Zodiac prison warrior sh.., p.1
Zodiac Prison: Warrior Shifter Book 3, page 1
Zodiac Prison
Warrior Shifter Book Three
R.C. Luna
Copyright ©2022 by R.C. Luna
All rights reserved.
No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher or author, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law.
Contents
1. Chapter 1
2. Chapter 2
3. Chapter 3
4. Chapter 4
5. Chapter 5
6. Chapter 6
7. Chapter 7
8. Chapter 8
9. Chapter 9
10. Chapter 10
11. Chapter 11
12. Chapter 12
13. Chapter 13
14. Chapter 14
15. Chapter 15
16. Chapter 16
17. Chapter 17
18. Chapter 18
19. Chapter 19
20. Chapter 20
21. Chapter 21
22. Chapter 22
23. Chapter 23
24. Chapter 24
25. Chapter 25
26. Chapter 26
27. Chapter 27
28. Chapter 28
29. Chapter 29
30. Chapter 30
31. Chapter 31
32. Chapter 32
You ready for more?
33. Preview Zodiac Throne
Fullpage Image
Chapter 1
“Darkness within darkness. Gateway to all understanding.” - Lao Tzu
I remembered this passage that was etched into the marble stone in our Magical Sciences class as Zayne, my nagual combat instructor and mentor, and I trekked in our jaguar forms through the dark jungle of the Gemini House. All manner of jungle creatures lived here in the thick, damp landscape. I was always surprised at the various species in the Zodiac territories. Variants of the familiar spiders and snakes, worms and gorillas. Yet there were so many more, some as small as the cueyatl, a tiny frog with a tongue so poisonous it could corrode your body with a single swipe. Or the ahuizotl, a dog-like creature with hands instead of paws and a hand on its tail with sharp claws. These creatures could also see perfectly under the cover of night. It made it nearly impossible for anyone to live in this precarious habitat. This is where the hunters became the hunted. All manner of jungle creatures lived here in the thick, damp landscape.
The clouds covered the moon, and it would have been pitch black if it wasn’t for our night vision. My jaguar form was as black as the night and adept at seeing in the dark, equipped with eyes that amplified even the slightest light peeking through the faintest parts of the clouds above. I wondered what understanding I was supposed to have right now as I lived the words of the timeless quote.
Up ahead, that’s it. Unable to communicate with Zayne in my nagual form, I thought this to myself as I peered through the bush at the creature crouched on the side of the riverbank. We blended with the dark energy of the night and watched her in utter silence, undetectable by Fae senses in our jaguar forms. It was a cihuatl. Thick, long strands of black-and-grey hair flowed from the top of her head. At her back were two dark-grey, slimy, scaled bat-like wings, and her belly was swollen from pregnancy. Because of her crouched position, her legs were hidden from view. Her face looked like it had no flesh, just the skull, because of the thin, transparent skin and veins that covered it. These were the creatures of nightmares. They brought sickness to Fae villages, hunted the children that fell ill, then stole them from their families. They drew power from the pain and suffering of the surviving family members. The creatures were nearly seven feet tall, rare and hard to find, mainly because of how they reproduced.
At the moment, with her eagle-like claws, she was tearing into what appeared to be young human flesh. My hackles rose as we crept toward her, my claws digging into the ground with every step. As we got closer, I glanced over at Zayne, who gave me a short nod. We emerged from the cover of the jungle, ready to attack.
The moment he lurched toward her, I rushed to the creature’s side and locked my teeth over her wings. I anticipated that she would immediately try to fly away rather than fight. Just as I did, Zayne went for the neck. The cihuatl easily flung him aside with one swipe of her arm. It was strong, and Zayne was stunned from the blow. The creature turned, trying to throw me off its back, and I dug my teeth even harder into those slimy wings. It tried to grab at me, but I dug my back legs into the ground as I locked my jaws on the wing’s bones and heard a few snaps. It grasped me with its clawed hand and tried to inject me with the venom she carried in her blood. But it was no use; her claws couldn’t penetrate my jaguar’s flesh. This was what made us so unique and so powerful as protectors of Zol Stria.
The cihuatl wrapped her arm around me and yanked me off of her, flinging me with the force of a semi-truck. I landed with a loud thump against a jagged boulder. A moment later she began to bat her wings in an effort to escape. I lunged after her again, and she swiftly avoided my grasp and maneuvered herself behind me. Before I could react, I felt her sharp talons dig into my back as she lifted me into the air with her. Her strong, powerful wings flapped, the wounds from my attack wearing on her, but she pushed hard. My heart raced in a fit of panic when we rose off the ground. She could drop me anywhere and make her escape. We had been searching for her for three months, and I wasn’t going to let her get away. We needed her.
I thrashed in a fit of rage and her talons gave way just a little. I couldn’t reach her with my mouth or my claws, and I couldn’t use my elemental powers in this form.
This mission is fucked.
Just as I thought this, she dipped lower to the ground, slamming me against the earth before lifting off again. My mind raced. Should I shift back to human form? The second I did, my skin would be filled with lethal diseases at the mere touch of one of her claws. But just then something crashed into her, and she began to tumble back down. It was Zayne. He’d leapt from the ground onto her back! I felt his weight send us hurtling down. Just as she began to fall, she released me, and my four legs landed firmly on the jungle floor. I ran out of the way as Zayne and the cihuatl plunged to the ground where I had been standing a heartbeat earlier. Instantly I was on her back, her wing once again in my mouth. As I tore into her left wing, the bitter-tasting blood spilled into my mouth.
The Zol Beast Keeper at the Academy had taught us that if anyone even touched cihuatl blood, their bodies would rapidly deteriorate with a cancerous plague. The only thing happening to me right now was my gag reflex; it was triggered by the god-awful taste. Once again, I was grateful for the gift of being a nagual and immune to Fae venom.
Zayne landed his canines into her neck, and a high-pitched scream left her throat. The creature that had just been towering over us stumbled to the ground with a thud, and Zayne landed on top of her. Once a nagual had you in their deadly jaw-lock, there was little, if anything, you could do to break free. Right now, she was struggling to breathe because his grip almost pierced into her veins through her hard scales. But he wouldn’t kill her, at least not if he could help it. We needed information.
She thrashed about and kicked out her bony ostrich legs in protest. I padded closer, and she turned her cold, emotionless, reptilian eyes toward mine. She seemed to be trying to shoot venom from her throat at me, but it was no use under Zayne’s tight grip. She would lose her breath soon if she didn’t simply give in. She was finally realizing that she was outmatched, because she let out an unearthly squeal for breath. Zayne held on a few seconds longer, and when her eyes bulged, he released her.
She reached a clawed limb up to her throat and began to cough. Now that she was down, I shifted into my human form and stood there, completely naked save for the long, black, wavy hair that fell down my back. I called the dark to my fingertips and brought fire to my palms. The creature squirmed in pain on the ground as I raised a Zol rune around us. It was a circle of my fire element, forming the zodiac symbols to channel their power and serve as a conduit of the magic we needed to complete the mission. It was incredible how far I’d come. Two years ago I could barely channel fire in just one direction, now I was creating fire runes. Zayne remained a breath away from the cihuatl, ready to leap at her in a single heartbeat.
I chanted the incantation, “Etchi nal Xila.” Darkness within darkness. Show me so I may understand.
As soon as I finished, the blaze of the Zol rune began to glow even brighter, threatening to singe my back and legs with the heat. But I didn’t move an inch as sweat began to form on my brow. My human form, or “Zol skin” as they taught us to say at the Academy, had a very high tolerance for heat because of my elemental power, but even still, if it consumed me, I would still burn, only slower.
The cihuatl looked around, winded, and just as she placed her clawed hands on the bloodstained ground to push her pregnant body upward to stand, Zayne took one step toward her and tore her abdomen open with his fangs. An ear-piercing shriek left her throat as her insides were exposed and spilled out all over the ground. It was critically important to our mission that the fetus was extracted while she was still alive.
I reduced the heat level of the fire rune and looked out past it, feeling the eyes of the jungle upon us. Her death released her dark energy. All of the torment, fear and agony this monster had caused and collected within her soul spilled out of her. An inky black mist filled the air within the fire circle. This was our bonus. I eagerly drew it toward me, soaking it up hungrily. A monster
“Sick. That must be it…” I said to Zayne as he got busy studying the creature.
Without lifting his gaze in my direction, he gave me a single nod of acknowledgment and continued to sniff and study the glowing, decomposing blue fetus that was still alive on the jungle floor. The cihuatl was a terrible sight, and her insides smelled of rotten flesh. They reproduced by stealing the fetus out of the belly of any warm-blooded creature, Fae or beast. They swallowed it whole, turning the creature into one of them while inside the womb, slowly infecting it with all of the diseases they carried. That’s why these creatures didn’t resemble each other. They turned into a hybrid of the life they stole and their beastly genes.
Over the years, the mages had created wards of protection over pregnant women that hid their unborn children from the senses of the cihuatl. This had made it very difficult for these creatures to reproduce and had reduced their numbers to near extinction. However, they would never become extinct. There were always those unfortunate mothers who had trouble getting the wards. Mothers who couldn’t afford the wards included those outcasted from Zol society for anything ranging from mating with humans to various other forms of transgression, and, of course, there were those who would use the cihuatl as revenge or punishment on a new mother.
In an instant, I felt my face flush with embarrassment. I realized that this was my first time being naked in front of Zayne. I quickly shifted back to a nagual. Shapeshifter. Creature of demons and darkness. The trouble now was that we couldn’t communicate with words in our nagual form. Only mated nagual could do that. So he went on sniffing at the rotted insides of the cihuatl. Then he picked up the glowing, acrid blue fetus with his teeth. I nearly threw up at the thought of the horrific tastes that must be filling his mouth. He lifted his gaze from the carnage and met my curious stare, bolting out of there heartbeats later with me keeping pace with him.
Our mission was complete, and now we would have some answers.
Chapter 2
As soon as we arrived at the Aries Academy campus, we ran directly to the ceremonial atrium behind the greenhouse. Zayne dropped the decaying body, which was still moving and taking its last breaths, on the ground in the middle of the summoning circle. Two Master Zol Sen, never seen unless at a ritual like this, were waiting for us in their long white robes with golden embroidery, along with the dean of Advanced Incantations and other academic instructors.
The world of the Zol Stria is incredibly complex and every day I learn something new about how all our lives are influenced by the cosmos and our surrounding universe. Zol Stria exists in tandem with the mortal realm, Earth. The world of Zol Stria is hidden behind twelve gates and is the soul of the planet, which is governed by the zodiac. The twelve constellations, visible on earth as the sun passes through each one, define our very existence. The position of Earth in relationship to the sun and the stars at the moment of birth for any creature on our planet outlines their soul’s journey during this lifetime and defines the soul contracts they signed before taking their first breath. The Zol’s journey, is the soul’s journey. The struggles one has, the milestones they will experience and the lessons they must learn in order to continue to evolve and grow is mapped out for them. The stars write the path. This is the mantra of all of the people of Zol Stria.
Here, Zol means soul. It is the deity that is within you. The creatures of Zol Stria are able to channel and harness the power of the constellations, in an effort to maintain balance between our realms and in harmony with the universe. The idea that the Zol is holy and above all things became clearer to me the more I lived among the people of Zol Stria and I have now taken it on as my belief, too.
Zayne and I shifted back into our human forms. One of the apprentices approached me, and I gave her a grateful nod as she slipped a loose cotton wrap dress on me while Zayne pulled on jeans and a T-shirt. We were both in need of a good shower, but we would stay on and watch the ceremony unfold.
“Glad you made it back without decomposing from disease first,” Jenna, my brown-skinned, jade-eyed nagual bestie, whispered to me as I went to stand next to her.
I reached both my hands to my throat and pretended to choke myself, sticking my tongue out and rolling my eyes. Then she nudged me, and I nudged her back playfully. We were in our third year at the Academy. Trent still held my heart, but our long-distance romance was wearing on me. We saw each other whenever we could, every few months or so. I figured out that if I snuck through the less-protected Sagittarius Gate, no one would notice. But it was such a long trip, and it was forbidden to cross the Gates without orders, so I was taking a huge risk.
Trent was growing in rank and had become a top mafia boss. By some miracle, he’d won back the trust of Solana, the most notorious leader of the Dark Zodiac on the other side of the Gates. The last time I’d visited, Trent wouldn’t say much about her, which bothered me because I counted on him to give me intel. Our unit believed she still had at least one of the two missing relics, if not both. We had to get those relics back; they gave her way too much power. With Trent being immortal and me having hundreds of years of life ahead of me, we agreed to spend time apart, giving us valuable time for him to earn her trust enough to get the relics back while I continued building my skills in the Academy.
But it didn’t matter how logical our plan sounded; Solana was a ruthless bitch who deserved to be destroyed for all the pain she had caused me. But every time I brought this up to him, he tried to convince me to see past my thirst for revenge to the bigger picture.
He would explain how her operation was too big for me to go at her guns blazing. We needed a strategy, and to form a strategy we needed intel, but it was hard to come by. Especially with Trent suddenly becoming tight-lipped. I did know that her focus was currently on Europe and the Middle East, and she had left Trent to oversee the North and South Americas operation. He made it seem like there was a lot she still hid from him.
I thought she would crucify him when he told her that the naguals had retrieved the Blood Ruby in our last mission. But she didn’t. She was livid, of course, but when she found out Ixia had the Stone Mind and that the nagual were sent in to retrieve both, she considered it more of a casualty than a fuck up on his part. When he explained that he was using the Blood Ruby to take down the Miami Mafia, who was being led by Ixia, she didn’t kill him. Instead, she reprimanded him, had him locked in a lead cell without blood for a while, then released him back into her ranks.
But I wondered what he wasn’t telling me. I wondered why she would forgive him so easily when the relics were key to bringing back the UnZol King, who happened to be her great uncle, and creating the world she desired. I suspected there was much more to his relationship with her, and the more I thought about it, the more upset I became.
The night was cool while the air was supercharged with magical kinetic energy. Jenna and I and the rest of our unit—Bjorn, Lex, Andres, Eliana and Axel—were all present at the ceremony. These were the other nagual who’d made it across the Gates with me for our transformation into jaguar shifters, and now, after three years together at the Academy, they had become my family. About thirty more students filed around in the Zodiac rune, as there hadn’t been a sacrifice of a cihuatl’s still-living fetus for hundreds of years. This was more exciting than a solar eclipse on the summer solstice.
“What is that thing? It smells,” Jenna asked, her long, golden-brown curls swishing across her back as she shook her head and crinkled her nose from the stench.
“You mean what was that thing,” I corrected her. “I think the child was dragon-Fae. See the wings?”
“A baby dragon!” Jenna growled.
“Converting the babies of other Fae is what they do. It’s one of the reasons they’re so depraved,” I whispered, shaking my head.
The masters of ceremony were at their places. The wind rustled through my dress as it blew, bringing with it the powerful energy of the cosmos summoned by the Zol Sen. This ancient wind swept toward the now-still carcass in front of us. Light sparkled all around and ignited the dark, as their hands brought forth a surge of energy toward the center of the Zodiac wheel where the fetus lay. From the floor the unborn child lit on fire and an image was clearly seen amidst the flames that it produced. Darkness within darkness. For over a year our team had been searching for any information that would lead us to the Blade Bone and the Devil’s Eye, the two missing relics of the Unzol King.
