“Don’t worry,” Lamar said. “I’ll tell you all about it.”
Bale shook his arms and howled at the sky. “There is no justice in the world!”
The Dogs laughed. Hugh chuckled, dismounted, and took Bucky to the stables. This was good. They all needed a victory after getting their assess handed to them for the last eight months and this one was theirs alone. The shapeshifters helped, but the victory belonged to the Dogs.
Hugh was settling Bucky into his stall when he heard light footsteps. She’d chased him down.
“A word in private, Preceptor.”
“Not right now,” he told her without bothering to look at her face.
“Yes, now. You put children in danger. You didn’t tell me what you were going to do. I could’ve helped. We could’ve killed them without jeopardizing the shapeshifters.”
He turned to her. Fury lit her eyes. Her mouth was a flat narrow line. She was clenching her teeth. She wasn’t just mad; she was livid.
“First, I’m going to take care of my horse. Then, I’m going to change and wash the blood from my face. If I feel like talking then, you can come and discuss whatever it is. Or you can make a hysterical scene right here in the stables where everyone can hear us. Your choice.”
He turned to Bucky. When he looked back, Elara was gone.
Hugh opened his eyes. A square room stood before him, the stone walls lit by the gentle glow of electric lamps. A square pool took up nearly the entire floor, with a three-foot walkway along the walls. Five steps led into the pool. The water lay placid, reflecting the light of the lamps. The soothing aroma of lavender and jasmine floated in the air.
How the hell did he get here? He looked over his shoulder. Another chamber, shrouded in gloom. The last thing he remembered was going upstairs to his room. He’d showered, had a steak sent up from the kitchen, ate it all, washed it down with some beer, and passed out on his bed.
A quiet feminine laughter floated to him. He turned back. Three girls soaked in the pool. One sat on his right, kicking her feet gently in the water, her long blond hair spilling over soft glowing skin. A brunette waited straight ahead, her plump breasts lifted slightly by the water. On the left a redhead sat, half-submerged on the steps, her long hair swirling in the water.
A dream. And a nice one. A welcome change from the usual shit he dreamt about. Whatever they brewed in that beer, he would need more of it.
The brunette raised her hands and stood up, her arms opened wide, exposing her breasts with pretty pink nipples. “Hugh!”
“Join us,” the blond giggled.
His clothes were missing. He was already hard. Hugh walked into pool. The water was hot. The aroma of lavender grew stronger. The redhead wound herself around him, the blue eyes on her freckled face laughing at him. The blond jumped into the water and surfaced next to him. The brunette kneaded his shoulders. He pulled the blond closer, her skin slick against his own, her body pliant under his fingers. Oh yes. Yes, that would do.
“Enjoying yourself?” Elara said.
She stood at the steps. Her hair was down, a soft silky cascade. She wore a simple white dress. It left her shoulders bare. A slit climbed its way up the skirt, revealing a leg with a slender ankle and rounded thigh.
Even better. “Come into the pool,” Hugh said.
She shook her head. “Greedy, greedy, greedy.”
He had to get her into the water. “Come here, Elara.”
She ignored him. Vapor rose from the water. There was something witchy about her, arcane and female. He would peel that dress from her.
“Tell me about the boy?”
“What boy?”
“The shapeshifter boy you tortured.” Elara walked along the pool to the left.
“Come closer and I’ll tell you.”
“Tell me and I’ll think about it.”
Hugh rose and began striding through the water to her. The three women hung onto him and he dragged them forward.
Elara leaned forward, her hazel eyes bright. “Are you going to chase me?”
“Do you want me to?”
She dipped her foot into the water. “You used the kids as bait today.”
“They weren’t in danger.”
“Tell me about Ascanio.”
Hugh was walking through the water but not making any progress. “Fine. What do you want to know?”
“Did you really torture a child?”
“Yes. He was sixteen at the time. I was chasing Kate through the city and she didn’t want to be caught.”
He drew closer. As long as he kept talking, the distance between them shrank.
“I used a wendigo to herd her, because I knew she was smart enough to stay out of its way. The kid was with her and he tried to fight it. It tore him up.”
If he could grab her ankle, he would yank her into the pool.
“What happened next?”
“Kate ran for the Order of Merciful Aid, and then knights stuck her into a loup cage. I killed them all.”
“You killed off the knights of the Order of Merciful Aid?”
“Yes.” Elara was almost within reach. “Kate was angry. The last one was her friend. She watched me kill him.”
“Why would you do that in front of her?”
“He didn’t give me a choice. It was a hard kill. Roland wanted his daughter. Nothing mattered except getting her to him. Nothing else existed.”
Hugh struggled to explain the relentless pressure and the finality in Roland’s eyes when he had given the order. He’d gone into it with a kind of grim determination that now seemed desperate. He couldn’t find the words.
“I had to get her out of the cage, she was pissed, and they left Ascanio on the table. His stomach was in ribbons. The wendigo crushed his ribs and bones stuck out through the skin. The shapeshifter virus kept him alive up to that point, but he was dying. The knights didn’t treat him, because he was a bouda.”
Her ankle was within his reach. Two more steps and he was there. There were things he needed to do to her.
“So what did you do?”
“I healed him.”
“What else?”
“The virus had fused some of the broken bones. I had to rebreak him to fix his chest. I made her think I was alternating between killing and healing. She promised to come out of the cage if I healed him, but someone interfered.”
“Would you have killed the boy to get her?”
“Yes.”
“But he was a child.”
“Nothing mattered except getting Kate to Sharrum.”
“What does that word mean, Sharrum?”
“King. God. Everything. Everything that I am is shaped by Sharrum. He is wisdom and purpose. He is life.”
“Not everything.”
Hugh lunged forward but her foot slipped out of his reach. She vanished. Hugh spun around and saw her on the stairs.
“No more talking,” he told her. “Come here, Elara.”
She laughed softly.
“I said come here.” He sank steel into his voice.
“You have no power over me,” she told him. “I don’t obey your orders.”
The water boiled in front of him. A blunt white head surfaced, eyeless and noseless, a wide monster mouth gaped open, studded with razor-sharp teeth, and bit down at his groin, ripping through his flesh.
Agony tore through Hugh. He jerked upright and saw darkness. Cold sweat drenched his face. He was sitting in his bed. His body shuddered in pain. He yanked the sheet aside and grabbed himself. Everything was still there. He was intact.
A ghostly voice whispered in his ear. “The next time I want to talk to you, make the time.”
Damn that bitch. Hugh sprung out of his bed. His door flew open under the pressure of his hand, revealing the hallway lit with fey lanterns. He marched through it and hit her door and it banged open. He strode through her bedroom. The big wooden canopy bed stood empty, but a stone doorway in the wall opposite the entrance glowed with a buttery-yellow glo
w. Hugh tore through it and stopped.
A square room offered the square pool from his dream. She was in it, long white hair swirling, steam and water hiding all of her, except for her face. And she was smiling.
“Stay the fuck out of my dreams.”
“Aww. You didn’t like the girls? Should I have made them with Vanessa’s face?” The water around her glowed with a pale light as if something much larger and glowing moved underneath.
“I mean it, Elara.” Hugh didn’t want to go into the water. The pain was still too real. Every instinct in him screamed when he caught glimpses of the glowing thing. He would do almost anything to avoid the pool.
“Have you ever killed a child, Hugh?” Her voice was completely serious.
He felt a powerful compulsion to answer. “Not directly.”
Elara stared at him, her face worried.
“I’ve never run a child through with my sword. But I led an army. We fought. People died. You can’t control war, Elara. Nobody leaves it with their hands clean.”
She tilted her head, studying him.
The lights on the wall were electric. The illumination outside in the hallway came from fey lanterns, but here electric lamps glowed with golden light. He was still dreaming. She was still fucking with his head.
“You want to see inside my mind, Elara?” He strode into the water. Panic bit him, but he crushed it. Magic bathed his legs. “Go ahead and look.”
He remembered it all for her. The razor-edge flash of ending a life, one after another, the endless chain of deaths he caused, the blood, the pain, watching friends fall, the screams, the clamor of metal on metal, the staccato of guns, failing, breaking, burning, getting up again and again, and killing… Everything that he used to shrug off and that now haunted his nightmares, he let it all out. He owned all of it. He was ordered to do it, he was praised when he succeeded, and it didn’t matter, because every drop of blood, every last gasp, all of it was his fault.
Blood spread from him through the water, thick and red. She shrank from it, but it stained her skin and hair.
The pool vanished.
Hugh opened his eyes to the welcome darkness of his bedroom. He wished he weren’t alone, but he was. He lay in darkness, listening to his heart beating too fast and waiting until the memories faded enough for sleep to come.
9
Elara paced back and forth. The scent of fresh bread and roasted meat filled the great hall in front of her. Long wooden tables covered with white cloths had been set out to form a horseshoe with breaks between them for the guests and staff to walk through. In the center of the horseshoe stood a massive wooden barrel into which the staff of Honeymead Brewery busily poured beer out of large metal casks.
Rufus Fortner, the head of the Lexington Red Guard, was due in less than an hour. The original plan was for him to bring a couple of his “fellahs” with him. As of the last phone call, a couple ballooned to fifteen, including Rufus. It didn’t seem like much, but she had seen what Hugh could do with twenty Iron Dogs. The Red Guard was the best in private security. Five guardsmen felt like guests. Fifteen felt like a raid. It could be just that Fortner wanted to show off Roland’s Warlord. It could be something else. Either way, when he got here, they had to offer him the kind of feast he would remember.
Hugh’s Dogs were hanging weapons and banners on the walls. The place looked like some Viking hall or the chamber of some medieval king.
She turned to Hugh, who was standing next to her. “Is that a good idea?”
He glanced at her. His eyes were very blue and clear this evening. They hadn’t spoken for the last three days after the dream. It wasn’t that she made a conscious effort to avoid him. It was that she’d been busy with offering protection to the nearby towns and processing the harvested roots of Lady’s Seal, while he was supervising deliveries of the volcanic ash for the mortar to line the moat’s bottom. Both of them had limited success. Of the five settlements they reached so far, only one took them up on their offer of wards. They’d saved Aberdine for last, since it was the closest. The party they had sent was due back any minute.
On the flip side, Hugh’s sample mortar refused to set, and nobody knew why. Elara’d been going over the budget requests and she’d seen him through the window down in the trench, mixing the mortar over and over. She’d had breakfast, then lunch, then dinner, and he was still there. Hugh had finally come in, chased indoors by darkness. He’d spent sixteen hours in that trench, then went out with the salvage party first thing in the morning. The Iron Dogs had been raiding the forest ruins, dragging in every scrap of valuable salvage they could find to offset the costs of the moat and the new siege engines they assembled on the towers.
They’d both had their hands full and had no reason to interact. Until now.
“The weapons and the beer,” she explained. “Is that a good idea to have both available to Rufus’s people?”
“The weapons are welded together,” Hugh told her. “If they manage to pry them from the wall, it won’t do them any good. I’m not about to arm drunken idiots.”
Well, at least he was sensible.
Five women walked into the hall and lined up in front of them, all young and pretty, with flowers in their hair, and wearing floral print wrap dresses that hinted at cleavage and revealed just enough leg without suggesting anything. Kelly and Irene’s tattoos were showing, a skull with arcane script above Kelly’s left breast and a wolf ripping apart a human heart on Irene’s right shoulder, but there was no help for that.
“What are these?” Hugh asked.
“Serving wenches. For your beer.”
Hugh squinted. “Irene? Serana?”
The Iron Dogs snapped to attention. “Preceptor!”
“You stole my hand-to-hand experts,” Hugh said.
“Borrowed.”
He eyed the other women. “What do the rest of you do?”
Kelly pointed at herself then at the other two women in turn. “Witch, witch, pagan with a shichidan in judo. That’s a …”
“Seventh dan black belt,” Hugh said. “Okay, you will do.”
“Remember, we need their money,” Elara said. “Don’t maim anyone if you can help it.”
The serving wenches took positions around the barrel.
“Where are you putting Fortner?” Hugh asked.
“You and I are going to sit in the middle of the head table, with me on your left. He will sit across from us with his people. I’m keeping Dugas and Johanna on my side. The rest is up to you.”
He nodded. “I’ll put the centurions on my right.”
“Do you want Fortner’s people all at our table so it would be easier for the marksmen to shoot them? I don’t think we can fit all of them in.”
He considered it. “No, let’s split them between the three tables.”
Elara surveyed the hall. It was almost done. The beer barrel was full, the places set, the food was nearly cooked. Everything had to go smoothly. If they lost Rufus, they’d lose the chance at business contacts in Lexington. They needed the contacts, the money and their influence.
“Food, decorations, beer,” she rubbed her forehead. “What am I forgetting?”
“Herbal samples,” he said.
“We have them ready in the Florida room. I don’t think he’ll be looking at them until tomorrow anyway. Did you double the patrols?”
“Yes. And I put extra marksmen on the balcony.”
She glanced up to where a narrow balcony ran along one wall of the room. Nice. Fortner would be sitting with his back to them. If anything went wrong…
If anything went wrong, they were as ready as they were going to be.
A commotion broke out at the doors. Johanna walked in, flanked by three Iron Dogs and Sam. A line of blood stretched from Sam’s scalp, running down his temple into his hair.
Hugh and Elara moved at the same time.
“What happened?” Elara asked.
“Aberdine does not want our help,” Johanna reported.
“They met us on the road,” an older female Iron Dog reported. “They made a road block.”
“Cops?” Hugh asked.
“Civilians,” Sam said. “They said Aberdine is a good Christian town and they didn’t need any help from devil worshippers.”
Of all the idiotic… “What happened to your head?” Elara demanded.
“Someone threw a rock.” Sam shrugged.
“We withdrew,” the female Iron Dog said. “It was that or kill the lot.”
Hugh looked at Sam. “You’ll live. Next time someone throws a rock, duck.” He raised his hands and signed. “Are you hurt?”
“No. Sam took my rock. He moved in front of me, so it hit him instead,” Johanna signed.
Anger boiled in Elara. “Marcus!”
Marcus turned to her. “Yes?”
“Stop all shipments to Aberdine.”
“Okay,” Marcus said.
She turned to Sam. “Don’t you worry. Nobody does this to our people. They’ll come crawling back to us in a week.”
“I doubt they’ll run out of cough tea in a week,” Hugh said.
“They’ll have plenty of tea,” she told him. “But we supply all of their wine and most of their beer. As of today, Aberdine is a dry town. They’ll be back with their hats in hand. Just wait.”
Nicole ran into the hall. “The guests are coming!”
Hugh turned to her and grinned. “It’s show time.”
“And then!” Stoyan waved his cup, pretending to be drunker than he was. “Then the Preceptor says, ‘To hell with it, we’ll burn it.’”
The table broke into thunderous laughter.
Hugh cracked a smile. Elara smiled, too, watching Rufus Fortner. He was a big bear of a man, a couple of inches over six feet and at least two hundred and fifty pounds. He was in his fifties, but time didn’t soften him, it just made him grizzled. His shoulders barely fit through the door. Caucasian, with skin tanned by sun and weather, Rufus had one of those masculine faces that looked overly exaggerated: square, jutting chin; massive jaw; short, broad nose; prominent eyebrows; narrow blue eyes. His mustache, which he kept trimmed, was still red, but his hair and beard had gone gray.
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