Dark King (Court of the Sea Fae #1) - C.N. Crawford Page 0,2
at least.
“Fucking hell, Aenor.” She pressed her hands on either side of the mirror, ignoring my admonition. “He’s, like, eight feet tall and, well … murdery. Third of all—was I on point three?—your demon kills were extreme circumstances. You didn’t have a choice. Those were demons beating their girlfriends, or vampires hunting teenage girls through the streets. You intervened to save lives. There’s no, like … immediate emergency right now. As long as we stay in the shop, no one has to die. Like I said. Zero assassins inside the shop. We’re perfectly safe underground.”
I could tell she was reassuring herself more than she was making a coherent argument.
The magic intensified around me, setting my teeth on edge. “You’re wrong, Gina. If I don’t act, we both die. He’s fixing to do something nasty.”
“I don’t see it that way. You could stay in here and wait till he gets bored enough to leave. He’ll slink off home to watch Doctor Who at some point and have a spliff or something.”
“That’s not how this works. Assassins don’t get bored and leave.” I stood, my body buzzing with adrenaline, and crossed to the desk behind the counter. I rolled it open and pulled out a handgun. “And anyway, I have a little advantage. They’ll be expecting me to use an attack spell, not a gun. Traditional fae like him never use modern weapons. It’s a whole taboo thing for no good reason whatsoever. Lucky for us, I don’t care a lick about tradition, so I’ll just shoot him in the heart with iron bullets. Unlike lead, they actually kill the fae. Job done.”
“But he has magic.”
“So do I.”
“Right,” she countered, “but you just have sad dirt hole magic, and he looks like his would be better.”
“Anyway,” I said a little too sharply. “Waiting until an assassin gets bored enough to wander home isn’t a real solution.”
“What will I do if you die, Aenor? I’d have no one to take care of me. I get scared at night, and I can’t run the shop on my own.”
Sometimes, Gina seemed surprisingly worldly. And at other times—like now—she seemed more like the sixteen-year-old human that she was.
From above, the killer’s magic grew stronger, thrumming over my skin in a dangerous warning. I breathed in the heavy, sea-smelling air, and my heart started pounding harder against my ribs.
He was going to hit us with an attack at any moment. Then, our bodies would sway from the hawthorn tree.
I had to stop this murderer before he got the chance.
Chapter 2
Cold, wet magic skimmed through my cluttered shop, growing so powerful it rattled the floorboards beneath my feet. Gina’s dark eyes went wide, and she stared at me, looking lost.
Suddenly, I wanted to protect her with a fierce intensity. Humans could break so easily.
Gina gripped the mirror tighter, staring into it. “Oh, bloody hell. There’s a second one, Aenor. At least I think I saw him? He sort of glowed from the shadows for a moment, like a … I don’t know, a creepy angel. There’s no way you can go fight both of them.” She looked up, forehead creased. “Maybe we can escape through the underground tunnel. It goes to the river, right?”
It wasn’t the worst idea. We couldn’t go straight up through the hatch in the ceiling, but there was a second route out of here. An old tunnel led south from here to the Thames, carving underground through the most ancient parts of London.
I threaded my fingers into my blue hair, pacing now. “We might be able to get to the river. I’ll have more power there anyway.”
That’s when it hit me—the heavy scent of the river, slamming into me like a fist. When I looked down at the old floorboards, my stomach dropped. Dark water seeped through the cracks, pooling in my shop.
“Change of plan,” I said. “They want to drown us. They’re going to flood us out. They’re flooding the tunnel as we speak.”
These creeps wanted to destroy my home, my livelihood.
This was exactly why I had a gun loaded with iron bullets.