One word cut through the melee.Husband.
I ended him with a single swipe of my sword. Not him—it.
The woman collapsed on the ground. Lyrena kicked open the nearest door, shoved the group of women inside, and slammed it behind her. More screams beckoned a few doors down.
We turned the corner—a group of them, more succubus than I could easily count, surged up the alleyway. A few broke off to feed. We could not help those humans. But we could try to stop the advancing pack.
Lyrena and I developed a rhythm. Her sword could not finish the succubus, but her fire slowed them enough that I could slice their heads off with Excalibur.
We cleared the alley. I grabbed Lyrena’s arm and took us through the void to the next one, parallel, leaving the handful of human survivors to find their own refuge.
Alley after alley. If we cleared the alleys, they could not make it to the main road where all of the doors were. Behind the doors hid most of the humans.
Until we followed screams through a door, where a mother stood at the stairway to an upper floor, fighting off a succubus by herself with a frying pan while her children cried behind her on the landing.
She died. At least the children lived.
I told myself that we were making a difference. That this mattered. If Lyrena and I were able to clear the village, then surely the army down on the land bridge was able to defeat the horde of succubus. But my brain knew what my heart protested—the reason we were able to fight so effectively was because the horde had not yet reached the village. We were not facing a wave of black death, but a stream. A stream we could manage without drowning.
Arran.
I did not want to distract him. I just needed to know that he was uninjured, still in command and fighting.
The connection remained silent.
I could not afford to close my eyes, but as I swung again and again, the motion becoming almost routine, I let a small piece of my consciousness seek out the bond between us. I found it quickly—golden bright and shining.
Arran might be too distracted to hear me, but he was more than alive. He was fighting.
I breathed a little sigh of relief.
Lyrena had finished shoving the last of the surviving humans into one of the structures. I did not pause long enough to examine whether it was a house or something else.
“Separate your men; choose the strongest among you to guard them,” she advised. With a grim nod, she added, “Protect your children from your husbands and fathers and prepare for the arrival or survivors.”
Then she slipped her hand into mine. We needed no words between us.
There was only one place for us to go now.
48
ARRAN
Where the fuck is Orcadion?
The eagle shifter with the stubbornness of a bull had not returned in nearly an hour.
I ripped the throat from the succubus in front of me, shaking my head violently from side to side until the body broke free from the head and flew across the battlefield, joining the ever-growing mess of carnage of the ground. The black bile that spewed from the severed head tasted even worse than it smelled. The heightened senses of my beast made it nearly intolerable. But the wolf also dulled my thoughts. In this form, my primary concern was killing. I’d have to shift back to talk to Orcadion. I’d be able to take stock of the battle and send him to relay orders to the other lieutenants. But that would require him to return.
My beast threw his head back and howled, sending the sound up in the air above the fray. Clouds had begun to roll in during the first few minutes of engagement. Rain had not yet begun to fall, but the deepening gray overhead told me it was only a matter of minutes.
If we’d had the elemental army, I would have called for the weather-wielders to clear them. Or maybe they’d be usinglightning to strike down succubus from the sky. It was not an approach we’d ever tried before.
My mind was in no place to file away information. Just that logical strain of thought was nearly too much.Kill, my beast urged.
I obliged him.
My massive jaws shredded the flesh from a newly turned succubus. Ripped off the arm of one that tried to claw out the guts of one of my soldiers. I always went back for the head. Just like a fae, removing their head was the only way to keep them down. An amorite weapon could do the job as well. Any mortal blow would do, so long as it was delivered by an amorite weapon. There were no fire wielders among the terrestrial troops—it was an elemental power. But somewhere, I knew Lyrena was using her flames to slow them down.
