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The third bolt singed Adam’s neck.
The nearest pole careened with a tortured creak and crashed down, taking the fence with it.
Adam spun, like a hammer thrower, and hurled the tree at the house. It cleared the ward in a flash of blue and smashed into the roof guard post. Boards exploded.
A bolt bit into his thigh, a gift from the south tower.
He was completely exposed now. The next bolt would hit him where it counted. Adam braced himself. He couldn’t dodge a bolt, but he could turn into it. Better take one in the shoulder than one in the gut.
The guard tower stood silent and still. No bolts sliced his flesh. He grasped the shaft of the bolt protruding from his thigh and wrenched it out. It hurt like hell, but it would heal. It always did.
The tower’s door slid open, and Siroun emerged. Behind her, a camouflaged figure fell to the floor, its arms slack. Siroun leaped onto the green shoot feeding the ward and dashed along its length as if it were a wide path on solid ground.
So graceful.
Siroun reached the end of the shoot, crouched, and struck in the same smooth movement, slashing the roots. Pale liquid oozed from the cuts. She cut again, lightning fast. The ward trembled and vanished, and she dropped to the ground softly.
Adam sprinted to the house. When he got going, he was impossible to stop. His shoulder smashed into the reinforced door. It flew open with a pitiful screech of snapped bolts and shattered boards. Adam stumbled in, glimpsed the sharp end of the crossbow bolt staring at him from six feet away, and dodged to the left. The bow twanged, and the bolt fell at his feet sliced in half. Siroun leaped forward, swung her curved knives, and the guard’s head rolled to the floor. Blood spurted in a thin spray from the stump of the neck, painting the wall crimson. The body took a step forward and tumbled down.
Adam exhaled.
“Death number one,” Siroun whispered.
* * *
The house stank of unclean magic. Siroun ran down the hallway, light on her feet. Adam’s hulking form moved next to her. It always amazed her how fast he could move. You’d expect a man of his size to shamble, but he was surprisingly agile, the way giant bears were sometimes surprisingly agile just before their claws caught you.
They had been making their way toward the center of the house, where Chang’s blueprint indicated a stairway. They’d run into the guards. Both times, she avoided casualties. Now the bloodlust sang through her, slithering its way through her veins like a starving, enraged serpent. She needed a release.
Somewhere deep within the house, a knot of foul magic smoldered. It brushed against her when she stepped through the door and recoiled, but not fast enough, not before she caught the taint of its magic. It felt old, primitive, and starved, gnawed by the same hunger inside her that longed for blood and severed lives.
A faint red sheen blocked the hallway ahead. Another ward, weaker and simpler than the first. Still, it would take time.
Adam moved toward the ward, casually bumping the fey lantern on the ceiling with his hand. The hallway drowned in darkness.
She ran up to the ward on her toes and swept her palm over its surface, close but never touching. Thin streaks of yellow lightning snaked through the red, trailing the heat of her hand. Past it, down the hall, she saw another translucent red wall.
Three men burst from the side room on their left. Adam barreled into them like a battering ram. The two front guards flew several feet and crashed to the ground in a heap of cracked bones. Siroun snapped a kick, connecting with the third guard’s jaw. He went down with a low moan.
Adam bent over the fallen female guard. The woman jerked back when she saw his face. He probed her side. “You have a broken rib,” he informed the woman. “Don’t move.”
She glared at him with remarkably blue eyes. “Go fuck yourself.”
Siroun pulled the duct tape from her pack. Six seconds, and the guards lay trussed up on the floor. Adam spun toward the ward. Siroun touched his arm and pointed to the side room. He understood and charged into it. His shoulder hit the wall. The wooden boards exploded, and she followed him into the next room, bypassing the ward.
Another wall, another crash, another ragged hole in the wood. The sheer power he could unleash was shocking.
They broke through the next wall. A foul stench hit her, the lingering, heavy odor of a greasy roast burned by an open flame. Bile rose in a stinging flood in Siroun’s throat.
Adam halted.
A barrier rose before them. Flesh-colored and transparent, almost gel-like, it cleaved the room in half, stretching from the left wall to the right. Long, thick veins, pulsing with deep purple, pierced the gel, branching into smaller vessels and finally into hair-thin capillaries. Between the veins, clusters of pale yellow globules formed long membranes, folded and pleated into pockets. A loose network of dark red filaments bound it all into one revolting whole. Adam stared at it in horrified fascination.
Tiny gas bubbles broke free of the capillaries and slid to the surface of the barrier to pop open. Here and there, small spherical vesicles of the yellow substance floated through the lattice of the filaments and veins, pushed by the invisible currents, bending and swiveling when they came to an obstacle.
It lived. It was a very primitive kind of life, but a life.
Her gaze traveled to the far left, drawn to the source of the vesicles, and found a gross, misshapen thickening of the yellow membranes, a bulging sack, tinged with carmine filaments. Globules of yellow matter detached from the surface of the sack and fluttered away one by one. She focused on it and found an outline of a human hand within the sack, complete with outstretched fingers. Another vesicle slid from the sack’s top, allowing for a glimpse of a swollen blue-black thumb. As Adam watched, the nail broke free from the bloated digit and spun away, caught by a current.
