Page 2 of Great Falls Protector
Looking down from the ridge where Coal and I ventured to survey the small army of campgrounds growing on what were recently sheep fields, I shake my head at the neat rows of tents. Torches and lanterns flicker in every direction, distant shouts and bursts of laughter echoing up the valley. By now, less than a week out from the Prowess Trials, the whole place has transformed from an isolated sleepy town to the makeshift capital of a new world, the Academy’s flag atop the keep tower flapping like a beating heart.
All are in high spirits, impatient for the coming games—and completely unaware of the potential danger lying in wait.
“You know”—I pull aside a prickly branch before it whacks me in the face—“with not so much as a loose sclice in the Great Falls woods for nearly two months now, I actually thought things might be shifting in our favor.”
“I didn’t.”
“Yes, but you just like killing things.”
Coal gives me a menacing look and quickens his pace so I nearly have to jog just to keep up with him. His tall, sculpted body cuts so easily through the night, it’s as if the air moves aside for him, every muscle in his powerful thighs and backside outlined under his tight black pants. If he’s going to make me run back, at least I can enjoy the view.
Deprived of killing sclices and other nastiness, the male has been channeling his pent-up frustration into correcting what he declared a deficiency in my training. “Now that I remember what you are, there is no reason to coddle you in the ring,” he’d informed me two months ago before launching into a new morning torment routine that has the other cadets keeping their distance from me, lest some of Coal’s inventiveness splashes their way. “Plus, the more time you spend in Shade’s company, the better. So, I’m doing us all a favor.”
Even these nightly patrols—with little else to occupy us—have become training opportunities, Coal stopping us in random moonlit clearings for near-silent sparring sessions. They usually start with me being pinned to the ground with no warning, furiously trying to free myself—and sometimes end with my back on the ground or against a tree, racing just as breathlessly to wrap my legs around Coal’s naked waist and fit him inside me.
The bond’s magic may be muted here in the mortal world, but the mating instinct feels just as strong—sometimes overwhelming now that Coal has his memories back. Tree bark or desk lamp or bedframe be damned.
By the timeCoal and I return to the library, Arisha and Gavriel have the place littered with books, maps, and notes. So far, we have all the hundreds of temporary staff camps marked on a chart, along with schedules of soon-to-arrive royals. The pot of red ink we’ve prepared to mark places of recent blight activity stands untouched, and it has for months.
“Tell me you two killed something today,” Arisha says, her back to the door as she juggles a journal in one hand and Minion—the two-pound kitten she found last week in the newly built arena’s scaffolding—in the other.
I shake my head. “No.”
Sticking his furry little orange head over Arisha’s shoulder, Minion hisses at Coal and me, showing a tiny mouth full of needle-sharp teeth.
“The night is young,” Coal tells the cat darkly.
Arisha turns, cuddling the vicious little feline as she glares at Coal, her wire-rimmed glasses askance over her narrowed blue eyes. Her freckles stand out more starkly now on her pale face after too many hours spent inside, deep in research—morning training being the one exception. Arisha may have expected Coal, upon learning the truth, to look the other way whenever she decided physical training wasn’t the best use of her time—but he disabused her of that notion with one raised brow and a great deal of running.
The warrior crosses his large arms over his chest, the sheer power exuding from him filling the room. Even with my amulet dulling my senses, his metallic musk makes my skin prickle, my body longing for the feel of his—as it seems to do approximately every few hours.
“I liked him better when he didn’t know he was a bloody legendary fae warrior,” Arisha tells me. “And that amount wasn’t much to begin with.”
“Good. There is little to like.” Grabbing one of her braids, Coal moves her out of his way as he takes a chair across from Gavriel. “When wards erode naturally, does it look like a steady decline or flashes of on-and-off activity?”
Gavriel takes off his glasses, cleaning them against the lapel of his robe. “Steady. Wards turning on and off is purposeful activity.” Despite an utter lack of progress in finding a way to mend the shattering wards, the man still knows more about how they function than any of the rest of us. “Might I hope you are asking out of academic curiosity?”
“That one has as much academic curiosity as I have coordination,” Arisha mutters.
“There was a moment today when we had full access to our magic,” I say, joining the others at the table as I recount the event, the Guild members’ faces getting progressively darker with each word. “Could it have been a glitch or something like the opposite of Ostera?”
Dislodging Minion, Arisha walks to the celestial reference text, her mouth moving through complex calculations before she shakes her head. “No. And even if there was a lunar influence, it would be nothing this stark.”
“So someone—let’s presume it was the Night Guard—pried the wards open on purpose?” I say. “But why now, and why only for a moment?”
“It stinks of a bloody mouse trap,” says Coal. “The Prowess Trials at the Academy to gather the royals, a sudden lack of Mors rodents to keep the prey from spooking, and now the magic jaws poised to snap shut.” The male growls his frustration, slamming his hand down on a side table.
Minion, crouching low on Arisha’s shoulder, hisses.
“The royals will be sitting ducks, and the bloody reality is that no matter what we do, we can’t keep an eye on all of them at once,” says Coal. “It will be a bloody massacre before we even get to the scene of battle.”
I rub my eyes with the heels of my hands. Coal is right. Without knowing how and when the attack will come, we can’t position ourselves to stop it—and telling this to Sage is more likely to get us thrown out of the Academy as anything else, where our ability to do something will drop to a heroic zero. The headmaster’s precious Prowess team and their parents are going nowhere.
I freeze.
Precious Prowess team. The eye of this whole blasted storm.
The fragments of an idea start forming in my mind. “Maybe Coal and I are only two people,” I say slowly, the fragments knitting tighter together, sending dread spiraling into my gut. “But I think I know how to get us into a better defensive position.”
