Storm Cursed (Mercy Thompson #11)(8)

I didn’t think even a thousand-pound bale would kill a werewolf—and I hadn’t felt the hit from the pack bonds that would tell me if someone was dead or (less reliably) badly injured. But those bales had been stacked pretty high.

I started toward the barn but stopped when the fugitive goblin emerged from the barn, crawling over a bale. He wasn’t running but moving silently, his attention behind him. He was taller than Larry, his build nearly human, but his bare feet were oddly formed—more like a dog’s feet than a human’s, with long toes unshielded by sock or shoe. If he was using glamour, he wasn’t using it to try to look human despite the sweatpants he wore.

I took the cutlass in my left hand and drew my Sig with my right. The practical part of me knew that I should just shoot, but shooting someone in the back who had not (yet) tried to hurt me seemed wrong.

I could hear Ben now, swearing a blue streak in between coughs. He didn’t sound hurt—just angry. A small part of me listened for Mary Jo or Larry, but the rest of me was focused on the goblin.

This goblin killed a child, I reminded myself grimly, raising my arm.

I don’t know if I would have shot him in the back or not because he turned his head and noticed me, spinning gracefully around to face me.

He hesitated and I shot him twice in the body and once in the head. The body shots made him flinch but there were no wounds in his chest where I shot him. Maybe I should have brought the .44 Magnum—but then I couldn’t have shot one-handed with any degree of accuracy. The third bullet, aimed at his forehead, bounced off some sort of invisible shield and zinged off on a different trajectory.

He dropped his head a little, like a bull getting ready to charge, and laughed. “Little coyote. I was the first of thirty. Do you think you and your toy can stop—”

I shot him again. Twice. The first hit him just left of the center of his chest instead of bouncing off, so whatever magic he’d worked required effort rather than being an impenetrable shield he could keep up forever. But the second shot that should have hit him in the same place missed him entirely.

He didn’t dodge the bullet. Bullets are very fast. He was just faster than I was. Between the time it took me to reacquire the target and pull the trigger, he’d moved out of the path of my aim and charged at me.

I dropped my gun—not by choice—rolled out of the way, and tried to nail him with the cutlass at the same time. I succeeded at the first two, but my left hand is not as quick as my right. He had no trouble sliding away from my blade, even putting in an unnecessary somersault in the air and landing on his feet like a performer in Cirque du Soleil.

It might have given him the opportunity to show off, but my cutlass swipe did keep him far enough away from me that I could roll back to my feet.

I have speed. It is my best superpower. I am as quick as the werewolves, probably as fast as the vampires. I was not as fast as that goblin was. It was a good thing, then, that I didn’t have to defeat him. All I had to do was keep him from escaping until the others emerged from the barn.

Unhappily for me, from the sounds I was hearing from the barn, it might take a while for my compatriots to fight their way free of the hay. Mary Jo and Larry were alive, I’d heard their voices, so that was something.

The goblin smiled at me. “Ah, it has teeth, does it?” He displayed his own, sharper and greener than human teeth. “That’s fine. I like a bite or two with my dinner.”

The hairs on the back of my neck stood up as he made a little throwing gesture toward me. Magic, I thought, though I couldn’t tell what it had done. I couldn’t afford to worry about it either, because, smiling broadly, he whipped out a long copper knife, maybe two-thirds the length of my cutlass, and struck.

I met his blade—his attack had been ludicrously forthright and slow, especially given the speed he’d already demonstrated. Almost, I thought, as though whatever magic he’d thrown at me should have taken care of the need to pay attention to my blade.

Steel bit into the copper as I absorbed the interesting and surprising news that, for once, my weird semi-immunity to magic seemed to have (finally) worked on something that was really trying to hurt me.

The impact of the blades made him hiss in what sounded like surprise. But he didn’t hesitate, changing his trajectory and his weapon in midattack. He opened his mouth and lunged for my throat with his big, sharp teeth.

Not for nothing had I endured a month of pirate-loving, self-styled-expert werewolves determined that I would wield the blade as well as any aspirant to Anne Bonny’s title of Pirate Queen ever had.

I freed my blade from the weak final throes of his knife attack and backhanded him with the cross guard in the same motion. Sadly, the cross guard was silver (because werewolves) and not iron like the blade. Cold iron, even in the form of steel, would have gotten his attention.

My blow knocked him back, but he grabbed me by the shoulder and knee and took me down to the ground.

Down to the ground is bad when you are dealing with humans. When dealing with creatures of preternatural strength, it is deadly. I managed, somehow, to bring up the cutlass between us without cutting myself. The flat side of it pressed against me from hip to opposite shoulder. Which meant it did the same thing to him in reverse.

Iron is a problem for most fae to one degree or another, but it varies. The goblin screeched, a sound that made my ears ring, and the smell of scorched flesh abruptly hit my nose.