Page 113 of Hunted in the Shadows
“We came in through there!” Jon shouted behind us.
As we approached the sealed door, a larger chorus of buzzing wings closed in. Cliff turned and took aim, firing off a single shot. A fairy howled in pain and plummeted, a ragged hole missing from his upper wing. An impossible shot—but not for Cliff. The bullet sent the others fleeing in fear, at least for the moment.
I pulled to a hover and gaped at the fallen, writhing fairy. My breath shuddered, numbness creeping over my senses like poison. Cliff had to shout my name twice before I snapped out of it long enough for us to reach the solid curve of stone.
Jon smoothed his hands over the rock, searching for an opening—foranything.
“Fuck, there’s no getting through,” Cliff growled. He raised his blade, ready to slice the back of his hand for a blood offering.
“Don’t!” I blurted. “They have control over the sacrificial path—even if it opened, they’d be able to seal us inside.” Regardless, I doubted they could survive a second round of blood loss.
We were cornered against the wall—there had been nowhere else for the hunters to run, anyway.
“Any ideas, Sylv?” Jon asked.
Shame flooded through me. The hunters had taught me to always know my exit points when casing an unfamiliar place. That should have been at the top of my mind, but I had been too busy memorizing my path to the gemstone. My mind may have been clouded by Marcellus’ gift then, but I was clear now.
“I don't want to use it, but I’ve gotthis,” I said, patting the satchel.
Jon studied me for a moment—then it dawned, and his eyes went wide. "It's—you have agemstone?"
I nodded. “But I think he may kill me for it, fertile or not.”
Jon looked fairly confused by that assessment, but his mind was still at work as he considered our surroundings. “There was an opening under the water—the sirens were coming through it.”
“There—I see it!” Cliff said.
Cliff grabbed Jon’s shoulder and pointed him toward a faint outline of a tunnel passage underwater several meters away.
“We’ll need to swim out,” Jon breathed.
“Fat fucking chance of that with the sirens,” Cliff said. “We don’t have enough bronze to take them all out.”
“Maybe we won’t need to take them all out.” I considered the pulse of the gemstone, wondering if I could use the sirens’ environmental advantage against them. The thought of being submerged already made me feel like I was drowning, but what choice did we have? “If I can spread the ice further, maybe I can—”
Before I could piece together what to do, a fairy burst from the crowd surrounding us—Marcellus. The others that followed were clearly his reinforcements. The attackers we’d been fending off were mere civilians—a community who perhaps hadn’t seen a fight in decades, even centuries. Marcellus was the one who brought control to the chaos. Where the attacks had been emotionally driven and messy before, his warriors approached with precision.
Bursts of lightning, fire, and ice drove Jon and Cliff away from the wall, trying to force them directly into the siren’s frothing waters. The boys staggered, and even when Cliff fired off a shot to try scaring the warriors off, they merely shifted formation and continued relentlessly.
“Let us out!” I screamed, surging forward to put myself between the warriors and the hunters. My fingertips brushed the gemstone, and a blast of ice briefly nullified the attacks in the air. I worried over spending the magic within—how fast would this gemstone drain and leave me defenseless?
In the next instant, one siren gripped Cliff’s ankle, viciously crawling her hands up his leg to make him stagger. A scream stuck in my throat—it happened so fast. As hefell to his knees, she grabbed either side of his face and pulled him into a fierce kiss, which softened into chilling tenderness as he relaxed.
“Cliff!” I raised my hands and prepared to send an icicle through her skull–unsure if even that would be enough, unsure if I was too late.
But in her fervor to claim him, the siren didn’t notice Cliff’s eyes were squeezed shut.
With unforgiving speed, he slashed her throat open. Picking himself up, he kicked her back into the water and side-stepped the vengeful hands of the siren’s sisters.
Jon swung his iron blade at another approaching formation of warriors to drive them back and make their magic falter. More earth affinities conjured black, twisting vines from the stone. Tendrils laced around his waist and up his leg, forcing his back against the stone.
In my race to free him, I didn’t see an assailant beelining toward me until it was too late. He slammed into me at full speed, nearly knocking me from the air. His heavy, muscled body pressed behind mine, wrapping around me.
“Sylv!” Jon bellowed. He reached for me, but the vines renewed their hold on him, forcing him down to his knees while I was dragged higher—far from his grasp.
The fairy restraining me took me roughly by the shoulder and tried to wrench the satchel away. I twisted to face him, my shout of fury dying on my tongue.
Marcellus.
