The Last Threshold (Neverwinter #4)(23)

“Yes,” Drizzt answered.

Arunika started to rise and Drizzt reached for his coin purse. But the woman deferred and promised, “I will go to him.”

***





“What do you want?” Artemis Entreri asked from behind the cracked door. He was stripped to the waist—and Arunika made certain that he noted her appreciative stare at his muscled torso.

“Barrabus,” she replied.

“That is not my name—never again my name.”

“Artemis, then,” she said. “Speak with me. We’re great players amidst a sea of peasants. We shouldn’t be strangers, or enemies.”

Her words were weighted with more than a little magical suggestion, but she needn’t have bothered. For most males, and Entreri proved no exception, the magically disarming and enticing affect of her spell-enhanced appearance sufficed. Entreri stepped back and opened the door, and Arunika happily entered his den.

“It’s good that you’ve returned,” she said, taking a seat on his ruffled bedding and demurely crossing her legs. It occurred to her that she should abandon Drizzt’s request and convince Entreri to remain in Neverwinter. Could she make him an informant, perhaps, another great cog in the network she’d fostered? She knew the exploits of Barrabus the Gray, after all, and he was a man of no small danger and power.

Too much danger, she decided not long into her conversation with Entreri, not long after looking into his cold eyes. Yes, she did remember Barrabus the Gray, and had always understood that he was one of the few mortals she had ever met capable of defeating her.

Still, that didn’t mean he couldn’t be useful to her, and in a number of ways.

Despite her protests earlier, the redhead did engage in a bit of overpowering seduction, to indulge herself as much as to please Entreri. She didn’t leave his room until the sky was beginning to lighten with the dawn, and she left Entreri quite exhausted, indeed fast asleep.

She had shown him great pleasure, and he had reciprocated. An added bonus, the succubus thought, for the purpose of her seduction had not been her own pleasure. Not this night, though it had come as an added bonus, surely! No, in the midst of their entwining, Arunika had placed an enchantment upon this dangerous assassin, a dweomer of clairvoyance. And when they were done, collapsed in each other’s arms, the red-haired succubus, a whispering demon, had lived up to the reputation of her kind, offering quiet encouragement into Entreri’s ear, assuring him that his best road forward lay beside Drizzt and Dahlia.

Her reputation as a seer wasn’t wholly unearned, after all, and now Artemis Entreri, marked by the dweomer of Arunika, would spy for her.





MY FRIEND THE VAMPIRE



THE CHANGE IN PERSPECTIVE WAS QUITE DISORIENTING FOR DRAYGO Quick. First he was standing in his room, watching the panther turn to mist, then he was traveling the ether, swirling and spinning, his sensibilities secretly carried along with Guenhwyvar.

Soon he was beside the drow ranger and Dahlia on Toril, but low to the ground, stalking. He could hear the pair but he couldn’t turn to regard them. Not having command over the cat’s muscles, but rather just seeing, hearing, smelling, and feeling through her created a strange, out-of-body, and more importantly, out-of-control, experience for the old warlock.

An altered reality, actually, for the panther’s eyes did not view the world as a human would. Everything seemed elongated, with distances more clearly defined. The crystal clarity led to a dizzying, almost magnifying effect on the grasses and branches and fallen leaves, as if a hundred mirrors had taken the sunlight and magnified it many times over to completely alter the color of the world.

Sounds filled Draygo Quick’s mind—some were soft, like the call of a distant bird, then became suddenly loud as the panther turned her ears. In that turn, other sounds were muted. It seemed to Draygo that the cat could lock her hearing directionally, this way or that, amplifying regions of sound almost to the exclusion of other areas.

She was moving then, swiftly, in pursuit of something, and the ground and low brush sped by so wildly that Draygo reflexively closed his own eyes to try to block it out. But he could not close Guenhwyvar’s eyes and so his actions had no effect. He almost broke the connection, but then Guenhwyvar’s prey suddenly came into view.

Humans and tieflings—Ashmadai zealots—scrambled in alarm, gathering up their war scepters, shoving each other aside.

A blinding flash ripped the air above him, and an Ashmadai man went flying away.

Then the warlock felt as if he were flying, too, as Guenhwyvar leaped. He saw a woman dive aside, another turn and shriek, and he flew past them both, crashing hard against the chest of a burly tiefling warrior. Draygo Quick felt the impact as that warrior tried to bang his scepter against the panther’s flank, but more keenly, Draygo Quick tasted the sweat and flesh as Guenhwyvar bit down. His vision failed him. The cat had closed her eyes, but he heard, keenly, the tearing of flesh and the crunch of bone, and the smell—oh the smell!—overwhelmed him. Coppery and warm.

The scent of gushing blood.

He felt as if he were flying again, and his vision returned suddenly. He saw the drow spinning by, scimitars humming through the air. Dahlia vaulted past and he heard a grunt and a groan and the slapping of her staff against the skull of a woman. The panther crashed into another man, tackling him to the ground, breaking branches and flattening the brush. As soon as they landed, Guenhwyvar spun around and sprang away. Draygo Quick didn’t even realize that he was pawing and clawing the air reflexively to mimic the feeling of Guenhwyvar’s claws ripping the flesh from the man.