Thibauld stretched his neck and looked at his arm. “Is . . . that . . . all?”
“Don’t worry, that’s just a little foreplay.” William waddled from foot to foot. “That’s what you look like when you move.”
Thibauld bellowed and charged.
William dashed, cutting, slicing, stabbing, turning his knife into a lethal metal blur. Thibauld struck back, huge arms swinging faster and faster. Claws raked William’s side, ripping through the leather. Pain scorched him. He ignored it and kept slashing, carving at exposed flesh with precise savagery. Left, right, left, left, down, cut, cut, cut . . . Blood slicked Thibauld’s massive frame.
Not enough. William drove the knife in to the hilt under the armored scales, aiming for the heart. The agent roared and swung. William jerked back, pulling the blade free. Not far enough. The fist caught him, spinning him around. The world turned fuzzy for a fraction of a second. William leaped straight up, knife in hand, aiming to slice Thibauld’s neck, and . . . landed in the mud as the agent staggered back, a puzzled expression on his face.
Thibauld’s huge legs trembled. He sucked in a hoarse breath.
The top half of him slid to the side and toppled in the mud, revealing Cerise holding a bare sword. The stump of the agent’s torso remained upright for a long second and then fell, spilling blood onto the wet mud.
What the hell?
Cerise passed her sword to her left hand and walked over to him, sidestepping the corpse.
If he hadn’t known better, he would’ve sworn she had cut Thibauld in half. Shell and all. How did she manage that? Swords couldn’t do that.
Her eyes were huge and dark on her mud-splattered face. He peered into their depths and missed her fist until it was too late. A sharp punch hammered his gut. He didn’t even have time to flex. Pain exploded in his solar plexus.
“Don’t ever do that again,” Cerise ground out.
He caught her hand. “I was protecting you, you dumb-ass.”
“I don’t need protecting!”
Behind her a bat crawled down the trunk of a cypress. William grabbed Cerise, pulling her out of the way, and hurled his knife. The blade spun and sliced into the small body, pinning it to the tree. Cerise jerked away from him.
“Are you crazy?”
“It’s a deader,” he told her.
Purplish, translucent tentacles of magic stretched from the bat, clutching at the knife, trying to pull it out.
“What the hell is that?”
“A scout. Bats hide during rain.” A “deader” meant a scout master who reported straight to Spider. He was pretty sure the bat hadn’t seen them, but he couldn’t be certain.
Cerise stumbled. Her legs folded; she swayed and half fell, half sat into the mud.
He crouched by her. “What is it?”
“Dots ...” she whispered.
William scooped her from the mud and dashed through the rain to the boundary, swiping their bags on the way.
THE pressure of the boundary caught William in its jaws, grinding his bones. He tore through the pain, carrying Cerise. The changelings didn’t have magic. They were magic, and while crossing hurt, it wasn’t anything he couldn’t handle.
He paused on the other side, catching his breath. Cerise lay in a small clump in his arms.
Oh, hell. He might have taken the boundary too fast for her to cope.
William lifted her higher so he could peer at her. “Talk to me.”
Her bloodless face was like a white stain in the rain. He shook her a little and saw the long dark eyelashes tremble.
“It’s gone,” she whispered. She had pretty eyes, he realized, big and dark brown, and at that moment luminescent with relief. “The bugs are gone. The dots, too.”
“Good.” He strode to the house.
“Put me down.”
That was a hell of a sword strike. A good punch, too. He was dying to see what she looked like under all that grime and mud. “If I put you down, you’ll fall, and I don’t want to pick you up again after your roll in the muck. I’m muddy enough as is.”
“You’re a thug and an ass,” she told him, baring small, even teeth.
If she had energy to snap, she was coming out of it. Good. “You say the sweetest things. And that spaghetti perfume you’re wearing is to die for. No hobo could resist.”
She snarled. Heh.
“You sound like a pissed-off rabbit.” He held her tighter in case she decided to punch him again, and he jogged to the house, up the porch steps, and to the door. The door looked good and solid.
“Wait.”
The alarm in her voice stopped him cold. “What?”
Cerise raised her muddy hand to a small mark burned into the doorframe, holding on to him with the other hand for support. A letter A with the horizontal bar leaning at an angle.
Her bottomless eyes got bigger. “We need to leave,” Cerise whispered.
“What does the letter mean?”
“Alphas.”
He waited for more explanation.
“They’re not from the Edge or from the Weird. They’re their own thing in the Broken, and they’re dangerous as hell. We see them sometimes, but they leave us alone if we leave them alone. This house belongs to them. If we break in and they find us here, we’ll be dead.”
William shrugged. “It will be fine. The house has been empty for months.”
“How do you know?”
There were too many things to explain: the layer of grime settled on the edge of the door, the absence of human odors, the scents of small animals, some weeks, some days old, crossing over what they now considered their territory . . . “I just know. Whoever these alphas are, they’re not around. We need a dry place to stay.”
Cerise’s face clenched in alarm. “Listen to me. We have to go. It’s a bad—”
William kicked the door. It burst open. “Too late.”
She froze in his arms.
The house looked dark and empty. No alarm broke the silence. Nobody emerged to fight them.
“Damn it, William.”
He liked the way she said his name. “Don’t worry, Your Hobo Highness. I’ll keep you safe.”
She cursed at him.