Page 89 of A Promise of Peridot
My low growl shook rain from nearby leaves.
I thought I heard Arwen say my name once in warning, but it was too late. My steel dagger clashed with the bandit’s sword in a violent clamor, and then they were on us like a swarm of bees.
Another masked man charged me, and I drove my knife through his improvised pot-lid shield with ease. He’d been running toward me fast enough that the blow sent him careening toward Arwen’s feet, where she kicked him square in the temple.
“Arwen,” I grunted, shoving back a kid with a block-shaped head into a wide, wet tree. “Back to camp. Now.”
But she slid up against me, her chest pressed to mine, and my heart attacked my rib cage like a cornered animal. Before I could articulate my confusion, she pulled my longsword from its sheath and plunged it into something—or someone—behind me.
“Watch out,” she breathed.
I pivoted from a thug swiping at us with a crude butcher’s knife and ducked his next blow, though I felt the stinging scrape of the blade against my forearm. I reared back and drove my dagger into his gut until the hilt met skin and a gruesome groan gurgled from him.
Two more men hurtled toward me. Unable to swiftly dislodge my dagger, I knocked them to the ground with the man still impaled on my knife like a human wrecking ball.
The whisper of a single arrow soaring through the air pulled my attention behind me. It was headed toward—
No, no,no—black wisps of my lighte reached from my hand and just narrowly slipped around the bolt, inches from Arwen’s back.
The wood splintered into sheer mist, and my stomach fell to my boots.
Far,fartoo close.
But she was none the wiser, driving my sword into non-vital organs. Thighs and arms and shins. Her blade singing through the night as she feinted to the right and used her pommel to smack an assailant hard in the temple, knocking him to the ground.
That move actually looked familiar.
“Where’d you learn that?” I called, as my knife landed on another bandit’s club, mere inches from my kneecap.
“Griffin taught me,” she gritted out, heaving an eager assailant off her with a grunt.
I had to admit, the thought of fighting alongside Arwen had terrified me. But she was... astounding. So strong, so poised. Strangely merciful, which made no sense to me, but was so innately Arwen. Each of her movements executed in striking harmony like a ballerina. A graceful goddess of force and precision.
“Kane!”
Her voice cut through my affectionate thoughts just in time for me to rear my arm back and deck a lanky kid sprinting toward me square in the face. He clattered to the ground with a wheeze, another already charging. I absorbed the bandit’s impact and we both went down. Driving my knee into his groin, I pushed myself up and planted my knife in his windpipe.
And then there were more—so, so many more.
“Ah, fuck.”
As promised, dozens of bandits crawled from the tree line, drawn to the sound of the brawl. Surrounding us on every side.
I cut a glance at Arwen, her sword now soaked in blood and her brow gleaming with sweat.
We couldn’t take them all. Not without help.
I rolled my shoulders back and undid the top few buttons of my soaked shirt. The power I fought to keep at bay inside me—fighting and squirming for release—galloped out with the speed of a prized stallion. It spun and curved around the glade, a single obsidian rope from my palm, sprouting spikes like razors and slicing cleanly through six men.
At the sound of Arwen’s grunts and metal against blunt wood, I sent the next wave of twisted power in her direction. The shimmering smoke spun around her ankles, almost tenderly protective, before spinning outward and suffocating the three men that surrounded her. She shot me an appreciative nod.
I opened my mouth to tell her once again togo find fucking Griffin, before pain bloomed in my shoulder blade.
Real, bruising pain.
I whirled on two bandits wielding bats. Poison-black vines wrapped around their necks, constricting like snakes until both men were mere pale, gray husks on the ground.
Fuck. I rubbed my shoulder.
