I wonder what they’re doing here.
And then one of them pulled a spear out of some contraption on his back. And stood over one of the writhing couples on the riverbank. And brought it down in a savage move that skewered the two of them with a single thrust, like a human shish kebab.
“Ohshit!” Pritkin said, more confidently that time.
My thoughts exactly.
The diddling duo shattered and then evaporated into mist, and I started wading madly for shore. Which would have been easier if fake Pritkin hadn’t decided to come, too, still trying to kiss my neck. And if this whole damned country wasn’t covered in moss.
Real Pritkin murmured something seductively while trying to help me up off my ass. “No!” I said, with feeling.
“No?”
he repeated, as if wondering what this new word was.
“No!” I grabbed his head and turned it toward the fey. Who had fanned out and were now systematically butchering illusions left and right.
“Ohshit,” Pritkin breathed, as another brutal blow scattered a squirming duo to the winds.
“That should be our motto,” I muttered, and scrambled for the bank.
At least I did until he grabbed my arm, saying something I couldn’t understand. But it became a little clearer when he started pulling me farther into the water. Which made no sense, no damned sense at all, because I’d just spotted some fey on the other bank, too. At least four or five who were busily turning carnal into carnage, and we needed to go.
But Pritkin at twenty, or whatever the hell he was, was just as stubborn as the man I knew. And a second later I decided that maybe he had a point, and not just because he was about to pull my arm out of its socket. But because one of the fey on top of the ridge had spotted us.
And I guess we weren’t looking sufficiently amorous anymore. Because he broke off from the rest and started heading down the bank straight for us. I had an instant to see my panicked expression in his shiny, shiny armor—
And then Pritkin threw himself at me, just as something flashed by us, blindingly bright, like the blaze of sunlight off a car window. And the patch of water where we’d been standing a second ago erupted into a geyser of steam. We both stopped to look at it, and then at the stuff around us, which had gone from straight-off-the-mountains chilly to lava. And then we leapt for the bank, because the threat of being boiled alive tends to end arguments pretty damned quick.
Not that things were looking a lot more survivable on land. The three fey I’d seen must have been a vanguard, because there were double that many now. And more were coming over the ridge every second, like they were sprouting out of the damned ground. And then another flash of something flew by, missing us despite the fact that the closest fey couldn’t have been more than a dozen yards away.
But it didn’t miss the bank we were trying to scale.
Half of it suddenly exploded out at us in an eruption of flying, stinging dirt. It felt like a mortar had hit right in front of us, ripping Pritkin’s hand out of mine and catapulting me backward through the air onto my bruised butt. Leaving me half stunned from the landing and half blind from the dirt and almost completely suffocated from the amount of Wales I’d just inhaled.
And then it happened again, to my left. And then to my right. And all I could think, in the middle of what felt like a combo of mortar barrage and an earthquake, was that the fey didn’t aim any better than I did.
Of course, I could be wrong, I thought, when I felt something whoosh by my head. But this time it wasn’t weapons fire or spell fire or whatever kind of fire they were throwing around. It wasn’t a weapon at all.
It was a boot.
Followed by another one.
Followed by a whole stampede of them, along with the guys in them, who ran right by me as if I weren’t even there.
For a second, I just froze, confused and half blind, with my eyes full of grit and a dirt cloud hovering in the air. But twenty-twenty vision isn’t necessary to see your own hand in front of your face. And I couldn’t.
I couldn’t see anything.
Only no, that wasn’t quite true. I waggled my fingers and saw a vague ripple in the air, not a hand so much as a hand-shaped void where there was no dust. But that was really good enough, wasn’t it, I thought, and slammed back down as some more fey ran my way.
This bunch should have seen me. Even glamouried or whatever Pritkin had done to hide us, because they were right there. Literally right on top of me in the case of one of them. Who didn’t go by so much as over, leaping through the air above my head in a move an Olympic long jumper would have envied.
And then kept right on going with the rest of them, in huge strides that looked more like a bouncy antelope should be making them than anything human. But then, they weren’t human, were they? As they demonstrated by eating up the ground even weighed down by all that armor, tearing down the beach after—
Shit!
I’d flipped over as soon as they passed, scanning the ground for a ripple of nothingness that might be a disguised incubus-in-training. But I didn’t find one. Maybe because instead of hiding, he was tear-assing down the embankment just ahead of the fey, a colorless, Pritkin-shaped void that was all too visible because he was moving, displacing the dust in a long streamer behind him. Which might as well have been a red flag to a bull, because the fey were—