The Lawless Man With A Thousand Chains

011 Soul Binding

Damon pressed two fingers to her wrist and began.

His free hand moved in fast, precise strikes. A walking line of points down both arms, across the chest, up the throat.

Her body arched once off the bed with a gasp, then went completely limp. She was barely breathing.

Everything in her slowed down except the thing in her chest, which pulled tighter once a second and kept getting faster.

Damon raised his right hand and drew.

Sovereign force came up out of his core and into the arm. The hand changed.

The flesh went pale, then bright, then clear. A hand made of gold light, with the bones inside it showing darker.

The Spectral Fist. Arcane surgery, and it didn't cut because it had no need to.

He drove his hand into her chest.

The skin didn't stop him and neither did the bone. His hand went into her without cutting anything, and closed around the thing coiled up in the middle.

It was like gripping the inside of a frozen furnace.

Damon set his shoulders and pulled.

It came out with a wet tearing noise he felt in his teeth. Her body slammed back against the mattress as her chest emptied.

Her heartbeat stumbled once, and then found a rhythm.

And the thing in his fist turned on him.

Black sparks tore across his hand and up his forearm. It had lost its host, so it stopped waiting and did the only other thing it knew how to do.

It attacked, chewing into the sovereign force that held it. Where it touched, it didn't burn flesh, it unmade it, eating muscle and bone like fire eats paper.

The ball swelled in his hand and the crackling climbed into a scream. The mirror on the far wall cracked from edge to edge without anybody touching it.

One more second and Turner Mansion, and most of the ridge under it, would stop being a place.

Damon closed his fist.

He couldn't throw it, and there was no putting it out. One thing in reach was strong enough to hold a blast that size, and he was standing in it.

He drove the energy down through the arm and the shoulder and into his own core. Then he shut the sovereign force around it like a vault door.

The explosion happened inside his body.

For one blinding second Damon Huntley lit up from the inside.

Every vein came up under his skin as a line of white fire, and his own gold blazed out of his eyes.

Smoke came off his forearms. The bedsheets browned in a wide circle around him.

Then it was over.

The room went quiet and ordinary again. A stranger breathing on the bed, and a mirror that would never be any use to anybody.

Damon stood there a moment and checked himself over.

Enough force had gone off inside his chest to level a mountain. All it had done to him was make him hungry.

He had eaten nothing since a sandwich in an Alaskan airport, the day before yesterday.

Eat first, he thought. Save the world afterward.

Then his legs went.

Damon dropped sideways onto the bed beside the woman he'd just saved. He was asleep before he landed. His head came down squarely on her chest, with the perfect timing of a universe that had been enjoying his day since the airport.

An hour later, Lucy Croft came back out of the dark.

The first thing she worked out was that she was alive.

That was strange. The last thing she remembered was the mountain road, and a wave of cold going through her heart like a spear.

The second thing she worked out was that there was a weight lying across her.

The third was warmth. The unmistakable warmth of another human being's head resting on her chest.

Lucy screamed.

She came off that bed in one convulsion and shoved the weight off her. Then she was on the floor barefoot, in a room she had never seen in her life.

Her blouse was soaked through, her shoes were gone, and her hair had come apart completely.

She put a hand out to the display on the wall and closed it around the hilt of a decorative dagger.

The man on the bed pushed himself up on one elbow. Dark hair, hollow eyes, moving like a man who badly wanted another hour.

The first thing Damon Huntley saw when he woke up was fifteen centimeters of polished steel pointed at his throat.

Above it were a pair of furious, terrified, tear-bright eyes.

"What did you do to me?"

Lucy's voice shook.

"Why did I wake up in this bed, in this state, with you?"