Lupi 09 - Mortal Ties

friendly creases. His
     hair was dark and cropped very short. His eyes were brown and dazed. He looked around
     as the two of them moved into the broad aisle between the packing crates…and stopped.
    “This is what kept me,” Friar said, exasperated. “The charm keeps him docile, but
     he loses track of what he’s doing. Come on, Adam.”
    “You can’t be rough with him,” Benessarai warned. “It disrupts the charm.”
    “Yes,” Friar said with heavy patience. “I know.”
    A dead woman touched Lily’s hand.
    Lily jerked. She couldn’t help it. The dead hand did something, and her restraints,
     the thrice-damned restraints, fell silently away. Lily’s arms trembled as her own
     muscles took over the job of holding her hands behind her back.
    The dead woman placed a knife in Lily’s right hand.
    Friar got Adam moving again.
    “Well,” Lily said loudly, “it looks like it’s now or never.”
    A burning man fell from the ceiling.
    Flames covered him completely. He fell headfirst, like a diver, but flipped in midair
     as if determined that his corpse would land on its feet.
    Lily thrust to her feet as her elf guard reached for her. She slashed with the dead
     woman’s knife—not trying for a specific target, just forcing the elf back, but she
     connected anyway. An arm, nothing fatal, but at least she hadn’t gotten her knife
     stuck, and the elf backed off. Lily spun toward Benessarai—who shouted something.
    The lights went out.
    Lily sprang at him.
    Benessarai was many things, most of them repellent. He was heavier, taller, and stronger
     than her, but he was not a fighter, and his mind tricks did not work on her. Lily
     felt the knife connect, but in the darkness she didn’t know what she’d struck. Benessarai
     squealed in rage or fear and grabbed her, yanking her to him in a bear hug. “I’ve
     got her!” he shouted. “I’ve got Lily Yu! Stop or I’ll kill her!”
    Lily’s arms were imprisoned. So she used her head.
    The cranium near the hairline is one of the thickest regions of bone on the skull.
     Lily couldn’t reach some of the best targets for a headbutt—he was too tall—so she
     smashed the top of her forehead into his chin. As she connected, she hooked his ankle
     with her foot and pulled.
    He toppled. She came down on top of him, cracking her left elbow on the floor but
     keeping a tight grip on the knife in her right hand. Mage lights popped up all over
     the place, and she saw Benessarai’s slack face—stunned, she thought, not out, so she
     pressed the tip of her borrowed knife to the spot right under his chin where a hard
     thrust would take itup to his brain. Then took the chance of glancing behind her for the guard elf.
    Who was several feet away, fighting a wolf.
    People were falling from the roof. Leaping down and falling.
    One of them was Rule. Her heart exulted even as she turned back to her prisoner.
    It would be easy, so easy, to end him here and now. More fitting to do it through
     the eye the way he’d made Dinalaran kill himself, but she wasn’t going to pass up
     easy to go for poetic.
    “Don’t! Lily, don’t do it!”
    It was Drummond. And he was a mess.
    He crouched in front of her. One arm hung down. It probably didn’t work right because
     a big chunk of his bicep was missing. Just gone. He crouched on both knees, but she
     only saw one foot. The other leg ended cleanly about midcalf. His shirt hung open.
     Skin and muscle were missing from his middle. She could see one of his ribs, the pale
     curve of it, and the round pillow of his stomach, and the segmented worms of his intestines.
     Which were also a mess, ripped and ragged.
    No blood. Somehow that made it worse. He’d been ripped apart, but he couldn’t bleed.
    “You’ve got a choice,” Drummond said urgently. “You don’t have to do it.”
    “What happened to you?” she whispered.
    He glanced down at his ravaged middle. His mouth crooked up. “I got there, got to
     Turner, but it was not a smooth trip. I guess I’m finally dying. So listen up. That
     scumbag deserves to die, but you don’t deserve to live with what that will do to you.
     You don’t deserve to end up like me.”
    His arm was fading. The one hanging down, the one with a chunk missing—it was dimming,
     going away. She swallowed. “I—”
    He leaned closer, scowling. “Promise me. Promise me you won’t kill him. Not like this.”
    She looked him in the eye and nodded slightly. “Okay. I promise.”
    He