Lycan Legacy - Paladin: Tales of Luna White - Werewolf Veronica Singer (children's ebooks online txt) 📖

We all dropped through the opening. There was a moment of insanity as we shifted through the one-way twist in space I had created at the entrance. Then we fell.

The piled-up sand softened the impact of our landing. I held my arms stiff to protect Mike from being crushed under the combined weight of me and Ariel.

Still, he was breathless and barely awake. I threw Ariel off my back with a grunt, tossing her four meters across the space. She landed heavily and slumped unconscious. The sudden silence made my ears ring as the storm swirled impotently above us.

I stood and looked at what I had wrought. The hole through which we had entered allowed meager light to illuminate our refuge. We were in a space about twenty meters across, standing on an enormous pile of sand. Sand continued to pour down the entrance, as if we were in the bottom of an hourglass. It quickly spread out, filling the bottom half of the globe.

With a gesture I shrank the one-way hole in the glass to the size of a dish plate. The flow of sands trickled to a stop, leaving the entrance exposed to the sky.

In the center of the space was a column of glass, extending from the sand-covered bottom to the entrance at the top. It resembled a tube, but with an impossible shape. The extra-dimensional shift made the light entering through the column bounce strangely around the area, illuminating some areas and leaving others in pitch darkness. It was like being in a funhouse made of magic mirrors.

Luckily, none of us needed help to see in near darkness.

I rolled Mike onto his back, made sure he was breathing, then stroked his forehead. “Mike, are you all right?”

His eyes fluttered open, and he wheezed. “Okay, the jump was fun. But let’s never do this again.”

I laughed and hugged him. “I’m glad you’re alive!”

“Me too,” he said with a grunt. “Can you let me breathe now?”

I pulled back quickly, embarrassed at my reaction to finding him alive after the pounding we’d taken. “Sorry, Mike. I’m just happy you survived.”

I stood and shivered as the grains of sand that had been sandblasted into my body were ejected. It was like a million mosquito bites at once, but quickly passed.

My clothes were a mess, shredded everywhere the sand had pounded. The heels of my combat boots had been sanded down to paper thinness. I salvaged some clothes from my ravaged backpack and stripped.

I ran my fingers through my hair, dislodging a pound of sand onto the floor. My scalp itched fiercely for a minute, then healed. Not as good as a shampoo and a good soak, but the best I would find in this desert.

I looked up as I pulled on my pants. Mike was facing away, staring at the hole at the top of the column of glass. He was still shy around me.

I buttoned up my top, slid my feet into my sand-blasted boots and said, “Okay, Mike, I’m dressed. You can turn around now.”

He took a quick peek to make sure I was decent, then turned.

“There’s something weird about that opening up there. It hurts my eyes to look at it.”

“It should. That’s a one-way extra-dimensional interface to the actual world.”

“One-way?” he asked. “Does that mean we’re stuck here?”

“Not necessarily—” I began, but was interrupted by Ariel’s groan. That crazy bitch had survived the sandstorm and the fall. I hated her, but she was werewolf tough.

Mike nodded, knowing I wouldn’t discuss using magic in front of another werewolf. Although it would take an idiot to not realize that I had used an impressive amount of magic to create this underground terrarium.

“Another of your magical trinkets?” asked Ariel as she looked around at our globe refuge. “You seem to have a lot of highly potent magical devices at your disposal.”

“You think her husband, the most powerful magician on Earth, would send her out without some tricks up her sleeve?” scoffed Mike.

He rubbed his bandaged forehead to emphasize that one of Mason’s ‘trinkets’ had already overcome her most potent weapon.

“Maybe,” she muttered. I could feel her thoughts skitter away from the impossible notion of a werewolf using magic. Trinkets, yes. Wielding magic? Impossible.

“We should reserve such potent objects for a country that really needs them. Like Israel.”

“Your alpha will decide where to place her efforts, runt,” I snapped.

She opened her mouth to argue, but stopped as our house-sized globe shifted.

A giant hand, spanning over thirty meters from thumb to pinky, plunged through the sand as if it were water and lifted us hundreds of meters into the air. My stomach dropped with the acceleration, then flipped.

An eye the size of a billboard focused on our globe, and I suddenly felt like a goldfish in a bowl.

“What are you doing in my domain?” the djinni said in a voice like thunder.

4

Ariel said something in Hebrew that I was sure meant, “Oh, shit.”

I tugged on her mental leash, choking off any further comments.

Mike’s eyes glazed over in shock. What did he see looking at the djinni? This type of creature was like a force of nature; they appeared different to different people.

I saw a scowling face with pores the size of manholes, swarthy skin, and a goatee. A turban topped his head, with a diamond as big as a house in the center. Looking down revealed an embroidered vest over a naked chest. There was no navel on his flat belly, just a smooth expanse of olive skin. Below his waist spun a funnel cloud, effortlessly holding him in the air.

My human side wanted to grovel; this creature was so much more powerful than any magic I could muster that it would be no contest. But my wolf side had other ideas. Instead of snarling, she bolstered my confidence. Bolstered it enough to overcome fear.

I crossed my arms, tilted my head back so I was looking down my nose at him, and said, “Your