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He’d end this threat once and for all. Destroy Doran Buchanan with one perfectly placed bullet.
“Come on, ye prick. I’m going to fucking kill ye right now.”
Had he really screamed that aloud?
No. He might have thought it, but it was Brodie’s shout of anger. Brodie who’d lost control and revealed himself.
To Cam’s right, the damned fool was scrambling for a foothold on the piles of shale, a hand out to control his wild plummet to the floor of the dry canal bed.
And what had been a calculated extermination blew up into calamity bordering on farce.
Brodie’s pistol came up even as he ran, the report a crack like the lash of a whip.
North went down, a bullet to the chest, shock at the unexpected attack by the hulking, screeching madman his last expression.
Euna sank to the ground, head bowed as if fighting to make herself invisible to the horror around her.
Only Morgan and Doran remained unmoved by the chaos.
Doran lifted a hand, palm out, fingers spread, and the very air seemed to shudder in a silent clap of thunder.
; The rocks around Cam clattered and bounced. He fought to remain upright as the earth under his feet jinked and settled back.
Morgan fell to her knees, even as her own arms rose over her head. Palms out. Face pale with what seemed great pain or great concentration as if she alone held back the earth around them. Kept the walls from caving, the rocks from spilling into the base of the canal.
Brodie turned his second pistol on Doran, but the Amhas-draoi merely flicked a finger at him and, like batting a fly, Brodie was swept off his feet, his pistol skittering out of reach, his face going white as flour.
Cam knew that anguish. The mind-exploding pain of the body being scythed apart with invisible knives. As if your very soul were being chopped to bits.
Morgan cried out and a wave of gold light pulsed from her hands, wrapped Brodie and Euna in a cocoon of star-shot air. But even that much seemed to drain her. How long could she hold, weakened by that bullet wound? When would she finally collapse under the force of Doran’s power?
He couldn’t wait for the perfect shot. It was now or maybe never.
He raised the barrel a second time. Took aim at the center of the Amhas-draoi’s chest. Squeezed off a shot.
From behind came a bone-snicking crunch. Just before the world exploded around him.
Went black.
Morgan felt her wards collapsing just as the crack of a rifle sounded above and behind her, the bullet passing so close she imagined she felt the slice of air as it stung by her ear. Buried itself with a puff of dirt in the ground beside Doran.
He glanced up, his eyes homed in on her with a diamond hardness.
And Morgan chose her moment.
Flinging the binding spell with the force of a sword thrust, she drove in under his guard, sliding her dagger from its sheath. Burying it into his stomach with a howl of fury.
He stumbled back, screaming, a look of stunned surprise in his pale eyes. But with a roar of pain and triumph, he whipped up a tornado of choking, blinding dust.
Morgan threw her arms over her head, dropping to the ground, hoping to avoid the hailstorm of dirt, glass, rocks, and splintered wood.
And when the worst passed, she rose on shaky knees to see Euna beside her whimpering, a layer of dust blanketing her cowering body.
Brodie and Doran?
Vanished.
