"Stay with Hala," Void ordered Mav, and stalked across the room to catch the blonde woman when she darted past Sang. At that moment, my Cheshire Cat slashed open the stomach of an unfamiliar weapon, and I retched. Blood and intestines splashed everywhere, covering Sang and Voidandthe other weapons, and making the ground slippery, dangerous.
"Oh god," I breathed, watching, itching to run to them.
Adrenaline pounded in my veins, my heart loud in my ears when Void crashed into the blonde weapon, slamming her into the wall beside the lift. He growled when she erupted into flame, but didn’t step back or let her go. My stomach roiled.
"Sang, that man’s got storm magic," I called out as my mate turned towards the other weapon. I cursed the tentacle holding me back, desperate to be fighting with him. "Be careful."
Sang laughed, not even a drop of worry in his voice as he angled towards the two weapons still occupying the lift.
He lurched forward when the man lifted his hands, storming out of the lift, and I felt sick as Sang rushed forward to meet him.
"What's he doing?" I demanded, pushing Mav's tentacle hard and taking a stuttering step.
"Sang!" I screamed in warning, recognising the bright flare of blue magic on the weapon's hands a second before he grabbed my mate's shoulders.
Time blurred at the smell of burnt flesh, the present overlapping with the past, and I shook hard enough that I nearly dropped the moon dagger in my hand.
"Stay behind me; follow close,"Vann said in a stern tone.
"Volts don't work on this one," the keeper with the bald spot shouted at his back up. "And someone get the others back to their hutches. Now!"
I struggled to breathe when the keepers—including the man who made sure I behaved my entire life—put away their prods and drew the sharp tactical knives that hung from their belts, normally unused. Normally harmless. But not anymore.
"Vann," I whispered tightly. "You've got to go."
Instead of running, he threw the mangled prod aside and two streaks of black magic filled his hands, stronger and darker than anything I'd seen before. He'd been holding back. A lot.
Some shadowkind we hunted used their magic to defend themselves—I'd been blasted into buildings, knocked into the middle of the road, been bruised all over, burned, my bones broken—but this was so much stronger. I could feel the force of it from a foot away, the air vibrating around his hands like it was scalding hot.
For a second, hope twisted through my chest and I thought his power would be enough to get us out of this.
But then even more keepers poured into the room in their uniforms, each with a prod in one hand and a sharp knife in the other. Vann might have been immune to a shock, but I knew steel would cut him as easily as any human.
"Hala,Hala!"Mav hissed urgently, and I startled back into the present, my heart slamming against my chest and sweat sliding down my back.
"Mav," I rasped, blinking at his face, so similar to Vann's that it cut my heart down the middle.
Movement over Mav's blue shoulder drew my eye, and I cried out at the sight of Void grappling with the fiery weapon, bright orange flames crawling up his grey arms.
"I told Void I'd protect you, and I'm not about to break that promise," Mav growled, winding his tentacles around my middle and drawing me back. "Let them fight, firecracker. They're tough bastards; they'll be fine."
But his voice was strained, and I knew he was struggling with staying out of the fight, too. How many times had the three of them fought together, back to back? It must have been second nature to rush into conflict alongside them.
"They're going to get hurt," I breathed. "We have to help them.Please," I begged when Sang staggered back with a low laugh, a big swath of brown skin on his chest singed and raw. The storm weapon advanced on him, pushing him further from the lift, the man's broad shoulders squared. He might have been much shorter than Sang, but if he was intimidated he didn't show it. He'd been trained not to, like I had.
"This isn't going to work," I said, shuddering with the need to act, to run, to fight. "You don't understand. We've been trained to hunt shadowkind. Every weapon was bred for the single purpose ofkillingyou. You can't fight us. And if you die here in the void, you die for real. You won't come back, Mav."
"I know," he agreed, but he didn't relax his tentacle around me. His body pressed to my back, stiff and tense as we watched Void draw both his swords and slash them at the fiery woman.
My heart crashed when the silver metal of his swords just … melted. He let go with a deep, furious sound, letting the hilts drop to the floor with twin thuds.
"Shit," Mav breathed, a shudder moving through him into me.
I dragged a shaky breath into my lungs, the scent of burning skin on my tongue, making memories of cattle prods lurch up around me again, but I fought them back. I'd lost Vann that day, and I would never recover from it, but here and now I could lose these three men, too. I refused to.
"Let me go, Maverick," I said in a calm, steely voice I rarely heard. "I'm not a porcelain doll; I'm a weapon trained to kill. You don't need to protect me."
If anything, Mav held me tighter. "Just try and stop me protecting you, Hala. Just fucking try it."