The Devourer: A Reverse Harem Fantasy (Airshan Chronicles Book 3) Read online

  And yet she was far more capable than she credited herself with being. I had learned that well in the last quarter sun.

  “The Goddess knew this was coming and she got us here in time,” Landor, her white husband, said to her. “She knows we can do this, Flame! Look at that incredible being we have released from his hiding place to help us. Everything is happening as it should!”

  He meant my comforter, and Landor was right!

  Flame squared her shoulders and met the gazes of each of her men. They were all powerful in their own way. And each one adored her and would go through demon fires for her.

  “Then we’d better start making our plans. We have a bare half turn to stop this bastard before he begins destroying our world!” Flame said fiercely.

  “Whatever you need. Whatever it takes to save my love,” my comforter intoned. I felt incredibly precious and adored in that moment. As much as Flame was. And that made me feel even more determined to save him.

  “To save us all, Sky! To save us all,” I said passionately, forgetting for a moment that I had used the name I’d given him in my head.

  “Sky?” he questioned me in confusion.

  “All beings need a name. And you need a name that reflects your essence. You have clouds for wings and eyes the colour of the sky. I would like to call you Sky,” I said a little nervously.

  How had he not picked up this nickname from my memory? Then again, I was shy about using it, even in my own head. It was bold to name someone without their permission.

  My comforter mulled it over for a moment and then smiled. “My mother’s people would be furious that I was known by such a name. Therefore it pleases me greatly. Sky I am, then, sweet love.”

  Chapter Two

  FLAME

  It was our worst nightmare come true. The Jayger was released and we had, at the most, a moon to stop him. As we sat around the fire that night, our first on dry land for a quarter moon, I marvelled a little unsteadily at how far we’d come in such a short time.

  Less than a moon ago, I was happily acting as an airling scout with my best friend, Zem. We’d stopped off to visit Airsha and her husbands, one of whom was my half-brother Calun, when they’d returned to their country home after an extended stay at the Airshan Capital. I’d been happy, the most challenging thing on my mind had been whether Airsha was right and I needed to have sex with Zem. I was sure she was wrong.

  Then the Goddess had made her announcement, and I had a five-pointed star branded onto my wrist. From then on, life became unimaginably complicated. In the time since then, I’d found the other three points to that star: Landor, a partial albino healer, who had been locked away in a dark room his whole life; Prior, a black-as-night fire mage, who couldn’t control his fire when he got aroused; and Laric, a cocky bastard with nightmare magic, who we had all considered our enemy until very recently.

  Zem, of course, was the other point on that star. I doubt I would have agreed to be part of The Five if he hadn’t been included. Not just because I loved him, but because I knew I couldn’t do it without him. He was my rock.

  We’d come by two others to aid us: Shardra a half-crazy seer who’d been in the clutches of the Devourers for suns, and Redin, a magical son not considered magical because all he could do was walk the Nether Plane. If the Godling had ever realised what he had in Redin we would have been sunk long ago. He was the ultimate spy, able to get inside a person’s soul from any distance and discover all their deepest secrets. He’d freed Shardra from the Devourer priests, and she’d led us to the daemon who now sat amongst us. He had the ability to mix his blood with the earth and open a whirlpool, which could pull The Jayger, the Devourer itself, back into the underworld where the Goddess had sent it eons ago.

  I had been suspicious of this daemon, or half-daemon, ever since I found out about him. It had seemed too coincidental that he’d discovered his one true love just before The Jayger was released. Or that his lover was systematically being sucked dry of her essence during the last five of the fifteen suns she’d known him in his dream world.

  I’d been almost convinced he had to be conning her. After all, I knew all about running cons. I’d been a conster for suns after my Dah died when I was ten. I knew how easy it was to con someone as innocent and gullible as Shardra.

  But in this I’d been wrong. As I had about Zem and I needing to have sex. It really did seem as if he was on our side and that he could help us lock the monster away again. Though the synchronicity of us releasing him from his cave a mere half-turn of the sandglass before the Devourer was released from the underworld, when the Godling had made numerous attempts to do so over the last half moon, still gnawed at me. I didn’t like coincidences. Even though my life seemed to have been littered with them.

  Of course, some of those had not been coincidences at all. They were either engineered by the Devourer priests or the Goddess herself. I could therefore be forgiven for doubting anything happened ‘by chance’.

  “May I ask a question?” Sky asked the gathering, as we sat staring into the fire after finishing our meal.

  The daemon—Sky as we were now calling him—had eaten before joining us, as he ate his meat raw. Seeing that would not have won him any friends around this firepit, that was for sure. But he had promised to keep his long fangs off us and the airlings, so we had to be satisfied with that. After all, we ate meat too. We just happened to cook ours first.

  And used knives to cut it, not our finger-length fangs.

  I shuddered at the image that brought to mind.

  “Of course,” I answered for us all without thinking, keen to dismiss the thought of his fangs sinking into my flesh.

  “I have noticed that so many of your words end in ‘ling’. Why is that so? I once asked Shardra, but she did not know.”

  I frowned. This was out of my league. I looked around at the others. Landor took up the challenge and answered, although Zem was just as ready with an answer.

  “Our language is a mix of old and new. In the old language ‘ling’ was the word for ‘one’. So an airling was one of the air; a sealing, one of the sea; and the Godling, one of God.”

  Laric smirked. “How about sweetling? One of the sweet?”

  “One of sweetness, I assume,” Landor answered equably, not seeming to notice Laric was teasing.

  “Childling?” I had to ask. I’d never considered where words came from before or how they came to be, but now I did I could see holes in this answer. “One of the child seems silly.”

  “Child was another of the old language words. ‘Child’ meant ‘heart’. So a childling was one of the heart. I think it may have been used as an endearment originally, much as sweetling is now. A lover might have also been called a childling back then. But when it was transposed into our new language the association with an offspring became predominate.”

  I stared at Landor with amazement. All those years locked away in the dark, reading books his mistress gave him for the length of time one candle remained lit, had taught him much.

  “Thank you. It makes sense to me now. Language is an interesting study, it seems,” Sky said to Landor.

  My pale husband shrugged. “I found anything beyond my dark room interesting.”

  “The way I see it, we have lost and won by The Jayger’s method of gaining his freedom,” Zem said into the uncomfortable silence that fell then. Most of us couldn’t imagine being labelled a monster and imprisoned in a dark room our whole lives. It was truly a miracle Landor had grown into the amazing man he now was.

  “Other than the obvious loss—of having The Jayger free—we have also lost our connection to the hub of the Devourer priests’ activities. We can no longer find out what they are up to. Clearly, they weren’t all killed when the monster escaped. And we can assume those that remain are still keen to keep us from undoing their handiwork.”

  He paused again, letting his words sink in. I had been a little uplifted to hear the hag, the Godling and the High Priest were all gone,
but that didn’t mean the rest were still not a threat. They were. Maybe even more than they had been before. Now they didn’t have to divide their attentions between freeing their master and us, they would throw everything they had at stopping us.

  “The gain in all this for us is that they no longer have their Soothsayer and, therefore, they can’t predict our actions. We have a powerful seer who saved us from a storm and told us the Devourers were forced to turn back because of it. She’s also led us to the Key the Goddess wants us to use on The Jayger. We also have a powerful Nether Plane walker who can get into the souls of anyone on that plane. Which means that, if he can locate the Devourers essences, we can know what they’re up to. So we’re not as blind as they are.

  “They have the ability to move across huge distances using their portal, but only to places the person opening the portal has visited. They can divide themselves into more than one, therefore increasing the number of enemies we face, but we have the full force of the world behind us. They have water magic they can use in a fight, but we have fire, lightning and airlings.”

  “They also have other seers. None as powerful as the hag. But they are there,” Shardra said softly, seeming to hate interrupting Zem’s flow.

  That didn’t bode well. We thought we had at least that advantage over them.

  “That’s not good news. But at least whoever they are, they won’t be as effective as the hag. I wonder what would happen if Redin connected with one of them?”

  “No one that I know of uses essences as the hag did. They drain themselves and then die,” Shardra added.

  “So as long as none do what the hag did, Redin would be safe eavesdropping?” Zem clarified.

  Shardra shrugged. “I... I assume so. But it would be dangerous. What if they realised what Redin was doing as I did?”

  “It has never happened before,” Redin said, blushing brightly.

  He kept throwing Sky anxious looks, as if expecting him to go into a jealous rage and kill him at any moment. It surprised me Sky hadn’t. I’m not sure I would be happy if one of my men joined their essence with someone else, on whatever level. But then, I was always the jealous type.

  “You were looking for me, and you came into my essence when I went into yours.” Another deep blush. “In the past that has never happened. I just floated along and let my essence blend just enough with theirs to pick up their memories. To know them. I do not think any of them were even aware I was there. Unless one knows something is possible, how can you be aware of it when it happens?”

  “You talked about seeing the hag as a parasite attached to Shardra’s droplet,” Landor asked diffidently. “And that all droplets have different colours. Did the hag’s droplet have a colour?”

  “It wasn’t a droplet as much as a cord with a sucker on one end. That cord was dark grey.” Redin paused for a moment and frowned. I could hear him checking through his memories for anything ‘off’ in the varying colours.

  “I have seen dark grey-green droplets before and avoided them. They did not feel right. Mayhap they were Devourers or other evil men.”

  Shardra shook her head. “I have never seen bubbles that were anything but iridescent, colourful and beautiful. If the hag nudged up against me at some point, I have no memory of it.”

  “It is something we need to consider,” Zem brought the conversation back on point. “But we have to consider our larger plans. It isn’t about just staying out of the Devourer’s way; we have to have a plan to bring the monster down.”

  “But they are still on their way here. The ones they sent after us. They will arrive in a few days,” I interjected. “We have to make defending ourselves from them our most pressing priority.”

  Zem nodded. “We will. That will be one of the tasks for the next few days. How many priests are there on board that ship?”

  Shardra looked at Redin who had been the one to see the priests through the scrying pool.

  “Fifty. Mayhap as many as fifty.”

  That was far more than I was hoping for. But then they’d been determined to get us this time.

  “There are the five of us and another five sailors with the skills to fight,” Laric stated, looking at the captain who had joined the meeting at the fire. The rest of his men were already abed or on duty.

  The captain, a youthful, greying man—who probably once had hair the same red as my own—nodded in agreement. “A few more, if necessary. But most of my men have never picked up a weapon in their lives. And though they’re all fit—they have to be for the sailing life—that fitness mayn’t be much use against trained fighters.”

  “We cannot afford to lose our crew if we are to get off this island,” Prior put in.

  A valid point. But then, we couldn’t afford to lose any of us, especially not the Key—Sky.

  “We also have airlings,” Laric went on, strategy obviously as much his thing as Zem’s. “They have to get ashore to fight us. That means rowing boats. We could rain arrows, fire and lightning down on them from the back of our airlings when they’re sitting ducks in those boats.”

  My heart lifted. Aye, that was the answer. But we’d have to practise our fire and lightning with the airlings. It might frighten them otherwise. And Prior and I might be jolted and send a bolt into a wing. There had been a few such accidents when we were learning to shoot arrows from their backs.

  “I wish we had the equipment you used to bombard the enemy with rocks from an airling’s back,” Laric said with admiration. “When I saw you do that in the final battle... it was a game changer.”

  “Airlings were essential to the war effort,” I said stiffly, caught between pride in their accomplishments and guilt that they were seen as anything but the gentle grass-grazers they truly were.

  “I can aid you in this fight,” Sky said uncertainly. “I could drop rocks on boats. I have never learned to fight. I have never had to. But I can take down prey well enough, some of them far larger than a human.”

  Zem nodded. “Dropping rocks would be useful and comparatively safe. I want you to remain out of the direct fighting though, as you’re too important to risk. I assume you can be killed?”

  The huge silvery man nodded his head regally. “I can. We are not immortal.”

  Zem looked at Landor. “Could your healing magic work on him?”

  Landor shrugged and shook his head, his pure white hair grazing each shoulder as he did so. He was the most extraordinarily handsome man I had ever set eyes on. Even the daemon couldn’t compete. And I doubted I’d ever get over the wonder that he loved me, of all people.

  “I can heal animals, but an elemental? I am not sure.”

  “We are elementals. Sky says we are earth elementals,” Shardra said, her eyes sparkling.

  I could see this information had been playing on her mind since Sky had explained it to her. It was as if she’d been bursting to share this outrageous piece of news with us and had just been looking for an opportunity to fit it into the conversation.

  That couldn’t be true. Elementals had died out eons ago. They were the stuff of myth and legend. We wouldn’t even know they existed for certain if not for having one of them here in our midst now.

  “May I suggest an experiment?” Sky offered. He picked up a knife someone had used to cut meat off the haunch, which had been spitted over the fire not long ago.

  Shardra realised what he was about to do and gasped in distress. Sky placed a comforting hand on her shoulder and smiled down at her. “A small cut, that is all. I heal quickly, anyway. But it would be useful to know if your healer could speed the process up.”

  Landor moved across to sit at Sky’s side. The opposite side of the big, winged creature from the anxious Shardra.

  Could two beings be more different than Shardra and her Sky? She was dusky-skinned, short-haired, thin, delicate, with eyes of varying colours, and ever-anxious. He was silver-skinned, long-haired, composed, with sky-blue eyes, and big... very big in every way. Yet they seemed to fit somehow. I�
��d seen that on the beach earlier.

  While the rest of us looked on, Sky sliced open his palm and offered it to Landor. Before the drops of his brownish blood could fall to the ground, Landor placed his hand over the wound and began the healing process. I watched in awe as his hand began to glow. It lasted no more than a few moments. When he took his hand away, Sky held up his palm, free of any cuts.

  So we had an answer to that question at least. Landor could heal the daemon if necessary.

  “Good to know. But unless things get out of hand, I still think it would be best if you remained out of the action, except for the rock bombardment. You could defend Shardra and Redin. You three are essential to the success of this quest.”

  “The Five are essential to this quest, if what the Goddess said was true,” Redin put in more confidently than he had spoken up all afternoon.

  “What the Goddess says is always true. But what she said was that our success is not assured but that we were the best chance the world has,” Zem paraphrased the Goddess’ pronouncement.

  “How will you do that?” Redin asked, not as a challenge but as a plea. He wasn’t the only one who needed an answer to that question.

  “That is a very good question. I don’t think we can have a proper answer to it until we become The Five. At the moment we are not... whole. My fault. I have been dragging my feet. But no more. My petty insecurities and jealousies have no place in the grand scheme of things.” Zem looked at me, regret plainly written in his brown eyes.

  “So while we practise our techniques on airlings, we will also be building our bond. This isn’t just up to Flame. Our bond of respect, affection and trust needs to exist between all the men, as well as with Flame. This is more than a sexual bond. What I do know is that we will have more power when the bond is complete. What I don’t know is the nature of that power.”

  Could we achieve that bond? I know I loved each of them now, although I had not formally committed to Laric yet. But was it enough? If I compared what I had with my four to what Airsha had with her Airluds it was so much less. But her men already had a bond before Airsha came along. She just fused them together in a different way.