Horsemen's War (The Rebellion Chronicles #3) - Steve McHugh Page 0,37

who knows what we’re going to face with Gawain.”

“There’s something else too,” she said.

“Yeah . . . I’m worried about losing my temper,” I admitted.

“Why?”

“Honestly? Because once that anger is let loose, it might not stop. If I’d lost my temper up there, my magic would have destroyed that entire floor. There would be pictures all over the world of a sorcerer who had just ripped the White House apart. I don’t want the people who feared Arthur and Avalon to fear us too. We’re better than them. I figured restraint on my part would be for the best.”

Selene kissed me on the cheek. “Just try not to get hurt. I doubt that Gawain and those in the Oval Office with him are going to be as easily dispatched as everyone we’ve faced so far.”

“I’ve been saving myself,” I told her with a grin.

There was an explosion somewhere within the West Wing, powerful enough to shake the walls.

“Remy?” we both said in unison.

“I guess we’re doing this, then,” Selene said.

We walked down the corridor past the Cabinet Room until the hall turned right toward where the president’s secretary normally sat. The position was currently occupied by two large men. They spotted Selene and me and charged to meet us.

One turned into a werewolf midstride and collided with Selene, who threw him over her shoulder into and through the wall behind her. She tore through the remains of the wall into the Cabinet Room as the man before me paused, looking a bit more cagey about what his chances were.

He created a sphere of air in his hand and threw it at me, but it was half-arsed, and I deflected it, sending it into the now-ruined wall of the Cabinet Room as I continued to move toward him.

“How many are in there?” I asked.

The man was sweating. His tattered suit suggested he had once been Secret Service. But now he was nothing better than a traitor to his own people.

“Five paladins, the president, and Gawain,” he said, the second sphere of air in his hand dissipating to nothing. “They were meant to take the place bloodlessly.”

The shadows around me crept across the carpet and under the man’s feet.

“I can’t lie,” I told him as the shadows leaped up, dragging the man down into them as he screamed. “You deserve worse.”

Selene stepped through the hole in the wall, covered in blood that I was certain wasn’t hers. Her face was halfway between her human and dragon-kin forms, and I doubted the werewolf had fared well.

A tinge of power ran through my body as the wraith finished his meal.

“Nate, Selene, we have a problem,” Sky said through the earpiece. “There are mines in the walls.”

I stopped moving and looked around the short corridor we were in.

“Say again?” Selene asked.

“Mines in the fucking walls,” Remy repeated. “Not magical ones but modified to contain silver pieces. One of them detonated while Sky was fighting a sorcerer. The sorcerer took the brunt.”

“It killed them?” I asked.

“No, I did,” Sky said. “But I doubt getting a face full of silver shrapnel felt too good.”

“Found two more,” Zamek said. “They appear to be attached to motion sensors.”

I searched the room.

“Bollocks,” Selene said behind me.

I turned and followed her finger to the large device that was inside the remains of the wall. How it hadn’t detonated when the wall had been partially destroyed, I’d never know.

“Okay,” I said. “We’re going to get to the Oval Office. You hear that, Jinayca?”

“I did, as did Roberto,” Jinayca said. “He’s getting a team ready to search this whole place when we get inside.”

“There will be some mines inside the rooms either side of the Oval Office,” I said.

“Seeing how this is Gawain, I would certainly assume so, yes,” Jinayca said.

“Have I told you lately that Mordred’s brother is a dick?” I asked.

“It’s come up once or twice,” Jinayca said dryly.

“Everyone hear what Jinayca said about the team?” Selene asked.

Everyone confirmed that they had.

“What are the chances that they’ve put up runes to stop any magic being used?” Selene asked me.

“No idea,” I said. “Let’s assume they have.”

We stood on either side of the door to the Oval Office. Selene grabbed the door handle and wrenched it free, tearing the door off in the process. I created a dense shield of air and stepped into the office to find four paladins kneeling on the floor with their hands on their heads and Gawain sitting behind the president’s desk. A large glyph on the