“I guess we go to shore,” Dante said, gazing out over the distance. I felt him cast his senses outward, and in response, loosened my own senses as well.
“No sign of our pursuers,” I murmured. “I think they stopped following us a long time ago.” If they had even bothered to.
Dante didn’t say anything as I slipped into the water and guided the raft with strong kicks toward shore.
“Just let me do it,” I said in protest when he eased himself into the water. “You’re still healing up.”
He ignored me. “Don’t pull the raft ashore. Let it float down and go over the drop. We’ll follow along the bank.”
“I don’t think it’ll survive intact. It sounds like a pretty big drop, and I spent a lot of time and effort making this raft,” I said, frowning. “Maybe I can carry it down.”
“No, I’d rather you had your hands free. I’ll help you gather up the logs again if they separate.”
It turned out he didn’t need to. The moment we were onshore, a net came flying over us. Silver, I realized, at Dante’s sharp hiss of pain, but it had no effect on me—no pain, no lessening of strength. I tore it apart easily and flung it off us.
Familiar undulating war cries shrilled the air, two close by that we somehow hadn’t sensed. The eerie chant was taken up more distantly by the rest of our pursuers.
Before we could spring away, another silvery net came down over us, entangling our limbs. I started to rip that away also and felt a stinging prick on my arm.
I yanked a dart out. Silver. But with something else as well. Drugged or poisoned, I had a moment to realize as my limbs grew unbearably heavy. Then darkness muffled me and swept me under.
THIRTEEN
WHEN I CAME to, it was not with a simple and easy drift-to-wake consciousness. No, it was much cruder than that. Pain first, a rough shaking of shoulder, then even rougher slaps across my face. Two voices yelling, angry. One of them was familiar—someone I knew, if only I could wake up. Then a cold, wet splash of water—a bowlful dumped across my face, I saw as I blinked the heavy lids of my eyes open. A dark, frightening face, painted black and brown, with a red eye drawn crudely on the forehead, looked down on me.
Ah, yes. It was all coming back to me: silver nets, a drugging dart, capture by these heathenish Monère. My impression of the race so far wasn’t that great. First a drug lord. Then what I had thought were bandits. Now this half-naked primitive bunch.
I turned my head and saw a familiar face belonging to the familiar voice. Dante. My poor comrade-in-arms. Me, I just hit my head and spilled out some memories, and, oh yeah, turned into a vulture. He was, however, by far getting the worst of things. Atop of his old injuries, now his right eye was swollen shut, with new bruises adorning his chest and arms in garish disarray. Couldn’t tell if his poor legs had been rebroken or not because he was lashed to a pole, arms and legs tied. His single unswollen eye glittered like a hard, pale diamond.
For all that he was bound, he looked more scary than scared.
At a woman’s command, I was pulled to my feet and secured to a similar pole, my wrists bound together with silver ties similar to the material used in the nets that had captured us. My arms were lifted up, tied, and my legs bound in likewise manner below. I was helpless to stop them—my limbs felt leaden and my wits just as heavy and slow. What the hell had they drugged me with?
A woman sauntered into view. The woman who had given the command, no doubt. She had black lustrous hair. True black, not the shade mine had been before, a brown so dark that some had mistakenly called it black before a talented stylist had skillfully lightened the color.
She had threads of gray streaking through the black strands—odd to see against an unlined face. Without those betraying gray hairs marking her age, she could otherwise have passed for thirty. How old was she now, midforties maybe?
She was lighter skinned than her men. Would have been the fairest one here but for myself. Even with my newly acquired tan, my skin was almost white compared to the brown pigment clearly marking her Latino ancestry. There was a curved roundness to the pretty features of her face and a softness to her small and shapely build, all but the eyes. Her eyes, the color of dark soot, fringed with long, fanning lashes, were hard and frightening, with not a smudge of softness in them.
“You have caused my men much trouble,” she said in lightly accented English. Her voice, like her eyes, was hard and authoritative. It was a bit disorienting. Like hearing a soldier’s voice coming out of a pretty doll’s mouth. Did she command all these hundred-odd poorly clad people surrounding us? Most of them were men, less than a handful were women, and even fewer, children. She seemed way overdressed standing next to her people in the long black gown she wore.
“Sorry,” I replied. “Wasn’t my intention. We weren’t trying to bother them. Quite the opposite.”
She assessed me coolly. “They said you broke our silver nets as easily as ripping through paper.”
“I’ll be happy to repay you their cost,” I offered.
She sneered. Not the answer she was looking for apparently. “And yet you are held by them now.”
Because you drugged me! I wanted to say, but kept my mouth shut. No need to give the enemy any more knowledge or advantage than they already held. But it seemed they had already figured out the reason for my weakness.
“Our venom affects you oddly,” she said in chill observation.
“Venom?”
“Viper venom.” She gave me a most unpleasant smile. “It kills humans but acts only as a brief sedative to those of our kind. It affected you more than him.” By him, I assume she meant Dante. Had he been knocked out by it also?
“You have the faint smell of human in your blood, and yet you feel as powerful as a Full Blood Monère.”
I didn’t respond. She hadn’t asked a question, after all.
Her voice suddenly dropped down into an ugly snarl. “What are you doing here, another Queen in my territory?”
Her territory? Had that leisurely drift down the river brought us closer to danger instead of taking us farther away from it? And here was that Queen stuff again. If it was confusing to me before, it was even more so now with a thick head and dulled wits. I bypassed it and stuck with what I knew. “We were running away from your men. They were the ones who drove us here; it was not our intent to trespass. We will be happy to depart as soon as you release us.”
Her cold smile told me it would not be that easy. “Of even more interest, what are you doing in his company, this Queen killer?”
Huh? “What Queen killer?”
“Him!” Her finger speared at Dante.
“Dante? He’s not a Queen killer.” Was he?
“Dante . . . is that what he calls himself now?” An alarming mixture of hatred and vicious satisfaction glittered her obsidian dark eyes. “He is the most legendary Queen killer in our history. And not just merely for the death of my mother.”
I swallowed sickly. Oh, crap.
“She deserved killing,” Dante said clearly, heard by all. “I spared your life, an innocent child, but that seems to have been a mistake.”
A child, I thought in confusion? How old had Dante been when he had killed her mother? Five? Had he lied to me about his age, or was this angry Queen younger than she looked?
She whirled to face him like a rabid badger. Small and mean—something that could tear your limbs off. “So you admit it,” she growled.
“Yes. I am who you seek.”
Triumph and an almost sick ecstasy filled her face, as though she had just gotten the confession she had expected to take hours to beat out of him. She sucked in a harsh breath in delight. “Queen killer. I have waited a lifetime to meet you again.”