“Ma’am, do you feel the Saghred moving?”
“No, but—”
“Then we wait.”
Less than two minutes later, four Guardians silently emerged from the dark on the opposite side of the street.
Mychael was one of them.
Yes, running across the street and launching myself at him would make me a target, and it took everything I had not to do it. Another reason to survive and not screw this up. I didn’t know the other three Guardians. They might be Mychael’s men, but there was still a warrant out for my arrest. It might have been rescinded, but until I heard that from Mychael’s own lips, I’d be wary of any armed man I didn’t know.
If those were Mychael’s lips.
I normally wasn’t this paranoid, but I wasn’t normally this powerless, either.
The Saghred was somewhere inside the building behind us. I could feel that; I knew it for a fact. The goblin thief had run in there with it. He sure as hell wasn’t going anywhere without it, so logic said loud and clear that the goblin was in there with his prize, not glamoured as Mychael standing across the street from me.
“Who are those—”
“Trustworthy men, ma’am,” Vegard assured me.
I saw the faint glow of shields as Mychael and his men darted across the street to us. The three Guardians went to the opposite side of the door. Mychael came directly to me, and I stepped back from him.
Mychael’s expression went from confused to hurt in the time it took me to take that step back.
“Raine, what—”
“Prove you’re you.” My whispered demand didn’t carry past the two of us.
“Who else would I . . .” Realization dawned. “I’m not the thief.”
“You’re wearing full armor, so it’s not like I can check you for freckles.”
One side of his mouth curled in a quick grin, an all-toofamiliar grin. “If we weren’t standing in the middle of the street in the worst part of town, I’d drop my pants, armor and all, and let you inspect to your heart’s content. Would that convince you?”
I smiled. “Won’t know until I see it.”
“You’re a bad girl, Raine Benares.”
“You bet I am.” I said, stepping into his arms.
Words couldn’t describe how good it felt to hold him, to be held. Best of all, Mychael smelled like Mychael. Though there was something that I couldn’t feel. Our link was gone. It made sense. No magic, no magical link. Dammit. I might be having that good cry sooner than I wanted to.
I swallowed against the sudden lump in my throat, and gave Mychael a whispered, thirty-second summary of my magic being gone and my theory on how it left.
Mychael pulled me to him again; my head nestled into the warm hollow of his neck. I felt the pounding of the pulse in his throat, the anger. He quickly released me and stepped around Vegard, one hand extended to check for wards. He frowned and moved his hand closer, then looked at me and Vegard and shook his head once.
No wards.
“Let’s hope it’s not a buka on the other side this time,” Mychael muttered. He carefully turned the knob, and the door opened.
No lock, either.
Step into my parlor, and all that.
Maybe when you got your hands on the most powerful magical object in the world, you forgot the little things like locking doors behind you. I didn’t believe it, but it was better than wasting time dismantling wards and picking locks. On the flip side, I’d been around powerful magical talents long enough to know—by learning the hard way—that when it came to outwitting one, there was no such thing as good luck. More than once, what I’d thought was good luck nearly turned out to be good riddance.
Mychael led the way into a big room, or at least one big enough that the Guardians’ lightglobes didn’t reach into all the dark corners. The place was covered in dust and empty bottles. The dust was everywhere, except on the bottles that were scattered across the floor just a little too evenly to be happenstance. Drunks don’t usually abandon an empty bottle every three feet to completely cover a room. These were strategically placed to make the most noise. Sometimes the best alarms were the most basic. The Saghred was here, somewhere below my feet, on the next level down. We were on the ground floor. That meant the Saghred was in the basement.
Naturally.
Scary, evil, bite-your-face-off, suck-out-your-soul magic. Of course it was in the basement.
I pointed down.
Mychael silently mouthed a word that summed up my feelings perfectly. Though actually knowing where the rock was did simplify the plan.
Find the stairs. Find the rock. Get out.
Though the plan did have an unspoken fourth step—try not to think about everything that could and probably would go wrong during steps one through three.
With a few gestures, Mychael ordered two Guardians to guard the door and the other one the stairs. Then he looked at me and mouthed, “Stay here.” The look I responded with didn’t need any words, mouthed or otherwise, to get my message across. Mychael raised my look and gave me a glare.
He scanned the door to the basement and silently raised the latch. No wards, no locks, no goblins. My stomach stayed clenched in terror, just in case.
The stairs were steep and narrow. Beyond that, my expectations were knocked flat.
There wasn’t a lot of light, but there was enough to see that there was nothing to see. No Khrynsani and no Chameleon—unless he could glamour himself as a brick wall.
The air was stale and damp like nothing had been breathing down here for years. The only thing that could qualify as living was the mold. We reached the bottom and near the far corner of the room was a single, battered chair.
The Saghred was on it.
It wasn’t in a casket; no wards held it. An armored glove lay on the chair next to it. The Saghred was just sitting there, its surface a flat, lifeless black.
I knew better.
So did the rock.
I had to get it out of here.
The rock knew that, too.
I looked around. The goblin hadn’t carried it out of the citadel in his bare hands. The Saghred had been in its casket, unwarded, but still in its casket.
“Do you think it ate the goblin?” Vegard asked quietly.
“I wish,” I muttered. “Even without my magic I’d have known.”
“Right, no burp,” Vegard agreed solemnly.
That made me crack a smile.
“Can you sense where . . .” Vegard stopped himself. “Oh, ma’am, I’m so sorry, I—”
I snorted quietly. “I might have to get used to it.” People asking me to use the magic I no longer had.
Bottles clanked and something hit the boards above our heads hard enough to shower us with dust.
I got an even more white-knuckled grip on my daggers, and the glow of Vegard’s ax doubled. Mychael drew his sword.
It didn’t glow.
No glow. No magic.
No Mychael.
Oh hell.
There was a single pop and Vegard’s eyes rolled up in his head as he crumpled to the floor. The goblin thief glamoured as Mychael stood over him, a small dart gun in his other hand. He smiled and pointed it at me.
“This promises to be a very profitable day.”
Chapter 23
Vegard wasn’t moving. I couldn’t even tell if he was breathing.
I started to go to him, but was abruptly nose to muzzle with the goblin thief’s poison dart gun.
“The Guardian’s alive,” he told me. “I only kill when need demands it.” The thief smiled and pointed the gun at Vegard’s exposed throat. “However, a second dose would be sufficient to kill a man of his size.” His finger tightened on the trigger.
“No!” I shouted, loud enough for the Guardians upstairs to hear.
Silence.
I didn’t think that was good.
The thief still glamoured as Mychael pointed the gun at me. “You on the other hand are rather small. It may be too large a dose.” He took a few steps back, keeping his eyes and the gun on me. “Dalen,” he called, his voice entirely too casual. “What was that?”
“Cahil tripped, sir.”
The thief chuckled. “Human eyes in the dark are worthless.”
“Permission to drop our glamours?” the goblin called back.
“In a few minutes.”
Oh crap.
“Khrynsani,” I said. So much for help—at least for me.
He smirked. “You catch on quickly, but not quickly enough.”
Three Khrynsani glamoured as Guardians. Two had been glamoured as elves in the harbor. Who knew how many more there were in the citadel and around the city? No one knew.
And no one knew I was here.
With the Saghred and a goblin master thief glamoured as Mychael.
Something wasn’t adding up. Like how the hell he was in two places at the same time—running from us with the Saghred one minute, then landing on a sky dragon as Mychael five minutes later? Not to mention, the longer I got him to talk, the longer Vegard and I got to keep breathing.
“You stole the Saghred and brought it here,” I said. “We saw you and chased you. Then you fly in here on a—”
Mychael smiled. The goblin might have looked like Mychael, but he didn’t bother to copy Mychael’s mannerisms any longer. His smile gave me ten different kinds of the creeps. “Did you actually see me on the dragon?”
“No, but—”
“Or any of my men?”
Realization dawned, and I thought it might just be worth taking a poison dart in the gut to get my hands on him. “Four Guardians flew in . . . you and those Khrynsani were there waiting. You killed them.”
“You make it sound simple,” the goblin said. “I assure you it was not. However, their arrival saved us a great deal of trouble.”
“You got what you came for,” I said. “So now you’re hiding in a basement?”
The thief winked at me. “Not hiding, Raine. Merely awaiting transportation.” He looked over my shoulder. “I’ve sent the signal that I have the Saghred; within minutes, we’ll have direct passage home. What would we do without magic?” He laughed. “Though it looks like you may be finding out; what a pity.”
Bastard. I took a quick glance behind me. Nothing there but a brick wall. I froze.
A Gate.
The bastard had just ordered a freaking getaway Gate.
A Gate was a tear in the fabric of reality. Stepping through one was like stepping through a doorway, except that Gates covered miles instead of inches. Black magic made them, and torture and death fueled them—the more the merrier.
Once that Gate was open and stable, the thief would have all the help he needed dragging me through it kicking and screaming. The Saghred would just be happily going home.
If that happened, it was all over—or I’d wish it was. At that point, the best thing I could do for myself would be to fall on one of Vegard’s dainty daggers. I wasn’t going to do that, because I wasn’t going through that Gate. To keep that from happening, all I had to do was get the Saghred, get past a fully armored man with a poison dart gun, then dodge three Khrynsani. And I’d have to do it all without magic. Just me and mine.
Help wasn’t coming. Vegard was unconscious, the real Guardians who’d flown in from the citadel were probably dead in an alley, the dragons were snacking on thugs, no one knew I was here, and I had no magic.
But I had desperation in spades.
Think, Raine. Think. Keep him talking.
“That’s why you came forward first out there in the street. You didn’t know I’d lost my magic, until . . .”
“You told me. Again saving me much trouble.” The thief gestured toward my daggers with the gun’s muzzle. “Drop the daggers, Raine.”
I made no move to comply.
The thief pointed the gun at Vegard, then back at me. “Your choice—the Guardian takes a fatal second dart or you take your fatal first.” His sea blue eyes glittered coldly—Mychael’s sea blue eyes. “Drop. The daggers.”
I dropped them and rethought my strategy, such that it was.
The thief kicked my daggers across the room to the base of the stairs, keeping the gun aimed at me the entire time. “I didn’t think I’d get the chance to take you alive. Put your hands behind your head and stand against the wall.”
Like hell anyone was putting manacles on me again. I began to circle him. When in an impossible situation, keep your goals simple. Circle until I reach my daggers. Get them without being shot. Simple. Right.
“Come with me without any trouble and you need not die.” The thief started circling me with a saunter as if he had all the time in the world. “My employers would rather have you alive, but they’ll be fine with dead.”
I kept my eyes on his, my peripheral vision on that gun. I didn’t need to look at the stairs, not yet. I knew where they were. “Yeah, Sarad Nukpana would be an extra happy psycho if he could kill me on a Khrynsani altar.”
I had only a few minutes to prevent that from happening.
The thief drew a dagger—long, thin, with a needlesharp tip. That wasn’t Guardian issue.
I kept circling. “Let me guess. Poisoned.”
“You don’t have to find out.” His voice became low, coaxing. “Come now, little elf. Let’s not make this hurt any more than it has to.”
He didn’t want to kill me, but I didn’t care what I had to do to him. Problem was, if I didn’t do it quietly, I’d have to do it three more times to the Khrynsani who’d come running down those stairs.
There were no winners in a knife fight. This was especially true when your opponent was wearing armor and had a poisoned dagger. He didn’t need to stab me; a scratch could kill me just as dead. Either I won or Sarad Nukpana won me, and I got a long and painful death, followed by the destruction of civilization as we knew it.
No pressure.
Nukpana could feed the rock just fine without me. All he’d have to do is sacrifice victims so that their blood fell on the Saghred. The rock would take the sacrifices, and I would feel every last one of them; it didn’t matter if I was in the same room or hundreds of miles away. I’d taken one mage already and he hadn’t even been murdered first. I’d be stark raving loony within the first hour.