Bewitched & Betrayed (44 page)

Feed the Saghred. Sacrifice lives, imprison souls.

I didn’t want to die or watch the people I cared for die. But I would not take the lives of others, the lives of innocents, to keep them safe. I would rather die first.

Mychael and Tam would rather die first.

No deal, goblin.

“Let me guess,” I said. “All this and more is mine if I agree to be your puppet.”

“Not a puppet; a partner. With the power we will wield, we could defeat Death itself.”

“Your partner in death and destruction.”

I heard the smile in his voice. “Only if certain governments are willful and do not wish to negotiate.”

“You mean unless they submit to you.”

“To us.” He turned the words into a caress.

“Partners have to want the same thing.” I’d made my decision; now all I had to do was live through the consequences. I knew they weren’t going to be pretty. “The only thing I want you to do is go to hell.”

“You reject my offer,” Nukpana said quietly. “You cannot say that I did not give you a compassionate way out. Carnades Silvanus is in the citadel now, is he not, Mychael?”

“Carnades hates Tam’s guts,” I said. “What makes you think he’ll let you within a hundred yards of him?”

“I thought I would invite you to assist me.”

“When Hell grows icicles.”

His voice mimicked the same words at the same instant that I said them. I had no idea what that implied, but it couldn’t be good.

“No, Raine. I don’t believe you will like assisting me at all; in fact, it may be rather painful for someone very close to you. My apologies in advance.”

Vegard screamed.

Sarad Nukpana extended his hand in the air before him, his fingers slowly tightening and twisting, never taking his black eyes from my face.

Vegard clutched his chest and fell to his knees in the street, his screams catching in his throat, each rattling breath an agony.

I heard another scream, raw-throated with rage. It was me. I snapped the crossbow up to my shoulder to fire.

“I have your guard dog’s life in my hands,” Nukpana said softly. “I could kill him now; crush his heart as easily as ripe fruit.” Softness twisted into a snarl. “Mychael, take one more step and I will squeeze his heart to a pulp and toss his body into the gutter beside my uncle. Tell your men to stay back.” His fist tightened and Vegard screamed again. “If they move, my hand moves—and your man dies.” There was a hesitation and the sound of retreating men from behind me. “Very good, Mychael,” Nukpana murmured. “You’re learning. I was beginning to believe it wasn’t possible. Now have them move back even farther. This is between the three of us; no one else needs to be involved.”

Tam?

I kept my eyes on Nukpana, and tried to keep my breathing steady. I didn’t know how Tam could talk to me in my mind when Nukpana couldn’t, but now wasn’t the time to ask questions.

Tam’s contact was a featherlight touch on the edge of my consciousness, so quiet it barely registered.
“Raine. Listen to me . . . I need your help.”

Tam didn’t answer me with words, but with a sensation—the smooth wooden stock of the crossbow in my hands.

Loaded, aimed, and ready to shoot. All I had to do was pull the trigger.

Tam was telling me to kill him.

No. No way in hell or anywhere else.

Sarad Nukpana’s phantom hand still held Vegard’s heart, and I dimly heard the goblin talking to Mychael. “Five levels down, third containment room on the left, buried in a spellbound lead casket in the right corner of the room. Is that not correct?”

Mychael didn’t answer him; he didn’t need to. Nukpana was right and he knew it.

“The spellbound iron casket is to keep anyone from finding it and a feeble attempt to contain it,” Nukpana continued. “Cold iron to contain magic. Primitive. Your spellweavers truly are desperate.”

Mychael’s body was glowing almost as brightly as his hands. “You’re not getting anywhere near the citadel.”

“Oh, but I am. Raine won’t stand by and watch me kill her guard dog. She’s become attached to it. Put down the bow, Raine. Come to me and he lives. Refuse me, and well . . .” Nukpana viciously twisted his hand, and Vegard collapsed onto the street, his boots moving weakly against the cobblestones.

“Stop it!” I screamed.

“Lower the crossbow, Raine.”

I hesitated and then did what he said. Nukpana unclenched his fist, and Vegard groaned, his breathing ragged, dragging air into his tortured lungs.

“I kept my end of the bargain, little seeker.”

“Raine, no!” Mychael’s voice rolled over me in a wave of sound; the intensity almost pulling me under. It was his spellsinger voice. He’d force me to stay put if he had to.

“I don’t need to dig up the Saghred or open the box,” Nukpana said. “I can simply wipe the citadel from the face of the earth with the Saghred’s strength and my will.” His black eyes glittered. “The stone wants out; it will do everything I ask if I promise to set it free.”

But he’d have to kill me first.

Tam spoke, low and urgent.
“Raine, lower Nukpana’s shields . . . The three of us . . . you, me, and Mychael . . . together we can do it.”

And a crossbow bolt through Tam’s heart would force Sarad Nukpana to flee Tam’s body or die along with him.

The rest of Tam’s plan came to me in a flash of thought.

It was a plan with a lot of ifs with entirely too much at stake and no guarantee that any of it would work or even be possible. But if Sarad Nukpana controlled the Saghred, Tam would be a prisoner inside his own body with Nukpana in complete control—and to the thousands or even millions that Sarad Nukpana would go on to conquer, enslave, kill, or sacrifice to the Saghred, it would be Tamnais Nathrach who would be held responsible, reviled, and hunted.

And Tam would be helpless to stop any of it.

This wasn’t my decision to make; it was Tam’s. He’d made it and I owed it to him to do everything in my power to help him.

I tightened my grip on the crossbow until the wood creaked under my white-knuckled hands.

One chance, one shot, no mistakes.

Suddenly Mychael was standing next to me, his body touching mine. Our magic quickly flowed back and forth between us, merging, strengthening, communicating—lightning quick, whisper quiet.

I wasn’t the only one Tam had been talking to.

Nukpana/Tam laughed and extended his hand to me. “The fair lady is no longer yours, Mychael. I released her guard dog; now she will surrender to me or I will finish what I started.”

To Sarad Nukpana, we were little things to be toyed with, tormented, and crushed at his leisure.

I had news for the son of a bitch—little things mattered.

And when you were working yourself up to destroy a fortress and thought you were an indestructible demigod, shields became a little thing.

Mychael’s hand in mine connected him directly to me, and our umi’atsu bond with Tam completed our circle. Sarad Nukpana might have been inside of Tam, but it was Tam’s body, Tam’s muscles.

And Tam’s will. Combined with Mychael’s strength and my connection to the two of them, we had access to Sarad Nukpana’s shields from the inside and out.

I wanted to yank the bastard’s shields down around his ankles, but Mychael and Tam had a better method that was just as quick as mine. When those shields failed, I would have a split second, probably less, to put that slender bolt through Tam’s heart. I couldn’t hesitate; I sure as hell couldn’t miss.

I didn’t want to pull that trigger; I didn’t want to kill Tam. His words from a few days ago came to me and my vision blurred with tears:
If you hesitate, you’re worse than dead and you know it
—finish him.
No hesitation, no mercy.

Mychael held his own crossbow low but at the ready. He knew what I was thinking, what I felt.

I clenched my jaw against any more tears. My eyes had to be clear for this.

“Mine,”
I told Mychael.

Mychael didn’t take his eyes off of his target, but his quiet response came in my mind.
“Do it.”

“Am I to believe you would shoot down your precious Tamnais in cold blood?” Nukpana/Tam spoke in a perverse mixture of voices: Nukpana, Muralin, and some others that I didn’t recognize.

Tam wasn’t one of them.

“No, I’m going to kill you and what’s left of Rudra Muralin.”

As quick as thought, the bottom dropped out of Mychael’s magic and it felt like the street was being sucked downward into a vortex of power and dragging us with it. Mychael’s hand tightened around my waist and I let him draw on my magic. We weren’t at the center of the vortex; our shields weren’t being drained from beneath our feet.

Sarad Nukpana’s were.

His shields buckled and failed, and Nukpana/Tam’s face blanched in sudden realization and panic. Sarad Nukpana couldn’t move at all. A smile—Tam’s smile—slowly curled his lips at the corners.

“You didn’t mean for that to happen, did you?” Mychael asked Nukpana. “Who’s the prisoner now?”

In a single blink, the solid black orbs became Tam’s eyes, not Sarad Nukpana’s.

His eyes were on mine, beseeching. “Now, Raine. Kill me.
Please
.”

I snapped the crossbow up to my shoulder.
“Forgive me.”

My thought carried to Tam—and to Sarad Nukpana.

“Now!”
came Tam’s shout in my mind.

I squeezed the trigger and the bolt flew. And so did Sarad Nukpana, abandoning Tam’s body the instant after impact. He knew Tam would be dead before he hit the street.

I felt Tam die.

My breath froze in my throat. Our umi’atsu bond pulled at me, stretching the distance between us, between life and death, becoming thinner and thinner until it snapped. The psychic recoil was like a monstrous whiplash across my entire body.

“Shields up!” Mychael shouted to his men, and pulled me to him, surrounding me with a protective, white nimbus.

A scream like a hundred banshees, a roar of fury and disbelief, shook the very air around us. A dark mist circled us, a bodiless specter. Then it suddenly vanished.

It wasn’t gone. Sarad Nukpana definitely wasn’t gone. The bastard wasn’t going to give up his prize that easily. He was a specter; he knew how to hide.

Mychael clutched my hand in his, keeping his shields around us both, and ran for Tam’s body now lying motionless in the street, my bolt protruding from his chest.

“Vidor!” Mychael shouted.

The nachtmagus was there a moment later, one hand on Tam’s chest, the other on his forehead.

One of Mychael’s officers took command, shouting orders, and we were surrounded by fully shielded Guardians, their backs turned toward us, standing shoulder-to-shoulder, their weapons glowing with battle magic, ready and waiting to be unleashed.

No one could see between or around them. No one could see what we were doing.

Tam was dead.

If the plan worked, he wouldn’t be that way for long.

Mychael was keeping the blood in Tam’s body, using his healer’s magic to stop the bleeding, begin to repair the damage. He couldn’t do it instantly, far from it. It would take hours, days—if it could even be done at all. Mychael was the best, but he could only do so much. He snapped rapid-fire orders: a cloak or blanket, a stretcher, a room nearby with a bed, and most of all, more healers. And all of it now.

Vidor Kalta was keeping Tam’s soul in his body while Mychael worked.

I had another soul to attend to.

Sarad Nukpana was still here. He had to find another host body or he would lose everything he’d tortured and murdered for. If he found another body, we would be going through this all over again.

“Raine!” came a bellow from outside the wall of armored bodies.

It was Vegard. Dear God, the man was on his feet. The Guardians wisely made a hole for my bodyguard.

I ran to him. “Vegard, you shouldn’t be—”

“Up? Walking? Alive?”

“Yes.”

I ducked my head under Vegard’s left arm, grabbed his wrist, and pulled his arm around my shoulders, my right arm tight around his waist. I knew I was nothing more than a crutch; if the big Guardian fell, we were both going down. I pushed our way through the protective circle of Guardians. I didn’t want Mychael to hear or know what I was about to do. Yes, we were bonded, but hopefully he was too busy to notice me right now.

Vegard’s breath hissed in and out through his teeth. “Damn, it hurts. Ever been hit in the chest . . . with a war hammer?”

“Can’t say I have.”

He groaned and sucked in a halfway decent breath. “This is . . . what it feels like.”

“Vegard, more healers are on the way. You should—”

“Find that goblin son of a bitch,” he rasped.

My eyes stung with tears of gratitude. If I’d been tall enough, I’d have kissed him.

“Nukpana’s still here. I can’t see or sense him, but the bastard’s here.” I felt Vegard sway, and tightened my grip. “I can do this by my—”

“No!” Vegard’s eyes were blazing. “His ass is mine.”

I tried to swallow, but my mouth was bone-dry. “If he runs, he loses everything. He needs another host body.” I looked back toward Tam’s motionless body and bit back a sob. “We’re not going through this shit again,” I snarled.

Vegard smiled, fierce and wolfish. “Damn straight we’re not.”

“I promised that you’d be at my side when the big trouble finally caught up to me.”

“Yes, ma’am, you did.” I knew that whatever I asked, he would do without hesitation.

“I know a way to find Nukpana and take the bastard out once and for all—”

Vegard knew what I meant. “Reapers.”

I nodded. “But they might want me worse than they want him. I don’t know if there’s anything I can do to stop them if they do—”