But Dragan’s unique vision saved his life yet again, catching the car’s momentum as it barreled toward him. Leaping on top of the car, he gripped his blade in both hands and stabbed downward into Sotiris’s shoulder severing tendons and destroying muscle, leaving his arm limp and useless.
With blood pouring from his shoulder and back, draining down his leg from what was probably a severed kidney, while intestines bulged pink and glistening from his gut, Sotiris sucked his remaining magic into a tight protective shield, and then dropping to the ground, he opened a warp in reality and rolled into it.
An instant later, he was gone, as if he’d never been there. All that remained was his blood spotting the courtyard.
NICK EMERGED FROM a warp of his own with a crack of displaced air, just in time to see Sotiris escape yet again. He immediately strode over to the blood stains that marked his enemy’s disappearance, trying every trick he knew to trace the bastard, knowing the other sorcerer was seriously wounded and would never be more vulnerable to an attack than he was at that moment. But it was too late.
“Fuck.” He spat the word as he rose to his feet, cursing himself for not improving his ability to track through the kind of reality warps that made Sotiris’s escapes so effective. A woman’s cry interrupted his self-loathing, however, and he spun just in time to see Maeve’s petite figure all but swallowed by Dragan’s embrace, his warrior’s back as torn and bloodied as it always was after using those damn wings.
Striding toward the massive blast hole in his house, he ignored the destruction, stepped over jagged chunks of stone and wood, and walked in, immediately starting down what should have been the hallway to Lili’s office, but that now resembled a war zone.
“Nick.”
He turned at the softly voiced call, his anxious gaze passing over the tossed furniture, the weapons scattered on the floor, the empty magazines lying wherever they’d been thrown. Until finally he saw Lili’s slender form rising from behind a table, one pale hand gripping the chair back as if afraid she’d fall over.
“Lili,” he cried, half relief, half worry, though he could see no blood, no wounds. But Lili wasn’t . . . human, though few people knew that. She was smart and loyal, but life had taught her it was better hide than to fight. This battle must have been terrifying for her.
“I’m all right,” she said, placing her hand on his arm. “Maeve . . .” She coughed dryly. “It’s so dusty here.”
He immediately guided her to the kitchen, which had been sheltered from most of the destruction, settled her on a chair, and twisted open a bottle of cold water from the fridge. “This will help.”
She took a few sips, nodding in gratitude. “I just want to sleep,” she said faintly. “I need to be alone.”
“I know. Come on, I’ll take you there.”
IT WAS SEVERAL minutes before Nick got back to the disaster of his living room and stepped through what was left of his front wall. Gabriel and Hana had arrived, and having already been given the short version of what had transpired, spun on Nick, wanting to know if he and Casey had succeeded, and if everyone was still alive back at the stadium.
“We did it. Casey and Damian are guarding the damn box for now. I took a short cut here, hoping to catch Sotiris in the act. Failed again.” He ignored the murmurs of encouragement, telling him it wasn’t his fault. He knew it was. But he’d no sooner had that thought that an even worse possibility occurred to him.
Swinging around, he strode over to where Dragan was sitting inside one of the cars, Maeve more than halfway on his lap as he dabbed at the blood flecking her cheeks and forehead, a more serious injury on her upper arm having already been wrapped in gauze. They both looked up when he crouched in front of the open door and addressed Maeve.
“Did he get it?” he asked quietly. He wasn’t accusing her of anything, especially not given everything she and Lili had been through, but he needed to know. “Did he get it, Maeve?”
His heart sank when she only gave him an exhausted stare, but then she shook her head. “No, Kato has it.” Her voice was so low, so rough, that he had to lean forward to hear as she continued. “He and Grace went out the back, to the boat. Sotiris never realized. It’s really over,” she breathed, then buried her face against Dragan’s chest, as his arms came around her.
“Thank you, Maeve,” he said, placing a gentle hand on her back. “Thank you for protecting Lili, and for outsmarting that evil son of a bitch. You’ve saved more lives than you know.”
She nodded her head without looking at him, Dragan’s arms tightening even more before he lifted his eyes to meet Nick’s, the look in them saying what they both knew. This wouldn’t be over until Sotiris was dead. “We’re all here, Nico,” he murmured. “It’s time.”
“Past time,” Nick agreed, making a vow to his warrior, before he stood and studied the house with a long, exhausted breath. “We can’t stay here tonight,” he muttered, then turned at the sound of a boat’s engine idling to a stop at the dock behind the house. Everyone tensed, weapons up and ready until Kato’s familiar voice called, “Friend, not foe,” a moment before he and Grace emerged from the shadows on the side of the house, and walked up to where Nick waited.
“Please tell me they both made it out alive,” Kato said somberly.
“They did. Lili’s fine, already asleep. Maeve has some cuts, nothing too serious.”
Kato’s eyes closed in relief. “This is yours, I believe.” He handed over a clear plastic garbage bag, filled with crumpled paper and . . .
The weight hit him the minute it touched his palm. The hexagon, in a trash bag. Perfect. “Thank you.”
But Kato shook his head. “Don’t thank me. Thank Maeve and Lili. They’re the ones who stayed behind to face Sotiris.”
“Can you get someone in tonight to secure this place?” Grace asked, eyeing the destruction.
“I guess I’ll have to. I have people I can call.”
“You can’t stay here,” she protested.
“I can’t leave Lili. I’ll get a team in to block it off and I’ll set some new wards. The bedrooms are all upstairs. They should be fine. Fine enough, anyway. We’ll be all right.”
IN THE END, THEY all stayed, too worried about reprisals from Sotiris to trust the security of the hotel, or even the makeshift repair on Nick’s house. He was as good as his word, calling in a team of security and construction experts, who specialized in making the unlivable, livable—temporarily anyway—until the proper repairs could be made. It was one of the benefits of living in Florida, with its annual hurricane disasters, he considered as he drove back to the stadium to pick up Damian and Casey, and to collect his enemy’s nasty little woodshop project. He could examine it in more detail, now that it had been drained of its magical juice by a combination of Nick’s power, and Casey’s innovative use of a safety pin to dig a miniscule hole around the tiny valve which Sotiris had used to input the power he’d stolen. The solution had been Casey’s idea. If she couldn’t slam an ax into the box to destroy it, she decided, then a slow leak might work instead. Nick hadn’t been certain, hence the containment field he’d erected, which wouldn’t have saved everyone in the stadium, but would have saved most.