“Most wizards don’t look like they’re having fun,” he noted sourly.
“Because they love the power. They get all their pleasure from the rush of that, whereasyou, my ethically tortured wizard, are much too worried about the consequences of power to enjoy it.”
She had a point. He was about to reply—probably with something she’d call self-excoriating philosophizing—when he caught the unpleasantly familiar feel of something…
“Hunters!” he yelled, spinning and thrusting Nic behind him. He wasn’t wearing his sword, but he’d been practicing for a crisis just like this. Beyond fortuitous that he hadn’t thought of a way to use his moon magic. Extruding a silver sword from his own magic, he faced the hunter slinking toward them. A creature of House Tadkiel’s ruthless justice and House Ariel’s animal-mutating magic, the thing was nothing out of nature. Like an amalgam of a jackal and a weasel in vaguely human shape, it moved with an arching glide, lifting its long snout in the air to sniff in Nic’s direction, tilting its head sideways to fasten one eye on them.
“Lady Veronica Phel,” it crooned. “You will come quietly.”
Behind him, Nic made an incoherent choking sound.
“Lady Phel is going nowhere,” Gabriel growled, levering the point of the sword toward the creature’s eye. “Go back to your masters and tell them Lady Phel is mine now. She’s where she belongs.”
“Lord Phel.” The hunter dipped its snout, jaws parting to reveal rows of teeth. “You may appeal to the Convocation to have thiss familiar returned to you, eventually, in accordansse with the law. But sshe will be taken into cusstody now. Sstand asside.”
“Never. Begone or I will kill you.”
The jaw dropped open further, giving the gruesome implication of a grin. “You did not ssucceed sso far, wissard.”
With a sinking sense of horror, Gabriel realized this must be the hunter from the barge. He’d blasted a hole the size of a watermelon in the thing’s chest, then washed it overboard where it should have drowned. Nic growled in frustration, and he knew she’d realized the same thing. Somehow the thing hadn’t died, and instead swam ashore and tracked them here.
The hunter snapped its jaws closed, hissing threats through its fangs. “I cannot be killed. I warned you previoussly that you have made a grave misstake interfering with uss and there would be conssequenssess if you persisted, Lord Phel.” A shiver of magic sifted over Gabriel, one he recognized from before. One that had frozen him immobile, rendering him helpless. And prompting Nic to thoroughly lecture him on being such a shitty wizard that he let a canned spell overpower him.Not this time.Using the purifying force of his moon magic, he shattered the spell before it could bind him. Huh. Surprisingly simple. No wonder Nic had been contemptuous of him for being caught by it previously.
The hunter sniffed, and its slimy gaze slid past him to Nic. “Learned some tricksss, have we, wissard? Nissse, but you interfere with the Convocation at your peril.”
“Blah blah blah,” Gabriel growled, keeping himself—and his sword—between the hunter and Nic as it tried to sidle around. “If I slice you into enough pieces, it’s the same as death.”
“Are you sssure?” The hunter snarled. And Nic screamed.
Gabriel whirled reflexively, cursing at the sight of two more hunters bearing Nic to the ground. She thrashed and fought, but their unnatural strength was more than she could resist. Mastering himself—because he knew they wanted her intact, along with the child she carried, and so wouldn’t hurt her—he turned back to the lead hunter just as it launched itself at him, fanged jaws snapping, curved talons slicing for him.
Fortunately, Gabriel might have shitty wizard reflexes, but he knew how to wield a sword. Better, his muscles knew, moving instinctively from all those years of practice when he thought he’d be only a farmer lad defending his land against the raiders and scavengers. His blade snicked through the hunter, cleaving off one hairy arm at the elbow. The hunter shrieked but kept coming at him, raking at Gabriel’s midsection in a taloned swipe that could have disemboweled him if he hadn’t jerked himself back in time. The upside was the hunter overreached and Gabriel sidestepped, bringing the sword down in an execution-style, two-handed blow—neatly decapitating the thing.
“Let’s see how you do without a head,” Gabriel snarled, turning to help Nic.
“You cannot evade the Convocation, wissard,” the head answered. “Give up the familiar now and ssave yoursself the devasstashion that awaits you.”
Gabriel considered stopping down on those jaws to shut the thing up, but the other two hunters had Nic pinned to the ground, one sitting on her as it tried to wrest a new iron collar around her neck. Without pausing, Gabriel simply beheaded both, sending those heads flying. To his supreme annoyance, the bodies continued their task as if nothing had changed.
Nic’s eyes widened in alarm. “Behind you!”
Gabriel grunted, staggering as a weight hit him from behind. The headless body of the lead hunter gripped him, claws scrabbling for purchase on his waterlogged clothes as the head laughed at him, the hyena aspect of the creature coming out in shrilling cackles. Reaching over his head with his free hand, Gabriel grasped a black-blood-soaked hairy shoulder and snapped the bones in his grip. Dragging the beast off him, he methodically chopped off the arms and legs, then yanked one hunter off Nic, then the other, butchering them both.
He and Nic stared at each other a moment, her eyes bright green with emotion, both of them panting. Holding a hand down to her, he asked, “Are you all right?”
“Yes.” She paused, then nodded, taking his hand and climbing to her feet, picking her way over the grasping limbs and twitching bodies. “That was a bit startling.”
Gabriel stared at her a moment longer, then choked out a hoarse laugh. “I’ll say.”
“You interfere with the Convocation at your peril, wissard!” the lead hunter shrieked.
He gave in to the savage impulse and kicked the yipping head, sending it sailing through the air to plop into the marsh. Nic watched it for a moment, then turned back to him, brows raised. “You might regret that.”
“I wanted to shut it up.”
“Indeed you did. But what happens when the head grows a new body and these limbs grow more hunters?” She nudged the limb crawling toward her by dint of digging talons into the muddy ground and dragging the rest behind it.
“Is that what happened? Because I could swear we used the enchanted dagger to melt all but the one that washed overboard.”