began. I hoped I wasn’t going to have to kick the iron maiden shut on him.
“Oh come on,” I replied. “Big personal sacrifice so your girlfriend can go free? You live for this shit. Unlive for it. Whatever.”
To my flat astonishment, Yelena seemed to be seriously considering it. “She would never give him up.”
“No. She’d probably track you down and try to get him back. And then you can trap her and rip out her still-beating heart or whatever.”
“Kate!” Now it was apparently Sofia’s turn to object. I couldn’t tell if the interruptions were undermining my case or making it for me. Probably Yelena would buy the idea more if she thought at least some of her enemies weren’t up for it. At least I hoped she would.
“Just being realistic.” I put my one good hand up in a don’t shoot the messenger kind of a way. “I want to end this without anybody getting hurt right now. We can think about later later.”
Yelena sashayed over to where Patrick was still pinioned inside a sodding great metal cabinet. “What do you say, lover? Will you be mine again if it buys your friends a little freedom?”
Come on, Patrick, say yes. It means absolutely nothing. I nudged Tara’s flank with my knee which I hoped she took as a signal to get ready when shit started to go down again.
Weakly, perhaps from reluctance, perhaps because he must have lost a huge amount of blood even without a heartbeat pumping it out of his body, Patrick nodded. Hooking her hands underneath his arms, Yelena lifted him triumphantly down and lowered him to the floor at her feet. If she was anything like him, and she was exactly like him or this wouldn’t have worked, we had about a three second window while she was wrapped up in obsession-haze.
I rushed the nearest knight, going straight for his sword hand and hoping to have him disarmed before he realised what was happening. The sunlight was still holding them back a little, but only a little, and I needed the strength and grace of the Deepwild to have any hope of pulling this off.
“Sofia,” I called out with my last coherent breath before it all went into hunter’s instinct and adrenaline. “Run.”
Partly I didn’t want the responsibility of looking after her. Partly I wasn’t convinced the sunlight would be enough to protect her if it kicked off again. Mostly, I wanted Patrick off the bench.
The moment Flick and Sofia got clear and the light winked out, he rose up with that half-scream-half-roar thing he did when he’d decided, sometimes in the face of all the evidence, that he was called upon to protect his lady. Going from four-on-two with a pair of civilians to look after, to four-on-three with no civilians, made a huge difference. Tara was busy demonstrating to anyone who cared why her people had been chosen to be warrior-guardians of the ways between worlds, and now I didn’t have to worry about collateral damage I could be a bit less cautious about drawing on my mother’s power. Which was good because otherwise fighting with one hand and a tiny dagger against a faery knight with a sword would have gone super poorly. But with the close quarters and the fact that you only needed one solid hit from an iron spike to sincerely fuck up a faery’s day, I managed to take my opponent out in good enough time that I could circle round and back up Tara. She had one of the knights pinned down but even as a wolf she only had one pair of eyes, and a second knight was rearing up behind her, about to bring his sword down on her spine. The weapon was steel, not silver, and werewolves healed fast, but they didn’t heal quite so fast that they could laugh off severed vertebrae.
Taking the no-nonsense approach, I rammed the iron dagger sharply into the knight’s neck and yanked him backwards, wrapping my broken arm around his chest and dragging him away.
With three knights defeated, that left Yelena. She and Patrick had been tearing up a storm the way only seriously bitter exes with a blood-borne need to pursue the objects of their desire through all eternity could. She slammed him back against the iron maiden, not quite skewering him as completely as she had the last time, meaning he had space to throw her into the far wall. I could honestly have watched those two