Veil of Shadows (25 page)

Their skin was a leathery, putrid shade of gray, their bodies hairless and often covered with a variety of bulges and bumps that made them look even more grotesquely disfigured. They were big, as well, nearly half as big as the average male warrior in the rebellion.

Big . . . and dumb. Syn counted six of them—they could handle six Jorniaks. They could do that without her needing the magic, even.

The low hum of pulsars filled the air and then a nauseating stench filled the air. A dead Jorniak stank like nothing else—cut them open and it was guaranteed to leave you fighting the urge to puke.

Kalen’s voice hit her mind just as she cut one of the demons down.
“Report.”

“Busy,” she snarled out loud, knowing he’d hear it anyway.

“Elina—”

He’d only send Elina for one reason. Adrenaline buzzed as she watched three of the monsters go down in a heap before they even cleared the woods.

Syn took down a fourth and as she swung to take aim on a fifth, she caught sight of the demons she’d sensed.

The Raviners.

Raviners and Jorniaks. Again. Working together . . . and in broad daylight. Jorniaks might be too stupid to recognize their lesser strength under the sun, but Raviners? Not again. Not fucking again.

“This is no damned coincidence,” she muttered, changing her aim to one of the higher demons. Somehow, the Raviners had figured out how to control the Jorniaks. Or at least point them in the right direction.

With her heart racing in fear, she called out an order.
Hold the line,
Kalen had said. She’d hold the line, damn it. She just hoped the magic would hold, too.

“Left flank,” she called out.

As one, a third of her fighters turned to guard against the Raviners. The demons appeared from the shadowy forest, their robes hanging on gaunt, skeletal bodies. They were flanked by more Jorniaks. A dozen, easy. Through her shields, Syn could feel the confusion from her fighters, the dread . . . and something else. Something hungry. Something that knew what she was and wanted her. She flinched as she sensed it reaching for her.

Slamming tighter shields into place, she let her gut lead her and she aimed for one of the Raviners. Nothing about him marked him as leader—not the cut of his robe, no physical adornments, nothing. But he was the leader, and he was the one casting out a psychic net and hoping to find the vulnerable mind of some talented soul.

Syn was talented, but her mind was anything but vulnerable. Still, just the feel of him was enough to turn her heart to ice. She sighted on him and fired—his head disintegrated under the blast.

But he wasn’t the only one.

There were more. Too many.

She heard the death scream of one of the baerns and swore, seeing from the corner of her eye as the beast went down. It was followed by another. The big creatures were being hampered by the close press of the demons—they couldn’t get the room they needed to fight, leaving them vulnerable.

Through the melee, she could see Xan, a pulsar in one hand, a wicked long blade in the other. He was no longer mounted—she didn’t know if he’d lost his baern or just preferred to fight on foot. He used the pulsar to take down anything he could get a bead on and the blade was reserved for anything stupid enough to cross his path.

The man was death personified.

Stay alive,
she thought desperately. For all of them. For herself. For Xan. For her men and the medics who wouldn’t stand much chance against the demons.

Her men knew how to fight.

They knew how to fight against ridiculous odds.

But they were being overrun. If they didn’t get help soon . . .

“Damn it, where are they all coming from?” Lo growled. Then he looked at Syn and said, “If you’re going to do something, now’s the time, Captain.”

She nodded and dismounted. Her feet had barely hit the ground when her baern launched his massive body into the throng of demons, stomping, crushing, using his powerful jaws and neck to grab one of the Jorniaks and send it flying. She hoped he’d make it. She loved the animal.

Taking cover behind her men, she took a deep breath. “Cover me,” she said, her voice flat and hard. Hopefully none of them sensed the fear inside her.

Staring at the demons, she started to gather the energy. In her mind, she spun a web of flame. They came boiling out of the woods like ants, more and more. Dozens of them. She waited until they were as close as she dared let them get—the more of them she could see, the more of them she could kill.

Then she flung the fire net at them.

Screams filled the air. Enraged, filled with pain. It echoed around them and Syn continued to call the fire, until she sensed no more life in the demons in front of her. But there were more. Coming from all around.

So many more.

The time would have passed quickly—logically, Syn knew that. But it felt as though she’d been fighting for hours. Gather the energy, form the fire, force it on the demons, burn them to ash and then start all over again.

But even with the earth feeding its energy into her, she could only call the fire for so long. After setting a third line of demons ablaze, she had to stop. Her control was too shaky, and even with an anchor, she had to be able to direct the fire or she could kill her own men instead of the monsters.

Adrenaline fueled her muscles and she relied on her weapons instead of her magic. Somehow, she found herself fighting shoulder to shoulder with Vena, guarding the fallen as best they could.

Lo was one of them. Although blood gushed from a nasty, jagged bite on his arm, he was on the comm-unit, contacting Bron.

Bron—with the reinforcements. Where in the hell were they? And Xan . . . she hadn’t seen him.

“Syn—Commander—drop.” Lo’s voice was ragged and harsh with pain.

They dropped as one and over their heads came a wide, pulsating burst of light. She felt the heat of it singeing her skin, close—too close, but she didn’t let herself flinch. Both the heating blasting over her head and the Jorniaks were just an arm’s reach away now.

Lo was a wizard with weapons—whatever piece he’d invented this time, he would have tested it and he trusted it enough—

The stink of burning Jorniak flooded her nostrils, and she swallowed the bile that climbed up her throat. Their bodies were in a burning, grotesque heap in the ground as she stood and turned to face yet another line of the monsters.

And another.

To her left, she heard a sharp female scream and she turned, jerking up her pulsar, but she was too late. Vena was down, blood bubbling from a vicious wound in her throat. A Jorniak grabbed her ankle to drag her away and Syn unloaded on him, reaching deep down for some remnant of her magic and delivering a fireball straight into his face.

The demon went down. But Vena was already dead, her throat laid open in a vicious, bloody smile of death.

It seemed forever before she heard Lo’s voice say, “Backup is here.”

It seemed almost as long before she was able to lower her weapon without fear of having her own throat ripped out the second she relaxed her guard. Bleeding from gashes in her right arm and left leg, she stumbled to a tree and leaned against it. Fumbling in her pack, she pulled out a couple strips of leather.

The injury on her thigh was ugly and painful, but not too deep.

The one on her arm was a different story. It was still pumping out far too much blood.

“Let me help.”

She looked up, dazed, to Xan.

Dazed, she reached up and touched his face. “You’re okay.”

“More than I can say for you, Captain,” he muttered, his voice nothing more than a growl. He reached for the strip of leather in her hand, and she let him take it.

He was bleeding, too. Under the gore splattered on his face, there was a long, sliver-thin cut. “You got that pretty face of yours cut up even more,” she said. “Gonna have more scars.”

“I’m told women like scars on their warriors.”

He wasn’t gentle as he tied her arm off. She bit her lip to keep from crying out. Focusing on the ugly mess of her arm, she said, “Well, the girls are just going to love me, then. I’m going to have some damn pretty scars when these heal up.”

He used the bandages in her kit to field-dress her major injuries, but when he moved on to the lesser ones, she waved him off. “I’m good. We need to stand guard in case they come back.”

“They won’t come back,” he said.

“Don’t be so sure.”

Famous last words. With the blood still roaring in her ears, she could barely make sense of the clamoring inside—whispers. Voices whispering to her. She squeezed her eyes closed and concentrated, focused.

She wasn’t a strong witch.

For short periods of time, she could burn things like nothing else but that was it. She knew her gift, though, had honed it to a razor’s edge, and right now, it was screaming.

The demons were doubling back.

“Elina . . . Where’s Elina?”

She came striding out of the bloody melee, dressed in the casual clothes she wore when she wasn’t on duty. She had her weapon belt strapped over it and blood splattered her arms and face. “I’m here.” She reached out a hand, caught Syn’s. “You feel it?”

Syn squeezed. “I feel it. We need more than just fire-power if we want to make it out of this.”

Elina nodded. “I’ll do it, though. You can’t handle it right now.”

“I can—”

“No.” Elina shook her head. “When it comes to the magic, I outrank you, and you can’t maintain.” She gave Xan a hard look and said, “Get her to camp. I don’t care if you have to throw her over your shoulder and haul her ass out of her. Get her to camp
now
.”

Xan nodded.

Elina called to Bron across the field. He was barking out orders but at the sound of Elina’s voice, he stopped. She gave him the signal to fall back and he nodded.

With Syn wounded, he was in charge.

“Round up the wounded and haul ass,” he called out.

One of the medics said, “We need to stabilize—”

“Now,”
he interrupted. He glared at the medics and said, “If we don’t move, it won’t matter if the wounded are stable or not—they’ll die.”

Xan didn’t know what Syn had sensed—it was something. He had seen the naked terror in her eyes before she locked it down. He boosted her into his arms as she ineffectually shoved against him. “I can walk—we need your hands free.”

He pushed his pulsar into her hands. “You be my hands—you can’t walk fast enough to keep up.”

“Then put me down, damn it. I’ll guard the retreat.”

Like hell. The ice-cold fear he’d seen in her eyes had him tangled into knots. He ignored her weak struggles, blocked them out of his mind. If she was so weak she couldn’t dislodge him, then she must have lost a lot of blood.

They almost made it.

Bringing up the tail, Xan cradled Syn against his chest and whispered, “Hold on. We’re almost there.”

He could see the walls of the camp. Could hear the voices just ahead.

But then he heard the growling behind him. He shot a look behind him just as the demons broke through the trees. Swearing, he grabbed his pulsar and looked around, searching for somebody who could take Syn. But there was nobody.

Elina—where in the hell was the witch? But then he figured out the answer. Within the woods, smoke billowed. She was burning them, and from the amount of smoke, she was burning up a whole hell of a lot more than the eight or nine demons at a take like Syn had been doing.

She hadn’t gotten all of them, though—too many of them were still rushing the ragtag, injured fighters.

The buzz of her magic thundered through the air, hot and powerful. Shit, every Warlord within a day’s walk would feel her power this time. There was nothing hidden about it. She had her hands full, wherever she was.

Bron was all but dragging a soldier toward the camp gates, and all of those able to walk were doing the same thing as Xan and Bron—aiding the injured. One of them tried to come up and help Lo, but the red-haired soldier shoved him off. “I’m on my own two feet, damn it. Find somebody that isn’t.”

Xan caught Lo’s eyes. The man was pale from blood loss, but the look on his face was grim, hard and determined.

“If we buy them a few minutes, they can get a team out there, protect the gate,” Lo said, his voice grim.

Buying them time against that many demons—it was a suicide mission.

“Syn won’t make it,” Xan said quietly. He glanced at the gate and then back into the forest. He might make it—if he ran. But more of the soldiers would die if they didn’t cover their retreat. He eased Syn to the ground—she was unconscious now, her face a deathly shade of gray.

It all but ripped his heart out as he stood over her body.