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The man’s groaning agony seemed to break the stand-off. The rest flung themselves forward like a pack of snarling, snapping dogs scenting rabid prey.
He reacted without thought. Without reason. Muscles stretched and rippled beneath his skin. Blood ran like acid through narrowed veins. Hazed his vision in scarlet hellfire.
The assault faltered as the dead and dying sprawled in tumbled broken heaps. At one point, he found himself clutching a rusty, pitted dagger, hot and dripping with his own blood. He flipped it in his hand. Gripped the handle. Embedded it in the stomach of a man charging him in a screaming bull-rush.
Shouts filtered through the roar in his ears, but he ignored them. They shouted a name that meant nothing to him. His true identity ground to dust among the scattered fragments of his injured mind.
He wasn’t Daigh. He wasn’t a man.
He was death undone.
Sabrina watched in growing horror. Held her breath for the moment when Daigh hesitated. Faltered. Weakened. And the remaining men would close in for the kill.
But it never came. Every moment seemed to strengthen his killer cunning, the unearthly sixth sense that kept him alert and alive beneath the onslaught. Until those remaining fled the chaos. Faded into the shielding twilight. Were replaced by the whispering shush of skirts upon the ground. The murmur of worried fearful voices as the sisters approached.
Slimy gripped her in an ever-increasing stranglehold, his elbow clamped around her throat. Cutting her air until pinpricks spotted her vision and her lungs cramped with effort. He jerked at each loss, his curses loud and increasingly panicked. Clutching Sabrina as the last buffer between Daigh and imminent death.
“I’ll kill her.”
Harsh words pierced the fog of his madness. A blood-freezing sight met Daigh’s hazy vision.
Sabrina caught around the neck, a pistol jammed beneath her breast.
He paused, blood-soaked. Chest heaving as his lungs fought for air. Met the man’s stare, each seeing murder in the other’s eyes.
Actions slowed to infinity. A weapon leveled at his chest. The explosion of sound and flame. Followed immediately by a punch to the chest. Blood hot and streaming from the wound. The sudden weight of drugged limbs.
Lurching to his knees, he concentrated his aim. Let his dagger fly. Watched with ruthless satisfaction as it found its intended target.
The brigand dragged at Sabrina’s skirts as he fell. Dead as he hit the ground.
She screamed.
And oblivion swallowed him.
“What was he doing out here?”
“Lambing time. Sent him to check on the ewes.”
“Have you ever seen the like?”
“Mad. He’s mad. Dangerous. Summon the authorities.”
“Saved Jane. Sabrina. A hero.”
The clucking worried babble of the bandraoi. The hum of nervous confusion. The shush of heavy skirts and cloaks as they moved among the carnage.
Sabrina knelt beside Daigh, rifling among her bag as if the potions and cures she carried could stanch the blood or halt the ebbing life beneath her hand. Pain bit deep lines into the gray pallor of his face. Blue tinted his lips. No human medicines would avail him now. But if she delved within the magic of her race, she might buy him time if not survival.
She tore the remnants of his shirt open. Laid bare the shredded and bloody flesh. Swallowed the bile clawing its way up her throat. Focused instead on the mage energy rising like a tide within her. The texture and quality and weight of the power. Using what she’d learned from Sister Ainnir to shape its flow. Hone it. Sharpen it to scalpel brilliance.
“Sabrina?”
She met his pain-clouded gaze with a smile of false reassurance.
“It’s not needed,” he explained through clenched teeth.
“Don’t talk,” she comforted. “You’ll be all right. I can . . .”
