Blackbird Broken (The Witch King's Crown #2) - Keri Arthur Page 0,20

shield. The shooter’s eyes went wide even as he pushed up and back, but he wasn’t anywhere near fast enough. The lightning hit him, incinerating him as easily as it had his bullets.

I twisted around to see what was happening behind me. Luc knelt over the body of a woman; the other was nowhere in sight. Barney climbed to his feet, and though he was covered in bits of plaster and wood, he looked unharmed aside from a small cut running along his left cheek.

I uncrossed the daggers, and the shield disintegrated, leaving me feeling washed out. But at least my eyes weren’t bleeding; creating the shield and ashing the halfling hadn’t drawn too much on my strength.

“Well, fuck,” Mo said, holding out one hand. “Even I didn’t know you could do that with those daggers.”

I clasped her fingers and pulled her upright. “Neither did I, to be honest. It was a wing and a prayer moment.”

“And one that means Nex and Vita have accepted you in a way they’ve not any other generation of De Montfort women.”

I frowned. “Countless ancestors have used the lightning—there’s multiple records of it in those old diaries you hold.”

“Yes, but the immersion process never went deeper than surface level. There’s no mention in any of those diaries of a lightning shield, and Vita hasn’t ever saved the life of another De Montfort—not since Rhedyn, anyway.”

Rhedyn was the first De Montfort to hold the daggers. She was also responsible for the tradition of passing them on to the firstborn girl at puberty—though I’d gotten them from Mo rather than my mother, simply because by the time I hit fourteen, she’d been dead for nearly eleven years.

“You never did tell me why Nex and Vita were forged, or even why they were given to Rhedyn rather than her brother.”

All I really knew was that they’d been forged at the same time as the king’s sword, and it had been the goddess Vivienne who’d gifted them to the De Montfort line. Which made no sense. No matter how friendly Mo appeared to be with the Lady of the Lake, why would she give them to my ancestor’s over the Aquitaines? We might once have been warriors able to both give and take life, but the Aquitaines had always ruled and protected this land—until Layton’s dismantling of witch rule, at any rate.

“No, I never did, did I?” Mo patted my hand. “That’s a tale for a less dramatic moment. Go check the balcony while I examine our dead halfling.”

I shook my head, then righted the two chairs and walked over to the shattered glass doors. Glass crunched under my feet, and the wind whipped in, its touch chilly and filled with the promise of more rain. It had already whisked away the ashed remains of the halfling—only a blackened circle of concrete spoke of the force that had hit him.

I carefully opened what remained of the door; a big chunk of glass smashed down, spraying glittering shards across the balcony. Above me, well beyond my line of sight, came an odd noise—one that sounded like the scrape of nails across concrete.

Light flickered down Nex’s side in response. It definitely wasn’t a human scrambling around up there … I gripped her hilt tighter. Lightning spat from her sharp tip, hissing lightly as it hit the floor. If I wasn’t careful, she’d set the whole damn place alight.

I stepped through the doorway and peered up. Unfortunately, the old stone lintel was wider than the actual door, and I couldn’t see past it. The scrape echoed again, this time accompanied by a brief fall of dust. He was on the move—

A hand came down on my shoulder, and a squeak of surprise escaped as I swung around. Only quick reflexes on Luc’s part stopped Vita scouring open his stomach.

“Damn it, Luc,” I growled, keeping my voice low, “you know better than to creep up on me like that.”

“Yeah. Sorry.” He pointed with his chin to the balcony. “What’s the problem?”

“Something’s crawling around on the roof.”

He reached back and drew Hecate again. Light flickered down her sides, but she wasn’t hissing, and she certainly wasn’t screaming like a banshee; but then, she only seemed to do that when in the middle of a fight.

“You keep watch here; I’ll go up and see if I can grab them.” He swung around and retreated. “Barney? I need you to unlock the roof’s exit.”

As the two of them left, I took a tentative step out