I had to keep him from realizing I knew more than I was letting on.
Easy.
The guard brought me to a black door at the end of a corridor. There were no other doors on this hallway, I noticed. No windows. Only the harsh fluorescent lights buzzing above, highlighting just how much of the paint had cracked and started chipping off the solid, concrete walls.
Before the guards’ knuckles could even touch the door, it opened, and a voice boomed from inside. “Leave her with me.”
It was the throaty rumble of a bear’s growl from deep inside its cave, and it set my skin alight.
The guard didn’t question the order. He nudged me closer to the door, turned around, and made a swift exit down the corridor, disappearing from sight as soon as he turned the corner… and leaving me alone with the Horseman of Devil Falls.
My ultimate target.
“Come,” came the voice again, low and deep. Not a suggestion, or a request, but a command. I could feel the or else at the edge of the word.
I stepped through the door. My hands were still bound, so I had to shoulder it the rest of the way open. What I found wasn’t a crowded little office bursting with paperwork and reeking of mildew, sweat, and old coffee, but a little palace within this wretched prison. An oasis in the desert.
The space was wide and open, as if three or four offices had been broken down just to create it. Despite that, though, the room was dark. A huge window spanned the entire length of the furthest wall, but there was only blackness on the other side of it. Not night, but an inescapable darkness.
Doors along the other two walls led to separate rooms; maybe a bedroom, or a bathroom. This one looked like something between a living room and a study. A giant desk with a tall, high-backed, leather chair sat close to the window, near a floor to ceiling bookshelf stacked with books. Along the opposite wall was a rack. Hanging from it were a number of weapons, from axes, to swords, each one looking like it was capable of cleaving a man in two.
I couldn’t help but notice the duality of it—scholar, and warrior—but I wondered if it was all for show.
The Horseman stood by his desk with his back turned, his reflection stark against the black glass pane that made up the entire far wall. His long, black hair hung wildly past his shoulders, and the light falling on him highlighted the contours of his face against the windowpane, but the light also cast a long, sinister shadow.
I knew I had to kill him, but I also knew I didn’t want to be alone with this man for very long.
With a lazy gesture of his hand, the door slammed shut behind me. He turned his head to the side, showing me the tip and bridge of his nose, his chin, a single eye—the golden flecks within it drinking in what little light there was and sparkling.
I felt my breath flee my lungs like it had been chased out. “You wanted to see me?” I said, the words spilling out rapidly with the breath.
“I did.” He gestured at a seat by his desk. “Sit.”
I blinked, my gaze briefly reaching the weapons rack, and then flicking back to him. “Sit?”
“Yes.”
I thought about racing for one of the weapons, but I had a strong feeling he would be on me before I could even reach them, let alone turn one on him. No, scratch that. He wouldn’t even have to reach me. I’d just seen the way he’d controlled the door with his mind. The Horseman could just as easily turn that power on me without breaking a sweat.
Then there was the matter of the handcuffs. Swinging a sword while bound wasn’t a walk in the park even at the best of times, and he was clearly a swordsman, so if I wanted to attack, I needed all my skills.
I headed toward the desk, forgetting about the weapons rack entirely. They may as well have been coats instead of swords, for all the good they were going to do me in here. Swallowing hard, I sat down.
The Horseman didn’t make a move. He had gone back to staring at the window, leaving me to sit in awkward silence while he… brooded? Finished thinking? I had no idea what he was doing, or why I was being made to wait, but my heart was a wild animal inside of my chest; a wild animal trapped in a cage and desperately trying to get out.
And maybe that was it—that was exactly the feeling he wanted to instill in me.
I heard him sniff the air, then he turned and brought his mighty gaze to bear on me. He walked over to my seat. I curled my legs up, thinking he was going to attack me, ready to strike back even if doing so would probably mean dying at his hands
He moved around behind my back, the air passing between us causing the hairs on my arms and the nape of my neck to rise. Without warning, he grabbed hold of my arms and lifted them up over my head.
“What are you doing?” I yelled. “Let me go!”
“You’re bleeding,” he said, his voice low and calm.
My breath failed me for the second time today. “I—what?”
“Your arms.”
A flash of memory danced before my eyes. Knives, the shifter. She’d dug her claws into my forearms and drawn blood, but the guard had been ordered to bring me here, not take me to a medical bay for treatment.
“It’s nothing,” I said. “Now, let me go.”
But he wasn’t listening. He took hold of the chains keeping my wrists bound together, then pulled, lifting me slightly from the seat. He wrapped one of his strong hands around my injured arm, causing the wound to sting. I grimaced, but I tried not to let it show on my face.
I had no idea what he was about to do. Taste it? Smear it on his face so he could wear my blood as a trophy once he’d murdered me in that chair? They called him the Horseman, and that was a pretty monstrous title if you asked me.
He lifted me fully from the chair, then turned me around to face him. Instinct tipped my chin up, made me meet his gaze. He still had hold of my chains and of my arm, but he’d lowered them now so my arms were flush against the sides of my body.
His soft lips parted slightly, and for a mad moment, I thought he was drifting closer to me. My heart pounded a ragged rhythm that made my entire body quake as, slowly, the gap between us closed. Was he going to… kiss me?
He was so close, now, I could see the pattern on his green eyes, the way the gold in them looked like little stars. Light flashed behind them, and then a soft, green glow emanated from his hand that filled my body with pulsating warmth; a warmth that transferred from him, to me.
The magic made my knees go weak, and it seemed to invite his powerful, oakwood scent to crash around me like a wave, and wrap me in it like a blanket. When he was done, he released my chains and let me have my hands back. Looking at my arms, the injuries—the scratches, even the blood—was gone, leaving only the tears in my jumpsuit.
I swallowed again. “What did you do that for?” I asked.
“You were injured,” he said.
“So?”
“I didn’t want you bleeding all over my quarters. Sit down.”
“And there I thought you were just being a gentleman.”
The Horseman said nothing and walked around his desk, taking his intoxicating aroma with him and leaving me standing there, my skin flushed pink, my body tingling. I sat down on the chair, trying to shake the moment off while he picked up what looked like a brown dossier, opened it, and rifled through the documents inside.
He peered at me, and I almost couldn’t take the weight of his gaze—I certainly couldn’t stand the way his hair so perfectly fell around his face.
What the hell was that about?
Without saying a word, he tossed the dossier over to my side of the table, where its contents spilled out. They were photos. I didn’t look at them. They were probably images of the crime scene I’d left behind when they found me. I remembered it clearly, now. The way I’d torn Jensen’s throat open, the mess his aorta had made when it started spurting his blood all over the place.
They tell you a human body contains eight pints of blood inside it—you don’t really know what that means until you see how just easily it can coat a couple of walls.
“Look at them,” he insisted, and the command itself seemed to have enough power to grab my attention and put it where he wanted it to be.
They weren’t pictures of a crime scene. There wasn’t a body in them, in fact. There wasn’t even any blood. Instead, what I was looking at was… graffiti. A stark, neon-orange sign sprayed into a dull, redbrick wall. I tilted my head to the side, now, curiosity taking over as the image started looking more and more familiar. I hadn’t seen the particular tag before, but I understood exactly what the words meant.
Because they were written in the language of my people.
I tried playing dumb to find out how much he knew. “What is this?” I asked.
“I was hoping you could tell me,” he said.
“Me? Why?”
“That is written in your language, is it not?”
“How do you know that?”
“Don’t insult my intelligence,” he growled. “I know those markings; I have seen them before, and I know they belong to your kind.”
“So, why am I here?”
“Because I want you to tell me what the words mean.”
I looked at the picture again, then started shuffling through the others that had fallen on the desk. More graffiti, more tags, each of them of different sizes and colors, but meaning exactly the same thing.
“Where did you find these?” I asked.
“Irrelevant.”
I turned my eyes up at him, this time bearing the weight of his stare and holding my ground. “No, relevant. Where did you find them? In Devil Falls?”
The Horseman’s eyes narrowed. “Yes. I know every inch of this place, and I had never seen those markings here before now. Can you tell me what they mean, or do I have to send you back to your hole?”
A smirk played upon my lips. “It means you’re in deep shit.”
Darkness curled around his features, deepening the contours of his face. “You find this amusing?”
My heart raced even faster than it had been a moment ago, but I didn’t let go of his eyes no matter how intimidating he looked. “I don’t know about amusing, but it’s certainly ironic.”
“Why?”
“Well,” I took a shallow breath. “I don’t know how versed you are in what goes on outside of this little Hellhole of a place, but in the real world, there was a war eight years ago between two factions—the Crimson Hunters, and the Obsidian Order.”
“Outsider factions?”
“Yes. The Crimson Hunters lost that war and peace was signed between the two factions, but a number of Hunters weren’t happy with it. This splinter group broke away, deciding to rebel against their former companions and the Obsidian Order, and continued their barbaric practices of hunting and killing anyone they pleased with impunity.”
“How do you know all this?”
I shrugged. “I was just a young Serakon caught in the crossfire. As soon as I saw an opening, I fled the war. I barely made it out of the conflict with my life, but I heard about what happened through the grapevine. News travels fast in the Outsider community.”
I was lying to him, and trying desperately to make it look convincing. None of that was true. I had been found in a dump, chained up, the property of a brutal Serakon whose name I’ll never forget. Scythe. If any of us deserved to be known as fiends, it was him.
The Horseman’s eyes narrowed. “You keep saying Serakon. Why?”
“Because that’s the name of my people.”
“No. You are fiends.”
I took a sharp breath through the nose. “No. That’s just what you call me when you want to get a rise out of me. I don’t suggest you keep it up.”
The Horseman paused, then changed the subject. “What does any of what you have told me have to do with these gang tags.”
“They’re more than just gang tags—they mark the borders of Crimson Hunter territory, their hunting grounds. They’re a signal to anyone who can see them that, whoever they are, wherever they are, they could become a hunter’s next meal, or a trophy on their mantlepiece—often both.”
He paused, staring at me, watching me. I wondered if he thought I would flinch if he kept looking directly at me. I didn’t. “Is that so?” he asked.
“Yeah. It is. And if you’ve found these tags in Devil Falls, it means they’ve pushed into your neck of the woods. It means you’re not safe. No one is. They hunt for food, they hunt for sport, there’s no tracking them down unless you know how. And even if you could figure out where they were, they won’t listen to reason because they’re—”
“—fiends.”
The word cut through me like a knife to the gut. I should’ve expected it, but I was too caught up in the fantasy of watching he and his men squirm under the collective claws and mouths of a group of hungry Crimson Hunters that I’d let him get past my defenses. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
I took a deep breath to steady myself. “I was going to say relentless. They’re a storm of teeth, and claws, and unbridled rage, and they’re on your doorstep.”
Another pause. This time, it was his lips that tugged into a slight grin. “Our doorstep,” he corrected.
“Our doorstep?”
“You said it yourself, your kind are notoriously difficult to track, otherwise this facility would be full of them. You’re going to help me find them.”
“No, I’m not.”
“Yes, you are. Because if they come for us, then they come for you too. The only difference is, I won’t be locked in a cell wearing a magic suppressing collar around my neck. You will.”
CHAPTER TEN
The Horseman
Her name is Six, and she is not afraid of me.
It made for a refreshing change of pace, to be sure. She was testing me. We both knew it. Like a hyena, she nipped and bit at my extremities, searching for a weakness. And I allowed her to. I watched her grow more confident with each word she uttered until, all of a sudden, she was holding my eyes as if we were equals.
There was only one other person I knew of who could hold my gaze without folding into themselves like a house of cards. She was not him, and yet, she was defiant. Courageous. Bold. She was hiding something, yes, but that didn’t interest me as much as her spirit had.
As much as her lips had.
Though I had tried to shut the thoughts away, I could still feel the wash of her breath against my lips, the feel of her heart raging beneath my fingertips, the pull of lust in the pit of my stomach. Heat had risen within me, then. Heat, and want, and desire. Dangerous, dangerous… dangerous. I wasn’t used to such a powerful tide of emotions rising within me. They weren’t supposed to. I thought I had trained myself better than that.
I had been able to purge the murder urge from my heart. I had trained myself to never falter in the face of fear, to never balk when the world around me starts to collapse. I had taught myself to be a rock in a hurricane, stoic, solid, and unmovable.
But there she was.
Not a hurricane that had come to move me, but a fire burning beneath me, turning the earth to magma. The moment we started speaking, I knew, she would be trouble. I knew, she would be difficult to resist. A true test of my character. In another life, she would have made a good mate.
Fool.
I stood from my chair and strode across to the drink cabinet on the far side of my office. There, I opened a crystal decanter and poured three fingers of malt whiskey into a crystal glass. I swirled the amber liquid in my hand, and as my mind began to fall into her amber eyes, I knocked the drink back and set the glass down on the counter.
The whiskey warmed my throat and tickled my senses, providing a moment or two of clarity.
I needed her. I needed her mind, her skills, and her expertise. I did not need her body, nor did I want it. The Crimson Hunters dared encroach upon my territory, and it was my duty to fight them back. To cut them out of Devil Falls, root and ste
m, and string them up along the walls of my prison as a grim message to anyone who thought they could cross the Horseman.
I would wait for the hunters to make their first move, and then I would ride out to meet them with her in tow. She will find them for me, I will kill them all for what they are, and for what they have done to my people.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
I got sent to the hole after my meeting with the Horseman. I guessed they didn’t want me going back into the cellblock so quickly, especially after the way I’d been stunned and dragged away; in case anyone got the wrong idea.
This time, there was no Azlu to talk to. This time, my cell was a cold, dark, dank hole true to its namesake. This time, the overnight stay I’d been sentenced to threatened to attack my mind. But instead of sitting in a corner all night, waiting to be released, I used the time to think, to train, to keep my mind and my body sharp—and to work out some of the tension that had built up inside of me.
I tried to keep him out of my thoughts, but it was impossible. Something in me called to him, drew me to him. Maybe it was the strangeness of it all. He was a monster, a murderer of Outsiders, and when I wasn’t near him, rage painted all thoughts of him. And when I was near him, that same rage turned into a blazing fire that yearned to be set loose on him.
I flurried my fists against the air, pretending to box against a living, breathing opponent and imagining it was him. He was much bigger than I was, but I imagined I was faster than him. Despite the massive power behind his hooks, despite his speed, he couldn’t land a hit on me. For every punch he threw, I hit him with five.
I wanted to aim high, but his guard was higher than my reach, so I went lower down, landing punch after punch against his abdomen. Some he could block, others he couldn’t. But the blows that made it past his guard didn’t faze him as much as I would’ve liked.
I imagined that lazy, half-smile creeping across his lips, peeking from behind his hands as he held them up in front of his face. Screaming, I hurled myself at him, forcing him closer to the wall, sweat dripping down my neck, my chest. He blocked some of my hits and weaved away from others.
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