Page 11 of Too Hexed to Handle

My knees wobble and my eyes leak wet, salty tears as I stare and stare at the flame, knowing it’s hopeless, knowing I’m about to end up either dead or hexed, and I’m not sure which is worse.

‘Come along.’ Benedict pats the chair with his fire-free hand.

Astin, despite my gripping his shirt in an attempt to haul him back, closes the distance between them, ignoring the threat of fire and issuing his own threat instead. ‘Or I could kill you.’

‘Astin,’ I hiss. ‘What are you doing?’

He ignores my perfectly legitimate question, too wrapped up in his show of bravado to remember we’ve both faced a Souleater before and lost, and dives towards the hearth, faster than I’ve ever seen him move. He plucks the poker from the pot and sweeps it in an arc over his head. My lips part. I’ve never seen him do that with a garden implement before.

Benedict cocks his head, as though recalculating the situation, and then the fire in his hand swells, and swells, until it’s the size of his head. Undeterred, Astin twirls his poker. I don’t understand his confidence. All I want to do is crawl into a hole and wish this whole situation away.

Astin lunges. Benedict’s surprisingly quick, dodging the poker and flinging the flame from his palm. The fire surges upwards in a blur of crackling black and grey before plummeting towards Astin, who barely sidesteps in time. My armchair erupts like the Laevothe bonfire.

Shit. Shit.

Sweat drips down my face as the pair of them circle one another.

‘I don’t want to hurt you,’ Benedict says. This statement is somewhat contradicted by the way he licks his lips. ‘All this determination to kill me would be such a feast, you know. If you wanted to help the girl, you could give yourself to me instead.’

Astin’s knuckles whiten around the poker. ‘I’m not doing this for her.’

Charming.

But I can’t bring myself to be offended, not as a strange numbness settles over me. My chair is on fire. My gardener thinks he’s some kind of swordsman. I owe twenty thousand gold coins to a treasury who don’t pay any attention to the kind of person they’re employing – or worse, they know and don’t care, so long as he gets them the results they need. If humans will happily use a bit of lust powder or a magic potion, who’s to say they won’t employ a Souleater to do their dirty work too?

It doesn’t matter either way, because I can’t do anything about any of it without becoming as terrible and dangerous as Benedict.

A flick of Benedict’s wrist has the bottles behind the bar flying towards my head, carried by a wind of shadow. They splinter into pieces as they shoot through the air; thousands of tiny glass darts that are impossible to avoid. Liquid sprays everywhere. I drop into a crouch, covering my head with my hands, shrieking as the glass pricks my exposed skin like the beaks of a thousand angry birds.

‘Daisy!’ Astin’s voice sounds distant, but I’m not sure if it’s the roar of my beloved chair going up in smoke or my own heartbeat drowning him out. My vision swims with tears, but within me desire stirs. Benedict’s right – Astin’s determination is palpable. Most of the time, his emotions are hard to read, almost muted, but the pieces I can sense are always tumbling, ever-changing, like he’s unable to settle on one thing. Now though, his smell is fixed. Solid. Steel and iron. It’s overwhelming. I want it. I want it.

I dig my nails into my palms.

Benedict stands above me, and with a wave of his arm, a wall of pulsing shadow splits the room in two, stretching from wall to wall and rising up to the ceiling, separating us from Astin. He paces on the other side, nothing but a vague shape among the dark, prodding, pounding, punching at the shadows, searching for a weakness.

I tremble. It’s happening all over again. I’m about to be attacked by a Souleater and I’ve nowhere to go, nowhere to hide, the cloaks hanging above me as useless as a broken shield. Benedict places his hand on my shoulder, his nail scratching the side of my neck, readying himself to sink it into me.

A crack of light catches my eye. A gap in the wall of shadow. Benedict’s distracted, his concentration lost as his nail pierces skin. I barely feel the sting. The wall wavers.

That gap widens further and Astin flies through, shoulder first, launching himself at Benedict and slamming into his side, throwing him off-kilter and sending him sprawling to the floor. His head hits the stone with a sickening crunch. Nausea churns in my belly, not just at the noise, but at the look of pure, unadulterated hatred on Astin’s face. It doesn’t come close to any expression I’ve seen on him before. It’s one I never want to see again.

Black smoke splutters from Benedict’s hands, but he’s dazed, struggling to move, let alone produce magic. My pulse rages in my ears. Astin places the point of the poker directly above Benedict’s heart, and I don’t want to watch what happens next, but my eyes refuse to tear themselves away. The lines on Benedict’s chest jerk. Astin leans forward, muscles trembling. The hard expression on his face doesn’t change when he says, ‘You shouldn’t have touched her.’

He slams the poker all the way in.

Benedict spasms. Flails. I let out a choked gasp at the same time he draws his last, his body going still, his hand landing limply at his side. The remaining lines of magic on his body stop writhing and fade to nothing, like they were never there at all, turning him from monster to man.

A man my gardener just killed.

I blink several times, in case I’m having some kind of strange and all-too-realistic nightmare. Astin, not paying any heed to Benedict, busies himself pouring water over my armchair – something about the magic of the flames means they haven’t spread, but the chair itself is as blackened as our hexmarks. Smoke clogs my throat. I go to move out of the way, only to realise I’m moving towards Benedict, towards his corpse.

Hexes, I can’t be on the floor with the body. I squeak, trying to stand, but my legs quiver and give way. My back slides down the length of the wall. I settle for whimpering and crawling in the opposite direction, until I reach the relative safety of the staircase and am able to hide by the banisters.

‘Astin,’ I say faintly. ‘What just happened?’

‘I saved you. You’re welcome.’ He shrugs, nudging the corpse with his toe, as though inspecting it for signs of life. I’m not sure why he needs to. Benedict appears extremely dead to me. ‘At least this one was easy.’

‘Oh, good, so long as this one was easy,’ I splutter, choking down a laugh, because what does he mean this one? My voice is high-pitched when I ask, ‘How many more have there been?’