Horsemen's War (The Rebellion Chronicles #3) - Steve McHugh Page 0,34
him in the chest, sending him back through the wall behind him.
Two more came at me, one turning into her werewolf form and the second sending a plume of fire at me that I had to wrap myself in a shield of air to avoid.
After throwing a ball of lightning at the werewolf, I detonated it with a snap of my fingers, causing her to dive into a nearby room to evade the blast. It hit the flame elemental in the ribs, taking him off his feet and dumping him in the room beyond the broken wall where his friend had been thrown.
The sounds of gunshots below distracted me for a split second, just as the werewolf let out a roar and charged, her razor-sharp claws dragging through my shield of air like it was paper. She was clearly much more powerful than a regular werewolf, and that meant that decapitating her might not actually kill her. Powerful werewolves were weird like that.
She swiped at me with a claw; I moved aside, smashing a lightning-wrapped elbow into her ribs, then hitting her in the jaw with an uppercut. I detonated the lightning magic wrapped around my fist, and it tore up through her face, destroying part of the ceiling above. A blast of air sent the werewolf flying back, and I turned the air into a whip and snapped it shut around her legs. I heard bone snap before she screamed.
Ice and flame poured out of the hole in the wall where I’d thrown the sorcerer and elemental. I covered myself in a shield of air and sank into my shadow realm, found the correct shadow to leave from, and ended up behind them. The shadows leaped up from the ground around the elemental, who screamed, throwing balls of fire at the darkness, which caused me pain as it retreated.
The sorcerer saw his opening and darted forward, but tendrils of shadow leaped out of the ground, wrapping around his arms and throat. I stabbed him in the head with one of my soul weapons—manifestations of my necromancy power. In this case a jian, a weapon that had meant a lot to me when I’d first been given it centuries ago.
The sorcerer died with a blade of fire to his temple.
The elemental hurled fire at me, and I wrapped myself in a shield of flame, walked through it, and created a sphere of air that I drove into his chest and detonated, throwing him to the floor. The shadows leaped out of the ground and pulled the semiconscious elemental into the shadow realm as I walked toward the werewolf, who was struggling back to her feet. I removed her head with a blade of fire, feeling the wraith feeding on the elemental, and sent her down to join him. I walked down the corridor toward the Solarium and stood to one side of the door before using my air magic to tear it apart. I threw the head into the room, and gunfire filled my ears as bullets tore into it.
I waited for the shower of bullets to finish and glanced inside the room, igniting my matter magic. Matter magic allowed me to be stronger and faster, neither of which were very helpful if I stepped inside the room and my magic cut off. In this case, I just wanted to be able to see all the runes, and my matter magic let me see where they were and which ones were weaker than others.
There were two men with AK-47s in the middle of the room, and a woman was guarding the seven hostages.
“We’re good down here,” Hel said in my ear. “Just dealing with the hostages.”
“All clear apart from three assholes in the Solarium and seven hostages,” I said. “Multiple runes; they all have guns.”
“You need a hand?” Selene asked.
“I’ll be okay,” I said. “You guys head up here; it’ll be over by the time you’re here.”
“See you shortly,” Selene said.
“You three want to put your guns down and head out peacefully?” I shouted.
“You come in here and these fuckers are dead,” one of the men shouted. “You hear me?”
I heard him. I sank into the shadows and came out in one of the bedrooms, which had a wall joining to the Solarium and a glass door that would let me out onto the promenade. Something I’d noticed when scouting the room was that the curtains were closed, presumably so that no enemy sniper could take a shot.