Dy was going to kill her.
~16~
Battle of the Fell Wolves
Cha had obviouslynever fought a fell wolf before, largely because she wasn’t an idiot.Also, the beasts were sent after targets much higher than her pay grade.If there had been any doubt that these had been targeted at Prince Charming, it disappeared now.Though Giant Jo continued to hold the threshold to her place against the wolves, as soon as the prince appeared, they ignored her—and everyone else—and turned on him.
The sole advantage of this singular focus was that Cha could attack them from the back.The enormous disadvantage was that being on the other side of the wolves from Prince Charming put her in the path of the fireballs he was flinging about like a toddler playing flower girl at a wedding, the sort that misses the concept entirely.
Case in point: a violet-blue fireball hurtled right at her, grazing her left shoulder only because she dropped and flattened barely in time, scoring her flesh instead of boring through her face.
“Watch out!”Prince Charming shouted, sounding irate rather than concerned.
Cha set her teeth and jumped to her feet, just as a fell wolf nearly backed over her as it reared to avoid a similar fireball.“Not.Helpful.Advice,” she ground out as she laid into the shaggy red wolf, which stunk decidedly of sulfur.Why did people always shout at you to watch out for a thingafterit had nearly brained you?
Hacking away at the wolf—which seemed not to notice her any more than it would a biting fly—Cha felt more like she was attacking a living pile of scarlet firewood with her sword.She rather envied Giant Jo’s axe, a far more appropriate weapon in this instance.Prince Charming had his own, much bigger problems, grimly battling two wolves advancing steadily on him, while another circled behind.Cha’s wolf seemed to gradually realize that she was a problem, turning on her and slashing with fangs that dripped red goo that she’d bet her now stinging and numb left arm was nasty fae poison.
Sure enough, a few flying droplets of the red ichor hit her sword hand as she lunged at the beast and it burned into her skin with acidic sizzling she could hear and smell.But Cha was no amateur to drop her sword at the first pinprick of pain.Instead she used the pain, pouring it into fury.Screaming in rage, she lunged at the fell wolf, driving it back with a flurry of sword-strokes, slicing across its muzzle and stabbing at its unnatural beady yellow eyes.The wolf scrabbled back, trying to evade Cha’s blazing attack.It hit up against something that stopped its retreat, and with a cry of triumph, she stabbed into one eye.
With a yip, the wolf vanished in a puff of red smoke.Choking, stinking red smoke.Cha flapped her free hand—the one attached to the arm aching from Prince Charming’s errant fireball—in a futile effort to clear the air.Her other hand burned like fire from the fifth hell, her grip slick on the hilt, and she decided she’d rather not look at it.Half the trick of courage was turning a blind eye to shit you knew would send you gibbering with fear.Time enough to gibber later when your life wasn’t on the line.
Oh, wait—notherlife but this deceiving piece of man-candy’s.Speaking of, she could hear him through the smoke, yelling in a garbled way that indicated nothing good.Bravely, Cha waded into the murk, sword at the ready.Giant Jo was out there somewhere, still hollering about this shit being bad for business, and Cha really didn’t want to run afoul of the big and angry woman’s axe.A multi-limbed shape resolved itself through a thinning area of the cloud, giving Cha a sinking fear that something even worse had manifested—until she saw that it was actually two fell wolves, each with a mouthful of her Prince Charming, the struggling royal between them as they dragged him off.
“Now would be a great time for one of those fireballs of yours, Your Highness!”she shouted at him helpfully as she sized up the situation.
He snarled something back at her that she interpreted as being disagreement with her suggestion, along with an insulting speculation on the legitimacy of her birth and ancestral bloodline.All unfortunately true.It wasn’t as if the humans who got themselves seduced by fae were fine upstanding citizens.
“Snob,” she muttered.“I should let them carry you off to that demon-bride you no doubt richly deserve.”
Still, the opportunity to wise up—oh, and stick to the very important smuggling job she was supposed to be paying attention to and had promised to be responsible about—had come and gone.Time was ticking away, and she was committed now, so best get this fight over with and either die or survive.On the bright side, if she got herself killed, she wouldn’t have to face Dy and Phinny’s wrath.
She stalked after the wriggling three-part creature that was the prince and his captors, leaving the stray members of the fell wolf horde to Giant Jo and her efficient axe, having to hurry as the beasts picked up their pace.She didn’t know if they planned to carry him all the way back to his interrupted wedding, but she didn’t want to find out either.She definitely didn’t want to have to retrieve Katu and chase after her wayward prince in the entirely wrong direction, with maybe only rural leys available or none at all.
If she could just get a good angle on those yellow eyes, maybe these wolves would poof, too.Deciding to take out the lead beast first, she skipped ahead, intent on finding the business-end of the huge creature.Something crashed in the background and the prince gargled in a newly alarmed way.Cha frowned, opening her mouth to tell him she was saving him as fast as possible—when she collided withsomething.
Rocking back on her heels and regaining her balance only through long practice and natural agility, she brought her sword to bear and… goggled.A towering red demon stood before her, glaring down as if she were a little kid who’d thoughtlessly plowed into an adult at a faire.“Oops,” she said, with a weak smile.
The demon growled, a sound that echoed through several dimensions, including magical, and an image popped into Cha’s head of her being torn into very tiny pieces and scattered to the four winds.Great.Telepathic threats, as if the verbalized variety didn’t annoy her enough.
Prince Charming made another garbled sound, which morphed into muffled shouting, resolving into: “Run!Save yourself, Cha!”
Sure.Nowhe had to be a nice guy and not an insufferably broody snob she could happily abandon to the wolves and demons.Not that she’d have done that anyway.Probably.
Summoning all her strength and considerable repressed rage, which she’d saved up from her miserable childhood for moments such as this, Cha gripped her sword with two hands and swung it at the demon’s knees, hoping for a lucky strike at whatever served to hold its legs together and keep it upright.
She bounced off with a jarring impact as if she’d hit an iron post.Fuck if that didn’t hurt her already throbbing hands.The right hand, the one already slick with ichor that burned like acid and probably a fair amount of her own blood, nearly slipped off the hilt, and she thanked her lucky stars she’d had a two-handed grip.The demon turned its back on her, jogging away, stomping a line of ambrosia pumps as it did.The wolves scampered at its heels, carrying her prince between them like a favorite shared chew-toy.Apparently the lot of them considered her duly chastened.They certainly moved too fast for her to run after them.Well, fuck it all.
The smoke had cleared and Giant Jo strode up, looking weary and irate in equal measures, her axe dripping with steaming ichor.“What in the seven hells, Bandit?”she demanded.“Look at my place!What kind of trouble did you drag in here?It’s going to cost me a year of income to fix it up again.Even longer because I’ll have to shut down, which means no income until I at least get the ambrosia tanks up and running again.”She dropped her axe to the ground, despondent as the fire of the fight went out of her.“This is it.I’m done for.I’ll have to close.”
Though it hurt Cha’s acquisitive heart, she dug out Prince Charming’s platinum coin.And flipped it to Giant Jo.Easy come, easy go.“Don’t close,” Cha said.“We need you.”
Giant Jo caught the coin reflexively, then stared at it much as Cha had.“Where did you get this?”
“Him.”Cha pointed her sword after the gang of monsters.“He hired me to play bodyguard,” she added, improvising, “which means I have to go after him.”
“You can’t give me this.”
“I’ll get another when I catch up to him.”She hoped her confidence would put that out in the universe.Turning toward Katu, she started into a run, finding she could only limp, her thigh burning like fire.When had that happened?
