скачать книгу бесплатно
“What?”
“You heard me. You get it back if you bag the Soul-Thief.”
A tremor of hungry need shoots through Shane, piercing the ice somehow, and he growls, “Get out.”
The door slamming is too much for the frame, and the glass shatters. Cold wind blows in, fierce and shocking, but it does little to affect Shane. He doesn’t even bother to do up his pants, staring instead at the closed door, hearing the words reverberating through his skull.
You get it back.
Those might be the words, but the meaning…
Oh, the meaning is a bit different.
You get him back.
Shane flicks on the TV and with a surge of power it changes from a teenage girl crying about her boyfriend not wanting to be a father to the inside of a martial arts studio. A dozen kids slowly punch and kick their way through beginner karate, calling out phrases in a language they don’t speak as their pudgy little bodies struggle not to topple over.
The instructor, obviously, doesn’t see it that way. “Good! Nice improvement. Keep your leg up, Jenny. Remember, keep that power in your core! Nice flexibility, wow, Jason, you’ve been practicing!”
Shane vaguely remembers watching Drake and not feeling pain. Now, pain is all he really feels.
His hair is short, which is always a startling reminder of how much time has passed, along with the short-cropped beard on his face, and the slight lines around his eyes, across his forehead. That’s right, he’s different now. It doesn’t matter that it’s only been a week since the last time he saw Drake in person. In Shane’s mind, Drake always looks like he did back then, when everything was good.
The image zooms in on Drake’s face, heartbreakingly familiar, and his eyes flicker suddenly, looking at the spell Shane’s using in place of a camera. Very quietly, out of the corner of his mouth, he mutters, “Stop it. I can feel you watching me.”
Shane doesn’t stop. He doesn’t bother to respond, by whispering into his ear or sending a chill breeze to hit him in the face. His continued presence is enough of a message.
It’s not like he can stop anyway. All right, he probably could, but he has no desire to. It doesn’t matter if Drake is angry with him, after all. He’s always angry.
You get it back.
The hunts have been boring lately. It’s always difficult to remind himself why he should bother climbing up the rankings when he’s already at the top, has been for five years, and nothing’s even a challenge anymore. But eighty points…
That’s got to be challenging, at least a bit. Fae creatures are only fifteen, and they’re the only big game the city sees on a semi-regular basis. It’s been nearly a decade since there’s been a bill posted for something over twenty, and Shane knows damned well that that hundred-point creature has never been caught.
Well, not in the traditional sense, with his head in a bag.
For a minute, Shane contemplates ignoring even this chance, just flopping onto his bed and letting the chill wind lull him to sleep, maybe not even getting up. It’s better than false hope. It’s better than being stupid enough to believe that something could change for the better after all this time.
On the TV, Drake turns to give some fat kid some praise, and his smile is the most genuine thing Shane’s ever seen. That spark of pain in his chest flares, and he chokes with how much it hurts.
“Fuck it,” he mutters, grabbing a coat he doesn’t need and a pistol he doesn’t need and a sword he does. “Gotta be better than staying here.”
Then again, anything would be.
Chapter Two (#uaf1edef8-3881-5a51-8364-0d3d50bc5ccb)
Finally, the sense of Shane’s presence around his face vanishes. Drake Young breathes a sigh of not-quite-relief, turning his full attention back to the kids. “You’re a little weak on your left side,” he says with a poke to the child in question, illustrating the blind spot. “Make sure to keep your guard up.”
They’ve all got such adoration in their eyes. Maybe he craves that a little too much, he admits to himself. It’s nice to be liked. “All right. That’s enough for the day. Practice the warm-up drill tomorrow, and I’ll see you Thursday night.”
They bow, uneven and exhausted, but with grins on their faces. A couple of them run up after class for a high-five, which he readily obliges. He checks his watch, but there’s time, barely. He hops in the shower for a few minutes, always feeling that prickle of hesitation like he does every time he strips off, never sure if Shane’s going to be watching.
What the hell, let him. Not like it’s anything he hasn’t seen before.
It isn’t Shane, but his downstairs neighbor Deborah waiting for him when he gets to the door, a smile hovering uncertainly on her face. “Oh, good. I wasn’t sure you’d still be here.”
“Still here. Leaving now.”
“Mind if I catch a ride home?”
He does, but nods anyway, mentally forgoing his plan to get groceries on the way home. “No problem. If you want, I’ll go warm up the car.”
“I don’t mind a little cold.” Deborah looks at him with naked hope in her eyes, trotting after his long legs into the cold night air. “I thought you only had classes until six.”
“Most days. Monday nights I teach self-defense, and Tuesday I just added an extra karate class for beginners.”
He wishes he could banish the admiration she shows him. He doesn’t deserve it, he knows that better than anyone. “You work so hard. How do you still have time to volunteer for the church every day?”
“You make time, for the things you love.” At least it isn’t a long drive to the apartment complex they share. On the down side, the heater doesn’t really start kicking in until they’re halfway home, tires crunching steadily over fresh snow.
“Ploughs haven’t come through yet. I’m sorry, I wouldn’t have bothered you, but it’s hell getting a taxi when it’s this cold out.”
“I don’t mind. How’s your younger sister? Still in the hospital?”
“I can’t believe you remember that.”
Stop looking at me like that. I’m not what you want. “I just wish the best for all you and yours. You’re both in my prayers.”
It’s probably because he’s preoccupied with wondering if he’s going to find a drunken Shane on his doorstep, or trying to navigate the powdery white roads, or trying to figure out how to subtly hint to Deborah that there’s no tree farther than him from the one she wants to be barking up, that he doesn’t hear the sound until too late.
For a split second, Drake thinks he’s lost control of the car, and it’s gone slamming into a brick wall. Deborah screams, and he has just enough time to realize that if they’d hit something they’d have slowed down, or stopped moving, when whatever’s grabbed them yanks the car sideways, sending them into a roll.
Then they hit a wall, with an absolute, final crunch. It’s difficult to orient himself, but Drake thinks he’s upside down, and not too badly damaged to keep living. He tastes blood, but that’s probably just the inside of his mouth, bitten during the crash, and he blinks bleary eyes, focusing on the slender form of the woman in the passenger seat. “Deborah? You okay?”
“I—” She coughs, but nods. “I th-think so. What did we hit?”
Drake starts to answer, but at the surge of movement outside his shattered windows, his voice dries up into one word. “That.”
The creature is massive, swelling to the size of a house, its shining black chitin the only thing he can see at this hour, in this light. More frightening than anything, it moves in total silence, its legs not even making noise as they touch the ground, and it rips the passenger-side door off its hinges with a single wrench of one arm.
Deborah doesn’t scream. Her eyes are wide as dinner plates, and her breath is trembling in her lungs, but she seems to be beyond screaming. She’s shuddering, and Drake doesn’t wait for those arms—how many does it have?—to come down again. He yanks at the catch on his seat, collapsing it backward with a wrench of his back, and fumbles in the backseat for the long cloth-covered bundle he knows is back there, strapped in securely, never more than an arm’s reach away.
For, you know, situations exactly like this.
His hand closes around the hilt, and he shuts his eyes on reflex at the usual blinding flash. Instantly, the minor cuts and bruises seem like nothing at all, the shaking he hadn’t even noticed banished, and strength surges through him as he cleaves through the warped metal of the door, hacking himself an escape hole.
The damn thing moves silently, and that’s not only creepy as all hell, it’s dangerous too. It doesn’t telegraph its moves, doesn’t let him know where it’s going, give any of the usual indicators that he sort of needs to be able to fight it.
“Drake!” Deborah screams, seeing one of the arms coming down towards her, eyes fixed on it rather than on him.
He vaults over the overturned car with a massive leap, arms swinging down with sword in tow, hammering down at the outstretched appendage. It looks more like a tentacle than an arm with the way it moves, but the hard slippery shell shouldn’t be that flexible, that’s not fair.
“Dra—” Deborah starts to yell again, then stops, stunned, seeing him land on the other side of the car, shining broadsword in his hands. He aims for the outstretched arm, but the damn thing is fast, dodging to the side. At least he’s bought Deborah a couple seconds. “Deborah! Get out of here, fast as you can!”
Usually, running away is the right choice for humans. For all the big talk of bravery in popular fiction through the ages, Drake knows very well that there are things in the world—most of them, really—that it’s just better to run away from.
Whatever the hell this thing is, he’s ninety nine percent sure it’s one of them. “Hey!” he shouts, running around to the thing’s other side, spreading his arms to present a bigger target, no matter how it strains his muscles to hold the broadsword one-handed. “You come here for me? I’m right here.”
From this angle, he has a better view of the thing, and vehemently wishes he didn’t. It’s tall enough that the hunch of its back brushes against the streetlights, with a perfectly round, un-segmented body. The curve of its chitinous shell makes for a totally spherical body, shimmering sleek black in the streetlights, reflecting the red and green of the flashing stoplights in the intersection. The legs are another thing entirely, shooting up to hold that oddly round body ten or so yards above the ground, moving fluidly around as though only vaguely connected to the body proper.
Drake swallows hard. Whatever this thing is, it’s nothing he’s faced before. For a moment, he can’t help the thought that it would be really nice to have a certain man at his back, guarding his weak side, or even just encouraging him while they pelt headlong into danger together, but he squashes that thought. He’s been fine on his own for years now. And he’s got the scars to prove it, he thinks sourly, and dodges just in time to avoid a swipe of those eerily silent legs.
Too late, Drake realizes that he’s more hampered by the lack of sound than he’d thought. No matter how fast he avoids one arm, the thing has another coming at him, not even whistling through the air as it strikes him in the back. Itfastens on to him, even through his clothes, and something sharp stabs him in the spine, slender as a needle’s prick and infinitely more painful.
Far more disturbing, he feels another attack, more subtle, more dangerous, the kind of thing he hasn’t felt in years, seeping into his body from that tiny stab wound. For a moment, everything is silence, and he can see his body from behind, a pathetic human thing, facing something a hundred times larger than himself, slowly going limp. The silence steals over everything, quieting the ever-present pain, the guilt, the anger that’s so much a part of him it just feels like background noise.
Then, the sword in his hand blazes. The light shocks him, intensely, offensively bright, hurting him even in his spirit form, worse still to the spherical creature. It shrieks, a horrible soundless cry that reverberates through everything nearby, rattling his bones. He snaps back into his body with a shock, hand tingling where it grips his sword, and he spares a quick moment to send up a prayer of thanks.
It’s the only polite response, after all.
Feeling oddly energized Drake leaps forward, launching himself with a fierce bellow as he swings, and has the satisfaction of hearing that arm break, shattered and torn by the sword’s sharp edge.
He starts to grin, but stops. There’s no one to grin at.
The creature shrieks again, yanking its severed arm back towards itself in obvious pain, scuttling awkwardly on its five remaining legs off to the side.
“I see now,” Drake mutters, loud enough for the thing’s benefit. “You’re not some new import from Fae. You’re not an escaped pet of some stupid mage. You’re just a big ugly bug.”
He can almost hear the jokes his own stupid mage would make—would have made, he reminds himself, and even having the thought makes him angry enough to leap at the bug again, scoring a long line down another thick arm, snarling savagely as oddly pink blood gushes forth.
It runs, dashing down the streets faster than a creature of that size should be able to, and Drake thinks for a second that it’s all flailing limbs in pain, before he hears a breathy, high-pitched shriek.
The arm wrenches away from Deborah’s back, something ephemeral and oddly blurry in a way real objects aren’t, and Drake’s heart clenches. He sees her drop, lifeless and uncaring, to the ground.
Drake sheathes the sword on his back, taking the time to at least prop Deborah’s body up in the remains of the car, checking to see that yes, she still has a pulse.
“Don’t worry,” he promises, “I’ll get it back. I’ll make sure you don’t have to live like this.”
No matter who she is, what his personal feelings, she doesn’t deserve this. No one does.
He straightens up, mutters, “Please, guide my feet,” and takes off at a dead run, long legs carrying him through the unnaturally dark streets, courtesy of the broken streetlights.
Damned if he’s going to let someone else lose a soul because of him.
First Interlude (#uaf1edef8-3881-5a51-8364-0d3d50bc5ccb)
Nine Years Earlier
Shane can’t help butlaugh as he tosses power around, swelling with the heady exhilaration of it, of feeling so unstoppable. “Finally,” he calls, giddy under the thunderstorm that rages all around them, “you’re putting up something like a fight!”
Drake grabs his shoulder, sheltered with him in the eye of the storm artificially created by Shane’s shields. “Don’t get cocky,” he warns before slicing down one of Kaliga’s minions, putting a sword through his chest and a bullet through his head when he reanimates in a flash of white. “He still might have another trick up his sleeve. Remember to kill him twice.”
There’s a big part of Shane that just wants to ask who cares, when no one can stop them, when no one’s been able to even dent them for years.
Then, up on the hill, in the light of a flash of lightning, a figure tumbles to the ground. “Kaliga!”
“Go!” Drake shouts, shoving him hard in the back. “I’ll hold them off here. Get him while he’s summoning the next wave!”
“We’re not getting paid nearly enough for this,” Shane calls over his shoulder, winking.
“We’re not getting paid at all for this! I took it pro bono!”
“You bastard, I’ll give you pro bono!”
Drake just blows him a kiss.
After that it’s all running and dodging, weaving past the obvious traps and the lurking armies, until Shane reaches the bedraggled figure of an emaciated yellow-and-red skinned figure on the hill, some creature of the underworld that’s clawed itself up with an army and a name and a plan. “You know,” Shane remarks, drawing back his hand for a final strike, “you take-over-the-world types never pay as well as people who kidnap a single child. What do you think that says about the world?”
Kaliga sneers at him, eyes at least twenty-five percent of his face, and screeches, “I will rain blood down upon—”
Shane swallows his distaste and lets fly, blasting the creature’s head from its body to land in several tiny pieces. He hates it, killing with magic, killing at all, but there’s no reasoning with Kaliga’s people, whatever they are. They haven’t existed in the world for long enough to name, only long enough to murder several town’s worth of people in the Midwest.
He watches the corpse for long minutes, but Kaliga doesn’t reanimate like the rest of his army. Wearily, Shane turns back to the valley, trudging down the hill to find Drake giving him a tired thumbs-up. “Good day’s work.”
“Yeah. Too bad we didn’t make anything on it.”
“Just think of it like we saved the lives of many future employers.” Drake grins, flashing white teeth, and Shane can’t help but smile along with him.
White flashes behind Drake, and Shane doesn’t even have time to scream before Kaliga plays his last trick, a long blade reaching red through Drake’s chest before Shane pumps him so full of destructive magic that he explodes.
Shane runs faster than humanly possible, hitting the ground without realizing he’d been airborne, managing to catch Drake before he falls. “Baby, baby, stop it, are you okay?”
Drake’s hand twitches weakly toward his chest, an expression of startled shock on his face. “It’s cold.”
Shane tries to heal him, tries to summon the energy but he can’t think, and he’s drained after fighting all day, and this isn’t supposed to happen. “Gonna fix you,” he mutters, ignoring the fact that it’s not working, that goddamn Kaliga must have used some cursed dagger he doesn’t have time to figure out, because his spell isn’t taking. He barely manages to slow the pulse of blood from the wound, seeping out and staining his fingers red and that’s not helping when he’s trying to concentrate.
Drake’s eyes flutter a few times. “Shane.”
“Shut up, don’t you dare talk to me like you’re dying, I’ll kill you myself, baby, just shut up and let me fix you.”
Even as he says the words, the tears start falling because it’s not working. Nothing he does is helping, nothing is fixing him, and Shane’s never felt so helpless in his life, watching Drake bleed to death under his hands. “I’m sorry, baby, I—don’t, please, I’m gonna figure it out, just don’t—”
Drake’s lips twitch into a smile. “Worth it. It was worth it.”
His eyes slide shut.
Before Shane can do something—the tattered thoughts in his mind run to blasting apart the whole countryside, or killing himself, or trying to pick himself up and continue when the last thing he loved in the world is gone—Drake freezes in his hands. He turns to ice in an instant, clear and cold as a white figure steps out of a sudden cyclone of ice.
