Retribution (73 page)

“Wrong,” she countered. “I’m meant to be with the man next to me, and there isn't a damn thing you or anyone else can do to change that.”

“Wizards can easily be erased and replaced, Layla, much like chalk.”

“Not this wizard.”

For the first time since landing on the ice, Agro looked at Quin, and his eyes widened as his mouth fell open. “Two of them,” he whispered, and a wicked smile stretched from one hollow cheek to the other, his eyes glinting with bigger and brighter flames. “You just made an old wizard very happy, Layla. Why don't you introduce your friend?”

“His name is Quin, and he's much more than a friend.”

“There are two of you,” Agro whispered, acting like he’d forgotten he was outnumbered.

“You can count,” Layla dryly noted.

“Where have you been hiding, young man?” Agro asked. “How did your parents escape my attention?”

“You've mistaken what I am,” Quin returned. “I'm merely a bonded child, a member of Layla's coven. And you've met my parents. You nearly killed my dad during one of your visits to our community.”

It seemed all but one of Quin's sentences escaped Agro's attention. “You're merely a bonded child,” he scoffed. “Your aura says otherwise.”

“If you’d look at my aura instead of my power-band, you’d realize your mistake, but since you're a blind old man, we'll make it easy on you.”
 

Quin raised his left hand, and the back three rows of their army left the ground, ascending far enough to have an unobstructed view of the enemy. They halted and hovered as though perched upon a massive flight of stairs, and the Unforgivables readied their hands.
 

“I'm merely a bonded child,” Quin repeated, “who's been blessed with an amazing bonded mate.”

He and Layla released proof that they were, in fact, useless to Agro, and a glittering gold cloud enveloped them and everyone around them, radiating love and swimming with silver rivers.

Agro's malicious smile fell away, and the color drained from his jaundiced face. “No,” he muttered.

“Yes,” they confirmed.

Agro's flame-kissed eyes flared blood-red as his body and aura vibrated. “No!”

His army fearfully glanced at him before looking back to their opponents, shifting from foot to foot, anticipating instructions to attack. Some of them began spreading out, moving from the backs of the circles to the sides to form rows like their enemies.
 

“Nobody do a damn thing,” Agro growled, sweeping his gaze across his active soldiers. “Did I tell you to move?”

The wizard next to Agro spoke, his hood up, his face shrouded in shadows. “The situation has changed, sir. We’re outnumbered and out-powered. For the sake of yourself and your soldiers, I advise you to rethink your position in this battle.”

“I advise you to keep your mouth shut, Guthrie, or you'll find your jaw buried ten feet beneath the ice.” Agro’s gaze shot back to Layla. “This isn't over.” But it seemed he was trying to convince himself as much as anybody. “She can be salvaged. We'll work around it.”

“There's no time for that…”

The back of Agro's hand slammed across Guthrie's face, and his head snapped sideways as his hood fell, revealing another pair of burning eyes, but they sizzled toward Agro's profile, not the hundreds of magicians prepared to strike at the drop of a hand. Wiping blood from his lip, Guthrie gave his boss one last warning. “They're going to attack...
sir
.”

“Prepare yourselves,” Agro commanded, backing away, and his dogs obeyed, falling back with their boss while flowing into five rows. A group of around thirty Unforgivables, those with the thickest power-bands, stood behind the others, surrounding Agro and his bitter first lieutenant.

Quin had been waiting for them to back up, and now that they were, he linked his fingers with Layla’s, letting her know what was coming.

“I want her alive,” Agro barked, pacing within his human shield. “If her heart's not beating when I get my hands on her, you will
all
suffer the consequences!”
 

“What about the male?” someone shouted.

Agro halted, his red gaze landing on Layla. “Kill him.”

Layla’s cool melted as every numb muscle in her body flexed, and Quin dropped his hand, signaling the attack.

Whatever the Unforgivables expected, it wasn't what befell them, and there was a short moment, as the explosion rolled toward them, that they tilted their heads, squinted their eyes, and scrunched their noses, looking for explanations in the scorching cloud. The phenomenal heat and pressure flowing from more than two-hundred magicians turned the glacier's surface into a river of bone-biting water, and the ground shook as the ice fractured.

The Unforgivables barely had time to react, and those quick enough to defend themselves lacked the sense to do it well. The inferno easily busted through their foremost fire shields, incinerating the thirty magicians in the front row. Then it slammed into several more shields being reinforced by dozens of minds. Only half of the more durable barriers caved to the diminishing magic, but flames curled into the exposed areas, charring another twenty-three lost souls.

In one swoop, they'd taken out over a quarter of Agro's army, and they'd done it without losing one of their own, but there wasn’t time to celebrate. The devastating loss threw the remaining Unforgivables into a panic, and they were no longer a disciplined army. They were a scared and desperate mob bent on retaliation and determined to stay alive.

Over a hundred fireballs shot from the mass of crimson cloaks, soaring toward the shiny shield protecting its contents against everything except fire. And apparently Agro's warning about keeping Layla alive had been disregarded, because the flames headed for her as well.

Many of the magicians behind Layla gasped, while others threw shields in front of themselves or over their neighbors. But Layla and her golden family were ready for the attack. As the barrier around them drifted apart, they each raised a hand and turned the wall of fire into ice. The frozen cloud immediately busted, crashing to earth with an echoing report, and Layla knew things were about to get a lot harder.

Her gaze darted across the battlefield, taking in all the details of the enemy, and she even caught glimpses of Agro, who’d lost control of his soldiers and himself. His aura was torn between maddening rage and despair as he moved back and forth within the human circle, trying to keep his eyes on Layla while screaming at his guard. To him, only two things mattered in the smoldering valley of death – her life and his own.

Layla looked from Agro to Guthrie, watching him flip his hood up and back away from his boss. She couldn’t blame him.

Chunks of ice from the failed artillery attack still smashed to the ground when the individual spells started flying, and complete chaos ensued. Agro's army divided – some remaining faithful to their boss, willing to protect him at all costs, while others drifted away, more concerned for their own safety than his. To add to the confusion, many of the magicians behind Quin and Layla lost their composure and started firing erratic and unorganized magic from shaky hands.

With a vast assortment of spells flying at them, Layla and Quin reached out, grasping clusters of fire, ice, wind and electricity then sending them back to their casters. His parents and her grandparents helped, along with a few of the more levelheaded magicians behind them, but they couldn’t keep up, and a barrage of deadly magic closed in.

Layla swept a hand around her head, casting a shield and spreading it out, but she’d only covered about twenty feet in every direction when the lethal spells showered the army. Serrated arrows of ice, sizzling bolts of lightning, and orbs of molten lava crashed into her barrier, shaking it like thunder, but it held, and the strangers who’d found themselves beneath her dome sighed their relief.

Layla was
not
relieved. She was terrified. She hated not knowing if the rest of her family avoided the assault. And if they had, would they avoid the next? Because it was coming in right behind the first, and since she and Quin had a shield around them, there was nothing they could do to lessen the blow. Their army was alone in blocking the ruthless onslaught.

The spells kept coming. The Unforgivables weren’t bothering to defend themselves and fired again and again. Their arms were automatic weapons, offering no chance for a secure retaliation, and their lack of defense wasn't slowing them down. Those who attempted to counter by tossing their own deadly spells into the mix missed their targets more often than not, and when they did manage to find their mark, they only disabled one or two Unforgivables at a time.

Agitated within her protective dome, Layla’s temperature started to rise. “What should I do?” she yelled. “We have to do something.”

“You have to drop the shield,” Quin returned. “On three.”

She gave a nod as she squeezed his hand, and he started the countdown. “One... two... three.”

As she vanished the shield, they quickly searched the air, finding individual spells and alternating their paths to their casters. That’s all they could do, so that's what they did, and they didn't stop to cast another shield.

A large fireball maneuvered through their defenses and rained down behind them, hotly exploding into the unprepared crowd. Heat licked their backs as smoldering and listless bodies slid across the ice and hit their ankles, but they forced themselves to ignore it as they continued grabbing as many bits and pieces of the violent barrage as they possibly could, blindly sending them in the opposite direction.

After several terrifying and brutal minutes, Layla began noticing a difference in the size of the enemy's army, and hope fluttered in her belly like blessed butterfly wings.

But then disaster struck.
 

A few of the Unforgivables with thick power-bands united to perform a smart and devastating spell. Layla's darting eyes saw them cast it, and she was ready to defend against it, but she couldn’t tell what they'd done… until she heard a thunderous crack behind her.

Rashly turning her back on the deadly magic flying at her, she focused on the cliff looming over the west end of her allies. It was splitting and crumbling, dropping bone-crushing chunks of stone on the magicians below.

Layla tightened her grip on Quin's hand as she placed her back to his. Then she swept her right hand through the air over and over again, aiming her magic for the deteriorating crag. The rock continued to shift, but a shiny green haze had coated the breaks, and it successfully kept the fragments from falling.
 

She was about to return to Quin's side when another loud thwack pierced the air, so she halted, furrowing her eyebrows at the unstable section of stone. She could see rocks settling behind the green fog, but her magic had halted the corrosion. She had no idea why she heard another booming crack.

When realization hit, it hit hard and too damn late. She hadn't heard the damaged stone splitting. The sound came from a different section of the cliff, set upon by a different spell, and she found the damage just in time to see it beset horror on her family. All of them.
 

She screamed and flashed her hand through the air, but she wasn’t able to complete the motion before watching her loved ones disappear beneath cold, gray rubble. “No!”

Her hasty spell braced what was left of the dislocated stone, and she began grabbing the debris with magic, blindly launching it behind her while hoping it would find the bastards who buried her family. She moved away from Quin's back, giving herself more room to work – grab, launch, grab, launch.

Within seconds, she'd cleared most of the jagged boulders from the base of the rocky ridge, and what she uncovered sent her head spinning. Bodies. Piles and piles of bodies. Some moving, most of them still.

“No,” she choked, returning to Quin's side in a daze. She was looking, but not seeing; hearing, but not listening; thinking, but not reacting.

“Layla!”

Quin’s voice came to her as if from miles away, and as she turned to look at him, the world seemed to be slowing down.

“What's going on…”
 

His voice cut off with a grunt, and for a moment, the world stood still.

So still…
 

Then it moved slowly, frame-by-horrifying-frame.

Layla caught every single one of them, snapped from her stupor by her worst nightmare come true, and she saw each horrid detail with crystal clear vision.
 

A broad, razor-sharp icicle laced with sizzling currents of electricity pierced through Quin's left flank, carving a huge chunk of flesh from his side as the voltage vibrated his muscles. The force ripped his hand from hers, flinging him into a pile of smoldering carnage, and her heart stopped.

Tick… tick… tick…

For three agonizing seconds, she could have been dead.

Her heart kicked into gear, thumping so fast she couldn’t distinguish individual beats. Then something grabbed the organ and yanked, pulling it into the air. Her head flung back as her body was forced to follow, and bright white light started seeping from her pores.

Higher and higher she floated, the battlefield far below. Then the supernatural grip on her heart squeezed, forcing her into a tight ball. The rage and sadness swelled, twisting her heart and torturing her soul, until she was so full of hate and despair, she surrendered to them.