I realize with a start that the heavily bleeding one is Monica—the empath atypical caster I met at Harlow's sadly-not-a-murder-rendezvous the other night. She slumps slightly onto one of the guys, who bares his teeth at us.
"It's the lottery quintet!" he snarls. "Take them out, and we'll eliminate the highest-ranked legacies at Everbound!"
That's enough for the rest of the legacies to launch forward with shouts and flares of blinding magic. These legacies don't seem to be matched together, so I assume they've formed a temporary allegiance as many legacies do.
Silas takes on two casters at once, Everett is attacked by a water elemental and a vampire, and Baelfire begins wrestlingwith a wolf shifter. The guy supporting Monica releases her and simply runs away, abandoning her to stumble backward in terror. I can already tell that the gushing injury on her side is fatal. But hearing her cries as she disappears through the trees calls to my human side—the often-dormant part of me that drove me to make the blood oath for those who needed it.
Monica might be an atypical caster, but she's far more human than I've been in years. I'm not part of their fluffy asscaster support group, but I can't just let her die in these woods.
The fight distracts all my matches as I take off after the atypical caster.
"Monica!" I shout, jumping over a fallen log and sidestepping a smoldering corpse as I continue in the direction she ran.
She ran fast. Really fast. Was she using magic to try to get away?
Finally, I stop in a clearing, taking in my surroundings quickly to avoid any nasty surprises. But I'm still taken off guard when I see Monica sitting on a nearby rock…with a smile on her face.
I'm just close enough to see that her pupils are square.
Fuck. I really hate this changeling.
Immediately, I whip out a throwing knife, but I barely have the hilt in my leather-gloved hand before blinding light smashes into me, sending me careening. Hitting the ground hurts, but I can usually take hits like no one's fucking business and walk it off.
But this time, I can't move.
And it dawns on me. That was a paralysis hex just now—a potent one. If I had magic in my system, I could rip the hex apart in the blink of an eye, but I haven't refueled. So now I can't turn my face away from pressing into a surprisingly green section of grass.
No matter how hard I try, I can't fucking move.
If I had my heart, it would be crashing in my chest. But even though I can feel my thundering pulse and breathe and bleed andfeellike any living thing, my shadow heart is undetectable, a reminder of the monster they turned me into.
Except right now, I don't feel like a monster. I feel…helpless. It's been a long time since I felt this way. Trepidation claws at my chest.
Sierra titters, "See? Told you it wouldn't be hard to get her alone."
A guy's voice snorts. "Nah, that was fucking easy. Thanks for your help, Mon—didn't expect you to volunteer to help us like that."
"It was nothing. We all want to get rid of the lottery quintet, after all," the changeling says sweetly in Monica's voice.
I'm going to fucking kill it once I get out of this.
"Sothisis the unmemorable little bitch everyone got so worked up over?" another of Sierra's guy friends scoffs, and all of my senses are thrown into panic when I feel hands turning me over.
At least now I can see, but it's not a pretty sight. Sierra stands over me with a victorious sneer on her face, with two guys leering alongside her and the changeling off to one side, smirking in a nasty way I'm sure the real Monica never could.
"Damn, she's a butterface," the taller guy with dark hair says, and the panic doubles when he reaches out and squeezes one of my cheeks hard enough that it might bruise.
The other guy, a blond, frowns. "You think? I think she could be really cute if she put in more effort. It looks like she's wearing a fucking tarp, though. And what the hell is with the gloves?"
"She's a germaphobe," Sierra says confidently, and fire flares to life in one of her hands. "Let's see how well asscasters burn, huh?"
Fire.
Fuck.
I'm going to actually die.Shit, shit, shit.
But I can't even formulate a plan of how to stop this from happening because this asshole is still touching my face, and it makes it feel like every nerve in my body was just submerged in acid.
