The Cage King (9 page)

And he
missed
it, maybe more than anything else, because it was the best part of her and showed who she was – smart and sentimental and willing to let their reality go and keep searching for something better, never settling for crap and saying there was no other choice. More than anything, she was what had kept him going those early days. He never wanted her to lose this part of herself, would protect it with whatever he had in him.

“At least I made some new friends first. Tiffany and I are now besties,” Nalah said, not looking up from the book, but bringing her hand up, her first and middle finger twining together.

Gods, this fondness, it bubbled up inside and damned if he could stop the smile overcoming his face. “C’mon. We’re going walking. Beylor ain’t going to say shit if you’re with me.”

The bookmark went in and the book went down, the movement quick but protective. “Yay! I almost feel like we’re out of the Middle Ages.”

With a quick, “Stow it, smartass,” he ushered her out of the building and in short work they were walking around, her hand engulfed in his, the low-level warmth bubbling within him as they walked and talked like they had before she left.

They weren’t the only ones out, and Esh let Nalah take the lead so she could get whatever she needed. She studied everyone and everything, but there was never any look of real interest on her, nothing to say she felt anything more than he did. For that, he was grateful. They had enough dealing with this item she had to collect. He didn’t need any other headaches.

“Have you met Rorth?” Her voice was quiet, careful not to carry.

“Yeah, this morning. Did you get something from him?”

She shook her head, which was what he’d figured. He’d never heard of an orc being anything magical. “Not like that. We spoke for a minute though.”

“And?” Nalah wouldn’t have brought him up if there wasn’t something.

“Does he seem like he belongs in the Cage?”

Course she would pick up on that. Nalah was as connected to the fights as he was, even if she hadn’t ever stepped into the ring. “No, but damned if he’s not a fighter. He’s one of the few who’d made me take notice.”

“I got that, but that doesn’t translate to participating in the Tour. The timing is suspicious.”

He didn’t get that from the orc. Yeah, she was right, there was something more that had him here, but Esh wasn’t worried about other fighter. But what she was saying did bring up a question. “How many know about Beylor having this item?”

“I don’t know. It’s a recent development, but it wasn’t exactly a secret transaction.”

Esh swallowed hard against the spew of curses rising up. Why did the Guild send her in here without information? This was supposed to be some all-important magic, but the person trying to find it was flying blind. “The Guild ain’t impressing me much.”

“I met my contact.” Nalah’s voice was so low it was barely above lip-reading, but he caught it.

With a quick look around to verify where everyone was, he pulled her to the side of a building and pushed her against the wall, bending low so her face was inches from his. “Tell me.”

“A guard. I don’t know what he looks like, and we only had a moment.”

“When do you meet again?”

“We didn’t have enough time to decide on one.”

“So not impressed with the Guild.” Even he heard the pissed-off growl in his voice.

But Nalah laughed, her eyes clear and easy in a way they hadn’t been since before. “Contrary to rumor, they don’t know everything. Well, maybe Tec does, but he’s too busy with online gaming in his off time to tell them.”

“Who’s Tec?” Pissed off
and
jealous. Great combination.

“Not my boyfriend,” she said, which was the most important information to him after all, and her smile said she knew it.

Hmmm. Wasn’t this a cozy spot to explore that smile, somewhere she couldn’t get away easily unless she wanted to make a scene.

Her eyes widened and her body shifted for flight, but he bracketed her head with his forearms. “Not fair, Esh.”

“So?” he said as his mouth lowered. “Think of it as keeping up appearances.”

He brushed his mouth over hers, playful and light, and she began to relax, pushed herself up on tiptoe to meet him.

It became a game, one of them pushing into the kiss, trying to deepen it while the other held off, then a sudden switch, the roles reversed. No matter which, Nalah’s smile held, her lips satiny smooth against his.

And then she froze, her mouth hardening, and her head whipped to the side so fast a few braids flicked against his chin.

Following her gaze, he saw the albino fighter. He hadn’t met the man earlier. While the other fighters played at introductions and good wishes, the albino had been there only long enough to see the competition, then had gone to the forest.

Rorth was one of the fighters Esh was keeping his eye on. This guy was another. “Did he speak to you today during your travels, like Rorth?”

His gaze never left the albino, but he saw the quick shake of her head from the corner of his eye. “Worse.”

The pale fighter’s stare never wavered from them, and under his hands Nalah began to tremble. Inside him, something kicked, fought free to take on this thing, this being who didn’t feel right, even without anything in him like Nalah had.

She pulled on his arm, and he looked down to find Nalah staring up at him. She blinked, her eyes going from fearful and confused to determined. “We need to get back to the apartment. Please. You can’t fight him here. They’ll kick us out of the Tour.”

Yeah, he had to get away. Her hand tugged on his, and without further comment Nalah led them back, quicker on the return trip than they’d been going out.

The door had only shut behind them when he said, “What did you feel? There’s something magic with him.”

Nalah was pulling herself back together. “I don’t know if it’s from him, but there’s dark magic connected to him, strong enough that even here I feel it full blast.”

“But magic doesn’t work here.”

“
Most
magic,” she corrected, pressing the heel of her left hand against her forehead.

With that gesture, he went to a cabinet, grabbed medicine, and gave it to her with some water. Her startled expression morphed into thankfulness, and she downed the offering. “It’s strong enough that it’s giving you a headache?”

“Yeah, pretty much.”

“Do you recognize it?”

“No. It’s evil. It’s connected to death, but I’ve never felt anything like it, not from any necromancer or vampire I’ve ever come in contact with.”

Esh swallowed hard, the casual sentence confirming every fear he’d had since that first night when the name of the Guild had been brought up. “You’ve been near necromancers?”

The pause of her body told that she realized what she revealed, but she went on the offensive. “You had to know. I’m Guild. At least for me it was only in contained situations. I was never in any danger.”

Contained? Being near things that used torture and death like foreplay before they did so much worse, and now Nalah and he might be facing that here? “Yeah, well this situation sure as fuck ain’t contained, and you’re telling me something here’s so strong it’s messing with you inside a place that’s supposed to stop magic? This stops now. We’re gone.”

Her long fingers curled around his forearm as he started past her to pack their belongings. “That won’t happen, and the days of you telling me what I will and won’t do never existed, so don’t think they start now. This is what I have to do.”

Underneath her pissed-off attitude existed something else. It was there in the shaky way she held herself, in the pleading mixed with the attitude. She was desperate to remain. “Why do you have to stay? We get out, you tell the Guild everything you know to this point, maybe it’s enough they can get other people in action. They got a thief here already.”

“And he needs me.”

Her attitude was pure stubbornness, something she always had in abundance. “What’s going on? What are you hiding from me? And don’t lie or I swear I will go to Beylor now and drop out.”

With those words, her body half crumpled on itself as she sagged forward, her hands reaching out to steady herself on the kitchen table. “What Beylor has…it’s my mom’s ring.”

She couldn’t mean…? “What?”

“The one with the red stone. I always wore it on the chain around my neck.” She swallowed, looked very obviously
not
at him. “The one I wanted to have as my wedding ring when I got married. That’s what Beylor has.”

“You’re telling me your ring is some big-time magical item? What does it do?”

“I don’t know,” she said, and as he was about to lash out, she looked up and held out her hands in a pleading gesture. She drew a deep breath, went into what he always dubbed ‘story mode’. “I never got a chance to tell you, but the ring got stolen by that pawnbroker on Third right before Jac died. When I went to get the ring back I met the Guild. They were there for the ring, and they were the ones who told me it was magic. Said if I wanted it back I had to train with them. What it does is still a mystery to me. I haven’t gotten strong enough to break through its magic.”

“Doesn’t make sense they’d send you after it without telling you about it. And that still doesn’t explain what Beylor’s doing with it.”

Her fingers wiggled, like she wanted something she could write with to illustrate her point. “The biggest protection for any magical item is no one knowing what it does. Because the possibilities are near infinite, people can spend years on even a medium-level item trying to find out what magic it contains. But once you know what an item does, it’s only a matter of time before you control the item. The Guild can’t take the risk of that information getting out, so since I don’t know already, they aren’t going to enlighten me. As for Beylor-” She broke off, looked him straight in the eye, serious and strong and with nothing of the little girl in her he always strove to protect. “If I answer that question, this has to remain between us.”

“You have my word.”

A nod to acknowledge him, and pleasure buried itself in his bones with that quick acceptance. Even with everything that lay between them, she still took him at his word. “Not long ago, Guild headquarters was attacked. When that happened, beyond killing a lot of people, the attackers broke into a vault that held the most powerful magical items in the Realms and stole a good number of them. The Guild counterattacked not long after and got some back, but you can imagine in that chaos how many items were bundled off by different lowlifes. They were able to track my mother’s ring to Beylor.”

“And that magic tonight? It’s after the ring?”

“I think it’s a very likely possibility. Whatever is out there is strong, and by definition anything in that vault is going to interest powerful people. Besides, what else could they be here for?”

“If they’re that sick, it might be they want to watch the Tour and let albino boy tear through the fighters.”

The odds of that were pretty low, but Nalah went slack-faced at his words. “What do you mean? As in killing them? Beylor wouldn’t allow that. They’d be disqualified.”

Esh had kept her from the worst parts of the fighting world, but she couldn’t be that naïve to not realize that was a possibility. “You’re kidding. Half the people here are for the bloodshed.”

“No, I thought…it’s about prestige, the best of the best fighting. I was never told…” Her eyes were wide and horrified. She collapsed into the chair, wiping her hand over her mouth, her brow furrowed as she absorbed the words. “I would never have asked you to come if I’d realized.”

“Like I have anything to fear.” But Nalah didn’t move, the vague horror of her expression not changing. “Seriously didn’t know?”

“Of course I
didn’t
.” Vague horror turned to indignation. “I don’t lie.”

“No, you run.”

Fuck if he meant to say those words, but now they were out and he was glad, meant or not.

She shot him a filthy glare, jerking up from the seat. “I don’t want to talk about that. We have other things going on now.”

“Convenient. I thought you were all about the
closure
.” The words were tumbling forth, unstoppable. “It’s only closure when you get to tell me how fucked up I did, right? Not going to hear my side?”

Nalah smiled, her mouth sharp-edged and ready to tear through him. “What is it you’re going to tell me? You’re upset he died? I
fucking know
that. He was your best friend. Didn’t stop you from turning him away when he needed help.”

“You got
no clue
what I went through, because I kept everything away from you so you wouldn’t worry or see what an ass he was.” Memories bombarded, the love and hate for Jac that were so mixed up in him, those last few months, when his soul brother kept fucking up and he kept trying to stop it. “Do you know how many hours I worked with him to make him better? How many times I stepped in when he couldn’t work a fight? How many fucking times I
begged
him to
never
get involved with those assholes?”

“Then why didn’t you do it one last time?”

She just never fucking gave up. “Because if I stepped in it would have put you in danger, and as much as I loved him, there’s nothing in this world that would ever make me sacrifice you.”

“
Me
in danger?” Her lip rose, nose wrinkling as if the statement was so dumbass, she had no idea how to process it.

More than anything, it was that look that pissed him off. That look that said she had no clue his actions were from anything except pure selfishness. “Fuck
yeah,
you in danger! What do you think would have happened if I’d bailed Jac out? They would have known it wasn’t because of Jac – I’d already said I wasn’t covering any more of his losses. They would have looked to his pretty little sister and wondered why I’m suddenly helping Jac out of a fucking mess and why I’m never with any other woman but her, and they would have pieced it together. And if they’d pieced it together, known I’d helped him to protect you? Your life would have been
forfeit
. You wouldn’t know peace again.”