Dead of Winter (The Arcana Chronicles #3)(46)

Banging sounded from somewhere else in the house. What was Jack doing?

I’d just finished dressing when I heard him return to the living room. “So you’re two thousand years older than she is?” he said to Aric. “There’s robbing the cradle—and then there’s this. She’s a teenager, you fils de putain.”

“When I married her, I was younger than she was,” Aric pointed out. “I can’t control that I’ve endured this long. In any case, counting her various incarnations, she’s lived on this earth for well over a century. She has memories of games when she was older, a woman grown.”

“The unwed girl in there is named Evie Greene. She went to Sterling High, and she grew up in cane country like me. And even if you had married her, you never consummated it, no.” He could be just as snide as Aric. “Not like Evie and me did.” Low blow, Jack.

“I’m going to make you pay for that. In time.”

“Now I know why you tried to stop us that night. How’d that work out for you? All my life, folks been telling me I cheat death. Guess they were right.”

“The honor doesn’t belong to the one she chose first for her bed,” Aric bit out. “It belongs to the one she chooses to keep there.”

“And you think that’s goan to be you? You’re delusional in your old age, you.”

Hostility continued to seethe between them, along with a cutthroat rivalry.

Now I was about to have to wade right into the middle of it. In a daze, I turned toward the door, nearly leaving my bag behind. Accustomed to the security at Aric’s, I’d forgotten the first rule of survival out on the road.

Jack had tried so hard to teach me. I’d thought he was just being cruel.

And now I knew why he’d gotten angry whenever I’d been hungry. I would never forget the image of him as a little boy kicking that trap in frustration. . . .

Back in the living room, a fire was going. Clever Jack had harvested boards from the building’s walls.

He sat at the hearth cleaning that crossbow, his own bug-out bag at his feet, his jacket drying nearby.

Helmet in hand, Aric paced along a line of dirt-caked windows, casting glances outside. Tonight, he moved soundlessly in that armor. Sometimes his spurs clinked as he entered a room; other times silent. Maybe he adjusted his stride. “The mortal’s handy, Empress. Your very own squire.”

Jack didn’t rise to the bait, asking me, “You eat anything?”

I sat beside the fire, dropping my bag. “Not yet.” I stretched my hands to the warmth.

Once my fingers thawed, I retrieved my canteen and dinner, a nutritious energy bar. Those bars gave me enough calories for an entire day, but the taste was so foul, I earned every one of them. I peeled the wrapper, knowing I’d need the energy to keep up with these two.

Jack polished his bow’s arrow cartridge with the tail of his shirt. “It’s goan to get worse and worse on this route. I brought an extra bulletproof vest for you.” Like the one he wore. “When we head out, I want you to try it.”

That vest would swallow me.

Death scoffed, “She can take a hundred bullets to the heart and survive.”

“I bet you know just what can kill her—since you’ve offed her so many times in past lives.”

“I wouldn’t say many. And she’s tried for me just as often.” Aric made a last round along the windows, then took a seat against the wall near the door. One arm rested over a bent knee.

“How’d you murder a girl who can regenerate, you? Decapitate her?” If a guy has beheaded you on more than one occasion . . . “Did you do to her what you did to those Baggers earlier? Sounds like a match made in hell to me.”

Aric’s fists clenched, the metal of his spiked gauntlets grinding. No doubt he wanted to drive those spikes into Jack’s face. “Unlike you and the Archer, who have everything in common?” To me, Aric said, “I would advise you to ask the mortal if he’s been with her in all these months, but then, he’d simply lie to you.”

Aric’s words cut right to the heart of my problems with Jack: trust. Despite Jack’s denial, I wondered again if something had transpired between him and Selena. She wanted him so much. . . .

The bar tasted like cardboard. I struggled to chew it. If Jack had lied to me about her, I could never accept him.

“You stirring the pot again, Reaper? Evie’s the one I want. It’ll always be that way.”

I glanced over at him with a question in my eyes. In a matter of hours, we’d gone from I can’t look at you to this. Why the turnaround?

“You had many women before the Empress.” Aric took a whetstone from a pouch on his swordbelt. “You’ll have them after her as well.” He slid one sword free.

That muscle ticked in Jack’s jaw. “I found the one I’m goan to be with. It’s her for me. Period. I’ll protect her with my life.”

Aric ran that stone along his sword blade. Graaaate. “As will I.”

“Like you did with those Baggers? I wrote the book on toughening Evie up, but that was too much risk.”

Graaaate. “Arcana are superhuman—should our lessons be merely human in intensity? Or even humane for that matter? Those Bagmen had been washed away with those victims, buried alive among them for weeks, perhaps months. They chose to rise today—because they finally had motivation. They tapped into the depths of their blood-thirsty natures for more strength. In battle, the Empress should do no less.”