I nodded, thinking about that. “You came back with a lot more than just a piece of the stone. What happened?”
The question hung in empty air for long enough that I started to wonder if I’d offended her.
“The fae queen… required us to complete challenges in order to get the piece.”
“The fae queen and the centaurs clearly swapped notes,” Lucien muttered under his breath.
Dirge snorted, but Shay just continued as if he hadn’t spoken. “One of them was to take my true form. I thought she meant wolf, but, uh, apparently I’ve got more forms than I realized. It’s harder to call on it outside the realm, but flying is worth it.”
Her apparent joy at her transformation made me happy. We’d all been through so much in the past few months, she deserved a cool new power.
“So, you can fly, shoot beams of light, and flash. Anything else?” Lucien asked.
“That’s not enough? Sheesh, you people aren’t easily impressed.”
“I’m plenty impressed, just making sure we didn’t miss anything.”
“Nope,” she responded, popping the p. “Oh, there was one more thing. Time is different between the realms. When we came back, I was surprised so little time had passed. Being in the fae court is… overwhelming. It gets hard to keep track of how long you’ve been there, and there’s no modern technology, and any tech you bring doesn’t work. So we didn’t know if we’d been gone too long.”
Weird. I was so used to having a phone in my pocket, readily available for any little question-well, mundane question. For magical questions, you still had to visit the pack library-it was odd to think about a society with no technology.
Granted, fae had wings. Fair trade.
We walked, and we walked, and we walked.
Sweat slid down my face at an alarming rate, and by the time the sun finally thought about setting, my water bottles were both drained, and we’d had to tap the water the males carried.
The sun was only two fingers from kissing the top of the sand dunes when Shay froze.
“Do any of you see that… blur?” She pointed off to the left, and to be honest, my eyes were so gritty, I couldn’t tell if there was anything out of the ordinary.
But after a second, Lucien did. “Right there. There’s something blurring the horizon.”
“I think that’s it. We found it, guys!” I didn’t know how she still had the energy for the happy little hop-skip she did or how she sped up as we closed the distance between us and the blur.
It wasn’t until we were much closer that I saw it, but when I did, it was obvious. A massive rectangular shape, see-through but clearly something, altering the shape of the horizon just slightly. It was big enough to hide three cruise ships, but disguised enough to make a human write it off as a mirage, a trick of the heat.
But not a wolf looking for a phoenix nesting ground.
Twilight had fallen as we stepped through the barrier, and I braced myself for the unpleasant twang I’d grown accustomed to with magical barriers. But it never came.
It wasn’t even an itch, just a gentle brush over my skin. Once we were through, though, everything became clear.
And sorrow was my instant companion.
What once had been teeming with life was completely barren.
The structure was beautiful, but there was an emptiness to it that felt wrong. It looked like an ancient temple. Tall pillars of sandstone supported the long, tiered, rectangular structure. We were staring at a ramp up to the first tier of open gardens, where palm trees swayed in the breeze, the soft grassy areas stretching between them inviting in the waning evening light. The second level of the temple was also open, but the top level was walled, hiding whatever lay inside.
But besides the plants, there wasn’t a living soul besides the four of us. And I had a feeling there hadn’t been, for a long, long time.
“Do you guys see nests anywhere?” I asked, eyeing the tops of the palms skeptically. I’d never seen a phoenix, but surely their nests wouldn’t be in the top of any old palm tree.
Medemia Argun. The magic was almost annoyed at my dismissal of the trees, apparently a rarer species of palm, recently thought to be extinct.
Sorry, I thought back, feeling a ripple of acceptance in the green tendrils I could now feel, since I was paying attention.
We climbed the ramp to the first tier in hallowed silence, as if all of us sensed the ground we walked upon was sacred. But the farther we walked-the temple was enormous-the more certain I became that this garden wasn’t where the nests were. There certainly weren’t any stone shards lying around, besides the occasional chip of sandstone.
Night had fallen by the time we finished searching the first tier. We paused at the ramp to the second tier of three.
“Should we split up?” Lucien asked, glancing down at me and then frowning. “Or are we going to find a comfortable spot and break for the night?”
“I can search a little longer.” I appreciated his concern, but the sooner we found the shard, the sooner this would be behind us.
I doubted it would take Fiona and Reed more than a day to get the shard from where the goblins had stored it, which meant we were officially the last holdup.
“If you get tired, we’ll rest.” He squeezed my hand where our fingers were joined, dropping a kiss on the back of my knuckles, not minding the bits of sand and sweat that had accumulated there on our journey.
“Deal.”
The second tier was just as large, though quicker to search, because instead of long gardens, it was all stone and still, rectangular pools. By the time we’d crossed it, we were all ready to break for the evening.
After a quick dip in one of the shallow pools to wash off the worst of the day, we shifted into our wolf forms and found a comfy spot in the gardens below to curl up. With the stars shining brightly and the desert winds blowing through the palms above us, we slept.
Morning light and the promise of beef jerky got us moving quickly the next morning. But when we climbed the ramp to the third and final tier, our search came to an abrupt halt. The massive stone doors-this was the only tier with walls-were either locked or stuck.
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