She didn’t know why she’d corrected him. Asil was neither fae nor magic user who might be able to employ a true name to lend more power to his spells. Defying the fae would not get him out of here without hurting anyone.
“Ivory Jim,” purred Asil, smiling with white teeth. “I am so happy to meet you.”
And then he moved.
Everything happened so fast she never would remember exactly what Asil did. She wasn’t sure she even caught anything with her eyes—it was like living through a stop-motion scene. One instant she was standing trapped beneath Ivory Jim’s hands. She heard a great booming sound. Then she was standing free, still in the entryway of the reception room but facing the opposite direction she had been—outward instead of inward. Her muscles remembered being moved, but it had happened too fast to register in real time.
In front of her was the entry hall, large enough to contain several dozen guests at once, but now it held only Asil andIvory Jim. Presumably Asil had decided that he needed more room for this fight.
Ivory Jim scrambled to his feet, having apparently been flung into the sturdy front door—possibly the source of the sound she had heard. Asil waited for him, his back to the doorway of the formal dining room. His eyes shone bright gold in the complex light of the stained-glass windows—for that moment, the uncanny beauty of his face looked almost savage.
“Watch out, Asil,” called Peg from the stairs, where all of Ruby’s people gathered on the landing halfway between the second floor and the first. “Magic attack.”
And at Peg’s warning, she realized why Asil’s pose worried her. His only chance was to keep this physical—and he had given Ivory Jim time to gather magic. Asil covered his eyes before the invisible blow struck him—and then the magic became visible as his body jerked taut. For the length of time it took lightning to strike, Asil glowed with a brilliant blue light.
She could smell burnt flesh as Asil’s body dropped to the ground—a smoking, blackened heap that still, unbelievably, moved. With a crunch of skin or fabric, Asil lifted his head and looked toward the stairway.
“Alan Choo,” he said out of a mouth that was blistered and bleeding, his voice a rough sandpaper roar, “keep those people back and safe.”
Ruby looked at the stairs, too. Asil’s words had caught Alan as he leaped off the landing. The impact of the command looked almost as if Alan had been hit in midair by a baseball bat. He was already spinning around as his feet hit the ground, and he rebounded up to the landing like a gymnast on a springboard.
The distraction gave Ivory Jim time to hit Asil with a second blast. Her nemesis strode forward, a smile growing on his face as he closed in on Asil. Ruby caught a flicker of movement—then Dusty threw himself into Ivory Jim’s feet. The fae stumbled, his magic faltering and dying with the distraction. Dusty disappeared from the floor, and his cold presence resonated from just behind Ruby—as if he’d taken refuge.
Ivory Jim snarled and reached one hand out toward Ruby—and she felt the razor-pain as he stole her magic wholesale. Stole it to kill Asil. The beautiful man she had helped lure here—because he defended those weaker than himself.
She stared at Asil’s scorched body—naked now with clothing burned away and blistered skin still bubbling in reaction to the last strike of magic. Impossibly, his eyes opened and met hers. She was sure there was some message in them, but she could not read it.
Ivory Jim had come again. Had captured her again. He was going to use her magic to kill a man who had done nothing except offer to help her.
She would not, could not let that happen.
Asil prepared to defend himself. He would give Ruby one more strike—and then he would do what he had to do. But as he met her eyes, he saw that his intervention might not be necessary.
It began in the pupil of her eye. The black expanded and then reshaped itself until it was slitted like a cat’s eye. Then the ice-blue of her iris darkened to deep velvet gray. The color did not stop there, rolling over her skin and hair and clothing as if an ocean wave had drenched her with gray rather thanwater—though he could smell water in the room now, as if his thoughts had brought it to life.
There was a whoomp in the room, the sound of her magic freeing itself from its bindings. It made his chest tight as if a heavy weather system had just made itself felt in the room—like a forming tornado.
Asil, not one to forget his enemy, glanced at Ivory Jim. A flicker caught his eye—and thirteen steel knives apparated in front of the fae before flashing into motion and burying themselves in the fae’s body. Blood burst from the wounds as Ivory Jim looked down at himself in surprise. Stainless steel was as fatal to the fae as cold iron, and the fae’s knees buckled.
Asil moved, rolling off the floor, crossing the room, and grabbing the dying fae without wasting any effort on gentleness. He tossed the body onto a carpet—one he was fairly sure was a reproduction of an antique.
The floor in the entryway was parquet—if blood spilled on the wood, it might ruin it. The craftsmanship of the people who’d fitted that floor made it as much a piece of art as anything in the Victorian mansion, and he would not let it be damaged if he could help it.
Asil’s burnt skin cracked as he moved, but he was not concerned. He was powerful, he had been hurt worse before—he would heal. He looked at the floor—there were a few drops of blood, but not so much it would soak into the wood through the finish.
“Asil!” Alan’s voice cracked a sharp warning.
Asil caught the knife out of the air before it could strike him, and looked to Ruby.
She stood where he had left her, in the wide doorless entry of the reception room. Her brilliant eyes were black with power and her hair moved as if she stood in a wind. Dusty curled around her left leg. They weren’t the same color—Dusty’s skin was a few shades darker and a little less blue.
Her power didn’t smell of death and the dying, as he’d half expected. He rather thought his first guess about her fae heritage having something to do with water was right. But she’d spent a long time with the dead and she knew how to communicate with them. It made sense she had called upon them for aid.
“Ruby,” he said sharply, waving a hand at Alan to signal him to keep everyone back.
She didn’t react to his voice. She was caught in the rush of her own power, hadn’t noticed that Ivory Jim was well and truly dead. Or that the poltergeist who liked sharp things had decided Asil was its new target.
Asil had dealt with a few poltergeists. There was usually a limit to the harm such a spirit could do at any given time, though Ruby’s magic added a wild card. Asil had been attacked with one knife, not a baker’s dozen like the fae who had breathed his last.
