One
Anna
A tremor rippledthrough the slave market a moment before the whisper from the front of our cage.
“Someone’s coming!”
Ella and I looked up from our efforts to cut through the binds of the incredibly tough brellwood to where Milly was slumped forward in apparent dejection, a ruse she was using while acting as lookout.
I didn’t doubt her, but I didn’t have to. I could sense the person approaching. Everyone could. An indistinct, indescribable yet utterly unmistakable gravity ofpowerfloated ahead of whoever had just entered the underground bazaar. I didn’t have to bother searching. My eyes found the owner of their own accord, drawn in like magnets.
The woman moved casually, draped in her finely woven shawl, the silk of the extremely rare Hollow Earth orbmoth dyed a rich purple. Her features were mostly obscured by the fabric, drawn up as it was across her face, but two things stood out.
First, she was tall, her long, lean body and toned muscles on display beneath the skin-hugging pant-and-blouse combination that left very little to the imagination. The other was her eyes.
They were so bright they shone a brilliant platinum-silver, bordering on white. No shadow could hide those, so she didn’t bother trying. That kind of confidence, paired with the press of what had to be near alpha-level power, could mean but one thing.
She was one of theelite.
Milly shrank back from the bars of our cage as the woman strolled past, uninterested in the trio of rundown, haggard clippys that stared up at her from sunken eyes. The three of us had gotten very good at exuding the “worn out and useless” air about us over the years. It was a great way to ensure we were underestimated and overlooked.
It worked for us once more, the woman sweeping past us without a glance as she moved on to a cage housing a pair of feral werewolves. Backed up against the far side, they eyed her balefully with their red orbs, teeth bared despite the ears pinned back against their heads. Ferals were never entirely sane.
As one proved when it uttered a low growl at the woman.
A whisper tore through the market as everyone paused what they were doing, stunnedby the offense given. Including the woman. Her head turned to the side, platinum eyes flaring even brighter under the shawl. She looked the offending wolf up and down. Even from halfway across the market, I felt her disdain.
One long, slender arm rose slowly from her side, index finger extended.
“Come,” she ordered, turning her arm over and crooking her finger at the werewolf a single time. That was all that was needed.
Whimpering, seemingly aware now of the magnitude of its error, the giant, scruffy beast eased itself forward toward the woman as she regarded it with those cold, calculating eyes. The market held its breath, waiting to see what she would do. It wasn’t like the wolf or its actions mattered to her. This was one of the elite. The strongest of the true dragons. She had no use for a feral.
But disobedience was another matter entirely. And that was to be punished. Proper deference must be shown, and in the Ice Kingdom, a growl like the wolf had uttered could easily be construed as a challenge.
“Sit,” the dragon shifter ordered as the wolf neared the front of its cage.
The creature promptly plopped its haunches down on the cage floor. The power that rippled out from that one command was so overwhelming more than one other person inthe market struggled to resist. Including me. My knees wobbled and I slid down to the floor of the cage with Ella and Milly. There was no resisting for us. The power of a clippy was like a candle before the towering inferno of this woman’s presence.
“Bad dog,” the woman said and waved a hand at the wolf.
Before the feral beast could react, ice flowed from her fingers. It froze the shifter to the cage and surged up its legs impossibly fast. The ice froze each strand of fur solid as it coated the flanks of the doomed wolf. The wolf, realizing too late what was happening, tried to react, but the ice was too strong, moving too quickly. In the blink of an eye, it was frozen solid.
The woman looked at the result of her action and sniffed in derision. Slowly, almost daintily, she then reached out and pushed on a bar of the cage, using a single finger only, as if the bars were too dirty for her to bother with more. It wasn’t a hard push, just enough to set the cage swaying. The boxy prison hanging from the ceiling creaked as it swung back and forth.
The motion was too much for the top-heavy wolf and tore the ice statue from the bottom. With a gasp from every throat in the market, the ice wolf toppled over. It shattered into a thousand pieces, many of them falling through the floor of the cage.
Each one contained a part of the wolf.
“Hey!” the cage owner shouted, stepping forward. The hunter might not have been one of the elite, but he wasn’t nearly as easily cowed as the wolf. “That was expensive merchandise, Miss.”
The woman looked him up and down. He was every bit as tall as she was and more muscular too. A hunter had to be strong to succeed out in the wilds if he wanted to make a living. The woman knew this too. She could beat him, but she would not escape unhurt either. I watched the standoff, wondering what would happen. Would we see them throw down?
“I will take the other one,” she said at last. “At ten percent off. Final offer.”
The hunter bristled, but there was no way he was going to get a better deal. With a sigh of relief from everyone else, he extended his hand, and they shook on it. Then the woman continued on, disappearing deeper into the market in search of whatever had brought her there in the first place.
“Damn, that was brutal,” Ella remarked from across the cage, where she had also paused her work on sawing the binds when the elite had come through. “She had to be damn near alpha level, if not alpha itself.”
