Sorceress Awakening Read Free

ducked under the branch to see what was going
on. Instinct guided her eyes up the tree. Two thin, blade-like fragments of
stone were embedded in the side of the tree’s trunk.
    Pink liquid dripped off the fragments and
dropped onto the ground below. More ran down the trunk. Astonished, she touched
the liquid. It was slick like sap, but smelt coppery.
    Tree sap mixed with blood?
    Another rivulet flowed down the trunk and
coated her fingers.
    Her legs grew rubbery. Numbness crept up
from the wounds, seeping through her blood and across her thoughts. Screams and
snarls interrupted the numbness. Had some of the other creatures been caught by
the exploding stones?
    “Your life blood is watering the dirt and
leaf litter. Such a waste of magic,” Alexander mused.
    What? Can’t I bleed to death in peace? Lillian twisted toward Alexander and winced as pain stabbed through
her hip. The little man stood a few feet away, admiring the tree, his head
tilted to look up at its top, thirty-five feet above his head. He walked around
its circumference, studying it from different angles.
    Resting against the tree took some of the
weight off her injured leg. She eased one hand above her head. Sliding her
fingers along the bark, she sought the rivulets of liquid and used them to
guide her to the first stone fragment. Her fingers closed on a cold, sharp
object. She clawed at it with her nails, dragging it from the wood.
    Agony burned in her hip. She embraced the
pain. It was better than the cold sucking sensation of having her life leeched
out of her injury. Her fingers worked at the second piece of stone as Alexander
finished skirting the tree and came to face her.
    With a grunt, she freed the second shard
and flung it with all her strength. Sap-blood flew in a splattering arc.
    Her aim was true and the blood-coated stone
collided with Alexander. He screamed in agony, a tone of glass-shattering
quality. She winced. Hopefully such an unholy sound signaled a mortal injury.
    The fragment was embedded in his neck where
an artery should have been. The stone smoked and hissed. Other drops of her
tree’s blood had eaten away at his skin, like she’d tossed acid upon him. A
human would have hit the ground, dead by now. She didn’t know what he was, but
he wasn’t human.
    The creature collapsed to his knees but
continued to smile at her. Oh, he was in pain. She could see it in his pinched
expression: the white skin, drawn tight across his face, the slight grayish hue
of his complexion. But it was the sharp fangs when he hissed at her which gave
him away. A vampire? Impossible. There was no such thing. Yet what else could
he be?
    Another blonde male and a muscular female
joined Alexander. While they were seeing to his wounds, Lillian took a step
forward. Her sight blurred strangely and she swayed. Instead of the carnage of
the glade, an image of Lillian’s grandmother stood before her, eyes closed and
face serene.
    Gran’s hands moved in a precise, intricate
pattern as she chanted low in her throat. There was a soft-edged quality about
her. She looked faded, like an unfocused old picture. That’s when she knew her
grandmother wasn’t really there.
    “Lillian, get to the gargoyle,” her
grandmother barked out the sharp command, her voice echoing as if from a long way
away, but she still heard the underlying fear. “Use your blood. Wake him.
You’re stronger than the Riven.”
    Lillian shook her head, trying to clear her
vision. She slumped against the tree. A low-hanging branch offered support. She
wanted to believe she was hearing her grandmother’s voice. Obeying her commands
sounded like a good idea. Lillian gauged the distance from her tree to the
gargoyle’s statue: a few feet, ten maybe, fifteen at the most.
    Ten feet or ten miles, it didn’t really
matter. She doubted she could walk more than two steps before she fell on her
face. But her grandmother needed her to get to the gargoyle statue. Maybe it
was another kind of protection