Page 24 of Tusks And Conditions

Not the runes. Not the war-magic. Something older. Something deeper. Something that predates the tattoos and the training and the centuries of Orcish battle tradition, something that lives in the marrow of my bones and my skull where the thinking stops and the ancient, thundering machinery of what I am takes over. The runes don't flare gold. They go red. A deep, arterial red that pulses in time with a heartbeat I can no longer feel as my own, and the light that pours off my body isn't warm anymore but scorching, nuclear, a heat that makes the rain sizzle and evaporate on my skin before it can reach me.

My vision narrows. The parking lot disappears. The warehouse. The sniper. The Drow. The rain and the fire and the broken asphalt and the burning van. All of it falls away until there is nothing left in the world but the Goblin sprinting toward Sabine and the sound of the chain whistling through the air and the absolute, irrevocable, galaxy-collapsing certainty that if that chain touches her I will tear this city apart with my bare hands and salt the earth where it stood.

The Troll's arms are still around me.

They don't matter anymore.

CHAPTER 11

SABINE

Idon't see him move.

One second the Troll has him pinned, with mottled green muscle wrapped around Jagger's torso like a living straightjacket, and the next second the Troll is airborne. Not stumbling. Not pushed. Airborne. The sound his body makes when it hits the corrugated steel wall of the warehouse is something between a thunderclap and a car accident, a wet structural crunch that dents the metal inward and leaves a Troll-shaped crater in the siding before he slides down into a boneless heap on the asphalt, unconscious before he lands.

The Goblin is still running at me. The barbed chain whips through its arc. I have the pepper spray up and my thumb on the trigger, and some distant, analytical part of my brain is calculating the spray radius versus the chain's reach and arriving at a deeply unfavorable conclusion when Jagger crosses the distance between us in three strides that shouldn't be physically possible for something his size.

He doesn't punch the Goblin. He catches the chain mid-swing, wraps it once around his fist, and yanks. The Goblin comes with it, it’s jerked off his feet like a dog hitting the end of its leash, and Jagger's other hand closes around the back of his neck with a grip that makes the tendons in his forearm stand out like bridge cables. For one terrible, suspended moment, he holds the Goblin there at arm's length, dangling, the creature's filed teeth snapping at empty air and his clawed feet kicking six inches above the pavement, and the red glow pouring off Jagger's runes is so bright it turns the rain to steam and casts hard shadows across the parking lot like a flare.

Then he throws him. Not at the wall. At the ground. Straight down, like he's spiking a football, and the asphalt cracks in a spiderweb pattern under the impact. The Goblin doesn't get up.

The silence that follows is enormous. It fills the entire parking lot, swallowing the hiss of the rain and the distant crackle of the burning van and the labored breathing of every conscious body within fifty yards. Jagger stands between me and the warehouse with both fists clenched and the chain still wrapped around his left hand, trailing barbed links across the wet ground, and every single rune on his body is pulsing that deep, terrible red that turns his grey skin almost black in contrast. His silver tusk-piercings flash in the firelight. The rain hits him and evaporates.

The Drow with the hammer takes one look at him, sets the weapon down very carefully on the asphalt, and puts both hands flat on her head. The second Drow, the one who was circling for a flank, does the same. The remaining Goblins, four of them still conscious and scattered around the parking lot in various states of injury, follow suit with a speed that suggests they have surrendered to law enforcement before and know exactly what the protocol looks like.

Nobody speaks.

Jagger doesn't acknowledge the surrender. His eyes, which are usually a warm amber that reminds me of good whiskey and afternoon sunlight through curtains, are completely black. Pupils have swallowed the iris. He stands there breathing in great, ragged pulls, staring at the spot where the Goblin was running at me, as though the threat is still there and he's daring it to reconstitute.

"Jagger. They surrendered."

Nothing. The runes pulse. Red. Red. Red.

"Jagger." I lower the pepper spray and take a step toward him, which feels a bit like approaching a reactor in a meltdown, but the logical part of my brain, the part that hasn't been obliterated by adrenaline, notes with clinical precision that his body is angled entirely in front of mine, shielding me, and that even in whatever berserker fugue state he's entered, every line of his massive frame is oriented toward protection rather than attack. He isn't hunting. He's guarding. There's a difference, and it matters, and my body knows it even if my racing pulse hasn't caught up yet.

I reach out and touch his arm.

The effect is immediate. The red glow flickers, sputters, and fades back to gold before dimming entirely, receding into the intricate whorls and spirals of ink like embers banking in a hearth. His breathing changes. Still rough, still ragged, but the rhythm shifts from combat cadence to something more human, or more Orcish, or whatever the correct term is for someone who has just torn through six armed supernatural combatants in under thirty seconds and is now trying to remember what century he's in.

His eyes find mine. The black recedes. Amber floods back in, warm and wild and so full of raw, undiluted terror that it stops my breath.

"Hi," I say, because I don't know what else to say to a seven-foot Orc whose runic tattoos are still smoking faintly in the rain.

"We're leaving," he says.

"My car is..."

"We're leaving now."

He walks. I don't protest, partly because protesting seems futile when you're being carried by an Orc in full berserker afterglow and partly because my legs genuinely might not support me at the moment and partly, if I'm being forensically honest with myself, because his body against mine in the cold rain feels so outrageously, overwhelmingly safe that some traitorous animal part of my brain has gone completely limp and refuses to generate a single actionable objection.

He carries me the entire way home.

Not to the car. Home. Fourteen blocks through the rain, past closed storefronts and late-night food carts and a 24-hour laundromat where a startled Pixie drops her basket of clean clothes at the sight of a massive, illuminated, blood-spattered Orc carrying a small human woman through the downpour like a war prize. The Pixie's laundry scatters across the wet sidewalk. Jagger doesn't notice. I mouth "sorry" over his shoulder as we pass.

The lecture starts at block three.

"Do you have any idea what a barbed binding chain does to human skin?"