“You got any eyebrows left, Pavel?” Crow called.
Pavel spat into the fire. “It’s burning, ain’t it?”
A slaver stopped by the cage. He was thin, with dirty brown hair and pale eyes. He climbed onto the wagon, opened a small door near the top of the cage, barely large enough to pass a bowl through, and dipped a ladle with a long handle into a bucket.
Richard waited. His mouth was so dry, he could almost taste the water.
The slaver passed the ladle through the window. “Why Leftie?” he murmured.
“It’s what his father used to call him before he beat him in his drunken rages,” Richard said. “His right testicle never dropped.”
The slaver held the ladle closer. Richard drank, three deep delicious gulps, then the man retracted the ladle and latched the window shut.
The slavers began to settle down. A pot was set over the fire; a couple of rabbits had been dressed and chopped into it. Voshak came to sit by the flames, facing the cage. He bent to poke at the coals, and Richard pondered the top of the man’s blond head. The human skull was such a fragile thing. If only his hands weren’t tied.
He had to survive and bide his time. The slavers were taking him to the Market, he was sure of it. Left to his own devices, Voshak would’ve strung him up on the first tree he saw. Richard grinned. And after his neck snapped, Voshak would probably stab his corpse a few times, drown it, then set it on fire. Just in case.
Someone near the top of the slaver food chain must’ve recognized that the rank-and-file slaver crews feared the Hunter. They wanted to boost morale by making a production out of killing him. Richard might have worked for a year to get to the Market, but he had no intention of arriving there on their terms. An opportunity would present itself. He just had to recognize it and make the best of it.
If he failed now, Sophie would take his place. The thought filled Richard with dread.
Revenge was an infectious disease. For a time it gave you the strength to go on, but it devoured you from the inside like a cancer, and when your target was finally destroyed, all that remained was a hollow shell of your former self. Then the target’s relatives began their own hunt, and the cycle continued. He’d learned that lesson at seventeen, when a feuding family’s bullet exploded in his father’s skull, spraying bloody mist all over the market stall. What he had lost was irreplaceable. No amount of death would bring his father back to life. Back then, Richard was already a warrior, a killer, and he continued to kill, but never out of revenge. He severed lives so the family would be safe, and the new generations would never feel the pain of having their parents ripped out of their lives. He fought to keep the rest of them safe.
He failed.
Richard’s memory resurrected Sophie the way she used to be—a funny, beautiful, fearless child. The muddy swamp flashed before Richard. When he had finally found Sophie in one of the holes, she was standing on the body of a slaver she had killed. As he pulled her out, her eyes burned with a fear and hate that had no place on the face of a twelve-year-old child. She had survived the slavers, but she would never be the same.
He’d hoped the years would cure it, but time only nurtured it. He watched, powerless, as that fear and hate germinated into self-loathing. When she came to him asking to be taught to work with the blade, he viewed it as a diversion. Sophie had never taken her lessons seriously before, neither from her own father nor from her sister. He thought she would get bored. He had no idea.
Her self-hate grew and matured into steely determination. He saw it in Sophie’s face every morning when she picked up her sword to meet him in practice. He was running out of things to teach her. One day, she would decide she was good enough, take her blade, and go hunting instead. He wouldn’t be able to stop her, so he had chosen to beat her to the punch. What he was doing wasn’t revenge, but justice. The world had failed Sophie by allowing slavers to exist. He had failed her by letting her suffer at their hands. He hoped to restore her faith in both.
A woman walked out of the forest. She was tall, about five-foot-eight, and pale. Mud splattered her faded jeans. Her lavender T-shirt had a scoop neckline and was smudged with something dark, dirt or possibly soot. Her blond hair rested on top of her head in a loose knot. Her mouth was full, her eyes were wide and round, and the line of her jaw was soft and feminine. She was beautiful, refined, but iced over by a lack of emotion and an eerie, unnatural calm.
Their stares connected. Every cell in his body went on alert. He couldn’t see her eye color from this distance, but he was sure her eyes were gray.
She was real.
His stomach tightened in alarm. What are you doing here? Run. Run before they see you.
The conversation died. The slavers stared.
Crow picked up his rifle and rolled into a crouch.
“Now that’s what I call free merchandise,” Voshak murmured from his perch on a fallen log.
“There are no towns around here,” Crow said quietly. “Where did she come from? I say shoot her now.”
“What’s your hurry?” Voshak leaned forward. “No gun, no knife. If she could flash, she would’ve hit us by now.”
“I don’t like it,” Crow said. “She might be with him.”
Voshak glanced at the cage. Richard turned to look him in the eye, and the slaver captain shrugged.
“Hunter is the Weird’s animal. She’s wearing jeans. And if she’s with him, then he’ll enjoy watching me fuck her brains out.” Voshak raised his voice. “Hey, sweetheart! Are you lost?”
The woman didn’t answer. She was still looking at him, and her eyes told Richard she wasn’t lost. No, she was exactly where she wanted to be. She had some sort of plan. How did she get here?
“Where are you from?” Voshak asked. “Talk to me. Are your folks worried about you?”
The woman said nothing.
“She’s mute,” someone offered.
“A pretty woman who doesn’t talk. My God, we can charge double.” Voshak grinned.
Appreciative laughter from half a dozen throats rang out.
“I don’t like it,” Crow repeated.
“I’ve seen this before.” Pavel spat into the fire. “She’s a loonie.”
“What’s a loonie?” A younger slaver asked.
“An Edger or someone from the Broken,” Voshak said. “Sometimes they blunder halfway through the boundary into the Weird and get stuck. Not enough magic to go either way. Eventually, the boundary spits them out, but they’re not quite right after that. The lights are on, but nobody’s driving. They just wander around until they starve to death.”
“Too much magic.” Pavel waved his hand around his ear. “Fries their brains right up.”
“I don’t—” Crow began.
“Yes, we know. You don’t like it.” Voshak grimaced and turned it into a smile. “Don’t worry, sweetheart,” the slaver captain called out. “We’ll take good care of you. You come sit by me.” He petted the log next to him.
The woman didn’t move.
“Come on.” Voshak winked at her. “It’s all right.”
The woman approached, moving with innate grace.
Richard watched her. She glanced at him briefly as she took her seat, and he saw a smart, agile mind behind her eyes. No, she wasn’t fried. Not at all. But Voshak was right. She had no weapons. Even if she was a flasher, the slavers were too spread out. Someone would shoot her before she got them all. He had to get out of this cursed cage.
“Pass me that puppy chain,” Voshak said.
Pavel passed the twelve-foot chain to him. The slavers used them as human tie outs—just enough length to let slaves shuffle off to the bushes to relieve themselves. Voshak smiled and locked one iron cuff on the woman’s ankle, above her shoe. He locked the other on his own ankle. “There we go. Just like marriage.”
The woman gave no indication she understood what had just happened.
Voshak leaned closer to her and brushed a small tendril of hair from the back of her long,
graceful neck. “That’s a good girl.”
Richard wished for a sword, a knife, a nail. Anything he could stretch his flash on. He’d slice through the bars with the first cut and sever Voshak’s fingers from the rest of him with the second. Watching him touch her was like seeing filth smeared on her skin.
Voshak let go of her neck. “If only you were fifteen years younger. You’d be worth double.”
“That’d make her what, like ten?” a young man asked from the right.
“More like fifteen,” Voshak said. “She’s fared well, but you’ve got to look closely. See, no baby fat left. No wrinkles yet, and her lips are still full, but the face doesn’t have that fresh look. Buyers like them young. She’s thirty, if she’s a day. She’ll still be worth a good chunk of change, but in our trade a woman past twenty-five is past her prime. And some of those bitches look like hags by thirty. It all depends on how gently they were used.”
The woman sat still, her gaze fixed on the flames.
Voshak leaned over and checked her face.
“Told you,” Pavel said. “Nobody’s home.”
“That’s not a bad thing,” Voshak said.
Richard locked his teeth. It had taken incredible courage to walk into the camp like this, to surrender herself into their physical custody. She had to know what they would do to her. He’d seen the aftermath of what happened to pretty women in slaver camps. They would pass her around and rape her, and he wouldn’t be able to stop them. He would have to watch, helpless. He had seen worse things, but never from inside a cage with his hands tied.
He wanted to scream and throw himself against the bars, but he couldn’t even move.
She had to have some sort of a plan. Please, whoever you are above, let her have a plan. Perhaps she planned to wait until they went to sleep and bury a knife in Voshak’s throat. She couldn’t hope to survive after that. Was this a suicide mission?
Voshak half turned to him and ran his hand down the woman’s back. “Friend of yours, Hunter?”
Rage boiled inside him. Richard pictured cutting Voshak into pieces. “No.”
“I bet you don’t have any friends, Hunter. Did we kill them all, or are you just an asshole?”
Magic brushed against him, a subtle, delicate current. Richard forced himself to sit completely still. The magic touched him again, nipping gently on his body, draining him. He focused and felt other currents sliding to wind around the slavers. He followed their source back to the woman. Their stares connected.
Her face was so placid, but her eyes burned. The woman looked away. The magic current slid away from him to find another victim.
His magic sensitivity was off the charts—one of the benefits of being born into an old Edger family—but he had no idea what she was planning. Whatever it was, she could use a distraction, and he was the man for the job.
“Let’s talk about your friends,” he said, leaning back as casually as his restraints would allow. “Jeremy Legs. Chad Gully. Black Nil. Isabel Savage. The Striker Brothers. Angelo Cross. Germaine Coutard. Carmen Sharp. Tempest Wolf. Julius Maganti.”
Voshak’s face skewed with rage.
The mysterious magic currents weaved back and forth among the slavers. Anger and fear stamped their faces, but he couldn’t see any adverse effects. The brush of the current that had slid by him was too light to cause any real harm. Maybe she needed more time.
Richard kept going, hammering each name in.
“Ambrose Club. Orville Fang. Raoul Baudet. My personal favorite, Jackal Tuline. Where are your friends, Voshak? Or rather, I meant to say ‘your cronies,’ since a lowlife like you doesn’t have friends. My mistake.”
The woman stared into the flames. Perhaps her magic wasn’t working.
Inwardly, Richard swore. He took a risk and provoked the slavers. They glared at him like a pack of mongrel dogs. If he kept aggravating them, he’d be in real danger of getting shot. He had to get out of this damn cage before they killed him and her, and he didn’t have any idea how to do it.
Richard feigned indifference and shrugged. “Do you want me to keep going? Would you like to know what each of them looked like when they died?”
“What the hell did we do to you?” Voshak snarled. “Did we rape your wife, did we take your children, what? What the hell is it?”
“You trade in human lives, which makes you an aberration. Your kind shouldn’t exist. You’re a wrong, and I decided to correct it. Or perhaps I’m just bored, and you’re stupid and easy to kill.”
Voshak swore.
The magic was getting thicker. She was still working on it, whatever it was. He needed to create some strife. As long as they fought among themselves, they wouldn’t pay attention to other, subtler changes. He picked a familiar face. Daryl Long, bad-tempered, neurotic, and jumpy. Perfect.
“Daryl?”
The dark-haired, lanky slaver startled.
“Two weeks ago, I killed your brother.”
Daryl recoiled.
“Every time I end one of you, I hope for some backbone, but your brother didn’t die like a man. Before I cut his head off, he offered to set you up for me if I let him go. I killed him anyway because there was nothing I needed from him. You see, I know everything already, Daryl. I know about the old man. I know about the barn. I know what the two of you did to him before you slit his throat, and I know why you had to set the fire to the place.”
Daryl’s meager control snapped. He lunged at the cage. “I’ll kill you. I’ll fucking kill you!”
Crow swung the butt of his rifle and slammed it into Daryl’s face. The blow knocked him backward. The slaver crashed to the ground, blood drenching his face.
“Nobody touches that bastard!” Voshak thundered. “The orders are he goes to the Market, and we’ll deliver him there even if I have to blow your brains out.”
Nobody said anything.
“We got him.” Voshak pointed to the cage. “He’s chained up! All he can do is talk. Let him yap. You touch him, I kill you. Anybody have anything to add?”
On the left, Pavel, the one who’d started the fire, coughed.
Voshak spun to him.
The man next to Pavel coughed, too.
Pavel coughed again, harder.
“Do the two of you think this is funny—” The end of the word dissolved into a wet hack. Voshak strained. “What the hell?”
Across the clearing, another slaver coughed, then another and another.
“All of you, stop it,” Voshak barked. “I said stop!”
The coughs died.
Pavel strained, obviously trying to contain his hacking.
Voshak pointed his finger at him. “Don’t you do it.”
Pavel clenched up, gagged, holding it in . . . The cough exploded out of him in a gush of red. Blood burst from his nose and the corners of his mouth. The slaver dropped to all fours, retching. A clump of something wet, soft, and bloody fell out of his mouth.
Voshak grabbed his gun.
Across from Pavel, at the other side of the fire, another man collapsed, coughing and bleeding. People gripped their weapons, looking around.
“What the hell is going on?” Voshak roared. His voice caught, he sneezed and stared at his hand, covered with red mist and tiny chunks of flesh.
The slavers fell, as if cut down at once by an invisible sickle. Voshak spun, looking left, right, his eyes wild.
“The woman,” Crow croaked, dropping to his knees. “The woman!”
Voshak whirled to her. She still sat on the log.
“You bitch!” The blond slaver lunged at her and fell back, staggering under another fit of coughing.
Crow struggled upright, raising his rifle.
A familiar wolfripper hound burst from the bushes and rammed Crow. A rifle shot popped, going wide into the sky. The dog bit into the slaver. Crow screamed once, writhing on the ground, and fell silent.
A stream of translucent darkness flickering with red sparks spiraled around the woman. An identical strea
m twisted in the opposite direction, winding about her body. She turned slowly to look at Voshak, hacking his lungs out on the ground.
Richard saw her eyes, and her gaze chilled him all the way to the bone. Power luminesced within her irises.
The woman rose. The dark streams of her magic widened and collided. The sparks flashed with deep crimson. The streams split into dozens of small tendrils and shot out like striking snakes, biting into the slaver captain.
Voshak screamed. His knees gave, and he crumpled to the ground.
“Help me!”
The bodies didn’t move.
Voshak tried to roll to his feet, but his legs refused to support his weight, and he crashed down, coughing blood. “What do you want?”
She didn’t answer.
Voshak cried out. Tremors wracked his body.
“Do you want money? I have money!”
The woman said nothing.
“What is it? What do you want?”
“You killed Daisy,” she said. Her hoarse voice trembled with barely contained anger. “You murdered Éléonore.”
So his memory of Rose’s grandmother wasn’t a dream or hallucination. Regret washed over Richard. Indirectly or not, he’d caused another casualty. The boys would be heartbroken.
He put it away, in the same place he put his guilt for the other things he had done.
Voshak squirmed on the ground. “I hate you. I fucking hate you. I’d do it again. I should’ve killed that skinny bitch, too.”
A tendril of dark magic streaked from her, stinging the slaver captain. He shuddered, gurgling.
“Éléonore was like a mother to me. You cut a hole in my life. You murdered a young woman. She had her whole life ahead of her. You just ended it, and now her sister will have to live with her death,” the woman said, her face iced over. “I want you to understand how much suffering you’ve caused. I want you to hurt before you die.”
Voshak flailed, as if she had whipped him.
She watched, her pain plain on her face. Richard wondered why she didn’t prolong the torture for the rest of the slavers. Considering the circumstances, instant death was a mercy.
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