Read Dreamwater for Free Online

Riffa, underworld enforcer, safe, whatever the cost, and whatever Riffa was doing at the moment in the tower. Mara’s contract obliged her to guard Riffa with her life, because Riffa held Mara’s soul.
    Mara shivered, and it wasn’t just the cold wind biting into her flesh. Her soul, the one thing that made her who she was, that frail, fine thing that nobody was supposed to be able to steal from her, taken, and used to enslave her.
    “Is it true Riffa brought you back from the dead?”
    Why was the creature taking so long to die? “None of your business.”
    “You were damned, and now you’re a demonic half-shadow. She’s your purgatory.” He coughed blood. His voice dropped to a raucous whisper. “A hundred years in her service and you might go free, and finally die. You’re jealous of me dying, aren’t you? Admit it.”
    “Just die already.”
    No answer. The werefox’s brown eyes remained open and glazed.
    Another one down.
    She clenched her jaw, her chest tightening. She thought she had buried every feeling deep inside. Damned for killing her sister’s abusive husband and so triggering the slaughter of her clan; turned into an assassin by Riffa, kept out of the underworld in this twilight existence, torn between sorrow and rage, played like a pawn on a giant chessboard. When would she be free at last?
    Mara wiped her scimitar on the creature’s pale chest, and turned her face away from that accusing dead stare.
    Stop fretting. Work. She began walking the perimeter again, around the tower’s metal fence. Belonging to the ruler of Siforis, the tower rose like a hand of grey lias stone from the ground, turrets with lancets for the archers, and a palisade. Somehow, Mara didn’t think that would cut it, when all the shifters attacked, as the werefox had implied.
    On the way, she crossed paths with Jana, the other huntress, and nodded a greeting. Blood splatters covered the young woman’s silk leggings and tunic, clothes typical of Morker, a city further south. She held her short knives ready.
    A busy night.
    Mara reached the eastern end of the fence, then started back.
    A low growl was all the warning she got when a pack of huge wolves poured over the outer wall and fell on her. She rolled to avoid being crushed, and reached for her daggers. “Jana! Help me!”
    Growling in the distance told her that the other huntress was probably in a fight of her own. Mara rolled again, barely avoiding teeth and claws. She had no choice but to let her shadow nature out, if she wanted to survive.
    She opened her mind to the other side, and the voice of her dead mother, sweet, rough with love, echoed in her head. Blinking away tears of sadness, Mara absorbed the breeze of the underworld, let it flow in her veins, icy. A grunt of pain escaped her lips as her body shivered and broke into particles, moving like a thick, sticky cloud of dust inside her clothes. She hovered on the paved path, not daring leave her weapons behind.
    The wolves snarled and sniffed, pawing and whining, tails between their legs, looking spooked. They fell back.
    It worked. Good. But she couldn’t fight that way. She forced the ice out of her mind, shutting the link, and it hurt as if jagged crystals tore her up inside. Gasping, she concentrated on the scent of the wet earth and animal bodies so close. Her body jerked, began to condense. 
    Normally, shifters would move away by now. Their keepers would call them back to keep them safe from a shadow creature like herself, the invisible bonds between keeper and animal tugging. But these wolves didn’t turn around and leave. Two came at her again, and five others loped toward the tower.
    War. That was what they wanted.
    Cursing, light-headed with the quick transformation, she turned, struggling to solidify more. But they swiped at her with their paws, grabbed her in their jaws. Every bite and slash, every foreign body inside her, their teeth or claws, prevented her from gathering her essence. Mara had