Three people cleared the top of the ravine. Two men, one thin to the point of being scrawny, the other wearing leathers and holding a dog leash, and a woman, tall, muscular, and with hard eyes. The slaver scouts. Hello there.
The dog was almost to him, running fast on massive paws, rugged, big-boned, bred to kill a pack of wolves and get home in one piece. Fifty feet. Thirty.
Richard squeezed the emitter. The sound, too high for human ears, lanced at the dog’s sensitive eardrums.
The beast halted.
“Get ’im!” the slaver with the leash yelled. “Get! Get!”
The wolfripper bared big teeth.
Richard squeezed the emitter again, holding the switch for a few painful seconds.
The dog whined and trotted over to the side, circling behind him.
The scrawny slaver on the right of the dog handler swore and pulled a gun from his waistband. Slavers were opportunistic thugs—most of them had barely enough magic to be born in the Weird or the Edge but not enough to succeed at life. They evened the odds with cruelty and Broken contraband weapons, counting on the element of surprise.
The slaver pointed the gun at Richard. He was young, blond, and the way he held the weapon, sideways, made Richard’s head hurt.
“We need him alive, you moron,” the dog handler said.
“Dude, fuck that.” The black barrel stared in Richard’s face. “I’ll take him out right now.”
“Is he an apprentice?” Richard asked, bracing himself.
“What?” The woman stared at him.
“Is he a scumbag in training?” Richard glanced at the gunman. “At least have the decency to hold the gun properly, you fool. If you don’t know how, pass it to someone who does. I’m not going to suffer being shot at by anything less than a full-fledged lowlife.”
The shooter sputtered. “Screw you.”
The gun barked, the sound booming through the woods.
Richard flashed, panning his magic in a defensive screen. Translucent white magic pulsed, forming a half sphere in front of him for a second, just long enough to knock the bullet aside. Even at full health, he couldn’t maintain the shield for longer than a moment, but with the right timing, it was enough. He used to flash blue, but being in the Weird had improved his magical strength.
The slaver spat another curse and fired, squeezing the trigger in a rapid rhythm. Boom, boom, boom.
Richard flashed, matching the cadence of shots a moment before they rang out. The white screen pulsed, deflecting the projectiles.
Boom, boom, boom.
A sharp yelp cut through the shots. The gun clicked. The man was out of ammunition.
Richard turned. The dog had fallen. The idiot had shot their own dog. That’s what happened when the destructive potential of a man’s weapons exceeded his intelligence.
“What the hell did you do that for?” The dog handler stared at the dog panting in pain on the grass. “You’re taking the heat for this one. There’s no way the fine’s coming out of my pocket.”
“Damn it.” The gunman shoved the gun back into his belt.
“Could’ve told you that,” the woman said. She was the tallest of the three and had the rawboned build of an experienced fighter. “Bullets aren’t going to hurt a blueblood.”
He wasn’t a blueblood. Far from it. Richard pondered the three slavers. “So far you’ve shot your own dog and wasted twelve bullets. Any other attempts to dazzle me with your superior fighting skills?”
“We have to go down there and get him,” the woman said.
The two slavers looked at him. Neither moved.
“No,” the dog handler said.
“It’s a bad idea,” the thug with the gun added.
“Oh, you whiny bitches.” The woman shook her head. “Look at him, he’s fifteen years older than you and barely standing. He’ll probably bleed out before I get down there.”
Richard let himself sway. It wasn’t exactly difficult in his current condition. He needed all three of them within striking distance because the trees were threatening to melt again.
“I’m going down there,” the woman said. “And just so you know, whatever bonus I get, I’m not sharing.”She started down the slope. The thug with the gun spat to the side and followed her. The dog handler looked at Richard for a long moment and descended after them.
The woman pulled a lean, long sword from her sheath. The dog handler brandished an axe with a short handle. The third slaver pulled out a baton.
Richard fought to stay upright. A drop of blood dripped down from the saturated fabric of his doublet and fell onto the pine needles. Another . . .
The woman struck. She was tall and fast, with sure footing and a good reach. In the split second between reading the intent in her eyes and her body processing it, Richard released his magic. It stretched in a thin lethal line over his blade, coating its edge. He stepped forward, avoiding her lunge, and cut in a savage overhand stroke across her arm. The flash-coated sword sliced through human sinew and bone like sharp scissors through tissue paper. The severed limb fell to the ground.
Before she managed to produce a scream, Richard buried his blade in the chest of the dog handler, piercing the heart, freed it with a tug, turned, and struck backward, sliding his blade along his side into the third slaver’s groin.
The woman finally screamed. He beheaded her with one sharp stroke, spun, and finished the scrawny slaver with a single vicious cut to the throat.
Three bodies fell to the ground.
Richard’s head swam. His legs gave out. He dropped to one knee, thrusting the sword into the ground and holding on to it like a crutch. What should’ve taken three cuts had required five. “Simply embarrassing,” he whispered. Two red drops splashed onto the green leaves—his blood. The brush around him was stained with it—some of it his, some of it from the slavers.
The dog whined next to him. Richard focused and saw two brown eyes looking at him with a silent canine plea.
“I’m sorry, boy. I can’t help you.”
Richard forced himself up and staggered forward, to the boundary.
The magic enveloped him, crushing, squeezing, as if the air itself had grown heavy and viscous. His body screamed in protest, feeling a part of its magic being stripped away. The Edge was his limit. He’d tried to enter the Broken once and nearly died. The very magic that made him good with his sword kept him anchored. It felt like he was dying now, but he would survive. He just had to keep going. One foot in front of the other.
A step.
Another step.
The magic licked his skin with a serrated tongue, and the pressure vanished. He was through.
The forest swayed around him, the trees sliding to the side. Richard stumbled forward. Cold slid along his skin. His leg muscles trembled, struggling to support his weight. Cotton clogged his ears, followed by a deep, overpowering nausea. He crashed, half-blind, through the brush.
The swamp clearing stretched before him. The slavers lay dead, delivered by his blade to the afterlife. He dashed from hole to hole. Dead children looked back at him with opaque eyes.
“Sophie! Sophie!”
“Here!” His niece’s voice sounded so weak.
“Where are you?” Holes filled with children slumped in the muddy water. He checked each one, sprinting back and forth in panic. A corpse. Another corpse. She was here, somewhere. He had to find her.
The world turned black. He ripped through the darkness by sheer will and saw the edge of a dirt road running through the woods, little more than two tire tracks with a strip of grass growing between them. He wasn’t sure if it was real or a remnant of some memory.
The blackness smothered him.
Richard clenched his teeth and crawled toward the road. This was not the end. He wouldn’t be dying now. He had things to do.
The rain-drenched clearing with its cypresses swam into his view.
“Help me!” Sophie called.
He stumbled over the bodies of slavers, tracking her voice.
“Help me!”
I’m trying, he wanted to tell her. I’m trying, sweetheart. Hold on. Wait for me.
The darkness stomped on the back of his head. The world vanished.
* * *
CHARLOTTE surveyed the groceries laid out on the island of her kitchen. Almost done. Only the big log of ground beef was left. She sliced it with a knife into five equal portions—each one would be enough for a dinner for one with leftovers for lunch—and began wrapping them in plastic.
The first time she’d hired an Edger to bring her groceries from the Broken, the woman had delivered a big pack of ground beef. Charlotte had frozen the whole thing as it was, in the wrapper. Unfortunately, it turned out that once you defrosted the beef in the microwave, it wasn’t safe to refreeze it again. She ended up throwing half of the meat out. Lesson learned.
Cooking was just one of the things she had to learn in the Edge. At Ganer College, staff prepared her meals, and at her estate, she had employed a cook. Charlotte sighed at the memory. She’d never truly appreciated Colin until she had to fend for herself in the kitchen. Éléonore had given her a cookbook, and if Charlotte followed the recipes exactly, the result was passable, occasionally even tasty. Decades spent learning to mix medicines ensured that she had good technique and paid attention, but if she didn’t have the exact ingredients on hand, trying to substitute things ended in complete disaster. A few weeks ago she watched Éléonore make banana bread. It was all “a handful of flour” and “a dash of cinnamon” and “add mashed bananas until it looks right.” Charlotte had dutifully written everything down, and when she’d tried to re-create the recipe, she ended up with a salty loaf-shaped rock.
She’d learned other lessons as well. Being humble. Living a simpler life. The dark magic inside her had long fallen dormant, and that was just the way she liked it.
Bright sunlight spilled through the open window, drawing warm rectangles on the kitchen floor. The day was beautiful. The air smelled of spring and honeysuckle. When she finished, she would go outside and read on her porch swing. And have a nice glass of iced tea. Mmm, tea would hit the spot.