LIAM (The Rylee Adamson Epilogues, Book 2) (15 page)

Cloudy, with a chance of showers.

I smiled at him. “Really? I heard a story that Bly knows who’s going to usurp you on your wee tiny throne. And Mai is going to help them.”

Another blow to my head, and then several to my back. Ribs cracked under the fists and feet, the snap of bone echoing through my body, making me jerk against the chains. I coughed, blood flowing from my lungs and into my mouth. I spit to the side, narrowly missing Levi. He scooted back until he was pressed against my legs. Not exactly a safe place at the moment, but he didn’t seem inclined to leave me.

His movement drew Pic’s attention to him. Shit, that was not going to help matters any.

Slowly, Levi pushed himself up, his whole body shaking as he held his hands out in front of him.

Pic put his hands on his hips and thrust his hips at Levi. “You want to take me on, boy? I’ll give you a fucking you’ll never forget.”

Levi’s whole body tensed and then a quiver ran through him as he cupped his hands together.

“Whatever you’re going to do, kid, do it now,” I said, and all I could do was hope he had some serious bad-ass water magic going on. Because without it, we were going to be in worse shape. If that was even possible.

The thing about thinking like that, though, was that fate was a bit of a jokester, and often liked to show you just how very bad things could get, indeed.

Indeed.

LEVI SHOOK, AND
between his hands the water built up, as though he were making a snowball prior to the freezing of the particles. He never got further than that.

From the left, an arrow shot through the ranks and buried into Levi’s side. He cried out, lost his concentration and fell to the ground in a puddle of his own making. I jerked against the chains and dragged the ogres who held the end of them with me as I bent to cover Levi’s body. Three more arrows sang through the air and two of them hit me in the back, burrowing deeply into the muscle between broken ribs. The third slammed into the ground right next to my head, narrowly missing my cheek. I could barely draw breath around the two arrows, but there was no way I could move off the kid and open him up to more injury. He was family.

He was part of the pack.

Lion, now would be a good time to break free, seeing as the distraction you needed is at its limit.

Already done. Have fun, Wolf. Pity you have no ability to breathe and hence speak a proper goodbye.

I lifted my head as Lion dropped from his chains and gave me a saucy wave and disappeared around the tree, his dark form blending into the shadows of the foliage.

“Lion,” I whispered, gritting my teeth around the biting, tearing pain as I took a deep breath and roared. “LION.”

The ogres swung around and half of them were gone in a flash, chasing down the bastard of a Guardian. Maybe that wasn’t a complete win, but that shit wasn’t going to offer help and then just fuck off on us. My mind fuzzed over in a haze of blood and wounds as I was pulled from protecting Levi.

Pic gestured to the kid. “Drop him in the pool, let Bly’s magic take him.”

Levi didn’t struggle as an ogre grabbed him by a foot and dragged him across the clearing to the mirrored pool. Maybe this would be good. Levi had water magic, he couldn’t drown. Right? Gods, I hoped not. Otherwise, the kid was done and I couldn’t save him. Fuck, I couldn’t save him.

“I see the hope in your eyes, Wolf. The thing you don’t understand about Bly is she loves blood and death more than she gives a shit about even her own kind. He won’t survive, no matter what kind of silly, piss-poor magic he can stir up.”

“Levi.” I said his name and his eyes rolled so he was looking at me. Upside down and being dragged to his death, but looking at me. “Believe.” I said the word, but didn’t really put any stock into it. Belief was Rylee’s realm, not mine. But I’d seen her go through things that would have killed, destroyed, and torn apart anyone else. Belief had been her mantra, from the moment I met her until the moment I thought I’d lost her forever. If it was good enough for her, it could be good enough for us.

Levi’s mouth tightened and a tear fell from one eye. I had no idea if that meant he trusted me or was terrified and thought he was going to die. I was betting on a bit of both. Hell, I didn’t know how the hell we were going to get out of this
.
We had no backup coming, Ophelia had left, we were surrounded by a mob of psychotic ogres. There really wasn’t much I had left in me to fight them.

Pic made an upward gesture with one hand and I was yanked to a standing position. The arrows dug in farther as if actively seeking internal organs.

The ogres’ leader clasped his hands at chest height, like some sort of politician speaking at a rally. “Shall we watch your young friend get destroyed?”

I was turned, and my head held so I had no choice but to see Levi dragged the last few feet to the mirrored pool. I could have closed my eyes, but I wasn’t going to be a coward. If this truly was his death, he deserved to have someone witness it. Even if I shortly followed him. I couldn’t even drum up the concern with my own death. I’d come so close before; hell, I’d died before and I remembered the process clearly. Levi wasn’t tossed into the water. Instead, he was laid at the water’s edge like an offering to the old gods. He lay there and nothing happened. I rolled my head to the side and lifted an eyebrow at Pic.

“That, is truly terrifying.” Well, shit, I’d officially been with Rylee long enough that her knack for making a situation worse had rubbed off on me. The thought made me smile.

A few ogres snickered and Pic sent a glare out that stilled any mirth.

Then Pic shrugged. “She will come for him when she is ready. I think it’s time we take this wolf to task for fucking with us, yes? For crossing into our territory and pissing on what is ours!”

The ogres roared together, the sound like that of a train tearing up a track, its brakes pulled off so it could thunder out of control.

I was dragged backward until I was pinned against a tree once more with Lion right back where he started to one side of me.

“You know, you could have let me get away,” he said, without a hint of malice.

I looked at him. “Would you have let me get away?”

A laugh burst out of him, and his chains rattled. “Hell no.” He calmed himself, but didn’t stop smiling. “You realize we’re probably going to die here?”

A sudden and complete certainty rolled over me that I wasn’t. I’d faced worse than Pic, hell, I’d faced demons that would have eaten him up like a midnight snack without an effort.

“You might, Lion, but that’s because you’re an oversized pussy.”

The ogres ooohed, but Lion just laughed. “Rich, coming from the martyr of our kind. You, Wolf, have never realized your own strength. You always let yourself die because you think the world needs your death. Did it never occur to you that maybe, just maybe, this world would be better with your life in it?”

His words were sincere and I stared at him, knowing that what I was about to say completely contradicted the situation we were in. But . . . that didn’t change the truth. “I don’t plan on dying.”

Pic laughed. “You might not be planning on it, boys, but I surely am. Time for a little target practice. Have at ‘em. No head shots. I want them to see this happen, and I want it to last as long as we can.”

The mob whooped in their excitement with only a few groans at the head shot bit. They split into two sets of double lines. The lines in front of Lion went first, giving me a front-row seat at what was about to be dished out to me. An ogre from each line threw weapons of their choice at the Guardian chained to the tree. One hit in the center of his belly with a curved axe, the other missed with a straight-edged knife. They went and pulled their weapons—Lion grunted as the axe was yanked out—and weapons in hand, they went to the back of the line.

Then the next two ogres were up—one with a bow and arrow, the other with a crossbow. I didn’t watch any more. I didn’t need to. I had my own line that drew my attention with a morbid fascination. Not like I could stop it from happening, so there wasn’t as much fear as I’d thought.

I locked eyes with the ogre in the left line. He grinned. “I’m going to eat you when we’re done.” He drew his arm back and let something fly. It spun through the air, catching the light here and there.

A throwing star thudded into my right thigh. The pain wasn’t immediate, so I just stared at the edges that stuck out of me as the blood pooled up around the wound. The bolt from a crossbow slammed into my right shoulder, pinning me to the tree. The ogres hurried forward to retrieve their weapons, making sure to yank them hard. The ogre with the throwing star licked my face. “Ooh, you are going to taste so damn good.”

I was no longer sure he was speaking in a purely knife and fork kind of way.

Knives, arrows, axes, bladed and curved weapons of every kind came at me. They hit more often, far more often, than they missed. At the end, they started to throw rocks, the stones digging into the opened wounds on my chest and belly, some stuck in the slow-closing wounds.

“Having fun yet, Wolf?” Lion croaked out. “Are you done being a martyr? Ready to be the Wolf?”

I closed my eyes and did the only thing I could. I brought up Rylee’s image behind my closed lids. The thick curtain of dark auburn hair, the eyes that had been tricolored for so long, now a steady green edged in gold. Her smile lighting up her face, the feel of her skin under mine . . . the pain in my body receded as I lost myself in her, as I lost myself in her love, and all I knew that was good and true in my life.

She was the place I belonged. She was the home I’d craved my entire life.

“You know, I hate to agree with the Lion, because he is an ass. But you’re being an idiot, grandson. Yeah?”

I blinked, losing the image of Rylee, seeing it replaced with my grandfather. He strode between the ogres as they took their turns at Lion and me. They didn’t look at him, didn’t even pause in their practice. As if he wasn’t there.

“Griffin, help us,” I whispered. He shook his head, his eyes sad.

“I’m not really here. Not in body, just in spirit, yeah?”

That wasn’t going to do me much good.

The ogres’ laughter flowed around me as the blood ran down my body.

“Pity, he’d make a handsome rug. You sure you want to mess it up? We could just take his head and be done with it,” one of the ogres spoke, didn’t matter which one.

I had to fight not to physically react to them; the one injury that would end my life, and Lion’s to be fair. Decapitation. The rest . . . the rest I was pretty sure I could heal, thanks to the Guardian blood. Of course, that was assuming I’d be alive at the end of this to be able to even think about healing. I didn’t know if numerous blows to the heart, or enough blood loss would do me in.

I didn’t know if had enough of a Guardian left to me to overcome the odds.

I stared at my grandfather, blinking to try and clear the blood that flowed from a glancing blow to my forehead. We could have been brothers, at least, back when I’d had my body. Not now, though. Now we were night and day, him with his dark hair and eyes, and me with Faris’s blond hair and silvery blue eyes.

“See, that’s your problem, yeah?” Griffin leaned against my tree and tapped a finger against my shoulder. “You still think of this body you’re in as not
yours
. Wolf picks up on that, says, well shit on a prickle bush, I ain’t giving my strength to a character who doesn’t even believe he’s really who he is, yeah?”

I frowned at him, a spark of pain pulling me away from the vision for a moment. I forced it away and focused on him once more. “I don’t understand.” My words were slurred, pain filled.

“You could break those chains if you really wanted to. Lion can’t, he’s not meant for that kind of power. He’s got other abilities. You’re about as strong as any Guardian can be thanks to your connection to me. But you don’t believe it, yeah? You don’t believe you’re a Guardian anymore, so you aren’t, yeah?”

“I can’t even shift. How can I be a Guardian?” The words dribbled from my mouth along with a wash of blood that trickled over my lips.