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  They were close enough that I knew they would be bound to feel the surge, now it was just a matter of unobtrusively guiding them into the right spot. The motor on the boat sped up and less than a minute later the boat came into view.

  There were three guys on it, one of whom was chained to the boat, and roughly ten hybrids on foot moving from island to island in an effort to increase their party's overall footprint. I was pretty sure that one of the guys in the boat was Onyx, and my bet would have been that he was the one who wasn't steering the boat, but there wasn't any way to be sure until the fur started flying.

  I didn't recognize any of the hybrids except one. Nicolas was cheerfully slogging through the water. I couldn't tell whether he was just happy to have finally found me, but he had blood on his hands, so it looked like he'd already tangled with one of the swamp's denizens and come out unscathed.

  I looked around as though scared and just realizing how badly outnumbered I was, and made as if to break across their line of travel. It wasn't the best route to go if I was truly trying to get away from them, but it did provide a more or less solid line of islands and, more importantly, I figured it would pull the boat the direction that it needed to go if the ambush was going to have any chance of succeeding.

  My first step went off without a hitch, but then the most excruciating pain I'd ever felt tore through me. I hit the ground hard and slid nearly five feet through the mud, but I was in too much pain to even worry about whether or not I'd managed to lure the boat into position.

  The pounding of my pulse in my ears was so loud that it drowned out almost every other sound. It was like standing under a waterfall, but one that came in irregular surges, one that seemed to stretch the surges out for an impossibly long time.

  "…don't kill him, we need him…"

  That was all I caught in between heartbeats and then the pain cut off as quickly as it had started up. I managed to get my head up in time to see the boat capsize, but even that didn't go according to plan.

  Only half of the lamias had surfaced. The half of the circle behind the boat had grabbed it and ripped it into pieces as they tried to get their claws into Onyx and the driver, but the other half of the circle, the half closest to me, was nothing more than furiously bubbling water.

  As fast as the lamias had been, Onyx was even faster. He sprang from the boat before anyone managed to get hold of him and transformed in midflight. He hit the muddy ground of the island as I rolled to my feet and saw the rest of his men rushing into the battle.

  The boat's driver was already dead, but the lamia who had destroyed the boat suddenly convulsed in pain and dropped back down into the water. I thought everything was over at that point. I'd never imagined that Onyx's gift was strong enough to keep twelve lamias paralyzed under the water where they would eventually drown, but given that there still wasn't any sign of the first set of lamias, it looked like that was exactly what he was doing.

  Two of the hybrids peeled off from the main group to come deal with me, but everyone else waded knee deep into the water to form a loose circle around the channel that contained what was left of the boat.

  As I prepared to sell myself as dearly as possible, the most amazing thing I'd ever seen happened. The water near the hybrids exploded with lamias who'd somehow managed to use the turbulence caused by the boat sinking to get within striking distance of most of the hybrids clustered along the shore.

  It was nothing less than miraculous, but it still wasn't quite perfect. There were twelve lamias, and Onyx had brought twelve other guys with him, but the driver of the boat was dead already, and the guy who had been chained to the boat still hadn't surfaced. When you added in the fact that two guys were almost within striking distance of me and Onyx was well outside of melee engagement range, the lamias outnumbered the hybrids twelve to eight.

  With the lamias' venom and the element of surprise, the hybrids should have been massacred. They probably would have been, notwithstanding Onyx's presence, but for the fact that the lamias hadn't matched themselves up perfectly against the waiting hybrids.

  A number of lamias matched themselves up in one-on-one battles against the New Orleans hybrids. One consort—I was pretty sure it was Pal again—put his opponent down with a single thrust to the chest. The wound shouldn't have been fatal, but the hybrid instantly started screaming and dropped to the ground before he could even finish up the attempted counterstrike that would have taken the consort's head off.

  I saw another couple of workers, each trading blows with a single hybrid, but it wasn't readily apparent who held the upper hand there. That was fine, under normal circumstances they would have just needed to last for long enough for another lamia to help them out, but this wasn't the kind of fight that they were used to.

  There were some places where two or three lamias attacked a single hybrid and felled them with ease, but there were other places where one lamia ended up squaring off against more than one hybrid. I saw one of the other consorts—not Set—sink his claws into the stomach of his enemy and then fall to an attack that Nicolas delivered unexpectedly from one side.

  We lost a couple of lamias in those first few seconds, but we still could have easily won except for the fact that an instant later Onyx reentered the fight.

  Unfortunately, I missed his opening salvo because the two hybrids who had been approaching me finally arrived. I dodged to one side in an effort to keep one guy between me and the other guy, but they had obviously worked together before.

  The closest guy trusted his teammate to back him up, and simply threw himself at me without even pausing. The move wasn't the kind of thing you usually saw out of a bunch of anti-social hybrids, so it caught me by surprise, but I still managed to block his swipe.

  It wasn't pretty—rather than checking his attack with a blow of my own, I just threw my arm up. It was good enough to protect my chest, but it didn't stop him from cutting bloody furrows in my back and the outside of my arm. I'd acted out of reflex and didn't even realize initially that the block was something Set had taught me.

  It was way too soon for me to be trying that kind of stuff in an actual fight, my aberrant success in my recent challenge fight notwithstanding. I hadn't even begun to have put enough time into wiring up a new set of reflexes, let alone the time required to integrate Set's stuff with what I already knew, but apparently my subconscious didn't agree.

  Rather than backing away, I stepped forward and sank my right foot into my opponent's leg. I didn't hit anything critical with my talons and I wasn't trying to knock him over. Instead I simply used my grip to launch myself upwards.

  I got my left leg up just high enough to take a slash, that otherwise would have disemboweled me, on the outside of my leg and then I sank my left hand in his stomach. Normally I would have said that the distance and angle was all wrong, but this time I capitalized on my momentum to do way more damage than I'd ever seen done before with what should have been a minor blow.

  I tried to keep half an eye on the rest of the battle as I backed away from my first opponent. He wasn't dead, but his core had been badly damaged and he was having a hard time getting himself back to his feet.

  The rest of the fight wasn't going as well as my little corner. Onyx had used his ability on nearly all of the lamias at the same time and the effect had been disastrous. It was impossible to fight when you were in that much pain, which meant that any lamia who had been within arm's reach of one of the few surviving hybrids had been savaged. More than half of the lamias were down on the ground, dead or dying, and only the fact that there hadn't been very many hybrids still alive by the time that Onyx had reentered the fight had allowed any of our guys to slip back into deeper water, out of sight and therefore safe from Onyx's power.

  I was hurt, but my injuries were relatively minor and I was ready to take my chances against the other bruiser Onyx had detached to take me down. I started forward with a well-timed slash to my opponent's neck that was designed to test his reaction time, but
Onyx hit me with another tidal wave of pain before I could even get within half a foot of his guy.

  The ground reached up and hit me. I was in too much pain to even realize that Onyx's guy had backhanded me nearly hard enough to break my neck. He could have just as easily torn my throat out, but apparently he hadn't forgotten that Onyx wanted me alive.

  I was still seeing double when Onyx's ability cut back off, but my guy was standing too close to me when it happened and I managed to reach up and nearly hamstring his right leg. He stumbled back away from me, obviously not willing to engage without more help now that his mobility had been compromised.

  I took stock of what was going on around me while I tried to get the world to stop spinning. There was one less hybrid standing on the island next to Onyx now. Somewhere along the way the rest of his guys had fallen back to surround him, that or maybe he'd only been able to save the guys closest to him. After that last knock to the head I was too shaken up to be sure.

  Onyx's guys all looked pretty uneasy considering that they had him backing them up, but then again I couldn't really blame them. Set and the others were downright creepy. They must have ambushed another of the hybrids from the edge of the water. There was blood in the water and big gashes in the mud that hadn't been there a few seconds before.

  I figured that was what had forced Onyx to break off and use his power elsewhere. I was going to buy Set and his guys whatever the lamia equivalent to a drink was once we got back to the enclave.

  Another round of splashing as something came up out of the water on Onyx's island brought everyone's head around, but I didn't bother waiting to see who or what it was. I lunged at the hybrid who had nearly knocked me out, and he wasn't fast enough to avoid me.

  I went in not planning on doing anything fancy. I hit him with more than enough momentum to drive him to the ground, but he managed to get a slash in while he was falling that should have taken me across the kidney and mirrored what Nicolas had done to Ash back at the hospital.

  By that time I was committed, there was no dodging the attack and my hands were out of position to stop him as well. Once again I acted out of reflexes that I shouldn't have had. My elbow shot out and caught him on the inside of his arm. It wasn't enough to completely stop his blow, but it served to rob his claws of most of their momentum.

  I still took some deep gashes to my back and side, but they weren't enough to kill me and as his claws recoiled backwards from the force of my elbow strike, I slammed my right hand forward, taking him in the chest.

  We hit the ground a fraction of a second later. I rolled back to my feet, leaving a corpse in the mud in front of me, but my thrill of success was short-lived because Onyx hit me again, locking up every muscle in my body as the pain made me try to rip my arms free of their sockets.

  It felt like I was screaming in pain for hours, but it couldn't have been more than a few seconds. I dimly heard another outbreak of splashing and then the pain vanished and I weakly got my hands back underneath me enough to lift myself up to where I could see what was going on.

  The earlier set of splashes had been the scrawny guy who had been chained to the boat. I wouldn't have thought he could survive that long under water, but somehow he'd gone all the way down to the bottom of the channel and then dragged his piece of the boat up onto Onyx's island.

  He looked half dead and he was obviously having trouble emptying the water out of his lungs, but I was impressed. He was a fighter, not that you would have known it by the way that the rest of Onyx's men were looking at him. They obviously would have been happier if he'd stayed at the bottom of the bayou.

  The second round of splashes looked to have been an unsuccessful attempt by Set and the others to get their hands on another hybrid. The number of hybrids hadn't decreased any, but it also looked like Onyx hadn't managed to stop the lamias from making it back into the water before the rest of his guys got to them.

  Onyx hit me with his ability and for a couple of seconds my world shrank down to nothing more than pain and the screams that I couldn't manage to contain. Once he let off of me, it was all I could do to turn over enough to look at him. I couldn't get myself to my feet, couldn't even sit up.

  "I can do this all day, Nazir. Maybe you should tell your weird friends that it's time to come out of the water and just give me what I want. Take me to Celeste Hunt and none of the rest of you have to die."

  "We aren't taking you anywhere, Onyx, but I'll give you an alternative. Turn around and walk back to New Orleans and my friends and I won't kill you."

  "You're hardly in a position to be making threats. How much longer can you take the pain before your body just shuts down? Ten seconds? Twenty? It's obvious you're getting close to the end. I can kill you without even moving, and then I'll just wait here until your friends have to surface for air and I'll kill them too.

  "Once you're all dead I'll track you back to whatever hole you've hidden Celeste in, and then I'll take her and her brother back to New Orleans and torture them until they hand over what's left of their family's fortune."

  "That's a nice theory, but my friends can spend longer than you would believe underwater. They can easily go out of sight in shifts to breathe somewhere you can't get at them. It's uncanny the way that they can move under the water without creating ripples, but there you have it. They'll just wait you out. Eventually you'll get sloppy and they'll take another of your guys down. It's really just a matter of time."

  I hadn't managed to crack Onyx's towering certainty of his own invulnerability, but I could tell that his remaining men were starting to get nervous. That would eventually get to Onyx even if nothing else did.

  "Even if you manage to stay far enough from the water to stop them from snatching you one at a time, that won't save you. Eventually you'll have to move and once you're in the water they can take you all at once. Did you see the way your one guy died? He was poisoned."

  Onyx's guys were all shifting around now, trying not to be obvious about it, but doing whatever they could to put extra distance between them and the water.

  "I know what you're all thinking. Poison doesn't work on hybrids, right? Don't ask me how, but this poison does. Pretty painful way to go too, based on the way your buddy screamed before he died. That means that my friends don't have to fight fair. They don't have to trade blows with you, they just need to break the skin. One stab, and you're a goner."

  "You're bluffing. They don't all have that ability, or none of us would have survived your ambush."

  "No, you're right, not all of them can do that, but enough of them can. Besides, they don't have to kill you all with poison. They still outnumber you. They just need to kill you with poison, Onyx. Inject you with a dose of hybrid-killing venom and then the rest of you will be easy pickings."

  I waited a second to see if any of his people would crack, but they seemed too scared to make a move on their own.

  "The best part of it is that even if you do manage by some miracle to beat my friends, it still won't do you any good. I'm telling you the truth when I say that you won't be able to track us back to where we came from. You came all of the way out here for no reason."

  "You're lying. You wouldn't have ambushed us if we weren't a threat."

  "Oh, you're a threat all right, just not for the reason you think. You were never going to find us—you never will, not until my friends are ready for us to be found—but there are plenty of other reasons for us to come after you. Do you really think that Celeste would pass up a chance to take you down, Onyx? We almost got you, too. If you'd been a split second slower or if your boat had been a little more to one side then you would have spent your last few seconds writhing in agony as the poison burned its way through your chest. Heck, I shouldn't get ahead of myself, that's still the most likely result of all of this. It's kind of exciting, isn't it?"

  Some of his guys were looking back at Onyx now rather than at the water like they were supposed to be. They wanted him to take my deal. It was always possible t
hat I was one of those rare people who could lie even to another shape shifter without being caught, but it wasn't likely. Besides, the lamias had already been under the water for more than six minutes and they'd seen their friend go down from the venom. It was hard to argue with facts like that. I decided it was time to play my last card.

  "Of course I could be lying about all of this—I'm not, but it's always a possibility. But even if you manage to kill us all, you're still going to have to make your way back through the bayou on foot. Have you seen the size of the alligators around here? Do you really want to be another man or two down as you try to swim past those monsters? There are really big snakes too. It might be interesting to see what the venom of a thirty-foot water moccasin would do to a hybrid. It probably still wouldn't kill you, but I'll bet it would put you down for several hours at least."

  That did it. Every single one of Onyx's men knew that he wouldn't stop in enemy territory for them if they got bitten. He'd leave them behind which would mean that the alligators would get them before they fought off the poison enough to be able to defend themselves again.

  "I think we should take his deal."

  "Me too!"

  The chorus of voices that piped up once the first of Onyx's bruisers broke the silence made it sound like there were two or three times as many people standing around him as there actually were. I had Onyx, and we both knew it. His power was nothing short of impressive, but without some foot soldiers to watch his back even he wouldn't be able to take on more than half a dozen lamia. They'd wait until he was focused in one direction and then they'd rush him from all sides.

  He could still kill me and I could see that he wanted to, but that wouldn't guarantee his safety and might even cause his men to turn on him. For a second I played with that idea. If I told his guys that I'd give them safe passage in exchange for taking Onyx down it might be enough to convince them to attack him en masse, but there was no guarantee of that and I didn't want to overplay my hand.