Earthbound (Dragons and Druids Book 2) Read online

  The sound of someone clearing their throat popped my love bubble, and had me looking over at the happy druid. He smiled wide. “Thought maybe you got lost,” he said politely.

  I smiled sheepishly and Logan’s hand slipped into mine as we followed Isaac to the sound of running water. Somewhere off in the distance, I could hear the jingle of that goat’s bell. What Logan had told me about Dom replayed in my mind, and I couldn’t focus on anything else until we came upon a large waterfall cascading down the mountain into the pristine, cerulean water of a small pond. It was the same waterfall from my dream … there was something relaxing and magical about it. I guess a property most waterfalls had.

  Isaac spun and faced Logan and I. “The Earth has chosen you to carry her magic, and that is a great honor,” Isaac told me as I eyed the tattoo on my shoulder warily.

  Wow. He was jumping right in, I thought.

  “And how exactly did that happen? The Earth tattooing me?” I’d always wanted a tattoo, but I was scared of the pain. Which was ironic now that I had two. One I’d signed up for, and one I didn’t.

  Isaac was wearing a Japanese-style shirt with a short, Asian-looking collar, and harem pants. His feet were bare, toes sunken into the dirt. His two orange-crystal-topped staffs lay in a bed of green grass beside him. He was the quintessential hippie in that moment.

  “The Earth is alive!” He spread his arms wide and spun around looking at the trees.

  Logan and I shared a side look. Great. My new “master” was crazy.

  Isaac lowered his massive arms and stepped closer to me, holding his palms out. “When you unleashed that magic, she felt it! I can feel it now.” His hands were a few feet away from me, hovering in the air, caressing at something I couldn’t see.

  “A druid without a master is nothing. That magic needs to be claimed. To be molded and cherished and harnessed. She knew you would make a good earth druid.” He was beaming at me like a father looking at a child who’d just reached some important milestone. Like I’d finally learned to ride my bike without training wheels.

  I smiled nervously and shifted my weight.

  Earth druid. Something about those words resonated with me, although I didn’t really know what they meant. The way Isaac spoke about the Earth you would think she was a real woman he had conversations with!

  I wondered how old he was. In this light, his gray hairs were in such stark contrast to his dark charcoal skin that I guessed he might be over forty. For all I knew he was three hundred years old. Either way, he seemed wise but a little mentally unstable. Or maybe I just didn’t understand what the hell he was talking about yet.

  I leered apprehensively. “Well … that was nice of the Earth to … initiate me like that.”

  Isaac raised one eyebrow at me, staring into my eyes. I started to feel uncomfortable and looked down at the ground.

  “What?” I asked, and I could sense Logan’s unease as well. He didn’t like another man making me feel uncomfortable. With Cooper’s death and my training looming over him, Logan was all kinds of on edge.

  Isaac gave an exasperated sigh. “How can you be an earth druid when you do not speak to her?” He looked down at my boot-clad feet and shook his head in disappointment.

  “Huh?” Logan said beside me, finally losing all composure.

  ‘This guy is off his rocker,’ Logan told me mentally.

  Isaac pointed to my offending shoes. “When is the last time you walked outside, in the grass or dirt, without those?”

  He said those like they were evil. They were shoes! But I thought seriously about his question. “I donno, since I was five,” I answered honestly. I was a clean kid, not a fan of messes and dirt.

  The druid shook his head. “Gardening?”

  My heart pinched and I saw Logan take half a step closer to me.

  “Not since my mom died,” I told him.

  His mood brightened a little. “But you did garden?”

  Yes, Captain Genius, I did. “Yes. My mom and I grew nearly half of what we ate.”

  Isaac clapped his hands together in excitement. “That’s how she knew you. How the Earth knew you were worthy of her initiation.”

  Okay, time to get real with him. “You’re kind of freaking me out. You sound a bit…”

  “Crazy,” Logan offered beside me, and I winced.

  ‘Way to be subtle,’ I told my mate.

  Isaac frowned, and then nodded as if thinking through what we were saying. “You’re right. You can’t feel it, so you don’t know. Take off your shoes, Sloane,” he instructed.

  “What?” I was not getting nasty dirt between my toes. God knows what else was on this forest floor. Animal poop, spiders, sharp stuff. Goat droppings…

  “This is part of your training. Now please take off your shoes.” He impatiently put a hand on his hip and glared at me.

  I groaned and leaned on Logan, ripping my boot off. Then came my sock, which I shoved into the boot and placed my foot down so that I could take the next boot off. The moment my skin hit the moss-covered earth, a low buzzing of electrical energy zipped into my toes, up my leg, and through my body, making me feel light and full of energy.

  “Oh,” I stated.

  Isaac smiled. “Now that you are initiated, you will feel it more, but when you were gardening you were feeling it too. On a smaller scale. The Earth is our source of life, and you are an antenna. Anything she can do, you can do.”

  He lost me at that last part, but it didn’t matter. As I placed my second bare foot into the earth, tears sprang in my eyes, and a contented sigh escaped me.

  “You’ve gone too long without it,” he said sternly. “You must walk barefoot for at least an hour a day. That’s an order.”

  I nodded, eyes closed, tears rolling down my cheeks. It hit me then, what this light and bubbly, energetic feeling reminded me of: my mother—being with her, gardening with her, it had been like this.

  ‘Do you really feel something?’ Logan asked me mentally.

  ‘Yes. I feel like I’m home,’ I told him and opened my eyes.

  Logan was peering at me as if I was a puzzle he couldn’t figure out, but Isaac was just wearing a smug grin.

  “You need a weapon,” Isaac declared, turning this fuzzy love-fest with Mother Earth on its heels.

  “She can’t even hold a dragon’s blade.” Logan interjected. “It burns her.”

  The good druid nodded. “Of course it does. The magic inside of her… it wars with itself. Dragon, druid, earth—it’s not sure what to be, where to pull power from.”

  I didn’t like that sound of that.

  “So how can I kill the druids without a special knife?” I asked, because I didn’t think ripping Steven’s head off was a possibility. He was too strong. Ardan too.

  Isaac walked over to his staffs and brought one to me. He reached out and attempted to hand it off to me, but I backed up. “No. No. Last time I touched something like that, it didn’t go well.” I remembered the way the metal had left an imprint on my palm.

  Isaac shrugged. “I admit it’s an experiment, but I think this will be your power weapon. Assuming we can get one made especially for you.”

  He continued to hold the staff out, and in this close proximity I was able to really look at it. It was beautiful. Mahogany wood, with spiral etchings wound down the base. At the tip, a beautiful burnt orange sphere, a crystal that eerily matched the color of his eyes.

  I reached out to touch it and paused. The Earth’s vibrations were still running currents up my legs, and as I neared the staff my hair stood on end. Isaac placed his free hand over his manhood and looked at Logan. “You should probably step back and protect the boys.”

  When I had blasted out with my purple magic back at the rest stop, Isaac had said it felt like I’d kicked him in the balls. Now Logan was covering his junk and backing up a few paces.

  Great. Sloane the ball buster.

  “Come on, we need to know if this works, if it can bring up your magic,” Isaa
c pressed. Without further ceremony, I grasped the mahogany staff right above Isaac’s hand, just below the crystal. With a resounding crack, my purple magic shot out, throwing Isaac and Logan backward and flying my hair upward with a gust of wind.

  “Drop it!” Isaac shouted with a groan from where he lay ten feet away, and I let the staff fall to the grass.

  “Shit! I’m so sorry.” I looked to the right, where Logan was curled in the fetal position, half against a tree that had broken his fall. To the left, Isaac looked in better shape, already standing and coming to retrieve the staff.

  ‘Are you okay?’ I asked, and Logan groaned again, sitting up this time, face red.

  ‘Covering didn’t help,’ he informed me, and I winced. I felt bad about hurting my mate, but ball-busting magic might be useful with Steven and Ardan.

  Isaac was pacing, staff in hand, tapping the sharp tip into the earth as the crystal pulsed.

  “So … what did that mean?” I asked, my friendly druid master.

  Logan was standing now, and limped slightly as he walked over to where I stood.

  Isaac stopped his pacing and sighed. “It means you need your own staff to hone the magic, so it doesn’t spread out like that and attack everyone. But … a staff like this is indeed your weapon.”

  Logan looked to be back to his normal shade, losing the red in his face. “Okay, how do we make one?”

  Isaac tipped his head back and laughed, showcasing all of his pearly whites. “We don’t make them. The elves do, and the last one to make mine was killed by the druids.”

  Logan and I both stepped forward with our mouths open. “Excuse me, did you say elves? Did I hear that right?” Logan asked incredulously.

  The druid nodded. “Yes, before Faery was purged and destroyed by the angry druids, a few magical folk made it out. The staff maker was one of an identical set of twins. I never met the brother, but he said they both worked to make the staffs together.”

  “So … theoretically…”

  Isaac nodded. “Theoretically, if we found the twin brother, he could forge a staff for you.”

  “Does she need a staff? Can’t we train her with other weapons,” Logan asked. I was gathering he didn’t like the idea of us traipsing around looking for some staff-forging elf.

  Isaac frowned. “I’m sorry, but you want Ardan dead, right? You want the skyborn hunt called off?”

  Hunt. That word sent chills down my spine, but it was so accurate.

  Logan groaned and put a protective hand on my lower back. “Yes, but…”

  Crunching rocks sounded behind us, and I spun around to see Sophie in her coyote form, and Danny walking towards us with wide eyes.

  “What in the hell was that?” Danny asked, waving his hand in the air and then grabbing his balls.

  I flinched. “You felt it back at camp? Geeze, sorry.”

  Sophie was smelling the ground as if looking for a magical perpetrator.

  Danny was in his usual rockabilly getup, slicked black quaff and well-manicured nails. Not a cuticle in sight. I decided then that his skin was much nicer than mine. Not a dry patch or large pore to be seen.

  “Sorcerer! Just the man I needed to see.” Isaac opened his arms wide and Danny looked at me with a raised eyebrow.

  “Is anyone going to explain why I might not be able to have children now?” Danny pinned me with a glare and then shifted to look at the good druid.

  I snickered, but I let it go.

  “Sloane needs a staff like mine in order to harness her magic properly, and learn to defeat the druids,” Isaac explained. “That means we need to find an old friend. An elf.”

  Sophie’s coyote head jerked up at the word “elf.”

  Danny’s Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed hard. “Excuse me, did you just say … elf?”

  Isaac nodded at the sorcerer. “But I don’t know where he is. Can you help me?” Isaac must have assumed that as a full-blown sorcerer Danny was capable of finding this elf fellow.

  Danny blew air through his lips. “If I knew what I was looking for maybe, but an elf? I’ve never even seen one, so I wouldn’t even know where to begin with making a spell to find one.”

  “I’m sure Eva can help,” Logan piped in, and Isaac met my eyes. We both looked to the ground.

  Danny frowned. “I haven’t seen her.”

  “She’s probably still sleeping,” Logan said.

  Isaac rolled out his neck, stretching, and then approached Logan. “Actually, son, Eva left right after you all went to sleep. There was something she felt she had to do. But she’ll be in touch.”

  Logan’s head snapped back in shock. “She left? We were just attacked. Half the pack is injured and she left us?” I could hear the hurt in his voice.

  “Ahem. I’m here.” Danny said from behind us.

  Logan ignored Danny’s proclamation and glared at Isaac. “Where did she go?”

  Isaac stared into Logan’s deep green eyes for an extended moment, seemingly sizing him up. “She went to search for the other skyborn. Said she owed it to you.”

  Logan’s mouth popped open. “And you let her go! Alone?”

  Isaac laughed deeply. “You think I can control that woman? She interrogated me about every scrap of information I knew about the remaining skyborn, and left. I’ve known Eva a long time. She’ll be fine.”

  Logan’s chest rose and fell harshly, his fists balled. “And what exactly do you know about the remaining skyborn? Where are they?”

  Isaac sighed. “All I know is that they are alive. I see them in my dreams and meditations. Like I saw Sloane. But I don’t know where they are. They’re in hiding.”

  When Isaac said no more, Logan turned on his heels and stalked off back to our little mud hut campsite.

  Oh crap, he was pissed.

  ‘Logan,’ I called after him, using the bond.

  ‘I want to be alone,’ he snapped back.

  Great. Leave me here to figure out how to stalk an elf. Men.

  Danny waved a hand. “Straight men can be so dramatic sometimes.”

  I chuckled. “Maybe we can keep training without a weapon, and then if we find the elf, great.” I wasn’t sure hunting the country for an elf was a great idea right now. Assuming he was even in this country.

  Isaac squinted and peered at me with those striking golden copper eyes. “Sloane, now that Ardan has seen your power and knows about you and Logan, he’ll stop at nothing to find you, kill you both, and locate the others.”

  Chills ran up my spine. “Do you think he knows what I am? I mean, that I’m an earth druid?”

  Isaac nodded. “Oh he knows. The second your purple magic unleashed, I could smell the earth druid within you.”

  Shit. I mean, technically I had told Steven in the alley of Jeanine’s bar what I was, but he didn’t seem to care. He just wanted me dead, yet he didn’t know I was an earth druid—I hadn’t even known at that point. If this staff was the only weapon I could protect myself with, then I wanted it. Ardan and Steven could teleport, for Christ’s sake. I was going to need more than a knife that burned my hand to take them out.

  “Okay, let’s do it,” I exclaimed. “Danny?” I turned to the sorcerer in hopes that he would know where to start.

  Danny raised one manicured eyebrow. “I’ll get right on that.” His voice was monotone, which told me he had no idea where to start looking.

  “Wonderful!” Isaac exclaimed, either not picking up on Danny’s sarcasm or pretending not to hear it.

  My feet were still sunk into the earth; the vibrations were now a low background hum, barely detectable. I just felt … good. Like waking up after sleeping ten hours. I was refreshed and full of energy.

  Isaac stepped closer to me and looked down at my feet. “Better than coffee, isn’t it?”

  I barked out a laugh. “I wouldn’t go that far.” Nothing compared to coffee; it had its own class.

  He smiled. Sophie must have gotten bored with us, because she was gone, trotted off back to
camp I assumed. Now Danny was just standing there, assessing me with narrowed eyes.

  “What?” I asked Danny.

  Instead of answering me, he turned to Isaac. “Is that a normal amount of power for a new druid?”

  Nerves tightened in my gut as his question. I didn’t like the way he’d used the word “normal.”

  “I mean, she just kicked all of us in the nuts two hundred yards away. That’s not normal. Right?”

  Isaac rested a hand on his staff. “No. It’s not. I suspect her magic is conflicted inside of her. She’s constantly plugged into her power source, and her druid power will grow every day until we can find a way to properly anchor it into the earth.”

  Fear saturated my entire being. I’d almost forgotten about his doom and gloom prophecy last night. That sounded dangerous, for me and everyone around me. “Anchor it? I … I thought you said I was already earth-initiated or whatever,” I stuttered, trying to find my words.

  The druid looked at me sadly. “The Earth has chosen you, yes. But until we can get a staff made for you, we can’t plug your magic into the Earth. It needs a filter.”

  “Plug it in?” Was I a lamp now?

  Isaac stuck the sharpened tip of his staff into the earth and the crystal ball glowed a deep orange. “You can pull power from her with your staff, or, in times of overwhelming energy bursts, she will take the excess so it doesn’t overtake you or others.”

  “So … the Earth will keep us from getting our nuts racked,” Danny concluded, and Isaac nodded.

  “Precisely.”

  Danny stepped closer to Isaacs’s staff and bent down low, examining it more closely. “Well, we’d better find it, then. The elf you seek, did he touch this staff?”

  Isaac shrugged. “I assume so. He was the quiet one. His twin brother was more social, and was the one I did all of my business dealings with. But he told me they made them together.”

  “What if he can’t make mine now that his twin is dead?” I pondered, peering at the staff closer as well.

  “You better hope that isn’t the case,” the sorcerer told me, and I swallowed hard.