“Ew, no.” She stuck out her tongue.
Damien nodded to himself, covering just about every possibility except the fear that had been niggling at him since they’d decided to return the child. He peered back, the town too far off now to see, then to the small hill ahead and a thicket running down each side of the road. “The spawn,” he said carefully, scratching at his neck, “when you returned it, its motherdidwant it back, didn’t she?”
Amma made a small, shocked sound, and then laughter bubbled up out of her. “What? Yes, of course! Why wouldn’t she?”
“Well, you can’t really be sure about these things. Maybe it smells funny now.” Damien shrugged, turning his hands over one another and searching the ground for good reasons. “Not everyone desires to have children, and even if that one were wanted, she could think, after being away from it, that it’s broken.”
“Broken?” Amma laughed louder then. “Damien, why on all the planes of existence would you think…” The words trailed off, her amusement following, her eyes finding him and looking much too deeply. “Why would you think that?”
The space between them was sliced through, and they recoiled from one another.
“Halt!”
With a thwack, an arrow pierced the ground just before them, narrowly missing Kaz who pulled his tail around him and squalled. Damien scanned the road, a figure at the head of the hill, tall and menacing with wide shoulders plated in armor that glinted in the sun. It couldn’t be Xander, not so soon, and not with that build, but magic crackled in the air with a familiar, stifling spell, hot even before it was cast.
“Fire.” Damien swept his hand across them, Chthonic on his tongue as he called up a wall of shadows, pulling Amma close.
Heat and flame burst on the other side of his infernal barrier, and Amma shrieked into his chest. That would have been quite damaging without a shield, and he was as incensed as he was confused: the attacker didn’t appear to be coming from the direction of Durendreg.
When the shadows cleared, the figure once at the end of the hill’s top was barreling toward them, weapon brandished overhead. The longsword caught the light of the day, the full plate armor of the warrior clanging as he charged, a gleaming beacon of metal and rage and, to attack a blood mage, foolishness.
Damien shifted Amma behind him, pulled out his dagger, and sliced into his palm. He called up his own, arcane sword, crimson and dripping with his blood, ready to meet the man. But the assailant was still running.
He’d started his onslaught too soon, it seemed, and Damien waited, shoulders drooping a bit as he glanced around his weapon. There were two other figures who had crested the hill, a woman in light blue vestments leading a small contingency of horses, hands clutching a pendant around her neck, and a thin, robed man holding an open book.
Something about the scene felt vaguely familiar, and he eyed the man with the book, knowing the spell had come from him. Still with a moment to spare before he was attacked, Damien flicked a hand and woke a shadow being cast from a nearby tree to flip the tome from his hands.
The sword-wielder finally reached him and brought his weapon down against Damien with a mighty force. Against a taller and broader attacker, Damien wavered slightly under the brunt, metal ringing against his arcane blade, but he didn’t use the magic itching inside his weapon just yet. The man’s face was close enough now, tanned and covered in dark stubble with eyes that were all too serious. “Do I know you?” Damien asked, releasing the pulse of arcana and sending the man staggering backward.
The sword-wielder regained his footing, difficult in the heavy armor, and held his blade aloft again. “Vile villain,” he called and once more charged at Damien. “This day evil will not escape from our righteous hands!”
Damien once again caught the blade with his own, keeping him there and ducking under where they crossed to take in the man’s face a second time. “Oh, it’syoulot.” He risked releasing his blade with one hand, losing the leverage and allowing the man to fall forward with his own momentum right onto Damien’s already sliced palm. Infernal arcana hammered out of him and into the attacker so forcefully he was lifted off the ground, sailing backward thirty paces, and then skidding at least twenty more when he landed, sword clattering away from him in the dirt. Damien sucked in a sharp breath between grit teeth, forgetting how powerful some of his spells were against even above-average humans.
Amma grabbed his arm, and he allowed the blood blade to melt away. “What’s going on?”
“Hold on, there’s meant to be one more.” Damien peered into the bushes along the edge of the road behind them, catching the shadow there. “Aha.” With the flick of his wrist and the cast of a bind, black tendrils wrapped around his target, and a crossbow clattered out into the road.
CHAPTER 10
MULTIPLE CRITICAL FAILURES RIGHT IN A ROW
Do you know these people?” Amma looked from the small figure wrapped in tendrils—she knew what that was like—to the huge man still unmoving in the ditch his body had made from Damien’s spell.
“Uh, well?” Damien scratched his head. “Yes, though it has been many moons since we’ve…collaborated.”
A woman still stood at the hill’s crest, clutching her necklace and shaking before a few horses, the thin man who had been at her side now cursing and searching through the weeds for where his book had been thrown. “You’ve worked together?”
“No, no, more apart.” He had his nose scrunched up in contemplation. “It’s difficult to explain, but I believe, thattheybelieve, that I am their…” His hand wound through the air, searching for the word.
“Nemesis!” cried a voice, and the man in the robe stumbled up to his feet, book finally in hand. His long, pointed ears gave away his elven heritage with a fall of silvery hair and limbs that could be snapped if they were looked at the wrong way. He flipped through a few pages, swore again, and flipped backward until his finger jabbed the presumably correct spot. “You shall not triumph this day, not in the presence of the Righteous Sentries!” A light began to form between his spindly fingers and the page.
“The Righteous Sentries, that’s it!” Damien snapped and sent another shadow to knock away the book once again, spell doused.
“Oh, come on, man.” Shoulders slumping, the robed elf traipsed off for the edge of the road, diving into the weeds.
“You’re their nemesis?” Amma gave Damien a long look. He was standing there to his full height, shoulders back, swathed in dark fabric and armor. With black hair falling messily around his temples, deeply violet eyes, that long scar across his face from forehead to cheek, and the last vestiges of shadows smoking off of his hand, she supposed he looked at least a bit like a villain, but it wasn’t the first thing she saw when she looked at him. It wasn’t even the second or third to be perfectly honest.
The blood mage shrugged. “I needed something once, so I went and got it, and some feelings were hurt.”
