Page 19 of Magic Claimed
And why did he seem so convinced that Tairen was weak?
Didn’t matter. I wasn’t going to stand back and allow any of this idiocy to happen. Faris might be hesitating to use his earth magic, but he also could not permit this kind of trespass to go unanswered. We might not be able to kill the shapeshifter representative, but neither could we just let him escape. That would damage Faris’s reputation, and his reputation was what kept all of us in the Shadow Court safe.
Not to mention, a giant snake loose on the streets of Oklahoma City was exactly what we didn’t need, given the existing tension with our human neighbors.
So the job was—don’t kill it, don’t let it kill anyone else, don’t let it get away.
Right.
If only we had more help, but all our customers had scattered, and even after Tairen’s threats, the dragons were just standing there watching. Presumably because they didn’t want to step on Faris’s toes, but right that second I didn’t much care about their reasons. All of this political posturing and tiptoeing was what had separated me from Callum in the first place, and now I was well and truly pissed off.
And in my rage I reached for the closest magic at hand…
Fae.
The blue glow rose around me like a tidal wave, and instead of the dagger I’d learned long ago, I shaped it into a sword.
The combatants seemed locked together, mirroring each other's movements, ignoring me as they waited for the right moment to strike…
And it was Faris who struck first. Not with a blow, but with a grappling rush that might have worked, if it hadn’t been exactly what the monster was waiting for.
When Faris charged, the snake darted to the side, shifting its coils and aiming for his unguarded flank.
Maybe the bite wouldn’t have hurt him. I wasn’t sure how much of Faris’s body was protected by the stone skin of his earth element.
But the moment the creature moved, so did I—plunging my razor-edged blade of fae magic through the snake’s tail and a solid six inches into the floor beneath.
He’d committed everything to the lunge, and when his tail didn’t follow the rest of his body, he snapped backward, landing in a sprawl of disordered coils and hissing indignation.
Faris, whose elemental form had grown to twice his usual size, pinned the center of the snake’s body to the floor with arms of literal granite, probably preparing to rip it in half.
The snake’s head rose, eyes glittering malevolently…
But Tairen-li-Corva struck first.
I never even saw her move, but suddenly she was there, close enough to fasten both hands in an iron grip around the snake’s neck. Her arm and shoulder muscles bulged with the effort, but somehow she prevailed, holding the outraged naga’s head only a forearm’s length from her face.
“I suggest you think very carefully, Hector Ademar, before putting those fangs anywhere near me.”
I couldn’t have said what it was, but something in her voice had changed. It was deeper, harsher, with audible echoes of the authority she’d once wielded as queen of the shifters.
And whatever that “something” was, it called to the struggling shapeshifter’s instincts and unlocked a primal form of terror.
If you’ve never seen a giant snake try its best to go belly up while pinned in three places? The resulting convulsions made my stomach lurch, and they ended only when Tairen-li-Corva shook the creature’s head until I thought its bones might snap.
“Oh, stop sniveling and shift back, you spineless weasel.”
Thirty feet of snake went utterly limp, and then, to absolutely no one’s surprise, the spineless weasel obeyed.
And a few moments later, we were all thankful that shifting into his snake form had not done any significant structural damage to his clothes.
It tooka little less than five minutes before the giant was dressed and relocated to one of The Portal’s basement rooms, which were most definitely not cells in any way. At all. Just ordinary rooms that happened to be very hard to get out of.
Hector’s feet had been sunk entirely into the concrete floor, so he wasn’t going anywhere. His expression remained utterly blank, and even though his eyes still glimmered faintly in his darkly tanned face, I couldn’t read them well enough to tell how he felt about the situation. Outraged? Embarrassed? Pleased with his success?
Faris loomed in the doorway, radiating both incoherent fury and wordless embarrassment as he regarded the would-be assassin.
The two dragons also stood nearby, shoulder to shoulder, wearing near-identical expressions of satisfaction, while I busied myself with calculating what it might take to convince Farisnotto kill the naga. Also with wondering how much damage had been done upstairs, how much business would be lost after this altercation, and what I was going to tell Callum about the evening’s events.
