Read Online Twenty-Sided Sorceress 3 - Pack of Lies by Annie Bellett - Free Book Online Page B

flaming to life on the ruins of his clothing. I poured everything I had into my shields as a wave of flame rushed at me.
    Belatedly, I remembered the house behind me, the people who might be there. Harper somewhere to the side of me, a crumpled form in the dry summer grass.
    My shields took the heat and I threw my will into directing it upward, toward the sky, toward nothing that it could burn and hurt and kill. My eyes squeezed shut against the heat. I held my breath, ignoring the stench of burning hair as I spread my shields as thin as I could, trying to funnel the flame wave away from everything. Away from the people I kept failing to protect.
    Pain radiated through my forearms and I felt my own clothing catching fire. It wasn’t going to be enough. I needed more power, another answer. No time. I hung on, gripping my twenty-sided talisman with hands gone numb from pain, pouring all my strength into blocking the flames as the unfamiliar magic roared over me, resisting, almost alive, hungry for death.
    And then, as it had before with the explosion in the parking lot, it suddenly ceased. Blood roared in my ears instead of fire.
    I raised my head, catching sight of the retreating taillights of the assassin’s car. Again. He turned a corner, speeding off. I had no energy to go after him. I wanted to breathe. To curl up in a bath of ice and forget what fire tasted like. My body vibrated with spent power. With terror. With pain. My arms were raw, skin bubbling into blisters even as I stared at it, trying to gather my mind back into itself.
    Rosie ran past me, toward a charred shape in the smoldering grass to the side of the driveway. Then she started screaming.

Harper was alive, barely. Her scorched chest rose and fell in uneven breaths. Clumps of charred hair fell off her as Levi and I carefully got her moved onto a blanket and brought into the house.
    “Why isn’t she shifting?” I asked, ignoring the pain in my hands and arms as the blanket rubbed on raw, burnt patches of skin.
    “She’s not conscious,” Levi said. “She’s breathing though. Her body will start to heal.”
    “Can you do anything?” Max asked me. “Heal her?”
    I shook my head. Healing was complicated. I didn’t know anatomy or what her healthy skin was supposed to be like exactly. I was scared to try using my magic that way. I’d attempted to heal Wolf once and had failed miserably, my magic sliding uselessly off her bloody chest.
    Wolf appeared as though thinking of her had called her. I wanted to curse at her, ask her where she had been, but she couldn’t have stopped this. The assassin was human—using some kind of magic, sure, but not a magical being himself, not enough that she would have been able to help.
    Still, part of me thought she could have at least warned me. She should have smelled the magic on him. Instead she’d been absent. I felt betrayed, but shoved it away. Irrational anger wouldn’t save Harper.
    “Max,” Rosie said. “Go help Ezekiel put out the fires.”
    He glared at her but left, throwing a last worried look over his shoulder at Harper.
    We put her on a bed in the first-floor guest room. Her fox body was small for a shifter, her normally red and glossy fur charred away in ugly weals, burned to brown and black and patches of raw red flesh.
    Guilt swamped me as I stood there, helpless.
    “I shouldn’t have come tonight,” I said.
    “You don’t know what he would have done if you hadn’t,” Rosie said. “Don’t start blaming yourself, dearie. If we start that game then Harper shouldn’t have run out the door like an idiot. That man was bad news. He is the one to blame. He set my baby on fire.”
    “But only because I was here,” I said, turning to her. My vision blurred as tears leaked out my eyes, tears of rage, tears of guilt. “And I didn’t stop him. How can you look at her and not hate me?”
    “You saved me from the slowest, most terrible death I could ever envision. You risked your life, your