The Last Warrior (Shifters Unbound #13) - Jennifer Ashley Page 0,1
kicks catching three of his attackers in the head.
He felt the beast he truly was coming out, the beast he held tightly inside because he had no choice. Ben’s inner self wasn’t a cute furry animal like a Shifter, but an ancient warrior who’d been forced into exile in this crazy human world.
His body thickened and grew, and his hands became powerful things as his true form struggled to emerge.
Ben reminded himself that these assholes weren’t hoch alfar coming to massacre his family, just lazy booze-heads looking for something to do on a Saturday night.
He stopped himself from becoming a destructive force of nature, only changing form far enough for what he needed. Ben kicked and punched, pummeled and whirled, the men’s drunkenness and the darkness not letting them see exactly what they battled.
Three went down, groaning, but the other four, not understanding their odds, wouldn’t give up.
Ben didn’t wait for them to regroup but simply launched into them. The legs of one went out from under him at the same time another doubled over with an oof! as Ben slammed a heavy fist to his abdomen.
Chime.
The cell phone-like sound distracted the remaining two men for a second, but only a second. One of them drew a knife.
Chime!
“Is that you or me?” Ben resettled into his human guise. “Maybe you should get that.”
The men hesitated, glancing at each other. Ben lunged at them, ripping the knife from the first one’s hand and throwing it across the parking lot. Then he knocked the two men together with inhuman strength. They fell, insensible, to the uneven pavement.
CHIME!
“All right, all right.” Ben jammed his hand into his pocket and pulled out not a cell phone but a small round crystal about an inch in diameter. Its white glow heated his fingers, its insistent peal ringing in his ears.
“What?” he yelled into it.
“Ben, dear, I need you.” The faint but musical tones of a woman called Lady Aisling came to him across the void from Faerie. The scary woman had powerful enough magic to do that. “Now, please.”
She said please, but she meant the now part. No arguments.
Ben glanced at the seven moaning men at his feet, none about to rise anytime soon.
“Yeah, I guess I’m done here. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
“See that you do. It is very important.”
Which meant, Get your ass back to Faerie in the next five minutes or deal with me. The men Ben had just fought wouldn’t stand a chance against Lady Aisling, who could wipe them out with her pinky. Ben stood in awe of her, admired and respected her, but damn, the woman could frighten a hundred years out of a goblin.
Ben walked to the motorcycle he’d left near the building, mounted, and started it. The men were barely twitching, so he thumbed 9-1-1 on his cell phone and sent first responders to them before he strapped on his helmet and rode out of the parking lot.
He sped the few miles to the haunted house, patted its wall as he went inside, and then had to talk to it for thirty minutes before it finally opened the way to Faerie for him.
Ben went through, leaving the house to creak in his wake, emitting a sound suspiciously like a mournful sigh.
“I don’t think you understand.” Rhianne mac Aodha shook the chains that stretched from her wrists above her head to the stone wall. “No means no. And ladies don’t really like being locked up in dungeons.”
She spoke the words in the language of the hoch alfar so that Walther le Madhug, the idiot who’d put her down here, would understand. He’d never bothered to learn Rhianne’s language, that of the Tuil Erdannan, but for some reason expected Rhianne to marry him.
When Rhianne had politely declined, Walther had signaled his thugs to grab her and drag her to his castle in the middle of ice-cold nowhere, locking her in this cell until she changed her answer.
“I shall count to three …”
Silence. Darkness. Walther wasn’t listening. He hadn’t bothered to put guards on the cell door, which wasn’t even a door, but a grating in the low ceiling she sat beneath.
“One …”
This always worked so well for her mother. When Lady Aisling started the count, the faint of heart fell all over themselves to do whatever she wanted.
“Two …”
The silence and darkness unnerved Rhianne more than she wanted to admit. She had magic, not anywhere near what her mother had, but enough to conjure a pinpoint