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The familiar, menacing growl punctured Sabrina’s swelling terror. Sent her peering into the dimming gray light for signs of her savior.
It couldn’t be. She’d last seen him under the watchful eye of Sister Liotha, raking down straw for the cows. She must be mistaken. But oh, how she hoped she wasn’t.
A shadow glided among the trees. Huge. Dark. Silent as a wraith. Never emerging from the overgrowth, but always there. Watching. Waiting.
“Show yourself, friend,” Bone-Thin Man shouted, his knife steady, his eyes narrow and searching.
“Let the women go. Take yourselves off.” Clipped, battle-edged tones. A quiet confidence, so different from the nervy bravado of the men.
The bandit scoffed. Spat in the dirt. “I’ll not be takin’ orders from a coward what hides in the bushes like vermin. And if you won’t reveal yourself, I’ll have my men flush you out. Then we’ll see what’s what. And who’s givin’ the orders.”
He motioned at his comrades, who fanned out into the shrubbery. Two dropping back. One beating aside the undergrowth with the barrel of a rusty blunderbuss. Jane’s tormentor twitched his reluctance, but released her to crash into the bracken alongside his compatriots.
Slimy kept a firm warning hold on Sabrina, thou
gh his attention was all for the woods.
Dusk deepened, the heavy gray fading into night. Trees black and clawing against the sky. Cold rain spattering through the branches. Calls from man to man all that broke the unnatural stillness of the scene.
Suddenly, a flock of chattering starlings rose in a whirr of wings as a scream ripped the silence. Ended just as abruptly.
“Abe?” Bone-Thin Man jerked one way then another, hunting the wood. His knife whipping the air. “Kelly!”
A crash of branches. A grunt and whoof of spent breath. No answer.
The remaining men crowded closer together like a herd sensing danger.
Slimy wrenched Sabrina close. His pistol’s barrel chilling her neck. “Come out or the sister gets hers! Call him, Sister. Tell him I’m meaning business.”
She opened her mouth. Squeaked. Swallowed and tried again. “Come . . . come out. Please, Daigh.”
“Yes, come out, Daigh,” he mocked in a sneer that turned her stomach. “Please.”
“As you will.” An enormous, looming shadow detached itself from the darkness like some creature from the deepest Unseelie abyss. Eyes, hellish pits in a grim face. A body rippling with raw magic. This wasn’t Daigh. This was some horrible, distorted version of him. He bestrode the roadway not like a bewildered shipwreck victim, but like a warrior who knew his business. Knew it and enjoyed it.
“Let them go.” His quiet command holding more violence than any shouting threat could. And even unarmed, danger simmered in the air around him. “Or join your friends.”
The men’s focus was all on Daigh for the moment. She’d not get a better chance. “Run, Jane,” Sabrina hissed. “Run for help.”
Jane moaned her terror but did as instructed. Darting beneath the cursing reach of Slimy. Swerving past Daigh as if he were the devil himself. None stopped her. All eyes riveted to the monstrous, grim-featured goliath blocking the path.
The remaining ruffians closed ranks to meet this intruder, only Slimy staying back. Holding Sabrina in front of him like a shield.
Daigh’s gaze swung over the group. Settled on her, the flicker of some lost emotion surfacing in the empty hollows of his eyes.
The world wavered and spun, the path dropping from under her, the trees bleeding into a haze of spring white and green. As she watched, the flick of a fur-lined cloak and a sword’s silver edge overlapped Daigh’s coarse linen and leather. She blinked, the vision vanishing as Daigh’s rage slammed at the base of her skull. Hot. Terrible.
She grimaced at the headache now clamping her brain. And though he seemed in complete control of the situation, she got the sense Daigh held to sanity by the thinnest of threads. And that—unlikely as it sounded—he looked to her for rescue.
The alien, probing presence pounded against his brain. Some undefined evil slithered along his nerves. His vision filled with a crackling, pulsing light. A wash of frozen fire behind which everything hovered in shades of nightmare.
Through the haze of his own madness, he felt the men shift, a grumble like distant thunder as they took his measure. Adjusted their attack. He allowed them their fill. It would avail them nothing, though how he knew this was lost to him like so much else.
At some invisible signal, a man struck from the trees. A knife thrust at his side. Scoring his ribs.
Cursing, he caught his attacker’s wrist. Bones grinding under his fingers. The man’s scream ripping through the last barrier between conscious thought and animal instinct.
A turbulent, endless void warped him like a sword upon the smithy’s anvil. Heart beating with the hammer’s clang. Reshaping him into something unnatural. Unstoppable. Unheeding of pain or fear or loss. Knowing only killing. Only hate. Only death.
