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I didn’t hesitate.
The blade of my axe cleaved deep into its chest, deep enough that a woman would have been split in half, a fae felled to the ground. But the man kept moving, as if it hadn’t felt the blade at all. It reeled back from the impact, but then it was on me again, closing a hand over my arm where I still gripped the handle of my axe.
As it touched me, my entire body filled with cold. It was reaching inside of me, burrowing past the physical to the center of me, where my magic dwelled. Just like that night in Veyka’s bedchamber. The assassin.
But the assassin had been fae, not human. He’d moved with precision and intent.
There was no time to think of it, not now. Not with the very core of my being, my magic under attack. I brought my knee up hard, slamming into its chest, trying to knock the axe free. The force of it was enough to send me back hard onto the ground. A second later I was up, dagger pulled from my boot, launched through the air.
It landed in the center of his face, lodging directly between where two eyes ought to have been.
The abomination did not even pause.
But neither did Veyka. She moved like the wind was at her heels, so fast I could hardly make out her movements in the half light. She swiped with her curved blade, but missed. Ducked, then kicked the monster’s leg out from under it. The bad leg, the one that was already broken. But it didn’t roar in pain or clutch at the wound. It simply pulled itself back up and advanced again.
Veyka drew the other blade from her back, one wickedly curved rapier in each hand. I opened my mouth to bellow that the blades did nothing, to try and behead it, but it was too late.
She shoved forward with all the force of her body, skewering the half-human, half-monster onto the twin blades. I was already on my feet. I grabbed her shoulder, yanking her back out of its reach.
But it didn’t attack again.
It fell back onto the clay with a slap that might have been comical if Veyka and I weren’t both breathing so heavily, the only sounds in our stunned silence.
We both stared down at it—what had once been a human man, now nothing more than a heap of ruined body and blood turned black by the night.
I took inventory of each limb, each wound. I’d landed two killing wounds. The ones it had when it emerged from the darkness should have done him in already.
“Why was it your swords that felled him?” I said, crouching down to pull out one blade and then the next. I handed the first to Veyka.
The second, I held up the moonlight, inspecting closely.
They were beautiful blades, to be sure, an alloy of multiple metals with a swirling pattern imbued at the time of forging. But there was nothing remarkable about them that I could detect.
Veyka frowned and held out her hand for the second blade.
I gave it to her, turning back to the ruined corpse. It bore no similarity to the assassin who had attacked Veyka, none at all. Other than that feeling.
I glanced over my shoulder, expecting her to be staring as well. But Veyka was already walking away.
I was the only one affected.
Why?
She went to clean her blades in the river. I stalked around the site, pulling back the flaps of the ramshackle tent.
“A bedroll and a bit of food,” I reported as I straightened. Nothing unusual.
Was I imagining it? My mind had tricked me before, long ago. It had tricked me into seeing what was not there, to killing when I might have stayed my blade. I’d accepted that death, because it had never happened again. But now… this…
I shook my head, trying to clear it of the memories that had no place here. They would only distract me, make me weak.
Veyka needed me strong.
She was already halfway up the river, staring up the ravine and to the mountains beyond. “How did he get here?”
I followed her gaze, shaking my head again. “And what happened to him once he did?”
She glanced behind us, to where the ruined corpse lay. “Should we bury him?”
