Courts and Cabals 2 by G.S. D'Moore (warren buffett book recommendations TXT) 📗

I couldn’t tell if she was thirty or fifty. Her brow was furrowed in either anger or concentration, but I was too far away to tell. I was too focused on her eyes. In the shadows of her hood, they blazed. It wasn’t the otherworldly light Lilith’s did when she was powered up, or taking dick. This woman’s eyes burned with a zeal that said she would take a torch to the world if she had too. Whoever the fuck she was, she was dangerous, and that didn’t even take into consideration the magic I felt swell around her.

Still, what I was seeing and feeling wasn’t being fully communicated to my brain. That was probably the concussion’s fault. I looked around like an idiot, taking my eye off the threat, to scan the crowd. I was looking for any other Harry Potter-looking motherfuckers, and trying to remember if Comicon was in town this week. I saw nothing.

Despite all the evidence to the contrary, I was only ninety-nine-point-nine percent sure this woman was the one capable of the extreme vehicular violence. I decided to play it safe.

“Excuse me, ma’am,” I hobbled toward her. “If you could please help me, I need to get to the hospital,” I gave her a tired smile, and hoped for the best.

The sneer on her face told me all I needed to know. “You aren’t going anywhere.”

“Okay, hot Gandalf,” I rolled my eyes, as she slid her feet until they were shoulder-width apart, and took a casual combat stance.

I don’t know how I’d missed it before, but she had a legit wizard’s staff. Not some dinky wand, but a five and a half foot, gnarly-looking hunk of wood as thick as my encircled thumb and pointer finger. It radiated magic, and looked perfectly capable of bludgeoning me to death without the help of the underlying power of the universe. I could tell it had seen some shit because the shaft looked like it had been hacked at by a sword. That told me it was probably tougher than it looked.

“I’ll give you one chance. Surrender, and I’ll finish this quickly,” those were the words that came out of her mouth, but her face told me a different story. This chick wanted a fight.

“This is bad,” I was coherent enough to add everything up.

Whoever this crazy bitch was, she was powerful. You couldn’t stop of SUV going thirty-five on a dime like that without significant magical energies. It was also well planned and executed. Either she knew we were coming this way, or she’d been able to execute that level of magic on the fly. I hoped it was the former, because the latter didn’t paint a pretty picture for little, old me.

I tried to remember my training. Lark’s voice came to me after a second. “When you’re ambushed, the best tactic is to fight through it,” the satyr instructed.

“That’s easy for the nearly all-powerful Fae to say,” I’d adamantly disagreed with the man.

I always found it better to run away from a fight like this. It had served me well so far, but something told me I wouldn’t get far. “Fight into the ambush it is,” I growled and pulled more power into a pair of glamours.

I still didn’t have a handle on streaming glamours, but fixed should work just fine. There was an explosion of light, and when it cleared, I had a sword and shield in my hand. They both glowed with otherworldly, pale light, and I gave the woman by best come-at-me-bro grin. Then I charged her.

I stumbled right off the bat as vertigo hit me like a hammer to the skull. The concussion was still healing, and it only emphasized how bad an idea this was. Still, battle had a momentum to it, and often times, the person who controlled that momentum emerged victorious.

That’s how I ended up charging down a midtown street, with a glowing sword and shield in my hand, at some rando who could pass as Snow White’s evil, hotter stepsister. I yelled a battle cry because it felt right and proper as I charged her. To my surprise, she just stood there; the edges of her mouth curling up in a grin that made me realize this was all a terrible idea.

A few moments later, that sentiment was confirmed. I was still about six feet away from her, and rearing back my sword to try and cut off her head, when she sidestepped. I forgot about my slash as something really fucking weird happened. Her body distorted, rippled, and then condensed. If the space shuttle sprung a leak in space, and an astronaut got sucked through a hole the size of my hand, that’s what this looked like.

My jaw dropped, I ground my heels into the asphalt to stop my forward momentum, and gaped at the empty space where the lady used to be.

“What in the ever-loving fuck,” I just stared at the empty space, which was a near fatal mistake.

I didn’t know it, but the woman reappeared behind me, brought her staff up like she was the Louisville Slugger, and bashed me in the back of the head. My thick skull, empowered with a troll’s strength, would have shrugged off a simple piece of wood. Little did I know, the etches in the wood I thought were hatch marks made by some long-gone sword, were actually arranged in a particular set of patterns. As she unleashed hell on my noggin, a pattern flared red, and the staff hit me with the strength of a runaway semi.

I blacked out, and the next thing I knew, I was blinking away pulverized asphalt at the end of a twenty-foot ditch I’d dug with my body. The world lurched violently around me and I dry heaved into the rubble. Nothing came out, I was on empty, but I was definitely back