“Tori.” Cearra’s head and shoulders appeared in the empty window frame, her blond ponytail splattered with green potion. “I can’t believe you did that.”
“Did what?” Ezra asked.
The apprentice sorceress glowered at me. “She called out that she surrendered and threw her gun outside, then fired on us when we moved in to capture her.”
Ezra blinked—then burst into laughter. My innards did another dumb somersault.
“It’s not funny!” Cearra burst out. “It was underhanded and dishonest and—”
“And something you should have expected.” Andrew, the fiftyish-year-old team leader, stopped beside her, framed in the window. He pushed his goggles on top of his head. “That’s exactly the kind of trick a cornered enemy might pull.”
I tried not to look too smug.
“But,” Kai interjected as he sat up, rubbing his shoulder, “don’t go out in a blaze of glory in real combat, Tori. We can’t rescue you if you’re dead.”
“Did I hear that right?” Aaron leaned over the gap in the ceiling, peering down at us with bright blue eyes, his copper hair tousled. Behind him, Sin capped her antidote bottle. “How many did you take out, Tori?”
“Four,” I answered, my smugness intensifying as I smirked at Cearra.
Aaron laughed and the blond sorceress stormed off, her ponytail swishing.
We gathered our things and returned to the starting point in a big, chattering crowd. Teammates reunited with one another, laughingly commiserating over their unlucky “deaths” while Sin quizzed them on the potion’s effects.
“I still don’t get how it can knock us out through our gear,” Liam, our short and weaselly telekinetic, told her as he rubbed his shoulder like it hurt. Which it probably did. I remembered firing that shot early in the game. “Sleeping potions need skin contact, don’t they?”
“It isn’t actually the paintball that knocks you out,” Sin replied. “It’s the draft I had everyone drink at the start. Inhaling the paintball vapors activates it.”
A safety feature, I was guessing. No unlucky passersby could be knocked out by our paintballs.
“Hurry up,” Andrew called to the seventeen Crow and Hammer members—two teams of eight, plus Sin, who’d been in charge of potions and antidotes—as we milled into the parking lot after depositing our gear. “We need to get back to the guild and clean up before the monthly meeting starts.”
Sin and I joined Aaron, Kai, and Ezra, and we piled into Aaron’s SUV. Letting Sin take the middle spot, I guiltily stretched my legs out. I didn’t miss Aaron’s old sports car with its almost nonexistent backseat, and that made me feel worse about its early demise. Aaron was still half-heartedly searching for a new vehicle, and he’d rented a boring SUV in the meantime.
The drive passed quickly as the guys compared notes on their strategies, successes, and failures. Sitting beside Kai and Sin, I found my gaze lingering on Ezra as he twisted in his seat to see Aaron. The scar that ran down his forehead, across his pale left eye, and partway down his cheek stood out starkly against his warm bronze skin.
“Well, Tori?” Kai prompted. “Where did you go wrong with your strategy?”
I let my head fall back against the seat. “Um … the building we used was too obvious a choice. It was the closest to the tower, so the enemy expected us to go there.”
“And,” Aaron concluded triumphantly, “you walked right into our ambush.”
“Don’t you mean you walked right into Kai’s paintballs?” I shot back.
Kai and Ezra snickered. A minute later, Aaron pulled into the guild parking lot. Andrew’s SUV and the guild’s communal monster-sized van squeezed into the tiny lot after us, and everyone piled out. I automatically headed for the back door that led into the kitchen, but Andrew and Kai herded the group around to the front entrance. We mashed through the threshold, and I barely noticed the icky surge of fear the spell on the door, used to repel humans, caused me.
The pub awaited us, its ceiling striped with dark beams. Wood-paneled walls enclosed the polished tables that dotted the space, and the bar stretched across the back so the bartender—aka moi—could watch over her patrons and the door.
“Hey!” I barked as two guys bumped a table while loudly bantering about something. “Cooper, Bryce! Watch it.”
Cooper—our greasy, lazy weekend cook—and Bryce—a handsome thirtyish telepath—shot me guilty looks over their shoulders, and everyone clustered closer to avoid knocking into my tables. Yeah, that’s right. Fear Tori’s wrath.
Ramsey poked his head through the kitchen’s saloon doors. He grinned, black hair hanging in his face and dark liner dramatizing his eyes. “How did it go?”
“Red Team won!” Cameron yelled, and half the mythics threw their fists up with a cheer.
As Aaron and Ezra shouted their victory, Kai and I exchanged dark looks.
“We got a great demonstration of a new technique,” Laetitia announced. “It’s called the Tori Feint.”
My head snapped around. “Huh? What?”
Liam wormed between Aaron and Sin to throw a skinny arm around my shoulders. “No, we should call it the Tori Bluff and Blast.”
“How about the Tori Cheat?” Cearra suggested nastily.
“Sore loser much?” I asked as I shrugged off Liam’s arm.
She stiffened. “My team won.”
“Uh-huh.” Flipping my ponytail over my shoulder—then flipping the bird at Cameron and Darren when they called out new suggestions for my patented fake-surrender strategy—I led the way to the stairs. The laughing, bantering group followed.
Chapter Two
We split into the men’s and women’s showers, and I joined Sin as we waited for Gwen, Laetitia, Cearra, and Alyssa to fight it out over the two shower stalls. Lost in thought, I tugged my t-shirt over my head.
“Tori?”
“Eh?” I realized I was standing in just my bra, holding my shirt in front of me. I quickly lowered it. “What?”
Sin frowned. “You okay? No lingering potion effects?”
“No, just tired. The gang takes these games way too seriously.”
“Well, it’s more training than play,” she pointed out, stripping off her damp top. She hadn’t been running around getting shot at, but she’d been wearing the same hot gear as the rest of us. “Speaking of training, how’s that going?”
I peeled off my jeans. “Good, I think. Aaron says I’m making excellent progress. I should be, considering how hard he and Kai push me.”
She sat on the bench in front of the scuffed green lockers to pull off her socks. Gwen and Laetitia exited the shower stalls, wrapped in towels, and Alyssa and Cearra took their places.
“What about Ezra?” Sin asked. “Does he help with your training?”
“No.” My mouth twisted. “He doesn’t help. He …”
She waited a moment. “He what?”
He wasn’t even there, that’s what. Not anymore. Which was freakin’ stupid, considering he lived in the same damn house where I trained for two hours, four days a week.