Moonshadow (Moonshadow #1)

Rowan stepped forward to put his hand on Nikolas’s taut forearm. “You’re right, Nik,” he said, his voice clear and calm. “That’s not who we are. Rhys was just being an unbelievably massive ass, weren’t you, Rhys? You didn’t actually mean to strike our friend, host, and ally. And I’ll bet you’re counting the seconds until you can say you’re sorry. Right?”

“Right,” Rhys said, his wary attention trained on Nikolas. He made no move to try to stand or ease away from Nikolas’s sword but instead remained sprawled half prone on the ground, his weight resting back on both hands. He looked at Sophie. “I apologize. I can’t believe I hit you. I’ve never done anything like that before. It must have been the heat of the battle.”

“Sure, it’s okay,” Sophie said easily. As Nikolas glanced at her, water dripped down her calm face. She smiled. “Battle fever can make the best of us do crazy things. No harm done this time. Just don’t do it again, or you can forget about what Nik will do to you. I’ll smack you into next week myself.”

Expectedly, Braden started to chuckle. “I heard the truth in that statement.”

Others started to laugh, and the tension eased. Rowan’s grip tightened on Nikolas’s arm until he forced his rigid muscles to relax. Taking a step back, he bent to clean the length of his bloody blade on the grass, then found his sword harness. Despite the discomfort of donning it while wet, he sheathed the sword and shrugged the harness into place.

He asked, “Did we get them all?”

“No way to tell,” Cael replied. “Maybe. We got all the ones that charged, and you took out the one that tried to leave the field. There could have been others holding back, in the woods, but they would have charged too, unless they had other orders.”

And Rhys killed the one that might have told us that, Nikolas thought. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Sophie offer a hand to Rhys to help him up. After a second’s hesitation, Rhys accepted it. It was a nice, diplomatic touch. A savage, barely controlled part of him wanted to knock their hands apart.

He watched closely until they stopped touching. Then he said, “I guess it doesn’t matter. None of these Hounds will be returning, which is a message in itself.” He told Sophie grimly, “I’m afraid all our hard work at misdirection has gone down the drain.”

“Doesn’t matter.” Sounding tired, she swiped at her dripping nose. “Misdirection was a long shot anyway.” She added telepathically, They showed up here awfully quick after Robin’s storm started though. Do you think Morgan knew I was lying after all?

Nikolas said, No. If Morgan believed you were lying, he would have come here himself, and he wouldn’t have waited. Or he wouldn’t have let you go in the first place.

She heaved a sigh, which turned into a cough. It must have been Robin’s storm that brought them then.

Although he didn’t say so, he disagreed. The puck might be a great many things, but he was neither naive nor stupid. A storm of this magnitude spanned miles, and Robin would never have made the manor house the center of it.

And Morgan hadn’t witnessed the deep emotional bond Sophie and Robin had developed. He had believed Sophie when she had claimed the dog had disappeared, so he wouldn’t have leaped immediately to searching for Robin here. He might have checked out the property as part of an overall search strategy, but there would have been no specific sense of urgency in doing so.

No, there was only one logical reason Nikolas could think of for a fighting force of thirty Hounds to show up on Sophie’s doorstep not an hour after the men’s arrival.

Betrayal. They were not supposed to live through this fight.

He watched Rhys closely for the next several minutes, but as the tension faded from the group, the other man appeared to relax gradually. He even stepped forward to mutter something at Sophie, which caused her to laugh.

Moving quickly, the men stacked the bodies of the Hounds together close to the tree line. As they worked, a single headlight of a motorcycle appeared. Gawain and Ashe had returned.

Sophie and Rowan went to greet them and explain what happened, and within moments Ashe had joined the rest of the group to help, while Gawain ran his bike into the manor house.

Now that Gawain had returned and could help to keep an eye on Sophie, Nikolas felt a hypervigilant part of him relax slightly, and he could turn his full attention to the task at hand. Once all the bodies had been collected, the others stepped back several meters. While they kept watch, he knelt to put his hands on the ground once again.

It had been a long damn day with a hellish ending, and he was not only tired, he was still tapped out from amassing morningstars. But this one task had little to do with wielding his Power and more to do with asking the Earth to wield hers.

Reaching deep, he made the connection with the rich, abundant land magic all around him and asked it to take the bodies of the men. This type of asking never moved quickly, but after a few moments, the ground rippled gently and the bodies sank below the turf. When they had completely disappeared, he thanked the magic and let it go, then stood.

The first thing he did was look for Sophie. She stood by Gawain at the back of the group. At some point while Nikolas had been working, the puck had appeared, still wearing the form of a monkey. Robin sat on Sophie’s hip like a toddler, his skinny, hairy arms around her neck.

No one offered to say any words at the Hounds’ grave. They got the respect of a burial, but they would not get prayers from the Dark Court.

“That’s it,” Nikolas said, wiping his hands on his sodden pants. “We’re done. Let’s get inside.”

The others didn’t hesitate. They jogged to the house, and as soon as everybody was inside, Nikolas and Gawain closed the iron-bound oak doors while everyone else watched in the dim glow thrown from the fire across the hall and the single lit oil lantern someone had set on top of a case of canned beans.

The sound of the doors closing seemed very loud in the silence. Nikolas turned to find them all watching him. Sophie hugged the monkey. Everyone wore the same, sober expression he felt on his face.

Nikolas thought, none of us know if or when those doors will open again.

And one of us is a traitor.

“We’ve thrown the dice,” he said. “Now we pray the gamble pays off.”

Gawain clapped his hands. “In the meantime, we’ve got work to do. Let’s dry off and get changed. Nikolas cleared the chimney so we can build up the fire to take the chill out of the hall. We can sort out the majority of this mess tomorrow, but let’s at least get things shifted so we can have enough clear floor space to make bed pallets for the night. And I don’t know about any of you, but I could use a late supper after all that work.”

While Gawain issued orders, Nikolas turned his attention to Sophie. Dripping wet like the rest of them, she was visibly shivering, and her face was completely colorless. Searching the immediate area, he found the blanket she had left crumpled on the doorstep and enveloped both her and the puck in it.