He got no brushes of that now-familiar feeling of the shield-surrogate they wore, but as the moments became candlemarks, he finally did sense the children approaching.
He froze in place. They didn’t seem particularly sensitive, but there was no point in taking chances. If they guessed he was going to ambush them, they’d bolt, and it would take days for him to track them down again.
They weren’t talking today, but he sensed the sleepy content in all three of them that came from a full belly. Good. That was exactly what he wanted. He needed them to be off guard and unready. If there had been a real predator hunting them now, they’d be tied up in sacks before they even reached the entrance to their maze.
They wormed their way into their shelter, thinking of nothing but the comfortable pallets they’d made out of the bedding that the Guards had taken apart. He followed behind them, silent as a snake. They started whispering to each other now, feeling completely secure. And in their minds, why shouldn’t they? So far no one had found them in here—except the mice, the rats, and the bugs. And even if someone did, there were three ways of escape besides the way in. Mags felt them letting their guards down further.
There was even a better source of light than a single rushlight in their shelter, as he had discovered to his amazement. You couldn’t see it until you were in their hidden corner, but they’d managed to create a little fireplace, and there was still plenty of wood in this building to scavenge. It was how they had survived the winter.
That was going to work in his favor.
Even though he felt a sickening guilt for what he was about to do to them. They had reached their “home” and were settling down on the beds. He heard them talking, not bothering to whisper. They were making plans on where to take some of the ruined boots and shoes tomorrow. Not the same rag-and-bone man that they had just sold things to; they were smart enough not to make anyone think that they might have more loot cached. He listened with his ears and his mind, pausing just inside the last twist of the path while they bickered. The eldest wanted to go quite some distance away; the girl whined that it was too far. He waited until they were fully engaged in their little argument, then slipped into the room.
“Shet it!” he shouted, before they even realized there was someone else with them.
Three pairs of startled eyes met his.
“Ye’ll be takin’ it where I tell ye,” he growled, contorting his face into a snarl.
They froze, but only for a moment.
The girl moved first; with a high-pitched shriek of terror that nearly split his head in two, she dashed for one of their exits, and she screamed again when she found it blocked. Well, actually, it was more than merely blocked; Mags knew tunnels and tunneling, and it had not taken him long to find the way to collapse the rubble so that the exits had literally vanished. The little girl didn’t know what to do; she only stood there and screamed in terror. The two boys rushed him.
He backhanded the younger into the pile of bedding, taking care to throw him rather than hit him, and grabbed the elder by the throat, pulling him close so the boy could see his face. “There’ll be none’a thet,” he growled, and used his free hand to pinch the boy’s mouth shut when he squirmed and tried to bite. “Nor thet, ye demonspawn. Yer mine. Sooner ye decide thet’s th’ way it’s gonna be, th’ less I’ll heveta beatcha.”
Now the girl and the other boy swarmed him; it was brave, but pathetic. He felt sick inside as he deliberately terrorized them. This was a horrible thing to do to anyone. This was what had been done to him—
’Cept the blows an’ the beatin’s were real and meant t’hurt, he tried to remind himself. But the rationalization felt... hollow.
He did the best he could to turn what looked like blows into deflections, always sending them tumbling to keep from hurting them too much, but it was almost a candlemark later when the three of them finally stopped fighting or trying to escape and huddled together on the pile of bedding, cowed and terrified.
He looked them over. The two boys moved to protect their sister. Good. That was the control he needed. He reached for the sobbing girl-child, slapping the other two out of the way, and before she knew what was happening, he’d snapped a collar and leash on her.
“Now,” he said, squatting down on his heels to glare at the three of them. “This’s how it’s a-gonna be. Ye do what I say. Ye do ev’thin’ I say. Yer my gang now. An’ iffen ye don’ do what I say—” he pulled abruptly on the leash when the child was off-balance, and the little girl sprawled onto the floor. “—then this bit has some’pun ’appen to ’er.” He let his lips curve in a lazy smile, while inside he cringed and felt so sick it was all he could do not to throw up. “Now, I dunno what that some’pun’ll be. It’ll d’pend on where we is, an’ what ye was s’posed t’ be doin’ fer me. Mebbe she don’ get no supper. Mebbe she gotta sleep i’dirt. Mebbe I fin’ some’un then likes liddle wenches . . .”
They were old enough to know exactly what he meant, and all three of them froze in terror.
“So,” he said blandly. “Yer gonna do what yer tol’. An’ right now, thet’s t’come along’a me.”
With the little girl crawling on hands and knees ahead of him and the boys, now thoroughly cowed, trailing behind, they emerged from the ruin.
“Where’re we goin’?” the eldest quavered, when the younger boy crawled out and stood up.
“Shet it!” he snarled. “Ye’ll see, soon ’nough.”
There were a number of places he could have taken them, including the shop, but he knew that Nikolas would never tolerate how he was going to handle these children. If it had been an adult—given what they needed to know, Nikolas would have terrorized them himself.
But not a child.
So for now, he had a different goal in mind.
The same house where the Agents had killed their predecessors.
The little girl began to fight and utter a thin, high wail when she saw the place. He grabbed her by the back of the neck and shook her a little. “I said, shet it.”
“Bu-bu-bu—” she blubbered. “They’s—they’s gh-gh-gh-“
“Ain’t no ghosts,” he scoffed. “I been squattin’ ’ere an they ain’t no ghostes. So shet it.”
Before he had gone stalking the children, he had prepared his squat, thanks to Tal and his squad. Tal had been far more pragmatic about the plan than he had been.
“Look. You’re going to scare them. Well, they’re scared that much most of the time, and if they’re not, they should be. When it comes right down to it, unless you do this, they’ve got three futures. They die of privation. They die by someone’s hand. Or—maybe—they survive. Like you survived in the mines. Reckon up the odds for yourself.”
There was a good, sound cellar here, one with only one door in and no windows. It was perfect for his purposes. He had already gotten the keys to the place from the Guard—anyone coming around now was going to have a rude awakening to find the place locked as tight as it had been open before. The turning of the key in the lock caused a thunder of deep barks to erupt on the other side.
The little girl would have screamed if he hadn’t had a precautionary hand at her throat. Instead, she shook where she stood.
“Down, Dammit!” he growled, reinforcing the command with a mental one. The dog—a huge fawn-colored mastiff, whose name really was “Dammit,” dropped to the ground. He shoved all three of the children inside and locked the door. “You—” he barked, pointing at the younger boy. “Kitchen. Git th’ food onna table. Now.”