Clay jars shattered against the cedar palisade, spewing sheets of sticky green fire across the dry timbers.
The scarred enforcer had panicked the instant twenty fire-wands leveled at his chest.
Instead of dropping his weapons, he had hurled three volatile oil-pots over the fence, screaming for his men to fall back.
Flames roared upward in a greasy green plume. Thick chemical smoke drifted across the lawn, carrying the stinging stench of sulfur and boiled toad tallow.
A glowing ember drifted on the updraft and landed directly on the paper cover of The Bandit King’s Secret Bride.
Kaelen Vance’s eyes snapped open.
He had been lying on his back in the canvas hammock, drifting into the warm, drowsy haze of an afternoon nap. He had been exactly ten minutes away from finishing the fourteenth section of Book Seven.
Now, a tiny ring of brown ash was eating into the painted cheek of the bandit king’s bride.
