Abruptly, rage surged over him in a scalding wave again. He snarled, “Now you take my orders?”
She speared him with a brief, sparkling glance. “I accept your suggestions. You can stick your orders up your ass.”
He would not laugh. Not while he was this furious. Spinning, he leaped into battle, amassing another morningstar to fling at a Hound that tried to flee the field.
It was a sloppy, ugly battle. Nikolas was able to amass two more morningstars before he tapped out. Aiming the last one strategically, he was able to take down two Hounds at once, and then he had to rely upon swordwork. Never moving too far away from Sophie, he kept on the defensive in a broad circle around her.
Within a half an hour, the battle was over. As Nikolas drew his sword from the throat of his last kill, he surveyed the field. A full thirty bodies littered the ground. When the Hounds had first appeared, the numbers had been decidedly against them, but now almost all of them lay dead, strewn across the clearing. Some of the bodies had already shifted back into human form.
They had gotten so damn lucky. If Sophie hadn’t acted so quickly and been such a good shot, if Nikolas hadn’t been able to amass the morningstars, if the other three men hadn’t been armed with guns and silver bullets, this battle could have gone entirely the other way.
The sound of shouting had him spinning on his heel.
Sophie and Rhys confronted each other over the body of a dead Hound. She was swearing, sounding as furious as Nikolas had ever heard her. “What the hell is the matter with you? I told you to back off and leave it alone! I had it under control!”
Rhys advanced, moving his body like a weapon until they were face-to-face. He backhanded her in the chest, pushing her back as he shouted hoarsely over her, “You don’t fucking tell me what to do, woman! He was an enemy! I cut him down like the murderous dog he was!”
Nikolas lunged over and slammed into Rhys so violently the other man skidded on the wet grass and went down on his ass. Breathing hard, Nikolas brought the tip of his sword to Rhys’s throat.
“She was doing what I told her to do,” he growled. “I wanted to question that Hound.”
“I tried to tell him that, but he wouldn’t listen!” Sophie exclaimed as she reached Nikolas’s side.
Rhys’s face distorted with rage. “You get a piece of tail, and now you’re holding your fucking sword to my throat? Is that the kind of commander you really are?”
Ice took over Nikolas’s molten rage.
“Yes.” His voice turned stone cold. He pressed forward until the tip pressed against the skin at Rhys’s throat. “That’s the kind of commander I am. You touch her again like that, and I will cut your fucking hands off.”
Beside him, Sophie had gone still. Nikolas grew aware that the other men had joined them and were bearing silent witness to the confrontation.
Nikolas bared his teeth in savage, naked aggression. “That goes for every one of you as well. This woman has risked her safety and her life for us. While you were scrambling for your weapons, she was the first one on the field tonight. We are guests in her house, and you will respect her expertise. And if I find out that one of you has verbally or physically threatened her in any way, I don’t care how long we have fought together, I will end you. Is that clear?”
Rowan stepped forward to put his hand on Nikolas’s taut forearm. “You’re right, Nik,” he said, his voice clear and calm. “That’s not who we are. Rhys was just being an unbelievably massive ass, weren’t you, Rhys? You didn’t actually mean to strike our friend, host, and ally. And I’ll bet you’re counting the seconds until you can say you’re sorry. Right?”
“Right,” Rhys said, his wary attention trained on Nikolas. He made no move to try to stand or ease away from Nikolas’s sword but instead remained sprawled half prone on the ground, his weight resting back on both hands. He looked at Sophie. “I apologize. I can’t believe I hit you. I’ve never done anything like that before. It must have been the heat of the battle.”
“Sure, it’s okay,” Sophie said easily. As Nikolas glanced at her, water dripped down her calm face. She smiled. “Battle fever can make the best of us do crazy things. No harm done this time. Just don’t do it again, or you can forget about what Nik will do to you. I’ll smack you into next week myself.”
Expectedly, Braden started to chuckle. “I heard the truth in that statement.”
Others started to laugh, and the tension eased. Rowan’s grip tightened on Nikolas’s arm until he forced his rigid muscles to relax. Taking a step back, he bent to clean the length of his bloody blade on the grass, then found his sword harness. Despite the discomfort of donning it while wet, he sheathed the sword and shrugged the harness into place.
He asked, “Did we get them all?”
“No way to tell,” Cael replied. “Maybe. We got all the ones that charged, and you took out the one that tried to leave the field. There could have been others holding back, in the woods, but they would have charged too, unless they had other orders.”
And Rhys killed the one that might have told us that, Nikolas thought. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Sophie offer a hand to Rhys to help him up. After a second’s hesitation, Rhys accepted it. It was a nice, diplomatic touch. A savage, barely controlled part of him wanted to knock their hands apart.
He watched closely until they stopped touching. Then he said, “I guess it doesn’t matter. None of these Hounds will be returning, which is a message in itself.” He told Sophie grimly, “I’m afraid all our hard work at misdirection has gone down the drain.”
“Doesn’t matter.” Sounding tired, she swiped at her dripping nose. “Misdirection was a long shot anyway.” She added telepathically, They showed up here awfully quick after Robin’s storm started though. Do you think Morgan knew I was lying after all?
Nikolas said, No. If Morgan believed you were lying, he would have come here himself, and he wouldn’t have waited. Or he wouldn’t have let you go in the first place.
She heaved a sigh, which turned into a cough. It must have been Robin’s storm that brought them then.
Although he didn’t say so, he disagreed. The puck might be a great many things, but he was neither naive nor stupid. A storm of this magnitude spanned miles, and Robin would never have made the manor house the center of it.
And Morgan hadn’t witnessed the deep emotional bond Sophie and Robin had developed. He had believed Sophie when she had claimed the dog had disappeared, so he wouldn’t have leaped immediately to searching for Robin here. He might have checked out the property as part of an overall search strategy, but there would have been no specific sense of urgency in doing so.
No, there was only one logical reason Nikolas could think of for a fighting force of thirty Hounds to show up on Sophie’s doorstep not an hour after the men’s arrival.
Betrayal. They were not supposed to live through this fight.
He watched Rhys closely for the next several minutes, but as the tension faded from the group, the other man appeared to relax gradually. He even stepped forward to mutter something at Sophie, which caused her to laugh.
Moving quickly, the men stacked the bodies of the Hounds together close to the tree line. As they worked, a single headlight of a motorcycle appeared. Gawain and Ashe had returned.
Sophie and Rowan went to greet them and explain what happened, and within moments Ashe had joined the rest of the group to help, while Gawain ran his bike into the manor house.
Now that Gawain had returned and could help to keep an eye on Sophie, Nikolas felt a hypervigilant part of him relax slightly, and he could turn his full attention to the task at hand. Once all the bodies had been collected, the others stepped back several meters. While they kept watch, he knelt to put his hands on the ground once again.