Ambrose coalesced beside me, shades lighter than usual, and he gazed into the distance with anticipation.
“Oh crap.” I got what the EMTs were raving about and totally empathized with their urge to burn rubber back into the city. “The coven.”
Six…things…charged down the hill toward the line of gwyllgi, and I almost fainted from the rush of blood to my head as I wedged my legs under me. The limp-noodle state of my arms told me sword fighting was a no-go. I could barely shamble toward them.
“Don’t make me regret this,” I told Ambrose. “Pick one.” I kept stumbling. “Drain it dry.”
The shadow bent his head and planted a kiss on my cheek then sped toward the biggest, ugliest, meanest I-don’t-know-what I had never seen. With the bloated head of a tiger, body of an elephant, and tail like a pug, it was pure nightmare fodder. Until it whirled to snap at a lion that got too close, I hadn’t noticed the golden gwyllgi herding it right for us.
Not one to dawdle when food was on the line, Ambrose honed himself into a black spear and struck the creature in its heart. It roared and thrashed as it fell with a thump that shook the ground beneath my feet.
The others glanced around, Team Good and Team Bad, shock bright on their faces, and that’s when they spotted me.
Luckily, Ambrose was too busy gorging to thin my cut of the magic to a trickle. That, or it had overflowed him and had nowhere to go but into me. I didn’t care. I would later. If there was a later, but it felt good to have my aches and pains fall silent and my body once again following my brain’s commands.
“My swords,” I ordered him. “Ambrose.”
The shadow ignored me and continued to feast. Unfortunately for him, now that I was flush with power too, I had the reserves to yank his metaphysical leash until he had no choice but to heel. He slunk to me, uncaring as the other creatures descended upon my friends. I jerked on Ambrose until his fury singed the back of my throat in a scream he couldn’t utter, but I got him close enough to reclaim my weapons.
“Sip from the rest.” I pushed as much power as I could spare into the command. “Help us take them down.”
The soul of cooperation, Ambrose ricocheted off me and shot across the field to ping-pong off the five remaining creatures.
“I’m a lover,” Remy said from behind me, “not a fighter.”
“You tried to mow down Midas,” I reminded her. “You’ve got killer instinct to spare.”
“That was One.” She pointed to another Remy, one of three I counted in the area. “I’m Five.”
“Do me a favor then.” I aimed her toward the ambulance. “Get them out of here.”
“That I can do.”
With her commandeering the ambulance, we had removed the innocents from the field.
Dividing my attention between Ambrose, who used his earlier hit of power to defy me and take more, more, more, and the battle raging ahead, I spotted my opening and took it. A gap split the line where the lions and gwyllgi met, their fighting styles too different to mesh seamlessly, and I filled it.
One of the beasts wasted no time homing in on me. Its torso was male, but its tail was snakelike, and a cobra’s fan flared around its humanesque head. Its skin was all mottled shades of green, and its blood ran black and sizzled where it hit dirt and grass.
“She lives,” he hissed between fangs the thickness of my thumb. “Take her.”
The remaining four shifted their focus from mowing down the defensive line to capturing me.
Midas fought his way to my side, and I wished I could run my fingers through his fur to reassure myself he was okay, but I couldn’t afford to distract him. Or myself. It would suck to die because I paused to give my boyfriend belly rubs. That’s the kind of end you never live down, not that I would be alive to enjoy my notoriety.
A lion with silver in his mane shot in front of me, raking his claws across the snake’s belly. The plating on its abdomen kept it from being a kill shot, but the snake man hissed and bowed over, and I took off its head with a clean slice.
“Coming through.” Bishop punched his fist through the snake man’s chest and ripped out a heart with no finesse whatsoever. “Back in five.”