Total pages in book: 141
Estimated words: 136009 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 680(@200wpm)___ 544(@250wpm)___ 453(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 136009 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 680(@200wpm)___ 544(@250wpm)___ 453(@300wpm)
“Steady,” Fordham said down the bond.
“I’m going to kill him.”
“Breathe.”
She took Fordham’s words to heart and inhaled sharply. Her eyes followed Gerrond, who had begun pacing like a cat, monologuing about how great he was and how he had tricked them. She wanted to reach through that shield and strangle him. He only cared for himself, not even the drifters. Because that deal was assuredly going to fall apart, and when it did, Gerrond would be in the same spot he’d started in, only that much closer to the top.
“Are you through with this self-aggrandizing bullshit?” Kerrigan asked.
Gerrond stumbled, straightening his jacket quickly. “You’re trapped here now, so you might as well get used to it. The only place you’re going from here is a prison.”
Fordham’s smile was feline and predatory. “Like one could keep us.”
“Strap you in enough iron and it could,” Gerrond boasted.
Kerrigan bristled at the thought of putting Fordham in iron, dampening his magic, hurting her mate. Something shifted at the thought. Something that made her anger hit a peak.
Her magic was weak from trying to use the bracelet unsuccessfully, but there was still a barely there thread of spirit magic. If she used it now, she wouldn’t be able to portal them out of the mountain. It was a risk she had to take.
She narrowed her focus to the center of the shield, ignoring Gerrond’s continued monologue. He no longer mattered. None of it mattered. All that mattered was the spirit magic she was currently centering like a sunbeam. She had practiced it back in the House of Shadows. Well, on a well-worn mountainside where she couldn’t hurt anyone, but Tieran had mostly laughed at her ineptitude. She’d either used the blast too effectively, cleaving the cliff, or absolutely nothing happened. She had no skill with it.
Today, she released it like a beam of light. It hit the dead center of the guards’ shields, shattering them into a million little pieces.
The guards scrambled backward in shock, and then Kerrigan and Fordham stepped through the vault door.
“You were saying, Gerrond?” Kerrigan asked.
Chapter Forty-Two
The Escape
Gerrond fled.
Kerrigan cursed under her breath and rushed after him, but there were even more guards than she had first thought, and they had parted to let the weasel traitor past. Now Kerrigan and Fordham were facing off with more than a dozen guards. They could probably handle it after everything they’d done when her magic was on the fritz.
If she wasn’t careful, they’d get backed into the vault and trapped all over again.
“Ford,” she yelled as she knocked out a guard and kicked another in the chest.
“We can’t get to him,” Fordham grunted. He drove the guard’s own sword through his shoulder.
“I know.” She disarmed the next guard, gaining herself a weapon that she bashed into the side of his head.
They needed to get out of here. The shields were down now. They could jump again.
“Truth or dare!”
“Right now?” he growled, shoving his elbow into the face of another guard. A second was sneaking up behind him, and Kerrigan let her knife fly, landing in the guard’s eye. He screamed and fell over. Fordham just grinned. “Thanks.”
“Can we get moving?”
“You know that isn’t what we called it in the House of Shadows,” he said as he dropped another guard to her ass.
“Challenge or consequence,” she snapped back as she rushed for Fordham. “Is that satisfactory for your memory?” A guard jerked her back by the dress, and she heard it tear down the back. She kicked him in the kneecap. “You’re lucky I didn’t like this dress.”
Then she slid their fingers together. Fordham kicked one more guard in the solar plexus as he reached for them.
“Don’t let them jump!” another guard roared. He lunged for them, but Fordham had already touched the shadows, enveloping them in the nothing. Kerrigan didn’t even get the satisfaction of watching the guard tumble forward into oblivion, because they were already gone.
A moment later, they clattered to the ground in the hallway in front of the greenhouse. During their year of training, she, Fordham, Audria, Roake, and Noda had taken a night off and headed to the greenhouses with a few bottles of faerie punch. One game of truth or dare—that the House of Shadows called challenge or consequence—later, and Kerrigan and Fordham had hooked up in the foliage. It was enough of a clue for Fordham to take them where she wanted him to go without the guards knowing what they were discussing.
As Isa had suggested earlier, the greenhouse exit was less guarded than before. There were only two guards present. One had fallen asleep with a bottle in the crook of his arm, the shield he was supposed to keep up already forgotten. The second guard yelped at the sight of them and backed away slowly.
“Uh…where’d you come from?” she asked.