Magical Midlife Battle （Leveling Up, #8）(97)

I swiveled to get out of the way as my altitude lowered. With the air passing through my wings, though, I wasn’t effective. More arrows slammed home, sending shooting blasts of agony through me.

Thankfully my gargoyle hide was a lot tougher than human skin, and the arrows weren’t going anywhere near deep enough to cause serious harm, but it still hurt like the blazes.

Not to mention people were shooting freaking arrows at me! People from the pack. Mages would use magic, number one, and two, our people were all over the territory perimeter. This many enemies couldn’t have snuck in unnoticed.

Fury burned in my chest.

Kingsley’s people were trying to get even for my getting that moron Bruce kicked out of the top hierarchy. That, or they didn’t like that I’d challenged Kingsley and nothing had happened to me. Hell, maybe this was still about Austin and they stupidly thought I was the weakest link.

Whatever their reasoning, they’d made a very grave mistake.

I flapped wildly now, pretending like I was trying to maintain altitude while sinking lower and lower. The arrows kept coming, making me wonder if they were actually trying to kill me.

Below the treetops now, I sent out a blast of magic, a stinging spell that would hopefully give them false confidence. None of them had ever been hit with magic before—maybe they’d think it wasn’t that bad and stick around. I sure hoped so.

Another arrow struck deep, fired at close range. My anger spiked. I folded up my wings and hit the ground. Making a show of stumbling and falling, I used that time to rip arrows out of my body and legs, before crawling forward and laboring to my feet, all for show.

James stepped out of the trees, that bastard. He was supposed to be leading the pack in town! His smile was smug and his swagger ridiculous.

Bruce came out, too, along with that woman from the bar last week and a few other shifters, all with bows in hand. All of them were supposed to be participating in training right now.

“Oops,” James said, walking toward me in the nude, having clearly shifted for this. “Looks like, for all the magic you have, and the strange light show, you aren’t impervious to something as simple as an arrow.”

The arrows removed, I shifted into my human form. Blood trickled from my many wounds, already healing.

“And you think you aren’t?” I asked, breathing heavily and hobbling toward them a little. I wanted to see their eyes widen when I blasted them back to last century.

“Think you run this pack, huh?” Bruce walked forward, a block of muscle. “Think you and your boyfriend call the shots?”

Ah. So they subscribed to the belief that shifters shouldn’t mate non-shifters. What idiots.

“What is it you guys want?” I asked, hunching a little, trying not to let my anger send pulses of

magical intent. “You think the alpha is going to be cool with your killing me? You think that’ll help your pack?”

“We’re not gonna kill you,” the woman from the bar said, walking forward also. All of them did, moving in to surround me now. “We’re just gonna teach you a lesson. You and your boyfriend have been sticking your noses where they don’t belong.”

“Teach me a lesson?” I asked as they fell in all around me. “What about Austin? You’re not going to teach him a lesson?”

“Well now, see, that’s the great thing about this…” James sneered. “By working you over, we can teach you both a lesson. Plus that beta and the strange gargoyle who seems to like you so much. Get to you, and we send a message to you all.”

I huffed out a laugh, my magic building. “You really haven’t thought this through. Again, you think Kingsley is going to be cool with your beating me up?”

“Beating you to within an inch of your life, actually, and he won’t know. That piece of crap brother of his has all but advertised his resolve to handle this personally. This will be our invitation to him. I think he’ll take the bait, don’t you? Then we can remind this territory what he really is, an unbalanced excuse for a shifter who should’ve been run out long before he’d been allowed to go wild.”

I caught a flash of movement out of the corner of my eye. The awareness of my Ivy House links filtered in slowly, informing me that Edgar waited just within the trees to my right. A little shape flitted in my peripheral vision on the left, skittering behind a trunk. There was a flash of red, like a hat.

Like a gnome’s hat…

Horror struck me.

We didn’t somehow bring the gnomes with us, did we? They couldn’t have burrowed into our supplies before they were loaded into the vans…could they have?

I pushed the thought away. I must’ve been seeing things.

I sure hoped I’d been seeing things!

Shifter power clouded the air all around me. I stared at James for a long beat. My words came slowly and evenly as I straightened my body, shedding my ruse of uncertainty and pain.

“If your goal is to sacrifice your life to prove that Austin is wild, you won’t succeed. Not only will everyone agree he’s in the right to retaliate against you, but I won’t let him kill you. I won’t let him, so you won’t be able to make a statement at all.”

“How cute, you thinking you have control over that wild thing.” James stepped closer, done with talking. “He thinks he’s a man of honor. He’ll come at us on his own, and there is no way in hell he can take all of us, though with his delusions of grandeur, he’ll sure try. And when he challenges us, we’ll do what our alpha should’ve done a long time ago. We’ll put him in his place for good.”