Kyle exhaled slightly. “All right,” he said. “I’m not going to say I’m sorry and that I didn’t mean it.” He turned to Anne and seemed to brace himself. “But I am sorry about planting that bomb. It was wrong, and I knew it was wrong when I did it. You want to come after me, I’m not going to blame you.”
Anne stopped, looking at Kyle in surprise. “Wait. You think I’d want to . . . ?”
Kyle didn’t answer. “Okay,” I said. “I think Anne and I need to have a word.”
Kyle stood with his arms folded as I touched Anne’s shoulder to lead her away through the trees. “Is he telling the truth?” I asked once Kyle was out of earshot.
“I think so,” Anne said. One of the side effects of Anne’s abilities is to make her pretty good at reading people. Few people are cold-blooded enough to lie to your face without tensing up. “You don’t think the Nightstalkers are still around?”
“No, they’re gone.” The leader of the Nightstalkers had been an adept named Will; he’d died in that mansion, and without him, the group had fallen apart. “I think I know which boss he’s talking about. You haven’t met him, but his word is good. Do you want to go?”
“With Kyle?” Anne thought for a second, then shrugged. “Well, he said sorry. That’s more than most of the people who’ve tried to hurt me have ever done.”
We walked back to the adept who’d once tried to kill me. “Okay, Kyle,” I said. “Let’s go.”
| | | | | | | | |
We walked through woods and across fields, tall grass brushing against my trousers as we picked our way between gnarled trees. The air was bitterly cold and my coat did little to keep away the chill. Anne stayed close by my side, quick and alert, and from her reactions I was able to tell exactly where the person ahead came into range of her lifesight. The trees opened up into a small clearing, and standing at the centre, a man was waiting for us.
Cinder is as tall as me and a good deal heavier. Not much of it is fat; he’s got the look of a weight lifter, with a thick neck and a barrel chest, though it isn’t his muscles that make him dangerous. He’s also Rachel’s partner, but while Rachel is crazier than a coked-out wolverine, Cinder is trustworthy, more or less. Piss him off and he’ll kill you, but his word is good and if he’d invited us to talk, I was pretty sure we were safe.
“Verus,” Cinder said in his deep voice.
“Cinder.”
Cinder looked at Anne, waiting. “You can call me Anne,” Anne said.
Cinder nodded. Most people would have missed the fact that by waiting for Anne to introduce herself, Cinder was showing good manners. It’s a point of etiquette among Dark mages to only call each other by a name that they’ve told you. “Need to talk,” Cinder told me. “Alone.”
I glanced at Anne. She gave a small motion, and I started walking.
“Wait here,” Cinder said to Kyle as I reached him. Kyle nodded and Cinder turned to walk by my side. We disappeared into the trees, leaving Kyle and Anne alone in the clearing.
“First things first,” I said once we were out of earshot of the two younger spellcasters. “Did I miss something, or is Kyle working for you now?”
Cinder nodded.
I thought back to the last I’d seen of Kyle, lying in the basement of Richard’s mansion, crippled and cornered. Cinder had warned me off, and I’d taken the out. I hadn’t had any reason to believe that Kyle was still alive. “Why?”
“Bonded.”
I stared at Cinder in surprise. “You bonded him?”
Bonding is an odd and very specific tradition among Dark mages. If a Dark mage defeats someone in combat, then he can offer to bond them. If the defeated party says no, they’re killed. If they accept, they become the Dark mage’s servant. Under Dark customs they’re considered property of their owner, and from the point of view of the Council they’d be a slave, but calling the relationship master-slave isn’t quite accurate. A bonded servant is closer to an apprentice or a junior partner—if a Dark mage chooses to bond someone, it’s a sign they respect them enough to want to keep them around.
Not many Dark mages take bonded servants. The only ones who still follow the tradition are the more martial and honour-oriented types, and they’re a minority. Of course, now that I thought about it, that described Cinder pretty well, so maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised.
But there was one thing I couldn’t understand. “Don’t you have to agree to be a bonded servant?”
“Yeah.”
“Kyle and the rest of those adepts were on a crusade to kill as many Dark mages as they could,” I said. “How the hell did you persuade him to say yes?”
Cinder shrugged.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Ask him.” Cinder looked at me. “You done?”
We’d walked fifty yards or so. “All right,” I said. Cinder wouldn’t have called me here unless he had something important to say. “Let’s hear it.”
Cinder stopped and turned to face me. “You’re working for Morden.”
“Yeah, that’s not exactly a secret.”
“So’s Del.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Thought she reported to Richard.”
“Less now.”
“Huh,” I said. The last I’d heard, Del—aka Rachel—had been first among Richard’s servants. For her to be reporting to Morden sounded a lot like a demotion. All of a sudden her trying to kill me made a bit more sense.
Though come to think of it, of all the people I’d laid eyes on today, the only one who hadn’t tried to kill me or do something horrible to me at some point or other was Anne.
My life is really messed up.
“So what about you?” I said.
Cinder raised an eyebrow.
“You working for Morden again?”
“If I have to.”
“You don’t sound that enthusiastic.”
“I’m with Del,” Cinder said simply.
And that was Cinder’s problem in a nutshell. “So I gathered,” I said. “Were you around when she took that shot at me?”
Cinder shook his head.
“And I’m guessing you’re not here to finish the job.” I folded my arms. “So what do you want?”
“Split her from Richard.”
I stared at Cinder. “Are you out of your mind?”
Cinder just looked at me.
“In case you didn’t notice, your partner just tried to turn me into a dust cloud,” I said. I almost said girlfriend instead of partner but changed my mind at the last second. “And you want me to do her favours?”
“Tried talking,” Cinder said. “Didn’t work.”
“What, and you think she’ll listen to me?” I was pissed off now. Only a month ago, I’d had Shireen tell me the same thing. She’d been Rachel’s best and closest friend while she was alive, and now both she and Cinder were expecting the same impossible task. “I have met Deleo exactly twice in the past year. The last time she saw me, she didn’t make it five minutes before trying to kill me. This time she didn’t make it five seconds. Expecting me to talk to her is one of the stupidest plans I’ve ever heard in my life.”
“Isn’t anyone else.”
I looked away, frustrated and angry. Rachel showed up and tried to murder me, and now not only was Cinder expecting me to put that aside, he wanted me to help her. I had more enemies than I could handle in a lifetime, and both Shireen and Cinder were expecting me to pick a fight with yet another. “Maybe you should find someone else.”
“You’re smart and you’ve known her the longest,” Cinder said. “Besides. Doing shit that’s supposed to be impossible is your thing.”