“Do you challenge my leadership?”
“Nah, just your assumptions.”
José motioned two men forward. “Untie her.”
“That’s a mistake.”
“No one asked you.”
Billings stepped back and away. “Nope. That is the truth.”
Another drag on the cigarette. The glow on the tip was very orange. She focused on it, sensing her situation had just gone from bad to worse.
Two men stepped forward immediately. She didn’t have names for them. They hadn’t done anything to stand out. Until now. Now, based on the grins on their faces, she was going to name them Lech and Lecherous. She kicked out. They avoided her feet with disheartening ease. She clenched her fingers over the worry stone as they cut the bonds between her hands. The gloves fell to the ground. They yanked her to her feet. Her arms howled in misery. Tears burned her eyes. She didn’t let a sound pass her lips. She had the ridiculous thought, as they dragged her closer to the fire, that her would-be rescuer would be proud of her.
As soon as she got within five steps of José, the men shoved her forward. Her headlong stumble was stopped by José’s hand under her chin. He lifted her face to his as he took a drink from his flask.
“Not so composed now, eh?”
She blinked the tears away. Her mouth felt stiff. The words sounded disjointed. “Everyone’s composure slips now and then.”
He took another drink, his gaze on the night behind her. “Like maybe the man who gave you the coat is about to?”
“Excuse me?”
Try as she might, she couldn’t get her arms to move. All she could do was stand there as far away as his grip allowed. She couldn’t even get a glare going for the agony shooting down her arms. She hoped she still had the worry stone in her hand. She pretended she did. Working it between her fingers. Two rubs on one side, and then rotate it to the other side, where she did three circles. Making five in all. The magic five. And then she started all over.
José made a tiny motion with his pinky. Just a couple twitches but it snapped every man present to full attention. Even Manuel stopped crossing himself to stare.
“Strip her.”
Oh, Lord in Heaven! The next ten seconds passed in a horror of slowness. The footsteps coming up behind her. The harshness of men breathing in her ear as their hands grabbed the front of her sturdy wool dress. The disgusting anticipation in José’s face as they took a step back and pulled. The tension that spread down her spine as the wooden buttons strained under the pressure. A splatter of brilliant red shot past her shoulder and splashed over José’s face as his hands fell away. Wetness hit her cheeks. She listed to the side and then the other hands released her, sending her reeling back the other way. She heard two soft thumps and then two loud explosions. Rifle shots, she realized. And those thunks were her attackers falling to the ground. Which meant the wet stuff on her face was . . . blood. Human blood. Horror spread through her. Around her, men shouted and dived for cover.
She stood there, staring at the fallen men, her skin crawling, memories screaming. War cries. A woman’s screams. Her mother’s shout to run. But she couldn’t run. She couldn’t move. She could only stand there and watch them come for her.
No
, she thought, holding her memories at bay with sheer determination.
No. This is now. Not the same.
And the blood was that of the enemy, not her mother’s. The explosions were gunfire. And someone had just saved her from being raped. This time things were going to end differently.
Adelaide spun around, her arms swinging uselessly as she stared into the darkness toward where she thought the reports had originated. Her lips shaped around the words “Thank you.”
Dear God, thank you.
3
THANK YOU.
Isaiah stared down the scope and blinked as he read the woman’s lips. She was thanking him. The men around her were diving for cover like squirrels surprised at a party, firing random shots into the dark, and she stood there like a symbol of calm amid the chaos, looking directly toward where he hid. Proud. Beautiful. Not looking through him but at him. And thanking him. Son of a bitch.
He lowered the rifle, feeling the shock of that look down to his gut. She’d been as brave as all get-out when those sons of bitches had come up behind her and put their hands on her, that chin coming up in an unconscious challenge as they got ready to strip her bare, to shame her in an effort to shame him. As if all the shame hadn’t been beaten out of him years ago. Assuming he’d ever had any.
She’d stood there and dared them, her arms hanging uselessly from the too-tight bonds to make it happen. He’d been as unable to let it happen as she had been to cower. The leader came up behind her, grabbing her by the hair and yanking her around. Her cry raked down Isaiah’s spine, raising the beast. A drop of blood spread over his tongue as his fangs cut through his gums.
He sighted down the rifle barrel, drawing a bead on the inch of flesh between the leader’s eyebrows as the man yanked her up against him. With anyone else he might have taken the shot, risked it, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Not with this angle. The unfamiliar hesitation was about as welcome as all of the feelings she brought out in him.
One step to the side, asshole. Just take one step to the side.
A bullet screamed off the rock to his left. He cut a glance at the source. Billings stood, rifle at his shoulder, drawing a bead of his own. Isaiah slid into the next shadow. Billings was the wild card in this mix. As skilled as Isaiah, he only had one weakness. He had a tendency to bring his conscience to the job. A conscience that had cost him plenty, but it didn’t make him any less deadly. Propping his rifle along a log, Isaiah took aim at the other Reaper. It would make sense to take Billings out now, increase his odds. Billings was easily worth five of the other outlaws when it came to a fight. As if sensing his eyes on him, Billings smiled. Son of a bitch, the rumors were true. The Reaper had a death wish.
Isaiah tightened his finger on the trigger. The leader shouted, “Take her.” A man with a large handlebar mustache raced forward. Choice time. Billings or the leader? The answer was obvious. Just before Isaiah took the shot, Billings stuck his foot out. The mustachioed man went face first into the rocks. Isaiah eased his finger off the trigger. Well . . . that was a first. Apparently, Billings was on his side. They’d never worked the same side of a war before. It could be interesting.
The leader took a step back, taking Adelaide with him, keeping her as his shield. Isaiah’s lip curled with disgust as the man yanked her against his chest, leaving his head open and clear. He toyed again with the idea of taking him out but another shot would give away his position and there wasn’t enough cover here to protect him from a return volley.
Billings’s protection aside, Adelaide needed him alive. It was a calm, logical decision. His training had become second nature and almost overwhelmed the logic. Training demanded he take the shot no matter the threat to himself or others. Training demanded he complete the kill. He brought Adelaide into the gun sight. Training didn’t take into account the human factor. He was more than his training. He moved the sight back to the leader.
Sweating, Isaiah fought the compulsion and forced himself to take his finger off the trigger. This time his snarl was for the woman. She’d been doing this to him for months, disturbing the calm he’d worked so hard to resurrect, dragging forth his demons, his nightmares. She made him feel and that was unacceptable. As unacceptable as the terror he could see on her face as José shouted to his men and threw her into the middle of the chaos.
Isaiah moved down the hill to the next position, keeping his eye on the camp.
Panic reigned around the fire. Men shouted and fired wildly into the darkness. Any control the leader had was gone. There was nothing left of his command but chaos. Isaiah smiled. He could work with that.
Run.
Isaiah sent the thought toward the woman. As if she heard, she broke free, spun around, and took two steps before José grabbed her by the hair again. She rounded on him, all spit and fire, the hold she had on her temper released in a scream that was absolute rage and frustration, striking Isaiah with the force of her fist to José’s gut, except it wasn’t José who gasped, who had the air knocked from his lungs. It was Isaiah. All because of that scream. It skated down his spine, joining the memories of other screams, other times. Faces of men, faces of women, faces of children, all grotesquely contorted, all dead, blurred within the circle of light thrown by the campfire. Spinning slowly when everything else was racing, giving him time to recognize the words tumbling from their lips in a senseless buzz. He stilled, counted slowly as he blew out a soundless breath. He blinked and the scene righted.
Adelaide was on the ground, holding her face. José stood over her, hands on hips, searching the dark nervously, his human eyes too weak to penetrate the darkness, but Isaiah’s weren’t. He could see easily. The shock on Adelaide’s face. The blood forming on her lip. The outlaw was right to worry. There would be revenge for that blow. Not the impersonal impact of a bullet. No. His hand dropped to his knife. This revenge would be personal. Isaiah might have failed to protect the woman from that strike, but his moments of insanity were mostly short lived and controllable. The stretches between were what the leader should fear. Reapers had been created for one purpose. To exact the revenge their handlers deemed necessary, though they no longer had handlers. But they were still damn good at revenge.
Thank you.
But not so good at protection. His gut wrenched. Adelaide had thanked him for one thing and he’d turned around and failed her on another. He’d never been worth a damn when it came to constancy. And sure as shit she wouldn’t be thanking him if she knew his history. About the only thing he’d ever managed to be good at was killing. Once someone made his list, they never got off. His grip tightened on his knife, his fingers tingling. And he was very good at killing, as the leader would find out before this was over.
Isaiah narrowed his eyes and focused on the other man’s lips, reading the words he shaped enough to know what he was saying was filth. The knife slipped free of its sheath. There were all kinds of ways to kill a man, some clean, some not so clean, and some flat-out hellish. Isaiah knew them all. It was his only skill. His only dependable talent and one with which José would soon become acquainted. Normally, kills were a dispassionate necessity, but he was going to enjoy killing the leader. The rage simmered and built. He was going to enjoy making him pay for
her
fear,
her
pain,
her
humiliation.
He swept the area with an all-encompassing gaze. The men who huddled nervously by the fire watched the darkness with more fear than their leader, followers who scented death approaching, doubting the strength of their leader, reconsidering their loyalty.
With a small smile Isaiah let loose a howl, feeling the beast rise as he glided effortlessly along the edge of light, using the trees and rocks as a barrier to the volley of shots that converged where he’d once been, heading toward his targets.
“What do we do, José?”
“Shoot
el bastardo loco
!”
The leader’s name was José. Isaiah tucked the information away.
José called for his sentries. Billings rose to his feet, his discarded smoke glowing faintly at his feet as he smiled grimly into the darkness when José shouted again.
There wasn’t going to be a response. Isaiah stepped over the body of one of the sentries. There would never be one. The price for invading his territory was high. He’d exacted it with ruthless efficiency. He’d even enjoyed it. They should not have touched her.
Adelaide scrambled to her feet, brushing at her skirt with awkward movements of her hands. Good, she was getting the feeling back. He’d worried that the bonds might have numbed her arms to the point of uselessness. Billings grabbed her arm and pulled her against his side. Around the camp, men faced the darkness, guns drawn. The firelight gave him a clear shot at anyone he wanted to take out. Isaiah growled. They always made it so easy to pick and choose. Except Billings. He was the only one standing away from the light, back against the tree. He’d taken the woman with him.
Isaiah would have done the same. Reapers were highly trained in only two things: survival and killing. Of the two skills, only the latter mattered to those who had created them from hell. The lesson had been drilled into the Reapers’ heads until they contained nothing else, and then they’d been recruited to tip the scales in civil wars within countries that had no winners. But that hadn’t concerned their creators. Their focus had been much more individual. Until the day the creators found they hadn’t been able to call back what they’d unleashed. That the monsters they’d created couldn’t be controlled. That day hell had come to earth.
After another unanswered call, José stepped back to the fire. Isaiah shook his head. Men always went to the light when in search of salvation. He drew his knife and crept up behind the bandit at the edge of the ring with his back to the rock. Redemption wasn’t coming tonight.