Tabitha - Royal Rebel, Kiana Dreamfairy [best adventure books to read .TXT] 📗

tense minutes, neither making a move forward. Each subtle alteration in the position of one evoked a mirror image in the other. Then the demon shifted its soulless gaze from the Lupine back to Tabitha, and the werewolf’s warning growl turned into a vicious snarl.

Just that quickly, the battle began. The first attack was a blur, a lightning-speed crash of black and gray, dull, scaly skin against thick fur. She almost expected the ground beneath her to shake with the violence of the impact. Both figures shook and twisted and grappled and roared in primitive fury. Hoof and claw dug into the mess of earth, stone, and organic litter that covered the ground, seeking purchase. Claws slashed across scales and fur. Fangs glinted, and muscles bulged and shifted. Tabitha’s eyes widened as the Lupine seemed to briefly hold his own against the impossibly powerful demon.

Even as the thought crossed her mind, the demon lowered its massive bovine head and rammed its horns directly into the werewolf’s stomach. Tabitha heard a loud whoosh as the impact drove the air from his lungs. His clawed hands raked furrows in the creature’s flesh even as he went airborne, landing at the opposite side of the clearing from Tabitha at the base of another tree.

She winced in sympathy at the dull thud of his landing, but she had no time to wonder how he was feeling. The minute the demon shook him off, it turned back toward her, perfectly clear in its focus on her as the preferred target. Which made no sense. Everything she knew about demons told her they were indiscriminately murderous. They didn’t care about the identity of their victims unless someone told them to. Normally, they would just attack whatever stood more clearly in their paths. So why was this one so intent on ripping out her heart when she assumed the werewolf had a perfectly good heart of his own?

Something here didn’t add up.
Tabitha pressed her back against the tree trunk and kept the demon clearly in her sights. It looked like the cavalry that had ridden to her rescue might be having some problems of its own. She’d never been much of sitting around wringing her hands and waiting for help—yet another reason that she made such a lousy princess. Unlike her aunt the queen, who liked to send her knights into the fray to deal with any problems, Tabitha preferred to handle everything on her own. That way there was no one around to tell her what she was doing wrong.

The demon stepped slowly forward on its crouching, satiric hind legs, spewing puffs of yellowed, noxious-smelling smoke from its nostrils. Holding her breath against the stench and her own unease, Tabitha levered herself into a sitting position and took a deep breath. She raised her hands before her as if to ward off the monster while she grabbed a thin thread of the magic left inside her and pulled hard.

It yanked free of her in a flash of bright blue energy and swirled into a small, powerfully glowing tornado of magical energy. The demon uttered something in a guttural snarl of pain and rage and stumbled a few steps away. Squinting against the glare in her hands, Tabitha watched it stumble backwards, right into the force of the Lupine’s renewed attack. Between the light and the noise and the violent crash, she felt like she’d gotten caught up in a lightning storm. She could only hope the demon did, too.

At least it seemed to hate the disc of bright blue light she had conjured up. Its reflexes seemed slower this time, and it appeared to have trouble tracking the werewolf’s movements. It didn’t see its opponent duck beneath a clumsy blow and dive toward its hind legs, claws flashing. With two quick slashes, the Lupine slice through the tendons at the backs of the monster’s legs, sending it crashing to the ground and bellowing in rage.

Quickly, instinctively, Tabitha jumped up from her tree, light balanced between her fingertips, and raced forward. She stopped a few steps short of the felled demon, took aim, and sent the swirl of light flying toward the creature’s gaping mouth as if the light were a Frisbee and the demon were an overeager border collie.

She should have stopped a few steps shorter. As the magic missle made impact, the demon lashed out with one arm and caught her across the lower torso with the tip of one glistening claw. It sliced through her clothing as in her pale flesh.

Dazed, she looked down at her injury with wide, confused eyes. The pain registered along with the ticklish trickle of blood across her stomach, but she stayed on her feet, unmoving. She couldn’t’ even raise a hand to cover the wound. Weakness crept over her, making her sway where she stood. Her little magic trick had taken more out of her than she had planned.

In the background, she thought she had heard a roar that sounded more like an angry werewolf than an attacking demon. She wanted to ask if he was all right, but she couldn’t form the words. She just stood there and tried not to fall on her face even as the demon begun to stir and struggle to right itself. The roar came again, louder this time, and then the Earth tilted on its axis as Tabitha’s legs collapsed beneath her and send her sinking into darkness.
Chapter VII

Hex wanted to grab the woman and shake me for being so stupid as to rush up to the other like that. Then he wanted to thank her for distracting it with the spell. And finally, he wanted to get a better look at what he remembered as being a truly fine backside, this time without the distraction of a rampaging creature to dull his pleasure.
But at the moment, he had other things to do. Like getting us both the hell out of here before the creature learned how to run with severed Achilles tendon.
Hex scooped the unconscious figure up in his arms and sprinted for home. The Other or creature reacted as positively to that as Hex had expected, but thankfully, the injuries slowed it to a point where the combination of werewolf speed and the thick tree cover foiled its pursuit. That didn’t mean Hex slowed down any.
He ran a good two miles before he felt safe in slowing to a brisk, ground-eating trot.
Through it all, my body remained limp and still. He wasn’t sure if I was asleep or unconscious, but either way, I was so out of it that he contemplated setting me down for a minute so he could shift back to human form before we left the park. The general rule for Lupines stated they shouldn’t walk in were form anywhere they might be seen by humans. Wolf form could be written off easily enough as the appearance of an especially large and long-legged dog, but there was nothing in the human world that could account for a seven- or eight-foot creature covered in fur with the posture of a man and the facial features of White Fang.
In this case, Hex weighed his options and decided that if he stuck to the alleys on the trip back to his apartment and didn’t get too close to any streetlights, he’d be better off going as he was. If he shifted back to human, he might not risk psychically scarring a wandering human eyes, be he did risk spending the night in a cell with a public-indecency citation. Given the way his night had been going so far, he didn’t have time to go to jail.
He reached the borders of the park and scanned the street from the cover. He didn’t see much movement, which did occasionally happen even in New York, and at three-something in the morning the streets were about as deserted as he could ever hope to see them.
Taking a deep breath, Hex lowered his head, held me tight against him, and dived into the shadows. His long strides ate up the ground between the park and his neighborhood. At a dead run, a werewolf could move faster than a sprinting racehorse and might even give a cheetah a thing or two to think about. Luckily, Hex could maintain his speed for distances closer to those of the equine than the feline, because it was a good couple of miles to his apartment.
He made it without incident, ducking into the alley behind his street and breaking his speed, slowing to a walk for the last hundred yards to his building. It took him a second to catch his breath, but both of us had made it in one piece. And, he hoped, with out being seen.
Hitching my unconscious body higher against his chest, he scanned the area before he rounded the corner, balancing me carefully in one arm while he paused outside his apartment door to retrieve his spare key. He kept it hidden for just this sort of emergency. In his line of work he never did know when he’d be coming home without pockets. That fact that his door was set down half a flight of stairs as a basement entrance made those times easier, too, by offering a bit of concealment from the odd passerby.
He let us inside and kicked the door shut behind us. Though the entrance to his apartment looked like it led to a basement, he actually occupied two floors of the narrow old building, and he used the bottom floor as a workroom and home gym. His living space was upstairs. He carried me up and directly to the sofa, lowered me down on the soft cushions before he shifted back to his human form.
He felt the sting and then easing as his genes reformed his body, knitting together the crack in his ribs, sealing the scratches he’d gotten wrestling around the forest. When the change was complete, his shoulders rolled in instinctive adjustment.
I never moved, and he frowned down at me, crouching beside the sofa to examine my limp form. He’d felt the steady beat of my heart and the rhythmic rise and fall of my breathing as he’d carried me home, so he knew perfectly well I wasn’t dead. And that was what had him frowning. No human woman or witch should have survived the attack, which meant I must not be human. He knew from my scent that I wasn’t Lupine or any other sort of shifter, for that matter. There was nothing earthy about me, nothing animal. I smelled too pure for that, and the fact that he could smell me at all meant I wasn’t a vampire. My skin felt too warm and smooth and elastic to belong to any other nonliving life form, and I