10. Jagger #2
Something flickers across her face. She lowers the crossbow an inch.
"Go home," I tell her. "This job is over."
For a long, suspended moment, she holds the weapon steady. Then she pulls the bolt from the channel, pockets it, slings the crossbow over her shoulder, and disappears behind the roofline. A few seconds later, I hear the clang of a fire escape ladder and the rapid fading of footsteps into the dark.
I push through the loading bay door. The interior of the warehouse is exactly what I expected.
Open floor plan. Crates stacked high along the walls, filled with contraband I can smell from here, hexed narcotics, stolen enchanted artifacts, black-market ward bricks.
A bare metal desk sits in the center of the space under a single harsh fluorescent light, and behind it, in a high-backed leather chair that looks absurdly corporate for a room that smells like mildew and dark magic, sits Korvan Blacktide.
He's a Naga. Eight feet of scaled, serpentine lower body coiled beneath the desk, a humanoid torso rising from the mass of blue-black scales, and a face that would be handsome if not for the vertical pupils and the forked tongue that flickers between his thin lips every few seconds, tasting the air.
He wears a tailored charcoal suit jacket over his bare body, because Nagas are vain and cold-blooded in every sense of the word, and his fingers are covered in rings that glow with minor enchantments.
Intimidation charms. Confidence boosters.
The jewelry equivalent of stuffing socks in your underwear.
Four guards flank him. Two more Goblins. A Troll with arms like tree trunks. And a Drow with white hair and a pair of curved daggers that shimmer with a poison enchantment I can smell from across the room, sweet and acrid, like burnt sugar and venom.
Korvan tilts his head, his vertical pupils narrowing as I step into the light.
"Ironjaw. You received my invitation, I see."
"The death warrant. Charming touch with the black wax seal."
"I'm a traditionalist." His tongue flickers. "I expected you to come through the roof. Or perhaps the wall. Not the front door."
"I'm trying something new."
His eyes sweep over me, lingering on my empty hands. "No weapons?"
I still have three blades strapped beneath my jacket and a collapsible war-hammer in my back holster. But my hands are empty, and that's the point. "Didn't feel like it tonight."
Korvan's mouth curves into something that isn't quite a smile.
He leans forward, and the coils beneath the desk shift with a dry, rasping sound that fills the silence.
"You've gone soft, Ironjaw. That little human mate of yours.
The accountant." The way he says the word is deliberate, loaded with a contempt that makes my runes flare hot against my ribs before I force the magic down.
"Word travels fast in the Hollowbridge District.
The great Jagger Ironjaw, domesticated. Eating oatmeal. Filing taxes."
"You should try filing taxes. Might keep you out of prison."
The smile drops. His pupils contract to slits.
"I put that warrant on you because you cost me three couriers and a distribution hub last month.
Forty thousand in product, gone. My clients are unhappy, Ironjaw.
Unhappy clients make me unhappy. And when I'm unhappy...
" He spreads his ringed fingers, and the enchantments on them pulse in unison, casting fractured light across the warehouse walls.
"I know what happens when you're unhappy.
I've been cleaning up the aftermath of your unhappiness for six years.
" I take a step forward. The Troll shifts.
The Drow's hands drift to her daggers. I stop, keep my hands loose, open.
"But here's what's going to happen instead.
You're going to pull the warrant. You're going to close your Fae credit union accounts before the SRS freezes them, which they will, because someone very smart and very thorough has already built the case.
And you're going to stop operating out of this district, because the paper trail that leads back to you is so clean and so detailed that a first-year DMI prosecutor could put you away for thirty years without breaking a sweat. "
Korvan's tongue flickers rapidly. "You're bluffing."
"I don't bluff. I break things. That's my whole personality." I pause. "But the person who built the case? She doesn't bluff either. She double-checks her work. She cross-references. She uses colored tabs."
Korvan’s eyes narrow to a new expression. Not fear, exactly. Nagas don't process fear the way mammals do. But calculation. The cold, reptilian arithmetic of cost and benefit, and I can see him running the numbers, and I can see the moment the numbers stop adding up in his favor.
"The warrant stays," he says softly. "And your little accountant... perhaps she needs a visit from someone less polite than a courier."
My body runes erupt.
Every single one. From my skull to my knuckles to the ancient glyphs spiraling down my ribs.
They blaze gold-white, so bright that the shadows in the warehouse leap and twist, and the fluorescent light above Korvan's desk pops and shatters in a shower of sparks, plunging the warehouse into a darkness lit only by me.
The war-magic surges up through my blood like lava through a fissure, and I feel it in my teeth, in my bones, in the silver piercing in my left tusk that vibrates with a frequency that makes the air itself hum.
I don't draw a weapon. I don't take a step.
I just stand there, incandescent with the oldest magic my people possess, and I let Korvan Blacktide see exactly what he is threatening.
Not me. Not the bounty hunter. Not the Orc with the blade and the reputation and the body count.
He is threatening the thing I want to go home to.
The spreadsheets and the oatmeal and the woman who told me I don't have to be dangerous in every room.
But I can be. If he makes me.
"Retract the warrant. Leave her name out of your mouth. And pray that the colorful tabs are the worst thing that finds you."
The warehouse is very quiet. The rain drums on the roof.
The Drow has drawn her daggers but makes no move to close the distance.
Korvan's coils have tightened beneath the desk until the scales creak against each other, and his ringed fingers grip the armrests of his chair, the enchantments on his jewelry flickering weak and pale against the inferno of my runes.
His tongue flickers once. Twice.
"Pull the warrant," he says to the Drow, without looking at her.
The runes dim. Not all the way. But enough. I pull the magic back like reeling in a line, coiling it down into the deep place where it lives, and the warehouse settles back into its mundane darkness, lit only by the faint glow from the open loading bay door behind me.
I turn my back on all of them and walk out.
I'm halfway across the parking lot when I hear the whisper of the bolt.
The hexfire round punches into the asphalt six inches from my left boot and detonates on impact, blossoming into a fist-sized flower of orange flame that scorches the leather and sends a wave of heat rolling up my calf.
I pivot, already dropping into a defensive crouch, and see the rooftop Orc silhouetted against the rain-grey sky.
She didn't leave. She circled back, or someone else took her position, because the build is wrong, too broad in the shoulders, and the hexfire crossbow is already racking a second bolt with the mechanical chunk of someone who's done this a thousand times.
The loading bay door explodes outward behind me.
The Troll hits me from behind like a freight train made of meat, both arms wrapping around my torso and lifting me clean off the ground with a force that drives the air from my lungs in a single brutal compression.
My ribs creak. My boots leave the wet asphalt.
He's enormous, easily a head taller than me and twice my width, and his skin has that rocky, calcite texture that Trolls develop when they've been juicing on mineral enhancement hexes, which means hitting him is going to be like punching a cliff face.
He slams me down onto the hood of a rusted delivery van parked against the warehouse wall, and the metal buckles under our combined weight, the windshield spiderwebbing from the impact as my spine connects with the engine block through two inches of corroded steel.
I should have known. Korvan is Naga. Cold-blooded in every sense.
He told the Drow to pull the warrant to my face, and the moment my back was turned, he gave the real order.
The calculation was always going to come out this way, because a Naga doesn't process the threat of future consequences when there's a simpler, bloodier solution available in the present.
The Troll leans his full weight onto me.
I feel something in my left side crack, a rib or maybe just cartilage, the pain bright and specific against the duller pressure of his mass.
His face is inches from mine, flat-nosed and granite-jawed, and his breath smells like raw quartz and the chemical tang of hex supplements.
He grins. His teeth are filed to points.
"Boss says goodbye, Ironjaw."
I headbutt him.