The dark currents of her magic licked the bars of the cage, sparking with red on the metal. Richard braced himself. He could tell by her eyes that whether he left this cage a free man or died of starvation and thirst inside it depended on what he’d say next.
* * *
THEY were dead. All of them. It had felt so unbelievably good to experience their dying. The darkness sang inside her, triumphant, while the rest of her trembled, repulsed and terrified. She was painfully aware of the corpses littering the clearing behind her.
It had taken all of her will to sit quietly and siphon off their life force, weakening their bodies and building up her own reserves. She’d thought it was the only way to kill them all at once and quickly. Finally, she had infected them and used their own magic to feed the disease within them. They felt nothing until the magically accelerated disease finally bloomed and severed their lives in a few painful instants. They didn’t deserve mercy, but she didn’t want their suffering as much as she wanted their lives. They couldn’t be allowed to continue, and so she ended them fast.
All except their leader. Something had compelled her to kill him slowly. She’d monitored his body, as it surrendered to the disease, and the feeling of intense satiation that came over her as he lay there dying terrified Charlotte to the very core of her being. She had to cut it short and kill him before she began to revel in his pain.
The magic pulled on her even now, whispering into her mind, begging her to continue. She locked the magic in the cage of her will, forcing it to subside. She had broken her oath as a healer, but she wasn’t a mindless abomination. Not yet. She could still hold it in check.
Richard leaned closer to the bars of the cage, his long, dark hair falling over his face. She almost took a step back.
His color was good, Charlotte noted. Stable vital signs. His body was strong and fit but still, he was recovering with surprising speed. His face was muddy and bruised, and the stench of old urine rose from his clothes. The thugs had tried to batter and debase him, but it made no difference. He refused to notice it, the way most people made a conscious decision to ignore light rain when they were in a hurry. He wasn’t humiliated. He wasn’t cowed or beaten down. A calculating mind looked at her through his eyes. He was like an old wolf on a chain, lethal, cunning, restrained for the time being but biding his time. Danger rolled off him. In her years as a healer, Charlotte had treated many threatening people: soldiers, agents, spies. Her instincts warned her to stay away from him.
Richard opened his mouth.
Her pulse spiked in alarm.
“You’re real,” he said.
What? “I am.”
“When I woke up in the cage, I thought I dreamt you.”
She wasn’t sure what to make of it. “You were delirious when we met.”
“Did you heal me?”
She nodded.
“Thank you.”
She forced herself to sit down on a pile of bags on the ground. The slaver dog trotted over and lay by her feet between her and the cage. Richard raised his eyebrows.
“Éléonore is dead,” she said. “They killed her, and they killed a young woman, Daisy. Then they set my house on fire.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
There was an unexpected sincerity in his voice.
“You brought this nightmare on me,” she said.
He nodded. “I did. It wasn’t my intention, but the responsibility is mine.”
“I want to know why. Why did they do this to us?”
Richard shifted in the cage. His hands were tied behind his back. It must hurt, Charlotte realized.
“These men are slavers. They raid the isolated settlements in the Weird and the Edge and sometimes even in the Broken. They kidnap men and women, and deliver them to the coast to the secret meeting points, where ships pick them up. From there, the captives are taken to the Market, a hidden auction house where they are sold off to the highest bidder. Slavery has been outlawed for three hundred years, but they prosper.”
“How? If slavery is illegal . . .”
“The border barons always need fodder for construction and armies. Mine owners use slave labor. The magic users who tangle with outlawed applications of magic theory buy subjects for their experiments. And others, well, when you see a rich man with a young, beautiful woman on his arm, would it occur to you to ask if she was free?”
“That’s barbaric.”
Richard’s eyes turned hard. “You would be surprised how many ‘servants’ come from the Market.”
He was right. It would never have occurred to her to ask anyone if their attendants were slaves. She simply assumed they weren’t.
“The slavers feed their own legends,” he said. “They dress in black, they arm themselves with wolfripper dogs, they ride dark horses. They appear from nowhere in the middle of the night, reap their human harvest, burn the settlements to the ground, and vanish like ghosts.”
“Like a night terror,” she said. Bastards.
Richard nodded. “They want to be the stuff of nightmares because fighting one’s fear is always harder than fighting another man. They see themselves as outside the law, as wolves who prey on sheep. Most of them didn’t amount to much, and they cling to their illusions of grandeur both because they have nothing else and because they find cruelty empowering. So if you wish an honest answer, here it is. They killed Éléonore and Daisy, and burned your house because that’s what they do. It wasn’t personal or planned. They didn’t give it a second thought. They simply did it because that’s the way they do business. Other people’s lives matter to them not at all. They’re slavers.”
His words only fueled her rage. “And you?”
“I hunt the slavers. I’ve killed dozens over the past months. They think themselves wolves, so they call me Hunter. They’re not fond of me.”
“I can see that.”
“I made a mistake, and they finally caught me. They were taking me to the Market for a public execution.”
That explained things. The slavers had beaten him not to hurt him—he was unconscious—but to make him less frightening. They were terrified of him. If they were the night terrors, he was their legendary killer, and when you kill a legend, you must make it as public as possible, or it might not take.
“Are there more of them?” she asked.
“Many more.” Richard grimaced. “No matter how many I kill, there are always more.”
Many more. That meant many more dead Daisies and Éléonores, many more Tulips, weeping over bodies. Many people like her, left with a gaping hole ripped in their lives, not sure how to pick up the pieces and move on. Her magic seethed within her. Her body was nearing exhaustion, but she wanted to scream in outrage. Why did this go on? Who allowed this to keep happening? Did they think nobody could stop them? Because she could, and she had, and she would do it again. It wasn’t finished. She wasn’t finished.