“He’s not my mate. And no, I’d rather not have him back.” I grinned up at her, knowing I was playing a dangerous, reckless game. But what was new about that?
Nothing. Reckless was my middle name. No, really it was. Zamira Reckless Wilson. That’s what you get when your ex-marine dad gave you your name. My mother chose my first name, and that had been good enough for her.
The giant queen frowned and I reached slowly to the left side where I’d stashed one of the other things I’d taken from the giants’ hoard.
Steve had grabbed the jewel, and I’d taken two other items. A black jewel that was flashy as hell, and the flail with my family’s crest etched into the wooden handle. The face of a lion in mid-roar, its mane a mass of hair, and eyes studded with tiny green emeralds. Coincidence that I should find it there, only a few hundred miles from my homeland? I think not. Anything with my family crest was rightfully mine, so I didn’t consider it stealing, just taking back my birthright. The black jewel I’d taken, well, that was prep work for the next hunting trip for Ish. I was, if nothing else, prepared.
At least, that’s what I liked to tell myself.
I let the flail slide through my hand until I was holding just the end of it, and the eyes of every giant followed the movement. A tingle started in my palm and rose along my arm, which I noticed, but ignored. So far so good. Lighter than any other weapon I had on me, I had no illusions about it. This weapon was not made for fighting; this show was to draw the giants to me—they were almost as bad as dragons when it came to guarding their treasures and what they believed was theirs. I swung it once, the two spiked balls hanging at the end of three-foot-long chains clicking, the chains holding them to the wood creating a nice patterned staccato of a rhythm. The tingle on my skin intensified.
“I have the jewel,” I said. “So . . . what are you gonna gonna do about it?”
Steve groaned as the giant queen tightened her hold on him, lifting him as if to put him in her mouth. “I kill kill him. Eat eat him.”
“He likes to be eaten. Don’t you, Steve?” I laughed and he glared at me.
“Ish is going to hear about this,” he yelled.
“Not if you’re dead.” I shrugged and turned Balder around with my legs, giving my horse silent cues. “No loss to me. He’s a right bastard, that one. Nobody likes him back at home.”
“Zam, don’t leave me!” he howled. I lifted a hand, waving at him while I stared forward, my heart clambering up my throat. I didn’t really want him to die. I just . . . didn’t care like I had once if he lived. Bad spot for him to be, really. I’d trusted him at one time. I’d trusted so many people and they’d all shown me that trust was stupidity.
Trust would break your heart and get you killed all in one fell swoop.
I gave Balder a gentle nudge, urging him into a slow gallop. Fast enough that the giants would think I was running, not so fast that we used up everything Balder had left in his reserves. The sweat on his gray hide was still slick and he glistened in the light of the dying sun even in the cold of the northern desert. While he had amazing stamina, I knew we were pushing it if we had to go hard for very long.
This was a gamble and if I was wrong, I’d sentenced Steve to death and lost the jewel we’d come so far to find. His death would be bad, the loss of the jewel . . . worse. The closest thing I had left to family was depending on us to get that jewel. I took a quick look under my arm like a jockey on the racetrack. Steve was falling to the ground, dropped like the useless piece of shit he was. Perfect. One problem down, one more to deal with.
My jaw tightened with each stride of the horse beneath me. The rumble of heavy feet reached my ears as the giants once more gave chase. I leaned over Balder’s neck. “Time to go, my friend.”
He plunged forward and once more we streaked down the gorge, drawing the heaving mass of giants after us. They were slow to get going, like a boulder rolling downhill. But once they were moving they were fucking hard to stop just like that same big-ass boulder.
I dared a look back to see them gaining on us once more, but the giants were not what I was looking for. No, I was checking to see if Steve was still alive after his fall.
I squinted, finally picking him out in the distance beyond the tree-trunk legs that hammered their way toward us. His golden hair and eyes seemed to catch the dying light as he turned his face toward me. He stood next to his horse and lifted a hand in a salute, then flipped me off.
That was about right for our current working relationship.
Saving him, keeping him alive was part of my job—and I hadn’t failed yet, nor did I plan to. I might have screwed up everything else in my life, but keeping Steve alive was not on that list. My pride alone would never let me just give up. The taste of failure was not something I needed to have coating my mouth.
I put my boot heels against Balder’s ribs, giving him the ignition spark he needed to finally unleash the remaining portion of his speed. He gave a grunt and then leapt forward as if I’d cracked him with a riding crop, when in reality . . . he just loved to run. I held my breath as he picked up speed, taking off as if we’d been standing still.
The giants behind us roared, the fury coming through clear along with a waft of horrible rotting teeth and soured stomach acid. I scrunched my nose, wishing not for the first time that I didn’t have such a strong sense of smell.
The gorge widened in front of us, branching off to the left which would take us home, and to the right which would take us to a dead end. I urged Balder to the right. The only way Steve was going to make it by them now and get the jewel back to Ish was if I kept the giants busy long enough for him to make a clean getaway.
“Good thing I did my homework,” I muttered. I’d scouted the gorge the night before, knowing we would likely need a quick escape and knowing there was a chance we’d be forced to the dead end.
I blew out a slow breath and once more dropped the reins so I had my hands free. This was going to be tight, there was no other way to look at it other than as a Hail Mary. I grabbed the shotgun from its holster under my leg once more. I only had two grenades left in the launcher, and they would have to be enough if we were making it out of this alive. The thing was, death didn’t scare me anymore. It hadn’t for years, which made me perfect for hunting the jewels in some ways. But it also meant that whoever I was working with was constantly put in situations far more dangerous than they needed to be. I couldn’t seem to help it. But maybe if I could trust the partner I worked with, that would be different. As it was, Steve proved again and again that trusting others was not a good idea. End of story.
I didn’t turn all the way around in my saddle but instead held the gun out to the side and pulled the trigger, shooting straight at the wall to my right. Before the recoil had even completed, I twisted to the left and repeated the shot.
Balder’s speed got us out of the explosions’ ranges, but just barely. The blowback from the rock wall sent shards of stone slicing through the air. One cut across my cheek, opening the flesh like a razor blade, and Balder stumbled, hit somewhere on his back end by the feel of the change in his stride.
He began to slow, his smooth gallop turning into a lurching leap.
Shit, this was not good. I looked back.
The rock wall had come down on either side, blocking the giants. For the moment.
But already they pulled at the boulders, throwing them out of the way, screaming at me.
“Pulling pulling her head off.”
“Eating eating her horse.”
“Take take our jewel back.”
“Spray spray her face.”
That last one made me shudder. Far worse than the others, spray was a term used for a giant’s mating so I didn’t want to think too much about it. Not when I was in the middle of seeing if we were even going to survive this race to the end of a dead-end gorge.
I let Balder slow, feeling the limp start to really set in on his right hind leg. I hopped off and ran beside him. There was a gash over the thickest part of his rump, deep enough that it was bad, but not so bad that it wouldn’t heal. Assuming we got out of here, that was.
“Just keep moving,” I said. “Keep moving, Balder. That wall over there? It doesn’t look like much, but there’s a goat trail winding up. If we can get on it, we can get out of here. No problem, right? We’ve been in tighter spots. You remember the jewel we took from the murder of griffins? That was rougher. And the coven of witches in India, that was no small thing either.”