The circle of soldiers converged at once. Fin struck out first, grabbing the closest man in hand and grappling him.
I started slicing at anything moving in my line of sight. I’d had about enough tonight.
Arms came around my waist and lifted me up. I kicked back and hit his soft bits. He dropped me and I landed on my feet. His curled-up form tripped up a couple of his friends. I used the opening to get my back to a wall. Not exactly an advantage, but it would keep anyone else from toting me around.
Five men advanced on me. I pulled a second knife from my boot, one in each hand.
Before I could draw the men in, they fell back, and Olivia stepped between them.
“This one is mine, boys,” she said.
I charged her, but her magic reached me first. It washed over me, and pressed me into the lumpy wall of the cave. With my back bowed, my hands locked around the knife blades grinding into the stone, I thrashed. Only my hips moved and only the barest inch upward.
I settled and stopped fighting. She approached slowly.
That’s right, bitch. Come closer. I’m harmless.
When her lips were kissing distance from mine, she reached up and wrapped her hands around my throat. She would like an up close and personal kill.
I fought for breath, for freedom. I refused to die this way. Not at the hands of a psycho bitch with a God complex.
But the desire to live couldn’t compete with the magic holding me down and Olivia cutting off my oxygen supply. The room rippled around me; darkness closed in at the edges of my vision.
Fin fought a few feet away, and I wished I could have said goodbye to him. He and I weren’t finished with each other yet.
Under another wave of soldiers, he folded, pressed down to his knees. I tried to focus, but I couldn’t gather my thoughts.
The men dragged him into the painted circle, and I tried to scream at them. No. No. No. Take me not him. But nothing came out. I dropped the knives and inched my fingers up the stone toward Olivia’s hands. Her magic pressed tighter, and it felt like a boulder situated itself on my chest. What little air left to me escaped under her pressure.
Fin jerked in the circle and flipped onto his back, reaching out, rolling around. Despite the odds, he tried to escape.
“I should make him watch you die,” Olivia whispered into my ear. “It would break him so deliciously.”
He continued to scratch and claw at the ground, invisible forces obviously torturing him. And when he slowed and finally stilled, something inside me broke.
I focused on Fin, begging him to get up. It didn’t matter if I died. No one would be safe from the Black Mage if they took his magic for themselves.
“Fin,” I croaked out.
His leg twitched and his chest stopped moving.
Darkness closed over my head and then a blinding flash of light broke through. The weight on me lifted, but I’d already surrendered.
In the darkness, my mom’s voice whispered in my ear telling me to come home.
The scent of my father’s cologne surrounded me.
The rough hands of the chief held me up.
Finally, Fin’s perfect petal lips grazing the cupid’s bow above my mouth.
Death seemed quiet and peaceful. It felt like home.
Chapter Nineteen
As gently as I could, because even my eyelids throbbed, I pried my eyes open and stared up at the rocky cavern of the ceiling. Bodies lie around me, fanned out as if a bomb had gone off right where I lay. Steel clashed with steel somewhere nearby, but damn, sitting up to investigate, didn’t appeal.
A flash of red near my shoulder caught my eye. Olivia lay face down, her hands flat on the ground by her face. Her eyes remained open, fixed forever in the distance. She’d tried to kill me, or maybe she had, and something out there decided it wasn’t my time yet. Either way, she was dead.