“By… by the order of King Jira of the Deadlands,” the head guard stuttered, fear lancing his words now.“Stand… down.”
Jaxon tilted his head sideways. The bones stopped at his feet in shapeless piles. “Free the Devil of the Deadlands, and you’ll walk away from this fight unharmed.”
His eyes flitted past the guards, towards the caravan, where Sonara herself sat waiting, still held by her insufferable diamond chains. The other prisoners watched her with widened eyes, as if they could scarcely believe what they were seeing was true.
“Sonara?” Jaxon cried out. “Now would be a good time to let me know you’re alive in there!”
A smile spread across Sonara’s dry lips. “Alive!” she called back. “And growing impatient!”
With a smile, Jaxon removed his hat and placed it beside him on the sand. It was that act alone, more than the risen bones, that confirmed no one would leave this place alive today.
Jaxon didn’t like to get blood on the old leather. And blood was most certainly about to be spilled.
“Free the Devil,” Jaxon said softly, his scarred face clearly visible now.
The guards did not lower their swords. “Stand down,” the leader said. “In the name of His Majesty King Jira.”
“You had a chance,” Markam told them, with a shrug.
The guard growled and lunged, swinging his blade.
A ripple of the air… and Markam disappeared.
One moment there, gone the next. The guards gasped, the one lunging towards him stumbling as his blade hit only air where Markam had just been.
“Shadowblood,”he growled as he turned his attention on Jaxon instead. “Kill them both!”
Jaxon only lifted his hands.
Like little white missiles, the bones shot forward across the sky, propelled by his power. They sank into the guard’s body like a hundred tiny swords; small femurs and knuckle bones and kneecaps that turned on their sides, the better to slice.
The guard staggered sideways, eyes wide, jaw hanging open in shock as he registered what Jaxon had just done.
Then he fell: a lifeless lump, face first in the sand, useless sword still clutched in his fist.
“Well done, brother!”
Markam reappeared on the edge of the crowd, behind the guards.
They spun, stumbling backwards in fear as his cloak settled around his ankles, like he was a ghost stepping out of an invisible realm.
“KILL THE DEMONS!” a guard shouted.
Sand sprayed as they dove into the fight, half towards Markam, the other half towards Jaxon.
Sonara watched as Jaxon dropped to one knee and spun in a circle, hands held before him as he called upon the bones of the dead. They shot from the sand, arced and twisted through the sky as he himself spun, sending them in a full whirlwind of death.
They sliced through arms and jammed into kneecaps and weakened muscles as the guards fell, practically bleating with fear.
Behind him, Markam fought on; standing in the sand, his arms crossed as he hefted his trademark red dagger and spun it in his hand, jamming it into the thigh of a guard before disappearing in a blink.
Two heartbeats later, he zapped back into existence behind another guard, sliding that crimson dagger across the man’s throat. Blood sprayed, and Markam was gone again. Only the mark of his footsteps shifting the sand revealed his presence as he sprinted across the desert, unseen, to fully form again at Jaxon’s side.
One by one, the brothers of Wildeweb took the guards down until there were only four left.
Two for each brother; the desert around them, littered with bodies that were once proud to be called King’s Men.
But Jaxon was beginning to stagger. Too long, too much of his power used, and he would lose his strength. Sonara saw it in the way his steps began to lose fluidity. The way the sweat was clearly beading on his scarred brow.
