Free Elf Saga: Bloodlines (Part 1: Curse of the Jaguar) by Joseph Robert Lewis Page B

set her on the
floor so I don’t slip backward into the oil.
    “Hey!” one of the prisoners hisses. “Me too!
Get me out of here!”
    “Hey, me too!” another whispers.
    “Shut up, all of you!” I snap at them. “You
want to bring the guards? I’ll deal with you in a minute. Just shut
up for a second.” Turning back to Rajani, I say, “Feeling better
yet?”
    She sits up, rubbing her head. “Give a girl a
second. Do have anything to eat, honey? I’m starving.”
    “Uh. No. And weren’t you about to barf?”
    “That was so ten seconds ago.” She blinks up
at me. “I need food to heal.”
    “Food?” I shake my head. “Who made up all
these stupid Feyeri rules?”
    “Um, an ancient sisterhood of women dedicated
to the healing arts?”
    “Exactly.” I snort. “A bunch of
fruitcakes.”
    “Okay, okay. Forget the food. I think I can
do it now.” Rajani produces the two skittish faeries from inside
her hood and holds them carefully over my shackled wrists. “Can I
have my little guy back, or do you still need him?”
    I can barely feel the little faerie clinging
to my hair, and my head has never felt clearer. “I think I’d like
to hang on to him a little longer.”
    She nods and looks down at my chains. “Okay.
So, let’s, uh, let’s try, oh, I know, balewood.”
    The faeries glow a bit brighter and a faint
cloud of green dust fills the air, and from within that dust a
tangle of balewood vines and yellow blossoms grow out of thin air.
Then a few pale tendrils weave down and around the steel shackles,
wrapping over and over the chains.
    “Now what?” I can’t feel anything
happening.
    “Keep your panties on.” Rajani grins. “You
can rush life, but you can’t rush chemistry.”
    “What does that mean?”
    The cuffs snap open somewhere inside the
tangle of balewood roots, and a moment later the roots themselves
loosen up enough for me to slip my hands out. “Nice. What did you
do?”
    “Balewood leeches all sorts of chemicals out
of the soil, which is how it kills other plants. I just used it to
leech the alchemic treatments from your chains, and poof, they
broke.”
    “Awesome.” I rub my wrists and stand up.
“What about the Drogori curse on them?”
    The chains begin to shriek. No, seriously,
the chains themselves begin to scream and wail like a woman trapped
between pain and rage, not unlike my friend Sakoya when she found
out mid-labor that she was having triplets and still had two to
go.
    Rajani leaps to her feet as her faeries dash
back into her hair. “The curse seems to be working just fine.”
    I kick the chains into a pool of oil, which
barely muffles the noise, and then we run across the chamber,
ignoring the shouts of the prisoners, and I crash through the door
with my shoulder. The entire door rips off its hinges and slams
into the corridor wall.
    “Rajani, let’s go!”
    “Wait, where’s my bag?” She’s standing in the
open doorway of the jailor’s office full of papers and keys and
small boxes. We grab her lightning knife and my hatchet, but she
keeps looking around.
    “I’ll get you a new bag. Let’s go!” I wave at
her.
    Rajani paws through the papers and pops the
lids off the boxes. “I have to find it!”
    “I’ll buy you a new one!” I stomp back into
the office. “Hell, I’ll make you a new one from the skins of your
enemies, but we have to go!”
    “We can’t go! The crystals are in my
bag!”
    I freeze. “What crystals?”
    “The crystal levers from the Valkyrie’s
console,” she says, still ransacking the office madly. “I put them
in my bag so no one could steal the ship.”
    “So, without them…?”
    “We can’t leave!”
    I blink. Somewhere behind me a cursed chain
is screaming, and angry prisoners are yelling, and approaching
guards are shouting. I turn toward an old book shelf and smash my
fist through it, shattering three shelves and spilling a dozen
ledgers and tools on the floor. I hit it again, and again.
    “Why! Is nothing!