by Lisa Shearin
“Absolutely not,” was Mychael’s response when I said I needed to be there when they caught him.
“Mychael, just because I tell you where he is, doesn’t mean he’s going to stay put for you. By the time your men get there, he’ll be gone. Rache can smell someone coming after him.”
“And he won’t be smelling you. I’ve caught him by surprise before.”
“And he’s still alive.”
“So am I,” Mychael countered.
“And so am I. You know I have to be at the front of your hunting party for this to work.”
His frown told me he knew it and he didn’t like it.
That made two of us.
I knew that finding Rache wasn’t going to be easy. He knew me and he knew how I worked. Yes, I’d learned a lot as a seeker since I’d last seen Rache, but no doubt he’d been keeping up with me just like I’d been keeping up with him. And even though my seeking skills had been multiplied by a factor of a hundred thanks to the power boost I’d gotten from the Saghred, the rock had merely enhanced the skill set that I already had.
Rache knew that skill set. He’d volunteered to let me practice my tracking spells on him. He’d gotten entirely too good at staying one step ahead of me. I usually found him. Eventually. That was then and for practice. This was now and for keeps.
It didn’t take me long to pick up Rache’s trail. The impressions from the crossbow bolt had reminded me of any details that I had forgotten. I hadn’t forgotten much, and it didn’t take me long to recall every last bit of it. We found that he’d been staying at an inn in the entertainment district. It had the benefit of a lot of people coming and going, and no one really paid attention to anyone else. Everyone was focused on their own pleasure—unless their pleasure involved finding someone else. Rache had the knack for making people either not want to be anywhere near him—or to be very close to him.
Yep, I’d been young and stupid.
And I’d been in love. My first and, I thought, my last time.
Until Mychael.
When I was in training to be a seeker, I’d thought that tracking Rache was just good practice. Though if I’d been paying attention, I’d have noticed that he was way too good at staying one step ahead of me. Rache claimed to be a merchant, which explained why he traveled a lot. That he was a successful merchant explained why he would bring me such expensive presents when he returned. That certainly explained the travel, money, and the uncanny ability to avoid detection and capture. Not a skill set often seen in your average merchant.
But downright critical in your above average assassin.
“Anything?”
Mychael was about twenty paces back, giving me enough room to work, but when you share some kind of mysterious magical bond with someone that lets you talk to each other without speaking, personal space changes into something that’s neither space nor personal. I hadn’t minded until now. Being able to talk without speaking to the man I was sleeping with was fun, and being able to do it in public took it a couple of steps and a leap over from fun and into naughty fun. But having the man I loved inside my head while I was hunting the man I used to love took awkward to a whole new level.
“He’s ahead.” It was all I said because it was all I knew. Rache was still ahead of us. I couldn’t sense that he was moving, but we didn’t seem to be getting any closer to him, either. The Rache I’d known and broken up with wasn’t a magic user; he wasn’t even a magic dabbler. Though maybe he’d lied to me about that, too. I didn’t want to find out now that Rache followed our breakup with an extended period of self-improvement.
Just in case, I quietly muttered my personal shields into place. They’d deflect a crossbow bolt—or a novice magic user’s attempt to fry me.
The farther toward the city center we got, the more uneasy I became. There were plenty of places for an assassin to hide—but only one was protected by wards, guards, and diplomatic immunity.
The elven embassy.
And guess what? That’s where Rache’s trail went cold.
The elven embassy was located half a block from the goblin embassy. And judging from the guards in full battle armor punctuating the walls around both compounds, everyone knew everything that had happened in the harbor. Everyone also looked entirely too eager to find a reason to retaliate. Retaliation of the painful, bloody, and deadly kind.
Neither Mychael, his Guardians, nor I shared the same homicidal need.
All of us were presently standing between the two embassies, but across the street from either one. I wasn’t comfortable with our proximity to either embassy’s range of fire. I think some of Mychael’s boys were beginning to reach the same conclusion.
“This isn’t a good place, sir.” Leave it to Vegard to say what we were all thinking.
Mychael’s stony gaze went from the elven embassy to the goblin embassy. “Which one?”
I knew that question was for me, and I also knew that I had no idea how to answer him. I stood a fifty-percent chance of being right—or wrong. Truth was, I didn’t want to go into either place. I’d been inside the elven embassy once, gotten trapped, damned near died, and didn’t want a repeat of either experience. I hadn’t been inside the goblin embassy, but if the exterior trappings—sharpened black iron stakes for fence railings, and blood-red wards sizzling on the gates—were any preview of what waited inside, I’d rather stand here in the street. Not to mention, I was an elf, a member of the race that all believed just tried to kill a goblin prince.
Embassy Row was normally crowded with coaches and pedestrians this time of day.
There wasn’t a living soul to be seen.
People knew what had happened. They were smart enough to stay away from the elven and goblin embassies. If someone fired a shot or launched a spell, Embassy Row would turn into ground zero for the beginning of a war.
Unless they were crazy, people usually stayed away from war zones.
We were standing right in the middle of the street. I guess that made us several kinds of crazy.
The elven embassy looked like it was expecting a full-scale attack at any moment. The guards appeared ready to shoot anything that moved wrong. And to put the paranoia icing on the cake, the embassy actually had battlements complete with armed and patrolling guards. Some of those guards had partners—nearly waist high, dark, sleek, and red eyed. Werehounds.
Rache had tried to kill Prince Chigaru—a goblin. There were plenty of goblins who wanted him dead, but so did a lot of elves.
Left or right. Elf or goblin.
Take your pick.
I didn’t want either one.
“This is a quandary,” Vegard noted.
My Guardian bodyguard had the gift for ultimate understatement.
I looked back toward the elven embassy. A man I knew only too well stood on its marble stairs, watching me, wearing the same smarmy and smug expression he usually did.
You could see Taltek Balmorlan in a room and look right past him—which was exactly what the elven inquisitor wanted. The word that described him best was average. His hair and eyes were an unremarkable shade of dull brown. He was of average height with average looks. There was absolutely nothing remarkable about his appearance.
It was perfect camouflage for the predator he was.
Balmorlan wanted war with the goblins. Balmorlan would want Prince Chigaru dead.
Taltek Balmorlan wanted me.
He was an inquisitor for elven intelligence. That was his job title. What he actually did was deal in weapons, and in a world of magic, mages were weapons—so Balmorlan dealt in mages. I called it kidnapping; Balmorlan called it doing business. Guess who was at the top of his shopping list?
I stepped out into the street.
“Ma’am,” Vegard cautioned.
Mychael didn’t say a word either out loud or inside my head. He knew what Balmorlan had planned for me.
Unable to get his hands on the Saghred, the elven inquisitor had found a way to bond other mages to me, which
would allow them to tap and use the Saghred—by using me. He’d had a warded cell built in the elven embassy with Level Twelve wards, detainment spells layered for strength, and magic-depleting manacles bolted to the walls.
All he was missing was me in those manacles.
I was Balmorlan’s target.
And he was mine.
Rache’s trail ended here. With all the wards and spells protecting both embassy compounds, he could be in either one, though I was leaning toward the elves as Rache’s latest clients. Taltek Balmorlan and his elven government allies had access to more money than was in the elven royal treasury.
He could afford Rache. Easily.
Besides, Imala Kalis was firmly in control of the goblin embassy. She was working every waking hour to plan the coup that would kick Sathrik off the throne and put Chigaru on it, not put the prince in the Mal’Salin family crypt.
I stood there, letting Taltek Balmorlan get an eyeful. It was all he was going to get, and I gave him a smug smile of my own to let him know it.
“Is he in there?” Mychael asked out loud and from right behind me, then he stepped up to stand by my side. I felt a surge of satisfied delight. Mychael and I were in the middle of Embassy Row. Vegard wasn’t with him, so he’d obviously asked him and his men to wait on the other side of the street.
Mychael beside me was an obvious challenge to Taltek Balmorlan—or Rache. Mess with my woman, and you mess with me, his posture said.
“I want you now,” I murmured.
“Right here in the street?” I heard the smile in his voice.
“What’s wrong with that?”
“You’re a bad girl, Raine Benares.”
“You bet I am.”
“Can you sense him?”
“Not with all the distortion.”
“Those aren’t the same wards the elven embassy typically uses,” Mychael told me.
“Heavy-duty mage work?”
He nodded. “They’re blocking anything from getting out.”
I didn’t need three guesses as to what—or who—that something was.
“Can you get in?” I asked.
“Not without a warrant, and by the time I got one, Rache Kai would be long gone.”
That was when the shot came. It didn’t come from the elven embassy or the goblin embassy. It came from the building behind us.
I heard the whistle of an incoming bolt.
Everything went into slow motion. Mychael shoved me away from him and twisted his shoulders and chest sharply to the right. The bolt glanced off of Mychael’s breastplate with a metallic spark.
Armor-piercing bolts.
Rache wasn’t aiming at me.
That shot was intended for Mychael. If his reaction time had been any slower, he’d be dead.
I clearly saw Rache in a third-story window of the building behind us. The bastard wanted us to see him—wanted me to see him kill the man I loved. Then in a blink, Rache was gone and the window empty.
So were the stairs of the elven embassy.
No Rache. No Balmorlan.
No answers.
Chapter 4
I thought I would be the one sharing Rache’s crosshairs with Prince Chigaru.
I was wrong.
We searched the building Rache had used for a killing perch, which conveniently for my homicidal ex was a Conclave office building that was being renovated, so there were no occupants who would have been very-much-needed witnesses. Even more frustrating, the workmen who were there had been on the lower floors and hadn’t seen anyone.
Right now I didn’t know if someone had paid Rache to kill Mychael, or if he was making this hit a personal vendetta. The potential who, why, and how much didn’t matter. The bottom line was that Rache wanted Mychael dead, and if no one was paying him that meant that in some twisted way, it was my fault.
And to make the situation worse—if that was even possible—I hadn’t known he was there until his bolt hit Mychael’s armor. That meant a veil of some kind. Rache didn’t have magical talent, but it was possible that his employer had given him an amulet personally keyed to him whose purpose was to veil his presence. I’d encountered them before, but they were obscenely expensive. But if Taltek Balmorlan could afford to fund the start of a war and retain Rache’s services to help that war happen, he could certainly afford a custom-made magical trinket.
We were walking quickly back to the Greyhound Hotel. Mychael had set the fast pace. He wasn’t trying to put distance between him and the man who tried to turn him into roadkill. Mychael wanted to get back to the scene of what he considered the bigger crime and Prince Chigaru as quickly as possible. There were plenty of Guardians there, and a senior knight to act in Mychael’s stead, but when a hopefully future head of state was poisoned, shot, and nearly blown up, that was a situation that needed to be handled by the paladin himself.
Mychael’s scowl mirrored my own. We’d chased Rache halfway across town, and now we were coming back emptyhanded. Mychael took that personally.
So did I.
Rache had gotten away from me twice in one day, and that pissed me off. Though Rache had missed his target twice, and I knew that would piss him off. Rache didn’t miss.
Though what bothered me the most was that for all intents and purposes, Mychael completely blew off the fact that Rache Kai had just tried to kill him. And Vegard and the other Guardians didn’t seem all that bent out of shape about it, either.
I nearly had to run to keep up with Mychael’s long strides. “So world-class assassins take shots at you every day?” I snapped.
“What?”
“Rache just tried to skewer you and you don’t care.”
“Trust me, I care.”
“You don’t act like it.”
“Because I have a worse situation on the waterfront and at the Greyhound. We didn’t catch Rache, and my time was wasted.”
“And your life was damned near ended.”
“Damned near. I won’t forget the attempt, but it was just that, an attempt.”
“So you’re not concerned?”
“At the moment, I’m more concerned with keeping Prince Chigaru alive. And with three assassination attempts before he even set foot on dry land, I think we can count on everyone who tried before trying again. That concerns me.”
We went around the next corner and the voices coming from the waterfront were like a solid wall of sound. That was one of the things you could always count on from a crowd that’s just seen a big explosion—the smart ones had gotten away, leaving the morbidly curious and the brainless gawkers, and the only thing either group did was get in the way of everyone who was trying to clean up the literal and political mess.
Mychael apparently trusted his men to deal with it all. He didn’t even pause, but headed straight for the Greyhound Hotel.
Prince Chigaru Mal’Salin had reserved nearly the entire hotel—a palatial structure in the center of the Judicial District built to accommodate visiting dignitaries and obscenely wealthy mages and students’ parents. I was used to inns where the smoke was as thick as the coffee. In my opinion, all the polished marble and gilded woodwork was a bit much, but I wasn’t the one footing the bill.
What I saw filling the entire wall behind the registration desk caused a twitch to take up residence in my right eyelid.
A mirror.
I looked around the room. More mirrors, ridiculously large and abundant mirrors.
Some people were content to merely ask for trouble; the hotel’s owner was on his knees begging for it. All kinds of nastiness could get into a room through a mirror. Assassins, spies, black mages, demons. Prince Chigaru had dodged death three times already, and it wasn’t even lunchtime.
I couldn’t believe this. “Who the hell thought those were a good idea?” I asked Mychael.
He looked where I was looking. “I’m not fond of them, myself.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “Not fond? They’re unwarded mirrors. What kind of lunatic wo
uld—”
“I had my best mirror mages check them. They’re completely warded.”
“But they aren’t all”—I made a wavy motion with my hand—“nauseatingly ripply.”
Warded mirrors rippled; rippling mirrors would make a lot of hotel guests sick. I could see where that would be bad for business.
“It’s a special kind of warding,” Mychael said. “I had a mirror mage friend of mine check them again last night. He assures me that nothing’s coming in that way.”
Imala was waiting for us in the lobby, though waiting normally implied patient and calm. Imala was neither. The head of the goblin secret service was pacing, and judging from the floor space available all around her, her people were very smart.
They were staying out of her way.
She spotted us and closed the distance. “Well?”
“He tried to kill Mychael, too,” I told her.
Imala’s expression didn’t change. “And?”
I didn’t think anyone could be less concerned than Mychael about Rache’s second target, but I was wrong.
“And we didn’t get the bastard,” I told her.
Imala didn’t say a word; instead she closed her eyes and inhaled slowly. Yep, the lady was frustrated to the point of violence. We had three assassins and only one of them was in something resembling custody. Imala’s day was far from over.
“Raine, I know you did your best,” she told me.
I was sure Imala meant it, but what she said wasn’t what I heard. “You did your best” ranked right up there with “I’m disappointed” as far as I was concerned. Both sounded nice enough, but it didn’t make me feel any better about failing. You couldn’t sugarcoat failure. The only thing that would cure that was having Rache trussed at my feet. Feet that would kick him a few times before anyone official could haul his sorry ass away.
“And it wasn’t good enough.” I paused. “I know him, Imala. I’ll find him.”
“Know?”
I told her exactly how well I knew Rache Kai.
She laughed, and a few of her people backed away even farther. “For many goblins, such a relationship would be cause for boasting, not shame.”