“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.”
The guy at my right lurched forward to grab me.
Then a whole lot of things happened at once.
“Hey, Jessie, care to dance?” Nessa bounded from the trees, a knife in each hand, behind the guy stepping forward. He nearly tripped over his feet as he half turned in surprise.
The shifters had been so focused on their little plan that they hadn’t paid attention to their surroundings.
“Hello,” Edgar said from the other side, puffing into a swarm of insects and heading for the woman on my left.
The man behind me lunged forward, as did the woman next to him.
I turned to meet them, blasting them with magic intended to crumple them to the ground.
Nessa reached the man on my right, jumped up to wrap her legs around his middle, and slung one arm around his chest with the blade facing in. Stabbing with that knife, she sliced across his neck with the other. The movements were so fluid and graceful that it looked like an actual dance they’d rehearsed.
“Don’t worry, neither wound will kill him,” Nessa said, sprinting across the circle at a man who’d also frozen in place. “You can be much less careful with shifters. No, Edgar, maim, not put to sleep!”
Edgar looked up from his limp victim with raised eyebrows, red dripping down his chin. He put his hands up, like this was a holdup, and the man dropped to the ground. “I know. The gnomes can do it.”
My heart constricted. “Wait… What? ”
But I didn’t have time to ask more about it. James was the last man standing. He looked around wide-eyed at the team he’d assembled, which we’d flattened in no time at all.
“Should’ve shifted,” Nessa told him, wiping her blades on the grass.
“It wouldn’t have helped,” I said, closing the distance. “I don’t fault you for not wanting to give Austin another chance.” I put up a wall of magic so he couldn’t keep backing away from me. “It can be hard to forgive and harder to forget. Using me to get at Austin, though?” Anger burned in my gut, making my stomach roll. “That’s disgusting. You’ll get your wish. I won’t hide what you’ve done from him. I will keep him from killing you, but I won’t temper his reaction. Good luck. Until then…”