Bounty (25 page)

“
Did Mastodon send you for something?” he asked, not sure if he merely wanted more information to peg a motive for Ossen’s presence, or if he asked simply for the sake of a distraction.

“
No, she didn’t. I sought you out all by myself – fancy that, ay?” Casually, he took note of Godren’s gun and picked it up from where it rested against the wall. “You caught anything interesting lately?” he asked curiously as he looked the gun over. It was evident that he was referring to the traps.

“
Not really.”

Cocking the gun, Ossen tested his grip on it. “Too bad. I was wondering if you could catch ghosts. This is off-balance, you know,” he said of Godren’s borrowed weapon.

“
It serves its purpose.”

Ossen’s eyes returned to him. “A pretty worthless purpose, if you ask me. I’d say it needs an upgrade.”

“
I don’t know,” Godren disagreed, “I wouldn’t want to outdo myself.”

“
It’s too late, Godren,” Ossen said.

A ring of tension rose around them as Godren failed to reply to the questionable significance of that statement.

“
You already have.”

Godren stopped blinking, realizing Ossen was watching him with an unbroken gaze.

“
It was not a warning when I said that the first time. You
have
sent me over the edge. Oh there have been little things,” he granted, “little things that burn through my tolerance and spark the fierce rivalry we share. But this.... We cannot be rivals over this. It calls for blood. And elimination. If it were up to me, I’d spill all your blood right here. However,” he said reasonably. “Since I’m forbidden to touch you myself…”

For a moment he let it pass that it was going to blow over that easily. Then, with no change to his facial expression, he flipped the weapon in his grasp horizontal with one casual arm and shot Godren in the throat. “We’ll just say you had a little accident with your own gun.”

The world stopped turning. Mortal shock registered like a cold rush of still water. Godren felt his pupils flare with alarm as he stared at the man who, with hardly moving a muscle and virtually nothing passing between them, had just become his killer. His mind went sharply blank, thoughts cutting off and shutting down, while his subconscious raged.

He had just been shot – with his own gun. What had he just finished telling himself? Safe? Not at all. Never safe. Where had he crossed the line? What was Ossen talking about? He didn’t understand. This wasn’t right. It must have been a mistake. Oh gods, it was a mistake. This dart in his throat, this irrevocable, inevitable poison tainting his blood, was a mistake. A fatal error. An injustice. He was going to die – was
dying
. And for what? What had Ossen said?
I liked you better when you reeked.
What did his smell have to do with anything?

A flashback of the last time Ossen had left him for dead in an alley came back to him. It was unrelated, just an inevitable memory he suffered reminded of last time – but he remembered the last thing he had been aware of: that strong rose scent lingering in his nostrils.

A connection jumped into proportion, but Godren’s mind was growing sluggish. Grasping at it, he blinked away blurring patches and slumped to his knees. Roses…there was something about roses.

“
When you came back the other day, you smelled like her,” Ossen said. “Usually I carry that honor, that secret. Whether from being with her, or from wearing the scent I know she likes, the roses are a direct result of my being with her.”

Her? Through confused, glazed eyes, Godren peered up at Ossen, struggling to fathom why he had jut been shot.

“
Because yes – she’s mine. Princess Catris Vandelta…belongs…to
me
.”

The fresh shock he felt at that blunt revelation hit him almost with more conviction than the last. Gods, Ossen couldn’t be serious. The impact must have shown on his face, for Ossen shook his head.

“
It never even occurred to you, did it? Didn’t you notice her scent? Didn’t it saturate ever corner of your star-stricken senses, luscious and beautiful like a terrible, wicked spell of deadly seduction? You must have been in deeper than you thought, bewitched to a senseless point if you never noticed. Well it turned out to be deadly anyway. You should learn to look before you leap, Godren – maybe even take a good whiff of the air. But good riddance.”

With an overwhelming wave of dreadful insight, it all came together and made terrible sense. And there had been clues. Why hadn’t he thought it through and put it together sooner? He recalled something Ossen had said to Seth once;
“I daresay, if a man’s scent is any indication of where he’s been, I’ve been granted the superior circumstances.”
Superior circumstances indeed. Royal,
epic
circumstances, when it came right down to it. And Mastodon’s reference to Ossen having certain advantageous connections she had ambition for, also ironically what she was using to blackmail him with. Had she threatened to hurt the princess, but promised to merely use her if Ossen provided her with the convenient means to do so? Or had she merely discovered his relationship and threatened to expose him as a criminal and end it if he didn’t let her get at some royal manipulation through him?

Then there had been Ossen’s unexplained disappearances, and his stubborn, guarded refusal when Godren had ordered him up on the walls quite against his convenience that night when they awaited Damious’s arrival. He’d been sneaking off to be with the princess.

Godren felt sick and distant, but couldn’t tell if it was the effect of the poison or the useless despair he felt at discovering these terrible secrets only as he was about to die, unable to do anything about them. His focus deteriorated as his breath thickened and slurred down his throat. The poison felt cold and heavy spreading out from the central point of the initial puncture. Already, his chest had gone numb, and the rest of his body was useless. That he was still on his knees was a miracle.

“
I’m sure Mastodon will thank me when she realizes what a fool you were,” Ossen went on, his watching eyes smoldering with festered loathing. “At least I handled my association with some discretion. But you – you had to be a hero, had to jump out and save the day in front of her whole company. The guards would have done the
job
, Godren. How dare you draw attention to yourself and risk our whole operation? And then she called you by
name
…not to mention she has a dart in her possession, thanks to you.”

To think, he had risked responding to Catris’s call because he had decided it was only Ossen who could see him from the roof.

“
The
princess
of Raven City is holding the crime queen’s secret weapon in her hand. You have not only incensed me, but very possibly ruined us all. For that, I am destroying you. Let’s see how heroic you prove to be as an incompetent lump of stilled, useless limbs unable to even crawl across the ground. Let’s just see how well you can woo her Highness as all the things you want to say turn to ash in your mouth and stay walled up in your constricted throat choking you forever. You miserable vermin. You’ve been a piece of hell lodged in my side, and you have no idea how good it’s going to feel to leave you to rot.”

Reminded that he had only been shot with his own gun, Godren felt a small spark of hope surface. Foolish, useless hope – he was paralyzed, only paralyzed! – but hope all the same.

He lost all enthusiasm for his state as the cold poison reached his corners and edges, though, turning his blood thick and his limbs stony, and finally forcing him to the ground completely. He tried to resist, denying his progressive immobility and throwing his will into holding the ground at bay, but there was nothing that could prevent it. Shuddering, he crumpled onto his side and stared up at Ossen, unable to even avert his gaze as the stilling poison assumed utter control.

Waiting for that result, Ossen made as if to take his leave. “Rest well, brother. If you had any last words, I hope they fester in your sealed mouth until you starve to death.” He started to turn, then stopped and spared Godren one last look of consideration. “Although, I am not so ready to take chances with you this time. And I couldn’t really explain to everyone how you shot yourself unless I claimed to see it happen, which would demean my character with its implications: that I didn’t also stop to put you out of your misery. Rotting sounded so delightfully torturous, but I’ll never be completely satisfied until you’re dead, and by my hand.” Casting Godren’s gun to the ground next to his paralyzed form with a clatter, Ossen engaged his own lethal weapon and, aiming at Godren once more, fired another shot into his chest.

Utterly sure of his task, he turned his indifferent back and coldly left Godren to die, efficiently disposed of behind him.

Numbness weighed down Godren’s body. The last thing he thought he felt was an unbidden tear running down his cold face, but he couldn’t tell if it was real through the stone-like fog he was fading into. That was the tragedy he faced there at the end, what he was reduced to: unable to even feel if he wept as he died. He didn’t know. Clenched in the poison’s overwhelming grasp, he waited helplessly as the symptoms overtook him. The barest movement evaded him, his breathing slurred like thick, suffocating liquid into his constricting lungs. The smell of roses, taunting him, dissipated – but stayed with him in memory until his memory fogged over. Soon he lost his emotion to the same numbness that had taken his body, and lay there with his hampered spirit utterly deadened until even his one-dimensional thoughts went dark.

*

A light flared at the deepest point of his descent. Emptiness possessed him, but something blazed through the dark and blinded his dead eyes. He no longer cared, but he was held there anyway – wherever ‘there’ was. Not a place, or time, but some unexplainable state of being. A place of
existence
, a bubble that served as a haven when the void soaked into all the edges around him and stretched on forever in every direction. That darkness was absolute, but his mind was bright with that stabbing illumination that drove the blackness back, holding it at bay.

Unidentifiable silhouettes moved with partial glimpses through the brightness. The light would bend around them like insubstantial web, glaring in his eyes, but their presences were noncommittal, and they never ended up showing themselves completely.

Anchored in that blinding fog, Godren existed without meaning. It wouldn’t let him go, but neither would it send him back. Would he be stuck there, suspended, for eternity? And what was eternity where time did not exist?

But it didn’t last. Though it didn’t seem possible, the light intensified, flashing so unbearably that he found the will to blink – and then he dreamed…

23:
L
eeches

O
ut of the shadows of the alley, a figure materialized and approached him. Silent, composed, and radiating a practical grace, she knelt at his side. Her skin dark as night, her eyes empty but gentle, she reminded him of someone – Lea. The same smooth bald head and foreign manner of dress named her another of Mastodon’s servants akin to the woman who had healed him after the wolf attack.

At first, because her skin was so dark, he did not see the many black lumps that adorned her. But then, with a resistant sucking noise, she removed one from her neck and placed it where it could nestle into the hollow of Godren’s throat. Squirming, it latched on, and Godren realized what it was – a leech. Any other time he would have been repulsed by the little creature feeding off him, but since he didn’t feel anything anymore, inside or out, it mattered little to him.

He did not feel the darts being retracted from him, but they appeared in the woman’s slender hands, and she put them aside. Then she continued transferring leeches onto him, one after another. When the parasite at his throat overdosed on the poison it was sucking out, it fell away, and she gave him a replacement.

Deftly, she worked. Godren could not feel what she did, and only saw snatches of it, but it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered.

Then suddenly, her silent mouth spawned words. They were senseless, some sort of flowing gibberish that she chanted over him as she worked – her native language, no doubt – but he was fascinated by it, having had it impressed upon him until now that these dark servants of Mastodon were mute. She had a beautiful voice – hypnotic, and he found himself sinking to a less aware rank of the dreaming world. The woman and her leeches were still there, but the alley faded away, and he felt drowsy – the first time he had felt anything since the poison had swamped his system.

When her eyes left her work and met his, her words abruptly started making sense and registering, no longer foreign, as if speaking straight to him formed a link of understanding between them.

“
Hold onto your soul, Venom Treader, for your blood is about to grow very weak. Find the center point of your existence, and retreat there; it will serve you well as you undergo this ordeal.”