“She’s suffering, Rune.” Z’s stare softened. “Let’s check the rest of them. We’ll put any still alive out of their misery.” He motioned for Blue to continue to the woman languishing on the pole.
“I said to fucking wait.” Rune’s voice was hard. “We’re not killing people who have a chance. If she’s beyond help, I’ll kill her myself. But we’re going to check first.”
Maybe her voice was accusing, but that was okay. She didn’t like that Z had changed so much he was willing to put down a suffering woman as though she were a rabid dog. She didn’t like it at all.
Because Z…
Z loved women.
“Okay,” he said. “We’ll check.”
There was a little shame in his voice.
Rune took a deep breath, regretting it when she inhaled the horrible scent of incomprehensible suffering and tortured death, then walked with the other two toward the fidgety woman on the pole.
The poles marched in an almost straight line into the horizon, getting smaller and smaller until they disappeared from view.
Dead. So many dead.
The woman Blue had been eager to kill was not ready to go.
She began to scream when she saw the three of them, and it was not a scream of pain. It was a scream of rage.
She jerked her head forward and then back, cracking it against the pole to which she was lashed. “Get away from me,” she demanded, but her voice was hoarse and raw.
“Does that sound like a woman who’s near death?” Rune asked, then sprinted ahead of them to the victim.
The woman was too bloody and cut up for Rune to assess her damage, but her voice, though hoarse, was strong.
“I’m going to get you down,” Rune told her. “We’re not going to hurt you.”
The woman stopped her thrashing, staring down at Rune with eyes nearly swollen shut. Her face was covered with blood. “Princess.”
Word had definitely spread.
Rune shot out her claws. “Whatever.” She cut through the ropes around the girl’s legs, then shimmied up the pole to cut the rest of the ropes binding her to the wood. “Hold on to me.”
But when she was released, the best the woman could do was wilt over Rune’s shoulder like a cut flower left too long without water.
Rune jumped down and gently placed the girl upon the ground.
The tortured woman had fainted.
Rune stared down at her, frowning. “She’s familiar to me. I think I know her.”
And then she realized who the captured woman was, but not because she was able to recognize her face through all the swelling and blood.
There was a broken slingshot twisted tightly around the girl’s neck, as though her captors had contemptuously decorated her with the remains of a weapon so lethal in her hands.
It was the slingshot girl.
Roma.
Chapter Seven
Roma had been using her slingshot—and only her slingshot—to put down enemies when Rune had jumped into her first battle in Skyll. The girl was good with it. Incredibly good.
Blue nudged the injured girl with the toe of her boot. “Roma Narez. Too bad.”
“She’s something of a legend here.” Z knelt down beside the tortured girl and brushed her hair out of her face. “We’ll take care of you, sweetheart.”
Rune blinked back tears. There was the Z she knew. “Fucking legislators.”
“They do enjoy their work,” Blue said. She stared off into the distance, impatience in every line of her body. “We should go.”
“We’re not leaving her here,” Rune said.
“Can you carry her?” Blue asked. She held up a hand. “I’m not being a smartass, but that’s the only way we can take her with us.”
Z stood and glanced back the way they’d come. “Do you hear them?”
Rune nodded. “They’re coming in after us.”
Blue paled. “The legislators?” she asked. Something about the look she shot Z made Rune stiffen. “Or the crawlers?”
“What are crawlers?” Rune’s stomach started to cramp with an uneasiness she couldn’t press away. Crawlers…
She shuddered and stumbled back as a half-chewed memory dropped into her mind.
Crawlers…
Z took her hand. “Steady, sweet thing.”
Roma woke up. “Where…what’s going on?”
“She saved you,” Blue said. “Can you walk? We’re in a hurry.”
Roma’s chocolate eyes seemed to float in the sea of blood on her face. “Princess?”
Rune shuddered again as fear awakened her hunger. It was an automatic response to terror—if she fed, she could fight.
She struggled against the urge to drop to her knees and lick the blood off Roma’s ravaged face.
“What—” She cleared her throat and tried again. “What the fuck are crawlers?”
The stinking city closed around her and the sounds of