to his leg.
He roared, but her smaller form made it easier to dodge around the mounds of jutting crystal—until he managed to catch a handful of her braid.
Yanking her toward him, he gripped her arms, his claws sinking into her skin. She bit down to hold in the cry of pain.
With a roar, he threw her away from him. She struck the wall with enough force to break a couple ribs. Blood trickled into her eye from where her temple just grazed a section of the jagged crystal.
Sucking in a breath, she felt around on the ground for her sword. Where the fuck was it?
“You don’t need to make this hard on yourself.”
“Who says this is hard?” She dragged herself to her feet, the sticky dampness in her side telling her she was bleeding heavily. Preferring not to give him a place to strike, she didn’t hold her arm to the wound like she wanted.
Her sword lay less than a foot away. Kel would be on her before she reached it.
“You’re not like your brothers.” The acid-filled insult rolled off his tongue.
“I can tell that attention to detail is a talent of yours.”
If not for the iridescent glistening of jewel-toned scales along his jaw that betrayed the dragon pushing to the surface, she thought Kel might have laughed.
“You don’t have their training or skills, cat.”
She hadn’t stopped to think how well Cian and the others would have known Kellagh the Black, preferring to remember him only as Arthur’s betrayer. “Who would have thought the Gauntlet would put you and Lucan back on the same side.”
Kel opened his mouth to respond, but came at her instead.
She pivoted to grab the back of his shirt and slam him into a tower of crystal. Satisfied at the sight of the blood that ran down his face and neck, she retreated.
A backward kick to her knee cap took her to the ground.
Eyes all fire and brimstone, he advanced on her. “Give me the stone.”
“Do you always repeat yourself?” Back on her feet and limping a little, she skidded away from him.
He snagged her wrist, and she guessed his intentions a second before he snapped it.
Crying out, she jammed her other elbow in his throat, staggering away from him.
All Briana could see was blackness, the way out of the cavern obscured by the crystal. Damn it. She couldn’t stay here, wasn’t strong enough to take him on by herself, not bleeding with a broken wrist and busted ribs.
She felt her way around another tower, the pain a white-hot pulse that fired with every step. Listening for Kel, she wiped at the blood that continued to run into her eye. Her gaze locked on a tunnel, and she bolted for it.
Halfway there, Kel caught up with her, his arms like steel bands clamping around her chest.
Her broken ribs sliced into her, stealing her breath and cutting off her scream.
The dragon squeezed.
How long until she lost consciousness and he took the stone from her? A wave of adrenaline flooded her. She would not lose it to Kel.
Next to the dragon’s head, a chunk of crystal dangled from the wall. Sharper than it looked, the crystal cut her palms, but she yanked hard, stabbing the broken shard into his thigh.
His arms fell away from her, and she landed at his feet, her lungs starved for oxygen. Kel plucked the crystal from his leg, and she knew he was two seconds away from breaking her neck. There wouldn’t be anything stopping him from taking the stone from her then.
Her arms trembled from the effort of holding herself up.
A blur of gray knocked Kel to the ground.
Vaughn?
In wolf form, he pinned Kel to the ground, his massive jaws snapping and just missing Kel’s throat.
The dragon kicked him off, but Vaughn regrouped, and she lost sight of them behind a column of the crystal.
Cradling her broken wrist, she crawled back to her feet. Kel’s yell echoed off the walls, followed by a whimper.
She picked up her sword, moving toward the other two immortals. A shadow separated from the icy walls, but she was too focused on moving forward, throwing her sword at Kel.
A second before the blade would have pierced his chest, the icy cavern vanished.
She spun around, finding herself alone in the same bedroom as when she’d first arrived. The competition was over.
It took another minute to process that, and she dug her hand in her pocket, finding the stone gone. Maeve and Aden already had it then. Two others may have also come away with a stone, but it was still a win for her.
Leaning against the wall, she let her battered body slide to the floor. She’d check on Vaughn in a minute. She tipped her head back against the wall and closed her eyes.
“How’s the wrist?”
Briana grinned. Her wrist, along with her ribs and other injuries had healed quickly when she’d gone to stone after the first competition. Rhiannon might have rethought her stone prison sentence if she’d realized it increased a gargoyle’s healing process. “Trying to pinpoint a weakness already?” She moved in a circle opposite Nessa.
Dark red mats covered the floor beneath them in the training room. Weapons she couldn’t identify, but reminded her of something she’d find in a medieval torture chamber lined the walls with the axes, swords and staffs, like the ones she and Nessa sparred with now.
The huntress pursued. “That implies I need to know one to smoke you in competition.” Nessa spun around, feigning a high blow and dropping at the last second to sweep low.
Briana stumbled, but managed to block the move. It had been her idea to spar. Her confrontation with Kel had proven she’d grown too lax with her own skills, her tech jobs taking up most of her time when she hadn’t been trying to find a way to free Cian from his stone prison.
She wasn’t sure that even if her skills had been up to par, she would have been able to take on Kel and come out the victor.
“But don’t worry.” Nessa went on the offense again. “If it came down to the two of us, the limbs I’d cut off would regenerate eventually.”
She didn’t doubt her friend meant every word, and spent the next hour proving to Nessa why it wouldn’t be a cake walk.
The back of her shirt stuck to her skin and her shoulder throbbed from an earlier dislocation, but she was otherwise holding her own, even though she’d gotten the impression Nessa wasn’t giving it her all.
Both the enchantress and the Fae had wandered in at some point, but Bran paid more attention to the weapons on the wall, or that’s what he wanted everyone to think.
“I don’t know how you pretend you don’t have a blood-thirsty shadow following you around.”
Waiting for the next competition wasn’t something any of the surrounding immortals were handling well. It didn’t help that outside the walls of their
Lucan had stuck close, but she’d ignored his attempts to talk. There wasn’t anything left to say. After everything else, reliving the memory of them together and the way he’d sent her away without a backward glance, had stung far more the second time around.
That alone should have been enough to temper the flames that continued to burn much too hot whenever she caught him staring at her. Twice he’d rejected her; three times if she counted their twisted
