Burn Me Deadly: An Eddie LaCrosse Novel (2 page)

“And you feel like saving me,” she said. It wasn’t a question.

“I don’t know about ‘saving’ you, but I
am
offering to keep people from beating on you any more tonight. What you tell me after that is up to you.”

Something changed in her face, and for a moment she looked ancient, with despair deeper than any I’d ever seen. And I’d seen a lot of despair. “The only way you can help me tonight,” she said with slow, deliberate words, “is to get me to Neceda alive. Nothing else will truly help me.”

We rode in silence for a bit. The trees began to thin out, and just ahead awaited the edge of the forest. Past it the road descended and snaked across miles of open prairie, as vivid in the moonlight as it might be on an overcast day. Scattered across the plain were small camps of travelers, a few with fires still lit. In the far distance glowed the lamps of Neceda, and just beyond that sparkled the Gusay River. The waxing, nearly full moon lit the vista in shades of blue and white.

When she saw the distant town she sat up straight and tightly grasped my arm. “We may make it,” she said softly.

“We’ll make it,” I said with certainty.

I was tense and alert and experienced in just about every sort of attack. So when the blow struck the back of my head, damn near hard enough to knock my beard from my face, I was so surprised it took me a moment to realize I was falling from my saddle onto the road. I’d heard no one approach, either on foot or horseback. These guys were
good
.

I landed awkwardly, too stunned to react but not completely unconscious. Sparks danced around the edges of my vision. My body pinned my sword to the ground; the hilt dug painfully into my side. I reached for it, but my limbs would not respond with any speed.

The dust from our pursuers drifted over me. Above the roar of blood and pain in my head, I heard Laura scream. We were too far for any of those camped on the prairie to come to our aid, even if they were so inclined.

A horse stopped beside me, and someone dismounted almost in my face. Expensive black boots, decorated with a silver dragon design that sparkled in the moonlight, hit the ground. Above them a stern, annoyed voice said, “Shut her the hell up. You can make her scream all you want back at the house, at least until she tells us where it is.” Laura’s screams were suddenly muffled, as if by a gag or a big hand.

“What about this guy?” another voice asked.

“Bring him along, too,” dragon boots said. “We don’t know what she told him. Oh, hell, he’s waking up.”

One of the boots rose out of my field of vision and came down hard on the side of my head.

I
awoke, sort of.

My whole skull was numb. My fingers tingled, and when I tried to wriggle them I found my wrists were bound tightly behind my back. I tried to move any other body part, but nothing cooperated.

I lay facedown on a rough wooden floor. A fire lit the room, and I felt its heat from my left. Over its homey smell, I caught the tang of blood and the odor of scorched meat. Or flesh. The air hung with the echo of the sound that had awakened me: a woman’s scream.

“Uh-oh,” a voice said. “I, uh . . . I think she’s dead.”

“You
killed
her?” another voice demanded. I recognized it as the one associated with the dragon boots.

“No, I didn’t kill her,” the first voice said with professional annoyance. “I
do
know how to do this, you know. But look how burned she is.”

“From
your
irons.”

“
No
,” the torturer insisted. “I didn’t do this. Not on her arms and hands.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I’m a professional. I have a
style
. See here on her tits? And here? I made these; they’re very specific, they have a pattern and everything. These others are . . . arbitrary.”

“What the hell does that mean?” a third male voice demanded. “I’m so tired of you and your damn big words, like you’re some kind of wizard or something.”

“It means I didn’t make those other burns,” the torturer sighed.

A moment of silence passed. Again I tried to move, but I was still too foggy. It took every ounce of strength not to fade back into that nice padded darkness.

“No, that’s not what it means,” dragon boots said, his voice cold with fury. “It means she
moved
them. Sometime between her escape and the time we caught her, she hid them somewhere else.
That’s
how she got burned.”

“Where?” the clueless third man asked.

“How the hell do I know?” dragon boots exploded. He slammed his hand on a table I couldn’t see. Rattling metal told me it held the interrogator’s special tools. “We didn’t know where she hid them in the first place, so how could we know where they are now?”

“The boss won’t be happy,” the third man said.

“Let me worry about him,” dragon boots snapped.

“What about her boyfriend?” the torturer asked, and nudged me in the side with his foot.

Hands grabbed my hair and bent my neck painfully back so they could look at my face. I played dead, which wasn’t hard. “This guy? You saw what he had in his saddlebags. He’s just some dumb-ass in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“I could still find out what he knows,” the torturer said. His eagerness really did scare me.

“He wouldn’t last five minutes in this shape. No, we’ll dump them both. Have to start from scratch. We know she hid them around here somewhere, so we’ll just keep looking the old-fashioned way.”

He released my hair, and my head thumped hard against the floor. That was all it took; I dove back into quiet, peaceful nothing.

WHEN
I woke up again, I was bathed in moonlight.

The clear sky above was alive with stars, all twinkling happily at me. I blinked, waited for the dizziness generated by that movement to pass, and then blinked again.

I lay on my back on the ground. I was untied, my arms and legs thrown wide like I wanted to embrace the night. A rock dug painfully into my behind, but I lacked the energy to move away from it. With tremendous concentration I turned my head to the right.

Laura Lesperitt lay beside me. Most of her front teeth, one eye and half an ear were gone. She was naked, and her upper torso was a mass of poker burns, cuts and bruises. I saw what the torturer meant: his points of contact were small and precise, but something else had burned the insides of her arms from wrist to elbow. The scabbing told me she’d been alive when most of it happened, but the milky stare of her remaining eye said she was past the agony now. Insects had already collected around the injuries, and a shadowy canine form slipped through the darkness beyond her: a wolf or coyote, cautiously approaching a free meal.

I tried to rise. I managed a feeble finger-wiggle.

We lay in a gully or a dry creek bed, where the light only reached us because the moon was straight overhead. The sides of the ravine rose sharply and seemed to my befuddled brain as if they might snap closed over us, trapping us in darkness like those fly-catching plants.

Suddenly a shadow blocked the moon. A shape in the air above me grew larger and made a high, keening sound. I knew some birds of prey hunted at night, and I recalled childhood stories of giant owls that would swoop down and snatch misbehaving brats from their beds. I’d never seen a bird large enough to lift a human being, but then again, this night seemed to be all about bad surprises.

Then my brain cleared enough for me to comprehend what I was actually seeing, and I used every last bit of available energy to roll twice, just before my horse, Lola, crashed down onto the spot I’d occupied. Her equine screech of terror ended with the sharp, wet sound of impact. Big globs of something splattered over me.

Three men stood silhouetted in the moonlight on the edge of the cliff. Dust glittered in the air from where they’d driven Lola over the edge. I lay very still; did they realize she had missed me?

I heard their murmurs without catching any words. Then they turned and walked away, apparently convinced I was as dead as my horse, and the girl. Boy, were they in for a surprise, I thought grimly. Especially that bastard with the dragon boots. All I needed was time to catch my breath.

Then I coughed, tasted blood and got a fresh jolt of agony from my side. I realized the girl and I had
also
been tossed off that cliff. I tried to rise, knowing if I stayed put I’d be dead by morning. But just breathing exhausted me, and before I knew it the night wrapped me up and again took away the pain. If this was death, I wouldn’t protest.

chapter

TWO

I

shimmied back into the world. That’s really how it felt, like different parts of me were yanked into consciousness and then shaken to make sure they were awake. It’s not the best way to wake up, and it definitely affects your temper.

The air around me was warm and scented with medicinal incense. I lay flat on my stomach, one eye buried in the pillow, the other showing me a flat expanse of white wall. I took a deep breath, harder to do than it should have been, and said, “Anybody there?” My voice sounded thin and weak.

A blurry head-shaped mass appeared in front of me, at an odd angle because of my own position. “Back with us, then?” a woman’s voice asked.

I blinked a couple of times, and her face resolved. She had gray hair and kindly eyes that belied her no-nonsense tone. She wore flowing robes and at her throat hung the crescent symbol marking her as a moon priestess, a religious sect that flourished in this part of the world. “I’m Donna Bennings. You’re in the moon goddess hospital, just outside Neceda. Can you understand me, Mr. LaCrosse?”

“Yeah,” I said, mostly into the drool-damp spot on my pillow.

“Can you repeat it back to me?” she asked.

“It back to me,” I repeated. I began to roll onto my back, and she moved to help, cradling my head. The maneuver exhausted me, and I closed my eyes. My skull was three times too large, and a throbbing mass clung to the back of it. My chest felt too small for my lungs. “Okay, that’s enough work for one day,” I said.

“Do you
ever
put in a full day’s work?” a familiar voice asked. Like mine, it sounded weak and tired.

I turned my gigantic cranium enough to see Liz Dumont seated beside me, bent forward with her elbows on the edge of the bed. She wore a tight tunic blouse and men’s-style trousers with high boots. Her short red hair was matted and strands fell into her equally red eyes. The harsh light from the window highlighted the crow’s-feet and smile lines on her face. She needed a bath, a change of clothes and some serious rest. I thought she was the most beautiful sight in the world. “Did you go out in public like that?” I asked.

“You’re no picnic yourself.” Her hand found mine in the tangle of blankets. “And watching you sleep is just as exciting as it sounds.”

Liz was, for lack of a better term, my girlfriend. It seemed an odd word for a relationship between two people our age, but no other one applied. She was a freelance courier, moving everything from documents to livestock as needed. Two years ago she’d come to Angelina’s tavern to deliver something to me, and I hadn’t let her out of my sight since. Besides being beautiful, intelligent, tough and inexplicably smitten with me, she was the only other person in the world whose judgment I consistently trusted.

“Now
you
can get some sleep, too,” Bennings said to Liz. The priestess lifted my eyelids higher than I expected. “Hm. Well, you seem to truly be on the mend. We’ve been giving you some elixirs and doing a few simple noninvasive spells for your recovery. But you’ll be feeling that head for a while, I imagine.”

“Better than not feeling it,” I said.

“Yes. I’ll leave you two alone to catch up on things, and check back later.”

After she left, I looked around the room. The moon goddess hospital was well-known, if mysterious, to most of Neceda’s population. It had been here for three generations, training apprentices as well as caring for the injured. The knot of small buildings was constructed over hot springs, and their heat could be channeled into the structures to keep the rooms at reasonably constant temperatures. The walls inside and out were whitewashed, while the door bore the universal red-pentagram symbol of the place’s purpose. It could accommodate about twenty patients, two to a room if necessary. A fence surrounded the compound, crucial since a constantly rotating population of young females lived within it.

The priestesses, called “Mother” once they reached a certain rank, and their trainees were skilled in herbal therapy and pain management. Neceda, a wide-open river town, appreciated this service even if officially King Archibald frowned on the order, whose hidden rites were the source of many scandalous rumors. I knew of the place by reputation, but luckily had never needed its services before now. Guess my luck had changed.

I turned to Liz. “How long have I been out?”

“A week.”

“A
week
?”

She tenderly brushed a stray lock of hair from my eyes. “They brought you in the morning after you left for Tallega. At first they told me you were dead. They kept you on sleep herbs for the first four days. You were pretty much written off, and they didn’t see any need for you to suffer. Then when you
didn’t
die, they decided to see if you’d come out of it. I told them a blow to your head was the least likely way to kill you, since it couldn’t hit anything vital.”

I grinned. “You’re a bitch when you don’t sleep.”

“Then scoot over,” she said, and without waiting climbed onto the narrow bed with me. I put my arm under her neck, and she draped one leg over mine. I winced as the weight came down on my injured side. “Ow,” I gasped.

“Oops, sorry,” she said as she adjusted. “Is that better?”

“Perfect,” I said, and meant it.

She rested her hand on my chest, a possessive gesture that made me glad to be possessed. I pulled her as close as my weakened condition allowed and kissed the top of her head. She was asleep within five minutes.