The Dragon Nimbus Novels: Volume III: Volume III

anyone else who cared to help. He raised his hands once more to find a spell, any spell that would trap the witch.
    Just then the weasel broke free of the last of its tin casing and leaped from its perch on the bardo.
    Lancier flung his arm forward as if launching a spell or an invisible spear.
    “Come back here,” Rejiia screamed and dove for the slippery animal. It eluded her grasp. “Don’t you dare leave before I’m ready. I am your master as long as you are enthralled. I will be your master when you live.” She crawled after the elusive animal into the midst of the sledges.
    A pain ripped across Jack’s gut, leaving him dizzy and disoriented. What was he about to do? He touched his temples, trying desperately to ground himself. His eyes crossed and lost focus.
    Then his vision cleared of the afterimages he’d seen ever since Rosie took up residence in his body. His bottom no longer itched as if to twitch a tail.
    “Rejiia and Krej, Krej and Rejiia, father and daughter, daughter and father, bound together by blood and by magic, cling to each other in the chase,” Lanciar said quietly as he traced a sigil in the dirt with his toe. He followed with more words, spoken too rapidly in a language similar to Rover, but . . . Jack didn’t have the concentration to think through a translation.
    More pain attacked every joint in Jack’s body. He needed to fall to his knees. He didn’t dare.
    And then Katrina was there, holding him, giving him the strength he needed to continue, as she had done in that dank and miserable dungeon cell beneath Queen’s City.
    But this time the weakness that assailed him felt like a kind of freedom.
    Rejiia continued to crawl after her father, coaxing now rather than screaming. She stopped to groom her wet and straggling hair. Then she returned to her determined chase.
    “Did I see her lick her hand and wash her ears?” Jack asked. Feeling suddenly lighter, he patted his gut, his backside, all of his joints in turn. Rosie did not respond. He risked a minor trance to search his inner being.
    “Katrina, I think I’ve just lost one of our problems.” He couldn’t help grinning.
    Then Rejiia did pause in her mad scramble beneath the sledges to rub dust off her hands and lick them.
    “What?” Jack eyed Lanciar carefully.
    “I just put a compulsion upon her.”
    “Compulsions are illegal,” Marcus reminded him.
    “I’m not a member of the Commune and not bound by their conventions. Yet.”
    “What did you do to her?” Jack asked again.
    “She’ll follow the weasel until one or both of them dies. And until she catches it—alive—she can’t throw any magic.”
    “She’ll be tracking that thing for years before she realizes she’s under a compulsion!” Marcus chortled.
    “All Lanciar did was enhance her own inner demons,” Jack added. “She’s been obsessed with her father since before his spell against Darville backlashed and turned him into a weasel. I think that was why she embraced Simeon as a lover. He looked so much like her father, and Rejiia controlled that relationship from the beginning.” He didn’t add that with the cat persona embedded with her own, the compulsion would compound. No one could outstubborn a cat.
    “Even when Simeon thought he commanded the world, Rejiia gave him the commands,” Lanciar mused. “She controlled him as she never could her father.”
    “How long does a weasel live?” Marcus asked. “What happens when Krej dies? Are we back to battling Rejiia?”
    “I don’t think so.” Lanciar whistled a jaunty Rover tune. “That compulsion won’t go away unless she captures the weasel alive! She’ll search for him even after he dies.”
    “I think we need to get back into the library,” Robb reminded them. “The gloaming is lifting, but not gone. Vareena needs our help.”

Chapter 45
     
    V areena watched and listened as Powwell and Ackerly continued their bitter litanies against each other. Over and over, she tried to project love and peace into their hearts. She’d done this for every ghost who came under her care. She had to show these two lost souls the lighted path through the void to their next existence.
    ’Twas her destiny, her purpose in staying so long in this cursed and unforgiving place. If she could not help these two, she would never have freedom, even if she left.
    Ackerly and Powwell rejected every offer.
    “Stop it, both of you!” she finally insisted. “Stop and listen to yourselves. You just