Page 121 of Faerie Hunted

With him at my side, the two of us deflected the attacks. He was my army, cutting through the shadows.

My lips pried back at the shock on Mike’s face when I brought Livvy's weapon down on the nearest guardian and it burst into pieces. I drew it on a second guardian and yelled as it ducked aside to avoid the swing of the blade.

The guardian used its weapon to try and knock the weapon out of my hand but Noren pounced on it and drove it into the stone beneath us with a roar.

My strength flagged. There and gone in an instant. My head lightened under a pulse of dizziness and I was going down. Noren wasn’t fast enough to catch me but a blast of air magic somehow managed to knock me into the wall and away from the attacking shadow guardian.

An agonized cry rattled through the ruins and I glanced over to see Mike curling his body over Laina. He’d left the sword in her shoulder, blood pouring from the savage wound.

Alarm paralyzed me.

If someone with the queen’s power could be easily taken down, then there was no hope for the rest of us.

The shadows swarmed in the unnatural wind, dark lances of power nipping at my skin and pulling my hair.

Noren leapt on one of the guardians and sent it crashing away. Before it had a chance to recover, he bit down around one of its insubstantial limbs, and the shadows evaporated again.

Bronwen and Livvy sent spears of their magic in a circle around me, around Onyx, around Mike and Laina, the points slamming down through several of the guardians and pinning them in place until Noren could move.

The wind lessened but didn’t die down.

I glanced over to Mike and he met my gaze with an arched brow that required no explanation. We needed to end this quickly.

The guardians were relentless. Several of them wrenched free of the spears of magic and hurled themselves at us. I went to move and my numb fingers dropped the weapon, the light guttering as darkness, like sharp teeth, bit down on anything they reached.

My head spun around and the vertigo bent me in half.

Of call the times for this shitty virus to take me down?—

My magic was there—I thought it was there—but I couldn’t access it. Like a blockade had formed around me to keep me from the very thing I needed to get us out of this.

Noren, luckily, still had every bit of his magic. And these fuckers couldn’t touch him. He towered over me and growled.

I dropped to my knees with my arms over my head and gritted my teeth, summoning whatever strength I had left to form the shield a second time.

I had no way of knowing what would have happened if Mike hadn’t erupted when he did. His magic, negligible during our classes, never showing beyond the trickle he used to get by, exploded out of him.

His head fell back on his shoulders and his chest swelled, a green aura pulsing out of him.

The cavernous ruins filled with the green glow of spring growth, of old forests, and the first buds of the year. The quality of the air changed and grew sweeter, like a breeze blowing away stale air.

I stood straighter. Noren quieted, shuddering, before he dropped down to all fours.

I pried my eyes open as the guardians evaporated one after the other. The last one held on longer than the others, howling in agony before the glow split it into two pieces and Noren slammed his massive paw down on it.

The roaring silence disappeared and left my head empty and aching.

For a long moment, no one moved, and the ruins were simply that. Empty, waiting. Nothing but stone.

The spell was broken by the dying glow and Mike’s harsh breathing. “Mom. Talk to me.”

“Is she okay?” At least that was what I wanted to say. Nothing came out. My lips moved but the words were impossibly far away.

Pressing my palm to my temple did nothing to dull the ache. I watched through a narrow tunnel of vision, blackness creeping in around the edges that had nothing to do with the shadow guardians.

Mike shifted onto his rear and dragged his mother up from the ground into his arms.

Her head lolled to the side, with her face already pale and her mouth slightly open.

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