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‘Alright.’ I flexed my fingers, marking the three fae he’d indicated. ‘I’ll take care of them.’
Creon’s smile as he turned away was a thing of dazzling, dangerous beauty, the smile of a wild animal about to be unleashed. I would have shivered, but my body was strung too tight with the anticipation of battle, and all that escaped me was a breathless chuckle.
A mere fifty feet away, Iorgas – white-haired, red-winged, and armed to the teeth – hollered commands to attack.
Time for the next surprise, then.
Creon’s magic slashed a cruel red line through the air, and I saw fae warriors flinch and duck even as they surged forward to strike. The force of destruction wasn’t aimed at them, though. Instead, it cut cleanly through the ropes that held the mainsail with its sun emblem attached to the largest mast, sending feet and feet of heavy, waxed linen tumbling down.
I was already drawing my soft magic again.
The sail was swept aside as if drawn by a heavy gust of wind, straight at the centre of the attacking fae formation. Their screams couldn’t stop it as it fluttered towards them like a murderous butterfly; their bursts of red left no more than a few tears behind. None of it stopped the cloth from folding around seven or eight of them as I abruptly surrendered it to gravity.
Sucking the last bit of softness from my dress, I gave the sail a firm tug down. It dragged at least a dozen fae with it on its unnaturally swift plunge into the ocean, their screams muted by linen and the flailing of limbs and wings beneath it, until the entire wrapped package of warriors hit the ice-cold waves and nothing but desperate splashing gave away their presence.
Some of them might make their way out from under that sail, but for now, they’d have better things to do than attack.
Yellow flashed as Creon restored my velvet dress without even glancing my way. Then the first of Iorgas’s people came within mage distance, and only a quick grab at my pockets full of shells saved me from the colours lighting up every corner of my sight.
There was no time left for clever strategies. Fae surrounded us like hungry vultures, their wings obscuring the sky above and around me. Everywhere I looked were swords and knives and surges of red, and my thoughts stilled as physical reflexes took over, numbing even the cold touch of my fear.
One mistake away from death, I could do nothing but fight.
My mind narrowed to that one instinct –survive. Wielding a rainbow of death, I no longer saw anything but weapons and targets, heard nothing but the whooshes of steel and the splintering of wood, smelled nothing but fear and blood. Red light burst from my right hand, cutting through skin and wing. Iridescence, nullifying an attack inches from my face. Red. Iridescence. The occasional flicker of blue to heal a cut I barely felt in my upper arm, and more red … There was an addictive simplicity to this, staying alive and nothing else. I swung my magic like I breathed, instinctive and unthinking, driven by nothing but the need to keep my heart beating another second, another minute.
A small pile of shells grew around my feet as I blocked the attacks of our opponents time and time again. Behind me, Creon’s alf steel knives did the same, catching bursts of light from the air with unimaginable speed and grace. We found each other’s rhythms as we always did, left and right and left again, turning back and forth over the blood-stained wood … Transforming this unlucky ship into the world’s bloodiest ballroom, the cries and screams of battle into the most gruesome of dancing tunes.
In the corner of my eye, something purple whisked past.
I snapped around, avoiding a ray of red in that same movement and reflecting another into its wielder’s face with a well-aimed bit of iridescence. There, another glimpse in the madness – the purple wings of the fae female Creon had pointed out for me, attempting to sneak up on him from behind the throng of bleeding bodies.
Of course he’d already noticed her. The quick flick of his right hand in her direction didn’t escape me, a gesture as if to release his magic at her. But no flash of red followed – the bindings blocking his power, just as he’d predicted.
A knife whistled just past me from behind, slammed into the mast beside me, and remained there, trembling with the force of its speed. Purple Wings moved at the same moment, flinging a bright blaze of red forward. Creon avoided the attack by quickly whirling aside, but she was too damn close – and soon, far too soon, she would realise hecouldn’thurt her.
Hell. I didn’t want that realisation to take root for any of them.
I’ll take care of them, I’d said. Time to get a little more serious about that promise. Slipping over the bloodied wood, dodging and countering at every step, I made my way to where she half-hid behind a smaller mast, seemingly unbothered by the dead and dying bodies littering the deck. Her stunning pale face split open in a grin when she noticed my approach, the look of a hungry cat spotting its first mouse of the day.
The question was, of course, which of us was the mouse.
I fired a ruby-red bolt of magic at her, and she laughed out loud as she whirled away, slender limbs moving with that perfect fae grace that made me feel like a stumbling child. Another fae female diving at me distracted me for the shortest moment. As I jumped aside, Purple Wings flung out her wings, fluttered just out of my reach, and crooned, ‘Coming to play, Emelin?’
Gods help me, no wonder the Mother liked her. This female had exactly the same honey-sweet way of speaking, singing her threats with a porcelain doll’s smile – a memory that brought my heated blood to a full boil. But she wouldn’t be goading me without reason, and the only reason I could see …
She was trying to lure me away from Creon. Without each other to shield our backs, we’d be ten times more vulnerable.
Gritting my teeth, I inched a few small steps forward, mindlessly flinging a full shell’s worth of iridescence into a flash of red to my right. The magic flew apart into vermillion sparks, and fae shrunk back, crying out in surprise. Purple Wings faltered, too, hesitating for just a heartbeat – but enough to shrink the distance between us by perhaps half a foot.
I risked using the last softness in my dress on her.
Was this new magic even visible to others the way colours were? She didn’t attempt to dodge, and my experimental attack caught the outer edge of her left wing and yanked her towards me like a puppet on a string.
For the first time, there was real terror in her scream – a frayed echo of the fears I’d felt with Zera’s bag in my arms. I flinched, the red I’d planned to draw at her staggering halfway up my arm. Wrong choices, wrong path … but exchanging even a word with her had been a mistake, had made her far too human through the rage and hate.
Magic bit me in the shoulder from behind, sharp and vicious.Fuck.I shouldn’t have hesitated. Shouldn’t have shown weakness. Like a dance that couldn’t be resumed once your feet had tangled up, my rhythm had broken; I was flailing in frantic panic rather than instinct. More red, and the fierce flare in my left thigh told me I hadn't been fast enough as I jumped aside. Wings slapped, announcing the arrival of yet another opponent, and Purple Wings was already rising from the deck, blood streaking her pale arms and cheek …
A knife split the air just beside my ear, burying itself three inches deep into the soft skin below the fae female’s jaw.
