Morrigan's Cross (Circle Trilogy 1)

She glanced around to make sure Hoyt wasn’t anywhere within earshot. “Generally, I need tools, chants, certain rituals. I can do this.” She opened her palm, focused, and brought out the ball of fire.

Curious, he poked at it. And snatched back his singed finger, sucked on it. “Hell of a trick.”

“Fire is elemental, like air, earth, water. But if I pulled this out during a battle, tossed it at an enemy, it might hit one of us instead, or as well as.”

He studied the shimmering ball with his odd eyes. “Like pointing a gun if you don’t know how to shoot. Can’t be sure who’s going to get the bullet. Or if you’d just end up shooting yourself in your own damn foot.”

“Something like that.” She vanished the fire. “But it’s nice to have it in reserve.”

“You go ahead, take a break, Red, before you hurt somebody.”

“No argument.” She sailed into the house, intending to drink a gallon of water and put together some food. She nearly walked straight into Cian.

“Didn’t know you were up and around.”

He stood back from the sunlight that filtered through the windows, but she saw he had a full view of the outdoor activities.

“What do you think?” she asked him. “How are we doing?”

“If they came for you now, they’d snack on you like chicken at a picnic.”

“I know. We’re clumsy, and there’s no sense of unity. But we’ll get better.”

“You’ll need to.”

“Well, you’re full of cheer and encouragement this afternoon. We’ve been at it over two hours, and none of us is used to this kind of thing. Larkin’s the closest King’s got to a warrior, and he’s green yet.”

Cian merely glanced at her. “Ripen or die.”

Fatigue was one thing, she thought, and she would deal with the sweat and the effort. But now she was flat-out insulted. “It’s hard enough to do what we’re doing without one of us being a complete asshole.”

“Is that your term for realist?”

“Screw it, and you with it.” She stalked around the kitchen, tossed some fruit, some bread, some bottled water into a basket. She hauled it out, ignoring Cian as she passed by.

Outside she dumped the basket on the table King had carried out to hold weapons.

“Food!” Larkin pounced like a starving man. “Bless you down to the soles of your feet, Glenna. I was wasting away here.”

“Since it’s been two hours for certain since you last stuffed your face,” Moira put in.

“The master of doom doesn’t think we’re working hard enough, and equates us to chicken at a picnic for the vampires.” Glenna took an apple for herself, bit in. “I say we show him different.”

She took another bite, then whipped around toward the newly stuffed dummy. She focused in, visualized, then hurled the apple. It flew toward the dummy, and as it flew it became a stake. And that stake pierced cloth and straw.

“Oh, that was fine,” Moira breathed. “That was brilliant.”

“Sometimes temper gives the magic a boost.”

The stake slid out again, and splatted as an apple to the ground. She sent Hoyt a look. “Something to work out.”

“We need something to unify us, to hold us together,” she told Hoyt later. She sat in the tower, rubbing balm into bruises while he pored through the pages of a spellbook. “Teams wear uniforms, or have fight songs.”

“Songs? Now we should sing? Or maybe just find a bloody harper.”

Sarcasm, she decided, was something the brothers shared as well as their looks. “We need something. Look at us, even now. You and I up here, Moira and Larkin off together. King and Cian in the training room, devising new miseries for us all. It’s fine and good to have the whole of the team split into smaller teams, working on their own projects. But we haven’t become a whole team yet.”

“So we drag out the harp and sing? We’ve serious work to do, Glenna.”