What he hadn’t expected was to find Sophia ahead, already climbing up from the water onto the docks. He watched in growing disbelief and, frankly, mild outrage, as she snaked her way toward the entrance of one of the warehouses, up behind one of the guards posted there with his back turned. She leaped onto his back, smothering him with one hand against his mouth and an arm banded over his throat. When another man emerged from the nearby warehouse, she pounced on him and did the same.
By the time Nicholas had climbed out of the water and ducked over to her, she’d already stripped the men of their tunics and shoes, as well as their swords. Nicholas accepted his with a pointed look of disapproval.
“Can you attempt to keep up?” she groused, turning her back to allow him to change.
“I will endeavor to do my best,” he said dryly, quickly tugging off his wet clothes and pulling on the soldier’s uniform with expediency as Sophia did the same. He bundled everything, including his soaking shoes, into his travel satchel. “Now where—”
A shadow melted away from the wall of the warehouse behind her, tucked into that very same pocket of blindness that had bedeviled her before.
“Move,” he breathed. “Move!”
But Sophia had, it seemed, already read the fear in his features, and she threw herself to the ground, just as a sword blade sang through the air, coming within a hair of scalping her. The sword instead slammed into the building, embedding itself so deeply, the attacker abandoned it in favor of another.
A curved dagger that stretched from the man’s finger like a claw.
A LANCE OF PAIN SLASHED across his shoulder blades. Nicholas was thrown forward by the force of the unseen hit, his breath exploding out of him. He whirled to see the last glimpse of a long spear disappear into the nearby water. Blackness threatened to swallow his vision as he rolled closer to the nearest building’s wall, trying to find cover from above.
Sophia—He searched her out, fuming and fearful. A hard gust of air and a grunt had him flying back, narrowly avoiding a new hooded figure as he slammed his sword down hard enough onto the stones for the blade to spark. It was close enough for him to see his own startled reflection in its surface.
Hell and damnation.
Nicholas ripped his own knife from his belt, parrying the swipe the first attacker took with the clawlike dagger. His forearm throbbed as it absorbed the shock of the blow, and he couldn’t pull back far or fast enough to avoid the bite of its tip at his chin. The cloak the man wore smelled of salt and sweat, and looked to have been cut from the night sky. It was only because the moon shone from so high above them that he could make out the embroidery stitched along its edges, the swirling pattern of what looked to be vines, or the powerful rays of a hundred small suns.
His attacker’s foot lashed out, hooking behind his knee, taking advantage of Nicholas’s unsteady balance and exhaustion. He crashed to the ground hard enough to see the lights of heaven behind his eyelids. As he tried to push himself off the ground, his right arm seemed to fill with white-hot needles and collapsed beneath him, aching.
A sickening thump struck the ground to his right, but Nicholas didn’t dare take his eyes off his attacker except to throw himself back onto his feet. His mind locked into the elaborate dance of death—strike, block, swipe, jab—the heat beneath his skin growing as he leaned into the fight. He allowed the towering man to back him up closer to Sophia, where she was now bending to retrieve her own knife from the neck of the shuddering body on the ground.
These attackers were all the same: black in the cloak, silver in the claw.
What the devil is this?
The attacker missed slicing the tip of Nicholas’s nose off, but clobbered him with a blow under the chin. Hard enough to knock that thought, and his brain, loose. Seeing double now, he couldn’t tell which of the split forms was the man, so he took a broad swipe at both. The claw lashed out, slicing up his arm, nearly puncturing his wrist. Closer, he saw the paleness of the man’s skin, the waxy quality of it, as if he had known nothing but night itself.
The attacker stumbled suddenly with a lurch and a gasp. Behind him, Sophia wrenched her knife out from where she’d jabbed it between his shoulder blades. Nicholas raised his wrist, but his arm still felt peculiar, heavier than it ought to have been, so slow that his next slash was blocked by heavy dark leather gauntlets. The attacker righted himself, keeping his claw on Nicholas and his blade on Sophia.
“You must be joking,” she said, eye white as a pearl in the dark.
He was not. If the man had split himself down his center and become two, he couldn’t have been any more effective than he was then, with his attention divided between them. Nicholas struck, Sophia struck, and he threw them back again and again. Nicholas felt every ounce of pent-up fury crest over his final bit of restraint. A last gasp of strength surged into his body, and, beneath it all, a single, cool thought.
Lure him in.
He feinted left, letting the man’s next hit knock the knife from his hand, letting him crowd closer. Sensing easy prey, the attacker moved in for the kill. The claw ripped the air in two, skimming over his throat as he leaned back.
Sophia slammed her blade into the base of his skull. The attacker’s hood was thrown back as he fell to the ground, his long, pale hair stained with bubbling blood.
The air heaved in and out of Nicholas, his lungs screaming for mercy as the red haze disappeared from his vision and that most basic instinct—to kill or be killed—abandoned him. He wiped his face with his sleeve, ignoring the way his hands shook.