10. Jagger #4
The Drow raises my hammer above her head, the enchanted steel catching the firelight from the burning van, and her white hair whips in the wind of the rain, and I think about spreadsheets and chamomile tea and the precise arrangement of blueberries, and I think maybe the country house with the reading nook was always a stupid dream, but at least for a few weeks it was a dream that had someone else in it.
"Hey!"
The Drow pauses mid-swing. The Troll's grip loosens a fraction. Even the sniper on the roof seems to hesitate, the faint orange glow of his loaded bolt hovering steady against the dark sky.
I look toward the loading bay door.
Sabine stands in the doorway.
She's soaking wet. Her brown cardigan is plastered to her body, her sharp bob haircut hanging in dark, dripping curtains around her face.
In her right hand, she holds a canister of pepper spray. The commercial kind. The kind you buy at the drugstore in a three-pack. It has a pink safety cap.
In her left hand, she holds a stapler. Not a desk stapler.
An industrial office stapler, the heavy chrome kind that accounting firms use to bind quarter-inch-thick financial reports, the kind that weighs a solid two pounds and has corners sharp enough to open a letter or, apparently, serve as a melee weapon, because she's gripping it like a brick, knuckles white, arm cocked back, and her face says she has done the cost-benefit analysis on this situation and has arrived at the conclusion that someone in this parking lot is about to get stapled.
"Sabine, how did you..."
"I picked the lock." She says it the way she says everything.
Factual. Precise. Like picking the lock on a door that was specifically designed to keep her safe from exactly this situation is just another line item on her to-do list, slotted neatly between 'organize tax receipts' and 'confront murderous crime syndicate in parking lot.
' "You used a Krayburn Model 7. The manual override is on page forty-three of the user guide, which you left on the kitchen counter. "
"I left it face-down."
"I flipped it over. It was bothering me."
The Drow recovers first. She lowers the hammer, tilts her head at Sabine with the detached curiosity of a predator assessing something it doesn't quite categorize as prey, and takes a single step toward the doorway.
Sabine's eyes snap to her, and the pepper spray comes up with a steadiness that would be impressive from a trained combat operative, let alone from a five-foot-five accountant in a waterlogged cardigan who has never been in a physical altercation more serious than a disputed parking space.
"Don't. This is industrial-grade capsaicin. I checked the Scoville rating."
The Drow stops. Not because she's afraid of pepper spray. Because she's confused. And in a fight, confusion is a gap, a half-second of hesitation where the variables don't add up and the trained response stutters, and I have built my entire career on exploiting exactly that kind of gap.
But I can't move. The Troll has me locked. My runes are spent. My left arm is dead weight. The binding on my ankle has frozen my knee. The woman I love stands in a doorway full of killers with a stapler and a can of pepper spray, and I cannot move.
The second Goblin recovers his chain. He sees Sabine.
He sees the opening. He sees a small, unarmed human woman blocking the warehouse exit, and every predatory instinct in his compact, wiry body tells him the same thing it would tell any opportunistic fighter in a kill box.
Neutralize the variable. Remove the obstruction. She's nothing. She's soft. She's human.
He charges.
Goblin muscle launches across the parking lot directly at Sabine, the barbed chain spinning up in a wide arc above his head, the binding hex glowing blue along its length, and his filed teeth are bared in a snarl that would send most people scrambling backward through the doorway and into the relative safety of the warehouse interior.
Sabine doesn't scramble backward.
Sabine raises the pepper spray.
Something inside me detonates.
Not the runes. Not the war-magic. Something older.
Something deeper. Something that predates the tattoos and the training and the centuries of Orcish battle tradition, something that lives in the marrow of my bones and my skull where the thinking stops and the ancient, thundering machinery of what I am takes over.
The runes don't flare gold. They go red.
A deep, arterial red that pulses in time with a heartbeat I can no longer feel as my own, and the light that pours off my body isn't warm anymore but scorching, nuclear, a heat that makes the rain sizzle and evaporate on my skin before it can reach me.
My vision narrows. The parking lot disappears.
The warehouse. The sniper. The Drow. The rain and the fire and the broken asphalt and the burning van.
All of it falls away until there is nothing left in the world but the Goblin sprinting toward Sabine and the sound of the chain whistling through the air and the absolute, irrevocable, galaxy-collapsing certainty that if that chain touches her I will tear this city apart with my bare hands and salt the earth where it stood.
The Troll's arms are still around me.
They don't matter anymore.