~ 1 ~
Jadren squinted at the onrushing horde of monsters, swinging his enchanted machete to limber up his muscles, and sighed to himself. He didn’t know what had possessed him to volunteer to heroically sacrifice himself to play rear guard. Especially since he was no hero. Clearly being among the idealistic fools of House Phel had affected his sense and good judgment.
Well, that and a heavy dose of guilt on top of his inherent self-loathing. The people he’d offered to protect didn’t trust him, which would be more upsetting if he could feel indignant about it. If he died, that would at least liberate him from the cage his darling maman had kept him in all his miserable life. Just because he was temporarily out of that cage didn’t mean he’d fully escaped it.
“So,” his lone companion drawled, “is your grand plan to stand here like an idiot and wait to be overrun?”
He glanced over at Selly, suppressing a rush of unwilling attraction. There was no way he should find the chit so compelling. Far too thin still from the magic stagnation that had very nearly killed her, Selly’s face was mostly huge amber eyes and jutting cheekbones. It didn’t help that she’d braided that tumbling mass of tangled black hair, the severe style making her look even younger, her piquant, heart-shaped face wistful, even sad in moments of repose, when she thought no one was watching. Her waifish mien made him want to cuddle and comfort her—not an urge he’d ever felt before in his emotionally stunted life. Fortunately that absurd impulse lasted only until she unleashed that sharp tongue of hers.
“No one asked you to stay,” he observed. “Just the opposite, in fact. There’s still time for you to flee, which would be the wise decision. Hop on your horsie and run along home.”
“And strand you without magic reserves?” She huffed out a disgusted laugh. “You’d run out of your own magic in no time, leaving you without any way to defend yourself as we both know you’re no fighter.”
“You have no idea.” Jadren set his teeth, turning away from her disdain to observe the river of hunters streaming from House Sammael and plunging through the valley straight for them. They moved like oily smoke, running on four legs, their long claws churning up a cloud of dust as they charged at full speed in their oddly loping stride, like a jackal’s.
House Phel’s small band of intrepid rescuers—like something out of the popular novels—had managed to rescue Lady Phel, but they wouldn’t make it far if the hunters overtook them. Thus the rear-guard offer. It was true, though, that he’d never trained in hand-to-hand fighting. As a scion of House El-Adrel, he’d been expected to learn one thing and one thing only.
That one thing wasn’t anything so menial as swinging a manual weapon.
He was beginning to appreciate the merits of edged weapons, however. He rather loved his enchanted machete. Made of silver that House Phel wizard ancestors had solidified from moonlight, then embedded with Gabriel Phel’s living magic, the blade killed the otherwise unkillable hunters on contact. It was also satisfyingly heavy and, dare he say, proletariat. His maman would be appalled, which gave him a nice thrill of satisfaction.
The only fly in the ointment of his martyrdom was the stubborn familiar who’d insisted on staying with him. “Your virginal magic reserves won’t do me any good, poppet,” he informed her. “I can’t lay waste to yon monstrous army from a distance like your rogue wizard brother. Unless you have a brilliant suggestion?”
She glared at him with glittering dislike that made her doelike amber eyes hard as faceted jewels. “You’re the one educated in wizardry, Lord son-of-a-fancy Convocation high house. I’ve only been awake and in my right mind for a short time. Shouldn’t you know what to do with the power I provide? As I understand it, I’m basically the fire in the stove while you’re the expert chef doing the cooking.”
He would’ve retorted, except the analogy was an apt one and, for the first time in his life, he’d lately begun to feel vaguely guilty about the status of familiars in the Convocation. Which made zero sense as it was hardly his fault that some people were born able to wield magic and others only to generate it. That was the way of the world, which sucked for everyone to a greater or lesser degree. “Yeah, well, this chef knows how to make enchanted artifacts, assorted widgets, and do a few other tricks. I’m not like Phel, able to bend rainstorms to my will and spin silver weapons out of thin air.”
She hmphed in disgust. “Probably Gabriel should’ve stayed to stem the hunter tide while you took Nic home.”
“What a brilliant plan,” he snarled, stung despite himself. Dark arts knew he should be long past the sneers and thinly veiled insults about his inscrutable magic. “Except Nic isn’t my familiar, is she? I know you’re ignorant, but no wizard lets another wizard run off with their familiar.”
“Do you wish she was?” Selly asked with innocent curiosity belied by the sly sparkle in her eyes. She seemed to have emerged from the oblivion of insanity raring to needle him to death.
He pointed the machete at the tide of hunters crossing the valley and closing far too rapidly on their vantage at the verge of the forest. “I’d love to have a conversation about my feelings—and lack thereof—for Lady Phel, not incidentally my employer, but I have hunters to kill.”
Selly measured the distance with her gaze. “Since we’re just standing here waiting for them to slaughter us, I figured we had time to chat.”
“I am not ‘just standing here,’” he snarled at her. “I am formulating a plan.”
“Isn’t that what I asked to begin with?” She batted her lashes, widening her eyes even more. “No need to get snippy.”
He didn’t dignify that with even a growl.
“Better formulate faster,” she suggested, making it sound like an innovative idea, “or it’s going to be slaughter for sure.”
She sounded so blithely unconcerned about that eventuality that he eyed her. “Don’t you care if you live or die?”
Shrugging, her expression went hard in a way that transformed her face from girlish to that of a woman three times her age.
Jadren waited, but she didn’t answer the question. “Still more than a little insane, huh?” he asked with oozingly fake sympathy.
She fixed him with a blank stare that made the hairs on the back of his neck prickle. “You have no idea,” she answered in a soft voice, flinging his words back at him with lethal accuracy.
Deciding to leave plumbing the psyche of the crazy girl for another time, he switched tactics. “How many arrows do you have left?”
“Between my quiver and the ones Iliana donated to our hopeless cause, just shy of a hundred.”
“Plus my machete, the sword, and assorted daggers…” He estimated the number of hunters, considered the math. Even though they only needed to break skin on the hunters to melt them with the enchanted weapons, they still needed to make that essential contact. By the time the hunters came close enough for that, he and Selly would only be able to melt a small proportion before the sheer numbers overwhelmed them. Hopeless cause and slaughter were distressingly accurate descriptors. “How fast can you fire those arrows?”
