Forever The World of Nightwalkers - By Jacquelyn Frank Page 0,56

me, and while I wait to get her back, I am going to content myself with watching you suffer the death you consigned her to over and over and over. Do you understand?”

He didn’t need details. Leo understood. He was going to be tortured. It was clear he was going to meet death in the process. But he was going to damn well make it as unsatisfying for them as was in his power to do.

Then the man nodded to Chatha and Chatha pounced, grabbing Leo by the hair and pulling hard until his neck was stretched to the limit. Leo struggled to not make a sound as pain and anxiety scraped through him.

And then Chatha used his hunting knife to cut his throat, the knife so sharp it severed everything with ease and purity, like spreading soft butter on bread.

Now Leo couldn’t scream even if he wanted to.

Hours later, Leo woke up. His throat, cut nearly to the bone the last time he was conscious was back in working order. He could breathe and swallow, although both acts felt like he was swallowing razor blades. How was this possible? How was he even alive? Twice now he had experienced what should have been his own death, only to wake up once more …

To the same nightmare. The calm, regarding eyes that were so eerily light blue they bordered on colorless, like the facets of diamonds. His expression was equally as hard and as cold as that particular stone.

“Where were we?” he asked aloud, clearly rhetorically speaking. He didn’t want Leo’s input. “Oh yes. The reason for all of this. You slit the throat of a woman, a very powerful woman whose gloriousness and magnificence so outshines the dingy, pissing existence you call a life. You nearly killed her. Not an easy trick, to kill one of us, and I suppose on some level you are to be commended for your strength and prowess.

“But on the other hand … you have sinned grievously against me and mine and I cannot let that stand.”

“Somehow I knew you were going to say that,” Leo croaked out. Hearing himself was a shock. Maybe it was because he’d worked so hard at his speech and its patterns, worked to rid himself of the barrio influences that could make him a caricature of his heritage. He was an intelligent Latino and he damn well wanted others to show him the respect he deserved. Hearing himself sound so rough hit him on a level that he would never allow this pendejo to ever see. “Anyway, you’re going to have to be more specific. I’ve slit a lot of bitches’ throats in my day. Just which bitch is yours?”

That was a ballsy bit of lying, but he could play this game, too. He’d shot a woman once. Punched one once, too. But in all fairness to him, one had been holding a gun to his head and the other had tried to stab him. Not that he’d blamed them. After all, in both cases he’d just killed their husbands. But hey, that was the risk you took when you hooked up with a drug kingpin and a sadistic mercenary, respectively. The only time he’d cut a woman’s throat had been in his dreams. A very vivid dream at that, he thought with a frown. It’d been a hell of a piece of fantasy fiction with spell-casting bad guys and himself, Ram, and Docia cast as the good guys. That dream had creeped him out in huge ways, mainly because in it Jackson had died.

“The fact is you will only remember the act as a dream. I can tell by the energy surrounding you that your memories have been altered. Let me expedite matter around him and huggedupis by telling you it was not a dream. Everything you did and everything you saw was absolutely real.” The other man stood up and loomed over Leo. What made it so unnerving was that he wasn’t trying to bully him, nor was he interested in convincing him. He was just dropping information for factual purposes. “The way you remember it is of little significance to me. It was what it was. It was a lowborn beast, a savage, thinking he had the right to rid the world of a queen. There is recompense to be paid for such things.” Those icy eyes flicked upward to above Leo’s head.

“Again” was all he said.

Chatha pounced, this time the knife slicing so deeply