Page 74 of Renegade Kingdom
Unless...
“What if this isn’t something new?” I said slowly, an idea forming in the back of my mind.
Fizzle snapped at me, his patience clearly fraying. “I would know if these creatures existed in Nymeria. I am centuries old. There isn’t a single place in this realm that I haven’t been, a single creature I haven’t catalogued. These things donotexist.”
“What if what we’re seeing isn’t real?” I pressed on, looking around more carefully now. The tree creatures were too still. Too perfect. Too much like a nightmare given form. The more I looked at them, the more wrong they seemed. Like a paintingof trees made by someone who had only heard trees described to them. “What if this is all a distraction? An illusion designed to make us attack so something can absorb our magic? What if they’re a lure?”
Fizzle went very, very still. His feathers flattened against his body, and I saw something shift in his eyes. Recognition. Understanding. And beneath both of those things, fear.
“A jin,” he breathed. “Gods and monsters, it’s a jin.”
I blinked. “Like... a genie? In a bottle?”
Fizzle’s beak snapped at me, and I flinched back. “No, you idiot. Like a creature that lures you into a living nightmare and then sucks your insides out while you’re trapped in your own fear. A jin. They’re rare, ancient, supposedly extinct. The last recorded sighting was three hundred years ago in the depths of the Autumn Court, and that one was barely a juvenile.” His feathers ruffled with agitation. “If there’s a full-grown jin in this forest, we’re in even more trouble than I thought.”
“Well, I’d like to RSVP no to that party,” I muttered, trying to mask my sudden, genuine terror with humor.
Fizzle glared at me with eyes that promised violence if I didn’t shut up, and I forced my lips closed. Now was not the time for jokes. Now was not the time for the deflection I used to hide how scared I really was. Now was the time to think. To plan. To figure out how the hell we were going to survive this.
“How do we find it?” Maddox asked, his fire still flickering around his arms. “There must be something that gives it away. If it needs to absorb our magic, it has to be close, right?”
Fizzle’s eyes darted around, scanning the ground, the trees, the sky above us. “It should be tethered to the illusion somehow. Connected to what it’s creating. If we can find the anchor point, we can find the jin.”
“How close would it need to be?” I asked.
“Not far. It would need to be able to see us. The illusion takes tremendous energy to maintain, and the jin needs to be close enough to feed on the magic we expend fighting it.”
“And the others? How far are they from us?”
Fizzle concentrated for a moment, his ancient eyes going distant. “They must be at a distance. I can feel a faint glimmer of Dean and Alyssa’s magic, but it’s far. If they were closer, the jin would have drawn them into the illusion as well. It can only maintain so much at once.”
Good. That meant Dean and Alyssa were outside this nightmare. Fighting their own battles, but not trapped in this particular hell. That meant if we could break free, if we could destroy the jin, we could find them again.
I pulled on my magic.
The electricity answered immediately, eager and fierce. I drew it in from the air around me, from the static charge that built between the fog and the forest floor, from the storm that was always waiting just beneath the surface of my consciousness. More and more, until I could feel the pressure building around me, until my hair stood on end and sparks crackled between my fingers.
“What are you doing?” Fizzle demanded.
“If this jin wants magic,” I said, feeling a grim smile spread across my face, “then I’m going to rain it down on him. With pain and fire.”
Maddox grinned, his flames burning brighter. “I like that idea.”
Fizzle looked between us, and then something shifted in his expression. The fear was still there, but it was joined by something else now. Something that might have been pride.
“I’d forgotten what it was like to be young,” he said softly. “This is what Nymeria needs. New blood. New ideas. And just enough carelessness to hopefully get away with it.”
I grinned at him. “Is that permission?”
“That’s a prayer,” he replied. “Now do it before I come to my senses and stop you.”
I let the lightning loose.
It crashed down around us in brilliant, blinding bolts. Not aimed at the tree creatures, that would have been a waste of energy, feeding magic directly to the jin. Instead, I sent it into the spaces between them. Into the fog. Into the ground and the air and every gap in the illusion that I could find.
The lightning didn’t just strike and fade. It wrapped around the creatures, arcing from trunk to trunk, creating a living lattice of electricity that spread outward in every direction. The fog lit up like day, shadows thrown in stark relief, every detail of the forest suddenly visible.
And that’s when I saw it.
