Ilona Andrews - On the Edge

“We do,” Declan said.

“What was yours?”

“Legionnaire First Class.”

“What is that? Is that like an officer?”

“No,” Declan said.

“An NCO, then.” Tom grinned. “I was a Staff Sergeant myself. Suppose I call you ‘Sergeant,’ would you go with that?”

“That will be fine,” Declan said.

“Good then, Sahgent.”

Rose rolled her eyes. Funny how “sergeant” became “sahgent” all of a sudden, and Tom had morphed from a surly bear into Declan’s best buddy, all smiles and camaraderie. It was a classic Edge tactic. She’d seen it employed with outsiders before. The six elders didn’t know Declan, they had no way of verifying the information he’d given them, and they were afraid of him. So Tom Buckwell had chosen to play a “friend,” hoping to establish common ground, get into Declan’s confidence, and stab him in the back if necessary. With some men, it might have worked, but Declan had good instincts and Buckwell was laying the none-too-bright we’re-all-just-army-buddies on too thick.

“Casshorn might be a goner, but he was human to begin with, so he’s still vulnerable there. We build a trap, and the elders will curse his arse into sleep. No matter how inhuman he is, the six of us aren’t without skill. We’ll hold him at least for a few hours. Meanwhile you and Rose here lead the hounds into the trap, kill them off, and then go after Casshorn. Good plan, yeah?”

“Great plan,” Declan said. “What kind of a trap?”

“Haven’t thought that far yet,” Tom said.

“How are you going to curse him?” Rose asked. Sleep would be the obvious choice: unlike pain curses, it was subtle. Casshorn wouldn’t even know anything was wrong. He’d simply get tired and fall asleep. “To cast sleep, we need a thing of his. Hair. Piece of clothing.”

“Haven’t thought that far yet,” Tom said.

Some plan. Rose sighed. Over half a millennium of experience between the six of them, and this was what they came up with.

“Trap first,” Declan said. “Without the trap, we have no plan. Bullets don’t work against the hounds. They go straight through their bodies. Dismemberment works. Flash does, too, but we have only two flashers. Fire, but they know to steer clear of it.”

“So it has to be something subtle. Can we poison them?” Tom asked.

Declan shook his head. “I doubt it. I know that the first time it was found, they had tried hemlock and arsenic on hounds with no result. Ideally, we need a slow-acting trap, something that would kill them slowly or in a gradual fashion so as not to alarm Casshorn out of his sleep.”

“Like drowning?” Tom asked. “Lure the hounds out into a lake and drown them one by one?”

“Possibly. Unfortunately, they can hold their breath for a long time, and they’re good swimmers.”

Silence fell. Leanne wandered over and came to sit in a rocking chair.

“Too bad we couldn’t electrocute the hound like that troll,” Declan said.

“Oh, now that is a capital idea, Sahgent.” Tom nodded. “Except we don’t know if electricity works against then.”

“It does,” Leanne said. “Before Karen Roe left for the Broken, she told me she killed a hound with electricity. Ta sered it to death.”

“How do you Taser something to death?” Tom’s eyebrows rose.

“Her mom got it into her head that Karen’s house would get broken into and bought her one of those expensive gun-looking Tasers,” Leanne said. “You pop a cartridge in and fire, then you disconnect the cartridge and reload. She’s kind of hard to buy for, so every Christmas or so the family would get her some of those cartridge packs. They’re like sixty bucks for two. She shot the beast once, but it didn’t croak, so she just kept reloading the cartridges and shooting it until it stopped wiggling. She said the damn hound cost her over two hundred bucks.”

“Well, we can’t take time to Taser them, and I just don’t see how we’d be able to stick each one of them with a live wire. They’d overrun us,” Tom said.

“Why don’t you just put the two together? Drop a live wire into a lake and electrocute the lot of them until they drown?” Rose asked.

The men looked up, and she found herself on the receiving end of two stares, one green, one brown.

“What?”

“That’s a good plan,” Declan said.

“It might work,” Tom said.

Declan glanced at him. “Is there a large enough lake nearby?”

“Laporte Pond,” Tom said.

Declan got up. “I need to see it.”

Tom nodded. “It’s perfect. It will take us a good hour to get there on foot, though, so if we want to go today, best to do it now. I need to check on my daughters anyhow, make sure they cleared out. Holly, I’m not worried about, but Nicki meanders like molasses in January. She was supposed to be out this morning, but I bet she’s still there, squatting on her bags like a mother hen.”

“I’ll come, too,” Rose said. “If you’re going to curse Casshorn, I’ll have to pick up a couple of things from Grandma’s. The boys are reasonably safe here for the time being.”

Leanne sighed. “That’s all good, but how are you going to make the hounds go into the water?”

Declan’s face was unreadable. “We’ll use bait.”

“Like what?” Leanne frowned.

“One of us,” Rose said. “The hounds are attracted to magic. He means me or him, Leanne. One of us will be bait.”

ROSE hugged herself and peered at the placid, tea-colored water of Laporte Pond. Twelve hundred feet long and close to five hundred feet across at the widest spot, the pond sat in a depression just west of town. Tall grayish cypresses flanked it like guards, their bloated trunks blocking the shore completely except for the far west end. A broken, dilapidated dock jutted sadly from the center of the pond.

Next to her, Declan crouched and dipped his fingers into the water. Tom Buckwell gave him a wide berth. Declan wasn’t buying all his “Aw, shucks, Sahgent” nonsense, and she suspected Buckwell realized that as well, because he watched Declan the way one would watch a large predatory animal.

“There used to be a rowboat,” she explained. “You could take it to the dock and fish. The boat sank about two years ago, and nobody bothered to get another one. And you can’t really swim in it—too much algae.”

Declan pivoted on his feet and glanced up to where twin power lines were etched against the sky.

“We’re stealing power from the Broken,” Tom explained. “Used to be there was no way to run a power line into the Edge. But about fifty years ago, the boundary crawled out farther into the Broken, about forty feet or so. Nobody knows what caused it, but when it was done crawling, we found a power pole in the Edge and the line was live. We got together and made a deal with the local co-op that owned the pole. We pay them a shitload of money, and they don’t ask what’s draining their power.”

Declan looked at the dock. Rose followed his gaze. The dock wasn’t very big. Twelve by twelve feet. Old tires hitched to its sides bobbed in the water. Either she or Declan would be on that dock, flashing to get the hounds’ attention. She’d been thinking about it for the last two hours, and the more she thought about it, the more certain she became that she should be the one. She could do it. Get on the dock. Electrify the pond. Flash a few times to attract the hounds and watch them pile into the deadly water. Simple enough. How hard could it be, right?

She pictured herself on the dock, surrounded by hounds. And what if electricity didn’t work on them? Alarm squirmed through her. No, it was a mistake to think like that. She raised her chin up a bit. It would be fine. Even if the electricity didn’t kill them, it would be fine. She had more than enough flash to deal with them.