Shatter the Earth (Cassandra Palmer 10)

And then I went after him.

A second later, I materialized in the middle of the dissipating trail of his spell. One that shouldn’t have existed, because Mircea wasn’t a Pythia. He could do a lot of things, but shift across space or time wasn’t one of them.

Or it wasn’t supposed to be. But he’d recently run across a spell called Nodo D’Amore, or Lover’s Knot, that our enemies had been using in the war to allow one magic user to “borrow” another’s skill set. The only catch was that the two people involved had to be lovers.

And guess whose ex-girlfriend happened to be Pythia?

It was partly the fear that he’d shift himself to the past if I didn’t take him, hijacking my power and causing who knew how many problems in search of his murdered wife, that had gotten me here. Because magic didn’t seem to understand break ups. Mircea and I had, until recently, been an item, and I guessed that was good enough.

“Mircea!” I yelled again.

But it wasn’t Mircea who came thundering out of the trees.

I just stood there for a second, staring at a party of at least three dozen fey warriors, their shiny black armor dappled with sunlight, their charging horses so light of foot that they almost seemed to fly, their silver hair streaming on the wind—

And then I was shifting again, maybe half a second before they ran me the hell down.

I rematerialized behind them, not having had time to think of another destination, facing the other way and confused and disoriented. And even more so when I spun in time to see Elena on the back of one of the steeds, fighting and clawing and screeching blue murder in some language I didn’t know. But I didn’t really need to.

Profanity tends to sound the same in any tongue.

And then, before I could even get my breath back, somebody was snatching me up, onto a huge fey horse that I wasn’t at all sure was under control, because it wasn’t a fey in the saddle.

“Mircea!” I wheezed. “God . . . damnit!”

“Hold on!” he told me, and pulled me into a seated position in front of him.

Which would have been a relief, except that the fey had started firing at us!

A white fletched arrow zipped by my head and would have taken me between the eyes, but Mircea had jerked the reins to the side at the last second, and fey horses had the reflexes of the gods. As it was, I felt the air of its passing, and saw several more fey turning around to shoot at us, because their horses didn’t seem to need hands on the reins. Then I was sending a time wave ahead of us, despite the fact that I didn’t want to waste the power.

But I didn’t want to be shish kebob, either!

“That’s it! That’s perfect!” Mircea said, as a whole volley of arrows disintegrated on their flight through the air, aging out of existence in the middle of my spell.

The one we were about to plow right through!

“Go around! Around!” I yelled, panicked.

He went around—barely. My headscarf, loosened in the fray, blew off and dusted away, fluttering like a dissipating ghost on the breeze as we plunged into a thicket. The denser forest slowed us down enough that I was fairly sure we’d lost the riders. Something that I, for one, was completely fine with!

“Tell me . . . you didn’t kill the guy . . . who owned this horse,” I panted, wondering how badly we’d just screwed up.

“No. Knocked him out,” Mircea said, way too calmly. “One of the others threw him over the back of his animal. Didn’t you notice?”

“No, I didn’t damned well notice!” I yelled.

And immediately realized that that might not have been the best plan when more arrows were suddenly vibrating out of the trees around us—and Mircea’s shoulder. He pulled two from his flesh and tossed them away, unconcerned, because for a vamp that was akin to an insect bite. But for me—

“Hold the hell up!” I said, grabbing for the reins.

And missing, because the horse wasn’t the only thing with good reflexes.

“We have to catch them,” Mircea said, turning the beast in the direction of the lethal weapons. “They’ll lose us in the forest, otherwise.”

“Good!” I whispered this time, not that it probably mattered with fey hearing.

And, sure enough, five or six more arrows sped by, one of them leaving a gash on the horse’s neck.