Page 39 of Shadow Master
“Like hell.”
I stood, ready to fight. Harmon grappled with a figure dressed in furs. Athos tore into another. I took a step forward, ready to join the party, but more shadows poured into the forest.
Harmon went down hard.
“Justice. Go!” Hyde said.
But it was too late. We were surrounded.
* * *
They’d separated us.Hyde and I in one cage and Harmon and Athos in another. Harmon had spent the first five minutes trying to bend his bars to get free. But the metal was something new. Something indestructible. The cages were solid. Impossible for even Harmon and Athos to break free from.
I could see my friends through the flickering flames of the fire that sat between our cages. Harmon sat hunched close to the bars, his gaze tracking the fomorians that held us captive. Athos was in the shadows, his red-rimmed eye whites gleaming in the gloom.
Seven fomorians in total were at this camp, but these two, Squat and Wiry, as I’d named them in my head, were the ones in charge.
They’d barked orders and sent the others retreating to their tents. It was just us and them now, and the way they kept looking at me … Unease slid up my spine and pooled like ice at my nape.
What were the chances of us getting out of this fucking mess? Low, but not impossible. I refused to lose hope, even though the pit in my gut argued otherwise.
I looked to Hyde. His eyes were closed, his face etched in pain. He was too pale from blood loss. That bastard had ripped off his breastplate and broken off the arrow, leaving the head in his shoulder. He wouldn’t be able to heal like this. I needed to cut the arrow out, to bind it, but they’d taken our weapons. There was nothing I could do for him right this minute, but I could get a message to base. I needed to contact Kash.
I closedmy eyes and focused on the ball of heat at my solar plexus. The darkness took me to the weave.
“Kash!” My voice was snatched away, gone too soon. “Kash!” This time it echoed in the darkness.
A figure materialized in front of me, dark-haired, dark-eyed, and solid.
“Kash.” I grabbed hold of his hands. “We’re in trouble. We’ve been captured.”
“Fuck, Justice—”
“Listen to me, I’m going to try and get out of this mess, but if I can’t … If I don’t make contact in the next few hours, you need to let Lloyd know. You need to tell him I appoint him the Shadow Master.”
Something tugged at my subconscious, an urgency that needled me, warning me to go back.
“I have to go.” I released him.
“No. Indig—”
But I was hurtling away from the weave, back to the cage. My senses snapped on and tuned in to the words my subconscious had alerted me to.
“They’re getting bold,” the fomorian closest to our cage said.
“Desperate more like,” his comrade replied.
“Doesn’t matter. They won’t come back from the blow Laramir orchestrated. The bolg will be here in less than a week, collecting fighters from the other camps as they come, and then we’ll storm the mists.”
“How many? Do you know?” the wiry one asked.
“I heard a thousand strong.”
“I got a cousin who’s bolg,” wiry said.
“Liar.”
“No, it’s true. On my mother’s side. They bred the fomorian out of him, pure fir bolg now. He’s a general.”
