Total pages in book: 78
Estimated words: 74292 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 371(@200wpm)___ 297(@250wpm)___ 248(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 74292 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 371(@200wpm)___ 297(@250wpm)___ 248(@300wpm)
Keelan blinked, his teaching moment temporarily derailed. He took a second to recover. “How do we proceed?”
I held my hand out, and Hakeem surrendered his branch. “I’m going to poke it with a stick.”
To my left Troy snickered. Owen cracked a smile.
Keelan looked like he was about to suffer a conniption fit.
“It’s a magic trap,” I told him. “It’s likely primed to go off when something organic makes contact with it. Wood in this case is a good substitute for a human. I’m going to enchant the stick and see if I can get a better sense of what this is.”
I approached the rocks and stopped a couple of feet away. Still nothing. The question wasn’t whether I could handle the trap. The question was how many of my cards would I have to show.
I whispered an incantation under my breath, focusing it on the stick. I’d learned it from my father about five years ago, and he’d learned it from some visiting mages several millennia ago, when he was trying to broaden his horizons. As a diagnostic tool, it was pretty limited. It told you if the magic was there and how much of it, but it revealed nothing about its nature. There were better spells and artifacts out there, but we were short on time and right now it was my best bet.
The magic coated the wood and saturated it, sucked into the dead branch with a snap. I raised my stick and concentrated.
Each of the rocks was a solid knot of magic. A staggering amount of it, compressed into a vessel that was way too small for that amount of power. The moment that containment broke, all of that tightly coiled magic would burst. Simple but devastating.
We had to disarm it. It was too close to town, and if we passed it, someone could trigger it behind us, hitting us in the back.
I backed away, pulled a vial out of my backpack, and looked around. A slight depression curved the forest floor about ten yards away. It would have to do.
“Fall in on me.” I walked over to the depression.
The shapeshifters converged around me.
“Hit the dirt and stay down.”
They dropped to the forest floor.
I uncorked the vial and brushed my thumb over the edge, testing the liquid inside. Magic nipped at me. Still potent. My father’s patented secret recipe, but instead of seven herbs and spices, it used vampire blood mixed with a binding agent and primed with exactly three drops of my blood.
A blood ward was the strongest defensive spell in my arsenal. However, bleeding all over the place weakened me and was inconvenient. It also gave away the nature of my power. The undead blood charged with my magic was almost as good, and it conveniently masked the clear signature of my blood.
I circled the prone shapeshifters, dripping blood from the vial at regular intervals, and stepped into the circle I’d made. The undead blood waited, ready for my magic.
I picked up a pinecone, dripped a drop from the vial on it, corked the vial, put it away, and hefted my improvised grenade.
“Fire in the hole!”
I threw the pinecone at the rocks and dropped, activating the ward with a pulse of magic.
Magic crackled like thunder. The four spheres toppled over and spun in midair at a dizzying speed, expanding into car-sized boulders in a blink. The boulders whipped around each other in a circle like moons that lost their planet.
The magic binding them snapped like a rubber band. The boulders hurtled through the woods like runaway trains, crushing everything in their path.
One rocketed directly toward us, smashed into the ward above our heads, and bounced off, into a pine tree. The three-foot-thick trunk snapped like a toothpick. The ward shattered, its power exhausted. The backlash slapped my brain. Oww.
Wood cracked, trees collapsed in four directions, birds screeched in alarm, then everything went silent.
Hakeem, Troy, and Owen stared at the crossroads of destruction with wild eyes.
“And that’s why we don’t poke random shit we find in the woods with a stick,” Keelan said.
A tree to our left, with a chunk of its trunk sheared off where one of the boulders grazed it, careened and fell. A humanoid figure dropped out of the branches, landing twenty-five feet away. A shapeshifter in warrior form. Huge, almost eight feet tall, with orangish fur splattered with dark rosettes, claws like knives, and giant fangs. A gold collar clasped his thick neck. He snarled and charged.
Keelan leaped. A human started the jump, but a werewolf landed, thrusting the claymore at the charging beast. Keelan was abnormally large for a werewolf. The enemy was bigger. Holy shit.
The collared shapeshifter batted the blade aside with his left hand and raked at Keelan with his right. Keelan danced back, slicing. The collared shapeshifter lunged at him and howled as the pain from the nearly severed wrist finally registered.