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The alpha rat smiled. “No.”
The knight with the scar raised his eyebrows. He knew where I was going with this and he knew I was right.
“To the best of your knowledge, who has the right to represent our group?”
“You do, Consort,” Robert said.
I looked at Ted. “This petition is invalid. You are detaining us illegally. Release us now.”
Magic crackled through the building, followed by a hair-raising desperate wail. Hugh’s wendigo had just tested the strength of the wards.
“She’s right,” the knight with the scar said. “We have no right to hold them.”
Ted looked at him. “This is D-day, Towers. This is what you’ve trained for.” His voice rose. “This is what we all trained for. This is important. We make a stand today. Can I count on you?”
Muscles played on Towers’s jaw. “Yes.”
“Good. We’ll continue this talk after we’re done.” Ted moved to the weapon rack and picked up a mace. Diana began to chant under her breath.
“Let us out!” I snarled.
Ted ignored me. “Diana, Towers, Mauro, with me.” He pointed at the medmage. “Steinlein, back us up.”
“Ted, listen to me, you stupid sonovabitch! Maybe you want to go out in a blaze of glory, but—”
They moved out. Steinlein, the medmage with the long braid, followed them. “Sorry.”
No. No, damn it. “Wait! The boy will die!”
“I’m sorry, but he’s dead anyway.” The knight left the room.
The wendigo’s enraged howl erupted. The building shook.
• • •
I TOUCHED THE bars. Magic surged through me in a flash of agony. Warded. Ascanio was dying, Hugh was breaking in, and we were trapped in a cage. Like sitting ducks. Well, this was going well.
I had a lock pick on my belt, but the knights had taken my belt, my jacket, and my sword.
Above us something shuddered with rhythmic, loud thuds, as if someone were hitting the building with an enormous hammer.
Robert rolled to his feet, hunched over by the lock, and tried to pass his hand between the bars. Magic nipped at his claws. He grimaced, baring vicious teeth, and tried to touch the lock. His forearm grazed the bars. He jerked his arm back. A gray scar crossed his skin, where the silver had killed Lyc-V.
Robert clawed at the floor of the cage, pried a board open, and dropped it back down. “Silver and steel.”
Same with the ceiling. We weren’t going anywhere. If I used a power word, it would bounce off the defensive spell protecting the bars and backfire at me. I had tried it in a warded cell under other circumstances and the pain left me crippled for an hour.
The pounding was getting louder.
I turned to Robert. “If Hugh gets through and you get a chance to run, I need you to leave us and run. Somebody has to tell the Pack what happened.”
Robert gave me a small smile. “If Hugh gets through, it’s unlikely I’ll survive.”
Magic slapped me with an invisible hand. I reeled.
“What?” Robert asked.
“Someone just broke the Order’s main ward.”
Something tore down the stairs and Hugh burst into the room. Blood slicked his clothes and cloak, but they were intact. None of it was his own. Too bad. A woman could hope.
He saw me and paused. “In a cage.”
Yeah, yeah.
Hugh shook his head. “How the fuck did you let yourself be put in a cage?”
He sounded offended on my behalf. Well, wasn’t that sweet? “I’m sorry, I can’t hear you. My ears are still ringing from that big boom your head made when it hit the stairs. Is your brain okay? Because your skull sounded hollow.”
Behind him Nick walked through the door. The crusader stared at each of us in turn, his eyes cold. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe Hugh had turned him.
Hugh strolled around the room, paused by Ascanio’s prone body, and grimaced. “I hate amateurs.”
I wanted to snap at him to leave the kid alone and caught myself. Anything I prized and anyone I cared about, Hugh would use against me. He was savoring the moment.
Hugh walked to the back of the room, with Nick at his heels, turned, and faced the entrance. “Don’t interfere.”
Nick nodded and leaned against the far wall.
Diana burst into the room, her face and arms smudged with soot. Towers, the one with the scar, was only a step behind. A gash tore his chest from left to right. Bloody but shallow.
“Is this it?” Hugh asked.
The two knights stared at Hugh.
Towers jerked a crossbow up.
Hugh said something. Magic popped like a huge balloon exploding. A power word. The cages shook. Pieces of the crossbow clattered on the stone floor.
“You have a problem.” Hugh shrugged off his cloak and hung it on a weapon hook in the wall. “You know who I am. You know what I can do. I’m here for her.” He nodded at me. “I won’t leave without her. I won’t let you shoot me. You could try locking me in, but your walls can’t hold me. And containment isn’t really what you had in mind, is it?”
Hugh unsheathed a gladius. A simple, ancient sword, with a straight double-edged blade, twenty-five and a quarter inches long, two and a quarter inches wide, weighing barely two pounds. Simple and brutal. The sword that carved the Roman Empire out of Europe.
Diana hunched her shoulders, whispering under her breath. Towers eyed him warily.
Above us the wendigo screamed again. Something thumped, followed by hoarse human cries.
Hugh hefted the gladius and turned the blade, warming up his wrist. Towers’s eyes narrowed. Hugh held the sword as if it were an extension of him, as if it had no weight. He was intimately familiar with it. He must’ve used it so much for so long that if he closed his eyes, he could probably reach out and touch its tip, because he knew exactly where the blade ended. I knew he could, because even in absolute darkness I knew exactly how long Slayer’s blade was.
“Get me out of this cage,” I growled.
“Shhh,” Hugh said. His eyes were hard. “Just watch.”
He shrugged, stretching, and nodded to the knights. “If you want me, you’ll have to come and get me.”
“Don’t,” I said. “He’ll kill you.”
Diana pulled a slender saber out. She held it like she knew what she was doing, but Hugh was in a class of his own. Fire dashed from Diana’s hand onto the blade, coating the saber in flames.
“A flaming sword.” Hugh shook his head. “Come on. Let’s do this.”
