“Sonovabitch,” Armstrong ground out.
The neat line of corpses grew. Sixteen people lay in a row, their ghostly bodies shimmering and fading into the mist.
Hugh studied the corpses. Quick and efficient. It only took a moment to snap a human neck. He’d done it enough times to recognize the practiced skill. That’s why nobody raised the alarm. The beasts killed them almost instantly.
The man turned toward the open gates and walked out, vanishing at the edge of Elara’s spell. The beasts grabbed the corpses and scuttled after him, darting back and forth until all were gone.
“Can you bring him back?” Hugh asked.
“I can hold him still for a bit.” Elara concentrated. This time he felt the power sink into the ground in a controlled burst. The armored man returned, frozen in mid-move.
Hugh circled him. The scales of the armor lacked polished shine, and the metal wasn’t black, but blue and brown with flecks of green, like tortoiseshell. Scuffs on the armor. That’s what he’d thought.
The mage grabbed a sketchpad and frantically drew. Hugh glanced to make sure his own people were sketching. They were.
“Who is this guy?” Dillard growled, her face contorted. “Does he look familiar to anyone?”
Armstrong grunted. “The question is, is he some random nutjob, or is he a part of something larger?”
Hugh would have to explain it. They didn’t see it on their own. Hugh pulled his sword out, stepped back, and swung. The blade lined up perfectly with a barely perceptible scratch across the scales.
Armstrong crouched next to him, so his face was inches from the sword and tilted his head. “He took a swing.”
“And survived.” Bad news. The cut didn’t angle enough to be a glancing blow. No, someone had slashed across this asshole’s middle straight on and probably dulled his sword.
“How do you know he survived?” Chambers asked. “Maybe he took the armor off a dead man.”
“The armor isn’t broken,” Sam said quietly. “And it was custom made for him.”
The kid was learning.
Hugh kept his voice low. “You see the gold on the shoulder?”
Armstrong studied the gold star etched into the armor, eight rays emanating from the center with a bright gold stripe underneath.
“Insignia?” he guessed.
“There is no other reason to put it on armor.”
Armstrong glanced at him. “You think there are more of them.”
“He’s a soldier. Soldiers belong in an army.” Hugh sheathed his sword. “The insignia is a rank, an identification. He’s clean-shaven, his hair is put away, the armor isn’t ornate. This is a uniform. Put him in the woods, and he’ll be near invisible. He’s part of a unit. If we’re really lucky, it’s just a unit and not an army.”
Armstrong rose and surveyed the woods around them. “We’re done here,” he said. “Let’s go back before something else shows up.”
The mist dissolved. Elara stood on the other side. She looked … in pain. No, not pain. Worry.
That same annoying feeling that flooded him when he’d looked at her bloody wedding dress came over him. He wanted to fix it, just to make it go away.
He strode to her and said, barely above a whisper, “Do you recognize this?”
“No.” She looked at him, and a small hopeful spark lit her eyes. “Do you?”
“No.”
The spark died. Hugh felt a sudden rush of anger, as if he’d failed somehow.
If they got hit on the way back, she would jump into the fight. She had too much power to sit back. If he lost her, her nature-worshipping cabal would riot. Like it or not, everything in Baile and the town revolved around Elara.
“Stay near me on the way back.”
Surprise slapped her face. She turned it into cold arrogance. “Worried about my survival?”
“Don’t want to miss an opportunity to use you as a body shield.”
“How sweet of you.”
“Stay near me, Elara.”
He walked away before she could come back at him with something clever.
7
Elara leaned against the table. They were upstairs in the room designated as her “study,” which she never used. She preferred the small room off her bedroom. The study held a large wooden table, flanked by five chairs on each side, which nobody was using, except her and Johanna, who sat cross-legged on the table, mixing reagents in small glass beakers.
Past the table, an open area offered four plush chairs set around a small coffee table, with smaller chairs scattered here and there along the walls. Hugh had taken one of the soft chairs. Stoyan, Lamar, and Felix picked seats along the wall. The crazy one, Bale, wasn’t invited to the meeting because he was standing watch. Just as well.
On her side of the room Savannah sat in a plush chair, while Dugas leaned against the wall.
Hugh was in a foul mood. They’d had three of these weekly meetings so far, with cooler heads on both sides present, because when they tried to work things out on their own, their discussions ended in a barrage of mutual insults. She’d seen him irritated before, even enraged, but this was new. His gaze was focused, his eyes dark. He sat in a large Lazyboy chair, flipping a knife in his hand, tip, handle, tip, handle. At first, she watched, waiting for him to cut himself, but after the first ten minutes she gave up. Some people paced, Hugh juggled a razor-sharp knife with his right hand. Aw, the man she married.
Ugh.
Elara tried to sink some sarcasm into that inner ‘ugh’ but couldn’t even fool herself. Hugh was worried. She never seen him worried before. Hugh always had things in hand and the grim look in his eyes was setting her on edge. He was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, but he looked like a king whose kingdom was on the brink of an invasion. And she was his queen.
Ugh.
What was even going on in his head? She had a feeling that if she cracked his skull open and somehow let his thoughts free, they would be echoes of her own. What is that creature? Why did the warrior kill? What did he do with the bodies? How do we guard against him? And the loudest thought of all, playing over and over. What did I miss? What else can I do? It was driving her crazy.
“Next item on the agenda,” Dugas said. “Rufus--“
She pushed away from the table. “We should send people to the nearest settlements.”
Savannah reached out, touched Johanna’s shoulder, and signed.
Hugh gave her a dark look. “Why?”
“To warn them. And to set perimeter wards.”
“What makes you think the wards would hold him?” Hugh asked.
Johanna put the beaker down. “They would not. He would make noise breaking them. An early warning system.” She picked up the beaker, raised it, shook the dark green liquid in it, and put it down again. “We have soil from the palisade where he stood. We can key the spell to him. It would not be expensive.”
Hugh stared at her for a long moment.
“Not very.” Johanna gave him an apologetic shrug.
“I need your approval, Hugh,” Elara said. “It’s a safety measure.”
“Your people will need escorts,” he said.
“Yes.”
“How many settlements do you want to warn?”
She glanced at Savannah.
“Seven,” she said.
“Okay,” Hugh said. “We’ll do them one at a time.”
“That will take a week.”
“Congratulations, you can count.”
She crossed her arms. “Hugh, this is important. Every day we delay, people may die.”
“I will have to send at least twenty people with each party. Any less is inviting an assault.”
“So what’s the problem? Seven by twenty is one hundred and forty.”
“Exactly. You want me to send almost half of my force out into the woods at the same time. That risks the lives of my soldiers and leaves us vulnerable, and I won’t do it. One at a time.”
She unclenched her teeth.
He beat her to the punch. “What makes you think that sending a party of twenty armed soldiers and some witches would predispose these settlements to trust us? A lot of these people are paranoid separatists. They’ll see us as a threat.”