Blood Ties (19 page)

“No one,” I said.

“No one indeed. And so we remain,” said William, sounding like a man speaking from the bottom of his own grave. “We receive the potions from Baro that maintain our humanity for us. And we dare not turn against Reaver since Baro is in his employ. We certainly cannot turn against Baro.”

“That's why you couldn't let me hurt him,” I said. “Because if he died . . .”

“Then all of us would descend into animal madness.”

My eyes narrowing, I turned back to Reaver. “At which point,” I said, “there is nothing to stop them from turning on you.”

“Oh, I have fail-safes, you can count on that.” Reaver did not seem the least bit concerned over the prospect of being torn apart by animalistic creatures. “Nothing will happen to me. I have an absolute means of controlling them beyond their need for keeping a tenuous grasp on their humanity. I always land on my feet. Always.”

“Yes, so I've seen.” I hated to admit it, but the man was right. “Then here we are. Me with my brother under your thumb, and you with no particular reason to let him out from it.”

“So it would appear.”

There was something in the way he said those words that provided me reason for hope despite all evidence to the contrary. It certainly matched up with all that had just transpired. If he had no use for me, why bring me here to his office? Why not simply have his guardsmen perforate me? Reaver had no motivation to lord it over me. Certainly, he had better things to do with his time.

My weapons had been removed from my person before we'd been led into the study, but that didn't mean I was incapable of doing violence all by my lonesome. I was confident that, should it come down to it, I could take Reaver in direct combat. In the back of my mind, though, there were warnings that it wouldn't be as simple as all that. The type of fellow Reaver was, for instance, would probably have some manner of ring on his hand capable of injecting paralytic poison. I glanced at his hand and, sure enough, there was a ring with the shape of a dragon's head etched in iron atop it. It might be nothing more than a simple ornament. It might also be an instrument of death, and there were quite a few men who had gone to their deaths underestimating just what Reaver was capable of. I had no desire to add to their number.

Yet still I maintained an aggressive posture as I said, “I want my brother released to me. I want whatever the pernicious magics you have infecting him removed from his person. I want him to walk out of here a free man.”

Reaver smiled broadly. “Is that all?”

“For the moment.”

“And you think that I'm prepared to provide you all that?”

“Yes, I do.” I tried to sound calm and not betray the way my heart was racing. “Because I think you are intelligent enough to know precisely what I was going to want. And I think you wouldn't have me here unless you were prepared to provide it to me in exchange for . . . well, for whatever.”

“How remarkably cunning you are,” he said. “I am five steps ahead of you, of course.”

“Of course,” I allowed.

“On the other hand, I have been doing this for much, much longer than you have.”

“Indeed. How much longer would that be, exactly?”

He smiled thinly but didn't reply. Instead, he steepled his fingers and peered over the tips as if he were giving great contemplation to my demands. I knew perfectly well that he had known what I was going to ask and doubtless already had his responses ready. Obviously, though, he liked to play his games, and since I was on his home court, I had no choice but to go along.

“Very well,” he said at last. “I will instruct Baro to undo the changes he made to your brother, and the two of you will be allowed to depart.”

William gasped in astonishment. Clearly, he had not thought things out in as much detail as I had. He was reacting as if his greatest dream were going to be handed to him on a tray as if by a serving wench at a tavern. I, on the other hand, knew that it could not possibly be as easy as all that.

“In exchange for—?” I said, and waited.

“Two things. There are two conditions.”

Here it comes,
I thought.

“The first,” he said, “is that Blackholm is off-limits to you. You give me your word that you never return there. Warlord Droogan is allowed to spread his area of control over Blackholm if it suits him, and you will do nothing to interfere.” He leaned forward, his chair creaking under him as he did so, and rested his elbows on the table. “Frankly, I am doing you a service by insisting on that condition. Without your brother in his capacity as Prime to turn my Half-breeds away, you would be serving a death warrant upon yourself. You would not want to be anywhere near Blackholm, you can count on that. Is this agreed?”

I despised the notion even though I had been fairly certain that it was a condition Reaver would insist upon. The warlord was his client, after all, and had presumably paid a considerable sum for use of the Half-breeds. I was a rather resourceful individual. Should I return to Blackholm, Reaver was no doubt concerned I might come up with some other means of turning aside the attack of his creatures even without my brother's aid.

I had done all I could to help the people of Blackholm, but they weren't my kin. Until recently, I had thought I was alone in the world, but I was discovering that that wasn't the case at all. When it came to making a decision between the brother I had thought long dead and the people whom I had met a relatively short time ago, there really wasn't all that much of a choice to be made.

“All right,” I said. William began to speak up in protest, as I knew he would, but I turned to him, and said, quickly but firmly, “I'm not looking to discuss this, William. If it's you or them, then that doesn't even require a second of thought.”

“But there are so many more of them . . .”

“I don't care. This isn't about how the numbers pan out. This is about what I can live with. I've seen people get killed, whole towns get slaughtered. There are always going to be more people who need protecting, and I'm going to do the best I can. But I only have one brother, and that's one more than I thought I had a week ago. Nothing else matters. You get that? Nothing.”

“Well, well,” said Reaver, his tone sly. “It appears I was mistaken after all.”

“Mistaken in what?” I had no idea what he was referring to.

“Why, in my assessment that you might be a Hero. Your choice is wholly selfish and weighted only toward your interests rather than the interests of many people.”

“I can live with that.”

“Ah, but can the people of Blackholm?”

The bastard was enjoying this. He was trying to shove a metaphorical sword into me and twist it, just to watch me squirm. It wasn't going to work. I knew what was important to me, and if that made me selfish, then that was just fine with me. “I really don't give a damn what you think of me. Now if we've concluded our business . . .”

“Ah-ah.” Reaver raised one slender finger in a peremptory fashion. “We're not concluded at all. My first requirement was conditional on your not doing something. In order to earn your brother's freedom, however, you actually have to
do
something as well.”

“Really.”

“Yes, really, but have no fear. Since you've already proven yourself less than a Hero and willing to operate from selfish motivations, this honestly shouldn't be too much of a problem for you.”

I had a suspicion that he was being less than truthful. The way he was smiling, the way he seemed to curl his tongue around every syllable of the sentence, led me to believe that what he wanted was going to be anything but not “too much of a problem.” But I was hardly about to put my uncertainties on display in front of him. “All right,” I said evenly. “What do you have in mind?”

He smiled in a way that did not touch his eyes. “I have business dealings in Bowerstone.”

“I know. Plenty of them, in fact.”

“Yes, but I have others that are brewing at the moment, and they would be far easier to attend to if a particular individual was no longer there.”

“What do you mean by ‘no longer there'?” I was asking the question even though I suspected I knew what the answer was going to be.

Turned out I was correct.

“I mean,” he said, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world, “I require someone to be disposed of on a permanent basis.”

My gut recoiled at the notion. Even though I knew what was at stake, my reflexive response could not be deterred. “You've got the wrong man. I'm no assassin.”

“Nonsense,” said Reaver, as if I had just made some sort of joke. “Of course you are. You kill enemies all the time.”

“When they're facing me. When they have weapons in their hands.”

“So this time you'll do it from behind, and it doesn't matter if the victim is holding a weapon or not. Either way, the target is going to be just as dead. Does it really matter, in the final analysis, whether you looked the person in the eyes and whether the person was trying to kill you at the time you killed your target? A life is a life, and the taking of it remains taking it. The only difference is that in this instance, it's going to serve my interests rather than yours. Except even that isn't entirely true, is it? Your interests will be served as well. You'll get your brother back. Your brother in exchange for a single life, and not an innocent one at that, I can assure you.”

I didn't know what to say. The notion of hunting someone down and taking the prey's life with cold, malicious planning . . . inwardly, I rebelled at the idea.

I had already agreed not to return to Blackholm. In so doing, I had consigned all those people to the nonexistent mercies of Droogan. Their blood, albeit indirectly, was still going to be on my hands.

“Benny,” William said softly, yanking my attention to him, “you can't do this. You can't turn into a monster just so I can stop turning into one. You cannot do it, little brother.”

“Of course he can,” said Reaver with so much cheer that I desperately wanted to leap across his desk and plant my fist squarely in his mouth. If I'd thought it would have done the least bit of good, he would have been missing some teeth. “He's clearly willing to do anything to save his brother. Obviously, he values you, values your life. So the only question before us is: What does he value more? You? Or someone who isn't his last connection to his roots?”

Damnably, he was right. The question of who I cared about more was an easy one to answer even if I wasn't willing to say it aloud or even to myself. My loyalties to my brother weren't at issue; only my loyalties to my principles were.

“Who's the target?” I said.

William looked stricken. “Benny, don't—”

“Shut up.” I was taking out my anger and frustration on him, and it wasn't fair. But fairness had nothing to do with it. “This isn't your choice; it's mine. I thought you were dead, and you had all this time to try to find me and let me know, and you didn't. You got yourself into this mess, and now it's up to me to clean it up. So I don't need your second-guessing and your appeals to my better nature. I'll do what needs to be done. Understood?” I didn't wait for him to acknowledge me and, instead, turned back to Reaver. “I said, who's the target?”

“The troublesome leader of the Bowerstone Resistance. Of course, it's not resisting much these days since our fearless leader is in place. But Page still has an annoying habit of sticking her nose into my business. I would see that nose cut off, and the rest of her head along with it.”

I tried to keep my face as impassive as I could, but I saw the sly smile creeping across Reaver's mouth. There was no way that he didn't know what I was thinking. In fact, I wouldn't put it past him to be something of an actual mind reader.

Page. Of course it was Page. It had to be Page. She had gone head to head against him in any number of confrontations involving various projects that needed to be approved by our heroic leader. Granted, no matter which way the decision went, Reaver somehow managed to turn a profit from it. But to someone like Reaver, being able to make the best of a decision that went against you wasn't enough. The fact that someone stood up to him was an affront. The fact that someone occasionally managed to get her way against Reaver's desires was simply unacceptable. In this instance, when the someone involved was Page, and he was confronted with someone who wanted something he had, naturally he was going to aim that supplicant at her with as much ease and as little thought as one would aim a gun at an oncoming monstrosity.

“Bring me Page's head,” said Reaver in a slow, unyielding tone, turning the screws to my predicament, “and your brother's fate is in his own hands. That is the offer. Take it or leave it.”

Trying to rally some manner of defiance, I said, “And if we decide to fight our way out of here?”

“Fight? On a lovely day like this?” Reaver chuckled patronizingly. “My dear fellow, the front door is open to you. Leave as you see fit. Go off and be brothers together. And just know that, sooner or later—and probably sooner rather than later—there will be nothing left of your brother, and you'll be faced with nothing but a ravening beast that will rip you to pieces without a second thought. Good luck with that.” He gestured lazily to the far door. When I didn't move, he interlaced his fingers and crossed his legs at the knees. “This is it, my dear Mr. Finn. This offer is on the table for exactly ten seconds, at which point it is withdrawn, and your brother remains as he is forever. Nine . . . eight . . . seven . . .”