A grunt and more fighting filtered through the buzz in my head.
Fin.
I sat up and my head swam. The room spun around me in swirls of black and gray. That was what happened after being deprived of oxygen and crushed by invisible magic. I glared at Olivia’s corpse and carefully stood.
Fin stood in the circle on the floor, body after body stacked up around him. But the bad guys kept on coming. He fought with his magic.
I stepped forward to help him take on some of his opposition, but when my foot hit the ground pain shot through me in a lightning strike. It burned and sizzled its way through my body from my toes to my ears.
Unable to walk, I wouldn’t be able to help him. Distracting attention would only get me slaughtered along with everyone else here. I wouldn’t leave him here though. He’d told me to run, but we both knew how well I followed orders.
Especially when they came from him.
I crouched through the pain and snagged a boot knife from the closest fallen goon. One guy attacking Fin turned toward me. I tried to smile at him, beckon him closer, but he didn’t bite, only loomed closer.
I wished I had a gun right now. For weapons, knives were my preference, but a gun would keep this guy enough distance away from me that maybe I wouldn’t get stabbed.
“Look, I’m tired,” I sighed. “And I am really sick of killing you people. If you wanted to walk out of here, I won’t say a word, and I won’t come after you.”
For a second, he appeared confused, his eyes narrowing. Then he advanced again, slashing out fast enough he caught the back of my forearm as I moved to block his move.
Blood, red and thick, welled up and slipped down my arm. Another slice of pain mingled with the rest, and I barely noticed.
“I see why you guys wear black so much. It hides the blood pretty well. My tactic is usually not getting hurt, but it seems to be failing me tonight.”
I was talking to my opponent, like he cared what I had to say. I must have had a concussion or internal bleeding, making me delirious.
Fin groaned in pain from my left. We needed to get out of here now.
I squared my shoulders and fortified myself against the pain about to drag me under. “Sorry, dude. I gave you the chance to walk away. Now I have to kill you pretty painfully.”
He opened his mouth to speak, but I shoved the knife into the side of his neck before he could get the words out. A fountain of blood erupted from his mouth and dribbled down his chin. He fell sideways when I jerked the knife from his neck. One down, a fuck ton more to go.
I took another step toward Fin, but the floor stuttered under me, or my body thought it did, and I went down hard on
my knees. Damn. For a second, I had thought I would actually survive this. That we might make it out of here alive. Esteban hadn’t even bothered to show up.
I slumped over and lay down at the edge of the painted circle. The magic barrier there waned as if the battery faltered. I touched the edge, barely sliding a finger across, and the vibration emitted from it stopped completely. The wood edges were higher than the black surface. The texture was smooth, like some kind of metal. Black steel? I’d heard of objects being created and infused with magic, but I’d never seen anything like this. A trap or an open channel to magic itself?
A goon approached, and I had nothing to fight with. The knife had fallen from my hands and I didn’t have it in me to stand up and punch him. Part of me wished I’d had the sense to stay down after Olivia killed me. Doing so would have saved me from an intense ten minutes of pain, only to die on the edge of a magical who-knows-what.
“Don’t bother,” I whispered to the looming goon. “I’ll be dead in a minute, anyway.”
He knelt down to slide his knife into my side. Of course, he’d go for a kill shot that hurt the most. It took a few minutes to bleed out from a belly wound, then you eventually choked on your own blood.
He pulled his hand back to slide the sharp edge home, when he froze, mid-strike. He seized up, and the knife clattered to the stone floor.
Fin appeared behind him, staring down between us. “Am I interrupting?”
The bad guy toppled over and landed a few inches from my head.
My breath wheezed between my lips. “Not interrupting. I was just luring him in, letting him think he could win one before I killed him.”
Fin crouched beside me and cocked his head so he could look at my face. “I thought you were dead.”
“Me too.”
He reached out to help me up, but I pushed his hands away. “Stop it. I’ll stand on my own. Did you finish off the good squad? Oh, did you see this circle? I think the magic is in the ring’s metal.”