Free Bloodkin by Amelia Atwater-Rhodes Page A

guilty as circumstances make them appear.”
    “
She
might not be,” Lucas cut in, gesturing to me, “but what about
him
?”
    “Shut up, both of you!” Shane snapped, his voice cracking on the second word. “You would bicker until this forest
burns
.” Shane turned to us again and cut to the point with no regard for authority or protocol. “We need you to deliver a message to Midnight. More specifically, we need you to make a deal.”
    I had guessed this was coming, but I still didn’t understand. “Why
now
?” I asked. “It’s been four months.”
    Lucas drew himself up, pulling in a long, slow breath as if to compose himself. When he spoke again, his voice was heavy with frustration, but he was at least no longer snarling in anger. “Midnight wouldn’t even tell us the extent of our supposed crime,” he said. “They said slaves had been killed, and that we were responsible, and they demanded payment. For weeks, we exchanged offers, incentives … threats. We insisted that we had no part in the exile’s actions. For over a month, we bickered, before the sakkri divined the truth, that the vampires themselves had been threatened. She says the trainers were nearly killed?”
    He sounded incredulous. I had seen it and still barely believed it, but I nodded.
    “When we realized they would not accept our protestations of innocence, we offered payment in coin and goods well beyond the value Midnight assigns the slaves. It would have indebted us for a decade, easily.”
    Unlike the serpiente and avians, who had come to this land as refugees, utterly dependent at first on the vampires for food and shelter, the Shantel had occupied this land centuries before the vampires had arrived to build their monstrous empire. They had never been forced into the crippling spiral of debt that held the other shapeshifters hostage generation after generation.
    “And in reply,” Vance said, “they cut off your trade and offered the bounty on your people.”
    “Our last messenger never returned,” Laurence said. “We waited weeks and heard
nothing
. Then, about a week ago, one of Midnight’s mercenaries delivered a message. Since we have failed to offer acceptable payment … they intend to burn the forest.” His voice at the end was small, as if he were saying something obscene. To him, it probably was. Even I was shocked.
    Once again, Vance and I spoke over each other, but this time it was clear our minds were traveling completely different paths.
    I gasped. “Is that
possible
?” I asked at the same moment that Vance asked, “What are you offering?”
    I turned toward him, startled by his words and even more startled by his tone. I knew that look, that posture, that voice, and it wasn’t one he had picked up among the Obsidian guild. The conversation hadn’t been much different when Malachi had negotiated with a mercenary from Midnight regarding Misha’s return.
    Shane stepped forward, swallowed, and then said in a clear voice, “It’s possible. You being here means the sakkri decided the danger is real, and that we must deal or risk far worse. So … I’m what we’re offering.”
    “Shane,” Lucas whispered, a single word that seemed full of heartbreak.
    But you’re so young
, I thought.
    How young, or old, is fifteen years? Vance and I were both outlaws already. Vance was still only fourteen, but he had seen people beaten, seen them die; he had inadvertently caused dozens of deaths. I had taken a life with my own hands when I was only twelve. We had both known terror beyond anything a child was supposed to know, and were treated as adults by our kin in the Obsidian guild.
    But all I could think about when I looked at Shane was the boy who had played a harp and sung to me as the fleshwitch’s spells and potions rearranged the very fiber of my being, twisting my innards in an ongoing attempt to shove unwilling muscle and sinew into a sleek serpent form. The witch, the Shantel’s version of a doctor,