“You’ve been maintaining that for too long,” she told him, her eyes darting back to the barrier, tracking the cultists she could still see on the other side. Perhaps a dozen left. Less. “Stop before you burn out. I have this under control.”
Ollie blinked twice, then nodded once. “On the count of three. One, two?—”
Elyria grinned. “Three.”
Ollie dropped his hand.
The watery barrier collapsed in a rush—and the night exploded.
Elyria surged forward, staff spinning in one hand, darkness roaring from her. Like a wave breaking on a rocky cliff, tendrils of living nightspread across the ground, snuffing out torches, knocking cultists from their feet, tearing weapons from hands.
“Stay. Away. From. My. Friends,” she said, her shadows sharpening into tiny daggers. She punctuated each word with a throw, flinging one after another after another, embedding them in the necks of three separatesanguinagiattackers. Two fell immediately, gurgled words of the old language trailing from their lips as they collapsed.
The third, a woman with tight blonde braids and burning black eyes, didn’t break stride. Despite the shadowdagger embedded in the side of her neck, she continued running at Elyria, using the blood leaking from the wound to conjure a long ruby spear.
Elyria braced her weight on her back leg, her staff held in front. A dark smile stretched across her face, shadow-forged armor locking into place around her. She inhaled deeply through her nose, welcoming the thrill of the fight.
Spear and staff clashed in a violent shower of sparks, spittle flying from the cultist’s mouth as she screamed, “Pixie whore! You’ve ruined everything!”
Elyria shoved her back, clucking her tongue and using a ribbon of shadow to yank the spear from the woman’s grasp. “Funny, I was about to say the same thing. Minus the ‘pixie’ part, of course. You should be so lucky.”
The woman released a feral cry as she ripped the shadowdagger from her neck, her blood pouring out thickly, the coppery scent flooding the air.
Shock had Elyria hesitating, and perhaps that was thesanguinagi’splan, because she didn’t waste it. Fueled by the river of blood streaming from her neck, the woman launched ten red ribbons of her own, one from each of her fingers. They wrapped around Elyria, cinching her arms tightly against her body, binding her legs together. Her staff was wrenched away as two ribbons wound around each hand, keeping her fingers locked together, unable to direct either of her powers.
Distantly, Elyria heard Cedric yelling her name. But she didn’t get a chance to see where he was, if he was coming for her.
Because someone else already was.
A guttural war cry came from beneath his beaded beard as Thraiggran up beside Elyria, his massive hammer raised overhead with both hands. He brought it down, cracking the earth, a fractured path running toward the cultist and splitting the earth beneath her feet.
She stumbled.
The bloody ribbons loosened.
Elyria smiled.
Then, she splayed her hand, and the fracture became a fissure—a canyon of rock and dirt and dark.
The cultist’s scream was long as she fell, before cutting off with athumpthat sounded very far away.
“Thanks for the assist,” Elyria told Thraigg, shuddering as she shimmied out of the rest of the blood mage’s binding ribbons, which fluttered limply like they were unsure of what to do or where to go with their master so suddenly disposed of.
Elyria closed the rift in the ground with a shudder, her eyes searching the surrounding scene. At her back, Shep still worked on Sephone, Jocelyn looming protectively over the pair, Ollie fighting off a single cultist.
Several yards away, Cedric moved like a firestorm. Ashrender was a silver blur in his hands as he continued dueling the pepper-haired man. The man who wasn’t aiming to kill, Elyria realized. His strikes were defensive, blocking, parrying, trying to get around Cedric. To gettohim. And any relief she might have felt at that realization was suddenly snuffed out by the deeper implications.
“He is not to be harmed!”
The innkeeper’s outraged cry rang in Elyria’s memory, and fury flared against the thread in her chest, questions battering her mind. What did they want with Cedric? Was that why they had cordoned them off together? The innkeeper was to take care of Elyria and then what? What had his plan been for the knight?
The possibilities had shadows leaking from Elyria as she continued watching Cedric fight. The innkeeper may have been the one sent to take her out, but it seemed like this man here was the one calling the shots.
Was this Malchior’s conspirator, Audaxus? He was clearly a seasoned fighter, wielding a wicked, serrated blade that had likely spilled far too much blood in its time—even if he wasn’t aiming to spill theknight’s at present.
But Cedric was a wicked force all his own.
Raising Ashrender with a vicious swing that forced the man back several more steps, his face was vengeance incarnate as he hissed a single word. “Why?”
