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 f**king 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 stream 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 f**king 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.
Voshak drew one last shuddering breath and lay still. The odor of putrescence flooded the clearing. Nausea choked Richard. Voshak’s body began to decompose.
The dark currents of magic shrunk, once mighty dragons, and now just pet snakes, sliding over the woman’s skin.
She stepped forward. The chain from the shackle around her ankle pulled at Voshak’s leg. The slaver’s bones fell apart, rotting flesh rolling off them, and suddenly she wasn’t chained to anyone. She walked toward him, picking her way among the bodies, beautiful and terrifying, like an angel of death.
She reached his cage.
They looked at each other through the bars.
Her eyes were just as he remembered: luminescent with power and heartbreakingly beautiful, but this time he saw no concern in their depths. His cage had changed owners. Whether it was for the better remained to be seen.
Richard weighed his options. One of three things would happen: she could kill him; she could walk away, letting him die slowly; or she could let him out. If he had any hope of getting out of this mess alive, he had to talk her down. He had to survive and finish what he started.