Page 100 of The Lure of Wolves and Whispers

With the sun at my back, I can see four long shadows stalking after me.

Fuck.They’re definitely following me.

The primal need to flee rushes in again. The backs of the stalls and the thatched fencing along the edge of the training yardshield the copse of trees, down a slight hill from the yard toward the cliffs, from the crowds thick and dense around the vendors.

If I can get there, could I hide?

Fear pulses in my throat. The rowan trees’ blush berries hang in lush bounties on heavy branches, but the trees are thinner than I thought as I get to the copse.

I can hear Wolf’s warning in my mind:It’s not safe for you out here alone.

And damn it, he was right.

I need to get back to the crowd—right now.

The crisp grass crunches under my boots, and I whirl to my right. If I can just get back to the edge of the festival, surely someone will hear me scream, even above the shouts from the burning stall. Talon, or Aoife. Maybe even the gardai, if they haven’t been paid to look the other way.

The sharp, cold hiss of blades being drawn slices the chill air.

My muscles freeze.

“The higher the climb, the farther the fall,” a lilting voice sings in the creepiest fucking tone I’ve ever heard. Every inch of the skin from my waist up the curve of my spine crawls.

Gritting my teeth, I reach both bandaged palms for the blade at my hip and the sheath at my thigh and turn to face what is very possibly my own impending death.

Four of them. All lined up, circling around me like wraiths. The hoods drawn up over their heads hide their features, and all of them move as smoothly as ink in water. Just one of the long, narrow daggers they each carry could gut me in an instant, or spear me clean through.

Or both.

All I have are my knives, and hands already screaming in pain.

“Don’t bother fighting,” the tallest of the four tells me, slinking across the grass and brushing back the last rowan branch hanging between us. “This will all be over soon.”

Not if I have anything to say about it.

Hesitate and die.

I lunge, using one of the advances Finn taught me, striking out with a deep, quick slash into the crook of the first assassin’s right elbow.

And I have no doubts anymore that’s what they are.

Assassins.

A scream tears from my throat—nerve pain lances up my palms, my wrists, all the way up my forearms. Like fire, scorching where I clench tight around the hilt.

The assassin hisses and switches the blade to her left hand. The right one hangs uselessly, blood dripping in quick rivulets down her fingers into the grass.

“Fighting will only prolong the inevitable,” the figure to my left says in a rough lilt. She comes at me in a ferocious slashing advance. I leap back, stumbling and dodging the vicious edge of her blade by an inch.

The two of them rush me at once, and terror sharpens every sense. I can’t fight them both. Not like this—it’s not supposed to end likethis.

Agony tears up my limbs. My hands feel like I doused them in oil and lit a match. I can’t feel the blade in my hand, in the palms hammering with the surge of blinding nerve pain, and lash out to strike the second assassin.

Furious. Slashing. Wild.

Exactly what Finn always drilled menotto do.

It’s all I have left now—and fuck, it’s not enough.