Gathering Storm (The Salvation of Tempestria Book 2) by Gary Stringer (howl and other poems .txt) 📕

Mandalee raised a quizzical eyebrow. “You’ve certainly got him well trained, now.”

Catriona's eyes twinkled as she replied, “That’s the general idea.”

It was what she’d been trying to achieve on Earth. She allowed Daelen to believe he was training her while she got on with the real task of training him to pay attention to her. Heaven’s Surrender was a terrible weapon and when the moment came, it was imperative that it should be under Daelen’s control. Cat agreed wholeheartedly with that, but the way she saw it, Daelen himself was a powerful weapon, and his power also needed to be under control. Specifically, hers. She would have liked a few more days to work on him, but circumstances had dictated otherwise. Hopefully, it would be enough.

After a quick telepathic exchange in the language of leopards, Mandalee told her friend, “Shyleen says he is welcome to join us, so you can call him.”

“OK,” Cat agreed, “and while I’m doing that, I think you should dry off and get dressed.”

“Well, only if you’re sure you’ve seen enough of my body, Cat.”

“Yeah, I’ve seen enough,” she laughed, “and don’t think I’ve forgotten my promise to, shall we say, tweak it a bit here and there? Still can’t do it, yet, but I swear I’m close.”

With that, she left her friend while she called for Daelen to come down.

*****

While he had been flying, Daelen had found no evidence of any other intruders on the island. Sadly, though, he did find casualties: the invading force had torn the StormChaser apart where she was anchored in the harbour, and her crew were all dead. He wept for them – they had deserved better – but there was nothing he could do for them now, except whip up a storm to push the ship away from the harbour, into the bay, and allow it to sink, giving them all a sailor’s burial at sea.

As he did so, however, he realised Catriona’s original travel plans had been vindicated, because nobody had even noticed the unremarkable Dolphin patrolling the waters. His elegant ship had drawn focus, while the very nondescript nature of the other vessel had spared it from harm. As difficult as it was for his ego to accept, he knew he was going to have to start listening to her more in future. His power, he dared to believe, allied with Catriona’s intelligent mind and Mandalee’s extraordinary battle prowess and fierce loyalty to her friend, might just be enough to turn the tide in the coming conflict.

As soon as his three companions were sufficiently recovered to travel, before leaving the island, he felt it was important to check his base for any signs of intrusion. As they searched the building, Mandalee took the opportunity to thank Daelen on behalf of Shyleen as well as herself.

“Without your training, at least one of us would have died today.”

The shadow warrior shook his head. “That was all you. I may have helped you sharpen your edge a bit, but that’s all.”

‘In the contest between predator and prey,’ Shyleen insisted in Mandalee’s mind, ‘a sharp edge can be the difference between life and death.’

Mandalee was mid-translation when they reached the door to the portal room and Cat yelled, “Stop!” and slapped Daelen’s hand away from the handle.

“What’s wrong?” Daelen asked.

There was a lot of higher planar energy behind the door, which was to be expected – it was powering the permanent portals – but something was different. Wrong. There were two different signatures. One was Daelen’s. The other was the same as what she had sensed outside Justaria’s house. “Don’t you sense it?” she asked.

Without her warning, he knew he wouldn’t have noticed, but thanks to her special ability of paying attention, he could now clearly see the word ‘trap’ laid out before him.

In case whatever-it-was, was monitoring the door, somehow, Cat decided to take an alternative route. Shapeshifting into a mouse, she used woodshaper magic to make herself a rodent-sized hole in the skirting board, which she extended into a tunnel into the portal room. Overhead, she felt rather than saw a strange kind of light travelling in a thin focussed beam across the face of all the portals. She didn’t know what to make of it, so she tried to project a sympathic image to Daelen.

‘Don’t shift back,’ he warned her. ‘If you interrupt that beam, you could die.’

Now that he knew there were no sensors on the door, he opened it, trusting that it was safe.

“What’s wrong?” Mandalee asked.

Peering into the portal room, without crossing the threshold, Daelen pointed to a small metal box to the left of the portals. Mandalee had no idea what it was, beyond a thing of technology. All she knew was that it hadn’t been there before.

The shadow warrior identified it as a bomb. “An explosive device, triggered to explode the instant anyone steps through one of my portals and interrupts the beam of invisible light it’s emitting.”

He employed a similar tripwire system himself on his Earth base, to ward against intruders, though his version was non-lethal.

Mandalee, however, shook her head and insisted his theory didn’t make sense. “Why didn’t I set it off?”

Daelen admitted the Cleric of Nature was right.

Shifting back well away from that invisible light beam, Cat asked, “Could this technology be designed to detect you, specifically?”

“Yes,” Daelen agreed. “Of course, Kullos couldn’t have known that I’d taught you to make your own portals. If I hadn’t, I would have naturally come back to StormClaw this way and set off the bomb. He wouldn’t have wanted either of you to trigger it.”

“That’s nice of him,” Mandalee remarked, acidly, knowing full well it wasn’t an act of kindness.

Daelen confirmed it. “He just wanted to make sure I took the full force of it.”

“How bad would it have been?” Mandalee wondered.

“Difficult to say without setting it off.”

“OK, never mind. It’s fine,” she assured him. “I can quite happily live the rest of my life without ever knowing.”

Seeing