I kept my eyes on his, my peripheral vision on that gun. I didn’t need to look at the stairs, not yet. I knew where they were. “Yeah, Sarad Nukpana would be an extra happy psycho if he could kill me on a Khrynsani altar.”
I had only a few minutes to prevent that from happening.
The thief drew a dagger—long, thin, with a needlesharp tip. That wasn’t Guardian issue.
I kept circling. “Let me guess. Poisoned.”
“You don’t have to find out.” His voice became low, coaxing. “Come now, little elf. Let’s not make this hurt any more than it has to.”
He didn’t want to kill me, but I didn’t care what I had to do to him. Problem was, if I didn’t do it quietly, I’d have to do it three more times to the Khrynsani who’d come running down those stairs.
There were no winners in a knife fight. This was especially true when your opponent was wearing armor and had a poisoned dagger. He didn’t need to stab me; a scratch could kill me just as dead. Either I won or Sarad Nukpana won me, and I got a long and painful death, followed by the destruction of civilization as we knew it.
No pressure.
Nukpana could feed the rock just fine without me. All he’d have to do is sacrifice victims so that their blood fell on the Saghred. The rock would take the sacrifices, and I would feel every last one of them; it didn’t matter if I was in the same room or hundreds of miles away. I’d taken one mage already and he hadn’t even been murdered first. I’d be stark raving loony within the first hour.
“Though you may welcome death,” the thief said. “If I don’t kill you now, you’ll beg for it later—or do it yourself.”
My mind was racing even faster than my feet. Okay, Raine. He was a thief, a thief who could make himself look like someone else. Big freaking deal. That was all the magic he had. If he’d had any more he’d have used it by now. The only advantage he had was that he was bigger than me. You’ve dealt with that before and come out on top. Literally. Come on, girl, time for some ugly.
I darted my eyes to the right like I was going to make a run for the stairs.
He bought it.
I ran straight at him, driving my shoulder into his midsection. The impact with that armor hurt like hell. Better to hurt like hell than to be dragged there. The gun fired, the dart went wide, and we hit the floor together. His head and hands were the only parts of him without armor. I sank my teeth into the wrist of his dagger hand. He swore, but held onto that dagger. Dammit. I didn’t kid myself into thinking that I could reach anything vital, but I knew extreme pain made me drop my glamours. If it didn’t work on him, at least I’d go down biting.
A thief and a glamourer did his job by hiding and sneaking, not direct confrontation.
My fist directly confronted his temple.
The thief dropped the dagger—and his glamour.
He had the high cheekbones and fine, straight nose of a pure-blooded goblin. He wouldn’t have either for long, if my fists had their way. Mychael’s armor vanished with the glamour, leaving the goblin wearing his own clothes with leather armor covering only the most vital of areas. Hurt a man badly enough in a non-vital area and it’d turn vital real quick.
He was bigger and stronger. I was desperate and terrified and exhausted. But desperation trumped terror and exhaustion every time. It had to. The thief pivoted his body, trying to pin my arms, my legs, pin anything he could to get me to stop kicking and punching. I didn’t have long nails, but I used what I had on the upswept tip of one ear and sank my teeth into the other.
He screamed. I snarled.
Next to nuts, the tips of a goblin’s ears were one of their most sensitive parts.
I growled and shook my head like a terrier with a rat. I didn’t have much, but I used what I had. It was an ugly fight, but I wasn’t in it to make it pretty. I was in it to win, or at least survive. I used every trick in the book and wrote a couple of new pages right there on the spot. The damned rock just sat there watching, or waiting, or whatever.
I had to hand it to Imala’s uniform design—skintight also meant impossible to hold on to.
The air grew heavy with power, like air just before a lightning strike, prickling my skin like thousands of hot needles.
Not yet. Please, no, not yet.
I was facing the back wall. A long, narrow part of the bricks shimmered. The sickly sweet, coppery stench of blood came from beyond.
The Gate.
It opened simply, no mouth of Hell, no brimstone stench, just a parting curtain of silvery fog. The smell of blood came from the Gate and the chanting of voices came from beyond it. The chants and what was feeding the Gate were worse, much worse—the screams in the background proved it.
A tall figure appeared just beyond the opening.
Sarad Nukpana. Now in his uncle Janos Ghalfari’s body.
Sarad Nukpana had been consumed by the Saghred, escaped, and attempted to regenerate his body by ingesting the life forces of the most powerful mages he could hunt down. Desperate for a body to inhabit, Nukpana took the corpse of his recently dead uncle, the nachtmagus Janos Ghalfari.
Sarad Nukpana considered it all my fault.
In a way, it was.
Now he was going to make me pay.
Nukpana was lean and lethal. His black hair gleamed in the light of the torches burning behind him. Like many a serpent that’d slithered out of a dark place, Sarad Nukpana was beautiful to look at; but unless you wanted to die, you needed to stay out of striking distance.
I was within striking distance. I knew it, and so did he.
So did the thief. He planted his fist in my gut.
I folded double in a red haze of agony. I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t speak. I was facing the Gate, curled up and panting on the floor less than ten steps from being at Sarad Nukpana’s feet.
He smiled, fangs gleaming in the firelight. “Mine,” he purred. He whispered as if I were his lover. “Even my dreams were not this good, little seeker.”
He had me right where he wanted me, or he would as soon as he stepped through that Gate and claimed what he saw as his—the Saghred and me.
“Give me the Saghred,” Nukpana ordered the thief. “Then bring the girl.”
Nukpana didn’t step through the Gate.
He couldn’t.
An instant later, I realized why.
The thief had only called for it less than a half hour before. Nukpana would have had to work fast, and apparently fast meant one-way. The thief could go in, but Sarad Nukpana couldn’t come out.
Hope flickered. It didn’t flare, but at least it hadn’t been stomped out.
Though nothing—especially me—was going to keep the thief from taking me through that Gate with him. I managed a gasp and a little air. Heavy breathing on the bastard’s boots wouldn’t exactly be a defiant gesture.
The torchlight from beyond the Gate glinted off the goblin thief’s dagger on the floor not two feet from where I was curled up. Both of my hands were busy clenched in agony around my stomach. If I could persuade one to move, I could just reach the thing. Though reaching was a long way from using. Hell, breathing was a long way from happening. Every time I tried, it was like pushing a white-hot poker through my own guts.
The thief pulled on the armored glove lying on the chair next to the Saghred and picked up the rock. He was bleeding, but was careful not to let any of it come in contact with the Saghred. Just my luck.
I wasn’t just going to lie there and wait for the bastard to come pick me up like so much baggage. If I did nothing, I was going to die. If I did something, I’d probably still end up dead, but I’d have my self-respect—like that was going to do me any good once Sarad Nukpana started his fun and games. I unclenched my right hand and slid it along the floor toward the dagger. I thought the pain would knock me unconscious. I bit my lip against a scream until I tasted my own blood, but my hand didn’t stop moving. I closed my hand around the dagger’s grip.