Page 164 of House of Embers
Most of the forces had been set up in front of the arena, still healing from its scars, and that was where Clover and her army hadcreated their own trap. Magical artifacts had been laid like land mines in a network that would be triggered by an amulet, which she currently held.
“The others are in position,” Jennith told her.
Clover sighed and glanced around one more time. Hadrian and Darby were supposed to have been here on the battlefield with her. Kerrigan had promised. And still they had never shown. Clover didn’t know what had held them up, what could possibly have kept them. But she couldn’t delay any longer.
“On your command,” Jennith said.
That was when the first spike of adrenaline hit Clover. All she’d been feeling was abject fear as they set this all up. She was sure that one of her soldiers would get blown to pieces or they’d get caught in the middle of the night. But no dragons had flown last night as they put the network together.
Only now were dragons engaging with Kerrigan’s army. Clover couldn’t pick out individual dragons the way that Kerrigan could, but she could tell that their army was more organized than the Society ones. Whatever the Society dragons were doing, they were falling apart. All their training had gone to shit.
Good.
She hoped it kept them occupied so that she could get this done.
“Go,” Clover said with a nod.
Out of the shadows of the buildings that lined the arena, her fighters appeared. They rushed for the guards, hurling magical artifacts like skipping rocks in water. The roses hit first, a cloud of red exploding all around the guards’ feet. They scrambled away as the toxic fumes headed for them. Then the blancs were hurled second.
Boom, boom, boom.
White clouds sprouted out, damaging eardrums and knocking the guards back on their asses. A shouted roar came up and down the line as the guards began to respond to the threat before them. Theyshored up into a formation, defending against entrance into the arena where the council remained.
They surely thought that was Clover’s target, but the council had bigger problems. Right now, her people wanted the guards out of the game, and she was close to getting just that.
“Now!” Clover yelled.
Noirs exploded all around the soldiers. They coughed into their uniforms as the smoke screen clouded around them, disrupting their pretty lines.
“Payback’s a bitch,” she snapped.
The guards and Red Masks had used these methods on the protesters last summer. They’d boxed them in on the streets and made them suffer through the smoke damage. The loch that had been in her system dissipated at the touch of those toxic fumes, causing her chronic illness to flare. She could barely walk, and the pain was unmanageable. It had felt like a thousand knives crashed into her at once. Only escape and more medicine had kept her from fully collapsing in on herself.
It was poetic justice to do the same to the bastards who had harmed her that way just for asking for equality.
The guards seemed to come back to themselves in their panic. They’d been trained at least. They knew how to evade the artifacts that were now being thrown at them. That was good. They were almost in position.
She needed them to come forward another ten feet. “Come on,” she whispered. “Come on. Come on.”
The smoke began to clear as the guards rallied and rushed toward them.
“Don’t engage,” she yelled into the din. “Hold positions.”
Her soldiers stood poised and ready, their amulets in their hands. They were jumpy, ready for this fight with the guards that Clover had been forestalling until this moment.
And as the wave of guards ran across the open sand before the arena, Clover grasped the amulet in her hand and then clicked it.
The field went up with a loudBANG!
It didn’t just blow the guards sky-high; Clover’s soldiers were blasted backward. Clover was lifted bodily off her feet and thrown a dozen feet.
In the din of the explosion, there was utter silence. Or was that the ringing in her ears? Everything was a dull buzz. She coughed, hacking up the black smoke that seized through her and tried to lift to her elbows. She dropped onto her back as the pain racked her body. This wasn’t just the pain of explosion, though she had thought she and her troops were far enough away from the blast. Never had she considered the size of the thing. But the smoke had gotten into her lungs.
She remembered this feeling from the protest, how it had eaten away at the loch in her system and her pain had been unbearable. Only then she’d had Hadrian to lean on. This time, she had no one.
Her troops were in chaos. The guards they had been fighting were decimated. The world was upside down, and Clover couldn’t move. She couldn’t breathe.
She felt like she had shrapnel in her lungs. Each breath was measured and painful like she was choking on serrated fluid.
