different kind of tool. My best magic is of the earth.” She pointed off the path, waving her hand at the field of grass undulating between us and the water. “I can make that open up and swallow anything that walks over it. But sometimes I need fire and if I have to, I can throw it around almost as good as Tate does. Not for as long, of course, and it won’t burn as hot, but I can do it. Now, Tate…she’s short-sighted. She’s got a touch of earth inside her, but she won’t mess with it. It could come in handy if she’d learn how to work it, but she won’t.” Kori glanced at me over her shoulder. “Know what separates the superior warrior from the middle-class one, Kit? It’s learning how to use every weapon, every tool at your disposal.”
“Wow. You sure use a lot of words to say that very profound sentence,” I drawled. Disturbingly profound. I looked at the compound bow I carried, thought of the sleek, lovely bow back in my car. And even that was enough to stir her song…I could hear her now. Whispering in my mind, the beat of her drums, thudding in time with my heart.
Well, shit.
“Work on it,” Kori said cheerfully. “You never know.”
Kori’s ability to hear the earth whispering came in handy.
By halfway through the afternoon, we’d managed to find two pits.
Nobody alive, but one of them held a corpse. Kori stared at it hard for a minute and then said, “Not a witch. Shifter of some sort.”
I looked at the corpse and tried to get a feel, but the life had been gone too long. I could read a person’s energy, but it was tied into the soul and the soul had been gone quite a while.
“Probably another stray cat or wolf,” I said tiredly, rubbing the back of my neck, thinking of my own cat.
He’d left early. It had been barely seven when he’d pulled out in that long black car and it was a bit of a drive to Orlando—two to three hours if traffic wasn’t bad. He would have been there by ten. It was crawling up on three now, meaning she’d had him for hours.
A hand touched my shoulder. “Stop it, kid. He knew what he was going back to.”
“Did he have a choice?”
“He’s the one who chooses to stay with an Alpha half the Assembly sees as bat-shit crazy.” Kori shrugged and turned away.
“If she’s that bad, why doesn’t the Assembly handle it?”
“Because she keeps her clan in line and doesn’t let her crazy outside of it,” Kori said, shrugging. “If she was like the rat you tangled with a few years ago, they’d intervene. Hell, sometimes I think people wait for that…and shit, if she’d come gunning for you? The Assembly could shut her down. Maybe that’s why Es did what she did, offering you the protection of the house, even as she jabbed at the bitch. She’ll snap sooner or later, and once she does, the laws will fall into place and she can be dealt with. She’s getting worse, I’ve heard.”
“She’s bad enough already,” I muttered, scratching at my arm.
“Yeah. But you can’t force your boy to do anything.” She sighed and settled into silence, her eyes taking on a flat look. I could feel her magic tingling my skin again.
Searching the earth, I suspected.
Something rustled in the grass and I grimaced as I caught the long body of a gator coming out of the water. Its black eyes stared at me and then moved away, headed off in another direction. Good gator. No food here. None at all.
Something whistled through the air. Familiar—
“I…”
Kori’s voice stopped.
I looked over at her.
For a minute, the red stain on her shirt made no sense.
But the glint of bloody iron protruding from her shirt made sense. A lot.
She toppled forward. I tried to catch her before she tumbled into the pit, but I couldn’t.
With a scream, I called my sword even as I flung myself to the ground.
The volley of arrows that came flying at me didn’t let up for a long, long time.
Chapter Twenty Three
It could have been an hour.
It could have been minutes.
I didn’t know how much time passed before there was a pause in the arrows coming my way. I couldn’t just fade away because they’d see me and I wasn’t going to reveal that secret in front of them, unless I had no other choice.