Enzo
His blade cut through the leather at her upper arm, and fresh blood ran red against black before she’d fully cleared him. The sound that came out of her was low and savage, not a cry of pain but an answer to it.
The ash at her feet shifted.
Darkness poured up around the Shadow Fae’s boots and twisted hard around his legs. He slashed down once, then again, but the shadow climbed past his blades, wrapping his torso, his throat, his face. It forced its way into his open mouth when he tried to shout.
His body convulsed. Then stilled.
I had known she was dangerous. I hadn’t understood how much of what I had seen from her was restraint.
Even now, cut off from the deep, depleted from days of being hunted, bleeding through wounds she should have been resting rather than reopening, she killed a Court enforcer as though his death had required nothing more from her than irritation.
But I saw the cost when she turned. The ash-pale cast of her face. The way her breath came too fast. The blood spreading beneath the old binding at her thigh.
My province was burning around me. My people were dead in the streets. Enemies were closing from every side. And every ruined, terrified part of me had narrowed to the fact that she was still on her feet when she shouldn’t have been.
The first arrow meant for her came out of the dark. I saw the line of it a breath before it reached her throat.
My body moved without permission.
The arrow struck my shoulder hard enough to turn me half-sideways. The head punched through leather and muscle, driving clean through until the shaft shuddered against my chest and the point broke free behind me.
Pain came hot and immediate as Nadia’s head snapped toward me.
Her face changed. I had no time to decide what the sight of that did to me.
“Roof,” I snarled. “Now.”
I snapped the shaft and dragged the arrow through before my body could begin healing around it. Blood ran warm beneath my coat, but the wound was already closing at the edges.
The second arrow caught me in the thigh. That one hit bone.
My leg buckled once before I forced it straight, the arrow shaft jutting grotesquely from the muscle, each movement dragging fire through the bone beneath it.
The rage became simple after that. Clean. There were men in my town standing among my dead. Men aiming arrows at the woman who’d guarded my back while I gave souls to Evara.
I no longer needed patience for this part.
Two attackers broke from the eastern side of the square, hoping the arrows had done enough to make me manageable.
They miscalculated.
The first came high with a broad short sword, the second circling low with a hooked blade meant to take my knee while I defended against the larger threat. A sound strategy, if they’d been fighting anyone else.
My sword met the first man’s blade, turned it wide, and opened his throat on the return stroke. His blood joined the ash before he did.
The second nearly reached my ribs. I caught his wrist with Mira’s knife and drove my sword through his chest with enough force to lift him half off his feet before I let him drop.
The arrow in my thigh broke against his body when he fell. Pain flared bright enough to blur the edge of the square.
Then Nadia was in front of me. “Hold still.”
“I told you to take the roof.”
“And I heard you.” She dropped to one knee beside my leg, fury making her movements sharp despite the tremor already working through her hand. “Unfortunately, I don’t take orders from men currently decorated with arrows.”
She caught the broken shaft.
“Nadia—”
“Bite down on something.”
Then she pulled.
The arrowhead tore free in a burst of heat that drove a snarl out of me before I could contain it. Fresh blood poured down my thigh, but with the obstruction gone, the wound began closing almost immediately beneath it.
She’d spent enough years around vampires to know exactly how much damage an embedded weapon did to our healing, and she’d crossed the square to put her hands on me while an archer still had a clean line to her body.
Terror struck through the rage.
“Nadia, move.”
The archer loosed again.
I saw the arrow in the same breath she did, flying toward the back of her left shoulder, aimed for the lung.
She didn’t duck, didn’t waste power trying to stop something already in flight. She shifted one fraction to the right, no more than the width of a hand, while her fingers flicked toward the roof.
The shadow beneath the archer rose like a striking serpent. It wrapped his ankle, yanked hard, and pulled him over the roofline with such violence that he never had time to scream until he was already falling.
His neck broke against the stones below.
The arrow meant for Nadia struck the wall behind her and shattered into the ash.
She stood over me, swaying slightly, her dagger red in her hand and her face gone nearly bloodless.
For a moment, I could hear nothing but the crackle of the fires and the sound of my own pulse trying to tear its way out of my body.
She’d let an arrow pass within inches of her spine because killing the man who fired it had been the better move. She’d been correct, and I almost hated her for it.
“Are you trying to fucking kill me?” I demanded.
One corner of her mouth lifted, faint and exhausted and sharp enough to draw blood. “Not tonight.”
A pulse of witchlight flared at the edge of the square.
I felt the working gather a heartbeat before it struck—the pressure tightening in the air, ash lifting from the stones in a pale, trembling ring.
“Nadia—”
The spell hit the ground between us.
Light erupted upward, green-white and violent, tearing stone loose from the square and hurling burning ash in every direction. I moved for her.
But she was faster. Shadow surged from the blood-blackened ground and folded around us in a solid wall of dark. Not a weapon this time.
A shield.
The witchlight struck it with a sound like the sky splitting open.
For one brutal instant, the square vanished in heat and light and screaming magic. Her shadow held. Barely. I saw cracks of white fire tear through it, saw darkness shred away at the edges under the force of the spell, felt the blast catch my injured leg and drive me sideways.
Nadia took the rest.
She stayed upright exactly long enough for the witchlight to gutter out against the shield she’d forced into being.
Then the shadows collapsed and so did she. I caught her with my good arm before her head hit the stones. The thing beneath my sternum tore itself raw.
Hurt. She’s hurt. She’s hurt.
Her body sagged against mine, too light and too cold beneath the heat of the square. Fresh blood soaked through the leather at her upper arm. The binding at her thigh had gone dark again, a steady, spreading stain that ran down her leg and dripped from the heel of her boot onto the ash.
The old wound had opened completely.
“Fuck.”
“How bad?” she rasped against my chest.
“You or me?”
“Either? Both?”
“My thigh’s closing.” I tightened my arm around her as her knees tried to go again. “Yours isn’t.”
Her chin dipped once toward the blood running along her leg. “Saints,” she muttered. “That seems excessive.”
I almost laughed. Almost. Instead, I forced my attention beyond her, into the ruined square. The remaining shadows had gone quiet, regrouping after the spell. That quiet wouldn’t last.
“There are still three in the open,” I said. “Two vampires. The witch.”
“And whoever arranged this little soiree.”
“Yes.”
“Behind the hall,” she breathed.
“I know.”
“No, I mean—”
“I know, Nadia.”
I pulled her arm over my shoulders and got my good hand beneath her waist before she could argue. Her breath caught when I took her weight, and I hated the sound with a violence that made the bodies in the square seem almost incidental.
“You’re not carrying me,” she said through clenched teeth.
“I’m absolutely carrying you.”
“Gods, I fucking hate you.”
“You’ve been very clear on that point.”
I got us moving.
Sugar stood behind the broken stone wall beside the witch’s hall, where Nadia must have put her before the rites began. Her ears were pinned flat, her body angled toward the opening as though she intended to take an actual bite out of the next assassin who came through it.
A sensible animal.
I lowered Nadia behind the wall with more care than I had time for and put my body between her and the square. She caught the front of my coat.
“Don’t be stupid.”
The words were thin, but they were Nadia. Relief hit hard enough to be almost painful.
“I’m afraid the bar for stupidity has moved considerably in the last ten minutes.”
She made a breathless sound that might have been a laugh or a curse.
Then the vampires committed.
I heard them before I saw them: two sets of feet crossing ash at speed, too fast and too close together for anything but a coordinated finish. They came over the broken wall in the same breath, one high, one low, both expecting to find an injured prince and a dying Shadow Fae trapped in cover.
They found the first part.
The first vampire cleared the wall with his blade already descending. I met him on my sword. There was no elegance in it now. No space left for admiration of school or form. He’d stepped over the burned bodies of my people to reach us. He’d chosen his ground.
I caught his strike, turned it aside, and drove my sword through his chest before his boots had found the stones on our side of the wall. His eyes widened. I shoved him off the blade and into the ash.
The second one hit me before the first finished falling.
My injured thigh failed under the impact, and we went down hard enough that stone tore the skin from my shoulder.
His weight crashed into my chest. His forearm pinned my sword arm.
His mouth opened above my throat, fangs bared, and there it was—the old true horror of vampire killing vampire, not clean steel or civilized challenge, but teeth through the neck and blood taken until there was nothing left to heal.
I had perhaps a second before he tore my throat open.