Dead Man's Deal The Asylum Tales - By Jocelynn Drake Page 0,74
at me. “It seems we’ve found the elf we were searching for, and she’s strolling with the one person who would most like to see the Towers fall.”
“You’re insane, Billy,” I called back, shoving Trixie behind me. “You’ve got the wrong elf and you know it. I might not like the Towers, but I wouldn’t be stupid enough to try to attack them like this. It’s suicide.”
My mind scrambled for protective spells that would shield both Trixie and me. I didn’t have my wand on me and I had dropped the stick I grabbed from Demoiselle Noire’s in the grass when I returned to the park. Fuck. I didn’t even have a weapon. Heading to a meeting with the queen of the Summer Court armed to the teeth hadn’t seemed a good way to convince her that I wasn’t a threat.
“No one believed you to be particularly smart.” The warlock laughed.
I ignored his taunts, focusing on drawing energy toward me. William Rosenblum was old, but not too old. Maybe in his fifties. We had had a few run-ins while I was living with Simon in the Tower. He was an arrogant prick and had never thought too much of me, which I was hoping to use to my advantage.
“Trix, when I tell you to run, I want you to head straight for the woods and don’t stop,” I said in a low voice.
One of her hands rested on my side, her fingers tightening in my ragged T-shirt, while the other pressed the edge of the white book she was carrying into my wounded back. “I’m not leaving you.” Her voice wavered with fear. A couple months ago, she attacked Simon, but then she had been lucky enough to sneak up behind the old bastard while he was busy attacking me. This time she was staring down the wrong end of a wand with no defense.
“You have to. I can’t protect us both. Now go!” I shouted. At the same time I threw a massive bolt of white-hot energy at Billy, sending it crashing against the shield he had barely created in time. The energy bounced off his shield and shot out, crackling through the air as it slammed into nearby trees and lampposts. Limbs crashed to the ground and sparks jumped. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Trixie running for the tree line to my left.
Billy knocked away the last of the energy with a wave of his hand and shifted his stance so that he was facing the direction in which Trixie had run. I ended the first spell and quickly wrapped energy in my hands while shifting my thoughts to a second aggressive spell. I wasn’t trying to kill him. Well, at least not yet. For now, I would be content if he would keep his attention on me, giving Trixie some time to put some distance between this bastard and herself.
With a grunt, I whipped the second spell loose. The energy caught up the wind, sending it scraping along the ground before it pummeled Billy so that he was forced to shield his eyes against the dirt and gravel that was thrown in his direction. His shirt and protective cloak flapped in the fierce wind, plastering against his thin, frail frame before dancing behind him like a pair of black wings. While I was good at it, I didn’t like fucking with the weather. Spells like that tended to get out of control fast and cause massive amounts of collateral damage—not that the Towers were worried about a little thing like that.
I took advantage of his brief distraction to close some of this distance between us. My movement didn’t go unnoticed because as Billy dropped his arms, the wind died and I was pummeled in the chest by a surge of energy. I rocked backward, struggling to regain my balance while I instinctively raised a new protective shield against another strike.
“What brought on the sudden decision to attack the Towers?” William called while his hands moved before him, weaving strands of energy together as he cooked up a new spell to rip my face off. “You kill Master Thorn and then decide that it’s now safe to take down the rest of us?”
A ring of fire sprang up from the concrete around me, the flames reaching more than nine feet in the air. The heat was intense, baking the air so that it was becoming hard to breathe and making it feel like my