Page 45 of Shadow Weaver
“To the east,” a thick guttural voice cried out.
My arm tingled.
“They ran east with the cargo.”
The fomorians were talking. I could understand them.
I stabbed at my attacker, who leaped back, turned, and ran. I gave chase, rounding the barracks after him, and skidded to a halt to find him grappling with a smaller clay-covered figure. What the fuck? Why were two fomorians fighting each other? I caught a flash of violet eyes, and my pulse kicked up.
It was the fomorian who’d saved me from the fir bolg. He fell back as the larger fomorian swiped at him with a fist, and then he broke into a run. The huge fomorian followed. My paralysis broke, and I made to run after the pair, but an arm snagged me around the waist and hauled me back.
I lashed out.
“Whoa, Justice, it’s me,” Hyde said.
I tried to shake him off. “We need to track them.”
“The moonkissed are on it.”
Several wolves raced past me and after the fleeing fomorians.
“They’re probably feeling the effects of the mist,” Hyde said. “Hopefully, they’ll slow down, and we’ll catch them.”
“I saw the guy from before, the one who saved me.”
Hyde released me. “Are you sure?”
Was I? “I think so. He was fighting the fomorian that attacked us.” I looked up at Hyde. “The raiders, the one he called fir bolg.”
Hyde led me back around the barracks. “Or he was with them, and they got into an altercation.”
I didn’t know what to think.
Around us, the fight was dying out. The raiders were either dead or escaped.
Hyde looked down on me with a small, satisfied smile. “You did well.”
“I had a great teacher.”
We locked gazes, and a lance of heat bounced between us. My heart did the painful, squeezing thing it had the habit of doing around him as if a fist were crushing it. I exhaled sharply.
I cleared my throat to dispel the feeling. “What happened? I mean, I thought the knights were doing something about the underground passages. How did these raiders get past?”
“We’ve posted guards,” Hyde said. “But it seems like there may be more exits. The tunnels are a vast network, and they’re all interconnected.”
“And what if the raiders vanish into one of these exits?”
“Then we’ll have found another breach.”
“Great, so what now?”
“They’ve called in an expert. They’ll be shutting down the tunnels using explosives. But it’ll take a couple of days to identify the best spots to cause cave-ins.”
Another set of cave-ins. “Do you think we’ll ever get tired of slicing up shit and blowing up shit?”
He grinned. “Never.”
“Yeah, me either.”
