A wicked chill slipped over me and goose bumps rose over my body. I rolled, trusting my instincts, tumbling halfway down the cliff towards the milling people. I was able to stop my free fall only by grabbing a four-inch-thick tree root that stuck out between the rocks—a perfect handhold. I stared back up the way I’d come, holding on to the root for all I was worth. Aednat was close behind. Two large Banshees stood where we’d just been.
One held a scythe, her hands manicured right down to a French-tip finish. Her face was stunning, a blend of beauty and anger that didn’t fade even when I concentrated.
The other held a long whip, which seemed to be braided with bloody sinews and tendons, but again, she was a true beauty, midnight dark hair floating around her face, black eyes pinning me to the ground.
“No, Quinn!” Aednat pushed me, forcing me to break eye contact. I shook myself.
“Thanks,” I said, letting go of the root and continuing to climb down the cliff as fast as I could, digging my fingers into small crevices and using anything I could for balance—boulders that jutted out, more roots and even tufts of grass.
“Where you going?” Aednat screeched.
I flung my hand back towards the Banshees and with the movement sent a burst of blue flame from my fingertips. The guards danced away, dodging the fire with ease. “Away from them!” I shouted over my shoulder. From the falling rocks around me, I’d guessed that Aednat saw the sense in what I was attempting. We couldn’t fight the guards on the bluffs; it would be too easy for them to maneuver us into a fall.
A glancing blow made me lose my grip with my right hand and swung me out from the rock face. My fingers were able to hold on just long enough to see that it was the Banshee with the scythe. A sharp, searing pain erupted on the right side of my back, the scythe making a perfect crescent moon slash on the top layers of skin. A few inches more and she would have sliced me in half.
“You think to free the humans?” She was floating in the air a few feet out from the bluff; I clearly had no clue what I was dealing with. She let out a long laugh, exposing her bare white neck. Using the same power bolt I’d levelled Bres with, I flung it at her, aiming for the hollow of her throat.
It snapped her head back, quite literally. The power bolt broke her neck, leaving her head dangling backwards as her body floated midair for a split second, before tumbling down, bouncing off the bluff face several times and landing on the rocks below.
One Banshee guard down; one to go.
Before I had time to see where she was, the second Banshee’s whip curled around my wrist and yanked me off the bluffs, flipping me out into midair.
I couldn’t stop the screech that escaped me. “Aednat!”
Her small body hurtled through the air and grabbed me around the waist. “Hang on!”
She slowed our fall, though I had no doubt it was still going to hurt like hell. Lucky for us, we landed on the body of the fallen Banshee and not on the rocks beside her.
The lone Banshee above us let out a wail that made my skin want to jump off my body. Spinning in a mini vortex, she disappeared in a whirl of her hair and whip.
Aednat stood and stared up at where the Banshee had been. “She’s gone for re-enforcements. Hurry.”
I scrambled to my feet. “You can fly too?”
She nodded as we ran to the edge of the clearing. It seemed that whenever I thought I knew what was going on, something new would jump out at me. Like the Barrier that we ran smack into, our bodies bouncing off with dual thuds.
“Ouch,” Aednat grumbled, rubbing her nose. “Stupid bad Queen.”
Yes, I should have known we couldn’t just walk in and take the hostages away. I slid my hands over the surface. It was similar to the Barriers I could make, but it hummed with a low frequency that set my teeth on edge. I tried to pull my hands away and they stuck, a tacky glue like substance covered the surface of the strange Barrier.
I made eye contact with a man about twenty feet away, but he looked right through me, as if I didn’t exist. “If we can get them out, how do we break the spell?” I wiped my hands on my pants.
Sidling closer to me, Aednat grit her sharp teeth for a moment before answering me. “We have to get them all the way out of the forest boundaries.”
In other words, we had to get them to hike for at least an hour through heavy bush in a zombie-ish state of being. Of course, that was if we could get them out at all.
I wracked my brain for a solution. “The last Barrier I dealt with, only Fomorii could cross it. So with this one, is it only humans that can cross it? How does it work with Banshee-made Barriers?” Blinking, I stared at the group of milling people.