She glanced at Emily, thinking of how her sister had burned away Morgan’s power, left him so that he was no longer a danger, and wondered if that gift would work on other shadows.
At the sound of the first gun firing, Brianna’s fear intensified, and Aern’s head snapped up, away from the spot he’d been watching. He’d somehow felt her, she realized, sensed her reaction to the coming fight. Understanding passed between them in that instant of time, and then the door to the gatehouse flew open as the four of them rushed into the light.
It was already chaos. The shadows must have known, somehow predicted the ambush. Brianna hadn’t anticipated things to escalate so quickly, but the moment she stepped from the shelter of the gatehouse, heart pounding, she felt the assault of wind and debris. She pushed her own power forward, creating a tunnel for her and Logan to run, and saw Emily bearing down on a man in black who dwarfed her. The man’s dark eyes connected with Brianna in a spark of recognition, but she couldn’t stay focused on him, because two more shadows were rushing toward her and Logan.
The shadows were weaponless, heading for her with single-minded focus, and Brianna felt them. It wasn’t that same tug, the pull she sensed from the dark-haired man, but the instinct to run or to fight. The exhaustion that had been plaguing her was suddenly gone; her shoulders drew back with the impulse to use her power, to strike. The woman seemed to recognize Brianna’s response, and she bared clenched teeth as she threw up her own arms, prepared for the clash.
Brianna hurled a force of wind at both shadows and Logan was suddenly beside her, running full speed as he gestured toward his team, all other communication lost from the surge and the roar of wind. Several of them must have fired, because the woman spun as her right shoulder was struck, pitching her back long enough that Brianna could take stock, see that the other man had been hit in the knee. It wasn’t slowing them down as it should have, their black uniforms hiding body armor or some other form of protection, and she knew Logan’s men wouldn’t risk it again. The shadows were too close; their next marks would be higher.
A bullet whizzed past Brianna, landing solidly into a post several yards beyond where the shadow’s head would have been, but the woman had dodged it with a precision that was unreal. Brianna and Logan were closing the distance when an explosion rocked the gatehouse behind them. The pocket of air protected them from the onslaught of brick and metal, but they were thrown forward by the concussion.
Logan shoved his arms out and Brianna recognized the aura before she realized what he was doing. They landed with a less painful impact than they should have, pushing themselves up before their opponents, but she didn’t take time to examine whether he’d softened their landing with a tactic like her wind tunnel, or somehow altered gravity and mass. Because across the narrow strip of grass that separated her and Logan from the shadows, they’d landed in a crouch and would soon be on their feet.
The blast had slowed them, she was grateful to see, but they must have expected the pulse and used their gifts to better react. They’d had their powers their whole lives, not a matter of days or hours like Brianna and the others, and that knowledge didn’t help her confidence in the least. The ground shook and trees lifted root and all from the earth where they lined the block wall, suddenly missiles that were knocking Council men off their feet. There was a synchronized snap from all around them as the sprinkler heads shattered from the pressure, the water spraying a mist only a heartbeat before it was redirected en masse toward an oncoming shadow. And all of this before the first minutes had passed.