Page 7 of Only Cold Depths
“Well, how serendipitous we found you instead,” Esmina drawled.
Her sardonic tone made her faint accent a bit more pronounced. It was similar to Kyrion’s crisp, proper Corios tone, but I couldn’t quite place it.
“Pollux and I were at the rendezvous point, but you and your men never appeared,” Esmina continued. “Then the tracker I planted on Lady Vesper went offline, as though it had been destroyed.”
A sheen of sweat popped out on Rina’s forehead that had nothing to do with the suffocating heat. “I don’t know anything about your tracker being destroyed. Lady Vesper must have disabled it.”
Esmina kept her icy gaze on the bounty hunter. “It doesn’t matter who destroyed the tracker. You were supposed to bring Lady Vesper tome, not here to your own ship. Unless, of course, you were thinking about taking my creditsandtrying to cash in on Vesper’s bounty.”
So Esmina and Pollux had hired Rina and her men to capture me, but Rina had decided to double-cross her employers and keep me—and all the credits I was worth—to herself. Bold but risky.
“Your vision was right. This bounty hunter scum betrayed us the second she got the chance,” Pollux rumbled in a deep voice. “You should have just let me bash her skull in like I wanted to.”
He hefted one of his war hammers onto his left shoulder, even as he twirled the other weapon around in his right hand. My seer magic also painted him in a silver light, although the glow wasn’t as bright and strong as it had been around Esmina.
I frowned at his words. What vision? What had Esmina seen about this moment?
Rina’s arms plummeted to her sides, although she kept the smile on her face. “Esmina had a vision? How wonderful! She must have seen us all here together.”
Pollux snorted in disbelief. We could all hear the lie in Rina’s high, nervous tone. Whoever Esmina and Pollux really were, the bounty hunter was afraid of them. No wonder she’d wanted to hustle me onto her ship and get off-planet.
The man closest to me shifted on his feet, his finger curling around his blaster trigger. I eased away from him. Any second, he was going to lose his cool, raise the weapon, and fire.
“Now,” Esmina said in a bored voice.
I tensed, expecting telekinesis or some other psionic power to surge off her, but instead, Pollux snapped his right hand forward, throwing his hammer. The weapon streaked through the air like a shooting star and slammed into the forehead of the bounty hunter who’d been about to fire his blaster.
Crack!
The bounty hunter’s skull split open like a ripe melon. Blood sprayed everywhere, and the man dropped to the dirt without making a sound. Pollux jerked his arm back as though he was pulling on an invisible rope, and the hammer yanked free of the dead man’s skull and zipped back over into his waiting hand.
Pollux was an extremely strong telekinetic, maybe even stronger than Kyrion. As soon as the war hammer settled into his palm, he started swinging the weapon back and forth in the same eerie motion as before. Bits of bone and brain matter dripped off the hammer’s head, every soft, sickeningplopas loud as a drum banging in the shocked silence.
Beside me, the dead bounty hunter’s blood sluiced across the ground. I shuddered, then looked past the crimson stream. The man’s blaster had slid out of his hand and landed a few feet away. The weapon was much closer than my stormsword, which was still tucked away in my shopping bag.
Rina and the three remaining bounty hunters were gaping at their friend’s body, so I sidled toward the blaster.
Esmina let out a soft laugh and looked at me. “I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”
I froze.
Esmina’s eyes were even darker than before, more black than green, although the gold flecks in her irises were much brighter now and sparking with magic. Before meeting Kyrion, I had never paid much attention to other psions’ abilities. They had power, and I didn’t, and that was all I needed to know. But this woman . . . magic just rolled off her like the heat blazing off the Tropics sun above.
Esmina had more raw magic than any psion I had ever met, except maybe Callus Holloway. Somehow she had known that I was going to reach for the bounty hunter’s blaster almost the second the thought entered my mind. Was she a siphon like Holloway? Or something else? Something even more dangerous?
“Don’t bother, Vesper,” Esmina purred. “I knowexactlywhat you’re going to do even before you do it.”
She strode forward. Rina and the three remaining bounty hunters scuttled back, leaving me standing alone. Esmina stopped in front of me. Even more of her magic surged over me, scraping against my skin like a razor. Sweat prickled the back of my neck, and another cold chill slid down my spine.
“Oh, yes. I can feel it now. Your power—or, rather, lack thereof.” She shook her head as though she had just revealed some sad, devastating fact. “You’re the weak link, destined to be broken.”
Weak link?Her words slapped me across the face, and I jerked back in shock. She was talking about my truebond with Kyrion. My hands balled into fists, and fury exploded in my chest, punching the air out of my lungs. She didn’t knowanythingabout me or Kyrion or our connection or how we felt about each other.
“Don’t bother denying it,” Esmina continued. “You’ve already sensed it. How much weaker you are than Kyrion. How fragile and vulnerable you make him. How you’re going to be the death of him, one way or another.”
She tilted her head to the side again. The gold flecks in her eyes brightened even more, and her gaze burned into mine like a cold laser, cutting straight to my core. A knowing smile curved her lips. “Ah, I see. You’ve already started having problems with your bond. How very sad Kyrion has all that magnificent power, and you don’t know how to use it.”
The fury in my chest died, choked to nothingness by sharp thorns of worry and doubt that burrowed deep into my heart. Kyrionwasa much stronger psion and far more skilled with his stormsword, whereas I was still struggling to figure out how my seer magic worked and trying to play catch-up with him as a warrior.
