11. Sabine
SABINE
Idon't see him move.
One second the Troll has him pinned, with mottled green muscle wrapped around Jagger's torso like a living straightjacket, and the next second the Troll is airborne.
Not stumbling. Not pushed. Airborne. The sound his body makes when it hits the corrugated steel wall of the warehouse is something between a thunderclap and a car accident, a wet structural crunch that dents the metal inward and leaves a Troll-shaped crater in the siding before he slides down into a boneless heap on the asphalt, unconscious before he lands.
The Goblin is still running at me. The barbed chain whips through its arc.
I have the pepper spray up and my thumb on the trigger, and some distant, analytical part of my brain is calculating the spray radius versus the chain's reach and arriving at a deeply unfavorable conclusion when Jagger crosses the distance between us in three strides that shouldn't be physically possible for something his size.
He doesn't punch the Goblin. He catches the chain mid-swing, wraps it once around his fist, and yanks. The Goblin comes with it, it’s jerked off his feet like a dog hitting the end of its leash, and Jagger's other hand closes around the back of his neck with a grip that makes the tendons in his forearm stand out like bridge cables.
For one terrible, suspended moment, he holds the Goblin there at arm's length, dangling, the creature's filed teeth snapping at empty air and his clawed feet kicking six inches above the pavement, and the red glow pouring off Jagger's runes is so bright it turns the rain to steam and casts hard shadows across the parking lot like a flare.
Then he throws him. Not at the wall. At the ground. Straight down, like he's spiking a football, and the asphalt cracks in a spiderweb pattern under the impact. The Goblin doesn't get up.
The silence that follows is enormous. It fills the entire parking lot, swallowing the hiss of the rain and the distant crackle of the burning van and the labored breathing of every conscious body within fifty yards.
Jagger stands between me and the warehouse with both fists clenched and the chain still wrapped around his left hand, trailing barbed links across the wet ground, and every single rune on his body is pulsing that deep, terrible red that turns his grey skin almost black in contrast. His silver tusk-piercings flash in the firelight. The rain hits him and evaporates.
The Drow with the hammer takes one look at him, sets the weapon down very carefully on the asphalt, and puts both hands flat on her head.
The second Drow, the one who was circling for a flank, does the same.
The remaining Goblins, four of them still conscious and scattered around the parking lot in various states of injury, follow suit with a speed that suggests they have surrendered to law enforcement before and know exactly what the protocol looks like.
Nobody speaks.
Jagger doesn't acknowledge the surrender.
His eyes, which are usually a warm amber that reminds me of good whiskey and afternoon sunlight through curtains, are completely black.
Pupils have swallowed the iris. He stands there breathing in great, ragged pulls, staring at the spot where the Goblin was running at me, as though the threat is still there and he's daring it to reconstitute.
"Jagger. They surrendered."
Nothing. The runes pulse. Red. Red. Red.
"Jagger." I lower the pepper spray and take a step toward him, which feels a bit like approaching a reactor in a meltdown, but the logical part of my brain, the part that hasn't been obliterated by adrenaline, notes with clinical precision that his body is angled entirely in front of mine, shielding me, and that even in whatever berserker fugue state he's entered, every line of his massive frame is oriented toward protection rather than attack.
He isn't hunting. He's guarding. There's a difference, and it matters, and my body knows it even if my racing pulse hasn't caught up yet.
I reach out and touch his arm.
The effect is immediate. The red glow flickers, sputters, and fades back to gold before dimming entirely, receding into the intricate whorls and spirals of ink like embers banking in a hearth.
His breathing changes. Still rough, still ragged, but the rhythm shifts from combat cadence to something more human, or more Orcish, or whatever the correct term is for someone who has just torn through six armed supernatural combatants in under thirty seconds and is now trying to remember what century he's in.
His eyes find mine. The black recedes. Amber floods back in, warm and wild and so full of raw, undiluted terror that it stops my breath.
"Hi," I say, because I don't know what else to say to a seven-foot Orc whose runic tattoos are still smoking faintly in the rain.
"We're leaving," he says.
"My car is..."
"We're leaving now."
He walks. I don't protest, partly because protesting seems futile when you're being carried by an Orc in full berserker afterglow and partly because my legs genuinely might not support me at the moment and partly, if I'm being forensically honest with myself, because his body against mine in the cold rain feels so outrageously, overwhelmingly safe that some traitorous animal part of my brain has gone completely limp and refuses to generate a single actionable objection.
He carries me the entire way home.
Not to the car. Home. Fourteen blocks through the rain, past closed storefronts and late-night food carts and a 24-hour laundromat where a startled Pixie drops her basket of clean clothes at the sight of a massive, illuminated, blood-spattered Orc carrying a small human woman through the downpour like a war prize.
The Pixie's laundry scatters across the wet sidewalk.
Jagger doesn't notice. I mouth "sorry" over his shoulder as we pass.
The lecture starts at block three.
"Do you have any idea what a barbed binding chain does to human skin?"
"I brought pepper spray."
"Pepper spray." He says the words like they personally offend him. Like the concept of capsaicin as a defensive mechanism has committed a crime against his entire ancestral line. "A Goblin war-chain can strip flesh to the bone in a single pass and you brought pepper spray."
"Industrial grade. I checked the..."
"The Scoville rating, yes, you mentioned that, while standing in a doorway surrounded by six armed supernatural mercenaries, any one of which could have killed you before the spray left the canister."
He's terrified.
"You could have died." His jaw works. The silver piercings catch the streetlight as we pass under a lamp. "You picked my lock, walked into a combat zone, and stood in front of a charging Goblin with office supplies."
"The stapler is very heavy. It's a Swingline 747."
"Sabine."
He hugs me to him.
"I couldn't stay in the apartment. I traced the money trail. I found the address. I knew you were walking into a setup and I couldn't just sit there organizing your receipts while..."
"While I handled the situation I am specifically trained to handle?"
"While you got killed. You absolute walnut."
His stride falters. Just for a second. Half a step where his boot catches on the wet pavement and his arms readjust around me, and when I pull back far enough to see his face, the expression on it is something I have no spreadsheet for.
No column. No category. No neat, colorful label in my filing system that accounts for the way a massive, battle-scarred Orc bounty hunter looks at you when you call him a walnut in the rain after almost dying together in a parking lot.
"A walnut," he repeats.
"You heard me."
He observes at me for a long moment, rain streaming down his face, the last faint traces of gold flickering in the lines of his tattoos, and his eyes change. Something that was holding, bracing, maintaining distance. It gives way.
He carries me up the stairs without another word.
The apartment door is still open from my dramatic exit, which I'm going to have to address at some point from a home security perspective, but right now Jagger kicks it shut behind us and sets me down on the kitchen counter, not the floor, the counter, which puts my face roughly level with his throat and does absolutely nothing to diminish the scale of him.
He stands between my knees and braces his hands on the counter on either side of my hips, caging me in, and his arms are shaking.
Visibly. The heavy muscles of his forearms trembling with the sustained effort of coming down from whatever primal state he entered in that parking lot.
"You're shaking," I say.
"Adrenaline dump."
"You should sit down."
"I'm fine."
"You're not fine. Your pupils are still dilated and your respiration rate is..."
"Sabine." He leans forward. The movement brings his face close enough that I can see individual raindrops caught in his eyebrows and the fading glow in the deepest lines of his tattoos and the way his jaw is clenched so hard the muscle jumps visibly beneath his grey skin.
"Stop analyzing my vitals and let me look at you. "
I stop talking.
He looks at me. His eyes move over my face with a thoroughness that would feel clinical from anyone else but from him feels like something entirely different, something that catalogues and memorizes and commits to permanent storage, and his gaze catches on the small cut on my cheekbone where flying asphalt must have nicked me during the fight.
I hadn't even noticed it. He notices it. His whole body goes rigid.
"You're hurt."
"It's a scratch."