Soul of the Sword (Shadow of the Fox #2) - Julie Kagawa Page 0,108

dragons appeared, spiraling up into the cloudless sky. Trailing blue-and-white flames, they curled around with twin roars and dove at the assassins lurking in the grass.

Shouts of alarm filled the air. The hail of arrows ceased as the assassins switched targets, firing at the two enormous beasts that had appeared out of nowhere. They certainly didn’t think the dragons were illusions. Perhaps they knew something was wrong, but it was difficult to ignore two howling serpents descending like vengeful gods.

A sudden, savage glee flooded my veins. Snatching a handful of rice from the floor, I grinned and let my magic infuse the grains in my hand. Murdering humans! You should have all stayed home, spying on visitors and assassinating people in dark allies. Now you’re dealing with a kitsune! I hurled the rice over the cart, and a dozen floating heads appeared, laughing and gnashing their teeth, as they flew into the grass. Standing straight, I flung out a hand, and the grass erupted in a circle of foxfire, blazing blue and white as it surrounded us.

Shouts became screams. The assassins scattered like ants, slashing wildly at the darting heads, firing at the dragons swooping down on them. In the corner of my gaze, I saw Okame duck behind a barrel, his face pale in the flare of kitsune-bi, as a dragon soared overhead. Daisuke stood at the edge of the cart, his eyes hard as he raised his sword and slashed a flying head out of the air. It vanished with a pop and a small cloud of smoke. The fact that my own companions believed the insanity happening around them struck me as hilarious, though none but Reika had seen me use fox magic before.

You haven’t seen anything yet. With a grin, I snatched up another handful of rice and threw it into the air. With small pops of smoke, identical masked assassins appeared, dropping into the grass. With chilling battle cries, they raised their swords and started attacking their real counterparts, who responded with surprise, then panic. Standing atop the crates, I watched the chaos: the swooping, roaring dragons, the shrieking heads, the roaring flames and the masked men attacking each other with wild abandon, and laughed in delight.

“Yumeko-san!”

Something grabbed my sleeve, snapping me out of my revelry. I blinked and glanced down into Reika’s grim, pale face.

“Enough,” she whispered in a shaky voice. “Yumeko-san, that’s enough. They’re all dead.”

Dead?

Blinking, I waved my hand, dismissing the magic. Heads popped into small clouds of smoke, the masked figures disappeared, and the blue-white flames flickered out. The two dragons circling overhead shivered into coils of mist and dissolved in the wind, as a pair of twigs dropped from the air and vanished into the tall grass.

The cart under my feet swayed, and a sudden bout of dizziness made my head spin. The next thing I knew, I was slumped against the corner, the blurry faces of Reika, Daisuke and Okame standing over me.

“Yumeko-chan.” Reika’s voice seemed to come from a great distance away. I blinked, and her worried expression swam into focus. “Are you all right?”

“I…yes.” I hadn’t realized how much magic my body had used, and how much it took out of me, until now. I would have to be careful about that in the future; fainting in the middle of a battle or a fight for our lives was probably a very bad strategy.

I pulled myself upright and froze, gazing around at a scene of slaughter. The bodies of the assassins lay scattered around us in the grass. Some of them had a single arrow jutting from their chest, lodged in their throat, or shot through their head. Courtesy of Okame, I suspected; in the short time I had known him, the ronin had never missed what he shot at. And there were a few lying in the grass right beneath the cart, headless or sliced open with a single precise stroke. Their reward for attempting to cross blades with Oni no Mikoto.

But the rest of them, scattered through the grass with their faces frozen in panic, were free of arrows, and too far away for Daisuke to have slain. Many of them lay in pairs, their swords drawn and bloody, with gaping wounds that turned the grass around them red. A few had been peppered with those black throwing knives, the dark iron blades sunk deep into their flesh. One assassin lay facedown a few yards away, pinned to the earth by a sword, the curved