Huntress

“Alongside magic? Consumed by it?”

Samuel closed his eyes. “Not all of us prey on humans.”

Maggie curled up tight around herself. She had hid under her covers from monsters, as a child. Monsters in her dreams. Monsters she could see while awake, inside her head. She remembered now. She had made herself forget that, too. Whatever else might be inside her head, she understood why forgetting was better. Life was hard enough without searching shadows for the unreal. There had been enough death.

Home, she thought, aching. She could have been home, in her own bed, among the safe and familiar. Ignorant. Blissfully so. Content to live and die in Olo as nothing but a fixer, a salvager, a toy-maker. A dreamer, watching the changing seasons through the great doors of her barn.

For one brief second Maggie wanted that again so badly, she wished she had never seen those shark teeth hanging around Ekir’s neck. Never laid eyes on the necklace at all. She wouldn’t have known Trace was in trouble.

She would not be in trouble.

Coward, Maggie told herself, ashamed.

Strong fingers wiped her cheeks, which were wet with tears. Samuel whispered, “I should have told you everything.”

Maggie rubbed her nose. “Why didn’t you?”

“It was ugly,” he said simply. “And I wanted to spare you that. Even if it was reckless of me.”

“You were scared to show me your face.”

He hesitated. “You are not looking at me now.”

It was true, she realized. While lying so close, she had stared at his chest, his throat, past his ear—but not at his face, or his eyes. She did not know why. And yet, when she began to raise her gaze to his, fear gripped her.

“Let me meet you halfway,” he whispered, and scooted lower, his muscles flexing in the shadows, until there—in front of her—was his face. Lean and rawboned, with dark, wild eyes searching hers. Maggie stared back, drinking him in, her heart beating unsteadily.

“You’re a bird,” she breathed.

“And a man,” he replied with sadness. “Your friend, too.”

Maggie closed her eyes, but only for a moment. She missed his face, and had to look at him again simply to keep from feeling sick. But that was impossible. Bodies everywhere, and pretending that was not the case could last only so long.

“We’ve got to get out of here,” she mumbled, and pushed herself up on her elbow, struggling to stand. Lying down felt suddenly too much like giving up.

Maggie scrabbled to her feet, swaying. Samuel stood far more gracefully, his hands outstretched to steady her. Her fingertips grazed his, ever so lightly, and she felt the pulse of his life shimmering for one hot instant: lovely golden wings beating inside his heart. She could taste them.

“Those feathers that … thing … wears,” she began to say, and then stopped.

“Those feathers belonged to her,” he said. “Her skin. Steal our skin, and you steal our ability to become … something else. You steal our power. The demon did that to her. And then … used her up. Used her like these people have been used. I … found her. Afterwards. I think, maybe, I lost my mind when that happened. I no longer wanted to be a man. Ever again.”

Samuel’s elegant dusky hands twined light as air around hers. Maggie wanted him to tell her why he had chosen to become a man, for her—and if that was the reason he had hidden from her for so long, in shadows and dreams—but he answered none of those things. Not with his voice. He continued to hold her hands, and then he leaned in, very carefully, to kiss her cheek. It was not chaste, or distant. Simple, maybe, but that brief touch of his lips filled her with more longing, and heat, than a million of Irdu’s forced intimacies.

“I wish I could have known you earlier,” she confessed, almost afraid of saying that much.

He hesitated. “There is something I did not tell you.”

The quiet urgency in his voice made her straighten, staring. But before he could explain, she heard scuffing sounds outside, and the door was pushed open. Men came inside, a blur of sharp lines and dark hair, and hands were rough, cold as ice, as they took hold of them both.

She did not fight them, and neither did Samuel. Instead he gave her a terrible, knowing look that made her heart ache. Whatever was going to happen next, he had already gone through it once before, on the periphery. He had lost someone he loved to these men. And now he was going to lose himself in turn—all for helping Maggie. It made her sick. Furious.

Irdu waited outside the room. Maggie felt all the men watching her, as if she was as much a curiosity to them as they were to her—not normal, an oddity.

You are a fixer, she reminded herself fiercely, pretending she stood inside her barn, tools at hand. You help people. You make things better.

She told herself that, again and again, digging in her heels. Hands dropped away until no one touched her. The men—vampires, incubi, demons—did not make a sound.

Robber King, she named Irdu, savoring the weight of the shark teeth hanging around her neck. His gaze flicked down to it, and disgust briefly filled his eyes; difficult to see through the curtain of hair partially obscuring his face.

“You have no way to leave us,” he said coldly. “And I think I am tired now of trying to woo you with kindness. I tried to give you time. I tried to set you on a path that would wake you to us, with care. A greater courtesy than has been shown others, I promise. But that is done. You will serve me. You will become us, even if I must force the waking of your blood.”

“I have no idea what that means,” Maggie replied, trying not to tremble. “But I’m not your pet. I asked for my life once, remember? I bargained for my life, and you agreed.”

“You’ll have your life,” he said coldly. “A better life. One not subject to human weaknesses.”

“I am human,” she shot back. “I like my weaknesses.”

Anger flashed through Irdu’s eyes. “You still have no idea what you are. After all this, you still fight yourself.”

He snapped his fingers, and Maggie watched in horror as Samuel was dragged to one of the tables and slammed upon it face first. Ekir stood close, caressing Samuel’s cloak of feathers with a faint grim smile on his face, which seemed to Maggie as much of a violation of the man as any other gesture, this touch more intimate. Samuel snarled at Ekir, fighting the hands holding him down.

Irdu stepped close to Maggie, his body so cold she could feel him near her like a sheet of winter ice. “Another bargain. Give yourself to me—willingly, now—and I will set him free, with his skin intact.”

“No,” rasped Samuel, and Ekir slammed his fist into the man’s face.

Maggie flinched, her hands flying to grip the teeth hanging around her neck, which were cold, but with a reassuring bite that steadied her. She met her friend’s dark, wild gaze, and every moment—each one—spent with him as bird or man flashed through her mind in one split second of pure rock-solid clarity.

“Leave him alone,” she said softly, and despair crept into Samuel’s gaze.

“You agree then,” Irdu replied, and for such a dangerous man, Maggie thought, there was a great deal of greed in his eyes. A weakness, she told herself, such a human weakness.

“Kiss me,” Maggie told him. Irdu hesitated only a moment—as though sensing the possibility of danger. But it was not enough to stop him. He leaned in and clamped his mouth over hers; a rough touch, and violent. Maggie braced herself and kissed back.

She knew nothing but instinct, although she had been fighting that, and herself. She closed her eyes, reaching deep inside, and felt a great fury and hunger rise strong and hot within her belly. Irdu pressed closer. Maggie grabbed his head between her hands and held him to her, her lips sucking on his, stealing his breath—stealing him.

It happened so naturally she hardly knew what she was doing until Irdu stiffened, his eyes flying open. He tried to pull away, but strength flooded her body—as though all those years of steelwork had turned her into steel—and she opened her eyes, locking gazes with him, savoring his fear. Using it to stoke the hunger burning inside her belly.

Fixer, she told him silently. I am going to fix you.

Maggie inhaled him like smoke, filling her lungs, and still he remained frozen, eyelids fluttering. She could feel his life pulsing like a black flame, and she sucked hard, pleasure growing heavy between her legs as she pulled sharp, loosening the demon—vampire, incubus, be mine—from his moorings. Irdu’s life slid through his mouth into Maggie’s own; he tasted like bone, baked dry and hot; and the tail of his spirit slithered down her throat, making her fit to burst—which she did, pleasure rocking through her body. She gasped, and shoved him away.

Irdu collapsed. Maggie did as well, falling hard on her knees. She felt sick to her stomach, sick at heart, but there was something else in her, too; a rising scream of power that was silent and awful and heavy against her skin. Her heart hammered with such strength, she thought she could pull the vital organ from her body and it would still keep pumping.

She looked up, her vision blurred, but saw enough pale faces staring at her to know she was in deep trouble. Irdu was dead. She knew it. Killing had been easy, like a disease.

But I can’t fight them all, she thought, with both defiance and despair.

No one touched her, though. Samuel was still pressed to the table, but he was watching her as well, grim satisfaction in his eyes.

Behind the men, Maggie heard the loud squeak of hinges. A door, opening and closing. Boots scuffed the floor. The men turned, staring, and a quiver rode through them as though they shared the same nerve endings. Maggie watched as they stood back in slow retreat, heads bowed, revealing a dark-skinned woman with white braids and a knit green cap tugged low over her ears. Her eyes glinted, and she looked from the men to Samuel, and then to Maggie.

“Well,” said Trace, smiling coldly, “isn’t this a pretty party?”

NINE

It was like being bludgeoned in the head, Maggie thought. Seeing Trace felt like a physical blow, and the young woman stared for one long moment, blood roaring in her ears. The sickening crunch of taking another life—even a life that had threatened her own—faded in comparison to seeing Trace.

The men released Samuel. He slipped off the table, dropping quickly to Maggie’s side. She clutched his hand, leaning heavily against his shoulder as he helped her stand. She could not stop looking at Trace. The old woman looked good and healthy, with a light raging through her eyes that could have been anger or pleasure.

Ekir strode to Trace but did not attack her. He clutched the cape of feathers, and the old woman reached out and took it from him. He let her, and when she held out her hand and pointed to the cape he already wore, his expression darkened, but he did as she asked. Yielding to Trace as though he feared her.

“She won,” said the old woman. “Just as I promised. Just as we bargained. She beat your leader at his game, and so she owns you now. She owns you.”

“She knows nothing of us, or herself,” Ekir rumbled, the side of his face not quite as caved in, though his eye was still hidden—or perhaps just smashed beyond recognition. “She could never lead us.”

Trace grunted. “Crow. The demon questions your lady.”

Samuel rose to his feet and in two steps snatched one of Maggie’s forgotten whirly-gigs off a nearby table. Ekir began to turn, but Samuel was too fast—so fast, Maggie wondered if he had let