Stoyan, his memory supplied. Figured. Stoyan was always a persistent sonovabitch.
“We need you,” Stoyan said, his voice quiet and close. “The Dogs need you. Landon Nez is killing us. We’re being purged.”
Eventually they would go away.
“He doesn’t give a fuck,” Bale said.
“Pass me the bag,” Stoyan said.
Someone knelt next to him.
“It’s not gonna matter,” Bale growled. “He’s all fucked up. He’s laying here in his own piss and vomit. You heard that dickhead at the door. He’s been in this shithole for weeks.”
Hugh heard a zipper being pulled open. Something was put in front of him. He smelled the stench of rotting blood and decomposition.
Bale kept going. “Even if he sobers up, he’ll crawl right back into the bottle and get shit-faced.”
Hugh opened his eyes. A severed head stared back at him, the brown irises dulled by a milky patina.
Rene.
“He can’t even stand anymore. What are we going to do, tie him to a stick and prop him up?”
The world turned red.
“To hell with this.” Bale leaned back, readying for a kick.
Rage drove him up before Bale’s foot connected with the severed head. He locked his hand around Bale’s throat, jerked him off his feet, and slammed him down onto the nearest table. Bale’s back hit the wood with a loud thud.
“Hallelujah,” Lamar said.
Bale clawed at his arm, the muscles on his thick biceps bulging. Hugh squeezed.
Felix loomed on his right, reaching for him. Hugh hammered a cross punch into the big man’s nose with his left hand. Cartilage crunched. Felix stumbled back.
Bale’s face turned purple, his eyes glistening. His feet drummed the air.
Stoyan locked his arms on Hugh’s right bicep and went limp, adding his deadweight to the arm. Felix lunged from the left and locked himself onto Hugh’s left arm, trying to force an armbar.
The world was still red, and he kept squeezing.
Water drenched him in a cold cascade, washing away the red haze. He shook himself, growling, and saw Lamar holding a bucket.
“Welcome back,” Lamar said. “Let go of the man, Preceptor. If you kill him, there will be nobody to lead your vanguard.”
The void gnawed at him, the big raw hole where Roland’s presence used to be. Hugh gritted his teeth and forced himself to concentrate on the head on the table in front of him.
“When?” he asked.
“Six days ago,” Stoyan said.
“What did he do?”
“Nothing,” Stoyan said. “He did nothing.”
“Rene was out,” Lamar said. “He and Camilla walked off after you were forced out. Went civilian. Rene took a teaching job in Chattanooga, high school French.”
“He wasn’t a threat to anyone,” Stoyan said. “They killed him anyway. I came to convince him to meet with you and found his body. They left him on the floor of his kitchen.”
His throbbing head made it hard to think. “Camilla?”
Stoyan shook his head.
Rene’s wife didn’t make it. Pain stabbed at Hugh, fueling his rage. Rene hadn’t been a great soldier. His heart was never in it, but he’d tried. He’d always talked of something better. Of living life after he was done.
“He and Camilla aren’t the only ones,” Stoyan said.
“Caroline?”
“Dead,” Bale said.
“Purdue, Rockfort, Ivanova, all dead,” Stoyan added. “We’re it.”
Hugh surveyed the four men. Stoyan, dark-haired, gray-eyed, in his mid-thirties, looked haggard, like a worn-out sword. Felix, a hulking mountain of a Dominican, leaned back, trying to stop a nosebleed. The bridge of his nose skewed right. Broken. Bale sulked in the corner. About five-eight, five-nine, with dark red hair, Bale was almost as broad as he was tall, all his bulk made up of bone and slabs of thick, heavy muscle. Lamar perched on the edge of the table to the far right. Tall, black, with a body that looked twisted together from steel cables, Lamar was closing on fifty and the age only made him harder to kill. His hair was trimmed short. A neat beard traced his jaw. He’d been an intelligence officer once and never lost the bearing. A pair of thin, wire-rimmed glasses rode his nose.
The second-in-command, the silent killer, the berserker, and the strategist. All that remained of his cohort leadership.
“This is the way things are now,” Stoyan said.
“Nez is going down the roster of the Iron Dogs and crossing out the names,” Lamar said. “Nobody is safe. We’re all tarred with the same brush.”
The Iron Dogs. His Iron Dogs, the elite private army he’d built for Roland. The name made him wince inside. The void gaped wider, scraping at his bones.
He’d led the Iron Dogs, and Landon Nez led the Golden Legion, the necromancers who possessed mindless vampires, piloting them like remote-controlled cars. The Iron Dogs and the Golden Legion, the right and left hands of Roland. He’d hated Nez, and Nez hated him, and that was the way Roland liked it.
Hugh would’ve found a way to kill Nez eventually, but he’d run out of time. Roland had purged him.
The memory punched him, hot and furious. Roland standing before him, devoid of all life and warmth. At that moment Hugh would’ve settled for rage, fury, sadness, anything. But there was nothing. Roland stood before him, cold.
The words scalded him. “You’ve failed me, Hugh. I have no further use for you.”
He remembered every sound. He remembered taking a breath and then the lifeline of magic that anchored him to the man who’d pulled him off the streets vanished. The void had opened, and all became pain. It bit at him now, its fangs shredding his soul.
His purpose, his teacher, his surrogate father, everything that was right and true in this fucked up world was gone. Life had no meaning. And he didn’t even fully understand why.
The four men were looking at him.
“How bad is it?” Hugh asked.
“We’re down to three hundred men now, with us,” Stoyan said.
A few months ago, Hugh had left five cohorts of the Iron Dogs, four hundred and eighty soldiers each. He’d hammered them into an elite, disciplined, trained force, the kind of soldiers any head of state would cut off his arm to have.
“There are more out there,” Stoyan said. “Some are in hiding, some are wandering about without any direction. Nez has bloodsucker patrols out. They are hunting us down.”
What the hell had happened since he was banished? “Why?”
“Because of you!” Bale snarled from the corner.
Hugh looked at Lamar.
“Roland discovered an unpleasant fact,” Lamar said. “We do not follow him. We follow you. You are our Preceptor. We’re viewed as untrustworthy.”
Idiots. He stared at them. “You swore an oath.”
“Oaths go both ways. Show him your arms,” Lamar said.
Stoyan yanked his sleeves up. Jagged scars marked his forearms.
“It’s the same old story,” Lamar said. “Roland wanted some land that was occupied. He offered the town money, but they refused to sell.”
“He told me to raze the town,” Stoyan said. “And hang the civilians on trees to send a message. I told him I was a soldier, not a butcher. He crucified the lot and hung me on the crosses with them. Thirty-two people. I watched them die for three days. I would’ve died there.”
“What saved you?” Hugh asked.
“Daniels saved me. She pulled me off the cross and let me go.”
The name cut like a knife. It must’ve shown on his face because Stoyan took a step back.
Kate Daniels, Roland’s long-lost and newly-found daughter. The reason for his banishment.
Hugh shoved the name out of his mind and concentrated on the problem at hand. Roland would’ve known Stoyan would refuse the order to butcher civilians. That wasn’t what the regular cohorts did. The dark arm of the Iron Dogs, which would’ve wiped the village off the face of the planet without question, no longer existed. Roland was painfully aware of that. The order had been a test of loyalty, and Stoyan had failed. Roland didn’t just require loyalty; he demanded unquestioning devotion. When he failed to receive it, he must’ve decided to destroy the entire force.