worse by increasing its power.
The woman’s agony broke the tie, because torture pissed him off. Kill if you must, but inflicting pain for its own sake was an offense against the laws of nature.
“Not in my territory, you nasty fucks,” he snarled at the warlocks, who were still scrambling back and away from him. And then he snapped the dying human’s neck.
Instantly, the reek of putrefaction and despair began to lessen. Their spells had been tied to her agony, then. The magic must have had an element of sound dampening, as well, because now the shouts and screams of the battle raging outside the cabin broke through.
“Marta, Otto, to me,” one of the men—the tall, cadaverously thin one—shouted, holding out his hands. The other man and the woman rushed over to him and clasped his hands in theirs and began to chant. Tendrils of foul-smelling magic slithered up from the floor and started to coalesce in the corners and curl around the warlocks’ feet.
Nausea swarmed up from Bane’s gut to his throat, almost choking him—his body’s automatic reaction to the blood magic.
But the fire of his rage burned through the nausea—burned through everything but the driving need to see their blood splashed on the ground.
To end them.
“No doubt casting a spell that will do truly horrible things to me,” Bane said, his lips pulled back, fangs fully descended, not that he’d drink the blood of abominations like these. “You must be more powerful when you join hands. I can fix that.”
With that, he blurred through the air and grabbed each man by an arm, and then he ripped them off at the shoulder, ignoring the black blood that spattered in dual arcs across the room. He threw the arms into the old stone fireplace, where they immediately caught fire.
It was barely enough to slow them down.
Marta screamed out her hate and threw a spell at him that probably would have eviscerated him if he hadn’t warded himself, Luke, and Meara before they came. His protection spells would have persisted even in the face of wards that blocked his battle magic, but depriving the warlocks of their victim had destroyed their wards.
Which would make the next few minutes a lot more fun for Bane and a lot less fun for the warlocks.
He grinned and flicked a stasis spell at Marta that knocked her back and pinned her against the wall of the shack. Just then, Luke and Meara burst in from windows on opposite sides of the room, blood dripping from a scrape on Meara’s forehead.
“Starting all the fun without me,” Meara said, leaping to his side and then whipping her daggers out of their sheaths and hurling them into Marta’s throat. The warlock’s spilled blood broke Bane’s stasis spell, and she fell, but then she started crawling toward the dead woman in the pentagram. Horribly, she gurgled out laughter with the knives still in her throat, black blood bubbling out around the edges of the blade.
Luke, meanwhile, grabbed the tall man, who must have been the leader, by the back of the robe when he tried to flee. “Not this time.”
A stinking, sulfurous wave of dark magic more powerful than any Bane had felt in three hundred years of existence hammered into him from behind, smashing him across the room and into the wall next to the fireplace so hard the entire cabin shook from the blow. He managed to turn in midair, though, and landed on his feet, immediately falling into battle readiness, his gut twisting in rebellion to the unnatural forces swirling through the air.
He’d known this would be bad.
He hadn’t realized it would be something far, far worse than bad.
His skin tried to crawl off his body in reaction to the power stabbing into him—an unholy tidal wave of magic so foul that it could only come from a necromancer.
Luke was down, unconscious or dead, and Meara lay sprawled on the floor, eyes staring, unseeing, at the ceiling. Whatever the warlock had done, it had decimated Bane’s wards, leaving Meara and Luke, who had no natural immunity to magic, at risk.
If the bastard had harmed them, he would die.
If he’d killed them, he would wish for death.
Bane started toward Meara, but an invisible force ripped a chunk of stone from the fireplace and hurled it at him, forcing him to dodge aside.
“Move again, and the next one crushes her head.” The cold, dead voice that spoke the words preceded the speaker into the room. Unlike the three