He was right and I felt like shit trying to force him into handing over Reave for fixing a curse that his people didn’t deserve in the first place. “I’m trying to give you an amicable solution to our problem.”
“It appears that you are the only one with a problem here, warlock, seeing as you’ve so kindly solved ours.” He chuckled, but there was nothing happy in that noise. “I’m feeling generous tonight. Leave now and we won’t kill you where you . . . float.” He finished with a wave of his hand.
“I can’t do that,” I said with a snarl. I didn’t want to kill the dark elves gathered around me, but I’d do it to get to Reave. “I can’t leave here without Reave. You hand him over to me now or you will find this valley flooded with warlocks and witches before you can even signal your people to attack me.”
“So you’ve moved from bribery to threats,” he said, sounding as if he were bored with the entire conversation.
“It’s no threat. Just a statement of fact. I can’t leave without him, and if you keep him, you risk the life of every last Svartálfar. The Towers are searching for an elf. They don’t yet know the elf they seek is Svartálfar. If I were to tell them, they would kill every dark elf on the planet rather than bother to search out their true target. You know this.”
I smiled at the king, a grim, cold thing as he glared at me. My voice dipped a little lower so that I was nearly whispering but everyone in the valley could hear me. “Or did Reave not tell you the true reason for his return to the bosom of his people? Didn’t you know that he’s the reason Indianapolis was destroyed?”
“Noooo!” The scream echoed throughout the cave before flying free into the night air. A tall, lithe body ran past the king and jumped from the edge of the cliff. There was no time to react as my mind struggled to accept that fact that Reave had thrown himself at me. I noticed the knife clenched in his fist a half second before his body crashed into mine. I grabbed his wrist and arm with both hands to stop him from plunging it into my chest, but I had no way to compensate for his hitting me. We flew backward into the darkness, smashing into tree branches as we fell to the earth in a tangle of struggling limbs. Pain exploded across my back as we hit a tree, while more pain slashed across my face as we passed branches. We had moved out of the light I had created, so I could no longer see Reave, but I had my hands on him, holding him away from me.
The impact of hitting hard earth and rocks threw us apart. Grinding my teeth against the pain, I rolled to my feet, eyes searching the woods for a sign of the damn dark elf. My heart pounded like mad and my breath was coming in shattered gasps. Pain seared through my chest with each inhale, making me think that one or more ribs were broken, but I couldn’t worry about it. I wasn’t sure if Reave would run or come at me again. He certainly had an advantage in fighting me in the woods, but it would be next to impossible to spot him if he ran.
The wind shifted and I twisted around to see a shadow lunging at me. The knife winked briefly in a shaft of light as he attempted to plunge it in my stomach. I sidestepped the blow, but Reave only turned and slashed the knife through the air. I raised my right hand to block his arm, but I wasn’t fast enough. The knife sliced through my wand, sending a massive jolt through my body. Breaking your wand sucked in the worst way, but you never wanted to be holding it when it happened. Any energy accumulated in that little instrument instantly shot back through the wielder.
I dropped the remains of the wand as everything became numb from my fingertips to my right shoulder. With my arm hanging limp at my side, I swung my left fist, hitting Reave on the side of the face with enough force to cause him to stumble past me. The deadweight was throwing me off balance and there was a buzzing in my head that wasn’t great for my