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The dog rose. He was a massive beast—if they both stood upright, he could put his paws on her shoulders.
Charlotte got up. “Where are your owners?”
The dog looked at her, sniffed the air, and turned to the right.
She had nothing better to go on.
“Right it is,” Charlotte said, and followed the dog down the path.
* * *
THE wagon rolled over a root, creaking.
“That’s far enough,” a grating voice called out. Voshak Corwen, a seasoned slaver with over a dozen raids under his belt. Hardly a surprise, Richard reflected. This was the man Tuline had promised to betray. They must’ve agreed to set that little trap together, and when Richard had cut his way through Tuline’s crew, Voshak took his men and went after him.
“We make camp here,” Voshak said.
“We’re only two hours from the boundary,” a tall, redheaded man called out. Richard didn’t recognize him. Must be a new hire. The slavers needed to replenish their herd regularly—he kept thinning it out.
Voshak rode into view. Of average height, he was built with a gristle-and-tendon kind of strength: lean, with high endurance. He wasn’t the fastest or the strongest, but he would go the distance. A network of scars sliced his face. No doubt he had some romantic story about how he got them instead of admitting that a stablehand had raked his face with a pitchfork during a failed slave raid.
Voshak’s hair, a pale blond braid, which he bleached, was his trademark. It made him memorable. That’s how the slavers operated. They adopted costumes and personas, trying to make themselves larger-than-life and hoping to inspire fear. They counted on that fear. One could fight a man, but nobody could fight a nightmare.
Voshak focused on the redhead. “Milhem, did I make you my second?”
Milhem looked down.
Ceyren, Voshak’s second, was likely dead; otherwise, he would be here pulling Milhem off his horse and beating him to a bloody pulp. Interesting.
“Then don’t open your trap,” Voshak said. “If I want your opinion, I’ll beat it out of you. ” He surveyed the riders. “If any of you morons are worried, nobody’s following us. These are Edgers. They look out for number one, and none of them want to catch a bullet. It’s been twenty hours since we last slept, and I’m tired. Now make the damn camp. ” He turned to an older, one-eyed slaver. “Crow, you’re my second now. See they get it done. ”
Crow, a broad-shouldered, weather-beaten bastard, roared, “Get a move on!”
Reasonable choice for a second, Richard reflected. Crow was older, had experience, and he worked hard to inspire fear. If his eye patch and height didn’t do it, the heavy black leather and ponytail of jet-black hair decorated with finger bones would.
Voshak turned his horse. His gaze paused on Richard. “Awake, my gentle maid? You’ve got something right here. ” The slaver touched the left corner of his mouth. “What is that? . . . Oh, that’s shit from the bottom of my boot. ”
Laughter rang out.
Richard smiled, baring his teeth. “Always brightening the day with your humor, Leftie. ”
A muscle jerked in Voshak’s face. He clenched his reins. “You sit in your cage, Hunter. When we get where we’re going, you’ll sing like a bird when I start cutting through your joints. ”
“What was that? I didn’t quite hear. ” Richard leaned forward, focusing on Voshak. A hint of fear shivered in the slaver’s eyes, and Richard drank it in. “Come closer to the cage, Voshak. Don’t cower like a little boy hiding from your daddy and his belt. ”
Voshak dug his spurs into his horse’s flanks. The animal jumped, and he rode off. Coward. Most of them were cowards, cruel and vicious. Brave men didn’t kidnap children in the middle of the night and sell them to perverts to earn their drinking money.
The riders dismounted. Two secured the horses, keeping well away from his cage. Others began pulling tents from the saddlebags, olive and gray, with a red logo spelling out COLEMAN sewn on one side. The tents must’ve come from the Broken. A few slavers piled together some branches. A dark-haired man soaked them in fluid from a flask, struck a match, and dropped it on the fuel. Fire flared up like an orange mushroom. He shied back, rubbing his face.
“You got any eyebrows left, Pavel?” Crow called.
Pavel spat into the fire. “It’s burning, ain’t it?”
A slaver stopped by the cage. He was thin, with dirty brown hair and pale eyes. He climbed onto the wagon, opened a small door near the top of the cage, barely large enough to pass a bowl through, and dipped a ladle with a long handle into a bucket.
Richard waited. His mouth was so dry, he could almost taste the water.
The slaver passed the ladle through the window. “Why Leftie?” he murmured.
“It’s what his father used to call him before he beat him in his drunken rages,” Richard said. “His right testicle never dropped. ”
The slaver held the ladle closer. Richard drank, three deep delicious gulps, then the man retracted the ladle and latched the window shut.
The slavers began to settle down. A pot was set over the fire; a couple of rabbits had been dressed and chopped into it. Voshak came to sit by the flames, facing the cage. He bent to poke at the coals, and Richard pondered the top of the man’s blond head. The human skull was such a fragile thing. If only his hands weren’t tied.
He had to survive and bide his time. The slavers were taking him to the Market, he was sure of it. Left to his own devices, Voshak would’ve strung him up on the first tree he saw. Richard grinned. And after his neck snapped, Voshak would probably stab his corpse a few times, drown it, then set it on fire. Just in case.
Someone near the top of the slaver food chain must’ve recognized that the rank-and-file slaver crews feared the Hunter. They wanted to boost morale by making a production out of killing him. Richard might have worked for a year to get to the Market, but he had no intention of arriving there on their terms. An opportunity would present itself. He just had to recognize it and make the best of it.
If he failed now, Sophie would take his place. The thought filled Richard with dread.
Revenge was an infectious disease. For a time it gave you the strength to go on, but it devoured you from the inside like a cancer, and when your target was finally destroyed, all that remained was a hollow shell of your former self. Then the target’s relatives began their own hunt, and the cycle continued. He’d learned that lesson at seventeen, when a feuding family’s bullet exploded in his father’s skull, spraying bloody mist all over the market stall. What he had lost was irreplaceable. No amount of death would bring his father back to life. Back then, Richard was already a warrior, a killer, and he continued to kill, but never out of revenge. He severed lives so the family would be safe, and the new generations would never feel the pain of having their parents ripped out of their lives. He fought to keep the rest of them safe.
He failed.
Richard’s memory resurrected Sophie the way she used to be—a funny, beautiful, fearless child. The muddy swamp flashed before Richard. When he had finally found Sophie in one of the holes, she was standing on the body of a slaver she had killed. As he pulled her out, her eyes burned with a fear and hate that had no place on the face of a twelve-year-old child. She had survived the slavers, but she would never be the same.
He’d hoped the years would cure it, but time only nurtured it. He watched, powerless, as that fear and hate germinated into self-loathing. When she came to him asking to be taught to work with the blade, he viewed it as a diversion. Sophie had never taken her lessons seriously before, neither from her own father nor from her sister. He thought she would get bored. He had no idea.
Her self-hate grew and matured into steely determination. He saw it in Sophie’s face every morning when she picked up her sword to meet him in practice. He was running out of things to teach her. One day, she would decide
she was good enough, take her blade, and go hunting instead. He wouldn’t be able to stop her, so he had chosen to beat her to the punch. What he was doing wasn’t revenge, but justice. The world had failed Sophie by allowing slavers to exist. He had failed her by letting her suffer at their hands. He hoped to restore her faith in both.
A woman walked out of the forest. She was tall, about five-foot-eight, and pale. Mud splattered her faded jeans. Her lavender T-shirt had a scoop neckline and was smudged with something dark, dirt or possibly soot. Her blond hair rested on top of her head in a loose knot. Her mouth was full, her eyes were wide and round, and the line of her jaw was soft and feminine. She was beautiful, refined, but iced over by a lack of emotion and an eerie, unnatural calm.
Their stares connected. Every cell in his body went on alert. He couldn’t see her eye color from this distance, but he was sure her eyes were gray.
She was real.
His stomach tightened in alarm. What are you doing here? Run. Run before they see you.
The conversation died. The slavers stared.
Crow picked up his rifle and rolled into a crouch.
“Now that’s what I call free merchandise,” Voshak murmured from his perch on a fallen log.
“There are no towns around here,” Crow said quietly. “Where did she come from? I say shoot her now. ”
“What’s your hurry?” Voshak leaned forward. “No gun, no knife. If she could flash, she would’ve hit us by now. ”
“I don’t like it,” Crow said. “She might be with him. ”
Voshak glanced at the cage. Richard turned to look him in the eye, and the slaver captain shrugged.
“Hunter is the Weird’s animal. She’s wearing jeans. And if she’s with him, then he’ll enjoy watching me fuck her brains out. ” Voshak raised his voice. “Hey, sweetheart! Are you lost?”
The woman didn’t answer. She was still looking at him, and her eyes told Richard she wasn’t lost. No, she was exactly where she wanted to be. She had some sort of plan. How did she get here?
“Where are you from?” Voshak asked. “Talk to me. Are your folks worried about you?”