we were tracking the crazy halfling Conleth, and I never wanted to see that happen again. Especially to Anyan.
“I repeat, primary target is down,” the man said again as one of his cohorts strode over to where Anyan lay. The crunch of gravel under his boots seemed abnormally loud in the eerily quiet morning. I half-expected the barghest to spring up and attack, revealing that it had all been a clever ruse.
But Anyan’s body stayed where it was, red blood seeping under gray stone.
Meanwhile, there was only one thing I could think to do. I knew it was a risk, and I’d been told not to do it once before. But I could feel, in my gut, it was my only real option.
The man who had been speaking had a “listening” face, after which he nodded and said, “Yes, sir.” Then he looked at the man standing next to Anyan and said, “Confirm the kill.”
The man raised his rifle to his chest, sighting down on where the barghest lay, undefended. He was aiming his massive rifle at Anyan’s head. Taking a deep breath, but otherwise giving no outward indication, I sprang my trap.
Luckily for me, no one thinks I’m anything special. I’m a halfling, and everyone assumes—quite incorrectly, as with most racist stereotypes—that halflings are exactly what the name implies: half as good, half as strong, and half as necessary.
So while at least two of the men had their laser sites trained on me, they hadn’t incapacitated me in any way. I was but a small woman, and only a little chit of a halfling.
Praise be to the god who invented underestimation, I thought, as I began to gather my power to me.
Running on adrenaline and instinct, I fell almost instantaneously into the cocoon of magic I’d felt the other time Anyan had been hurt in front of me. It had been only weeks before, in Pittsburgh, that Phaedra had nixed Anyan’s ambush by hurling him into a wall. He’d landed in a sickening heap, causing me to go all primeval and reach with my power. The only thing that had stopped me was Blondie’s intervention and her warning that I should never, ever heed that siren’s song to pull.
What I saw in my magical trance back then was just like what I saw now. Water, water everywhere, and all of it full of power. Water connected everything: hydrogen and oxygen atoms, tiny strings of pearls hung like billions of bead curtains across my vision. It was like being in the Matrix’s computer code, only instead of numbers there was water. And if you switched your perspective, it became obvious that just as the water droplets went up and down, they also went horizontally.
Connecting each and everyone of us, I thought, as I went down deeper into my power, until I was my power…
And then I searched out the strings of beads connecting me to my attackers. Finding them, I reached, again…
And then, seeing no other alternative, I did exactly what I’d been told not to do. I pulled.
Focused on the man who was going to shoot out Anyan’s brains, I only saw what I did to him. Despite the circumstances, and never regretting my actions, what I saw—what I did—still haunts me.
Apparently, people remember their first kill.
He was just setting his eye to his site when he jerked hard. Thankfully, he didn’t have his finger on the trigger at that moment, or he may well have shot Anyan. Instead, his arm holding his assault rifle dropped uselessly to his side as he spasmed. I saw, in my peripheral vision, similar movements from his fellow attackers.
My assault lasted only seconds, but it felt like hours.
I called to the water in all the men’s bodies, and it responded to me with the alacrity of a squadron of eager retrievers. I watched, cold, as the man upon whom my eyes were pinned began to shrivel, but I didn’t stop. I didn’t stop when he fell to his knees, and I didn’t stop when he fell to the ground.
I didn’t stop even when I saw that the fingers protruding from his leather half-gloves were desiccated like those of a long-dead mummy.
True guilt about my actions would never set in—I knew what I did was right. Those men made their choice when they took money to murder strangers, and—somewhere between the Alfar Compound and the Healer’s mansion—I’d become hard enough by what I’d seen of evil to understand that fact. But visions of the