by Laken Cane
She lifted an eyebrow at his pride. “I’m going to kill you, but first I’ll hurt you until you tell me where the ghoul is. Then I promise to end your pain.”
He wasn’t a bulky man, but he wasn’t small, either. The black mask covered his face, and she wondered how he stood it on hot days. His clothes were black as well—pants, pullover shirt, boots—and he had a couple of weapons strapped to his body.
Surprisingly few weapons for a man who’d been sent to kill a monster.
She tensed, ready to take him, but hesitated when he peeled off his shirt. “What the fuck are you doing?”
It was not the way she’d imagined her encounter with the assassin going.
But then she understood exactly what he was doing when he stood a few feet from her, his shirt held carelessly in his fist. “I want you to see why your threats don’t scare me. Why nothing you could do to me would make me talk if I didn’t want to talk.”
“Holy hell,” she whispered.
The man’s body—every inch that she could see—was scarred. Terrible scars. Disfiguring scars. He’d been tortured in ways she couldn’t even imagine, and for, it appeared, most of his life.
“Holy hell,” she said, again.
He might have smiled. The mask moved a tiny bit where his smile would have been. There was a thin slit over his mouth—not even enough to show his lips. Most likely, they were scarred as well.
His face would surely have been the face of nightmares.
Heat wouldn’t have bothered him. He’d lived in hell. He would have become accustomed to heat.
“Who…” she swallowed, trying, with that brief swallow, to force herself not to question him. Not to care. Eat him. Just eat him and be done with it. “What happened to you?” she asked.
Shit.
He took a step closer. “I can bear unimaginable agony, Alexander. I laugh at pain. But…” He hesitated.
“Ah.” Sudden understanding flooded her like a bucket of cold water. “The addiction. That’s not something you’ve been taught to deal with.”
“No,” he said, and his voice was hoarse. Hoarse and despairing. “Imagine going through a lifetime of torture only to end up beaten by a fucking addiction. There’s nothing else in my brain. Nothing but you.”
“You deserved the bite I gave you. You tried to stake me.” She smiled, knowing he would see the cold satisfaction in her smile. “And now you can’t kill me because you can’t bear to be without me.”
His eyes were like glinting pieces of steel beneath the holes in his mask. “It would almost be worth it.”
“No,” she said. “It wouldn’t.”
“The deal.” He was once more unemotional. He’d given her a glimpse of the real man who lay beneath the mask, but she was pretty sure that wasn’t an ordinary occurrence with him.
“You’ll give me back my ghoul if I feed your addiction.”
He didn’t even hesitate. “I will.”
She’d have to kill him. He’d never stop chasing her. He’d never stop taking or threatening those she loved because he’d need them to use as barter.
She would kill him.
He needed put out of his misery anyway.
But first…
“You have a deal, assassin. Now take me to Gunnar.”
Chapter Thirteen
He had no way of knowing if she’d keep her word and bite him, so he refused to give up Gunnar until he had what he needed from her.
And she refused to bite him until she had the ghoul. “Take me to him, assassin. I won’t feed your addiction until I have him.”
“You have no choice—the ghoul has another forty-five minutes before he’s gone for good. I swear that to you.”
Shit. She balled her hands into fists. Gunnar might already be gone. The assassin would say and do whatever he had to in order to get his drug.
“Fuck you,” she said. “This is the last chance I’m going to give you. Take me to Gunnar, or I swear I’ll leave you here to suffer.”
“Fuck.” He ground out the words and pressed his fingers into his temples.
He was strung out and desperate, and wouldn’t be able to think past the horrific clamoring in his brain. All he wanted was her. Her bite.
And he knew he had no choice.
“He’s in the crabapple tree grove. I buried him beneath the thirteenth tree and marked the bark with a cross.”
“Show me.”
He put his shirt back on, then turned without another word and loped away.
Eventually, maybe after he’d been bitten and the raging demons inside him slept, he’d try to come up with a plan of action.
But there was nothing, really, that he could do.
He could only hope that she’d continue to munch on his twisted, gruesome flesh.
She smiled grimly as she followed him.
The assassin was hers.
“Here,” he said, and pointed to the thirteenth tree. “He’s a few feet under the ground.”
She strode forward, her heart beating hard and fast against the recently healed stake wounds.
Gunnar.
Dammit, she should have brought his Baby Ruth candy bars.
The assassin whirled and grabbed her arm. “My bite. Do it.”
She snarled and shook him loose. “When I see Gunnar.”
It would be a simple thing to bite him and leave him drained and dead in the grass. If she decided to kill him, he’d go happily into death once she pierced his flesh with her fangs.
“Who sent you?”
“You know better than that.” His rough voice was somehow soft, silky. He crossed his arms, then shifted from one foot to the other. His hand was shaky when he uncrossed his arms and wiped at the leather of his mask.
Yeah, she’d known better, but it’d been worth a shot. She’d get Gunnar and be grateful to have him.
She shot out her claws. “Stand over there while I dig him up.”
“I’m fucked,” he muttered, and backed up a step.
A brief flare of pity sparked inside her, but she stomped it out. She could have no softness for him. That would get her into a shitload of trouble.
She turned her back on him and put her mind to getting the ghoul out of the ground. Be alive, baby. Be alive.
She heard a rustle a second before he pushed his gun to the back of her head.
“Now,” he told her. “You’re going to bite me.”
She laughed and pushed her head back against the gun. “No. I’m not.”
She knew he wouldn’t kill her.
But Jack didn’t.
He exploded from the tree line like an avenging, raging warrior, one hand holding a long blade and the other holding his gun.
“Oh shit,” she said. She shoved the assassin, hard. He flew into the hard bark of a tree and slid to the ground.
“Jack,” was all she had time to say before he dragged the assassin from the ground and began to beat the hell out of him.
The assassin, even as battered and full of mindless craving hunger as he was, fought back. And he wasn’t an easy adversary.
Rune wasn’t surprised.
“Jack,” she yelled, as the masked man knifed Jack. The blade stuck in Jack’s shoulder when he growled and punched the assassin, sending him sprawling six feet away.
“Fuck,” Rune screamed, and grabbed Jack’s wounded shoulder to get his attention.
He roared and pulled back his fist to hit her, then seemed to recognize her through the rage clouding his vision. He dropped his fist and gave his head a hard shake.
“It’s okay, baby. He’s not going to kill me. We have to get to Gunnar. Now.”
“He had a gun to your head, Rune.” Jack clenched his fists, his stare on the assassin, who had picked himself up and stood watching them.
“He’s bluffing. He’s addicted to me. All he wants is to be bitten. He’s not going to kill me.”
“Maybe not.” Jack grasped the handle of the protruding blade and pulled it from his flesh, absentl
y wiping the blade on his pants. “But a bullet to the head would sure as hell hurt you.”
She patted his arm. “You good?”
He glared at the assassin. “Yeah. What’s the deal?”
“She will bite me for the ghoul,” the assassin said. He leaned against a slender tree trunk and crossed his ankles.
The move was so overly casual that Rune gave him a lingering look. If he’d have been anyone else, she’d have sympathized.
“Stay the fuck over there,” Jack told him. He nodded at Rune. “Let’s get Gunnar.”
“First, I’m going to disarm him. I don’t want him coming after you with a blade while I’m occupied.”
Jack snorted.
She walked to the assassin. “I’ll need your gun, and then I’m going to search you for more weapons. You okay with that?”
“You say that like I have a choice.”
“There’s always a choice. You can walk away.”
“No. I can’t.” He tossed his gun a few feet away, then held his arms out. “Search away.”
His scars were bumpy, raised ridges beneath her palms, and she caught herself before she shuddered with horror. He didn’t just have scars—he was a scar.
He was hideous, and he knew it.
Poor fuck.
Shit.
He glared at something in the distance, his eyes unfathomable beneath the holes of his mask.
She swallowed hard, her stare on the knot of scars covering his neck. Could she ever sink her fangs into that? No.
The assassin stiffened. “Try not to faint, Alexander.”
She forced out the images of what had been done to him, of what he’d suffered, and what he looked like.
“Shit,” she whispered, and patted him down. So many scars.
“Fuck you,” he said, his voice as rusty as old metal hinges.
She had him flat on his back almost before he could finish his sentence. She pushed her fingers against the eyeholes of his mask.
He didn’t move, didn’t breathe, didn’t twitch.
“You’ve fucked with the wrong monster, assassin. Don’t push me, or you’ll end up blind as well as scarred.”
She left him there, his chest barely moving as, perhaps, he took stock of his body parts, happy to find them all intact.
She walked toward the watching Jack. “Now,” she said, “let’s get our ghoul. The assassin will behave.”
Jack froze in mid-nod and his eye widened with horror a millisecond before the assassin pressed himself against her back, brought his blade around, and with a swift brutality she should have been ready for, sliced her throat.
Then he was gone.
Chapter Fourteen
He was good. He’d somehow hidden one of his blades—and she couldn’t think of how, or where.
Yeah, he was good.
She rolled on the ground, her fingers to her cut throat, gurgling on her blood. Waiting, choking on the pain.
Jack didn’t even try to go after the assassin. He knelt beside her, his face pale. “Rune!”
She closed her eyes and felt him pushing his hands against her throat, trying to staunch the flow of blood. Or maybe he just needed to do something to help.
He knew she’d heal. She had healed from worse than a cut throat. But it was a son of a bitch to witness.
Fucking assassin hadn’t believed she’d keep her end of the deal. His desperation made him want to believe, for a while, but he’d known better. He’d known he’d die, with no hidden Gunnar to save him.
Or worse, that she’d restrain him and haul him into a prison cell to suffer for the rest of his miserable days.
He’d try to think of something else that would force her hand. And the next time, he might succeed. She had to bite him, because that was the only sure way to kill him.
But God, she didn’t want to bite him.
Finally, she healed enough to let Jack help her to her feet. “Gunnar is going to die before I can fucking dig him out,” she said, her hands to her knitting flesh.
Technically, Gunnar was already dead. He’d have to be beheaded, his heart ripped out and destroyed, and his remains burned to actually end him.
But that would be a quick death, not a lingering one that would give him days to slowly fade away.
So what the fuck had the assassin done to him?
“What can I do?” Jack asked.
“Nothing unless you have a shovel hidden somewhere on your hot body.”
He grinned, his face regaining some of its color. “No, but I may start carrying one.”
She fell to her knees on the ground beneath the tree, shot out her claws, the only tools she had, and started digging.
Jack stood at her back, his gun out, watching for threats.
“Gunnar,” she called, once.
She got no answer.
By the time she struck the hard top of what appeared to be a metal box, her fingers were aching and her claws were covered with dirt.
The box was too short and too thin to hold a grown man, even one as skinny as Gunner. At least that’s what she told herself.
The top of the box wasn’t difficult to lift—it wasn’t secured by padlocks. Instead, it was wrapped with thin twists of silver rope.
Which wouldn’t hold the ghoul, would it? He wasn’t overly sensitive to silver.
She frowned, urgency making her pant as she tossed the chains away and lifted the lid. The hinges barely made a sound.
For a second she was too stunned, too sick, to move.
“Gunnar,” she whispered. “God.”
At least she thought it was Gunnar.
The assassin had crammed the ghoul into the box, breaking his brittle bones to get him to fit.
Gunnar’s eyes were open.
Staring and rubbery as they bulged from dried, shrunken sockets. His skin was gray and so dry she was afraid it would blow away if she exhaled.
The hours he’d spent trapped in that tiny box inside the ground, unable to move, to hope…
But maybe he’d hoped a little. Hoped that she’d come.
He wore a hideous smile, but only because his lips had retracted away from his teeth.
Strands of his fuzzy black hair had been caught beneath the blade driven nearly entirely through his forehead. There was another blade through his heart.
One blade was obsidian, one silver.
Whether the different blades had been chosen by accident or design, she might never know.
A white, grainy substance covered him, lying in scattered piles upon his clothes, his skin, and in his hair. She caught glimpses of it in his mouth, lying upon his dry, swollen tongue.
Salt.
She closed her eyes. Certain ghouls were sensitive to salt. Salt them, and it was like salting a slug. But that was only true, she’d heard, for the ancient ghouls.
Which meant Gunnar had to have been nearing at least eight hundred years on earth. Older than eight hundred years and ended by a fucking assassin who’d been sent to take her out.
“Gunnar,” she cried.
“Your Highness,” he croaked.
She screamed and fell back, scrambling with the thoughtless fear of a child from the hole she’d dug.
He couldn’t move. His body stayed in its horrifyingly broken position, his legs folded under him, his arms forced, somehow, behind his back.
“Help,” he said. His voice was as dusty and light as a bird’s discarded, long-forgotten feather.
“Oh fuck me,” she whispered, and slid back into the hole.
And then, once there, she had no idea what to do. One tug would pull him apart. She sat back on her heels and wiped her hands on her clothes. “What can I do, Gunnar?”
If he could have moved his eyes, he would have averted his gaze at that question. She understood what she had to do, and he knew it.
“Shit,” she murmured, and lifted her wrist to her mouth.
“Wait,” Jack said. “You can’t spare it. I’ll take this one.”
Sh
e could have cried. He was right. “Jack. You’re sure?”
He offered her a hand. “Come out of there and let me give Gunnar some blood. We all want to do our part.”
When she was out, he adjusted his eye patch and peered down at Gunnar. “Son of a bitch,” he murmured. “Poor little guy.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Feed him, Jack.”
“How are your claws?”
She looked at her bloody, scraped fingers. “Good.”
She would have dug through rock to get to Gunnar.
“Let’s haul him out of there,” Jack said.
They pulled him out, box and all. Once he’d fed, they’d get him out of the deplorable coffin. Rune was still afraid to touch him.
Jack held out his wrist, and she flinched as she shot her claws back out through her throbbing fingers. She cut his wrist, then watched anxiously as he pushed the bleeding wound against Gunnar’s teeth.
The ghoul didn’t move or drink or blink his staring rubber-ball eyes.
“Come on, Gunnar,” Rune said. “Come back to us.”
“Might be too late,” Jack said.
“No. He spoke. He’s aware. Give him a minute.”
Jack crouched patiently, his wrist to the ghoul’s mouth. He didn’t appear overly shocked at Gunnar’s condition. They saw it all.
Just as Gunnar gave a small twitch and the first stirrings of relief came alive inside her, she heard a shout and turned to see the berserker, his long hair streaming over his shoulders, jogging toward her.
“What now?” She stood up, waiting for him to reach her.
Jack stayed quiet and still, his wrist to Gunnar’s mouth. His stare was hard, though, and he’d already slid his free hand down to grasp his gun.
Then Strad stood beside her, his gaze going, for a brief second, to Gunnar.
“Is it Owen?” Rune asked.
“No. He’s good. But one of the memory wiped shifters is remembering,” Strad told her. “And he wants to talk to you before he dies.”
Chapter Fifteen
She blew out a hard breath, pressing her fist against her abdomen, as though she might push away the sudden churning inside. “Which one? And why the fuck is he dying?”
He shook his head. “Elizabeth said his memories are making him self-destruct. That’s all I know.”
