“Can you really not get me?”
Heavy feet stumbled on the other side of the wall. “What are you doing, witch?”
Emma let her laugh echo, high and eerie.
She heard a ragged intake of breath. He was afraid now. Good.
“Do you like the dark, Richard? The running? I hope you do. Because you’ll never leave it.” She had become good at lying, she realized, with all her time in the Night City. “You will die here. Imagine that, Richard.”
A sound from the nearest wall suggested he had slumped against it, and slid to the floor.
“I will get you. I will kill you.” She heard his fists thump the wall. But he was panting as he said it.
Emma slid to the floor on her side of the wall. She could hear the wet rattle of his breath, only inches away. It was almost intimate.
“You know, this is the second time you’ve run after me and not caught me,” she mused, as if at random. “How frustrated you must have been, the night of your ritual. Chasing me through the streets. So close, until I…”
She held her breath. He might not pick up the lure she had left dangling.
“… until you made a bargain.”
Emma closed her eyes in silent gratitude. He had taken the bait.
“I did.” And she let her voice puff with pride, smug and unbearable. She was quite pleased with her next crow of laughter. “And to think of you, all learned and expert, with your bowls and your runes, failing and failing. Always a failure. When I did it the first time, all by myself, running from you, and all I needed was desperation and a plea, and a bit of blood to open the way—” She let her voice squeak, as though she’d stopped herself.
“So that’s it.” There was glee in Richard’s voice. “Of course. Our bargain was complex. So many elements to fail. But yours was simple. One request, one person: your promise sent straight from you to the Power—”
“The Night City,” Emma corrected, as officiously as Richard might have, then let her voice spill over with horror. “No—I shouldn’t have said—the proper name, we use it only—”
She hoped Nat would be proud of her acting.
“—only for bargains. I see.” He was wrong, but it didn’t matter. She had just wanted him to hear the right name. Richard chuckled. “The Night City.You won’t understand, you idiot, but you’ve given me exactly what I need to end this.”
“End this? End this how?” She added a touch of terror. Tried to sound weak, an idiot. A thing she never had been. Richard was the one who didn’t understand.
From the other side of the wall came a muffled sound of pain.
“I give my blood, to open the way.”
The wall scraped as he pushed himself up it.
“The desperation of the trapped.” His footsteps began to thud again, moving around the outside of the room. “Pounding heart,painful breath. And oh, would you look? I have that.” He was wheezing now. “And what was the last you said? Oh, yes. The plea.”
She heard him raise his voice, sonorous. “Great Night City. I pledge you this bargain. I will offer you just payment—”
Emma steeled herself to jump in. The interruption would infuriate him. But she had to say it perfectly. Every word mattered. “No! The Night City won’t let you break in here to hurt me, it can’t—”
“It can and it will.” Oh, there was real venom in his voice now. “You think you can do what I can’t? I command these powers. You are nothing.”
The repetition of the idea was important. She needed him to pick it up.
“Oh please, don’t let him in,” Emma declaimed to the heavens, borrowing Nat’s favorite dramatic tone. “Don’t let him break in here so he can finish his ritual, please—”
“Great Night City,” he roared over her interruptions. She had stoked his fury well, she noted with satisfaction. His voice was shaking, the words tumbling over one another. The sound of a man primed to make a mistake. “Let me in, damn you. Take my bargain. Come on.” The walls rattled with his pounding. She heard the grit of exhaustion in his snarl. “Please. The old boys won’t take me back without it. The Balfours don’t have a home for me, not if I can’t fix things. I need this. Wherever she’s hiding, just let me through so I can finish our ritual. I’ll pay whatever you want, if you give me that.”
Emma squeezed her eyes shut and her hands over her mouth, smothering laughter. He had done it. He had thrown himself, tongue-first, into her trap. For the Night City loved its tricks withwords. And there was a vast difference between a bargain to kill someone and a bargain to break into a roomso that one mightkill them. She had only to wait for what came next.
The nearest door swung open. Richard stumbled in, disheveled and sweating. Emma perched on a desk, waiting.
