The Sword-Edged blonde (35 page)

“It means I didn’t make those other burns,” the torturer sighed.

A moment of silence passed. Again I tried to move, but I was still too foggy. It took every ounce of strength not to fade back into that nice padded darkness.

“No, that’s not what it means,” dragon boots said, his voice cold with fury. “It means she
moved
them. Sometime between her escape and the time we caught her, she hid them somewhere else.
That’s
how she got burned.”

“Where?” the clueless third man asked.

“How the hell do I know?” dragon boots exploded. He slammed his hand on a table I couldn’t see. Rattling metal told me it held the interrogator’s special tools. “We didn’t know where she hid them in the first place, so how could we know where they are now?”

“The boss won’t be happy,” the third man said.

“Let me worry about him,” dragon boots snapped.

“What about her boyfriend?” the torturer asked, and nudged me in the side with his foot.

Hands grabbed my hair and bent my neck painfully back so they could look at my face. I played dead, which wasn’t hard. “This guy? You saw what he had in his saddle bags. He’s just some dumb-ass in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“I could still find out what he knows,” the torturer said. His eagerness really did scare me.

“He wouldn’t last five minutes in this shape. No, we’ll dump them both. Have to start from scratch. We know she hid them around here somewhere, so we’ll just keep looking the old-fashioned way.”

He released my hair, and my head thumped hard against the floor. That was all it took; I dove back into quiet, peaceful nothingness.

W
HEN I WOKE
up again, I was bathed in moonlight.

The clear sky above was alive with stars, all twinkling happily at me. I blinked, waited for the dizziness generated by that movement to pass, and then blinked again.

I lay on my back on the ground. I was untied, my arms and legs thrown wide like I wanted to embrace the night. A rock dug painfully into my behind, but I lacked the energy to move away from it. With tremendous concentration I turned my head to the right.

Laura Lesperitt lay beside me. Most of her front teeth, one eye and half an ear were gone. She was naked, and her upper torso was a mass of poker burns, cuts and bruises. I saw what the torturer meant: his points of contact were small and precise, but something else had burned the insides of her arms from wrist to elbow. The scabbing told me she’d been alive when most of it happened, but the milky stare of her remaining eye said she was past the agony now. Insects had already collected around the injuries, and a shadowy canine form slipped through the darkness beyond her: a wolf or coyote, cautiously approaching a free meal.

I tried to rise. I managed a feeble finger-wiggle.

We lay in a gully or a dry creek bed, where the light only reached us because the moon was straight overhead. The sides of the ravine rose sharply and seemed to my befuddled brain as if they might snap closed over us, trapping us in darkness like those fly-catching plants.

Suddenly a shadow blocked the moon. A shape in the air above me grew larger and made a high, keening sound. I knew some birds of prey hunted at night, and I recalled childhood stories of giant owls that would swoop down and snatch misbehaving brats from their beds. I’d never seen a bird large enough to lift a human being, but then again, this night seemed to be all about bad surprises.

Then my brain cleared enough for me to comprehend what I was actually seeing, and I used every last bit of available energy to roll twice, just before my horse, Lola, crashed down onto the spot I’d occupied. Her equine screech of terror ended with the sharp, wet sound of impact. Big globs of something splattered over me.

Three men stood silhouetted in the moonlight on the edge of the cliff. Dust glittered in the air from where they’d driven Lola over the edge. I lay very still; did they realize she had missed me?

I heard their murmurs without catching any words. Then they turned and walked away, apparently convinced I was as dead as my horse, and the girl. Boy, were they in for a surprise, I thought grimly. Especially that bastard with the dragon boots. All I needed was time to catch my breath.

Then I coughed, tasted blood and got a fresh jolt of agony from my side. I realized the girl and I had
also
been tossed off that cliff. I tried to rise, knowing if I stayed put I’d be dead by morning. But just breathing exhausted me, and before I knew it the night wrapped me up and again took away the pain. If this was death, I wouldn’t protest.