Courts and Cabals by G.S. D'Moore (best e reader for academics txt) 📕

All of that was background noise as the troll charged me. I saw the glint of victory in his eyes, and knew I was fucked. My sight showed what was going to happen. It showed where his blade would pierce my heart and make me dead with a capitol D.

I wanted to move. I knew what I had to do to survive, but my body wouldn’t respond. My shoulder was shattered, and my sword arm useless. I hadn’t let go of the blade, but there was fuck-all I could do with it. Blood leaked down my chest from four, one-inch-deep puncture wounds. This time, they didn’t heal. Lilith’s magic was spent. I was going to die, and there was nothing anyone could do about it.

“Lilith,” I was more comfortable with her face – specifically with her lips wrapped around my cock – being my final thought.

“Get up, Cam!” I heard her yell as the sword inched closer to my chest.

Time seemed to slow, but that was just the adrenaline coursing through my mind and body.

“Get up!” she screamed again; her voice full of anguish. It was the most emotion I’d ever heard out of her.

The blade continued to descend in slow motion, before it suddenly stopped all together. Everything stopped. Even I stopped. My eyes were locked on the blade, but if I focused, I could see beyond. I saw the troll behind the sword, and the man behind the troll.

“What the fuck,” I looked into cold, unfriendly, blue eyes. “Who . . .” I tried to see and say more, but those blue icebergs held my complete and utter attention.

“Get up,” power course through the world with those two words.

The two eyes continued to hold me as my entire body convulsed. Fire shot through my veins, and lightning lit up my nerves like the lightning bolt that had started this whole mess.

As quickly as he appeared, the blue-eyed man was gone. The world was back in motion. The troll’s blade was inches from my chest, but I moved. I felt myself blur as the lightning in my veins propelled me forward.

Still, it wasn’t enough. The sword came down just above my hip. It punched through me and into the stone floor below. I expected unimaginable pain. I expected to shit and piss myself as my life’s blood leaked out of me into the bleeding grounds. Despite the raw power I felt running through every part of my being, I still expected to die.

Don’t get me wrong, it hurt like a bitch, but it was replaced with a burning heat. The heat was just on the edge of uncomfortable, but I could feel it dulling the pain. I could feel it healing my body despite the sword pinning me to the ground.

Most importantly, the heat continued to fuel me. I wasn’t frozen in shock or overwhelmed by pain, “and I still have my sword.”

The troll looked utterly surprised that he’d missed his mark, and was still trying to comprehend what had happened when Dani’s cold iron-forged blade stabbed him through the chest. It exploded out his back, throwing blood and gore halfway across the bleeding grounds from the force of the strike. A strike I should never have been capable of producing.

The look of surprise was eternally frozen on the troll’s face as veins of black poison crept across his body. My enemy fell to the side, and in the process, tore his blade out of me. I gasped as more pain wracked my body, but the heat quickly claimed it.

Slowly, hesitantly, I started to sit up. My own sword was still sticking out of the troll, so I used both hands to probe my wound.

There was nothing but fresh pink flesh. A small pool of my blood stuck to my side and back, but the hole the troll’s sword had cut out of me was gone.

“So is the heat,” I felt the fire and lightning that lit up my body like a nuclear Christmas tree slowly fade away.

As it did, the aches and pains of my humanity returned, along with the overwhelming sense of victory. I struggled to my feet and stood over the troll. I thought about putting my foot up on his chest and roaring in conquest. That felt right, but a tingle working its way up my spine stopped me. The wind picked up, swirling around the bleeding grounds. It didn’t touch me, but it picked up the body of Ser Fredrick. The black veins completely covered him, and I knew what came next. As the wind swirled in a miniature vortex, his body came apart. It turned to ash, but at its center, something white pulsed like a beating heart.

“What the fuck?” I looked closely at a ball of power . . . and then the vortex threw it directly into my face.

Chapter 27

“Really,” Vernon growled. “Could they be a little more conspicuous.”

He heard the chopper before he saw it. The rotors could be muffled with magic, but unless the Echelon team was willing to expend the power to go into full stealth-mode, it didn’t make sense for a flight in friendly territory. His shifter hearing picked up their approach, so he knew the small town had about a minute to prepare.

“Sitrep?” he asked over the net. Everyone came back with nothing new to report, which was fine with him. “Everyone, watch out for the helicopter.”

“What?” several mundane deputies replied as the black attack craft appeared out of the night and passed overhead.

Vernon grimaced as the craft banked and came around to hover fifty feet above Main Street. If Becky was already pissed at him, she was going to hate him now. Where Echelon teams appeared, protestors followed. By noon tomorrow, everyone who thought the WRA was a violation of human rights would descend on Vincent’s Hollow.