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  Mind reading. The ability to appear and disappear like the wind. A voluptuous, curvy woman whom Durga had offhandedly referred to as his “queen.” Mind reading would not be too far off from the skill of telepathy and the construction of mental illusions, such as had been the case with Kane’s daylong, coma-like imprisonment.

  Kane had described the queen’s interaction with Durga as more seductive than tortuous, as it had been with Kane himself. Thurpa had noted the obvious romantic relations between this very healthy, odd-hued woman and Durga. Right now, Brigid wasn’t entirely certain of who this Neekra was, but she knew full well that she and the queen were as related as the amorphous assassin and Kane’s psychic tormentor were.

  Neekra was this woman’s self-appellation, and Brigid immediately returned to the dream wherein Kane had become aware of the artifact Nehushtan and the tales of a Puritan adventurer in the heart of Africa. Neekra matched up with not one but two names: Negari and Nakari—a hidden city and its queen, an immortal, vampirelike queen.

  Nathan’s father had died of massive blood loss, and yet there had been very little blood spilled in the Longa home. The smell of blood was quite salty and coppery, Brigid knew from too much experience. Perhaps the reason no blood had been spilled was because it had been ingested, swallowed by the murderer.

  Brigid’s mood turned black. A vampire queen and a hidden city.

  Before skydark, Africa had been known as the Dark Continent. Now Brigid was certain they were going to find out exactly how dark. And that darkness could swallow them all whole.

  Literally, Brigid feared.

  Chapter 3

  Kane’s mood was not good as he and Grant crept through the forest, closing in on the caravan that had crossed their path. Normally, he wouldn’t have been too interested in another group traveling through the jungle, and they had hidden their pickup truck, parked well off the formation’s route so as not to draw unwanted attention.

  The group was armed to the teeth, and they had settled down for the evening not far from where Kane and his companions had set up their camp for the night. Traveling all day by truck was still tiring; there weren’t many roads, and the suspension could only take so much out of the bumps and jolts, especially for those who rode in the bed of the truck.

  It was just good strategy for Kane and his allies to scope out a new group before coming out and greeting them, and seeing the column’s armed guards was more than a little unnerving. What made things even more tense was that they wore the uniforms of the Panthers of Mashona, the very militia they had battled back at Victoria Falls. While it was unlikely that Gamal could have communicated with this column, Kane was keen on keeping a low profile.

  Well, he had been keen on that low profile.

  Then he saw the row of naked Africans lying on the ground, connected to each other by chains and heavily burdened with steel yokes.

  “We’re not going to leave well enough alone,” Grant murmured, counting on the Commtact to amplify the words in Kane’s ear.

  “Slave traders. Damned straight we’re not leaving this alone,” Kane answered.

  Grant nodded. Kane turned to regard his friend, and the massive former Magistrate’s brow wrinkled, knit with a mixture of concern and anger. His drooping gunfighter’s mustache only served to deepen the man’s frown into a grim mask.

  Grant had no sense of solidarity with the blacks of Africa. Sure, his skin was dark like theirs, and they shared general facial features, but, culturally, Grant was a product of a world where race and familial history removed ties to anything other than fellow Magistrates. But here, Grant felt for the poor victims, lying immobilized by steel collars on their necks and shoulders, evidenced by the cracked, dried rivulets of blood on their torsos and the raw redness of scraped-off skin near the edges of those inhumane yokes. Kane heard the tendons in his fists pop as he flexed his big hands, and anger swiftly bled away as his eyes flitted from guard to guard.

  Like Kane, he was sizing up the armed resistance, thinking of ways to kill the Panthers and to free their prisoners.

  “We’re going to have to be very slow and patient,” Grant mused.

  “Careful, yeah,” Kane agreed. “Even a silenced Copperhead would draw attention. It’s going to have to be knives and garrotes.”

  Grant nodded. Neither Magistrate enjoyed murdering unaware opponents, but such ruthless tactics were going to be a necessity. If just one of the men standing guard over the prisoners suspected that someone was attempting a rescue, the Panthers would open fire, killing the group rather than giving up their treasured human cargo. “My bow, too.”

  Kane turned, regarding the big man. “You brought that?”

  “A collapsible version,” Grant replied.

  Grant’s lover, Shizuka, the leader of the samurai force known as the Tigers of Heaven, had been teaching Grant to use the bow and the sword. It was a shadow of a skill that Grant had retained from when his tesseract—a physical “time shadow”—had been hurled back to the time of ancient Sumeria. Back then, Grant’s tesseract had been mostly amnesiac and just enough “off time” to have superior reflexes and durability, as well as his natural strength. His captor, a son of Enlil named Humbaba, had named Grant Enkidu, the man-bull, because of that physical power. In that era, Malesh, a rogue Annunaki, had been first Grant’s target, then his lover and co-warrior in a rebellion against Humbaba’s rule of the region.

  Malesh was the inspiration for the mythic hero Gilgamesh, and she taught Enkidu the use of the bow as a replacement for Grant’s firearms knowledge. When Kane, Brigid, Domi and Shizuka had managed to arrive in the time stream where Grant’s tesseract had been deposited, the shadow had developed enough that its spirit gained reality in a spare body of the Annunaki court, returning Grant to his mortal form. All seven warriors had engaged the leonine, eleven-foot-tall Humbaba in direct conflict, finally killing the scion of Enlil after throwing everything at him, including flights of arrows, magazines of bullets and the slashing of deadly blades.

  Grant had left his tesseract Enkidu back in antiquity, husband to a warrior goddess, and he’d returned home with the love of his life, Shizuka. Grant found great comfort with her.

  “Bow’s pure silent, as opposed to a silenced gun,” Grant said. “And it packs a lot of power, especially with my strength and its construction.”

  Kane didn’t doubt that. “Let’s get back to the others.”

  The two Cerberus Magistrates slithered back through the forest. They moved slowly, cautiously, from where they’d closed on the slavers’ position. The two men took care to watch out for any sign that someone had come across their trail, and they felt secure once they didn’t pick up any. It helped that the two of them utilized the multiband optics in their shadow suits to look for spoor or tracks. Someone might have been good enough to evade high-tech optics capable of focusing on single broken stalks and twigs and disruptions in the dirt, or the talents of a skilled tracker, but when both combined, there was little sneaking up on them.

  Then it would take an hour for the assembled travelers to make up a plan on how to assault the slave caravan.

  The plan was simple: kill quietly or the failure would be measured in helpless prisoners executed.

  Thurpa’s approach to the prisoners on the chain was at a midpoint on the line. There was only one member of the Cerberus group who could handle opponents at range with utter silence, and that was Grant. However, if there was one thing that the Nagah outcast knew he was capable of, it was a silent kill, by virtue of his half-cobra nature and the gifts that Enki had endowed every Nagah with—transformed or native born.

  His fangs were folded against the roof of his mouth, and his legs were bent beneath him as he stood at the edge of the clearing, thigh muscles tightly coiled. He was to wait until one of the guards was close enough for him to strike, and Thurpa knew that his calculations had
to be exact. One misstep, a few inches short or even a simple stumble could result in an armed killer turning his automatic weapon against Thurpa, his allies or the very people they were there to rescue.

  Thurpa hadn’t cared much for the Panthers of Mashona when he and Durga first encountered them alongside the Millennium Consortium. They were brutish men, the type of beings who exemplified Durga’s description of mankind as nothing more than a pack of barbaric apes. It was their disregard for their enemies and victims that reinforced Thurpa’s initial prejudices. He’d seen what the Panthers had done to their captives already.

  It had been that negative impression, and the consortium’s equal disregard for the militia’s cruelty, that had primed Thurpa to become so disgusted with “mammals” that he’d used a grenade against a small family of meerkats who had made too much noise. The last thing Thurpa had wanted to do was seem weak in front of the hairy-knuckled, thick-browed thugs who took the defeated and helpless and used them as glory holes, men or women, if they weren’t already pressed into hard labor.

  Thurpa hadn’t wanted to think what would happen to him if they saw him as a pushover. He had little interest in becoming a rape rag. If there was one thing that Durga didn’t appear to tolerate among those fighting for the purity of the Nagah race, it was that the cobra men didn’t engage in that kind of sexual violence, against their own or against others.

  That was before Thurpa had met humans with a conscience. People who protected their injured, who cared for others despite differences. That was before Brigid Baptiste had related Durga’s sexual cruelty toward Hannah, his princess, and the evidence of what he had done to other women who hadn’t been his perfect little toys.

  You’ve been following a rapist, a kin-murderer, a despot, damn you, Thurpa told himself. That only strengthened the young man’s resolve to take the gunman guarding these prisoners out quickly and certainly.

  The Panthers are so strong, so cocksure against the helpless, Thurpa thought. You haven’t faced a son of Enki, though. We were born with fangs to ensure that you do not poison the other beloved of our Father.

  The Panther gunman drew closer. Kane and Grant had timed out the patrols of these men perfectly. Everyone seemed to be stepping into position as the two men had predicted. Even so, there was no guarantee that his timing would be right, and Thurpa’s heartbeat increased.

  Just in case he had to take out more than one opponent silently, Thurpa also had his knife in hand. He had venom and long fangs, but a broken fang or an empty venom sac would make it impossible for him to bite two opponents. He wondered at the ability of Brigid Baptiste and Nathan Longa when it came to close-quarters murder, but he didn’t want to think about it too much.

  Thinking about how hard it could be for others to take down a murderer with a swift, ruthless strike made him think about how cruel his act would be.

  Brigid Baptiste was not a murderer, nor was she a trained assassin, but she hung around with some of the best masters of sharpened steel in the world. She knew how to use the knife in its sheath as more than a tool or utensil. Kane, Domi and Shizuka had taken turns at teaching her the art of the fighting knife, not any intensive set of exercises, but they’d shown her moves, explained to her the discipline and made her go through every step.

  They hadn’t gone easy on Brigid simply because she had a photographic memory; they’d expected her to copy their maneuvers. They had her go at it with blunt, rounded cornered blades for intense sparring matches. Muscle memory was different from the data that came in through her eyes and ears, and they worked her in the gym until her arms and sides ached, her flame-gold hair was matted to her scalp and her breaths came in long, ragged gasps.

  In the end, no, Brigid was not going to take on another knife fighter as a master duelist, but she would be able to show a good accounting of herself if she was separated from her pistol.

  That if had come enough times in Brigid’s adventures around the globe for her to know that losing her firearm would be a when. Any distaste for an assassin’s strike had been washed away with Kane’s depiction of how the caravan of prisoners had been treated. Naked and manacled about the neck and ankles, as she could see now, thanks to the light amplification optics in her shadow suit, the captives were in miserable physical condition. They were gaunt, exhausted, with blood dripping down their torsos.

  To a child, they were naked and ragged, and each had to sleep staring straight up into the night sky because the metal yokes about their necks would cut or tear skin if they moved their heads one inch. Brigid’s heart ached for the poor victims of the militia members, and she was able to make out the insignias on the patches of the soldiers.

  They were the Panthers of Mashona, the same group who’d laid siege to the Victoria Falls power station, who’d allied themselves with the mad Nagah prince, Durga, and the Millennium Consortium. They were known killers, murderers, raiders who had no concern for human life except for what they could get out of them.

  Brigid examined the line of prisoners. Women, men, those in their early teens, none of them seeming as if they were good for forced labor, especially after the march that had turned their necks and backs raw with the weight and abrasion of their slave collars. These people were going to be shells of human beings if they had to go much farther.

  Her thoughts went back to the killer who had all but drained the last drop of blood from Nathan Longa’s father. The murderer would have made use of biomass, draining either blood or other moisture and plasma within the human anatomy. Sure, the prisoners spilled some blood, but they still retained more than enough to feed—

  Feed what? Brigid asked herself, but she fought off the urge to visualize the horror or horrors that awaited them. She had her knife pulled from its sheath, the keen edge held in an ice pick grip, and the Panther guard ambled closer on his prescribed patrol route along the chained line of prisoners.

  Concentrate on the horror before you, Brigid told herself. We’ll deal with an entity or entities who’d devour two dozen human beings when we get to it.

  She locked her green eyes on the gunman, who showed no concern for the suffering of other human beings. Slipping a knife between his ribs or into his kidney wouldn’t be a pleasure, but it’d be one step closer to the safe emancipation of twenty-four human beings.

  Brigid promised herself not to take visceral satisfaction in gutting the bastard.

  Grant assembled the recurved bow he’d brought with him. He screwed the two arms into the central riser, the grip that an archer held, complete with an arrow rest where the shaft would stay during the draw. The riser was made of rigid, high-density carbon fiber around an aluminum core. The arms themselves were composed of sandwiched layers of carbon fiber and wood, making the limbs of the bow denser, harder to flex, and thus building up greater potential energy when the string was drawn back.

  Grant also had the yugake glove that Shizuka had made for him. Grant was a student of kyudo, the samurai art of archery, and the yugake was specifically designed for the kind of hold an adherent of the style used, one in which the other fingers trapped the drawn string against the thumb. The yugake had ridges on the thumb designed for securing the drawstring, especially under the pressure of an eighty-eight-pound draw weight. That translated, with the 750-grain broad-head arrows he had, into 58.5 foot-pounds of energy when the recurved snapped straight and hurled the shaft at 188 feet per second.

  The kinetic energy downrange might not have seemed like much in comparison to a bullet that moved much faster, but the dynamics of an arrow, especially with razor-sharp leading edges, translated into better aerodynamic passage through flesh and a larger wound cavity. And the fact that the wound channel was filled with the shaft of the arrow added to the disruption of physical function.

  With this bow, Grant had dealt with a rogue deinonychus on Thunder Isle, a wounded creature weighing in at 250 pounds of lean muscle and reptilian
hide. Grant first had assumed that he’d missed his shot, as there was no arrow jutting from the rib cage of the time-trawled predator, but the animal dropped to the ground immediately. Grant’s arrow had punched through the deinonychus’s rib cage, breaking one rib and turning both lungs into slurries of destroyed brachial tissue, and burst out the other side, embedding into a tree just behind it.

  The impact had had such force that Grant had broken the shaft retrieving the arrow, and its hunting tip jammed into the cedar trunk. That kind of trauma was more than sufficient to end the life of a desperate, limping, but still deadly, dinosaur with a single shot. Grant knew that few humans would be able to stand against him. He pulled back on the bow, arms raised in the traditional kyudo draw, his shoulder muscles flexed and tensed.

  His would be the shot that initiated this conflict with the Panthers of Mashona. Through the light amplification sensors on his shadow suit’s faceplate, he could see the others, perched and ready to begin the butcher’s work for this night. Grant, with the reach of his bow, and his speed and grace, was given the task of taking down two more men subsequent to his first target. Kane had another target, as well, but Thurpa, Brigid and Nathan were limited to only one ambush apiece.

  Kane was a veteran of a dozen blade battles, and he had both the swiftness and certainty with which to bring down a militia maniac in a minimum of effort and time, freeing him for a second opponent. Even so, Grant braced himself to fire a fourth arrow in this dark plan.

  Grant cleared his thoughts, entering the samurai state of zanshin, relaxed alertness, his thoughts in a smothered calmness. He was focused on nothing but aware of all around him. It was part of the art of kyudo and as much a mental state as a series of physical movements. He was mentally standing on the razor’s edge, uncommitted to any single action, to leave himself ready for anything.

  The guards were in position, Grant stretched the drawstring back, packing the two-ounce arrow with kinetic energy. The stiff, reinforced limbs struggled to return to their natural state, fighting against Grant’s manipulation of them. He opened his thumb, and the string was freed to slip over the ridges on his glove. Now, at close to 190 feet per second, Grant’s first arrow sliced silently through the night.