“Oh, yeah? Keep laughing.” Cheyenne brought up a churning, hissing sphere of black energy in each hand and held them over the orc’s head. “This’ll be real fun for you. It tickles.”
“That’s enough.” Rhynehart’s gloved hand clamped around her upper arm, and she let off one of the crackling orbs right at his feet. The agent stepped back and released her arm, but he’d gotten her attention again. “They’ll get what’s comin’ to ‘em, rookie. We did our job. Come on.”
“I should break his neck,” she spat, glaring at the orc but giving in just enough to step away from him. The asshole just kept laughing.
“Yeah, you probably should. But that’s a helluva lot more paperwork than I wanna have to do. And you’ll be looking at a lot more trouble than that asshole’s worth, okay? Come on. Outside.”
“You’ll get what’s coming to you too, mór úcare,” the orc shouted after them as Cheyenne followed Rhynehart on still-unsteady feet toward the church doors. “We have everything we need now to come after you. The line of the Cu’ón will rot in the ash of the death torch, just like he will!”
The halfling whirled around to glare at the orc, laughing and coughing through sprays of his own blood. Rhynehart nudged her toward the door. They passed other magicals cuffed and pinned down beneath the FRoE team’s fell weapons. The last thing Cheyenne expected to see were so many faces—orc, troll, goblin, and Skaxen—staring up at her as best they could from the ground, all of them sneering up at her like a bunch of hungry hyenas. The halfling glared back at all of them, hissing at a Skaxen licking his bright-orange lips. Then she saw the thick silver chain spilling out of his robes and the crudely crafted shape of a bull at the end.
Just like that asshole in my neighbors’ apartment.
The Skaxen tittered at her as she passed and tried to draw himself up onto his knees.
“I don’t think so.” The FRoE agent behind the magical stuck a black boot into the center of the Skaxen’s back and pushed him back down to the floor.
Rhynehart shot her a sideways glance, frowning despite the joking tone in his voice. “Those friends of yours?”
Cheyenne found enough energy to storm out of that church as fast as she could. Tears pricked the corners of her eyes as she fought to get that goblin kid’s face out of her head. Or maybe she was trying to keep it there because then she’d have a good reason to still be this pissed off. That energy had faded completely by the time she hit the bottom step, and she quickly sat down before she ended up on her face, just like all the thugs inside who’d used black magic to take a kid’s life.
“All right. I guess this works.” Rhynehart shifted his helmet under one arm and turned to face her. He glanced at the open church doors, then muttered, “You have about a minute before the new-prisoner parade gets marched out here. Wanna tell me what the hell made you break like that back there?”
Cheyenne grunted.
“That kinda response only works for ogres, rookie. Maybe some of the dumber orcs. Not an acceptable answer from you.”
The halfling fought as hard as she could not to blast the FRoE operative back into the street and out of her personal space. She swiped quickly at her burning eyes with the back of a hand, surprised to find it dry. “You can’t seriously tell me I need to explain why I did what I did.”
“No, kid. I get that part. Hey, if I didn’t have to answer to the higher-ups, I woulda let you cave his goddamn skull in. It’s more than any of them deserve.”
“He couldn’t have been older than, what? Twelve?”
Rhynehart sighed, pulling off his thick dampening gloves around the giant helmet under his arm. “Something like that, yeah. Those magicals are into some seriously sick shit.”
“It has to stop.”
“I know. That’s why we’re here. I hate to say it, rookie, but this isn’t even the worst of it. You’ll see things that’ll make you swear you’ll never get a good night’s sleep. Maybe you won’t for a while, but you just keep movin’. Hell, I won’t even say it gets easier the more it happens. Just gets easier to focus on how to keep it from happening again.”
Cheyenne blew a thick strand of white hair out of her face. “Don’t talk to me like I signed onto this bullshit as part of the team.”
Rhynehart glanced at the church doors again, where the first two operatives were jostling their first two cuffed prisoners outside onto the landing. “I know that’s not why you’re here, but you’re part of this world whether you like it or not. The FRoE just sees one side of the equation, but that doesn’t mean the other magicals on this are blind to the rest of it. Let’s take this to the Jeep, huh?”
He stuck out an ungloved hand again, but Cheyenne pushed herself to her feet and brushed him off, making a quick retreat to the black Jeep at the curb. She reached it just in time to slam a hand on the hood and keep herself from buckling to the concrete right there.
“Yeah, see, that’s what I was asking about.” He’d already gotten the message that she didn’t want help, so Rhynehart just leaned back against the Jeep’s front bumper and folded his arms. “That whole collapsing thing. I thought it was the bullet in your hip that did it the last time—”
“It was,” she hissed. “I don’t know what happened.”
The first two prisoners were hustled quickly out to the first waiting van. The troll thug with a raw gash that looked like a fresh burn across his face eyed Cheyenne and ran a tongue over his crooked upper teeth. “You’re next,
