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This time, the cut blazed with darkness.
The man stirred under my hand. The muscles of his forearm shifted, and I prepared myself—groping for his mind, ready to send him back into dreamland.
“But first, tell me your name.”
He was still a blank in there. Only that was impossible, wasn’t it?
“Who are you?”
I pushed further into his mind, sweeping past his sense of self and his mental constructs, deep into wastelands, the chasm of not-thought, where I slammed intosomeoneelse.
Like me, he wasn’t just one person. He was two. He was...I almost knew. The presence locked there was familiar.
So familiar.
So...
“Impossible.”
Hewas dead.
“I shot you. I saw the pistol ball... I watched you fall.” A bullet etched with dream and forged in metal from the House—everything I knew about alchemy told me it had killed him.
He should be dead.
My breath caught, a sinking cold as I watched my latest not-victim rise into awareness, a leviathan swimming up from the deep.
One day I will have you flayed and fucked while I watch.
Today was not that day.
I grabbed a fistful of his hair while my other hand squeezed the handle of the dagger.
“You’re supposed to be dead.” I could hear my own fear.
His big hand shot up, fingers locking as he latched onto my forearm. Crushing strength that could break.
I ached, up my arm and down to my bones—my heart battering my rib cage.
One more chance. I’d been given one more chance.
“Fuck you.” I gritted through the pain as I raised the knife high enough to drive it deep into his skull. “Go back to the hel—”
A force from behind rocked my head, an explosion that rained in fragments of brain.
A sniper? I hadn’t...
The world was slowing down.
I was dying.
Screaming. All I could hear was screaming.
I couldn’t...
Think.
The dagger, whatever happened I had to keep the dagger.
