Lisa Shearin - Con & Conjure

Bastard. I took a quick glance behind me. Nothing there but a brick wall. I froze.

A Gate.

The bastard had just ordered a freaking getaway Gate.

A Gate was a tear in the fabric of reality. Stepping through one was like stepping through a doorway, except that Gates covered miles instead of inches. Black magic made them, and torture and death fueled them—the more the merrier.

Once that Gate was open and stable, the thief would have all the help he needed dragging me through it kicking and screaming. The Saghred would just be happily going home.

If that happened, it was all over—or I’d wish it was. At that point, the best thing I could do for myself would be to fall on one of Vegard’s dainty daggers. I wasn’t going to do that, because I wasn’t going through that Gate. To keep that from happening, all I had to do was get the Saghred, get past a fully armored man with a poison dart gun, then dodge three Khrynsani. And I’d have to do it all without magic. Just me and mine.

Help wasn’t coming. Vegard was unconscious, the real Guardians who’d flown in from the citadel were probably dead in an alley, the dragons were snacking on thugs, no one knew I was here, and I had no magic.

But I had desperation in spades.

Think, Raine. Think. Keep him talking.

“That’s why you came forward first out there in the street. You didn’t know I’d lost my magic, until . . .”

“You told me. Again saving me much trouble.” The thief gestured toward my daggers with the gun’s muzzle. “Drop the daggers, Raine.”

I made no move to comply.

The thief pointed the gun at Vegard, then back at me. “Your choice—the Guardian takes a fatal second dart or you take your fatal first.” His sea blue eyes glittered coldly—Mychael’s sea blue eyes. “Drop. The daggers.”

I dropped them and rethought my strategy, such that it was.

The thief kicked my daggers across the room to the base of the stairs, keeping the gun aimed at me the entire time. “I didn’t think I’d get the chance to take you alive. Put your hands behind your head and stand against the wall.”

Like hell anyone was putting manacles on me again. I began to circle him. When in an impossible situation, keep your goals simple. Circle until I reach my daggers. Get them without being shot. Simple. Right.

“Come with me without any trouble and you need not die.” The thief started circling me with a saunter as if he had all the time in the world. “My employers would rather have you alive, but they’ll be fine with dead.”

I kept my eyes on his, my peripheral vision on that gun. I didn’t need to look at the stairs, not yet. I knew where they were. “Yeah, Sarad Nukpana would be an extra happy psycho if he could kill me on a Khrynsani altar.”

I had only a few minutes to prevent that from happening.

The thief drew a dagger—long, thin, with a needlesharp tip. That wasn’t Guardian issue.

I kept circling. “Let me guess. Poisoned.”

“You don’t have to find out.” His voice became low, coaxing. “Come now, little elf. Let’s not make this hurt any more than it has to.”

He didn’t want to kill me, but I didn’t care what I had to do to him. Problem was, if I didn’t do it quietly, I’d have to do it three more times to the Khrynsani who’d come running down those stairs.

There were no winners in a knife fight. This was especially true when your opponent was wearing armor and had a poisoned dagger. He didn’t need to stab me; a scratch could kill me just as dead. Either I won or Sarad Nukpana won me, and I got a long and painful death, followed by the destruction of civilization as we knew it.

No pressure.

Nukpana could feed the rock just fine without me. All he’d have to do is sacrifice victims so that their blood fell on the Saghred. The rock would take the sacrifices, and I would feel every last one of them; it didn’t matter if I was in the same room or hundreds of miles away. I’d taken one mage already and he hadn’t even been murdered first. I’d be stark raving loony within the first hour.

“Though you may welcome death,” the thief said. “If I don’t kill you now, you’ll beg for it later—or do it yourself.”

My mind was racing even faster than my feet. Okay, Raine. He was a thief, a thief who could make himself look like someone else. Big freaking deal. That was all the magic he had. If he’d had any more he’d have used it by now. The only advantage he had was that he was bigger than me. You’ve dealt with that before and come out on top. Literally. Come on, girl, time for some ugly.

I darted my eyes to the right like I was going to make a run for the stairs.

He bought it.

I ran straight at him, driving my shoulder into his midsection. The impact with that armor hurt like hell. Better to hurt like hell than to be dragged there. The gun fired, the dart went wide, and we hit the floor together. His head and hands were the only parts of him without armor. I sank my teeth into the wrist of his dagger hand. He swore, but held onto that dagger. Dammit. I didn’t kid myself into thinking that I could reach anything vital, but I knew extreme pain made me drop my glamours. If it didn’t work on him, at least I’d go down biting.

A thief and a glamourer did his job by hiding and sneaking, not direct confrontation.

My fist directly confronted his temple.

The thief dropped the dagger—and his glamour.

He had the high cheekbones and fine, straight nose of a pure-blooded goblin. He wouldn’t have either for long, if my fists had their way. Mychael’s armor vanished with the glamour, leaving the goblin wearing his own clothes with leather armor covering only the most vital of areas. Hurt a man badly enough in a non-vital area and it’d turn vital real quick.

He was bigger and stronger. I was desperate and terrified and exhausted. But desperation trumped terror and exhaustion every time. It had to. The thief pivoted his body, trying to pin my arms, my legs, pin anything he could to get me to stop kicking and punching. I didn’t have long nails, but I used what I had on the upswept tip of one ear and sank my teeth into the other.

He screamed. I snarled.

Next to nuts, the tips of a goblin’s ears were one of their most sensitive parts.

I growled and shook my head like a terrier with a rat. I didn’t have much, but I used what I had. It was an ugly fight, but I wasn’t in it to make it pretty. I was in it to win, or at least survive. I used every trick in the book and wrote a couple of new pages right there on the spot. The damned rock just sat there watching, or waiting, or whatever.

I had to hand it to Imala’s uniform design—skintight also meant impossible to hold on to.

The air grew heavy with power, like air just before a lightning strike, prickling my skin like thousands of hot needles.

Not yet. Please, no, not yet.

I was facing the back wall. A long, narrow part of the bricks shimmered. The sickly sweet, coppery stench of blood came from beyond.

The Gate.

It opened simply, no mouth of Hell, no brimstone stench, just a parting curtain of silvery fog. The smell of blood came from the Gate and the chanting of voices came from beyond it. The chants and what was feeding the Gate were worse, much worse—the screams in the background proved it.

A tall figure appeared just beyond the opening.

Sarad Nukpana. Now in his uncle Janos Ghalfari’s body.

Sarad Nukpana had been consumed by the Saghred, escaped, and attempted to regenerate his body by ingesting the life forces of the most powerful mages he could hunt down. Desperate for a body to inhabit, Nukpana took the corpse of his recently dead uncle, the nachtmagus Janos Ghalfari.

Sarad Nukpana considered it all my fault.