i 2d586356cf1586df by Unknown Read Free Book Online

of the Ghostlands when he flew back to Turtle Creek. He'd left his domi in the care of his household at Poppymeadow's enclave and returned to help deal with the beast that attacked her. He dropped down to land beside his First.
    "I don't know what Storm Horse was thinking," Wraith growled in greeting. "How did he end up with all the babies?"
    Little Horse had chosen the five youngest sekasha to make up the Hand that accompanied Tinker into Turtle Creek; not one of them was over three hundred. True, any death would have been grievous, but to lose the five youngest would have been a blow to the close-knit band of warriors.
    "They are the ones my domi is most comfortable with." Wolf knew that Wraith was truly rattled if he was using the nickname, as some of the "babies" were in truth older than Wolf. His First Hand didn't like to remind him that he was impossibly young for his level of responsibilities.
    "Oni, they could have handled," Wraith allowed and then handed a sheet of paper to Wolf. "But not an oni dragon. I'm amazed any of them are still alive."
    Wolf recognized Rainlily's fluid hand in the drawing. The low-slung creature looked like a cross between a ferret and a snake. "An oni dragon? Are you sure?"
    Wraith clicked his tongue. "It's much smaller than the one we fought when we closed the gate between Page 29
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    Earth and Onihida, and the coloring is different. It might be just a less dangerous relative, like we have the wyvern cousins to our dragons, or perhaps a hatchling. It would explain how they survived."
    The oni war had been shortly before Wolf was born. A Stone Clan trading expedition had discovered the way from Earth to Onihida by accident. When the survivors managed to return to Elfhome with their tale of capture and torture, the clans united to send a force to Earth to stop the oni spreading from Onihida to Earth, and then, possibly to Elfhome. Wraith Arrow and others of Wolf's First Hand had been part of the battle.
    "Are oni dragons that dangerous?" Wolf folded the paper and tucked it away. He would have to let the Earth Interdimensional Agency know of this new threat if they couldn't kill the beast quickly. The EIA could best spread warnings through the humans.
    "We lost two dozen sekasha in the caves to the beast. We couldn't hurt it. It could—" Wraith frowned as he searched for a word. "— sidestep through walls as if they didn't exist, and it called magic like you do."
    "How did you kill it?"
    "When the Stone Clan pulled down the gate and the connection between the worlds broke, its attack pattern totally changed. It dropped its shield and became like a mink in a chicken coop, stupid with bloodlust. We boxed it in so it couldn't turn and we hacked it to pieces."
    "Maybe the oni were controlling it magically. Little Horse said that the tengu used a whistle to call it off them—perhaps the sound only triggered a controlling spell. Earth doesn't have magic."
    "So their control over it vanished and we were fighting the true beast?"
    Wolf nodded. "Perhaps."
    "So the key is to kill the controller first."
    "Perhaps." Wolf didn't want to fall into a wrong mind-set. He crouched beside the torn earth and spilt blood to find the monster's tracks. They were as long as his forearm, with five claw marks splayed like a hand. Pressed into the dirt at the center of one track was one of Tinker's omnipresent bolts, a bright point of polished aluminum glittering in the black earth. It must have fallen from her pocket during the fight.
    Wolf picked it out of the dirt, realizing for the first time the size of his beloved compared to what had attacked her. Gods above, sometimes he wished her sense of self-preservation matched her courage; she couldn't keep leaping into the void and swimming back. One of these times, the void was going to drink her down. He rolled the bolt around his palm to shake off the dirt, thinking he should talk to her