Total pages in book: 135
Estimated words: 128061 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 640(@200wpm)___ 512(@250wpm)___ 427(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 128061 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 640(@200wpm)___ 512(@250wpm)___ 427(@300wpm)
I hadn’t seen the first guardian’s reach. I’d only heard about it in the aftermath. I had seen Tristan’s movement, though, and reacted. Badly.
In a move that I would now blame on an excessive amount of wine, I tried to blast him. Except I missed—because of wine—and hit the guy on his other side with such force that he flew through the window. He landed on a flowerbed below the window, screaming. The people inside started yelling. Everyone jumped up, trying to figure out what was going on.
The basajaunak outside didn’t need to figure anything out at all. They just assumed all the commotion meant the mages were attacking.
They sprinted out of the trees, hackles raised. Dave got ahold of the flowerbed-crushing gargoyle, held him up by the ankles in his favorite hold, and growled threateningly through the window. The other basajaunak gathered around, following suit.
The yelling inside turned to drunken screaming. The gargoyles apparently hadn’t believed I actually had a basajaun on my team, let alone two handfuls of them (their numbers kept growing).
Edgar tried to calm things down until he realized his flowers were getting trampled. Then he decided the best course of action would be to swarm-of-insect his way through the window, reform next to Gerard, who hadn’t been expecting it, and close-talk about the fragility of flowers.
Gerard freaked out and grabbed Edgar, probably hoping to fling him away. But Edgar held on, wily as he was, and skittered up his arm in an impressive display of gymnastics, dropped down on the other side, and bit him on the neck. Gerard fell, and the guardians lurched forward.
Cue more hysteria.
It had taken Austin and the shifters ten minutes to separate everyone and calm things down. That was when the accusations had started flying about my excessively large crew. Needless to say, it didn’t help my status any.
“Pretty unfortunate, yeah,” I muttered, reaching the back door. “Anyway, I’ll head out tonight. By rule, raids happen in broad daylight, so we’re good this evening.” I turned back to point at Jasper. “If you’re going, take a shower. Body spray does not count as a shower. Use actual water.”
“Thank you,” Ulric said. “He makes an impossible wingman.”
“I feel attacked,” Jasper groused.
Ulric and Jasper waited downstairs. I felt Nathanial on the roof. He’d be rolling in gargoyle form tonight, keeping watch like a sentinel.
“Nessa and Sebastian are going to meet us there,” Ulric said, wearing a subdued blue dress shirt and black slacks.
“Where’s your usual outrageously bright outfits?”
He looked down at his shirt, and Jasper looked away; both of their emotions went a bit turbulent. His nose crinkled a little.
“Just didn’t feel like it,” he said. “I felt like being lazy.”
Something about his tone—and Jasper’s pointedly averted gaze—didn’t ring true.
Before I could press, he said, “Cyra and Hollace will probably meet us, too, depending on whether they have an update.”
“An update about what?” I said as Naomi briskly walked down the hall, spying us.
“I think it’s Nelson tonight.”
I shook my head as Mr. Tom descended the stairs with a jewelry box. “I’m not following. What about Nelson?”
Naomi stopped beside us, no notepad or papers in hand, waiting patiently to speak to me.
Ulric frowned, glancing at Naomi before going on. “Niamh tasked Hollace and Cyra with checking out the cairn leaders—what they’re doing, who they’re engaging with.”
“What? Why wasn’t I told about this?” I demanded, a shock of fear going through me. If the leaders found out, I’d be in even hotter water. It had become clear to me that they didn’t go about things the way mages did. They didn’t spy on each other or cunningly try to kill each other. If they had a problem with another cairn, they were open about it. Sure, the sneaky approach had paid off in the beginning, but we’d need to pick and choose when to play dirty politics. It was starting to get out of hand.
“Niamh set it up,” Ulric said. “Their target was Gerard last night. Nothing to report there. He was hungover from the dinner, so he mostly just lay around watching TV all night.”
“You have to make sure your top people are all involved,” Naomi said diplomatically. “If they aren’t, they feel left out and restless. Leave it long enough, and when they finally do get to do their jobs, they go overboard and botch it. It’s best to keep them occupied with even small, meaningless jobs. It seems Niamh knows this.”
That made sense, though Niamh still should’ve told me. She hadn’t even told me about the basajaunak meetups. She needed to be reined in a bit.
I nodded to Naomi, and her crisp return nod back said the matter was closed and she would move on.
“Where are you going?” she asked.
“Oh. Uh…” I hadn’t expected such an easy question to answer. “The Paddy Wagon. Austin’s bar.”