Merciless Villains (Ruthless Villains Book 5)

The people of Eldar believed that dark mages were selfish and power-hungry. That we craved control over everything and everyone around us, and that we enjoyed seeing the fear and awe in our victims’ eyes as they bowed in submission and begged us for mercy. That we lied and cheated and killed without conscience or remorse. And that we would burn the whole fucking world down to get what we wanted. Unfortunately for them, they were absolutely right.

A vibrating force scythe shot through the air, severing a constable’s arm from his shoulder. I followed it up with another spinning arc that cut his head off. It plummeted to the grass along with the rest of his body while blood misted the warm afternoon air.

“Go left,” Audrey snapped from behind my back.

Not hesitating a second, I immediately took a step to the left while raising a force wall to block the combined wind and fire attack that the constables threw at me from straight ahead. Lightning shot past me on the right a fraction of a second later, coming from behind.

Audrey let out a low snarl of annoyance.

I couldn’t spare her side of the battle any attention, but the rapid flashing of glittering green light on the grass around us suggested that she had increased her attack speed even more. We were fighting back to back so I couldn’t see what was happening on her side, and since she didn’t have any defensive magic with which to block, she had to warn me if an attack went through. So far, I had managed to dodge them all, but I could tell that it irritated her when a strike slipped past her.

A boom echoed across the hills as a blast of wind magic slammed into my force shield. I released it the moment it had stopped the attack and instead hurled a wide arc towards the five constables who still drew breath on my side. Three of them blocked it with a wall of water while the others shot more attacks at me. A fireball and a lightning bolt zapped through the air, but I managed to shove them off course with a well-timed shield, and then threw another spinning arc. It cleaved the constable on the left halfway down her chest.

I had almost forgotten how to fight against people who were connected to the Great Current. After battling our way up the dark mage mountain in Castlebourne and then dealing with Johnson and Kane’s gang of vengeful idiots in Malgrave, I had gotten used to fighting people who possessed raw power. One power. These constables weren’t nearly as powerful as Johnson’s gang had been, but each one of them could switch between several different magic types. And that was annoying. There were also quite a lot of them.

Heat washed over me as two simultaneous fire attacks crashed into my defending force wall. I shoved it sideways before calling up a massive scythe and hurling it at the constables across the now bloodstained grass.

Only two of them managed to block it in time.

Fear flashed across their faces as they tried desperately to hold off the sudden barrage I started up. Wind and water smacked into my attacks, but their power levels were so much lower than mine. Stumbling backwards, they whipped their heads around in search of back-up. But there was none.

There had been twenty of them when they had ambushed us. Fortunately, Audrey’s quick reflexes had managed to take out five of them before they could even get the first shot off. The remaining fifteen had pushed in on us from two sides, trying to split our focus and take us down separately. But Audrey and I had done this dance quite a lot at this point. I trusted her to watch my back, just as I watched hers, which gave us seven to one odds. And against normal magic users, that wasn’t too much of a problem for dark mages like us.

Green poison magic suddenly shot past me and slammed into the two constables who had been busy blocking my force arcs. They collapsed to the ground immediately. With shock still lingering on their faces, their lifeless eyes stared unseeing up into the bright blue sky.

Turning slowly, I arched an eyebrow at the poison mage who now stood next to me.

She lifted her shoulders in a nonchalant shrug. “You were taking too long.”

“I was just about to finish them off.” I shot her a pointed look. “If you had just waited ten more seconds, they would’ve been dead.”

“Uh-huh. Ten more seconds was still too long.”

Reaching out, I took her jaw in a firm grip and leaned down closer to her face. “Don’t steal my kills.”

“I won’t.” A smirk played over her lips as she lifted a hand and gave my cheek a couple of brisk pats. “When you stop being so inefficient.”

I slid my hand from her jaw and instead wrapped it around her throat while slanting my lips over hers. “Oh the things I could do to you.”

“I know.” Her dark laugh danced over my mouth. “So let’s go kill Chancellor Quill and Lance Carmichael and everyone else so that we can finally get to that part.”

With my hand still locked around her throat, I pulled her the final bit to me and claimed those wicked lips for myself. She grabbed the back of my neck, holding me firmly against her as she answered the possessive kiss.

My heart still beat twice as hard every time she did that. Every time she touched me and kissed me as if she was declaring to the whole damn world that I was hers. And I was. Every blackened piece of my soul belonged to this vicious little poisoner.

All I wanted to do was lift her up and feel her wrap her legs around my waist. But we had people to slaughter and a war to win, so I grudgingly released my grip on her throat and stepped back.

She ran her tongue over those luscious lips and flashed me a smirk, informing me that she knew exactly what I’d been thinking, before she swept her gaze across the rolling grasslands.

“The horses are gone,” she observed.

“Yeah.” They had run off quickly when we were ambushed by the squad of constables. “But it shouldn’t be that far to Grant’s mansion now.”

“That’s what worries me. If Quill sent this patrol,” she motioned towards the dead men and women around us, “out here, it must mean that his main force isn’t far off either. We need to get to the mansion before they do.”

“Agreed.”

I jerked my chin and started forward. Audrey scanned the corpses littering the grass before falling in beside me as we continued on foot towards Harvey Grant’s mansion.

While Audrey and I were in Malgrave trying to persuade Levi to help us, Henry had sent a message saying that he and Paige and Sam had reached Grant’s mansion safely. Since Grant’s mansion was protected by that massive magic-infused garden, we had decided that it was the best place for them to lie low until we could come back with Levi’s people. We hadn’t heard anything from them since, but hopefully that just meant that there was nothing to tell.

“I wonder where Malcolm and Sienna are,” Audrey said after a while. “Back in Castlebourne, Sam just said that Malcolm was on the run and Sienna was unaccounted for. But that was weeks ago. We’ll need them if we’re going to win this war.”

“I’m sure they’re out here somewhere. Malcolm is too smart to get caught. And Sienna is too unpredictable, so they won’t be able to capture her either.”

“I agree. But the problem is, how the hell do we find them then?”

“Let’s just meet up with Henry and Paige and the others first. Then we can make a plan while we wait for Levi to show up with his people.”

“Yeah.”

After telling Levi how to get to Grant’s mansion, we had left the King of Metal in Malgrave to clean up the rest of Trevor Gale’s gang on his own. With one exception. Audrey and I had tracked down the water mage and the lightning mage who had worked for Trevor and who had tortured us in that warehouse when they tested our loyalty. And when we found them, we had tortured them to death instead. Brutal revenge at its finest.

It hadn’t surprise me that Levi had given us permission to do that. He understood the concept of getting even, more than most. What had surprised me was that he’d had his healer fix all of our injuries before we left. It hadn’t been part of our original deal, and the King of Metal wasn’t exactly known for his selfless generosity. Especially not where I was concerned. But maybe he really had been satisfied with how we had dealt with the threat to his wife.

“Do you hear that?” Audrey asked, pulling me out of my thoughts, after a long stretch of silence.

Cocking my head, I listened. My heart sank. “Yeah.”

Audrey blew out an annoyed breath. Her dark hair rippled in the golden sunlight as she pushed it back over her shoulder and adjusted the straps on her pack. “Let’s approach carefully.”

“I thought you liked to make an entrance.”

A brief smile blew across her lips, but it didn’t stick. She was worried. And so was I, to be honest. If the noise coming from below the hill was what we thought it was, Henry and Paige were in more trouble than we had feared.

Tension crackled in the air around us as we snuck across the sloping grass and approached the edge. When we were almost there, we dropped to the ground and crawled the final stretch so that we wouldn’t be spotted against the clear sky behind us.

The air around me smelled like warm grass and soil, but it did little to dispel the dread that pulsed through me with every beat of my heart. Henry had to be okay. He was strong and capable. And I wasn’t sure if I could handle it if Quill had somehow managed to take him. So he had to be okay.

Sunlight beat down on me, warming my back through my leather armor as Audrey and I closed the final distance to the edge. Bracing myself on my elbows, I peered down into the valley below the slope.

Another wave of dread washed over me. Fuck.

Harvey Grant’s mansion sat nestled like a white jewel in the thick greenery that served as both his gardens and his defense against enemies. But that was not what made my heart thump in my chest.

The gardens were surrounded.

A massive ring of people had laid siege to the mansion. As far as I could tell, all of them were still stuck outside the gardens, but they had circled them so that no one would be able to get in or out.

I stared at the sheer number of people. These couldn’t only be constables. It had to be other volunteers who were decently skilled in combat too. They really hadn’t been exaggerating when they said that they had mustered the whole city for war.

Lying on her stomach beside me, Audrey heaved a frustrated sigh.

“Well, this war is off to a great start.”