The Lady of the Storm - 2 by Kathryne Kennedy

the mix of elven blood that flowed through his veins.
    And she could not even think that they were friends. Temporary companions forced to journey together.
    She had misread his kindness and natural charm before. This time she would not. She would not . No matter how many times she had to tell herself—
    A muscular arm wrapped about her shoulders and then her mouth, dragging her deeper into the hollow of the boulder. His hand muffled her cry of surprise but she reflexively struggled anyway, gathering her magic to help free her from his hold.
    “Stop,” he whispered, his mouth against her ear. “Fire demon.”
    What?
    But she didn’t have to wait long to understand, for several whirling orbs of flame bounced along the valley floor, no more than a few feet from where they huddled. Following those harbingers walked a creature she could not have imagined.
    Red fire shaped a being that had legs like a man but flowed across the ground rather than stepped. A black, dripping mess formed the semblance of a face and an emaciated body.
    Cecily froze and Giles angled his body in front of hers, that sword of his appearing to jump from his scabbard into his hand.
    The horses had been grazing on a patch of grass in the path of the creature. Their nostrils flared and they suddenly bolted, their flight not hampered a whit by Giles’s and Cecily’s belongings still strapped to their saddles.
    The fire demon laughed, tossing a ball of orange flame at the beasts, hitting poor Belle squarely on her rump. The little mare squealed, her shorter legs pumping to overtake the faster gait of Apollo. Cecily gasped in sympathy, and the demon stopped, glowing eyes studying the rocky walls of the valley.
    When those red orbs slowly settled on their hiding place, a flush of weakness made her muscles go limp. When the unnatural creature flowed toward them, Giles let out a curse and leaped at it. Cecily watched, still frozen with fear, as the demon threw another ball of fire straight at Giles.
    He dodged, with unnatural elven swiftness, his sword slicing through the fireball and dissolving it into a shower of sparks. It appeared that the blade had enough power to disarm the magic of a fire demon, if not that of an Imperial Lord.
    The flaming creature roared, making Cecily jump and finally freeing her from the terror that had held her immobile. Her hands trembled but her fingers followed her commands, coaxing the water from the spring, swirling it into small translucent tornadoes.
    Giles danced around the demon, dodging more flaming spheres and occasionally getting in close enough to nick the thing with the tip of his sword. Wherever he touched it, a small hole appeared, but quickly closed up again with a lick of black fire.
    The demon roared in frustration and this time gathered a blob of black sludge that dripped down its face, flung it at Giles. It hit the blacksmith on his injured shoulder, setting his coat aflame.
    Cecily pelted Giles with a tornado.
    It doused the flame but made him stagger in surprise, his gaze flying to hers in fury as he fell. The demon laughed, or at least, a similar imitation of one, and moving as swiftly as fire igniting dry thatch it swooped down upon the blacksmith. Giles rolled with an agility and grace that testified to the amount of elven blood flowing in his veins, but Cecily could not see past the flames to tell if he’d avoided the demon’s attack.
    “Fie,” she breathed, and launched the full force of her swirling water at the monster. But the small spray had little effect on the demon, and the spring quickly ran dry. Cecily reached deeper into the earth, inside the very mountain itself, where an underground river flowed dark and cold. It came to her call through the narrow opening of the spring, cracking the edges of the earth and shaking the mountainside itself.
    A deluge of water fell upon the fire demon and the creature turned its burning red eyes in her direction, screaming defiantly as it slowly withered to