9. Sabine
SABINE
The change in him is immediate and total.
One moment we are sitting on my living room floor surrounded by crumpled receipts and half-eaten containers of pad thai, and the next he is standing at the door with his back to me like a wall of grey brick, his shoulders drawn up and locked, the lines on his forearms pulsing in a rhythm I haven't seen before.
Not the slow, warm amber of irritation or the bright flicker he gets when the Snarbo chews on his boots.
This is different. This is a deep, sullen red, like banked coals, steady and dangerous, and it makes the hair on the back of my neck stand straight up.
"Jagger?" I set down my legal pad. The pen rolls off the edge and hits the carpet without a sound. "What is that?"
He doesn't answer. He's reading something, a sheet of dark paper that seems to drink the light from the room the way a sponge drinks water, and his jaw is clenched so hard I can see the muscle jumping beneath the slate-grey skin of his cheek.
He folds the paper in half. Then in quarters.
Then he slides it into the back pocket of his jeans with a motion so deliberately casual it might as well be a flashing neon sign that reads SOMETHING IS VERY WRONG.
When he turns around, his face is blank, wiped clean of everything except a flat, neutral calm that I recognize because I use the same expression every April when a client tells me they haven't filed taxes in six years.
"Nothing. Wrong address. Junk mail."
"Junk mail."
"Yeah."
"Junk mail that was hand-delivered by a faceless courier in a coat made of actual darkness."
"Aggressive marketing." He steps away from the door and walks toward the kitchen island.
The Snarbo has pressed itself flat against the floor with all his eyes squeezed shut, which is exactly what it did the morning the bounty target crashed through my window.
The creature is afraid. Jagger is lying.
And I am an accountant who has spent eleven years reading the body language of people who are hiding things they don't want me to find, and I am very, very good at my job.
I stand up. I cross the room. I plant myself directly in his path, which requires me to tilt my head back at an angle that borders on the ridiculous because he is six feet and six inches of solid Orc and I am five feet and five inches of determined human woman in a cardigan and comfortable flats, and I hold out my hand, palm up.
"Give it to me."
"Sabine."
"The paper. In your back pocket. Give it to me right now."
"It's nothing you need to worry about."
"Jagger Ironjaw, I am a forensic accountant. I have uncovered fourteen cases of criminal tax fraud, three Ponzi schemes, and a supernatural money laundering operation that involved a network of enchanted vending machines. I am professionally trained to worry about things. Give. Me. The paper."
He exhales through his nose. The sound is enormous, like a bellows collapsing, and his shoulders drop half an inch, and he reaches into his back pocket and pulls out the folded black paper and places it in my palm with the careful reluctance of a man handing over a loaded weapon to someone who has never held one.
The paper is cold. Not cold like it's been sitting in a drafty hallway.
Cold like something fundamental has been leeched out of it, like the temperature of the material itself was based on intent.
I unfold it, and the creases are sharp and exact because even when he is trying to hide something from me, Jagger folds things neatly, and the words on the inside glow a deep, wet red against the black surface, and they are written in a script I don't recognize but can somehow read, and they say:
JAGGER IRONJAW. BY ORDER OF THE TEETH OF VAREK. YOUR BLOOD IS CLAIMED. YOUR BONES ARE OWED. YOU HAVE SEVEN DAYS.
Below the text is a symbol. A serpent, coiled tight, consuming its own eye. And below that, a single name, written in smaller script, almost an afterthought, but my trained eye catches it immediately because it is the kind of detail that matters.
Korvan Blacktide.
"Who is Korvan Blacktide?"
Jagger's jaw tightens. His forearms pulse brighter.
"Crime lord. Runs the eastern docks. Smuggling, black market enchantments, unlicensed soul-binding operations.
" He pauses. "I brought in his nephew three weeks ago.
Bounty was clean. Legal warrant. Kid was running a hexed fentanyl ring through the university district, selling cursed product to human teenagers. I did my job."
"And Blacktide took it personally."
"Blacktide takes everything personally."
I look down at the paper again. My hands are not shaking.
They should be shaking, because I am holding a literal death warrant issued by a magical crime lord against the Orc who is legally, magically, and bureaucratically bound to me by blood-magic ink on Form 8B, and if he dies, I go to supernatural prison for a decade for bond violation, and also, I assume with a clarity that hits me like a freight train, I do not want him to die for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with prison and everything to do with the quiet way he reads his paperback novels with his knees drawn up and his brow furrowed in concentration, and the careful way he peels hard-boiled eggs, and the fact that he organized his bounty receipts by stuffing them into a grocery bag and writing "drove a lot" on a napkin, and I cannot lose the person who does these things because the world would be objectively, measurably worse without him in it.
The panic arrives all at once. Not a slow build.
Not a creeping dread. A wall of pure, ice-cold terror that slams into me so hard my vision tunnels at the edges and my breath catches in my throat like a physical blockage, and I am suddenly, violently aware of every risk variable in this equation.
Magical crime lord. Professional assassins.
Seven days. The man standing in front of me has a massive target on his back, and we are in my apartment with its beige walls and IKEA furniture and a chore wheel with colored labels on the refrigerator, and none of these things will stop a killer.
Not even the chore wheel. Not even if I've laminated it.
"Seven days. Jagger, this is a death threat. An actual, formal, magically sealed death threat. From an actual crime lord."
"Yeah." He says it the way someone might confirm the weather forecast.
"You need to go to the authorities. The DMI. The Supernatural Crimes Division. Someone with jurisdiction and weapons and, and body armor."
"Blacktide owns half the SCD. And the DMI doesn't handle bounty disputes. I've dealt with death warrants before. I'll handle it."
"You'll handle it. You'll handle the magical crime lord who has formally claimed your blood and your bones. By yourself. With, what, your sword and your winning personality?"
"I've got more than a sword."
"Oh, wonderful. A sword and a Snarbo. I feel so much better."
He almost smiles. Almost. The corner of his mouth twitches, and the silver tusk piercing shifts, and for a fraction of a second the red glow of his runes softens to something warmer, and I want to scream because he is not taking this seriously enough and I am taking it too seriously and somewhere in the middle there is a rational response and I cannot find it through the roaring static of fear in my skull.
"Sabine." He uncrosses his arms. He takes a single step toward me, and the floor creaks under his weight, and he stops, leaving exactly eighteen inches between us, which I know because I have become pathologically aware of the precise distance between my body and his at all times.
"I need you to stay here. Lock the door.
Don't open it for anyone. I'll set the ward glyphs on the windows before I go. You'll be safe."
"Before you go where?"
"To find Blacktide before he finds me."
"No." The word exits my mouth before my brain approves it, which is a thing that has been happening with alarming frequency since this man entered my life. "Absolutely not. You are not walking into a crime lord's territory alone with nothing but a vague plan and a death wish."
"I don't have a death wish."
"You have a napkin that says 'drove a lot' where your mileage log should be. You absolutely have a death wish."
He blinks. His eyes tighten, something complicated and raw that he buries almost immediately beneath that flat, professional calm, but I see it.
I see it because I have been studying his face for days now, cataloging his micro-expressions the way I catalog financial anomalies, and I have become fluent in the silent language of Jagger Ironjaw, and what I just saw was surprise.
Genuine, unguarded surprise that someone is arguing with him about his own survival.
I set the death warrant down on the kitchen island.
I smooth it flat with both hands, because touching something terrible is easier when you can flatten the creases and make it organized.
Then I walk to the living room, lift my laptop from the coffee table, and carry it back to the island and open it.
"What are you doing?" His arms stay at his sides, his huge frame motionless except for the steady pulse of his runes.
"My job." I pull up the forensic accounting database I'm still licensed to access through my firm's VPN, the one with the cross-referenced financial tracking tools and the supernatural entity search function that cost the company forty thousand dollars and that nobody else in the office knows how to use properly.
"Korvan Blacktide. Eastern docks. Smuggling and black market enchantments.
If he's running operations at that scale, he has a money trail.
Everyone has a money trail. Even magical crime lords have to pay for things.
Warehouse leases, shipping manifests, utility bills.
The IRS doesn't care if you're trafficking hexed narcotics.
They care if you're reporting the income. "
"Sabine, you don't need to..."