attackers.
Every single gun possessed by the Bloods flew into the air, lifted by invisible hands. Shouts of surprise mixed with screams of pain.
“What the fuck?” I asked.
I saw him then, standing on the second-floor balcony above the Center’s front door. Instinct told me it was Tovin, even though I’d never met him. He stood almost five feet tall, the tallest Fey I’d ever seen. His lean body seemed too thin, like pulled taffy, something a stiff breeze could knock over. Silver hair stood in short spikes, reaching high to the sky like his sharply pointed ears and eyebrows.
Small like most Fair Ones, he overcame that by radiating power. Even from where we stood in the cover of the forest, Tovin dwarfed everyone in front of him. I felt the power of the Break all around me, but Tovin lived it. He was born part of the Break. He was power. For the first time since I discovered his plan, I was genuinely afraid of him.
He levitated the weapons into the sky. The Bloods compensated by pulling blades, and the surface attack became more vicious, almost feral. The weapon cloud began to coalesce and spin. Each individual gun melted into the one next to it, until all that remained was a ball of metal the size of a washing machine. It fell and crushed two battling Bloods.
Wyatt had his gun out and aimed at Tovin before I could stop him. He squeezed the trigger, and for one brief, shining moment, I thought it would work. Tovin was watching the battle. The bullet roared at its target.
The world seemed to slow down, each second taking thirty. The bullet telescoped forward. Tovin turned his head and seemed to look right at me. I was certain he saw me. I felt deadly cold under that hateful gaze. He smiled, raised his hand, and plucked the bullet from the air.
Sound and action roared back to normal time. Tovin was gone. The balcony doors slammed shut behind him.
“Oh my God,” Wyatt said.
“He knows we’re here.”
“I’ve never seen that kind of power.”
I squeezed his bicep, trying to offer comfort and calm my own nerves. I could kill mortal creatures, and I never had a problem with the morality or with the actual task. Killing something that plucked bullets from the air? Not exactly within my realm of experience, Gifted or not.
“Should we help them?” I asked, tipping my head toward the battling Bloods.
“They seem to be doing okay.”
They were. I spotted Isleen in the fray. She’d removed her protective headgear, and her brilliant white hair flashed in the moonlight. She moved with the speed and grace of a dancer, each motion calculated for maximum damage as she spun through the battle bearing twin blades. Cutting and slicing, drawing blood from her most hated enemies. Dead or dying Halfies littered the pavement, but the battle was far from over.
In chess, you sent in the pawns first. We hadn’t yet seen the big guns.
“We need to get inside the Visitors’ Center,” Wyatt said.
Headlights flashed across our position. Vehicles approached from the access road. They’d turned a curve and would enter the open parking lot in moments.
“What now?” I asked, more to myself than to Wyatt, and took off.
I ran down the tree line, sticking to the shadows and dodging underbrush, Wyatt close behind. Four Jeeps were on the road. The first one crashed through the closed gate and turned sharply to the right. Three more followed, each tailing the other until they formed a wall of trucks by the gate, a good hundred feet from the actual fight. Men and women, armed for a fight, flooded out the passenger-side doors.
“Triads,” Wyatt shouted.
We had backup after all. No sense in waiting for three o’clock if they thought we’d died in the fire with Nadia or if they thought we’d set it and run. No way to know which they thought was true without asking, so I blundered forward and burst through the trees just behind the last Jeep.
Two familiar faces stood out among twenty-odd strangers.
“Tybalt,” I shouted, hoping to catch his attention. Tall and lean, Tybalt Monahan always seemed better suited for the pro-basketball court than our down and dirty job. He heard his name, turned, and saw me. Suspicion and confusion flared, and I realized my mistake too late. He didn’t know me as Chalice.
None of them did.
Wyatt put himself in front of me, but even his familiar face didn’t stop someone’s itchy trigger finger from twitching. The gun of a fresh-faced Hunter—probably a week out of Boot Camp—roared. Wyatt stumbled backward into me. Air hitched in my lungs.
“Hold your fire, goddammit,” Tybalt commanded.
Wyatt gained his balance. I ducked around to stand in front of him. My heart nearly stopped when I saw the blood on his shirt, with more oozing between his fingers. It was all I saw, hot and crimson—something meant to be inside of his body, not outside.
“It’s okay,” he said. “It went straight through, it’s fine.” His voice startled me back into breathing. He’d been shot in the bicep—not a mortal wound. Our eyes met. Pain had glazed his, and I could only imagine what he saw in mine.
Gina Kismet appeared, with Milo and Felix—the rest of her Triad team—in tow. Kismet was the only female Handler I’d ever met. She was built like a gymnast—short, muscular, and not an ounce of extra fat anywhere—but looked like a pixie, with short red hair, angry green eyes, and a voice like a Marine drill sergeant. She seemed more suited to being a Hunter than a Handler, but I’d never bothered to ask her story. It had never mattered.
“We thought you were dead,” Kismet said to Wyatt.
“Not for lack of trying,” Wyatt said through gritted teeth.
“Rufus?”
“We saw him taken away in an ambulance, but Nadia never got out.”
She nodded, then gave me her full attention. A quick sweep with her eyes preceded a terse, “Stone?”
“In someone else’s flesh,” I said.
“When Rufus called and asked for our help, he said you’d … ah, changed.”
“He’s a master of understatement.” I had to get their brains back on the continuing bloodbath on the other side of the Jeeps. “The Bloods are on our side right now. We know Tovin is inside the Visitors’ Center. Goblins are here, too; we just haven’t seen their numbers yet. Anyone got a bandanna or something?”
A nameless Hunter whose face I barely remembered handed me a red-checked cloth. I pulled Wyatt’s hand away from his still-bleeding arm and tied the bandanna around the wound. I tightened it, until he hissed.
“Big baby,” I said.
“We need to form a perimeter around the Visitors’ Center,” Kismet said. “Just in case Tovin gets any ideas about leaving. Morgan, Willemy, take your teams to the north side of the Center. Nothing gets past you.”
Eight people tore away from the group. One of them was the baby-face newbie. I tapped him on the shoulder as he passed. He looked up. I punched him square in the mouth. Teeth cut my knuckles. He yelped and stumbled back, blood seeping from his lip. Someone snickered, but no one reprimanded me.
“That’s definitely Evy,” Tybalt said.
“That idiot could have killed him,” I said. Maybe ended the fight sooner, rather than later, but I was not giving up hope of an alternate solution to one of us dying. Not yet. We had time, dammit.
“Once Morgan and Willemy are in place—” Kismet started, only to be cut off by a raucous war whoop that started as one voice and rose into dozens. Screeching and inhuman, it signaled a fresh attack.
Goblin warriors streamed from the cover of the trees behind us. Too clumsy for guns of their own and too fast for us to shoot them down, they swarmed over and around the Jeeps. The sight of them, barely clothed and aroused by bloodlust, flooded me with fury. Hatred pushed pure adrenaline through my veins, and I found myself looking forward to the carnage.
“Use your blades!” Kismet ordered, barely audible above the din of the war cry.
Claws swiped; teeth gnashed. Serrated knives in hand, I dove in.
Movement blurred around me as I searched for the hunched shapes of goblin males. They were faster than they had any right to be and outnumbered us four to one. I still heard scattered gunfire as I plunged one knife into the back of a goblin. Fuchsia blood spurted in stinking jets. Thoughts of anything but slitting throats and spilling
