Which meant that someone higher up was pulling the strings. Didn’t think it went as high as Slade, but no way to be certain. It didn’t matter, really. Because there would be a point made, just not the one they’d anticipated.
The marsh was unforgiving, and if I put a foot wrong, I’d solve their problem for them. So instead of trying to walk through the soggy mess, I took off my boots and climbed.
Some of the trunks ran for over a hundred feet, but they were as much horizontal as vertical. Where their branches touched, they grew together. If I could make like a monkey, I could be much more mobile up here than on the ground.
Once up there, I stashed my boots before silently crawling among the sheets of hanging moss and ferns that grew off the branches.
The dickhead that sent them must be scarier than me, at least to them, because they followed me into the swampy tangle.
As a divide-and-conquer technique, the swamp worked amazingly well. I moved carefully along the trunks in bare feet as I tracked my first victim. Nemi helped me, hovering above his position. When I dropped onto him, I hit him so hard he didn’t have time to do more than gasp.
Seconds later, I was back up in the trees, wiping my blooded blade on a leaf. Nemi hovered in my face, then darted to my right, and hovered again. I followed her and found a guy pushing carefully through the foliage…
Twenty minutes and three more bodies later, I sensed a tremor in the branch beneath my feet. Nemi uttered a high-pitched trill of warning, and I acted on instinct, dropping off it just as a merc came at me from behind. He missed his grab, his knife slicing through the air right where I’d been. His longtail whipped at where I hung beneath the mossy trunk, and I grabbed it as I let go.
It hauled him right off the branch with me. We crashed through ferns and hit the ground with a soggy thwack. He hissed and rolled, pulling his tail free and raising his knife?—
Then I stared down at mine and buried it to the hilt in his stomach. I braced against his hip with my foot and ripped him open.
In seconds, I was back up in the trees. Five down. Three to go.
Fifteen minutes later, Nemi and I had disposed of another. The remaining two clearly embraced their inner intellectual and bolted. They’d face the head thug’s wrath instead of mine.
The hummingbird and I emerged from the trees. I regarded her as I wiped three of my knives on leaves before sheathing them. She’d become an effective working partner, and I didn’t understand it.
I shrugged the thoughts away. It only mattered if she suddenly stopped doing it, and if I remained on guard for that, I’d be fine.
What would Slade make of my efforts? I had my doubts that anyone would search for the bodies, or even give two shits about them. The marsh didn’t lack for scavengers, and Slade didn’t lack for mercs.
As Nemi twittered and flitted between flowers, I leaned against a trunk in the shadows and watched seven Dragons fly in low over the trees. Not Victor’s crew—five Dragons flew in formation around the center two, escorted to Victor’s ledge by two of the Wyverns. All the newcomers were huge, far bigger than any Dragons I’d seen so far.
With the softest rustling of bush, a large furred form emerged about twenty feet to my right. He must have been in the swamp the entire time. Not much got past the mercenary shifter.
That he hadn’t intervened meant he didn’t care. I guessed no one needed a stupid mercenary. And they’d all been very stupid.
Slade sat his furred butt down on the ground, and stared up at the Dragons, now landing on Victor’s ledge.
“Legion,” he stated.
I had no idea what he was talking about. But all I said was, “You sure?”
He snorted. “Everr see a fuckin’ underworld Dragon that big?”
I filed that away. “Why the fuck are they here?”
Slade shook his heavy mane, and his blue eyes glittered in the evening shadows. “Victorr is making interesting friends,” he growled. “Things across the rrealms are changing. The balance of powerr is shifting to the underworld.”
Interesante.I desperately needed that fuckingRealm Guide for Dummies. Not knowing this shit meant I was stumbling around in the darkness.
The Dragons vanished into Victor’s suite. Slade rose and paced straight past me.
“Time to get going.” He aimed for the door.
And that was all he said. As though I hadn’t rendered several members of his team marsh bait.
I whistled to Nemi, and once she’d landed, followed Slade into the building.
21
