The Lone Warrior Read Free

arched in surprise. “She’s not bad. Don’t look like a murderin’ bitch, not really. Who’d a thought it?”
    Who indeed?
    The woman moaned and rolled her head on the pillow. Her lashes fluttered, revealing a glimpse of strange silver irises. Unnerved, Pounder fell back with a curse, making the sign of the Sibling Moons.
    Her white blond hair whispering across his knuckles, Walker used the nerve-pinch to send her under again. The agitation smoothed away, leaving her face unlined and innocent as a sleeping child’s, marred only by the ugly necklace of bruises around her white throat. Her body was . . . well, lush was the word that came to mind, broad-shouldered and deep-bosomed. Long, strong bones. No wonder they’d found her dead weight so awkward to maneuver.
    A murderer for hire.
    Walker sent Pounder away before he unlaced her shirt and folded it back to expose one magnificent breast. The left. He had to be able to access her heart.
    His fingers itched to slap her awake, to take his blade and carve Dai’s full name into the soft swell of flesh. The Ancestors had blessed him; he was light handed, deft. He could make the agony last for hours.
    He closed his eyes, seeing Dai convulsing on the tavern floor until his spine cracked, the hideous clotted sounds he’d made as the prettydeath clawed his gullet to ribbons. Gods, poor Dai—merry and wicked, gifted with the charm of a junior angel and the morals of an alley cat. Yet the man was never casual about his blade work. He could have been a swordmaster in his own right, with his own establishment, but he’d chosen to stay at Walker’s House of Swords, the gods knew why.
    He owed Dai for his loyalty. The assassin owed the man for his pain.
    Walker prayed to Those Before for the discipline not to kill her. Then he reached out and spread the fingers of his left hand over Mehcredi’s breast and cleavage. He touched only what he needed to touch, even when her nipple stiffened, ruching into a velvety pout as tender and pink as a new rose.
    Kneeling by the bed, he concentrated so hard everything faded away save the beating heart beneath his palm and the Magick he drew from deep in the loamy earth, welling up from the ch’qui of the planet. One tendril at a time, he willed green spectral shoots out of the rich moist soil and wound them gently around her heart, a cage of Magick to keep her with him, interwoven with guards to prevent her doing further harm to Dai. What he crafted was beautiful, because to do less with what the Ancestors had given him would have been blasphemy. In the end, he let instinct guide him and when he opened his eyes, the thing was done, the delicate fronds of the pattern as pleasing to his aesthetic sense as the graceful, unbreakable strength of the Magick.
    Walker laced up her shirt, his fingers a little unsteady. Something deep in his guts ached. He hadn’t done a Magick as powerful as that for a long time. Why bother? The Shar were gone, his people no more than ash blown by the hot desert winds. Alone, always and ever.

    The dreams were terrible. Or was this death? A succession of horrors to be endured over and over, endlessly?
    A cloak of formless evil gathered in the night sky and swooped—smothering her mouth and eyes and nostrils in a blanket of filth, plucking at her nerves with strong, cruel fingers. Mehcredi tried to scream her agony, but no sound emerged. Instead, the Necromancer’s thin, sexless voice echoed in her skull. You failed me, assassin, it said. Failure is not acceptable in my service .
    Her soul shrank with horror. Gods, not again, she’d rather die. Every dream visit from the Necromancer had been a leisurely violation, undertaken with casual, lip-smacking glee.
    The hunter appeared suddenly, all of a piece, as dream figures do. Immediately, the Necromancer’s hideous form shrank, coalescing until it was no more than a greasy spot that oozed away, trickling down a gutter. Mehcredi turned to her nemesis with something