Chest heaving, he stared at it. She was as good as she had said she was. She hit what she aimed at. Even at night, in the middle of a pounding storm.
More Hounds poured out of the woods. It was too late to formulate any kind of sophisticated strategy. Gathering his Power, he flung a morningstar, straight and hard, at the second closest Hound.
Like a bolt of horizontal lightning, the morningstar split the darkness and exploded in the Hound"s broad, furry chest. The force of it lifted the Hound and spun its body in the air before it slammed into the ground. It didn"t rise again.
Not many warriors could cast a morningstar. Morningstars were one of the deadliest weapons he had at his disposal, but they were a h.e.l.lish drain on his energy and they took seconds to ama.s.s. Whirling back around, he raced toward Sophie.
Now she strode forward. She didn"t run. Sighting down the length of her arm, she held the Glock in a two-handed grip and fired repeatedly at the approaching Hounds. Even as he came up to her, he was counting her bullets, and he knew the exact moment she went out.
"You"re out!" he shouted in her face. "Go back to the house!"
Unbelievably, she dug in her jeans pocket. She told him, "Just need to reload."
He cast a quick look around. Thanks to his morningstar and her marksmanship, there were four bodies lying on the lawn, but there were at least twenty or twenty-five more Hounds racing across the lawn while his men sprinted to meet them.
G.o.ds d.a.m.n it, he needed his sword.
"Nik!" The shout came from behind him. As he looked over his shoulder, Braden tossed his sword harness at him.
Nikolas s.n.a.t.c.hed it out of the air. "Get behind me," he snapped at Sophie. "Get down, low to the ground, and stay there!"
Miraculously, this time she did as he ordered, jumping to crouch low behind him. He pulled hard on his Power to ama.s.s another morningstar and flung it at the next closest Hound. It sizzled through the air and hit the Hound broadside.
Behind him and low to the ground, the Glock spat multiple times. Sophie had finished reloading, and he remembered what she had said when she had shown how she could a.s.semble and load a gun without looking. Because you should be able to do it in the dark, if need be.
He was so furious at her for risking her life, but at the memory of that c.o.c.ky, s.e.xy little lift of her mouth, he felt a fierce grin break over his face.
At his best, he could ama.s.s four morningstars, perhaps five, before he was tapped out. And morningstars were no good at fighting in close quarters. Around him, Braden, Gareth and Rowan were armed with guns too, and the flat, erratic percussion of their firing punctuated the ominous roll of thunder from the storm. The rest of his men slammed into combat with the Hounds, so he drew his sword and dropped the harness to the ground.
He said to Sophie, "For the love of all the G.o.ds, do as I said and get your a.s.s back to the house. If you shut the doors, the Hounds can"t get inside. n.o.body can get inside unless you let them."
"You are such a s.e.xist boor," she snapped. "Look around-did any one of your men make that choice, and are you b.i.t.c.hing at them for it?"
I"m not in love with my men. The thought sprang, sizzling and white-hot, like a morningstar in his head.
He shouted, "My men follow orders!"
"I"m a consultant!" she snapped. "Not your foot soldier. I don"t take orders from you."
"You"re fired!" he growled.
He didn"t have time to say any more or hear if she argued. Not ten yards away, Cael was facing off against two Hounds. Moving forward rapidly, Nikolas engaged the closest Hound.
The battle turned into images he saw in microsecond snapshots. The Hound turned its slavering jaws toward him, and they feinted with each other, pacing in a circle as the driving rain made every step a hazard.
Naturally, Sophie hadn"t gone back to the house. Instead, she calmly walked up behind the Hound while its attention was fixed on him. As he watched in incredulity, she tapped it on the haunch.
He thought he was beside himself before. This time he nearly levitated out of his body.
"What the f.u.c.k are you doing now!" he roared.
The Hound spun to face her, then kept turning. It looked skyward, then down at the ground, and turned around the other way, head tilted.
"Confusion spell," Sophie told Nikolas breathlessly. "He"ll do that for hours. I"ve got one left."
Even as he lifted his sword to behead the creature, Nikolas filled his lungs to lambast her with everything he had. Then he paused. "It"ll be like this for hours?"
"Yep." Lifting the Glock, she shot one-handed at the second Hound that Cael was fighting. It was a headshot, clean and true. The Hound was dead before it hit the ground.
She was so limited and fragile. She wasn"t nearly as fast as his men and not half as big or strong as the Hounds, yet in spite of that, she was one of the most dangerous fighters on the field that night, and he adored her for it.
"Keep an eye on it," he said, watching Cael salute her and race off to engage another Hound. "I want to question it if I can. If you have to, shoot it in the head."
"Got it," she said. While she kept her attention fixed on the incapacitated Hound, she quickly reloaded.
Abruptly, rage surged over him in a scalding wave again. He snarled, "Now you take my orders?"
She speared him with a brief, sparkling glance. "I accept your suggestions. You can stick your orders up your a.s.s."
He would not laugh. Not while he was this furious. Spinning, he leaped into battle, ama.s.sing another morningstar to fling at a Hound that tried to flee the field.
It was a sloppy, ugly battle. Nikolas was able to ama.s.s two more morningstars before he tapped out. Aiming the last one strategically, he was able to take down two Hounds at once, and then he had to rely upon swordwork. Never moving too far away from Sophie, he kept on the defensive in a broad circle around her.
Within a half an hour, the battle was over. As Nikolas drew his sword from the throat of his last kill, he surveyed the field. A full thirty bodies littered the ground. When the Hounds had first appeared, the numbers had been decidedly against them, but now almost all of them lay dead, strewn across the clearing. Some of the bodies had already shifted back into human form.
They had gotten so d.a.m.n lucky. If Sophie hadn"t acted so quickly and been such a good shot, if Nikolas hadn"t been able to ama.s.s the morningstars, if the other three men hadn"t been armed with guns and silver bullets, this battle could have gone entirely the other way.
The sound of shouting had him spinning on his heel.
Sophie and Rhys confronted each other over the body of a dead Hound. She was swearing, sounding as furious as Nikolas had ever heard her. "What the h.e.l.l is the matter with you? I told you to back off and leave it alone! I had it under control!"
Rhys advanced, moving his body like a weapon until they were face-to-face. He backhanded her in the chest, pushing her back as he shouted hoa.r.s.ely over her, "You don"t f.u.c.king tell me what to do, woman! He was an enemy! I cut him down like the murderous dog he was!"
Nikolas lunged over and slammed into Rhys so violently the other man skidded on the wet gra.s.s and went down on his a.s.s. Breathing hard, Nikolas brought the tip of his sword to Rhys"s throat.
"She was doing what I told her to do," he growled. "I wanted to question that Hound."
"I tried to tell him that, but he wouldn"t listen!" Sophie exclaimed as she reached Nikolas"s side.
Rhys"s face distorted with rage. "You get a piece of tail, and now you"re holding your f.u.c.king sword to my throat? Is that the kind of commander you really are?"
Ice took over Nikolas"s molten rage.
"Yes." His voice turned stone cold. He pressed forward until the tip pressed against the skin at Rhys"s throat. "That"s the kind of commander I am. You touch her again like that, and I will cut your f.u.c.king hands off."
Beside him, Sophie had gone still. Nikolas grew aware that the other men had joined them and were bearing silent witness to the confrontation.
Nikolas bared his teeth in savage, naked aggression. "That goes for every one of you as well. This woman has risked her safety and her life for us. While you were scrambling for your weapons, she was the first one on the field tonight. We are guests in her house, and you will respect her expertise. And if I find out that one of you has verbally or physically threatened her in any way, I don"t care how long we have fought together, I will end you. Is that clear?"
Rowan stepped forward to put his hand on Nikolas"s taut forearm. "You"re right, Nik," he said, his voice clear and calm. "That"s not who we are. Rhys was just being an unbelievably ma.s.sive a.s.s, weren"t you, Rhys? You didn"t actually mean to strike our friend, host, and ally. And I"ll bet you"re counting the seconds until you can say you"re sorry. Right?"
"Right," Rhys said, his wary attention trained on Nikolas. He made no move to try to stand or ease away from Nikolas"s sword but instead remained sprawled half p.r.o.ne on the ground, his weight resting back on both hands. He looked at Sophie. "I apologize. I can"t believe I hit you. I"ve never done anything like that before. It must have been the heat of the battle."
"Sure, it"s okay," Sophie said easily. As Nikolas glanced at her, water dripped down her calm face. She smiled. "Battle fever can make the best of us do crazy things. No harm done this time. Just don"t do it again, or you can forget about what Nik will do to you. I"ll smack you into next week myself."
Expectedly, Braden started to chuckle. "I heard the truth in that statement."
Others started to laugh, and the tension eased. Rowan"s grip tightened on Nikolas"s arm until he forced his rigid muscles to relax. Taking a step back, he bent to clean the length of his b.l.o.o.d.y blade on the gra.s.s, then found his sword harness. Despite the discomfort of donning it while wet, he sheathed the sword and shrugged the harness into place.
He asked, "Did we get them all?"
"No way to tell," Cael replied. "Maybe. We got all the ones that charged, and you took out the one that tried to leave the field. There could have been others holding back, in the woods, but they would have charged too, unless they had other orders."
And Rhys killed the one that might have told us that, Nikolas thought. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Sophie offer a hand to Rhys to help him up. After a second"s hesitation, Rhys accepted it. It was a nice, diplomatic touch. A savage, barely controlled part of him wanted to knock their hands apart.
He watched closely until they stopped touching. Then he said, "I guess it doesn"t matter. None of these Hounds will be returning, which is a message in itself." He told Sophie grimly, "I"m afraid all our hard work at misdirection has gone down the drain."
"Doesn"t matter." Sounding tired, she swiped at her dripping nose. "Misdirection was a long shot anyway." She added telepathically, They showed up here awfully quick after Robin"s storm started though. Do you think Morgan knew I was lying after all?
Nikolas said, No. If Morgan believed you were lying, he would have come here himself, and he wouldn"t have waited. Or he wouldn"t have let you go in the first place.
She heaved a sigh, which turned into a cough. It must have been Robin"s storm that brought them then.
Although he didn"t say so, he disagreed. The puck might be a great many things, but he was neither naive nor stupid. A storm of this magnitude spanned miles, and Robin would never have made the manor house the center of it.
And Morgan hadn"t witnessed the deep emotional bond Sophie and Robin had developed. He had believed Sophie when she had claimed the dog had disappeared, so he wouldn"t have leaped immediately to searching for Robin here. He might have checked out the property as part of an overall search strategy, but there would have been no specific sense of urgency in doing so.
No, there was only one logical reason Nikolas could think of for a fighting force of thirty Hounds to show up on Sophie"s doorstep not an hour after the men"s arrival.
Betrayal. They were not supposed to live through this fight.
He watched Rhys closely for the next several minutes, but as the tension faded from the group, the other man appeared to relax gradually. He even stepped forward to mutter something at Sophie, which caused her to laugh.
Moving quickly, the men stacked the bodies of the Hounds together close to the tree line. As they worked, a single headlight of a motorcycle appeared. Gawain and Ashe had returned.
Sophie and Rowan went to greet them and explain what happened, and within moments Ashe had joined the rest of the group to help, while Gawain ran his bike into the manor house.
Now that Gawain had returned and could help to keep an eye on Sophie, Nikolas felt a hypervigilant part of him relax slightly, and he could turn his full attention to the task at hand. Once all the bodies had been collected, the others stepped back several meters. While they kept watch, he knelt to put his hands on the ground once again.
It had been a long d.a.m.n day with a h.e.l.lish ending, and he was not only tired, he was still tapped out from ama.s.sing morningstars. But this one task had little to do with wielding his Power and more to do with asking the Earth to wield hers.
Reaching deep, he made the connection with the rich, abundant land magic all around him and asked it to take the bodies of the men. This type of asking never moved quickly, but after a few moments, the ground rippled gently and the bodies sank below the turf. When they had completely disappeared, he thanked the magic and let it go, then stood.
The first thing he did was look for Sophie. She stood by Gawain at the back of the group. At some point while Nikolas had been working, the puck had appeared, still wearing the form of a monkey. Robin sat on Sophie"s hip like a toddler, his skinny, hairy arms around her neck.
No one offered to say any words at the Hounds" grave. They got the respect of a burial, but they would not get prayers from the Dark Court.
"That"s it," Nikolas said, wiping his hands on his sodden pants. "We"re done. Let"s get inside."
The others didn"t hesitate. They jogged to the house, and as soon as everybody was inside, Nikolas and Gawain closed the iron-bound oak doors while everyone else watched in the dim glow thrown from the fire across the hall and the single lit oil lantern someone had set on top of a case of canned beans.
The sound of the doors closing seemed very loud in the silence. Nikolas turned to find them all watching him. Sophie hugged the monkey. Everyone wore the same, sober expression he felt on his face.
Nikolas thought, none of us know if or when those doors will open again.
And one of us is a traitor.
"We"ve thrown the dice," he said. "Now we pray the gamble pays off."
Gawain clapped his hands. "In the meantime, we"ve got work to do. Let"s dry off and get changed. Nikolas cleared the chimney so we can build up the fire to take the chill out of the hall. We can sort out the majority of this mess tomorrow, but let"s at least get things shifted so we can have enough clear floor s.p.a.ce to make bed pallets for the night. And I don"t know about any of you, but I could use a late supper after all that work."
While Gawain issued orders, Nikolas turned his attention to Sophie. Dripping wet like the rest of them, she was visibly shivering, and her face was completely colorless. Searching the immediate area, he found the blanket she had left crumpled on the doorstep and enveloped both her and the puck in it.
His hands were reluctant to leave her. He clamped his fists in the blanket and drew her close. She didn"t resist him. Neither did Robin, as the puck turned his face away and laid it on her shoulder.
"You looked spent hours ago, and a lot has happened since then," Nikolas muttered. "Let"s get you out of these wet clothes. Then will you please sit by the fire and warm up?"
Her teeth chattered. "I would l-love nothing more than to fall asleep by the fire, but Nik, we haven"t found the privies yet."
He told her, "The men can p.i.s.s in a jar for one night."
She glowered at him. "I c-can"t."
Unexpectedly, amus.e.m.e.nt welled up inside. Tucking the blanket higher around her neck, he said, "We"ll set up a chamber pot for you and a blanket for privacy. We can locate the privies in the morning."
"Nikolas Sevigny, I am not going to pee in a chamber pot while I"m in the same room as the rest of you. Just wipe that concept out of your head." She sniffed and rubbed her nose on the blanket. "I"ll feel better when I"m warm and dry. It"s not going to hurt if we look around a little bit."
Heaving a sigh, he conceded. "All right, but only after we change into dry clothes."
They changed quickly. First Nikolas held up a blanket in one of the two corners closest to the fire so that she could strip out of her wet clothes in relative privacy. When she was freshly dressed in jeans, a sweater, and her black boots, he changed too. Thanks to Sophie washing his clothes, he had exactly four changes of clothes with him from his go-bag. In many ways, no matter how much or little time it took, this was going to be a long siege.
While he dragged on clean clothes and settled the damp sword harness into place between his shoulders, he said to Gawain, "We"re going on a brief exploration, hopefully to find privies and a viable source of water without encountering a major shift between here and there." Switching to telepathy, he added, When you set up pallets for tonight, be sure to put hers close by the fire, between yours and mine. She feels the cold more than we do, and we"re not leaving her unguarded for a moment.
You bet, Gawain said without a flicker in his expression. Aloud, he replied, "We"ll have hot soup and bread waiting for you when you return."
"Thanks." Sophie was still shivering when Nikolas turned to her, and she had wrapped the blanket around her again, but there was more color in her face. "Where"s Robin?"
She shrugged. "Hiding in the shadows. Pilfering the food. Your guess is as good as mine. He took off when I changed clothes." She gave him the ghost of a tired grin. "He"s a bit prudish, I think."
Nikolas dismissed Robin from his mind. The puck could look after himself, and he had a talent for disappearing when he wanted to. He took one of the nearby oil lanterns and lit it. "Ready?"
"Yeah." She looked at the chaos around them. "Wait, did we get chalk or paint?"
Gawain said, "I saw that box. Hold on a second." He rummaged between two stacks and lifted up a hand-labeled cardboard box. "Here it is-both chalk and paint and paper for drawing maps."
Sophie peered inside and pulled out a plastic package filled with white chalk. "This will do for tonight. If we find any shifts, we can mark them more permanently tomorrow."
Nikolas approved of that plan. He said, "Follow me."