AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Van Blackside, it’s time for you to die.”
33
Perfect Warrior
BRAND
Ialmost couldn’t believe my eyes when Flor appeared. She soared into battle, a miniature Valkyrie, already covered with blood and armed with a small blade. Her scream had every other fight pausing to see what had arrived.
Who had come to fight.
My tiny mate flung herself across the melee, her feet landing lightly as she seemed to fly over the blood and bodies toward Margarette. There was no way she would get there in time to save her. Not one of us could, though we were all trying desperately.
Dad chopped down another Southern Enforcer behind me, but two more took his place. The Southern troops had obviously planned this coup well. In retrospect, it was obvious.
Most of our Enforcers had been given housing much farther away. They had explained it was because those were the nicer homes for housing visitors.
Help wasn’t coming, not in time. It was only the Alpha Heirs, the members of the Council who had gone with Bradley for the execution, and that strange dark-eyed shifter, against all of the Southern troops.
Bradley and Margarette would die, I knew it. Glen was close to them, but he’d been swarmed by a group armed with swords. Finnick was even farther away, fighting back-to-back with Glen’s brother Patrick, their sword work almost balletic. Beautiful moves weren’t going to save us, though. Technique lost to sheer numbers, every time.
I felt a blade slash my leg, turned and twisted to find my way past my opponent’s guard, but my attention was on my mate. She was running, skipping, faster than I’d ever seen a shifter move. But Southern shifters had seen her, scented her, and were raising their heads, eyes gleaming.
I had to get to her.
She howled, a high-pitched, ear-splitting sound filled with a rage so powerful, all the shifters near me stopped fighting for just a moment.
It was long enough for me and Dad to run our blades across our opponents’ necks, sending them to the ground. “Go,” Dad grunted, thrusting a longer sword into my hand. I grabbed it and ran to help Flor.
The world slowed. I watched her leap between Van and Margarette, shouting a cry for justice. Van was holding Margarette’s long hair and bringing his blade down with the other, but he hesitated at the shout.
My little mate let out a snarl and brought up her blade.
Her steak knife.
When she’d palmed it at dinner, it had made my gut twist that she still felt unsafe with me there to protect her. What good would a steak knife do against Enforcers?
But now I saw exactly what a steak knife was capable of. She raised it to meet Van’s sword near the hilt, moving her thin, muscular arms in a circle to turn the blade away from its trajectory. Van let the circle continue, obviously hoping to bring the knife back around—to cut into Flor or Margarette’s neck, I wasn’t sure. His other hand was tangled in Margarette’s hair, pulling at it so hard, I was surprised the tendons in her neck hadn’t torn.
Maybe they had. Her eyes had rolled back, as if she were seconds away from being decapitated manually.
Flor allowed the blade to continue in the arc, the knife flying in a wide circle above her head, useless. Van snarled a laugh and moved his hand to Flor’s wrist to grab the handle of her blade, letting his own fall. He was going to force her to slit her own throat.
But with one hand on her wrist, and his other tangled in Margarette’s hair, the burly Enforcer didn’t have anything left to stop Flor’s next dodge, a ducking movement, inside his guard. I assumed she did it to avoid the blade.
I assumed wrong.
Flor had dropped down so that the top of her head was level with Van’s waist, only her arm held high. Somehow, she wriggled her arm, moving so fast I wasn’t sure what she’d done—maybe used the blood on her wrist to slip free of his grip? All I knew was that his hand now held the steak knife, and she was free. Then she pressed her cheek against his thigh, as if she was submitting.
But she wasn’t submitting. Not at all. She struck, like a snake, her mouth wide.
Van’s high-pitched shriek sounded clear and loud over the fighting. I let my gaze drop and saw the blood marking the front of Van’s thin sweatpants, the dark puddle growing rapidly.
I could tell what she had done from his face. And from hers, from the stains that covered her mouth and chin, the wicked, victorious gleam in her crazed eyes.
I had never been so proud, so terrified, and simultaneously sickened in my life.
She’d bitten off… well, from the amount of blood, and the way Van dropped like a stone, whatever could be bitten off below the waist.
