Attack
The
attack happened in the space between one moment and the next. One moment she
had been enjoying a peaceful walk to school and the next there a dagger buried
hilt deep in the ground at her feet.
Zehodain sighed. She had known it was coming, she had been sensing her
attacker for the past week, but she had been hoping… “You couldn’t have waited
until my first day of college was over?”
Sighing
again, she shook her head as she bent down to pluck the knife from the ground.
She flipped and caught it by the blade before she sent it flying back in the
direction it came from. Her hypersensitive ears could hear it trimming stray
leaves as it flew through the woods, seconds before she heard the telling thud
as it buried into a tree.
A
feminine laugh echoed through the trees. This particular area of the woods was
a valley, as the old river the used to run through it had diverted onto a new
path. It left behind a large gorge that time had seen fit to fill in with trees
and wildlife. Still, sound bounced off
the high dirt walls like a tennis balls bounced around tennis-courts.
“You
have good aim.”
Zehodain
turned to face the voice’s owner. She
was hardly impressive looking. At roughly five and a half feet, she was almost
a foot shorter than her, with a round, child-like face. Large green eyes
dominated most of it, giving her a youthful, almost angelic, appearance. A
rapidly healing cut ran parallel to her left eye, made by the knife now firmly
gripped in the woman’s right hand.
“I
almost would have had to fight you with one eye.” She smiled and flipped an
errant blond curl over her shoulder. She
had a mass of them falling down past her collarbones and completing the look of
wide-eyed innocence. Zehodain wasn’t fooled. “It’s a good thing that I was able
to dodge it. I would have looked a little weird with one green eye and one blue
one.”
Because she would have torn out one
of Zehodain’s to replace it. Lovely. “I
don’t think a Fae eye would respond well to being in the body of a Vhalic
anyway,” she stated dryly.
The woman smiled faintly. “But
you’re not fully Fae, now are you?”
The origins of her birth were
hardly secret, but for one of the Vhalic to know about it, someone had to have
done some research. She shrugged. “It is
what it is.”
“Well, it can hardly been anything
else.” The woman shifted her weight suddenly and threw herself into a swift
lunge. Zehodain dropped on to her back leg as she drew on her magic
reflexively. Glowing, iridescent runes
flashed briefly across her skin as she threw up her right hand. She finished
summoning her own weapon in the nick of time, her own blade materializing in
her hand to protect her neck. The blades
squealed as they clashed and steel slid against steel only to lock together
briefly.
Zehodain used the blonde’s extended
reach to her advantage and pushed down with her own blade clearing a path for a
hard left hook against her jaw. The woman flew to the right a several paces but
she recovered quickly and used her momentum to flip head over feet. She landed
in a crouch, one foot behind her to slow her skid. Blood coated teeth bared into a vicious grin.
“I thought this was going to be boring. Now, I think that this is going to be
much more fun than I thought.”
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