Cara was still with Kiegan and Sera, and I needed to meet her there.
I had just come out into the hallway when the doors to the stairwell hit the walls hard enough to crack the plaster on either side.
Eight of them. Obsidian, masked for now but identifiable by their glossy black chest plates, the contempt in the way they moved.
Maura went still halfway down the corridor. I wished I could see her face. I wanted to know if she was surprised or not in the brief flash that she could not have hidden.
“Out of our way. We’re retrieving stolen property.” The one in front said it as if he expected it to work.
I flashed a smile at the Obsidian shifters who were filtering down the hall toward me. “Back up out that door, and we can pretend this never happened.”
They didn’t, but the four of them looked at each other. When they had to check with each other, the confidence was unconvincing.
Maura stood there uncertainly, and I raised a hand to shoo her away.Not your fight, Maura. Not anymore.
Hurt flashed over her face. But if she had not entered as a decoy, then I did not want to burn her place in Obsidian.
Az stood in his doorway. When he glanced at me, I shook my head. Not yet. No need. They had to come one by one, because the hall was narrow for two abreast to swing a sword. I could manage one at a time and none at my back.
“Must we?” I asked, and one of the shifters’ blades came for my throat before I had fully finished the sentence.
This Obsidian, holding his blade to my throat, was the largest of the pack. That must have given him confidence before he waseye to eye with me. His eyes narrowed, ready to strike if I moved. Or so he thought.
His wrist broke cleanly. Then my elbow met his throat, and he went down.
His sword was now mine.
The second one was faster. He’d expected the first to take longer. The miscalculation cost him half a second, which was more than enough.
I threw him into the wall.
Anayla, who had also emerged in the entrance to the common room behind them, winced as the wall cracked. “Messy.”
“If you wanted to search my rooms, you should have asked,” I told the third. “Now you’ll have to crawl out of here.”
The third hesitated. He looked at the two on the ground and then at me as if he wished very much he was somewhere else.
Rees shot past Anayla, and the fourth shifter made a sound I had not previously associated with trained warriors. He tried to run, but Rees was on top of him.
“Don’t kill it,” I said. To Rees, not to the shifter.
Rees sat on him. This was generally sufficient.
The third one still wasn’t moving. His eyes cut past me to the corridor beyond. As if he hoped the mission had been satisfied without him bleeding.
“Clean them up,” I called to Bismyth urgently. “They’re a distraction. They’re coming through the windows to search our rooms.”
Asrael passed me in two strides. Dairen swore from somewhere deeper in the rooms. There was a crash, the clean ring of steel, Dairen swearing again at a higher volume. Someone shouted from the far end of the corridor.
I ran for my own quarters.
The curtains moved in the night air. Drawers on the floor. Papers scattered by their rough work emptying hiding places.
The chest was open, but that didn’t matter anymore. The contents were safe with Ander.
Two of them looked up in the midst of ransacking my room.
They went out the window instead of toward me.
