he is here since two of your knights stayed with your mate’s blood, the land told me as we hopped through the veils.

Well, okay. The land could be prickly if it didn’t like a person, and it didn’t like that Zeddira required medical attention.

You need to protect everyone though, even Luëris and the other protectors, I told it. Remember, no bloodletting.

Remember that I told you such a thing is not within my power, Rory. We are here.

“Here” was not the dark camp made up of tents and orc-like Koa Esher with a cloud of doom looming above that I’d expected, but instead a very fancy estate. It was almost a castle, from the size of it and the gray ivy-encrusted stone I spied from where we’d arrived…which was in the middle of a golf course.

We were stuck in one of those sandy pits, and the castle was right across a small and no doubt artificial lake, framed by formerly neatly pruned trees that had taken the chance the apocalypse had given them and were growing wild now, with mistletoe berries in the upper branches. The once perfectly mown green lawns were mottled, long grasses growing there now and making any games a thing of the past.

Charles dropped into a crouch, and everyone followed, Inkiri pulling me down as well.

Charles looked at me. “Where is he?”

He was calm and held his gun as if he was ready to use it. He was. And he might. Violence might happen. Actually, there was a high probability that violence was going to happen. I needed to get used to the idea.

Inkiri and the other protectors closed in around me and Vergis, moving quickly despite sticking so low to the ground, and Lissir unsheathed one of his sickle-like swords. He had a look in his fiery eyes that I’d not seen there before, and his mouth pressed into a thin line that quirked up on one side ever so slightly.

I turned in to the presence, and it reacted immediately.

I will guide you. There are many of them here, a lot who have the strange magic.

“Follow me,” I told them, and Luëris translated.

I started crouch-walking in the direction the land was pointing me—toward the castle—but Inkiri stopped me.

“No. Tell us.”

The land kind of nodded, and it did the thing where I had to close my eyes so I wasn’t hit square over the head with a bout of vertigo.