Page 56 of Wolf of Ashes
I eye the man, noting the way he isn’t looking at the corridor. I suddenly consider the possibility that he might not be able to see the door.
I’m not sure how or why that might be, but it would explain why our appearance startled the men so much. If they can’t see a door, then I imagine it looked like we appeared out of nowhere. Or walked through a wall.
With that thought, I relax, because I seem to have the upper hand.
“You don’t see a door?” Keeping the man in my sights, I turn to Diavolo. “Do you see a door? Because I see a door.”
“Uh-huh.” Very slowly, he sweeps aside his jacket to reveal his illusion wand.
“A completely visible, clearly there, door?”
“Uh-huh.” Now his hand very slowly closes over the hilt of his weapon, although it’s his fingers that glimmer with sapphire light.
“A green door,” I finish with a smile.
“Very green,” Diavolo replies.
The man’s face has turned red and he splutters so hard that he spits as far as my feet. “Stop talking about a fucking door!” he roars, launching himself at me. “There’s no fucking—”
There are flashes of black and then—
Thud.
It happens so fast that Diavolo doesn’t even get a shot of magic off.
The female panther leaps, her muscular body flying through the air and into the big guy, knocking him down.
In unison with her, the male panther with the russet paw also leaps, but at the man’s weapon hand.
All three hit the floor. The female’s jaw is locked around the man’s neck while the male panther has his wrist.
I expect to see blood, but neither of the beasts rips or tears, and the man has frozen beneath them. His eyes are wide with apparent shock, and he appears a little dazed, no doubt from the knock to his head when he landed.
The moment he hits the floor, there’s a collective gasp from the other men.
Half of them adjust their aim, their weapons clicking as they train their guns on the panthers.
The other half take a quick step back as if they’d like nothing more than to get the fuck out of here.
Diavolo removes his hand from his wand and tips his chin at the panthers, both of whom are now looking to me as if for instructions.
“Step back,” I murmur to the panthers. “I think we’ve shown our new friends enough for now.”
The panthers open their jaws, revealing the tiniest pinpricks of blood on the man’s neck and wrist, before they step back toward me.
To the man on the floor, I say, “If you value your life, I’d advise you to move very slowly. My pan—uh, dogs—are due for a meal and I’d rather they didn’t eat my new friends.”
Despite my warning, the man with the skull tattoo scrambles to his feet and hurries away, finding himself a table at the back of the room.
It’s then that the sound of a chair scraping back reaches me. A man, much taller than the others, moves at the table on my far right. He wasn’t visible to me before. It seems he remained sitting when we first arrived and now that the others have stepped back, they’ve revealed his presence.
This man rises slowly to his feet. Like the others, he’s dressed in a suit, but otherwise, he stands out from all of them.
He has ice-blond hair with startlingly amber eyes, a combination of coloring that I don’t see on any other man in the room. His skin is fair and the breadth of his shoulder beneath his jacket and thickness of his neck behind his collar indicate a muscular frame rivaled only by the keeper.
He’s holding a small, golden object in his right hand, sort of like a cube but slimmer and more rectangular. His thumb moves at the side of it and a lid flips open. There’s a softclickas a flame appears.
I’m sure I have a name for this object. Some sort of fire creator… or fire lighter…A lighter!That’s it, I’m certain of it.
