“What are you looking at?” Bowman asked.
I met his gaze, fed up with his self-delusional half-truths. What kind of grown man didn’t have the backbone to face up to what he’d seen and felt, even if he couldn’t explain it? “They fought over the box?” I asked, ignoring his question in favor of one of my own.
At the edge of my vision, Allen nodded enthusiastically. “Oh, yeah. They—”
“No.” Bowman’s voice was sharp and insistent, though he couldn’t have known he was interrupting anything but my thoughts. “I don’t know where you’re getting all this crap, but there was no fighting over the box. The men—”
“—crawled all over it…” Allen said, now gesturing wildly in the air. “…pulling and kicking each other down. Even your foreman here looked tempted to jump in, but in the end, he just—”
“—got a little excited and clambered forward for a closer look.” Bowman finished, still defending his crew. “That’s it.”
“—stood there watching, like he didn’t know how to control his own men, even though he—”
My focus volleyed between them as I struggled with the chaos of two conversational threads. “Okay, that’s enough!” I shouted, crushing my now-empty coffee cup in one fist. Bowman had no idea he was involved in a very confusing argument. And Allen was so worked up, so desperate to be heard and believed, that he’d transitioned from helpful to pain-in-my-ass over the course of the past thirty seconds. I’d had it with them both.
“Mr. Bowman,” I began, shooting Allen a keep-your-mouth-shut-or-else look, which clearly confused the hell out of the foreman. “We’ve established that the men tried to get the box open, so don’t bother arguing that point with me any further. Understand?”
He nodded, obviously confused about when we’d established that particular fact.
“Now, did they succeed?” My mutilated cup fell to the ground at my feet, staining pristine snow with several drops of coffee-brown. “Did they get the box open?”
Bowman opened his mouth to answer, but before he’d even uttered the first word, footsteps sloshed rapidly through the snow behind me, followed by the unmistakable click of a pistol being cocked.
I froze. Allen’s eyes widened. He stared at a point beyond my right shoulder.
Bowman made a strangling sound in the back of his throat, like he couldn’t breathe. But he was looking in the opposite direction.
Hell. There were at least two of them—whatever they were.
I spun in the snow, already drawing my gun with my frozen stiff left hand. Sprinting toward me in the snow from the direction of the open gate was a short, thick form, bundled in a solid black snowsuit. As ifthatwould blend into the natural surroundings.
Something streaked past on my left. My head swiveled, my gun still aimed at the first figure. The newcomer was identical in size and clothing—two idiots for the price of one.
“You got another one at three o’clock,” Allen said from behind me, and I spun again to see a third man step out of a stand of trees fifteen feet to my right. He wore a brace on his left leg, from thigh to ankle. Just in case the leg wasn’t enough of a clue, the fury in his expression was unmistakable. It was Berg, whom I’d last seen lying in the rain with a busted knee and a bullet through each thigh. Impossible as it seemed, he was up and moving now, a new nine-millimeter aimed right at my head.
Evidentlythisis what I get for showing mercy for the bad guys.
TEN
“Drop the gun and hit the snow!” Hagen called from directly in front of me.
“Fuck off!” I took aim at his forehead, lamenting my decision to leave my other gun in the car. Without it, other than the Ruger, I had only my blade and the crowbar, both close range weapons. Unfortunately, if it came down to hand-to-hand combat with a goblin who already knew how I fought and what weapons I carried, this was going to get very, very nasty.
How the hell had they recovered so quickly? Yes, Berg was still limping, but Hagen should have been flat on his back, holding his guts in with a half-mile of sterile gauze, not loping toward me across the snow, murder in his eyes and spinach in his teeth. I’d twisted the knife in his stomach specifically to cause him a long, rough recovery.
“Friends of yours?” Bowman’s voice was admirably steady for an unarmed human facing three armed goblins. But then, he probably had no idea they were goblins.
“Yeah, we’re like brothers,” I mumbled, sniffling from the cold as I sighted down the barrel at Hagen’s forehead.
Bowman chuckled nervously, and at the edge of my vision, his head turned as he eyed the goblins one at a time.
“Get behind me,” I whispered, trying to watch all three stooges at once. Bowman didn’t move, which was just as well, because I couldn’t possibly cover him from all angles. Even if I could, they’d just shoot him over my head. That’s what the foreman got for being so damned tall. “What the hell do you want?” I shouted at Hagen, the nominal leader. “You masochistic? Didn’t get enough pain the first time around?”
But what I really wanted to ask was how they’d found me. Had they been at my office with Orthus, watching from the shadows, waiting to trail me to the airport? Surely they hadn’t followed me all the way to Nova Scotia just for revenge. I’d certainly held my share of grudges in the past, but this was going overboard, even by my standards.
Hagen stopped twenty feet away. “We came to finish what we started.”
Dirk stopped an equal distance away on my left. “This time, can we just shoot her and get it over with?”
