Page 71 of Smoke & Ashes
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 dickheads beating on each other for a very long time, but Tara brought a stop to the whole thing by pouncing heavily on Yelena and bringing her crashing to the floor.
It was about at this point that I realised quite how pissed off at her Tara was, because without a moment’s hesitation, she took Yelena’s head in her jaws and—
“Stop!”
Good old Patrick, you could always rely on him to add to the melodrama.
32
Promises & Mercies
“Is there any special reason,” I asked, “why you don’t want Tara to eat this objectively terrible person?”
“If we kill her, then we are no better than she is.”
I rolled my eyes so hard my face hurt. “Patrick, you’realreadyno better than she is. You’re both creepy vampires who get way too fixated on people you shouldn’t.”
I heard a snarl from behind me. And the thought occurred to me that if Tara was waiting for my signal then she was being much more consultative about this than usual. Which I hoped was evidence that we’d developed a respectful and mutually supportive relationship, rather than that I’d taken over her mind with my newfound ability to control werewolves.
Yeah, we needed to talk about that at some point.
“She may be able to tell us about Elaine,” Patrick said. And much as I hated to admit it, he had a point.
Also I wasn’t exactly bananas about watching a lady get her head chewed off either. “Okay.” I bent down and got as close to the two sets of fangs—the wolfey ones and the vampirey ones—as I could bear. “Let’s try this. Assuming Tara doesn’t kill you now which, given you’re still wearing bits of her friend, I’d say is fifty-fifty, you stand down and tell us everything you know. And then we’ll work out what we need to do with you. Deal?”
I almost thought she’d be defiant, which would have been a gutsy move given that her actual head was in the actual mouth of an actual werewolf. “Deal,” she said at last.
Tara backed off, shifting fluidly back to bipedal. The moment she had, Yelena made a bolt for the door but between Patrick and an instantly re-furrified werewolf she got all of two paces.
“Can’t blame you for trying,” I said, “but you really don’t want to try again.” Not that she’d be likely to for a while, Tara had gone for the legs this time and werewolf bites were nasty.
Shifting back to her less terrifying—or at least differently terrifying—shape, Tara folded her arms and eyed me warily. “My patience is wearing thin. This woman has transgressed against my pack in the most heinous way possible and Iwillhave justice.”
“You heard the lady,” I tried to give Yelena an intimidating look but even without a broken arm I’d definitely have been the least scary thing in the room. “You’re on borrowed immortality here, give us something good or we havezeroreason not to let her eat you.”
Huddled on the floor nursing her extremely damaged limbs, Yelena looked up at me, still a little defiant if I was any judge. “When I realised that the Prince of Wands was sheltering Patrick—”
“You mean when Itoldyou he was sheltering Patrick?”
“When I realised, I approached the King of Shadows and he told me that we had been betrayed, and that both Douglas and Patrick’s new lover needed to die.”
I waved a hand. “To clarify, bynew loveryou mean the person he’s dating who is basically a child?”
“I would not expect you to understand our love, Katharine.” Patrick’s tone was grave. Why oh why hadn’t I left him in the spikey box?
“Sorry, my fault for interrupting. Get to the part where you wound up in a fake Victorian castle ramming our mutual ex into an iron maiden.”
Rather than doing anything helpful like letting Yelena continue, Patrick picked up the story. “I heard something in the dark outside,” he explained. “I went to investigate and was set upon by the three men you have just dispatched. They brought me here.”
“And what about Elaine?” I asked.
Yelena shot me a resentful look. “We went to the house for her. She was gone.”
“There was no sign of break-in.”
