Blood of the Tallan (The Petralist Book 7) Read online

  Blood of the Tallan

  Frank Morin

  Blood of the Tallan

  Book 7 of The Petralist

  This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2021 by Frank Morin

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  ISBN: 978-1-946910-21-9

  A Whipsaw Press Original

  Edited by Joshua Essoe

  Cover art by Brad Fraunfelter

  Illustrations by Jared Blando

  Book design by Kate Staker

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Maps

  1. Friends Don’t Let Friends Duel Cakes Alone

  2. Every Girl Needs a Few Secrets

  3. Too Many Not-so-imaginary Friends

  4. There Are Secrets, and Then There Are Crazy-super-secrets

  5. If Only Crazy People Were Always Wrong

  6. A Gift with a Catch

  7. Making Bad Situations Worse

  8. Hey Guys, Watch This!

  9. When Simple Poisoning Is No Longer Enough

  10. Countdown to the Apocalypse

  11. It’s All a Matter of Priorities

  12. Everyone Loves a Jean’s Jacket

  13. Impossible Relationships Sometimes Work Out

  14. Sort-of, Maybe, Almost Proposing Isn’t As Hard As Everyone Thinks

  15. Strong Women Build on What They Know

  16. Sometimes You Get Exactly What You Deserve

  17. Pastries, the Building Blocks of Great Things

  18. Just Dance!

  19. Sometimes Completing a Puzzle Is Depressing

  20. Never Ask a Woman Her Age

  21. The Unrivaled Power of Second Helpings

  22. Two Desperate Plans Are Better Than One. Maybe

  23. How Best to Use a Really Big Stick?

  24. Always Ask for Dessert

  25. If You Don’t Really Want Something, No One Can Help You

  26. Floppy Physics Are the Best

  27. There’s Always Another Secret

  28. Dig Deep and Give It Everything You’ve Ever Eaten

  29. All You Can Do Is the Best You Can Do, Especially with Explosives

  30. The Best Teams Perform As One Unit

  31. What Could Go Wrong with a Very Complicated Plan?

  32. Traps within Traps

  33. And You Thought You Got Grumpy when Someone Wakes You Up Early

  34. Battle Plans Are Supposed to Last Longer than Three Seconds

  35. Splitting Headaches

  36. Joy Can Be Found in the Most Difficult Situations

  37. The Importance of Presentation. And Bombs

  38. Nothing Like a Good Old-fashioned Bash Fight

  39. A Great Entrance Makes All the Difference

  40. Sometimes We Just Need Another Pair of Hands

  41. The Second Skin

  42. Some Days Just Keep Getting Worse

  43. Hunter versus the Hunted

  44. The Weirdest Catch-the-devil Game of All Time

  45. There’s a First Time for Everything

  46. A Shocking Distraction Initiative

  47. Of Course Bad Guys Cheat

  48. Dealing with a Really Bad Man

  49. It’s Okay to Arrive Late to a Party, If You Do So with Enough Style

  50. It’s Not in Wielding the Most Power but in Knowing How to Apply It

  51. No Regrets

  52. Vengeance As a Motivator Is Very Risky

  53. Time-out

  54. Dying for a Good Cause Never Gets Easier, No Matter How Many Times You Try It

  55. And You Thought Things Couldn’t Possibly Get Worse

  56. Higher Forms of Cheating

  57. A Disobedient Child

  58. An Elemental Conspiracy

  59. When One Monster Is Not Enough

  60. The Finer Points of Getting Electrocuted

  61. Sometimes a Guy Just Needs a Good Woman Armed to the Teeth

  62. All Seven Kinds of Idiots Can Still Have Good Ideas

  63. Painful Choices

  64. What Is the Most Important Priority?

  65. The Final Threshold

  66. Best Friends Risk Everything for Each Other. Maybe Just Not Dessert

  67. The Price of Victory

  68. Kids Say the Darndest Things

  69. Cake Is a Better Motivator than Sticks

  70. The Promise of a Very Interesting Life

  71. Some People Get Exactly What They Deserve

  72. New Beginnings

  Thumbs Up? Or Thumbs Down?

  Author’s Note

  Also by Frank Morin

  About the Author

  Acknowledgments

  The last Petralist book. Wow!

  What a long and wonderful road. It’s hard to believe we’re here at the end, but since it’s such an amazing, epic end, it’s okay.

  As usual, I owe a lot of thanks to a lot of people for helping me along the way.

  My family—stalwart supporters all the way.

  My beta readers—you rock!

  All of my fans whose boundless enthusiasm for this book makes me think maybe basalt really works.

  THANK YOU.

  I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.

  Frank

  Maps

  1

  Friends Don’t Let Friends Duel Cakes Alone

  “This is what I call research,” Connor said as he surveyed the long table, piled with eight dozen fresh-baked sweetbreads, a bucket full of smashpacked desserts, six pounds of sizzling bacon strips on hot plates, and fifteen Althing chocolate cakes of varying sizes and numbers of layers.

  Hamish rubbed his hands together eagerly as he slowly walked around the table, which filled most of the private dining room. “No better way to prove you didn’t suffer any lingering problems from your elfonnel immersion than with a little gluttoncrafting.”

  They’d actually participated in a lot of gluttoncrafting during the triple feast honoring Tomas and Cameron and their near-victory over the dread queen. Connor had convinced Shona that since Verena had turned off the Sucker Punch super mechanical, which cut off the incredible flood of healing power it was stealing from the convergence point, the best way for him to restore his strength would be by consuming a lot of food.

  Only Hamish, Jean, and Verena knew the full extent of what Connor could do with gluttoncrafting, and he’d shared the ability with Hamish and Verena during the feast. Each of them had consumed far more than any normal person could have without bursting. After each plate, he had transformed the food into pure energy, clearing their stomachs for another helping and instantly refreshing them.

  Connor had eaten seventeen plates of food, impressing even Evander by his stomach powers. Then he’d slept for thirty-six hours straight.

  He’d been right. He almost felt back to normal.

  So of course, as soon as he awakened from his epic nap, he and Hamish had returned to the kitchens for a round of research. Luckily, Shona hadn’t thought to rescind her order to the cooks to give Connor anything he needed. He doubted that order would survive until lunchtime, but that was okay. He didn’t plan to simply waste a bunch of precious food when Merkland was still so battered from the swarm and the volcanic eruption.

  They were preparing for battle. Sort of.

  Connor selected one sweetbread, a soft, fluffy scone, still warm from the oven, slathered with golden butter. With a thought, he embraced both air and fire. Ever since his third ascension, he almost never totally severed his links to
his tertiary affinities, so the connections solidified instantly.

  Air appeared beside him, invisible to anyone else. To him, she looked like a beautiful woman with flawless skin and long, flowing tresses that today were the color of storm clouds. She wore a long, white cotton dress that billowed around her as if she was draped with afternoon clouds.

  Fire appeared beside her, his hair longer than the last time Connor had seen him. Today it was orange, and sparks burst from the tips. He again wore a fancy tunic of interwoven tongues of fire that formed a colorful pattern.

  “Experimenting this morning, are we?” Air asked as she danced a slow spin around him in the air. Fire just crossed his arms, the hint of a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth.

  Connor was glad he could still reach fire. Queen Dreokt had destroyed the ancient sculpted stone that had filtered the sylfaen energy at one of the convergence points to create the marble affinity. With the stone gone, the lower-level access to marble that most Petralists used had snuffed out, leaving their affinities useless. Only he and Kilian, as well as the dread queen, could access the higher-level power of fire still available through the green frequency energy, accessible after the second threshold.

  Connor grinned at them and said, “Sculpted scone breakfast mission, take one.”

  He tapped granite, and the so-familiar itch of it crawling under his skin helped center his mind, as always. He focused the power of granite into the center of his chest and pushed it out, wrapping it in layers of air and fire. Usually when performing a summoning, he would then pour that mixture into clay. Every summoning required granite strength, elemental lifeblood, and a body. It was possible to simply clothe the summoned creature in the element, but clay was easier and consumed less power stone.

  Today, Connor poured the mixture into the scone, focusing on the commands that would structure his summoning’s entire focus. The little pastry shuddered, then came alive in Connor’s mind. A tiny fraction of his focus diverted to control the little summoning, and he grinned to feel its eagerness to fulfill the mandate he’d used to define it.

  “Did it work?” Hamish asked, his tone awed as Connor gently placed the summoned scone onto the table.

  “Let’s find out.” Connor pushed a single thought down the conduit connecting him to the scone. Hamish.

  The scone scurried across the table, little legs forming out of bread to propel it. In seconds, it rushed to the edge and easily leaped across to Hamish, little arms forming to catch Hamish’s shirt. Without slowing, it raced up his shirt, and as he started laughing in delight, it plunged into his open mouth.

  Hamish gagged as the little pastry tried rushing right down his throat. Coughing, he grabbed it and held the squirming pastry long enough to chomp down hard. It stopped moving, and Hamish sighed, a look of rapture on his face.

  Around the mouthful of scone, he managed to say, “Feffet wumpf.”

  “Excellent.” Connor had hoped he’d gotten the heat right. He easily understood Hamish’s words as, “perfect warmth.”

  Hamish swallowed and added, “Maybe tone down the suicidal tendency a bit, though.”

  “On it.” Connor chose six slices of bacon for the second test. Wrapping them together, he replicated the summoning, and the bacon twisted into a tiny man-shaped treat that again charged Hamish and leaped into his mouth. That time, it stayed there, the bit of fire in it heating it to the point where it was obviously at the almost-but-not-quite burned his tongue point.

  “Oh, that was perfect,” Hamish grinned. “Let’s try a cake next.”

  “Haven’t you two had enough to eat?”

  Verena approached, dressed in her regular Builder work clothes, including tan trousers, a dark green blouse, and a scarred, brown leather jacket. Her black hair was held back from her face with a red leather cord.

  He grinned, elated to see her. She wore her satchel slung over one shoulder, as always, and crossed her arms, staring at the table full of food, one eyebrow raised in question.

  Connor stole a quick kiss. “We’re experimenting on a variation of the sculpted scones we used against Queen Dreokt.”

  She smiled. “I read Ailsa’s report probably ten times.”

  “I wish I’d been there to see it,” Hamish said as he wiped bacon grease from his lips.

  “I’m not sure we can catch her with another batch of sculpted scones,” Verena said.

  “I doubt we could,” Connor agreed. “Hence the variation.”

  Hamish added proudly, “After the swarm nearly destroyed Merkland, I noticed it was hard to ensure refreshments reached everyone fast enough.”

  Verena grimaced at the mention of the swarm. She’d played a pivotal role in defending the city from the horde of summoned monsters that almost wiped out Merkland. Connor wrapped an arm around her shoulder, shivering at the memory of that huge summoned creature bearing down on her, with the Swift a smoking ruin, and her only weapon a short sword. She’d faced it defiantly, but would have died in seconds if he hadn’t returned.

  “So we’re planning a summoning that can get critical resources to people fast,” Connor said.

  Verena chuckled. “Critical resources? All I see are desserts, sweets, and bacon.”

  “Exactly,” Hamish said. “Only the basics.”

  She sighed, but smiled. “Only you two could propose something so ridiculous and make it sound vital to the war effort.”

  Hamish grinned and gave her an extravagant bow, perfectly mimicking Kilian. Connor asked, “Want to help?”

  “I wouldn’t miss it,” she said, pointing at a three-layer chocolate cake. “How about we test that one next?”

  They tried it, but Verena’s face got covered with chocolate as the entire cake tried crawling into her mouth. She stumbled backward, hands sunk into the soft confection, trying to chew while laughing hysterically.

  Connor was still fine-tuning the commands he imbued the summoned pastries with, so maybe she should have tried something smaller. He could have terminated the summoning, but seeing her wrestling the cake was so funny, he couldn’t make himself do it. Hamish leaped to Verena’s defense, lunging in and ripping half the cake away and shoving it into his own mouth.

  Connor rushed to Verena a second later, pulling the cake free and helping her finish it. Laughing, she wrapped cake-covered hands around his neck and pulled him in for a very messy kiss. Her lips usually tasted like mint, but he did not mind at all when she tasted like chocolate.

  He doused them all with water to clean them off, then drained it away, leaving them dry and laughing.

  When Verena caught her breath, she said, “Definitely need some more testing.”

  “That’s why we ordered so much,” Hamish said grandly.

  “Let’s get to it, then,” she said with that determination that Connor loved so much. “Because Connor and I have a meeting with Kilian in half an hour.”

  Connor glanced at all the food remaining and grinned. “We can do it.”

  2

  Every Girl Needs a Few Secrets

  Half an hour later, feeling very refreshed, Connor joined Verena on a couch in Kilian’s suite in one of the towers of the Merkland palace. They’d finished every scrap of food on that table with time to spare. Connor had dialed in the summonings to the point where each of them had a long line of pastries and desserts queued up to feed them. Hamish had lain down on the floor near the table so each pastry could dive off the edge and plunge into his open maw.

  He’d said the experience changed forever his concept of the perfect breakfast.

  Connor had used gluttoncrafting on each of them to instantly convert the food into pure energy. Even though he felt almost normal again, his body had still welcomed the extra energy as he healed from his strenuous elfonnel experience. He rubbed his chest where Kilian had stabbed him through the heart to prove that he could regenerate from usually-fatal wounds.

  Hopefully he wouldn’t need to experience that lesson again. He might be able to survive a heart stab, b
ut that didn’t mean he wanted to deal with it again.

  Kilian sat in a comfortable chair nearby, wearing his usual casual clothes of trousers, white shirt, and black vest. Aifric sat beside him in another chair, wearing the form-fitting black clothing that Student Eighteen preferred, under her white Healer jacket.

  At the moment, it looked like Aifric controlled the shared body she inhabited with eighteen other women, and she gave Connor that signature warm smile of hers. “I’m so glad you’re looking so refreshed.”

  “Lots of rest and good food are my favorite medicine.”

  “Don’t overdo it,” Kilian warned. “Recovering from an elfonnel experience takes a few days.”

  Aifric’s face shuddered slightly as Student Eighteen took control and asked, “Connor, will you allow me to enter your mind?”