I spoke on the barest breath. “Dad, tell me how to do a negating spell.”

He arched a brow at me. “Raine, it takes more than few seconds to teach—”

“Just tell me,” I said flatly. “The rock and I learn fast.”

He glanced at Talon. “It’s an individual spell, so it won’t cover him. We’ll have to—”

“I think the rock will cover all of us. It wants Sarad Nukpana. Badly.”

I wanted the same thing, but for a different reason. The rock wanted to eat him; I just wanted him dead, preferably the old-fashioned way—just steel, no soul sucking. The longer we took getting to the goblin, the longer he’d have to prepare for us.

A prepared demigod would be very bad.

Dad told me the spell. I understood, but most important, the rock knew what to do and how to do it.

A few minutes later, we were sporting a solid negating spell courtesy of my magic and the rock’s knowledge. Dad and I wove a quartet of lightglobes and sent them down the hall in pairs at intervals of about twenty feet. We stayed behind the second pair close enough to the light to be able to see what or who was in front of us, but far enough away to have a hope of not being glaring targets. And if the negating spell was doing its job, any goblins would see four lightglobes coming down the tunnel by themselves with no one behind them. Goblins liked the dark, so you had to wonder what, if anything, they considered spooky. I knew that four disembodied lightglobes floating down a dark, deserted tunnel would do it for me.

The spell just negated our presence. Blades would still work, Talon’s voice could still do its thing—and now the Saghred was itching to get a piece of the action.

We hadn’t gone fifty yards before the rock started stirring. We were getting close. The Saghred could smell Sarad Nukpana, and through our bond, so could I. Gleefully sadistic, relishing the torment he’d caused, the death he’d brought, and eager to do it all again. The Saghred was experiencing much the same emotions. It had absorbed Nukpana and held him captive for nearly three months. It knew its own. And now, so did I.

I also knew something else. I had never been this scared in my whole life.

Facing Sarad Nukpana in Markus’s parlor had paled in comparison to this. This was raw terror of the whimpering kind. I tried to steel myself against the fear, at least the whimpering part. I could deal with Nukpana’s goons finding me if I got stupid and tripped over something in the dark, but I’d die of embarrassment before they could kill me if a whimper actually made it out of my mouth. Though that didn’t stop my nearly overwhelming need to do it. I bit my lip to stop any wayward, cowardly noises.

The only way I could defeat Sarad Nukpana was to use the Saghred. And the only thing the rock was interested in doing was eating Nukpana’s soul and anyone he’d consumed. That included one elven general, two ancient psychotic mages, and Rudra Muralin. The thought of their souls being forcibly pulled through me and into the Saghred was enough to make me want to scream my throat raw. I was going into this confrontation monumentally ignorant of what else to do and fatally unprepared for any of it. I’d tricked Sarad Nukpana once; that kind of luck wasn’t going to happen to me again. Phaelan would say that a Benares makes her own luck.

Phaelan wasn’t here. I was, and I didn’t want to be.

The farther we went, the worse the air got. Then my brain registered what my nose had caught wind of and my skin tried to crawl somewhere and hide.

Musty air and mold.

I’d smelled it before. In Sarad Nukpana’s coach behind Markus’s house. The smell was here, right here. The actual smell, not Nukpana’s memory of it.

We were within spitting distance of Sarad Nukpana’s lair.

Step into my parlor, said the spider to the fly.

I stopped and so did Dad and Talon. Dad didn’t question why. Talon just settled for keeping his mouth shut. I was grateful for both.

I slowly dimmed our lightglobes, then let them flicker out of existence. We didn’t need them anymore. We could see just fine.

I’d seen it through Sarad Nukpana’s memories. Now I could see it with my own eyes.

The tunnel curved, and flickering firelight came from beyond an opening at the far end. A bunker. Nukpana’s bunker. Though with that crazy goblin in there, it was more like a crypt. Between us and the opening, cold blue light shone dimly from globes embedded in the ceiling, forming pools of light on the floor at regular intervals all the way from us to the door. Circles of pale light with plenty of shadows for hiding evil minions along the wall. Rats scuttled and squeaked in the dark next to the walls, running away from the light.

Away from what was in that room. The rats had the right idea.

I was shaking. Terror would do that to you.

So would a soul-sucking rock thinking it was going to get its biggest meal in centuries.

That thought just made me shake harder.

A rat brushed past my foot. I sucked in air through my teeth. I didn’t get this far to squeal like a girl now. Then I remembered a little fact about rats.

They knew the way out—and the way in.

Rats didn’t live where there wasn’t a food source. And when they ran, it was to safety. I’d seen nothing but bare tunnels, no food here. Nukpana and his Khrynsani didn’t just choose this bunker for privacy; they would have chosen it because it gave them a quick and hidden way to get out into the city. I saw two of the rats run into the darkness of a side tunnel and heard squeaks from farther into the darkness.

Down there, somewhere in the dark with the rats, was a way out.

Before I could stop him, Dad slipped into the shadows and moved quickly along the wall to the bunker opening. I started to call out to him, but that would just get us killed faster. Though I hadn’t seen or sensed even one Khrynsani guard.

Dad reached the end of the tunnel and with his back against the wall to the right side of the opening, cautiously peered into the room. I’d expected him to look, see what was in there, and then run like hell. I didn’t get what I expected, and apparently neither did Dad. He looked at me, confusion and disbelief on his face.

What the hell?

I went, I looked, and I didn’t believe my eyes for one second.

Sarad Nukpana was laid out on a stone bier in all of his dark beauty, his long black hair flowing over the side in an ebony wave. His eyes were closed, hands folded serenely on his chest. He wasn’t moving and I didn’t need the Saghred to tell me he wasn’t breathing, either.

The bastard was dead.

I froze. That meant his soul was no longer in his body. The damned thing could be anywhere.

A flash of panic gripped me and my breath came shallow and fast. Nukpana had told me that he wanted my body, to push my soul aside, to possess me completely. My shields went up, the strongest I had.

The Saghred suddenly felt like a tiger in a crouch. Its prey was in that room, waiting.

For me.

The Saghred had no interest in the empty corpse on the bier. All its attention was on someone standing in the shadows. There was someone in that bunker, a living, breathing someone. There were no guards, none at all. I didn’t trust it, but I couldn’t think about it, not now.

I had a job and I was going to do it, through the terror and with knees shaking so badly I had to concentrate to get one foot in front of the other.

I stepped into that bunker, brushing aside Dad’s attempt to stop me. Fear it and face it. I wasn’t going to run like the rats, so there was no going back. That left forward and fighting. I’d do whatever I had to, be it steel—or soul sucking. This had to end. Now.

My mouth was bone-dry and open; I was panting. “Come out, you son of a bitch.”

Black magic, thick and vile, hung in the air like an oily stain. This was evil, fetid and dripping. I felt it through my clothes, crawling on my skin, slick and cloying.