Bucky pawed the ground.
“You’re just wasting time now. Come on.”
The stallion eyed him again. In his years Hugh had seen all sorts of horses. The Arabians who would rather die than step on a human foot; the strict, mean horses from the Russian steppes that gave all of themselves, but forgave nothing; the German Hanoverians that would just as soon walk through a man as around... With a cross like this he couldn’t tell what the hell he was going to get, but he’d ridden horses since he was ten years old, all those long decades ago.
Their gazes locked. There was a fire inside that horse, and it shone through his eyes. A mean sonovabitch nobody wanted. You will do. You belong with me.
“Come here. I don’t have all day.”
Bucky sighed, raised his ears, and walked over. Hugh patted the warm neck, feeling the tight cords of muscle underneath, dug the sugar cube he’d stolen from Ryan’s kitchen out of his pocket, and let warm lips swipe it off his palm. Bucky crunched the sugar.
“I knew it,” Ryan said from behind the fence. The kid behind him rolled his eyes.
Bucky turned his head and showed Ryan his teeth.
Hugh stroked the stallion’s neck. “How much do you want for him?”
“A favor,” Ryan said.
The man really didn’t know when to stop pushing. “What do you want?”
Ryan nodded at his youngest son. “Take Sam with you.”
What the bloody hell? “I just told you I couldn’t pay you for the horse, and you want me to take your son with me. You know who I am. You know what I do. He’ll be dead in a month.”
“I can’t keep him.” Pain twisted Ryan’s face. “He isn’t right in the head.”
Hugh squeezed his eyes shut for a moment. It was that or he really would strangle the man. He opened his eyes and looked at the kid.
“How old are you?”
“Seventeen,” the kid said, his face flat. His eyes were dull. A liability at best, a pain in the ass at worst.
“What’s your name?”
“Sam.”
“Are you slow?”
“No.”
“I didn’t mean like that.” Ryan grimaced. “He can’t act like normal people. He doesn’t know when to stop. He caught a horse thief last month. Now, you catch a horse thief, you beat the shit out of him. Everyone understands that. That’s how things are done. You don’t get a rope and try to hang the man. If I had found him, that would be one thing. The sheriff saw him getting ready to string the thief up.”
Hugh raised his eyebrows at the boy.
“He stole from us,” Sam said, his voice flat.
“He had the rope over the tree ready to go right there by the damn road. Why hang him by the road, I ask you?”
“A warning is only good if people see it,” Hugh said.
Sam looked up, surprise flashing in his eyes, and looked back down. The kid wasn’t as dim as he pretended.
“He was always like this. He fights and don’t know when to stop. The sheriff told me he would let that one go, but this idiot doesn’t think he did anything wrong.”
“He stole from us.” A harsh note crept into Sam’s voice. “If one person steals and we don’t do anything, they will keep stealing.”
“See?” Ryan reached over and smacked the kid upside the head. Sam’s head jerked from the blow. He righted himself.
“Sheriff says he tries it again, he’ll end up in a cage for the rest of his life, or they’ll string him up instead and save everyone the trouble. He just isn’t made for ranch life. It’s not in him. At least this way he’s got a chance. You take him and Bucky, we’re even.”
Hugh looked at the kid. “You want to die fast?”
Sam shrugged. “Everyone dies.”
The void scoured Hugh’s soul with sharp teeth.
“Get your shit,” Hugh said. “We’re leaving.”
The magic was still down.
The tall, gleaming office towers that once proudly marked Charlotte’s downtown had fallen long ago, reduced to heaps of rubble by magic. The waves would keep worrying at the refuse, grinding it to dust until nothing was left. Magic fought all technology, but it hated large structures the most, bringing them down one by one, as if trying to erase the footprint of the technological civilization off the face of the planet.
With construction equipment functioning barely half of the time and gasoline supplies limited and pricey, clearing thousands of tons of rubble proved an impossible task, and Charlotte did what most cities decided to do in the same situation: it settled. It carved a road roughly following the old Tryon street, with hills of concrete and twisted steel beams bordering it like the walls of a canyon, and called it a day. Stalls had sprung up here and there, clustered where the road widened, selling all the fine luxuries the post-Shift world had to offer: “beef” that smelled like rat meat, old guns that jammed on the first shot, and magical potions, which followed the tried-and-true ancient recipe of ninety-nine parts tap water to one part food coloring. This early in the morning, only half an hour past sunrise, most of the vendors were still setting up. In another half hour, they would start squawking and lunging at the travelers, trying to hawk their wares, but for now, the road was blissfully quiet.
It didn’t matter, because for once Hugh didn’t have a hangover. Yesterday, after they’d left Black Fire behind, they’d spent the night in the open, at an old campground. He’d wanted to drink himself into a stupor, but then he would be no good the next day, so he stayed sober. His mood had soured overnight, and in the morning, when he found Sam waiting with the rest, the irritation heated up to a simmering hate.
He hated Charlotte. He hated the way it looked, the way it smelled, the rubble, the tortured skyline of the city, the white stallion under him, and the void waiting just beyond the border of awareness, ready to swallow him. He thought of getting off this damned horse, finding a hole within the rubble, laying down, and just letting it eat at his soul until there was nothing left. But he had a feeling the four men riding behind him would pull him out, set him back on the horse, and force him to keep going. There was nothing left but to stew in his own hate.
“Friends.” Bale grinned and patted his axe.
Hugh glanced up. An emaciated figure crouched on top of the wall of the rubble canyon on the far left. Thin, a skeleton corded with muscle, the creature hunkered down on all fours as if it had never walked upright, its hairless hide turned to a sickly bluish gray by undeath. It was too far to see much of its face, but Hugh saw the eyes, red and glowing with all-consuming hunger. No thoughts, no awareness, nothing except bloodlust, wrapped in magic that turned his stomach. A vampire.
Not a loose one. Loose bloodsuckers slaughtered everything with a pulse, feeding until nothing alive remained. No, this one was piloted by a navigator. Somewhere, within the secure rooms of Landon Nez’s base, a necromancer sat, probably sipping his morning coffee, telepathically gripping the blank slate that was the undead’s mind. When the vampire moved, it was because the navigator willed it. When it spoke, the navigator’s voice would come out of its mouth. He never liked the breed, the undead and the navigators both.
“A welcoming committee,” Stoyan said.
“Nice to be recognized,” Lamar quipped.
“Have you found a base?” Hugh asked.
“I found several,” Lamar said. “None that would have us.”
“What’s the problem?” Bale demanded.
“We are the problem,” Lamar said. “We have baggage in addition to a rich and varied history.”
“What are you on about?” Bale asked.
“He means we’ve double-crossed people before,” Stoyan told him. “Nobody wants Nez as an enemy, and nobody wants to take a chance on us stabbing them in the back.”