Page 115 of Land of Monsters

Dubthach.

“It’s a Druid spell!” Brexley also could feel the difference.

“What? She has a fucking Druid working for her?” Warwick barked from the backseat.

“Dubthach can’t be working for her.” Raven shook her head like she couldn’t fathom the concept. “She must be forcing him.”

That meant he was here, close by.

“The bitch locked us in.” Brexley’s fury was rising, the air crackling with energy. “She really wants to piss me off? Did she not see how Istvan fared against me?”

Warwick might have legend status, but it was really Brex who held the power of death. She wasn’t as lethal as she used to be without the nectar, but the girl was still half necromancer and half everything else she absorbed the night of the fae war.

And Raven was just as frightening.

But they could die like the rest of us, and we had too many against us.

Nyx’s screech rang out again, close this time, followed by the sound of her talons dragging over the roof, the metal splitting under her claws right over Brexley’s head.

“Shereallyhates you.” I wrenched the wheel, plowing through a horde of guards, their frames tumbling over the hood.

“We have to suppress the Druid’s power to drop the barrier.” Brexley rolled down her window enough to shoot at the mindless guards coming after us, making me feel we werein some end-of-world dystopia. “Can you do that?” she asked Raven.

“No.” She shook her head. “It takes more than one to counter another Druid’s magic.”

“But you and your brother could?”

“Maybe.” She shrugged. “Like I said, I’m not a normal Druid.”

“It’s worth a try.” Brexley shot out one side while Warwick shot out the other from the back.

Raven peered over at me. “I can’t leave him here.”

“Looks like we’re going in.” I pointed the car towards the garden entrance of the castle, the one Dzsinn and I had entered. But too many would follow us. “We need a distraction.”

“Allow me,” Brexley spoke before Warwick did. In seconds Wesley’s car broke away from us, twisting in the opposite direction, tossing hand grenades out the windows and creating mayhem, steering most guards toward them.

“What are they doing?”

“I told Scorpion to go the opposite way,” Brexley stated. “Take attention off us.”

I sometimes forgot she and Scorpion had a spirit-like connection too. Saving his life that fateful night had linked them forever, as well as her and Warwick.

“Okay.” I gripped the steering wheel tight, pressing the gas, curving the car around a pond. “Get in the back seat!”

Brexley and Raven crawled over with Warwick, slipping down low and bracing themselves. I pushed the gas pedal to the floor, and the car barreled toward the wooden door of the entrance barricaded with a dozen soldiers, their bullets cracking into the windshield. “Hold on!” I squeezed my eyes shut, the car plowing into the men, chopping them down until the bonnet crashed into the door.

CRACK!

The force punched into me like a whip. The door splintered into pieces, breaking open, but the thickness jolted the automobile to an abrupt stop.

My forehead slammed into the steering wheel, spinning my mind, pooling bile in my throat.

“Raven?” I forced myself to move, turning to peer in the backseat. “Are you guys okay?”

“Yeah, I think.” She groaned. Blood trickled out of Warwick’s nose and forehead, his body curled over the two girls, taking the worst of the impact.

A hawk’s cry sounded from the sky, rushing urgency through me.

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