The Hero: Hunter Circles Series Book Four

by Jessica Gunn

  Or she was about to. Maybe she hadn’t yet. That kind of shakeup would have been felt everywhere. Was it possible she planned to overtake Ammon before moving on Alzan?

  Lady Azar smirked, watching my reaction as though she could read my every thought. “You wouldn’t give me the Son and Daughter of Alzan, and now you will not have any of the three of them.”

  She shot the cyclone out at me. At the last second, I rolled out of the way and into a teleportante that took me behind her. I elbowed her in the back of the head, then went to use requirem on her, but a burst of lightning snapped against my hand. It knocked me away, sending me sailing through the air.

  I landed with a hard thwack against the stonework, stars dancing along the edges of my vision. Looking up, I searched for the source of the attack, and instead found Riley on the dais, his hand outstretched and tears streaming down his face. “Riley?” He’d attacked me with my own magik? The last demon he took power from must have been a lightning-elemental user like me.

  “You. Hurt. Mommy!” he shouted, sounding for all the world like an angry three-year-old throwing a temper-tantrum. Lightning swarmed around him and he sent it all straight for me.

  I threw up my hands, grabbing on to my son’s lightning attack and moving it around to take aim at Lady Azar instead. But she knocked it out of the way with another cyclone. This had to stop. I would not end up in a three-way fight with my son as one of my opponents.

  BANG. A explosion rocked the chamber, followed by a bright flash that ripped across my vision. My ears went deaf except for a single, piercing ring.

  I fell to my knees, crawling toward Riley through smoke that filled the chamber. Lady Azar and Riley both blinked wildly, confusion twisting their brows as they coughed.

  Flashlights appeared, their beams revealing more of the scene as the echoes of boots against ground sounded through the space. I looked back toward the entrance we’d come through and saw a dozen or so soldiers, real soldiers, file through the doorway. Then one was next to me, helping me up.

  Max, Rachel’s boyfriend. A Hydron agent.

  They’d come to help us. But how the hell had they known where we were?

  Max’s words filtered into my ears in pieces and strands. “…called to tell me… you were here… she knew you’d need help…”

  I turned, spinning back toward the dais and pointed where Riley stood. “Rescue him!” I yelled, though it sounded like I’d only whispered. So this is what it was like to be flash-banged.

  The Hydron agents—soldiers, really—swarmed around the demons, fighting alongside Hunters to subdue them, but these weren’t normal demons. They were of Shadow Crest’s ranking and power, and they weren’t going down easily.

  “I got you, Riley!”

  I looked back toward the dais where Rachel leapt onto it and grabbed Riley. She pressed a hand against his back and spoke a word I couldn’t hear, then wrapped him in her arms. He fought it as best a three-year-old could, but she held on tight—not getting her magik drained. She must have gotten him with a requirem.

  Lady Azar’s face twisted into rage. “No!” she screamed, the sound making it past my muffled ears as she dove for Rachel and tore Riley from her grip. She yanked Rachel off the dais, wrapping her up in a tornado and hoisting her up into air.

  Rachel’s eyes went wide, her hands going to her throat to pull away invisible hands.

  I scrambled from the ground and the world tilted as blood seeped into my eyes. I’d been hurt? I wiped my forehead with my hand and it came away slick with crimson blood. “Riley!”

  A pillar of fire appeared out of nowhere, soaring right for the dais. But instead of knocking Rachel off of it like I’d thought it would, the attack slammed square into Lady Azar’s back. She dropped Riley as she fell. Ashbel scrambled forward to catch him, straining against his binding chains to pull him away from the fight.

  Lady Azar picked herself back up and we both looked for the source of the attack.

  Giyano stood, Krystin at his side, an expression dripping of abhorrence and retribution and death. “Let them go. Both of them. Now.”

  Lady Azar flicked her wrist and a wind scooped up Ashbel and Riley and brought them to her, snapping the chains binding Ashbel to the dais. She hovered them up thirty feet into the air, to the top of the chamber’s ceiling. The winds surrounding Ashbel and Riley moved so fast, I couldn’t see either of them through the tornado. And if Giyano hadn’t attacked, then there was no way either of us would get magik through that tornado to our loved ones. Why didn’t Ashbel teleportante them free?

  Maybe he never learned the word-magiks.

  Lady Azar sneered. “If you do not stop this, Giyano, I will kill them both. Starting with Ashbel.”

  I watched, horror filling my heart. The fate of my son, of the entire world, now rested in the hands of his kidnapper. Hands that now caught on fire with a bright, blue-hot flame.

  Chapter 25

  Krystin

  Giyano’s body vibrated with anger and hate. I stood next to him, as ready to aid him in whatever his next move was as I was to stab him through the heart myself. I’d convinced him to turn on Lady Azar easily enough. But if she killed Riley, I had no doubt that all bets were off. For good.

  It didn’t help that my veins had started to burn. Not from aura sickness, but from something more immediately sinister and inescapable: my magik had started backfiring. I was honestly surprised it’d taken this long, after six months of non-use and the transformation that’d occurred at Alzan. All the yo-yoing I’d warned Shawn about, all the times my magik had backfired before… It was nothing compared to this slow burn, sitting so closely on the edge of a scorching wildfire.

  “Set him down or I will kill everyone in this room,” Giyano said coolly. “You can’t get to Alzan if both your conduits and your magik sources are dead, much less overthrow your brother in the process.”

  Oh, shit. She really was going for broke. Ammon and the throne. Alzan. What more did Lady Azar want?

  She snarled and rose her tornado as high as it could go against the ceiling. Riley’s wailing roared over the winds of the tornado. “I will kill him.”

  Giyano’s expression didn’t change a single millimeter, but his aura began flashing through a kaleidoscope of colors along with his emotions. “He’s already dead. You’ve kept him as a slave for all these years.”

  I looked to Ashbel as Giyano’s words bit into me. All this time, he’d thought Ashbel dead, just for Lady Azar to have kept him prisoner. And Giyano was right; Ashbel did not look to be in healthy shape at all. But with time and recovery, I was sure he’d be okay.

  If he wants to live after all these years.

  Maybe Ashbel didn’t.

  “Then so be it,” she said, brazenly cavalier, and dropped the hand to her side that’d been holding Ashbel and Riley up in the air.

  Riley screamed as they dropped, nothing to protect them as they flew to the ground. Ben shouted something unintelligible, Rachel right behind him as they both raced to the spot where Ashbel and Riley would land. I went to reach for them both with my telekinesis, but someone latched on to my arms and swung them behind my back.

  I looked over my shoulder. Giyano stood, restraining me, as his ex-lover and Riley tumbled. “Are you insane?” I cried.

  But his face remained stoic, his body unmoving.

  Shawn appeared from nowhere, blinking in from a teleportante, until he stood beneath both Ashbel and Riley. He reached out into the air and faced his palms against the ceiling. The pair stopped falling, held by Shawn’s newfound powers. Which didn’t give me much confidence because although he’d used telekinesis okay so far, there was one hell of a steep learning curve to this particular magik.

  With them both caught, Giyano released me.

  “What the hell was that?” I asked.

  Giyano’s form lit up with the blue-hot flames he loved so much and he took off like a rocket powered by flames beneath his feet for Lady Azar. He smacked into her and they
tumbled across the ground, a mass of flames and the wind knocking them around. Her swishy pants and the almost-cape behind her caught fire as they rolled. But she flicked out the flames with a simple twist of her wrist before too much damage to her clothes had been done.

  I looked for Rachel and Ben in the mess, dodging errant magik attacks as I went. A swipe at the air to move earth bullets out of their path at my head. A touch of ala-ether to hold off one of Lady Azar’s ether-shapers.

  The more I moved around the cave, the more I realized we were winning. Between Avery and Cassie’s team and the Hydron agents who’d appeared out of nowhere, only three demons remained standing. And they could handle the three.

  Me, on the other hand… The magik coursing through my veins burned with every use. At one point, I stepped in to save Nate and instead of letting me go once the demon was down, Nate squeezed my arm.

  “Your magik,” he said, eyes wide and afraid.

  “I know.”

  “Stop, then—”

  I tore my arm from his grasp. “I’m not stopping until she’s dead and Riley is safe.” I turned, focusing my attention on Ben and Rachel, who’d cornered Riley to try calming him down. If we got Riley back, then whatever happened to me because of my magik backfiring would be tolerable.

  “It’s me. Daddy,” Ben said, kneeling before his terrified child.

  “Get away from me!” Riley wailed, twisting out of Ben’s hold. “Mommy, no! The fire!”

  Giyano had completely engulfed both himself and Lady Azar in flames, although something told me that any demon as old as Lady Azar would be able to somehow keep them from burning her. Her air-elemental magik kicked the flames up and redirected them at Giyano. He cried out, burned by his own magik.

  I jumped toward them, flicking her away from his hold even as the movement sent magik rippling through my system as though I’d been electrocuted. I stumbled as Lady Azar sailed into a nearby pillar and slid down it. “Stay the fuck away from him.” My voice was as shaky as my legs suddenly were.

  Giyano spun on me. “Go. Run. Take Riley and run to Alzan before—”

  A howl of pain cut through Giyano’s warning, silencing the entire chamber. Giyano’s face paled as he spun toward the sound. For one frightening moment, I forgot what the wail sounded like. If it’d belonged to a man or a child.

  My stomach dropped, my heart frozen, and I too turned to look. Bile slicked my throat, preparing me for the worst.

  Lady Azar stood on the dais. She had Riley in one bloody hand. Ben cradled Rachel on the ground, a crimson swath across her lower abdomen blooming with more red. In her other hand, Lady Azar held up another small tornado, this time with only Ashbel inside.

  I slammed my hand to my mouth to keep from crying out. All air escaped my lungs as my mouth ran completely dry.

  “This ends now,” Lady Azar bellowed across the chamber. “You come into my home and create this bloodbath to prevent a war that will come to pass no matter what happens here today?” She spat to the side of her feet. “Barbarians, all of you. You never learned and you never will. And you have not halted my plans. You never could.” Her fiery red gaze settled on Giyano, an evil mirth finding a place inside her eyes. “Let this be a lesson in what disloyalty buys you in this war. May you never live long enough to betray another ever again.” Her glare cut to me. “Either of you traitors.”

  Then she squeezed her hand—and her magik.

  Ben was gone from Rachel’s side in the next second, disappearing into an utter lightning storm that tore across the expanse between him and Lady Azar. Giyano shouted out as Lady Azar’s tornado strangled Ashbel. Nate, Shawn, and I all scrambled for the dais, but with so many people in the way, any attack could easily hurt friend as well as foe.

  I drew my sword, aiming for Lady Azar, but found air instead. And when Ben’s lightning storm connected, we were all thrown away from the dais. My shoulder collided with the stone floor, folding under the weight of my impact. Pain spliced across my bones and head. I bit it back, swallowing everything else down as I looked up at the scene.

  Ben emerged from the lightning storm with Riley in his arms. I teleported to Rachel’s side, swaying on my feet, and put pressure on her wound. Nate appeared in the next instant, placing his hands over mine.

  “Ri…ley…” Rachel whispered.

  “Ben has him. Don’t worry.”

  Another person ran over, a Hydron agent. “Rachel. Here.” He pulled out a bandage from his soldier vest and removed my hand. To me, he said, “I’m Max. Go—help them. I’ve got her.”

  I swallowed hard and turned, relying on this Max person to handle the situation. But when I turned back to the fight, I found an impossible situation.

  Giyano had Shawn by the neck, his form hanging limply a foot above the ground. My own power felt dampened in that moment, as if he’d hit Shawn with a requirem to keep his magik at bay.

  Lady Azar had Ashbel once more in her grasp with a knife pointed at his throat. He must have been hit with requirem, too, if he wasn’t trying to steal her magik to use.

  Ben sat there between the both of them, Riley pressed against his chest in a bear hug to keep him from squirming away while he wailed. “Mommy!”

  “Drop him,” Giyano warned, drawing a blade of his own. He skimmed it lightly across Shawn’s throat, enough to draw blood and scare the fuck out of me, but not enough to actually hurt him. “Release Ashbel, or this is over.”

  Lady Azar lifted her chin. “You’ve spent decades preparing the Daughter for this fight. You wouldn’t dare throw that away for someone who gave up on living centuries ago.”

  “You know nothing about me or him,” Giyano spat, his knife against Shawn’s throat once more.

  “What are you doing?” I hissed at him.

  He didn’t respond. I stood there, shaking, my gaze flitting between all three parties. All Ben had to do was teleport out and he’d be safe. But doing that might draw Lady Azar’s attention and not in a good way. Not that he had anywhere to go that she couldn’t get to. Ben must have thought the same thing because he sat there unmoving on the stone ground.

  Lady Azar stepped forward, pushing Ashbel. Both she and Giyano held their knives still. “I don’t need this fool to get to Alzan, nor the Son.”

  I wet my lips, waiting for a moment to act that wouldn’t cause death to someone I cared about. In that moment, I realized Giyano had become one of those people, as twisted as it sounded. “Tell me what to do,” I said, so low that only Giyano heard. But he already said it. Go. Run.

  “You’ll need the both of them to keep that cianza from exploding,” Giyano hissed. “If Cianza Alzan is gone, you will be obliterated by that which you do not understand.”

  Lady Azar laughed. “From what? The Neuians? They haven’t set foot on this plane in ten thousand years. They wouldn’t dare do it now.”

  “Are you really willing to risk that?” Giyano asked, breathless.

  He’s terrified of them. He must be. And he’d known about Jaffrin—that must have been what he meant when he told Ben as much, which meant Giyano might actually know a hell of a lot more about the Neuians, too.

  Oh, god. Giyano had told me he and his father had uncovered a certain truth about our world, one he didn’t think I was ready to understand.

  The Neuians were that truth.

  Lady Azar pushed the tip of her knife into Ashbel’s throat. He cried out but didn’t move as blood flowed down the metal. “Are you? Hand over the Son and this is over.”

  “Don’t do this!” Giyano screamed, so raw and so desperate that my heart started to cave in. He was just a normal man after all, caught by the same vices as the rest of us.

  Lady Azar shrugged. “You give me no choice.”

  She plunged the knife into Ashbel’s throat. Crimson spurted out from the wound as Giyano threw Shawn to the ground. Giyano launched into a sprint and shouted, “Teleportante!” before disappearing. He blinked in front of Lady Azar, knife still drawn.

  “Nate!�
�� Ben called at the same time, backpedaling away from Giyano’s attack.

  “Asanak!” Nate screamed as he ran past me right up to Ben. At the last second, Ben threw Riley forward and Nate’s ether-shaper attack hit the child.

  Riley’s cry obliterated what was left of my heart as his soul was cleaved in two, stopping his access to his magik—along with Lady Azar’s. At least for a few months.

  As soon the attack was over, Ben went to grab for Riley, but Lady Azar appeared and snatched him right from Ben’s arms. Giyano wasn’t with her anymore!

  I turned looking for him and Ashbel and found Giyano cradling Ashbel as he gasped for air. But a slit throat bled out too fast and there was nothing, nothing, Giyano could do.

  Lady Azar’s eyes widened when she realized what’d happened to Riley. “You will pay for this!” She roared and turned on Nate, firing a piercing torpedo of wind right at him. I fired off a shot of ala-ether that knocked it out of the way at the last second. She shot out a sloppy second and third torpedo, both of which we deflected.

  But having Riley wasn’t enough. Lady Azar was out for blood. She glared down at me, then turned her focus back on Shawn, who still lay unconscious on the ground.

  “If I can’t have my champion, then neither than Alzan,” she growled, readying another wind torpedo. “This fight shall be an even one.”

  Oh, fuck. “Teleportante,” I said at the same time she let it loose. I appeared just in time to throw my hands up. But before my telekinesis caught the wind torpedo, Giyano was there, throwing his body in front of both Shawn and me.

  The wind torpedo cut straight through Giyano, leaving a gaping hole three inches wide clear through his body. The hole filled with blood that oozed down the front of his shirt. I caught him as he fell to the ground, coughing up blood that trickled down the sides of his mouth.

  “No!” Ben screamed.

  I looked up and Lady Azar—and Riley—were both gone.

  “No! She’s got him still!” Ben ripped across the dais, searching wildly for his son.