a way to save Gus from four baddies without getting both of us killed. I was also trying to figure out what, exactly, Phaedra’s lot was doing in the first place.
It’s like they want Gus’s boulder, I realized, even though I couldn’t, for the life of me, figure out why anyone but Gus would want the stone spirit’s rock.
Then again, I can’t really understand why anyone would want Gus, either. I’m sure he was a very nice stone spirit and all, but man he was hard work.
Speaking of which, I thought, as the harpies’ attack on Gus intensified. The poor little guy was obviously struggling, and I was hiding in the bushes.
No fucking way, I thought, remembering that moment when Anyan was attacked and I just stood there. Not this time.
Inhaling deeply, I stood up right behind Fugwat, who’d moved forward a few feet toward Gus’s boulder. Conjuring the biggest, baddest mage ball I could muster, I held the swirling iron-gray orb in my hand as I used my outdoor voice.
“Fugwat! Duck!” I shouted, praying that my plan worked.
And it did. Fugwat dropped like he’d been shot, leaving Graeme’s flank totally undefended. I let fly my mage ball, which smashed through the incubus’s token side-shields and into the side of his head with a crunching noise that was music to my ears.
It’s not that Graeme was more of a threat than the spriggan, really. I just liked him even less.
By the time Fugwat had raised his rather empty head to see what had happened, I was across the clearing and running to Gus’s side. He’d seen me and was reaching out a plump hand when the lean, dun-colored shape of Kaya (or Kaori) came streaking down from the sky, landing a solid blow across the stone spirit’s forehead.
Blood gushed from Gus’s wound and I cried out, extending my hand and my shield toward him as I solidified the latter using a combination of power woven through the water saturating the air. The second harpy, Kaori (or Kaya), bounced off my impromptu shield with a thud before she could strike Gus.
Squawking painfully, she tumbled to the ground. While I wouldn’t normally kick a person when she was down, I was more than willing to kick any of Phaedra’s murderous lot. So I dropped my shields, funneling my force into another large mage ball. Instead of throwing this one, however, I bowled it at where the harpy lay, hooting piteously. Her sister snatched her up from the ground just a second before the mage ball could strike.
They spoil all my fun, I thought, as I finally gained Gus’s side.
The stone spirit was weaving on his feet, clearly wounded. As I had absolutely no healing skills (another huge gap in my education), there was nothing I could do but try to keep him from getting hurt any worse until Nell finally arrived.
And where the hell is that gnome? I thought, as I watched Kaya (or Kaori) land her sister Kaori (or Kaya) a few feet from where Graeme lay. I think the rapist incubus was smoldering, which pleased me to no end.
The mobile harpy sent a blast of healing energy at Graeme, even as Fugwat finally cottoned on to the fact that he’d been tricked and insinuated both his sizeable bulk and his even more formidable shields between me and his cronies.
Gus’s hand clutched at mine as he pulled me toward him to get my attention.
“Save her!” he pleaded with me. “They want her! I don’t know why, but they want her!” It took me a second to put two and two together, and then I realized that the “her” in question was Gus’s boulder.
I was about to tell him that I’d try when we both fell silent under an onslaught of incubus magic so dark, so violently sexual, and so terrifying that both Gus and I turned as one.
Graeme stood there, his waxen face even odder than before. The incubus had been gorgeous once: an Apollonian delight of perfectly symmetrical, golden male beauty. But such beauty had only barely masked the monster peering out of those sky-blue eyes. When Conleth—the ifrit halfling—had melted Graeme’s original face, the subsequent healings had left the incubus with a weird, waxen parody of his former glory. In other words, he now looked on the outside like the horror he was on the inside.
Graeme stepped forward, waving his cohorts behind him. The look in his eyes froze my blood; he wasn’t any more of a fan of