rested it on Kane’s knee, taking on an almost noble bearing before turning its attention off in the distance.
“What is it?” Kane asked.
The dog turned its whole body, its nose acting like an arrow directing Kane’s eyes toward a ribbon of water that moved off the main river they were on, rolling toward the shore of a hardwood hammock. He flattened his oar in the water, providing a braking force for the boat.
Grant made an annoyed groan as his friend worked against his progress, but that died off as he followed Kane’s gaze. “What?”
“Dog must have heard or smelled something,” Kane said.
Rosalia looked over her shoulder, disbelief coloring her gaze. “Like he knows something’s happening? It could be a squirrel.”
Kane squinted, silencing her with a raised finger.
“Magistrate Man, you don’t shut me up like—”
Kane turned and glared at her. “Quiet, damn it.”
Rosalia’s mouth closed, lips pressed together tight until her mouth was a thin, bloodless scar on her face.
Grant knew that Kane’s senses were nearly preternatural, and if he was trying to focus on something that Grant himself couldn’t hear or see, then he would follow the point man’s lead.
The silence folded in around them, weighing in as heavily as the humidity and the stench of mold around them. Kane knew something was wrong as the normal lively sounds of the swamp, the chirp of crickets and the warble of birds, had suddenly fallen away. The quiet lasted only a moment before a scream, faint and weak, but still a woman’s scream, reached his sharp ears. Even as he heard it, he noticed that Rosalia’s dog had perked up even more. It turned its big, dark eyes toward the former Magistrate, as if to say, “You heard that, right?”
“Trouble. Let’s go,” Kane announced, and he and Grant put their backs into it, turning the boat and pushing it down the waterway. The only sound they made was the slap and suck of their oars in the murky swamp water.
SUWANEE’S BLACK MANE of silky hair flew as the open hand cracked across her smooth, dark cheek. She struggled to maintain her balance on the uneven ground between the long leaf pines and tumbled down into the wiregrass. Her face throbbed from the force of the impact, and the Seminole woman had one thought—that she was lucky to have been slapped rather than punched. A closed fist would surely have shattered her facial bones and left her unconscious and helpless.
Suwanee dug her fingers into the wiregrass, using it as handles to pull herself up to her knees, but gnarled fingers reached down, snarling in her thick, ebony hair. She was going to scream again in protest, but a firm yank tugged hard on her scalp, follicles popping out at the roots, but most of it holding on as she was jerked to standing on her knees. She looked toward what would have been her tormentor’s face, but it was cloaked in shadow by the droop of his hood’s cowl. She couldn’t even see the glint of what she imagined were the cruel, merciless eyes of the man who handled her so roughly.
Though her head was held still by the leverage of her own hair, Suwanee could see the others around her, some obscured by the trunks of the pines, but most of them in a position like hers, cowed to their knees. She took a breath to release another scream, but fingers wrapped around her throat.
The snarl of her hair eased, and the man raised a finger to his shadowed lips, a universal signal for silence. Suwanee swallowed, wishing she could make out the features of the man holding her just tightly enough to keep her still, giving her windpipe plenty of room to suck down air.
“Please, no,” she whispered.
The shadow-faced man was not the only one of his hooded kind, and they appeared to be all sizes and skin color. Some of the strange marauders seemed to be women, as well, but none of them spoke, communicating only in hand signals at best, in violence at worst. Suwanee and the other refugees of the Appalachia River Basin had heard of these silent travelers, and how their numbers increased. Where they had first come as stalkers and thieves, making off with the young, unprotected or unwary, their numbers had increased so that few left their guarded communities without sufficient numbers. Somewhere in the muddy waters just off the shore of the hammock lay Suwanee’s weapon, a crudely made single-action revolver cobbled together from parts and what metal scrap the panhandle gunsmiths could accumulate.
Even if she had the gun, Suwanee wasn’t a combatant. Sure, she could hit a tin can resting on a log, but that wasn’t a person, and it wasn’t moving and trying to capture her. The Seminole refugee’s only saving grace was that these hooded men were not armed with guns and weren’t trying to kill them.
Suwanee didn’t want to think of what would happen if they succeeded in this capture.
The hooded attacker froze, his fingers still clutched around her throat, but he was involuntarily squeezing. Something was upsetting him and drawing his attention away from her.
Craning her head, the young woman saw a canoe moving with remarkable speed toward the shore. She lifted one hand, clawing the air in an effort to summon the people on board. The right thing would have been to warn them, to wave them off, but the trio of people in the scull were paddling with all of their might.
A strange, unnatural keening issued from the cavernous shadows of her captor’s hood, and it pointed an accusing finger at the people in the boat. Suwanee sucked in air as it released the death grip on her throat, and she collapsed onto the wiregrass, vision blurred from those fingers closing off the flow of blood to her brain. Suwanee wanted to scrounge for the knife she kept in her belt, a tool that she’d used to crack open shellfish or to clean fish, but the pain of the would-be strangle left her weakened, both hands clutching at the bruised flesh around her windpipe. All she could do was watch, brown eyes blinking to clear her sight as the scull splashed closer and closer.
She thought of the noise the raider made. Such an inhuman cry, issued from beneath the cowl, was not a good sign, either of the marauders’ intent or their origins. Things had been bad already, and it was likely that they were going to get worse.
A sandy-colored bolt shot from the boat, followed by a tall man who moved nearly as swiftly as the dog. Suwanee was about to utter another croak, warning the tall rescuer, telling him of the incredible strength these hooded fiends possessed. But then she saw the flex of his muscles beneath black skin-conforming fabric and the folded weapon on his right forearm. Dread landed in her gut as she recognized the legendary Magistrate’s weapon, the badge of office each of the grim, faceless lawmen wore. The black bodysuit he wore was unlike the shining, polycarbonate shell armor that the Mags were also famous for, but it was still the same fearsome dark shade of brutal authority as the official Mag armor.
Knives suddenly flashed from sheaths and the ring of naked steel being drawn was resounding. Curved, mirror-polished blades sprang quickly into view and the cowled kidnappers moved swiftly, taking cover behind tree trunks, as if they could anticipate the need to avoid the deadly weaponry the Magistrate carried. Suwanee struggled to roll over onto her stomach, to pull herself to her hands and knees to get away from the two warring factions.
In a battle between the Magistrates and these hooded thugs, Suwanee knew that she and her fellow refugees would only be the losers, no matter who won.
She’d rolled onto her side, still gasping for breath, when her assailant gave her a hard kick in the shoulder, knocking her flat on her back. He pointed a gnarled finger at her, and this time she could see the merciless glint of hatred reflecting on the shadow-faced man’s eyeballs.
