Total pages in book: 134
Estimated words: 125179 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 626(@200wpm)___ 501(@250wpm)___ 417(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 125179 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 626(@200wpm)___ 501(@250wpm)___ 417(@300wpm)
She hit the ground hard, her breath whooshing out of her, inwardly wincing as a rock dug into her spine. Well, ow. Looming over her, the coyote snapped his teeth but didn’t move to kill.
Not that he would have managed it in time, because she was already moving.
His head whipped to the side as she punched him with a ball of dark, rotting magick. She would have repeated the move, but then a blur of black fur barreled into his side, knocking him off Wynter.
She leaped to her feet, lifting her sword to take out the coyote. Anabel/Mary beat her to the punch, slicing off his head, singing “Everybody Walk the Dinosaur”. As you do.
A hard impact slammed into Wynter’s shoulder, sending white-hot pain lancing through her. Bullet. Heat grazed her upper arm as another skimmed her flesh.
“Just come with us, Wynter,” said the shooter—a lycan who was something of a bully. “I don’t know what your plan is, but you don’t have a prayer of taking on all of Aeon. Come quietly. Don’t make us kill you.”
She smirked. “Ah, don’t forget, Adam would kill you if you did.”
A crow swooped down on the lycan’s head and flapped her wings, obscuring his view and clawing the motherfucking shit out of his face. Wynter all but flew at him, burying her sword in his gut.
The fight raged on. Bullets fired. Animals lunged. Magick blazed through the air. Bodies fell, but more keepers came. Which was totally fine, because it meant that plan A was a raging success.
The keepers never tried to kill Wynter, but they tried to disable her. They failed. With her blade, she sliced, stabbed, and impaled. With her magick, she burned, infected, and destroyed.
Even though the keepers knew her blade was enchanted and that insects weren’t really crawling all over their bodies, the illusion nonetheless distracted them—something she pounced on. Again and again, actually.
Wynter braced herself as yet another keeper rushed her. A severed head came out of left-field and hit his skull hard, causing him to stagger to a surprised halt. Anabel/Mary was then there, hacking his own head clean off.
Hot pain punched Wynter’s leg, and her knee buckled. Hissing in agony, she tracked the shooter with her gaze. Before she had the chance to retaliate, a surge of Xavier’s magick crashed into the asshole’s arm, causing him to drop his weapon with a loud cry. Ha.
Wynter hobbled over to the piece of shit. “He’s mine,” she told the large cat who went to charge him. Wynter swiped out with her sword, disemboweling the prick in one smooth, cruel motion . . . and he dropped to the ground like a stone. Dead. Just like every other keeper.
She heard the gunning of engines coming from behind her. She didn’t need to look to know that the army that had been hiding in the woods had now poured out of it.
Skirting the corpses and dismembered body parts that littered the ground, Wynter looked at each of her coven. “Everyone okay?”
“Fabulous,” sang Anabel/Mary, even as blood poured out of a wound on her thigh.
Wynter didn’t panic for two reasons—the injury wouldn’t be fatal for an immortal, and it was already closing over much like Wynter’s own bullet wounds.
“I’m good,” said Xavier, panting. “Got shot a few times but healing fast.”
Delilah and Hattie shifted to their usual forms. Their skin streaked with blood, they prodded at the few non-lethal injuries they sported and then announced that they too were fine.
“Then it’s time for us to get back in the jeep,” said Wynter, crossing to the driver’s door. “We have a town to invade.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
As the SUV Cain rode in whizzed past the spot where Wynter had fought the keepers, he noticed that the jeep was gone. Which meant she’d already joined the sea of speeding vehicles. He hoped she wasn’t in the front, but he wouldn’t put it past her to lead the charge.
There was no way to creep up on the town. Not when there was nothing but prairie land up-ahead, giving them no cover, making it easy for the people in the watchtowers to spot them. As such, they’d all chosen to drive toward Aeon at top speed, using the vehicles as shields of a sort.
Despite the rumbling of so many engines, Cain heard bells ring in the near distance. “The alarm has been sounded.”
Sitting beside him in the rear passenger row, Azazel nodded. “I wonder if they’ll guess it’s our people who’s coming at them.”
“Whatever the case, they won’t guess that any Ancients are part of the army. Our presence will take them off-guard for certain.”
Azazel grinned. “Which makes this all the more fun.”
Cain studied the curtain stone wall—one covered in rotting moss, thanks to Wynter—that shielded the town. It wouldn’t be necessary to take it down in order to enter Aeon. Which was good, because it was solid enough to withstand blasts of power and even the impact of crashing vehicles. The grand wooden doors in that arched opening, however? Not so much.