He stopped. “Robert, what is keeping you? I cannot finish until you and the hostage are within the circle.”
“I’m coming.” A moment later he appeared. He carried a large duffel in one hand. With the other he guided Adam King.
Lily knew from the file that Adam King was Caucasian, forty-eight, five-ten, and one sixty. She knew his features were even, save for a crooked nose that had been broken twenty years ago. What the file hadn’t told her was how inviting his face was. King had one of those lived-in faces, the kind that says its owner has spent plenty of time laughing or crying, singing and shouting. The kind with friendly creases. His hair was dark and cropped very short. His eyes were brown and dazed. He looked around as the two of them moved into the broad aisle between the packing crates…and stopped.
“This is what kept me,” Friar said, exasperated. “The charm keeps him docile, but he loses track of what he’s doing. Come on, Adam.”
“You can’t be rough with him,” Benessarai warned. “It disrupts the charm.”
“Yes,” Friar said with heavy patience. “I know.”
A dead woman touched Lily’s hand.
Lily jerked. She couldn’t help it. The dead hand did something, and her restraints, the thrice-damned restraints, fell silently away. Lily’s arms trembled as her own muscles took over the job of holding her hands behind her back.
The dead woman placed a knife in Lily’s right hand.
Friar got Adam moving again.
“Well,” Lily said loudly, “it looks like it’s now or never.”
A burning man fell from the ceiling.
Flames covered him completely. He fell headfirst, like a diver, but flipped in midair as if determined that his corpse would land on its feet.
Lily thrust to her feet as her elf guard reached for her. She slashed with the dead woman’s knife—not trying for a specific target, just forcing the elf back, but she connected anyway. An arm, nothing fatal, but at least she hadn’t gotten her knife stuck, and the elf backed off. Lily spun toward Benessarai—who shouted something.
The lights went out.
Lily sprang at him.
Benessarai was many things, most of them repellent. He was heavier, taller, and stronger than her, but he was not a fighter, and his mind tricks did not work on her. Lily felt the knife connect, but in the darkness she didn’t know what she’d struck. Benessarai squealed in rage or fear and grabbed her, yanking her to him in a bear hug. “I’ve got her!” he shouted. “I’ve got Lily Yu! Stop or I’ll kill her!”
Lily’s arms were imprisoned. So she used her head.
The cranium near the hairline is one of the thickest regions of bone on the skull. Lily couldn’t reach some of the best targets for a headbutt—he was too tall—so she smashed the top of her forehead into his chin. As she connected, she hooked his ankle with her foot and pulled.
He toppled. She came down on top of him, cracking her left elbow on the floor but keeping a tight grip on the knife in her right hand. Mage lights popped up all over the place, and she saw Benessarai’s slack face—stunned, she thought, not out, so she pressed the tip of her borrowed knife to the spot right under his chin where a hard thrust would take it up to his brain. Then took the chance of glancing behind her for the guard elf.
Who was several feet away, fighting a wolf.
People were falling from the roof. Leaping down and falling.
One of them was Rule. Her heart exulted even as she turned back to her prisoner.
It would be easy, so easy, to end him here and now. More fitting to do it through the eye the way he’d made Dinalaran kill himself, but she wasn’t going to pass up easy to go for poetic.
“Don’t! Lily, don’t do it!”
It was Drummond. And he was a mess.
He crouched in front of her. One arm hung down. It probably didn’t work right because a big chunk of his bicep was missing. Just gone. He crouched on both knees, but she only saw one foot. The other leg ended cleanly about midcalf. His shirt hung open. Skin and muscle were missing from his middle. She could see one of his ribs, the pale curve of it, and the round pillow of his stomach, and the segmented worms of his intestines. Which were also a mess, ripped and ragged.
No blood. Somehow that made it worse. He’d been ripped apart, but he couldn’t bleed.
“You’ve got a choice,” Drummond said urgently. “You don’t have to do it.”
“What happened to you?” she whispered.
He glanced down at his ravaged middle. His mouth crooked up. “I got there, got to Turner, but it was not a smooth trip. I guess I’m finally dying. So listen up. That scumbag deserves to die, but you don’t deserve to live with what that will do to you. You don’t deserve to end up like me.”
His arm was fading. The one hanging down, the one with a chunk missing—it was dimming, going away. She swallowed. “I—”
He leaned closer, scowling. “Promise me. Promise me you won’t kill him. Not like this.”
She looked him in the eye and nodded slightly. “Okay. I promise.”
He exhaled in relief. “Good choice. You’re a good cop, and we don’t have enough—” Suddenly his head tilted. He looked up and to his right. His mouth fell open. She could swear tears filled his eyes—and joy. He reached up, his face lit with happiness as real as anything she’d ever seen. He reached up with his remaining hand, the wedding band on the third finger glowing softly.
“Sarah,” he said. And the rest of him faded away.
Lily felt shaky and weird inside. Kind of hollowed out. Then the body beneath her tensed, and she was called back to reality. This reality. Benessarai was looking up at her. She sighed and pressed the knife into his skin slightly to make him pay attention. “So what the hell do I do with you?”
“I can help with that,” Cullen said. He limped over, wincing with every step. He was missing half his hair, and he looked like he had a bad sunburn.
“Cullen! That was you falling? You didn’t—”
“Didn’t burn. Much. I couldn’t get the last damn ward down, but it was a fire ward, and I’m good with fire, so I took it down by leaping through it. Landed badly, though—my ankle’s got a hairline fracture, I think. It took a lot of concentration to keep the flames from burning me until I could snuff them.” He sank down carefully to sit by Benessarai’s head. “Good thing this asshole doesn’t know about mage fire, or I’d be really crispy. Nighty-night,” he said, and slapped his palm onto the elf’s forehead.
Benessarai went limp, his eyes closing.
“Sleep charm,” Cullen added. “Don’t know how long it will work on his sort. You okay?”
“Not…long,” a breathy voice said on Lily’s right.
Lily turned to see the not-so-dead Alycithin smiling faintly at her. She scooted close. “What can we do? How do we help you?”
“Aroglian…will help. Give him…ring and word. Thelaisat.” She closed her eyes as if gathering herself. “I bequeath to you, Lily Yu, my…rights and responsibilities for…Sean Friar, hostage. You…accept?”
“I do.”
“Say…the word.”
“Thelaisat,” Lily repeated. Alycithin’s wince might have been at Lily’s mangling of her language, or simple pain. “That one…” The halfling’s gaze shifted to indicate Benessarai. “Best if…you kill.”
“I can’t. I gave my word.”
The slightly lifted brows expressed incredulity. Alycithin didn’t ask who Lily had promised, though. Instead she said, “Duct tape.”