A Midwinter Fantasy - Leanna Renee Hieber [71]
Mace darted into the covered clearing where he’d left the females. It was deserted.
Lurching about with all of his senses, Mace physically froze. There was no sign of Sally, not visually and not patternwise. The ground was torn up, and Mace made a mournful sound, setting Jayden down and shifting to human shape, spinning around with a growing sense of horror.
“What’s wrong?” Jayden asked, wiping his eyes. “Can’t we just go home?”
Mace closed his eyes and focused, reaching out with his senses for both Sally and Ruffles. The dog was apparent to him immediately; they must not have frightened her during the capture. But they wouldn’t have to. Sally was brave, but she was also smart enough not to try and fight against a group of armed men. Mace had dropped her here, in a copse only a few miles from the bandit camp. Then he’d gone back, focused on the camp itself, not on his surroundings. How hard could it have been for a few men to skirt the valley and take both Sally and Ruffles? How could he have been so unmitigatedly stupid? He’d never underestimate a human man again, he promised himself. Not if he survived long enough to outlive the world.
He stared back toward the bandit camp, standing nude among the pine needles and snow, since he’d abandoned his clothes, his mantle throbbing from the pain of his wounds. He couldn’t feel Sally over this distance without a master bond, but he could touch Ruffles. She was there, and Sally had to be with her.
“Mace?” Jayden whimpered as the battler closed his eyes. “I’m sorry I ran away. I am. I shouldn’t have gone with them, but they said they’d kill everyone.”
Mace opened his eyes and looked down at the boy, really seeing him this time. There were all the usual male traits that he’d always ignored, feeling they made men inferior to women. Below that, though, he found a desperate need to be acknowledged, to be loved. To be worthy of attention from the person Jayden believed to be the greatest warrior in the world. He wanted to be just like Mace, and he couldn’t because he hadn’t been hatched a battle sylph. Surprisingly, finally realizing that made Mace feel rather small.
He reached out and clapped a hand on the boy’s shoulder, felt him instantly tense. “Going with them to save the others was the right thing to do,” he said. “It’s what a battle sylph would have done.” Well, a battle sylph would have killed the bandits, but the courage was the same, the instinct of hive over self. For Jayden, the courage to do that actually had to be greater than anything a battler would need. “You . . . you honor me.”
Jayden stared at him for a moment and then started to cry again, obviously trying to stop and furiously wiping his eyes. Mace couldn’t leave him here. Not with how Sally had been plucked from the same place. And he couldn’t take him back to the bandit camp; he wasn’t so stupid that he’d make the same mistake multiple times. He had to get Jayden to safety.
Oddly, he wanted the boy to be safe.
Chapter Eleven
The ritual of visiting and gift giving in Falloweld had turned into a full-out party, likely at the thought that there was a battle sylph out hunting down the bandits who’d been terrorizing them for so long. The inn was filled with townspeople and families all raising their glasses in a cheer, as though there had never been any danger at all to a woman, two boys, and a dog.
A lot of those glasses dropped when Mace crashed in, slamming the door into the wall as he did, and dropped his natural shape for his human one while he set Jayden down. They gaped at him, at his nudity, and at the filthy boy standing in the circle of his arm.
“What?” Falon managed.
Mace pushed