When I pushed myself upright, he smiled. Next to him, Gerald, the slipshot, grimaced. I’d forgotten he was there. Pain had a way of blinding you to everyone and everything.
“The slipshot,” Jagger said, his gray lips curling, “told me everything. You and Justice could’ve left, but instead, you chose to save the conjurers. Is that right?”
I swallowed, my throat burning. “Yes.”
I braced myself for another river of pain, but it didn’t come.
“Then you allowed the conjurers to leave before you. You even let the slipshot out before you. Is that right?”
Something tickled my mind. I hesitated before responding. “Yes.”
Jagger’s boulder-like stance widened. He was a rock. A mountain. A hard, granite, hateful thing. He turned to the slipshot. “You helped my mines escape?”
Gerald nodded. “I did.”
“Yet you left the Den before them?”
“I . . . I . . .” Gerald licked his lips, sensing something wasn’t quite right. “I did.”
Jagger sighed.
“Wait—” I cried.
It was too late. Jagger thrust his hand out and yanked the slipshot’s throat free.
It was done so quickly that only a second passed between when Gerald was breathing and when he was not. He lay dead, crumpled at Jagger’s feet.
Jagger licked his long gray nails, staring at me as he tasted the slipshot’s blood.
“Why?” I asked. But I knew why. First, no one helped another without punishment. Second, in Jagger’s mind, Gerald should’ve been the last creature out. If he were, he might’ve been the one taken by the Den instead of Justice. For Jagger, a slipshot was worthless compared to a mine.
“Don’t question me, Mari.”
I curled my fingers into my palms.
“You’ve cost me a slipshot. You’ve cost me my Knife. You’ve cost me a Silencer and even a bottle of Furtig. What should I do with you?”
I looked into Jagger’s slate-gray eyes. “Is he still alive?”
Jagger’s mouth stretched into what some would consider a smile. It filled his dark, cavernous office with a sickly, gleeful feel. “Oh, he’s alive. He’s suffering horribly, and it’s delicious.”
The smile stretched wider, and I shuddered.
How long had he been there now? It had been four hours for me; had it been weeks or months for Justice? Years? The Merchant had said time there was unstable. It moved in spurts and jerks. Gerald, in his recitation to Jagger, had told him he thought he’d been there twenty-five years (the life span of a slipshot). We’d experienced five years; he’d experienced twenty-five. How quickly was time moving for Justice?
“Send me after him.” My voice sounded raw, burned and battered by the fire in my throat. “Let that be my punishment. Let me bring him out.”
Jagger laughed. It was his rockslide rumble, and it battered me with its cruelty. “No. I don’t think so. I believe, for the moment, he will stay where he is.”
“Please. He?—”
“Do you think I don’t know my mines? I know them better than they know themselves. My Knife always fights me. I thought I might have to discard him. But this . . . I can already feel . . .” The flat stretching of skin on Jagger’s face turned to a triumphant smile. “He won’t fight me much longer. He won’t want to.”
His eyes gleamed as he circled me. Jagger was large. Nearly seven feet tall. Sometimes, it felt like he might crush you under his rocklike will. But other times, he moved with eerie fluidity, like the smooth flow of heated marble. He circled me, orbiting the barren room.
My heart pounded painfully. It felt like it was trying to push gravel through a straw. Each beat was a hard, shoving lurch.
The Den was doing what Jagger had never been able to accomplish. It was robbing Justice of his good. I had to go after him. I had to get him out. Even without Jagger’s permission.
