Page 23 of Tusks And Conditions

The Goblins throw their chains simultaneously. I swing the war-hammer in a wide arc, catching one chain and wrapping it around the hammer's head, then yanking it hard enough to pull the Goblin off his feet and send him tumbling across the asphalt toward me. I kick him as he arrives, not hard enough to kill, just hard enough to fold him in half and launch him back the way he came. The second chain wraps around my left ankle. The binding hex activates instantly, and the links constrict with a mechanical tightness that bites through my boot leather and into the skin beneath. I feel the hex trying to crawl up my leg, trying to lock my knee, my hip, freeze me in place.

My runes fight it. The golden light along my calf flares and sputters as the hex and the war-magic wrestle each other in my blood, and for three horrible seconds I'm locked in a stalemate, my left leg immobilized, my runes burning through their reserves to counter the hex, my hammer up in a guard position that's the only thing keeping the Drow's daggers out of my throat. She presses the advantage, a flurry of slashes that ring off the hammer's shaft in rapid succession, each one accompanied by a fresh dose of poison that my faltering runes struggle to neutralize, and I feel the numbness creeping up my left arm again, slower this time but steadier, like a tide that knows it's winning.

The Troll hits me from behind again. He's recovered faster than I expected, and his arms lock around my torso from behind in a bear hug that lifts me off the ground despite the chain on my ankle, which tears free from the Goblin's grip but stays wrapped tight around my boot, the hex still active, still eating at my runes. The Troll squeezes. My cracked rib grinds against something it shouldn't be touching, and the pain punches through the war-magic's dampening effect with enough force to make me see stars. Bright ones.

I throw my head back for another headbutt, but he's learned. He tucks his chin, takes the blow on his calcified skull, and it's like hitting a boulder. My vision strobes. The hammer slips from my numb left hand and clatters to the asphalt. The Drow sheathes one dagger and picks it up, testing its weight with an appraising look that tells me she's about to use my own weapon to cave in my skull.

The sniper's fourth bolt hits the ground at my feet, close enough to scorch my boots, and he's not missing. He's herding me. Keeping me pinned between the Troll's grip and the Drow's blades while the second Goblin recovers and picks up his chain. Professional. Coordinated. This is what Korvan's money buys.

My runes are failing. I can feel them dimming along my arms, the golden light flickering to amber, to a dull rust color that means the magic is almost spent. The poison from the Drow's blades is winning the war in my left arm, the numbness spreading past my elbow now, turning my fingers into dead weight. The binding on my ankle has locked my left knee at a bad angle. The Troll's arms are a vise around my broken rib, and every breath I draw is smaller than the last, shallower, buying less and less time.

I'm losing.

The realization lands with a cold, clinical clarity that cuts through the pain and the magic and the animal fury of the fight. I'm losing, and I'm going to die in a parking lot behind a rotting warehouse, and Sabine is going to wake up tomorrow in her beige apartment with no one to eat oatmeal with, and the thought of that, the thought of her standing in her kitchen in the quiet morning light with one bowl instead of two, hurts worse than the broken rib. Worse than the poison. Worse than any of it.

The Drow raises my hammer above her head, the enchanted steel catching the firelight from the burning van, and her white hair whips in the wind of the rain, and I think about spreadsheets and chamomile tea and the precise arrangement of blueberries, and I think maybe the country house with the reading nook was always a stupid dream, but at least for a few weeks it was a dream that had someone else in it.

"Hey!"

The Drow pauses mid-swing. The Troll's grip loosens a fraction. Even the sniper on the roof seems to hesitate, the faint orange glow of his loaded bolt hovering steady against the dark sky.

I look toward the loading bay door.

Sabine stands in the doorway.

She's soaking wet. Her brown cardigan is plastered to her body, her sharp bob haircut hanging in dark, dripping curtains around her face.

In her right hand, she holds a canister of pepper spray. The commercial kind. The kind you buy at the drugstore in a three-pack. It has a pink safety cap.

In her left hand, she holds a stapler. Not a desk stapler. An industrial office stapler, the heavy chrome kind that accounting firms use to bind quarter-inch-thick financial reports, the kind that weighs a solid two pounds and has corners sharp enough to open a letter or, apparently, serve as a melee weapon, because she's gripping it like a brick, knuckles white, arm cocked back, and her face says she has done the cost-benefit analysis on this situation and has arrived at the conclusion that someone in this parking lot is about to get stapled.

"Sabine, how did you..."

"I picked the lock." She says it the way she says everything. Factual. Precise. Like picking the lock on a door that was specifically designed to keep her safe from exactly this situation is just another line item on her to-do list, slotted neatly between 'organize tax receipts' and 'confront murderous crime syndicate in parking lot.' "You used a Krayburn Model 7. The manual override is on page forty-three of the user guide, which you left on the kitchen counter."

"I left it face-down."

"I flipped it over. It was bothering me."

The Drow recovers first. She lowers the hammer, tilts her head at Sabine with the detached curiosity of a predator assessing something it doesn't quite categorize as prey, and takes a single step toward the doorway. Sabine's eyes snap to her, and the pepper spray comes up with a steadiness that would be impressive from a trained combat operative, let alone from a five-foot-five accountant in a waterlogged cardigan who has never been in a physical altercation more serious than a disputed parking space.

"Don't. This is industrial-grade capsaicin. I checked the Scoville rating."

The Drow stops. Not because she's afraid of pepper spray. Because she's confused. And in a fight, confusion is a gap, a half-second of hesitation where the variables don't add up and the trained response stutters, and I have built my entire career on exploiting exactly that kind of gap.

But I can't move. The Troll has me locked. My runes are spent. My left arm is dead weight. The binding on my ankle has frozen my knee. The woman I love stands in a doorway full of killers with a stapler and a can of pepper spray, and I cannot move.

The second Goblin recovers his chain. He sees Sabine. He sees the opening. He sees a small, unarmed human woman blocking the warehouse exit, and every predatory instinct in his compact, wiry body tells him the same thing it would tell any opportunistic fighter in a kill box. Neutralize the variable. Remove the obstruction. She's nothing. She's soft. She's human.

He charges.

Goblin muscle launches across the parking lot directly at Sabine, the barbed chain spinning up in a wide arc above his head, the binding hex glowing blue along its length, and his filed teeth are bared in a snarl that would send most people scrambling backward through the doorway and into the relative safety of the warehouse interior.

Sabine doesn't scramble backward.

Sabine raises the pepper spray.

Something inside me detonates.