Twin Passions: 3 Read Online Free PDF Page B

creatures.
    Marina might believe others were more powerful than Astra. She might be uncertain where Astra’s powers were concerned. But Astra was not uncertain. Neither was she unprepared to spill blood in the defense of the animals she had grown so fond of.
    Animals that were stone, their magick silenced since the moment the Justice Layel had touched the perverted spell upon them, was surely an evil punishable by the fiery horrors of Shadow Hell.
    Clearing the stream and entering the valley, Tripelli took his own path, following his connection with Astra to find his way to the emanations of magick that called to her.
    Winding through the edges of the Emerald Valley, sheltered by the heavily leafed, sheltering trees of the Royal Forest, Astra could feel the hope beginning to burn inside her that somehow the spell had been reversed and the cubs were calling out for soothing strokes along their backs or the warm baths the Sorceresses provided.
    Surely she would not find cold stone.
    Surely it was not the still, gray forms she would find as the cubs’ spirits cried out to her.
    The horror of that thought tore at her chest and filled her eyes with tears as the Unicorn made a wide turn around the huge boulders that rested on the forest floor as though tossed there by the gods’ restless play.
    Rounding the great stone spheres, the Unicorn came to a sliding stop, his rump nearly touching the ground at the sight that lay across his path.
    A sob tore from her lips, a gasping cry of shock at what she found and her inability to process such a sight.
    It could not be.
    The Delmari Twins. The Wizard traitors both Covenan Warrioresses and Cauldaran Wizard and Sorcerer Warriors were searching for to question in regard to dabbling in dark magick and leading that perverted power into the Griffons’ lair. The two warriors Astra had fought to forget, to push from her soul at the knowledge that they had disappeared before the battle in the valley for the Griffons had ended.
    It was believed they had fled from the fight, refusing to battle against the dark evil because they called it master. They were accused of betraying both Sorceresses and Wizards to the dark magick, without care of the consequences.
    But it wasn’t dark magick she saw as she slid from the Unicorn’s back and approached cautiously. It was not evil that the land and the Griffon cubs were whispering to her, rather a demand for aid.
    Lying beside the Wizard Twins’ unconscious forms were the fully intact, living, breathing, if weakened, forms of the Griffon babes she believed she would never see romping about the valley again.
    What caused her to do what she did next, she couldn’t explain.
    Well she could, but it was an explanation she didn’t want to venture into at the moment. It was one she couldn’t allow herself to venture into.
    Instead, she joined her Wizards in treason.

Chapter Two
     
    The battle for the land of the Sorceresses was one that drained all who fought it.
    The magick of the Covenan Sorceress Brigade, twelve warrior Sorceresses—led by the Guardian of the Lands of Covenan, the Guardian of all feminine magick, and commanded by the heir in waiting of the Covenan throne—had nearly lost all they held dear in the battle.
    They had been betrayed by one of their most revered Justices, a Sorceress charged with deciding the guilt and innocence of those suspected of criminal acts. And she herself had committed one of the most heinous crimes known. She had betrayed her own to the dark arts and a shadowed evil that had nearly destroyed Emerald Valley.
    Lying within the Royal Mountain range, surrounded by towering peaks and nearly unscalable mountain walls, the Emerald Valley had been all but hidden for as long as Covenan had existed.
    And here, the Sorceresses had hidden one of their greatest treasures, the nearly extinct flying lions. Creatures whose love and loyalty to the Sorceresses they had been gifted to had been betrayed once before by Cauldaran