Island of Dragons (Unwanteds #7)(65)
Rather than killing the pirates, which now seemed like an impossible task, Alex began casting glass spells between the two parties, trying to slow the enemy down and keep his team safer.
That definitely helped, as the pirates weren’t expecting such a thing. Several of them smashed into the walls of glass, their weapons clanging against them. But each glass wall Alex put up took several seconds and a good amount of energy and concentration, and Alex wasn’t nearly fast enough. Some pirates began to slam their shields against the glass, while others simply went around the panels and began swinging their swords wildly. Alex’s team had nothing with which to protect themselves, and with only a small percentage of their spells causing any harm, they began to panic.
Some of them ran to the fountain in the middle of the lawn for cover, while others hid behind the mansion and cast spells from there, trying to find a better angle. Mr. Appleblossom on the roof was the most successful, for he could strike pirates on the head, but the pirates soon discovered him and moved out of range.
Alex, finding himself backed up against a shattered mansion window by a pirate twice his size, had no choice but to flip backward through the frame and scramble to his feet again in time to send a freeze spell at the pirate’s ankles. It hit its mark, and the pirate froze in place. Alex jumped back out through the mansion window and finished off the brute from behind with a triple dose of heart attack spells, and soon the pirate fell over on his back, both frozen and dead. Alex grabbed the man’s shield.
More boats arrived on shore. Alex looked up just in time to see thirty or more pirates with shields and swords running toward him, with none of his team around to help fight them off. Desperate, Alex began casting spells with all his might, but there was nothing he could do to stop them all.
Just then, Simber came swooping down from above and plowed into the line of pirates, knocking them flat. Swords and shields went flying. “Grab the shields to protect yourselves!” Alex screamed to his team. “Swords too, if you know how to use them!” The team descended on the items and armed themselves.
The next boat reached the shore, and the pirates piled out as before. Simber knocked them down as well, but the first row of flattened pirates was getting back up again.
“Into the mansion!” one of the pirates cried out.
Alex felt his heart throbbing, and his throat was parched. “No!” he yelled, and ran to pick up a sword. He brandished it awkwardly, then ran at the pirates. They knocked him aside like a feather. As they broke down the door, Alex, still prone, dropped the sword and found his extra stash of heart attack spells. He rolled to his side and pelted the pirates’ backs with them one by one, and they toppled over, but it wasn’t enough, and soon they were storming into the mansion.
Alex flopped back, exhausted, and then he struggled and scrambled to his feet and ran after them until he’d stopped every last one of them. He raced back past the hospital ward, shouting to the nurses, “Use the magic lock to protect yourselves—this is going to get very ugly!”
The Brunt of the Attack
Lani and her team took on the pirates the best way they knew how—by running past them into the water once they reached the shore and firing at the pirates’ backs. It worked the first time, and seventeen pirates fell to their deaths. But all the rest of them whirled around, furious, and began brandishing their weapons. The pirates were big and they were strong and some of them were even smart, and Lani knew her team was in trouble.
But she’d also seen Alex put up glass spells, and while she had never been able to pull off that spell, she knew Samheed could do it, so in the midst of a high-speed chase with a lumbering pirate behind her, she ran toward Samheed’s team. “Sam!” she cried. “Glass barriers!” She hoped he heard her. She circled around, three pirates on her tail now, and tried freezing them, but they blocked all of her attempts. She tossed heart attack spells over her shoulder, but they couldn’t find their marks because of the shields.
She wished she’d grabbed a sword when her team had felled the first round of pirates, but those weapons were out of reach from where she was now. She knew that all she had to do was kill one of the pirates chasing her to get one. But it was proving impossible. She ran away from the water toward the rocky hill that led up to the road in Quill, now leading half a dozen pirates away from her team. Nimbly up the rocks she ran, and realized the pirates weren’t quite as agile as she. She climbed faster, her legs burning, and the pirates fell farther behind. When she reached the top, she picked up a huge rock and threw it down at the first pirate, and because he was looking down at his footing, he didn’t see it. It smashed into his head, sending him tumbling backward and knocking down the two women behind him.
Lani followed up with deadly scatterclips, one right after the other, putting an end to all three before the pirates behind them could reach her. Heartened, she picked up the pace again, going down the rocky hill this time, leaping recklessly, but with no other choice. She ran past a few of her team who were struggling and managed to fire heart attack spells at their enemies’ backs as she ran.
More tenders landed, putting Lani and her team in even bigger trouble. Lani managed to dodge the chasing pirates long enough to go back to one of the fallen ones and grab a shield and sword. She swung the sword wildly, finding it a good bit heavier than the swords Mr. Appleblossom trained them with in Actors’ Studio, but she soon adjusted. And when she managed to knock the shield out of the hands of a pirate, she threw her own shield to the ground so she could grab a handful of heart attack components.