An smooth, unfamiliar male voice came from behind me.
“Sorry, Benny. Threats are where I draw the line. You know what you have to do.”
Stiffening, I pivoted midair to find a well-dressed human stepping out of the shadows against the wall.
His keen eyes, nearly electric blue in their intensity, made my mouth go dry.Shit. There was no magic coming off of him. With all the strange power looming around me, I hadn’t been prepared to face an ordinary human. But he did look like he would fit right in among the people lounging in the lobby, those who had been invited to luxuriate in this bizarre and sinister place.
He raised his hands innocently. “Don’t mind me. I’m just here to supervise.”
My jaw squared. I would not be cowed by a charming smile masking sinister intent. With a snarled spell, I fired off a warning shot of frost at his chest. It wouldn’t pierce skin, but itwouldshove him back and show him I am not to be fucked with.
But the spell never reached him.
The glistening burst of air fizzled out as it hit an invisible wall mere inches from his body. The last sparks of ice flashed out of existence harmlessly, and his face came back into focus. The man shot me an almost apologetic look, rubbing his left wrist. I glimpsed a dark, metallic band sitting just under an expensive-looking watch.
A blessed object, perhaps? But what kind of enchantment could deter fairy magic like that?
Maybe the human wasn’t so ordinary after all. My heart began tothud, thud, thudfaster in my chest. He could be a warlock, something I was only familiar with from gruesome secondhand stories from Jon and Cliff about practitioners of dark magic who made pacts with supernatural entities. I didn’t know much, just enough that I didnotwant to face one alone.
“You stay back,” I growled at him, failing to hide the panic constricting my voice.
With one frosted hand still pointed toward the human, I turned to the sound of Ben’s heavy sigh. He was palming his face.
“This is a horrible first impression,” he muttered. In the next breath, he whispered a verse from a spell that I was unfamiliar with.
A startling pressure lashed around my waist. For an instant, I thought the human had taken hold of me, but I glanced down at the bizarre sight of vegetation bursting from mypocket. The flower Ben had given me was sprouting vines nearly as thick as my forearm, rapidly restraining me. I shrieked in protest as my arms were forced to my sides. My wings carried me backward on instinct, but there was no escaping the spell. One of the vines slithered around my kicking legs while the other gagged my scream for Jon.
It went for my panicked wings next. My stomach dropped as my flight halted and gravity took hold, but Ben’s arms were around me before I could drop from the air. He hurried me to the top of a wooden crate, where I fell to a hard seat and squirmed viciously.
“I’msosorry, please don’t hate me.” He pressed his fingers to my forehead.
My attempts to twist away from his touch were fruitless as he fervently started a new incantation.
Darkness began to roll into the edges of my vision like storm clouds. Weightlessness seized my mind and dragged me toward sleep. I recalled an Elysian healer relaxing my mind after a night terror once, but this was something else entirely. A whimper caught behind the vine gagging my mouth as I fought to stay awake. I stared at Ben in horror, revolted by his touch.
He was aglamouraffinity as well as an earth.
Which meant his timidity was nothing but pretense. I’d been fucked from the moment he laid eyes on me. Blinking hard, I attempted to form a spell through sheer force of will. Despair rattled through me as a light shell of frost was all that I could conjure without spoken words. I wasn’t as strong as Marcellus,that mythic and twisted warrior who could summon powerful, awe-inspiring spellwork without a word, thanks to his centuries of gemstone use. If I had gotten my hands on a gem within the hotel before taking Ben’s bait, all of this would be different.
But then again, Marcellus, charged as he was with gem magic, had died atmyhands in Veloria’s caverns. By my dagger, not from spellwork.
I clawed at my thigh until I found the hilt of my blade. Ben was too focused on layering the verses of his glamour spell to realize I had a weapon until it was too late.
Slashing through one vine made it all unravel. His incantation choked off, but he was too stunned to recover before I slammed the hilt of the dagger into his skull. He collapsed onto the crate.
“Benny!” The human lunged toward us.
I shook off the withering vines and bolted into the air before the human could reach us. He didn’t make a grab at me, more concerned with Ben. Hovering near the ceiling, I faced them with fresh ice pooling in my hands.
“Benny? Hey, look at me. You alright?” The genuine concern in the human’s voice made me frown.
Wincing, Ben rubbed the back of his head as he sat up. “I’m fine. Where’s—”
The door burst open with a spectacular crash. Jon and Cliff staggered inside and nearly tripped over each other, looking as surprised as anyone that they had finally made it inside. Ben’s spellwork had been entirely interrupted, I realized with crushing relief.
The boys’ gazes snapped from me—assessing my panicked, defensive posture and clutched dagger—onto the others. With terrifying reflexes, Cliff and Jon both produced a handgun, their harried confusion vanishing into lethal stances.
“Don’t move,” Cliff barked.
