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“Are you going to tell me what you did?” Nick demanded.

Jem let out an exasperated sigh.

“I might have warned them not to use the old well,” he admitted. “The one you figured out caused that cholera outbreak in town…”

Nick was already clicking under his breath, his jaw clenched.

“Couldn’t you have pushed them?” he complained.

“Ishouldhave,” Jem conceded. “I didn’t realize there were already accusations going around that lepers had poisoned the well. Once they got it in their heads I was part of the same conspiracy, working with the Roma and whoever else… OW!”

He gave Nick an affronted look, his hands now clenched in fists.

“Gaos,”he complained. “Be careful, would you? I’m not made of stone, like you.”

Nick didn’t answer.

He’d known that yanking out that one shard of metal might hurt; it was why he’d been bugging his mate to talk. Now he found another, slightly smaller piece of iron by smell and started to yank it out.

“OW, OW, OW…” Dalejem complained.

Nick didn’t answer that, either.

He scowled down at the piece of buckshot, though. He could practically smell the bacteria on the damned things.

But that was the last of it.

The iron was gone. He could smell that, too.

He picked up the vile bottle of rotgut moonshine they kept around for just such occasions, the one they’d jokingly labeled “Brain Murder.” He showed it to Dalejem and swished it around a little in the container as he met his mate’s gaze meaningfully.

“This part’sreallygoing to hurt, you nitwit. Want something to bite down on? Or would you rather just tough it out, like some kind of cowboy, or––”

* * *

Nick’s eyes shot open.

Pain had awakened him.

His cut thigh had slammed painfully into something hard and jagged.

It hurt so fucking bad, his mind went totally blank.

He tried to groan, but the sound got choked off before he could get it out. It caught in his throat instead, so that he could only make a muffled but significantly quieter gasp.

Groggy, half-conscious, he stared up at the underneath of the metal truck, watching it move dizzyingly over him. His mind swam with the wooden shutters and blown-glass windows of the house he’d just seen in the dream-space of his mind. He imagined the rolling fields outside the white-washed fence, the small forge he’d built with his bare hands over a series of nights, halfway between the garden and the small stable.

At that time, his horse had been Ferdinand, a big black Spanish horse.

Jem’s had been Ardalan, a smaller, dusty-gold Arabian.

His leg smacked into something sharp and hard again, and Nick let out a muffled cry.

He watched as the bottom of the truck disappeared, and a crush of stars set in the dome appeared overhead. He watched the stars blur and focus and blur again as he fought his mind back into straight lines.

Someone was dragging him.

He was being dragged.