The gunshot makes my ears ring. I drop my drink to cover my ears, and the glass shatters on the floor.
“That fucking asshole!” Juniper’s accent is thick and heavy with rage. “I wasn’t really going to shoot him, but he asked for it, the fucking prick!”
A man stomps in from the back of the house, a wide-barreled gun in his hand. He sees the body of the man on the ground, blood pouring from his head, then hollers, running straight for the only other person with a gun in the room. Juniper.
“Juniper! Behind you!” I scream, but it’s too late. He grabs her by the throat, slamming her against the nearest wall.
“Let me go. Right now,” she growls through clenched teeth.
“Fuck you,” the man growls back.
“Fine.” I don’t know how she manages it, but Juniper raises something between them. It’s not a gun, but some kind of thick, long metal weapon—the same one I saw when her shirt lifted on the way here. She presses it to the man’s chest, generating a large volt of electricity, and it zaps him so hard, he flies backward and crashes through a glass window. I look over my shoulder at where the man went, and he lies there, unconscious. Then I look back at Juniper, and she’s holding the weapon in hand, smirking.
Another man stomps into the kitchen, and then another. They’re coming from all angles, armed with guns, and I freeze, unsure where to go or what to do. What the hell is happening?!
“You lot better back the fuck off right now or you’ll regret it,” Juniper pants raggedly, rubbing her throat. “You saw what happened to your friends. Let’s be wise here.”
One of the men growls and lunges for her, but she grips him by the wrist, twists it, then cracks it, all in one swift motion, causing him to cry out in pain. As she forces him to his knees and uses the electrical stick thingy to put him out, one of the other men points his gun at her and shoots, but she ducks just in time for the bullet to miss. Retrieving her gun, she points it at the shooter and the bullet pierces him in the chest, just as another man charges toward her from behind and tackles her to the floor.
A gasp escapes me, and I rush forward, attempting to yank him off. “Leave her alone!” I shout, but he shoves me off and my back hits the edge of a counter. Pain seizes me and I cry out, crumpling over. I knew I should’ve stayed in the palace. What is Juniper thinking? She’s killing everyone and I’m in the midst of it. What if she goes prison? What if I have to testify? There’s a room full of witnesses! Is she out of her fucking mind? Damn it! Now I see what Caz was worried about.
“Get the fuck off me!” Juniper screams, but her scream doesn’t last long. The man’s body lifts in the air and goes flying across the room, smashing into glass that leads to the glittery pool. People shriek and scream (as they have been doing since Juniper’s first bullet), jumping out of the way.
Hannie rushes into the kitchen, her eyes glowing, her hand up in the direction the man went flying. The man tries to get back up, but Hannie curls the tips of her raised fingers, and his nose bleeds. He hollers in agony as he bleeds out on the ground, clutching his head, and in a matter of seconds, the hollering ceases.
Everything is quiet now. Even the music has stopped. Juniper grunts as she stands, dusting herself off, and wiping blood off her cheek.
“WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON HERE?” A deep voice fills the room. Hannie drops her hand, looking back as a tall man shoves his way through the crowd.
He’s much, much taller than anyone here, his eyes blazing gold, his jaw clenching on and off. He studies the mess in the kitchen, the dead bodies on the ground. But his eyes settle on one person. The man outside, who has just bled out because of Hannie.
“Brother!” he cries, rushing for him. “No! Brother!” he wails, dropping to his knees next to the body.
“Oh, shit.” Hannie looks at Juniper. “We need to go. Now.”
“Who did this?” the man demands, but it’s all I hear before Juniper has my arm and is rushing with me out of the kitchen toward the front door.
We reach it—the door wide open for our escape—but it slams closed on its own, and Hannie sucks in a sharp breath as she spins around, watching as the tall man floats into the main area. Yes, floats. His feet are off the ground, but he’s moving toward us.
“Did you do this?” he demands.
“Tomán, I—I didn’t know he was your brother,” she says, her hands up, as if trying to calm a wild beast.
“You did this!” he roars this time, and he glides forward, slamming into Hannie and knocking her through the closed door. The front half of the house is gone from the smash, now an open crater that faces the street, and outside is Hannie and Tomán, battling in the air. Both of them are floating. Both of them letting off streaks of gold as they punch and kick.
“Shit! We’d better go!” Juniper says behind me.
“Oh, no you don’t!” A man grips Juniper by the hair, and she cries out as he twists it around his large hand. “You started this, you Blackwater bitch!”
The party becomes rowdy as the man tosses Juniper across the room. She lands on a display table full of glass and tumbles over, hitting a wall.
“Juniper!” I scream.
The crowd swarms me, rushing out the hole in the wall, running from the chaos. Hannie and Tomán are still fighting, and the man attacking Juniper is roaring as he picks her up and throws her again. Across the room, a burly man looks at me, points a finger, and asks, “Are you Blackwater too, ya darkie?”
“What?” I shriek.
“You are, ya darkie bitch!”
Get down.
Caz’s voice rings loudly in my head, and I don’t think as I react to it. I lower to a squat, and the sound of another gun goes off. When I look up, the man who was pointing at me no longer has a head. It’s been blown off, nothing but blood and membrane. The body falls to its knees and hits the ground with a heavy thud. More screams. More cries for help. More people running.
Panicking, I scramble away, bumping into someone’s legs. When I look up, I’m staring into Caz’s blue eyes.
“See what happens when you listen to Juniper and not me?” He reaches down, grips my arm, and helps me up. “Let’s go!” He charges through the back of the house, where more men are coming in, dressed in brown and grimacing at him. With one hand holding my wrist, he uses the other to aim and shoot. He doesn’t miss. Each man goes down, and he runs past their bodies like they’re meaningless creatures.
Behind me, I see Killian tearing through the rowdy crowd, and I have no idea where he came from, but I assume he showed up with Caz. How did they know where we were?
Killian rescues Juniper from the other man who is giving her hell, and when she’s up, their guns go off. Rounds of bullets fly in the air, Juniper screaming and Killian roaring, their backs pressed together, taking each man on. When they have a clearing, they run after us, and when we’re far enough, Caz releases my arm, demanding me to run to the black vehicle parked down the cobblestone street. It’s his car, and he presses a button on a fob, unlocking it and shoving me inside.
Juniper and Killian are at the car in a matter of seconds, hopping into the backseat. As soon as they do, Caz starts the engine and speeds off, driving away as fast as he possibly can to get out of Iron Class.
“Your head is as hard as steel, Juniper!” Caz barks.
“It’s not my fault that fucker was rude to us!” she shouts back.
“You’re always starting something! Always!” he snaps. “You know we aren’t to fight or use our guns like that in Vanorian territory! If Alora gets word of this and hears about your gun, she’ll ban us! You know this!”
“Oh, don’t play the innocent, like you didn’t keep a gun or two yourself!”
“That’s beside the point, Juniper! Mine is for emergencies! Look at you! You almost got yourself killed! You almost got Willow killed!” I don’t know why hearing him say my name makes my heart beat harder. I mean, it’s already beating pretty hard, but his voice causes a different effect on me.
I glance back, and Juniper does look bad. Gashes are all over her face and her nose is bloody.
“Caz, you have to understand. It was never my intention to—”
“Oh, fuck off!” he barks. “Just sit back there and shut the hell up! For once in your life, just listen to me and shut up!”
The car becomes quiet, and I face forward again in the passenger seat. The tension has mounted, and it sticks like glue in the confines of his car. It’s a short ride back to Alora’s castle, but the silence is deafening.
When we pull up to the palace, Caz has them store their guns in a lockable compartment beneath his driver’s seat, where there are more guns hidden, and then he says, “I’ll do all the talking to Alora. You all go to your chambers and don’t come out until morning. Fucking hell. I swear.” He pushes out the car, slamming the door behind him and storming up the stairs.
“You never listen,” Killian grumbles, getting out the car. “I told you not to run. You’re lucky I don’t shoot you now, where you sit.”
When he’s gone, it’s just me and Juniper in the car. She sighs and tosses her head back, resting it on the seat. Silence ticks by, and then Juniper blows a breath.
“As terrifying as that was,” she says. “It was also pretty fantastic.”
I’m not even sure what to say or how to react. And I don’t know if it’s my shock from everything that’s happened—the glowing eyes of Hannie and Tomán, the floating, the guns and violence, people literally getting their heads blown off by guns—or if I’m losing it, but I laugh. I laugh so hard it hurts my stomach.
Here I am, facing death at every corner, in a world I never knew existed, and I’m laughing. It’s all I can do.
“Hannie will be okay,” Juniper says after a while. “She always takes care of herself.”
“Yeah.” I wipe a tear from the corner of my eye. “I hope so. But is what just happened a normal thing around here? Won’t you all get in serious trouble for it? There were so many witnesses. So many men are dead, and you fled a crime scene. You killed like, ten people, Juniper, but Caz is treating it like a slap on the wrist.”
Juniper holds up a finger. “Actually, I only killed three of them. The rest were stunned beautifully. Besides, why wouldn’t I have killed that guy? He was a Rippie who threatened you and hit me—with very thick glass, might I add. I’m sure he’d have done much worse if he had a weapon on him, and in Blackwater, we leave no loose ends. It’s our motto. Do you not kill people who threaten you where you’re from?”
“Not exactly,” I murmur. “We just get the authorities to handle it.”
“Wow. People must get away with awful shit there then.” Juniper rubs my shoulder and I meet her eyes. “For what it’s worth, I wouldn’t have let anyone hurt you, Willow.”
I pat her hand with a smile. “I know.”
