Enchanted Guardian. Sharon Ashwood

already packed and waiting at her condo. They were both running in their own ways, this man with his addiction and Nim with her plans to vanish. They were both running to meaningless ends. The thought made Nim falter, and the fae must have seen it in her step.

      He thrust Susan forward. The girl stumbled forward, but Nim’s reflexes were too swift. She pushed Susan onto the sofa and stepped aside in the same moment. Susan fell hard into the dusty cushions, but now Nim had the opening she needed.

      She took aim, but was a split second too late. The fae had a gun, too.

Chapter 8

      They both fired, and though the fae’s hand shook, his aim was good enough. Hot pain scored Nim’s shoulder the same instant as she fired.

      The fae stumbled backward, crashing into the furniture. He hung there, clinging to the jumble behind him for a long moment. Finally, he collapsed a bit at a time, first dropping the gun and then folding limb by limb until he sank to the filthy floor. Nim stumbled forward, picking up his weapon and thrusting it into her belt. There was a neat hole in his forehead, assuring her that he was dead. She refused to look at the mess on the wall where he’d been standing.

      Only then did she look down at her own wound, feeling a wave of sticky heat rise to her skin. It was the second wound in two days, but thankfully it wasn’t deep. She bled, but the bullet had only scored her upper arm.

      “What happened?” demanded Lancelot.

      She spun to see him filling the doorway. Someone had brought him an ax, and he was covered in dirt and blood, his hair slicked back from his broad forehead. He’d lost his jacket, and his heavily muscled arms glistened with sweat. Tension slipped from Nim’s shoulders, making her wound throb afresh as her muscles released. There was no doubt that she could have got Susan out of the house on her own, but now that Lancelot was here everything would be so much easier.

      “I found her.” She pointed to the couch.

      His gaze was slow to shift from her bloody arm to Susan’s prone form.

      “I’m fine,” Nim said. “She’s alive.”

      “And he’s not.” Lancelot nodded to the body of the fae. “That was a clean shot.”

      With some surprise, Nim felt a pang of regret. “Perhaps it was a mercy.” Yet those words tasted false, so she tried again. “It was a tragedy.”

      Working quickly, Lancelot thrust the ax into a leather hanger strapped to his belt and carefully rolled Susan over. As Nim had suspected, she was gagged with a strip of cloth. Nim loosened the knots, cursing the fingers of her left hand. The wound was making them clumsy.

      “There’s fighting on the stairs,” Lancelot said, his tone brisk. “I had to fight my way up here. We can’t descend carrying an unconscious girl.”

      Nim finally got the knots undone and pulled off the gag, wincing at the angry marks the bindings left behind. Susan didn’t revive, even when Nim tapped the girl’s cheeks. “Stars!” Nim cursed. “After what’s been done to her, there is no telling if she’ll ever wake up, or if she’ll be right when she does.”

      She met Lancelot’s eyes, nearly falling into their deep brown depths. There was sadness there she’d never seen before. Whatever he’d endured since they parted had left traces behind. She looked away, the room suddenly feeling too small.

      “A house this size would have had servants,” she said. “Perhaps they had a back staircase for the staff to move about the house. We could take her out that way.”

      Glad to have a concrete goal, she returned to the hallway. Lancelot followed, Susan draped in his arms. Nim forced open the remaining doors. The smallest was in a recessed niche off the main corridor, and the settling house had jammed it shut. One slam of Lancelot’s boot sent it crashing open.

      It was indeed another staircase, but the opening showed a cobwebbed nightmare. Nim could almost hear the scuttle of spidery feet in the yawning blackness. “This looks old. It might not be safe,” she said.

      But then they smelled smoke. “Fire,” said Lancelot. “This place will go up like paper.”

      Nim looked over her shoulder and saw flickering light in the direction they’d come from. “There was a candle in the room where I found Susan. It must have tipped over in the fight.”

      Even as she watched, the flames licked the dry, crumbling wood outside the room. Lancelot was right. The old place would go up in minutes, and the fire was between them and the main exit.

      “Go,” he said, his voice firm. “We don’t have a choice.”

      One hand held up to protect her face, Nim took a step into the stuffy blackness. The stairs creaked ominously beneath her foot. “I don’t like spiders,” she said.

      “I know.”

      She could hear Lancelot’s feet searching for the steps behind her. Although she had better night vision than a human, she was all but blind once they were halfway down the old staircase. How he managed was a mystery. Once or twice she heard a scrape against the wall as he misjudged and Susan touched the plaster.

      And then she thought about what she’d said. She wasn’t supposed to like or dislike anything. And yet—a cobweb snagged over her hair and she frantically flicked it away—she really did not want to encounter anything with more than two legs. She felt it with an intensity that went beyond a fae’s self-preserving fear.

      She coughed, smoke sticking to her tongue and throat. It was too dark to see how thick it was, but she could feel the rising temperature around her. She’d lost any sense of how far they’d come, but it was plain they had to hurry. Her thoughts were interrupted when her foot plunged through the wood of the staircase. She threw her weight back, hoping to retreat to the last step, but it gave as well. Shards of wood stabbed her ankle as she pitched into empty air and tumbled over and over into the claustrophobic dark.