Page 36 of Fortune's Blade

My butt hit down on cold stone once more and I spun, getting behind the bearded man I’d been clutching, grabbing him by his now very human throat, and getting a knife against it.

And, suddenly, the room stilled.

There were some battles going on at the peripheries, others on various balconies, and a few more that seemed to be taking place inside of the walls, judging by the pieces regularly being knocked out of them. But all of the fighting in the main part of the room ceased. Leaving me panting and cutting a line of red into the hairy throat of a startled and uncomprehending dragon who had just been thrust unceremoniously back into his human guise.

And wasn’t liking it.

But I wasn’t liking much right now, either, and there was one thing, and one thing only, keeping me from ending him.

“Where,” I gritted into his ear. “Is my sister?”

Chapter Twelve

Dorina

“At least we found Marlowe,” I said sometime later, and received a purely vicious look in return.

I did not object, for I knew it was born out of fear. Ray had grown up rough, in places where it was unwise to show his true emotions, so he tended to cover them with belligerence. I did not take it to heart.

And he was probably very afraid now, as we were currently back in jail. Only this was a better jail than the one we had experienced on the road. It had a water bucket, another container for refuse, smelled clean, and the walls were merely tent panels, albeit ones with strong enchantments on them. We even had a bench to sit on, which would have been more comfortable if we hadn’t been sharing it with our fellow prisoner.

And if we hadn’t been about to die.

“Should have known,” Marlowe snarled, pulling on the chains that our captors had seen fit to put him in, after he escaped them twice. “They’ll come any time now,” he said sarcastically. “They’ll rescue me. We’re both on the senate, after all; she wouldn’t merely leave me to die!”

I received a malevolent glare from him, an order of magnitude stronger than Ray’s, although I didn’t see why.

“We were coming to rescue you,” I pointed out.

“You call this rescuing, do you?”

It was truly amazing, I thought, how much venom he could put into a single sentence.

“We were interrupted by the queen’s guards.”

“You’re a first-level master and a dhampir. You can’t handle a few goddamned fey?”

“Oh, yeah,” Ray said, piping up from behind me. “’Cause you’ve been doing so much better. You had what? Two days here and three on the road to escape, and where are you now? And why do you still smell like pig shit?”

Marlowe roared and lunged at Ray, who just sat there while the enchanted chains pulled the enraged senator back before he could reach him. Ray was on the other side of me, on the end of the bench, which was probably just as well. I shifted position slightly to block Marlowe’s view of him.

“No one seemed to know where you were,” I said. “Or had even heard of you. The only thing everyone talked about was an upcoming death match with someone known as The Reaper—”

Marlowe said a bad word. “Yes! That’s what they’re calling me—”

“Wait, what?” Ray asked, peering around my shoulder.

“—and they’ll dream up some stupid name for you, too, for both of you! Don’t think they won’t!”

“Wait. You’re The Reaper?”

“You volunteered to fight the Queen’s champion?” I added, because that seemed very unwise.

Marlowe cursed again. He did that a lot. “Volunteered! If you call being told it was that or the axe, then yes, I volunteered! They wanted some new experience to excite the crowd, since this bastard has apparently killed everyone he’s gone up against. They can’t get any bets against him, so nobody makes any money. Until they had the splendid idea of having him fight some crazed off-worlder, which is how they’ve billed me—”

I didn’t comment. He was looking a bit crazed at the moment, with wild eyes staring out of the mask of mud and less savory things that he still wore, as no one had apparently allowed him to bathe. His hair was likewise clumped and matted, and his rags covered less than the mud, having been shredded by multiple fights.

I supposed it all added to the wild man persona they had assigned to him.