Page 32 of Hellbound

A hum rang through her, faint and low.

She crossed over an iron threshold, set flush into the stone floor—the entrance to a bondsmith’s ruined forge. The bound metal still singing after all these decades.

She pivoted, hitting another one a few paces later, a different pitch entirely.

Her eyes snagged on old maker’s marks lining the doorframes. Family symbols, Damascus fold counts, some scratched away or covered with whitewash.

Then, her teeth ached.

Tink. Tink. Tink.

A discordant needle to her skull. A hellbound blade tapping against stone somewhere ahead.

A man leaned against a narrow junction, all tendon and sinew, his hair roughly shorn, a scar running along the side of his head.

His finger twitched on a wicked, curved butcher blade. Every few seconds, he tapped it against a stone on the floor beside him. His eyes drifted lazily across the crowd.

A boy passed him, no older than ten, with dirty clothes and tattered shoes.

Tink.

The boy flinched.

Less than a second. A tightening of his shoulders, a fraction turn of his head that he caught and corrected.

But it was enough.

The man’s gangly hand shot out and clamped around the boy’s arm.

He screamed.

The crowd parted around them like a school of fish around a shark. No one stopped, no one helped.

On the man’s belt, a sigil embroidered on torn, garish purple ribbon.

Ksenia’s vision turned red.

How many has he caught? Vornaya’s voice was hot and feverish in her ear.

He dragged the boy into the alley.

Ksenia followed, her breathing even, her bondsense tracking the jagged whine of his hellbound blade through the twists and turns. It quavered somewhere between metal and a disembodied voice, pulling her forward.

She could hunt too.

The tunnels narrowed as the crowds fell away.

The screaming had stopped.

She reached a dead end. A single oil lantern affixed to the low ceiling, casting shadows over the headhunter’s leering face with a smile that showed too many teeth.

Clutched in his hand was the young boy trembling like a leaf.

His glassy eyes brimmed with tears as they darted between his captor and Ksenia before settling on Caromir at her hip.

The headhunter turned his smile on her—his teeth a mismatched row of yellow with a single canine capped in silver. “Move along, pretty,” he sneered. “Though—you look like a damn animal with those yellow eyes. What are you, part cat?”

Ksenia could smell his hot and rancid breath from where she stood, paying his insult no mind.