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I retreated to the car, my fingers clumsy with my relief as I unzipped my backpack and grabbed my phone from an inner pocket.
“Y-you’re elves,” the tracker said as he started to come out of it.
“Don’t speak,” Oleander ordered in the coldest voice I’d ever heard.
Keeping my sword unsheathed, I unlocked my phone, then headed back to Pat.
“How could you help ashadow?” the tracker demanded.
Prydwen held his arm out and his bird landed on it. “He seems unwilling to stop talking. Why don’t you muzzle him?” Prydwen idly suggested, his voice lacking emotion and warmth.
“A good idea,” Oleander said.
I opened my phone app.When they get serious, they really go for it.
I was just about to punch the phone number when the tracker shouted.
Before Oleander could stop him, he yanked some kind of necklace from his neck, breaking the leather cord, and slapped it onto the asphalt.
Onyx colored magic formed under the necklace, then streaked outwards like a bursting star, shooting branches out at Oleander, Prydwen, Pat, and the humans.
The magic grew out of the ground like tendrils of ivy, and coiled around them. As the tendrils grew around its targets, I saw the magic left scorch marks in Pat’s and Oleander’s clothing.
It must have been unimaginably painful. Pat’s back arched, and Prydwen fell as if he’d been kicked, a keening noise ripping free from his mouth.
The magic tried to ensnare me, attempting to twine around my legs, but the second it touched me, it fizzled and died.
But I wouldn’t have minded the pain—the muffled screams of the humans trapped in the circle and Pat’s shouts tore my heart open.
“This is forbidden magic,” Oleander ground out between clenched teeth. “How does he have it? He can’t have this kind of power, not as a half—” She broke off in a choked exhale, too pained to keep talking.
Forbidden? This must be dark magic, then. I need to stop it—now.
I was on the tracker before he could stand, standing over him as I tried to figure out how the spell worked.
The necklace—he used it to start it!
The broken leather cord had a pendant made of a black stone, but it looked weirdly liquid, and it didn’t seem to reflect any light.
I aimed my sword at it and thrust down, intending to impale it.
The moment my sword touched the necklace, lights flashed, and the recoil nearly threw me off my feet. The entire sword shook, rattling my hands so hard I couldn’t feel my fingers. If it had been anything less than elven made, it probably would have shattered.
The tracker laughed as he picked himself up off the ground, holding the necklace. “It would take a lot more power thanyoucan wield, shadow, to destroy an elf made artifact!”
He yanked Oleander’s spear from her limp fingers and pointed it at me. “Now, submit—or the pain they’re in will only grow, and it will peel away at their bodies, layer by layer.”
A sob caught in my throat as the screams grew louder.
I’m not strong enough…I must give in.
“Okay, whatever you want, just stop!” I shouted.
“Not so fast,” he said. “First, I want you to suffer—through their pain.” The tracker’s nose was bleeding—that was probably Oleander’s handiwork—and his mussed hair gave him more of a crazy aura than normal, but I trembled as Prydwen’s shouts grew in pitch, his voice going hoarse from the pain.
The smell of burnt hair was starting to fill the air—I could only imagine how much pain my brother and the others were in.
“Stop it!” Tears of desperation clogged my throat, and I couldn’t arrange my thoughts—did I attack him? But if this necklace was indestructible even if I killed him, would the spell stop?
