She stared at him.
“What?” he asked.
“Nothing, Lord Camarine. Absolutely nothing.”
A long eerie howl cut through the evening. Rose jerked. A flock of birds burst from the distant branches. William was close, with the horde of hounds on his heels.
Declan raised his hand and shot a burst of white magic into the sky. She added her own flash and then shot another, just in case.
She sensed the magic first. It swelled like an icy tide along the pond’s edge, drenching the brush and rolling across the water. Tiny hairs on the back of her neck stood on their ends.
The magic slimed her in a clammy wave. Tiny needles prickled at her pores. Inside her, an instinctual alarm wailed, Run away! Run away as fast as you can and don’t look back!
A dark body burst through the brush. Amber eyes glared at her, and the enormous wolf dashed to the left, veering around the lake. She flashed again.
The first hound pushed through the branches. God, that was fast.
Another appeared. Another . . . The first ten or twelve. The advance guard. Rose fought rising panic. She had to do this, she reminded herself. There was nobody else to do it. There was no escape anyway. For some reason that thought calmed her. It was very simple, just like cleaning an office: she had to do a certain amount of work before she could go home. No need to fret about it.
“What did I say?” Declan asked quietly.
“Not now.” She raised her hand and let a string of white magic play on her fingers, taunting the beasts.
The hounds entered the water. They swam like dogs, but their heads remained underwater. Did they even need to breathe? she wondered.
Please work. Please work.
Please.
Midway through the lake, the foremost hound shuddered. It struggled for another six yards and sank. She breathed a sigh of relief. Two more drowned. The fourth one persevered and kept on, heading right for them. One in four. Better odds than she’d hoped for.
The surviving hound clenched the wooden support. Sluggish, it crawled up slowly. The moment its head rose above the edge of the dock, Rose blew it off with a sharp slice of white.
“Too much,” he told her. “Reduce the intensity. We have a long way to go. Why are you mad?”
The rest of the hounds braved the water.
“Rose?”
She recognized the persistent tone. He wouldn’t let it go. “You just said that the only women you favor with your attentions are either sluts or whores and that you prefer it that way. I’m just wondering where I fit in. I would hate to create any painful confusion for you.”
His long blade cut through the air and sliced an emerging hound in half. He kicked the pieces into the water.
“You’re neither.”
She said nothing.
Declan squared his shoulders, eyeing the approaching hounds. “When I was a child, I watched an iren-play called Aesu’s Rage. It’s similar to a motion film from the Broken. It’s the story of Aesu, a leader of a small tribe, who takes on an enormous empire and succeeds against all odds. I vividly remember one scene in it: Aesu, huge in his spiked armor, was about to go into a battle he couldn’t possibly win. He stood there in his tent, caressed his wife’s face, and told her, ‘You’re the measure of my wrath.’ I was twelve years old, and at the time I thought it was a remarkably asinine thing to say.”
A third hound reached the dock. An ugly head broke the water, and Rose flashed, cutting the dark skull in two.
“Over the years I’d come to understand what the scene meant, but now I finally feel it, very sharply.” Declan decapitated the emerging hound with two quick precise strokes of his blade. “And I would never tell you this, if you hadn’t insisted on coming on this dock, because that means you feel it, too. This used to be about honor, and duty, and my dislike of Casshorn. Now it’s about you.”
“Me?” She tried to concentrate on the next group of hounds swimming through the water.
“I would give all of myself to keep you safe. To do that, I have to kill Casshorn. It’s a simple trade. Casshorn has to die, so you can live. Two sides of the same coin. I love you, and you’re the measure of my wrath.”
“What did you say?” She flashed too hard and missed the hound.
He stepped in and sank a focused shot of white into the three bodies squirming in the water. “I said I love you, Rose. Easy on the flash.”
ROSE swayed. She gritted her teeth and stood her ground, fighting to remain upright. The magic inside her no longer thrived and filled her up. She had to reach deep to pull it out. She was draining the last of her reserve.
“Are you all right?” Declan’s voice asked.
“Fine,” she said.
Dark bodies bobbed in the murky waters around the dock, their silvery blood sliding across the surface of the lake like an oil rainbow. The silver wet the rubber under her feet, and she had already slipped once and barely caught herself.
They kept coming. Two, three at a time, a fraction of the horde unaffected by electrocution, swimming through the dark stream of cadavers and climbing on the dock, teeth bared, eyes glowing. Next to her, Declan swung his sword, mechanical, silent, and unstoppable. Like a machine.
Another hound. Flash.
Flash.
Flash.
Her heartbeat thudded like a hammer in her temples. One flash too many. Her vision began to blur. To push any further would be stupid. “I think I’m done,” she said and pulled out the machete Buckwell had given her.
A hound crawled onto the dock, and she hacked at it. Gray goo sprayed the rubber.
“Will they never end?” she whispered. She was so tired.
Declan’s hand caught her waist. He pulled her to him and kissed her, his lips warm and dry. “It’s over. There are none left. They’re pulling the cable out.”
“We’re done?” she asked.
“Yes.”
The surface of the lake was gray with the hounds’ blood. Bodies bobbed in the water. “You were right,” she said softly. “I never could’ve killed them all by myself.”
“What did you say?”
“I said you were right . . .”
He gave her a dazzling grin. “One more time, my lady?”
“You were right,” she told him with a tired smile.
“I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of hearing that. Unaccustomed to it as I am.”
It took another fifteen minutes before Buckwell rowed up in his boat to take them ashore. She watched as several Edgers under Buckwell’s direction dumped gasoline into the lake. When the first spark blossomed into orange flame above the water, she felt a great sense of satisfaction.
It lasted until Declan came to stand next to her. Her throat closed in. It was time for him to go after Casshorn, and there was nothing she could do to help him now.
She turned to him. Declan’s face was cold like a block of ice. He had locked himself into a rigid stance. Behind him, William waited, a dark shadow. Now wasn’t the time to break down and start crying. It was all or nothing. Either he came back and they had everything, or he would never return and they had nothing. She wanted desperately to run and throw her arms around him, but if she did that, letting go would be that much harder for both of them, and she sensed he was fighting for control.
Rose looked into Declan’s green eyes. “I love you,” she said. “Come back to me alive.”
He nodded, turned without a word, and walked away, William in tow.
Something broke inside her. It hurt, and she just stood there, trying her best not to crumble.
“He isn’t dead yet,” Tom Buckwell’s gruff voice said behind her.