The pain intensified, like heated wires slicing into my nerves. “Sunmages are supposed to be healers,” I managed to gasp as I struggled and the sunlight—hells-damned sunlight—filled the room, caging me as effectively as iron bars might hold a human.
I swung at him with my free arm, but he blocked the blow, taking its force on his forearm without a wince. He fought far too well for a healer. Who was this man?
“Ever consider that being a healer means being exposed to hundreds of ways to hurt people? Don’t make me hurt you. Put the knife down.”
I swore and flung myself forward, swinging my free hand at his face again. But he moved too, fast and sure, and somehow—damn, he was good—I missed, my hand smacking into the wall. I twisted desperately as the impact sent a shock wave up my arm, and the light dazzled me as I looked directly into one of the lamps.
A split second is all it takes to make a fatal mistake.
Before I could blink, he had pulled me forward and round and I sailed through the air to land facedown on the feather mattress, wind half knocked out of me. My free hand was bent up behind my back, and my other—still holding my dagger—was pinned by his to the pillow.
My heart raced in anger and humiliation and fear as I tried to breathe.
Sunmage.
I was an idiot. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.
Stupid and careless.
His knee pushed me deeper into the mattress, making it harder still to breathe.
“Normally I don’t get this forward when I haven’t been introduced,” he said, voice warm and low, close to my ear. He still sounded far too calm. A sunmage healer shouldn’t have been so sanguine about finding an assassin in his house. Though perhaps he wasn’t quite as calm as he seemed. His heart pounded. “But then again, normally, women I don’t know don’t try to stab me in my bed.”
I snarled and he increased the pressure. There wasn’t much I could do. I’m faster and stronger than a human woman, but there’s a limit to what a female of five foot six can do against a man nearly a foot taller and quite a bit heavier. Particularly with my powers cut off by the light of the sun.
Damned hells-cursed sunlight.
“I’ll take that.” His knee shifted upward to pin both my arm and my back, and his free hand wrenched the dagger from my grasp.
Then, to my surprise, his weight vanished. It took a few seconds for me to register my freedom. By the time I rolled to face him, he stood at the end of the bed and my dagger quivered in the wall far across the room. To make matters worse, the sunlight now flickered off the ornately engraved barrel of the pistol in his right hand.
It was aimed squarely at the center of my forehead. His hand was perfectly steady, as though holding someone at gunpoint was nothing greatly out of the ordinary for him. For a man wearing nothing but linen drawers, he looked convincingly threatening.
I froze. Would he shoot? If our places were reversed, he’d already be dead.
“Wise decision,” he said, eyes still cold. “Now. Why don’t you tell me what this is about?”
“Do you think that’s likely?”
One corner of his mouth lifted and a dimple cracked to life in his cheek. My assessment had been right. He was pretty. Pretty and dangerous, it seemed. The arm that held the gun was, like the rest of him, sleek with muscle. The sort that took concerted effort to obtain. Maybe he was one of the rare sunmages who became warriors? But the house seemed far too luxurious for a Templar or a mercenary, and his hands and body were bare of Templar sigils.
Besides, I doubted Lucius would set me on a Templar. That would be madness.
So, who the hell was this man?
When I stayed silent, the pistol waved back and forth in a warning gesture. “I have this,” he said. “Plus, I am, as you mentioned, a sunmage.” As if to emphasize his point, the lamps flared a little brighter. “Start talking.”
I considered him carefully. The sunlight revealed his skin as golden, his hair a gilded shade of light brown, and his eyes a bright, bright blue. A true creature of the day. No wonder Lucius wanted him dead. I currently felt a considerable desire for that outcome myself. I scanned the rest of the room, seeking a means to escape.
A many-drawered wooden chest, a table covered with papers with a leather-upholstered chair tucked neatly against it, and a large wardrobe all made simply in the same dark reddish wood offered no inspiration. Some sort of ferny plant in a stand stood in one corner, and paintings—landscapes and studies of more plants—hung over the bed and the table. Nothing smaller than the furniture, nothing I could use as a weapon, lay in view. Nor was there anything to provide a clue as to who he might be.
“I can hear you plotting all the way over here,” he said with another little motion of the gun. “Not a good idea. In fact . . .” The next jerk of the pistol was a little more emphatic, motioning me toward the chair as he hooked it out from the table with his foot. “Take a seat. Don’t bother trying anything stupid like attempting the window. The glass is warded. You’ll just hurt yourself.”
Trapped in solid form, I couldn’t argue with that. The lamps shone with a bright, unwavering light and his face showed no sign of strain. Even his heartbeat had slowed to a more steady rhythm now that we were no longer fighting. A sunmage calling sunlight at night. Strong. Dangerously strong.
Not to mention armed when I wasn’t.
I climbed off the bed and stalked over to the chair.
He tied my arms and legs to their counterparts on the chair with neck cloths. Tight enough to be secure but carefully placed so as not to hurt. He had to have been a healer. A mercenary wouldn’t have cared if he hurt me. A mercenary probably would’ve killed me outright.
When he was done he picked up a pair of buckskin trousers and a rumpled linen shirt from the floor and dressed quickly. Then he took a seat on the end of the bed, picked up the gun once again, and aimed directly at me.
Blue eyes stared at me for a long minute, something unreadable swimming in their depths. Then he nodded.
“Shall we try this again? Why are you here?”