Page 21 of Tusks And Conditions

"And yet."

I keep walking. They raise their weapons. The Goblin jabs the shock-staff at my midsection, and I catch the shaft in my left hand, feeling the electrical discharge ripple up my arm and ground itself harmlessly in the war-runes along my bicep, which absorb the energy with a greedy flare of gold light. I twist the staff out of his grip with a rotation of my wrist, spin it once, and plant the butt end into the asphalt between his feet hard enough to crack the pavement. He stumbles back, wide-eyed.

"Sit down," I tell him.

He sits. On the wet ground. In a puddle. Immediately.

The human swings the enchanted baton at my head. I duck it, not because I need to, my skull is thick enough to take the hit with nothing worse than a headache, but because the follow-through of his swing carries him off balance, and I hook my foot behind his ankle and drop him onto his back on the asphalt with a wet, graceless thud. The baton skitters out of his hand. I step on it. The enchantment sputters and dies under my boot.

He stares up at me from the ground, rain pooling in the hollows of his eyes, and I observe him calculate his options and arrive at the correct answer.

"Stay down," I say. "I'm not here for you."

He stays down.

The roof sentry. I glance up. The hexfire crossbow is aimed at my heart, and I can see the faint orange glow of the loaded bolt, a nasty piece of work that punches through standard wards and sets whatever it hits on fire from the inside out. The shooter is a young Orc, barely twenty from the look of her, grey-green skin and a shaved head and the kind of desperate tension in her shoulders that tells me she's here because she needs the money, not because she believes in Korvan Blacktide's vision for organized supernatural crime.

I look up at her. She looks down at me. The rain falls between us.

"What's he paying you?"

Her jaw tightens. She doesn't answer.

"Whatever it is, it's not enough to die for. And I promise you, one way or another, his accounts are getting frozen by the Supernatural Revenue Service within the week. Evidence organized by color in a file. Very thorough. You won't get your last paycheck."

Something flickers across her face. She lowers the crossbow an inch.

"Go home," I tell her. "This job is over."

For a long, suspended moment, she holds the weapon steady. Then she pulls the bolt from the channel, pockets it, slings the crossbow over her shoulder, and disappears behind the roofline. A few seconds later, I hear the clang of a fire escape ladder and the rapid fading of footsteps into the dark.

I push through the loading bay door. The interior of the warehouse is exactly what I expected. Open floor plan. Crates stacked high along the walls, filled with contraband I can smell from here, hexed narcotics, stolen enchanted artifacts, black-market ward bricks. A bare metal desk sits in the center of the space under a single harsh fluorescent light, and behind it, in a high-backed leather chair that looks absurdly corporate for a room that smells like mildew and dark magic, sits Korvan Blacktide.

He's a Naga. Eight feet of scaled, serpentine lower body coiled beneath the desk, a humanoid torso rising from the mass of blue-black scales, and a face that would be handsome if not for the vertical pupils and the forked tongue that flickers between his thin lips every few seconds, tasting the air. He wears a tailored charcoal suit jacket over his bare body, because Nagas are vain and cold-blooded in every sense of the word, and his fingers are covered in rings that glow with minor enchantments. Intimidation charms. Confidence boosters. The jewelry equivalent of stuffing socks in your underwear.

Four guards flank him. Two more Goblins. A Troll with arms like tree trunks. And a Drow with white hair and a pair of curved daggers that shimmer with a poison enchantment I can smell from across the room, sweet and acrid, like burnt sugar and venom.

Korvan tilts his head, his vertical pupils narrowing as I step into the light.

"Ironjaw. You received my invitation, I see."

"The death warrant. Charming touch with the black wax seal."

"I'm a traditionalist." His tongue flickers. "I expected you to come through the roof. Or perhaps the wall. Not the front door."

"I'm trying something new."

His eyes sweep over me, lingering on my empty hands. "No weapons?"

I still have three blades strapped beneath my jacket and a collapsible war-hammer in my back holster. But my hands are empty, and that's the point. "Didn't feel like it tonight."

Korvan's mouth curves into something that isn't quite a smile. He leans forward, and the coils beneath the desk shift with a dry, rasping sound that fills the silence. "You've gone soft, Ironjaw. That little human mate of yours. The accountant." The way he says the word is deliberate, loaded with a contempt that makes my runes flare hot against my ribs before I force the magic down. "Word travels fast in the Hollowbridge District. The great Jagger Ironjaw, domesticated. Eating oatmeal. Filing taxes."

"You should try filing taxes. Might keep you out of prison."

The smile drops. His pupils contract to slits. "I put that warrant on you because you cost me three couriers and a distribution hub last month. Forty thousand in product, gone. My clients are unhappy, Ironjaw. Unhappy clients make me unhappy. And when I'm unhappy..." He spreads his ringed fingers, and the enchantments on them pulse in unison, casting fractured light across the warehouse walls.

"I know what happens when you're unhappy. I've been cleaning up the aftermath of your unhappiness for six years." I take a step forward. The Troll shifts. The Drow's hands drift to her daggers. I stop, keep my hands loose, open. "But here's what's going to happen instead. You're going to pull the warrant. You're going to close your Fae credit union accounts before the SRS freezes them, which they will, because someone very smart and very thorough has already built the case. And you're going to stop operating out of this district, because the paper trail that leads back to you is so clean and so detailed that a first-year DMI prosecutor could put you away for thirty years without breaking a sweat."