“No killer instinct, remember?” he said. “It’s a natural reaction. When in danger, we fight, flee, or freeze.”
“You don’t freeze.”
“I’m too busy trying to impress you,” he said. “Is it working?”
She gave him an unreadable look. Perhaps now wasn’t the best time for levity.
The street ran into an eight-foot-tall stone wall. Small rocks, each paler than the gray stone making up the bulk of the wall, guarded its top, embedded about twenty feet from each other.
“Ward stones,” Charlotte said.
Climbing the wall was out of the question. The ward wouldn’t let them pass.
“New plan.” Richard turned, and they trailed the wall, heading down. Somewhere there had to be a gate or an opening.
Ahead and to the right, screams cut the silence. An orange-and-red glow lit the night, punctuated by a column of smoke. Jason’s crew had set something on fire.
The side street curved, and they followed it around the houses, closer to the fire and to another wall. An iron gate lay wrenched to the side. Richard ducked through the opening. A wide courtyard spread before him. To the right, near a blocky building, a fight raged between the slavers and a ragged mob armed with shackles and rocks. The slaves struck out, their haggard faces contorted with bestial fury, their bodies, gaping through the holes in their rags, bearing whip marks. They had no weapons. They ripped into the slavers with their nails and teeth like wild animals.
These weren’t the freshly acquired, to be sold as slaves. No, they were the rejects, probably used for manual labor on the island, little more than beasts of burden. No human being should have been treated this way, but they had been, and now they were finally venting their rage. They would kill anyone in their path.
Straight ahead, a raised platform with seven sets of metal posts stood, each post widening at the top. The slaves’ shackles would be fixed to the post, under that wide top, so they could be evaluated. To the right, another gate gaped open, and another group squared off for its control. Nine armed slavers in leather on one side and four of Jason’s people on the other. Neither was willing to make the first move. Jason’s people were good and looked desperate, but the slavers outnumbered them two to one.
He had to get through that gate.
Richard grabbed Charlotte’s hand and squeezed it. “We’ll have to cut our way through. Stay behind me.”
He strode toward the fight. A slave spun into his way. Richard knocked him aside and thrust himself between the two lines, holding his sword lightly at an angle.
The slavers surveyed him, spreading out. He heard Jason’s people move back.
Here, poised on the threshold between violence and peace, was his true place. Generations of warriors, stretching back through time to the fierce native clans that had first fled into the Mire to escape a magic catastrophe, had stood just like him, balanced on that sword’s blade between life and death. Here he was in control, serene and at peace.
In that brief moment, when their lives and his came together, he truly lived. But for him to experience life, his opponents had to die.
The first slaver moved to his right. Richard struck, piercing and cutting with a surgeon’s precision and speed honed by countless hours of practice. He spun in a fluid movement and stopped, his sword held at a downward angle.
The slavers looked at him.
The second, fourth, fifth, and seventh of them fell. They made no noise; they simply crumpled to the ground.
The remaining slavers froze for an agonizing second and rushed him. He melted into the moment, striking without thought, completely on instinct. Gash across the chest, reverse, throat cut, abdomen cut, stab under the rib cage to the right, free the blade cutting across a chest in the same move, reverse, cut across the throat, thrust forward . . . and it’s over.
Too soon. It was always over too soon.
The last slaver stopped short of his sword. The thrust never connected. The man lingered upright for the space of a breath and sank to his knees, struggling for air. Behind him, Charlotte’s magic coiled back into her body.
She stood very still, her eyes opened wide, looking at him as if they had met for the first time. This is it, he wanted to tell her. This is who I am.
He couldn’t tell if she was surprised or horrified or perhaps both or neither. Regret stabbed at him, but then it was better that she knew his true nature. They had to move. He took her hand, and they ran to the gate.
“Thank you,” he told her. “That was brave of you, but also unnecessary. Please don’t do that again. I don’t want to accidentally injure you.”
She pulled her hand out of his fingers. “I’m not helpless, Richard.”
Did she find his touch repulsive? He sliced through the lock securing the gate. “I know you’re anything but. But you’ve done your part, and it’s my turn. Save your reserves. We may need them.”
They went through the gate, and Charlotte gasped. Above them a corpse hung from a pole. A boy, Jack’s age. His eyes had been gouged out. His mouth was sewn shut. His nose was a broken mess of flesh and cartilage on a face scoured with burn marks. A sign hanging around his neck read, “We’re always watching.”
He had seen this before—the slavers’ favorite visual aid to discourage escape. He had pried Jason out of a hole in the ground just before he was about to end up on such a pole. Anger, hot and furious, burned in him, then died down to a simmer.
“He was alive,” Charlotte whispered.
“What?”
“He was alive when they mutilated him. Those are predeath wounds.”
Darkness whipped out of her. The hair on the back of his neck rose.
Charlotte clenched her fists. “I’m going to kill every slaver we find.”
He noticed the set of her jaw and the thin line of her lips. Her eyes burned. He recognized this fury. It and he were old friends, and he knew it was useless to get in its way. “As you wish,” he told her. “All I ask is that we move up the hill toward the bookkeeper.”
Ahead, the streets unrolled before them, climbing up a low hill. They marched upward together.
* * *
THE house sat recessed from the street, a stately, respectable, two-story mansion, flanked by carved columns and palm trees. A brown horse was tied to the side, flicking its ears and casting nervous glances at the street.
Richard glanced back behind them. No movement. They had left a trail of dead bodies, and half of them belonged to Charlotte. She killed again and again, driven by an overwhelming need to stop the slaver savagery from happening. He was like that too, at the start of this mess. Back then, every new mutilation and atrocity infuriated him. He had seen things so wrong and shocking, that the only reaction he could manage was to destroy those who committed them. It had become his moral imperative and the only possible human response.