my hand across my brow, smearing more ash into my pale skin so that I now looked more like a banker who worked part-time as a chimney sweep.
I opened my mouth to ask Gideon about the vampires, but he wasn’t looking at the house or even the corpses littering the empty street before us. His attention was behind us. A small group of people had gathered several feet away and were angrily shouting. They called us murderers and butchers.
Rage and hatred twisted their features. Shoulder to shoulder stood humans, shifters, ogres, sirens, and dwarves, shouting at us. At any other time, this motley group barely tolerated each other, but they easily united when faced with members of the Ivory Towers. We saved their lives. If any one of them had approached the bespelled vampire corpses, they would have been torn apart like that one poor soul minutes earlier.
But they didn’t care. Or rather, they likely thought that we were the cause of the attack in the first place and the vampires were merely defending themselves. When they looked at Gideon and me, they saw only centuries of oppression, violence, and death.
If only they knew what it was like inside of the Ivory Towers. If only they knew what we were protecting them from. The two separate thoughts whispered through my head, but I quickly shoved them aside.
“Let’s go, Gideon. We need to finish this investigation,” I growled, turning back toward the house the vampires had exited. Guilt and frustration warred in my chest. There was no convincing them that I wasn’t one of the bad guys.
I didn’t get more than two steps when pain exploded in the back of my head, knocking me to my hands and knees in the middle of the street. Gravel bit into my filthy palms while a second shockwave of pain surged through my knees. Blinking hard to clear away the stars from my eyes, I lifted one trembling hand to find a massive gash across the back of my skull while blood poured across my scalp.
“What the fuck?” I groaned, trying to pull together a coherent thought through the pain that was making a playground of my body. “What happened?”
“A rock,” Gideon answered in an icy voice. I slowly turned my head at his tone and I saw the large stone he was pointing to a couple feet away. I was pulled from my stunned contemplation of the act by the sharp swell of magical energy sweeping through the air. Gideon was summoning up great amounts of energy for a spell.
The air had grown frighteningly still in that frozen moment so that the silence was nearly suffocating. Pushing unsteadily to my feet again, I turned back to find that the crowd was still standing several yards away, but no one spoke. They looked as if they weren’t even breathing as they waited to see what would happen. A rabbit trapped by a fox. They waited wide-eyed for their messy end to be delivered by the warlocks they dared to attack.
And Gideon was more than willing to hand out Tower justice. The wind rose, rattling the limbs of the nearby trees, and the sky turned dark with thick black clouds rushing in to blot out the once clear blue sky. The warlock spread his hands wide and blue sparks arced between his fingertips. His black cloak snapped angrily in the wind.
“Gideon,” I started in the firmest voice I could muster over the howl of the wind. “Let it go.”
“They attacked us!” he shouted at me without taking his eyes off the gathered crowd.
“They attacked me and I said drop it!”
The warlock ignored me, keeping his focus on his spell. A sharp crackling filled my ears and the hair on the back of my neck stood on end. Cursing him and the rock thrower, I gave Gideon a hard shove, knocking him off balance just as the energy was leaving his fingertips. The blast of energy flew wide, cutting through the bare limbs of a nearby tree. People screamed and scattered as debris rained down on the street.
Gideon swung around, turning nearly black eyes on me now that his initial targets had beaten a quick retreat. I fought the urge to grab my wand, knowing that the sight of it would only escalate the matter. My heart was pounding so hard I could taste it in the back of my throat.
“Protecting them only gives them courage!” the warlock roared, waving a hand back at the empty