Death's Mistress by Karen Chance Page A

probably be well on the way to healed by tomorrow. Yet for some reason, my hands shook as I taped my knee off, and my lungs kept dragging in more oxygen than I needed.
    They’d been doing it downstairs, too, like they thought there might be another shortage soon and needed to stock up. But it was worse now, to the point of making me dizzy. It took me a moment to realize that I was close to hyperventilating. I sat there, struggling to calm down, and wondered what the hell was wrong with me.
    I’d come that close or closer to death more times than I could count, with many of them more painful and a lot more messy. I’d woken up from fits covered in my own and others’ blood, with broken bones still reknitting, or burned flesh still sloughing off. Then there had been the memorable incident of coming back to consciousness only to interrupt the feeding of the vultures who had mistaken me for a corpse.
    Sometimes I still had flashbacks to that one, the feathers dragging over my skin, the claws digging into my flesh, the beaks tearing. Yet I’d beaten them off, retrieved my weapons and stolen one of the horses of the men who had tried to gut me to get to my next job. I was used to dealing with the aftershocks of near disaster: the taste of blood, the scent of death in the air and the quiet that followed.
    But, I realized slowly, I wasn’t nearly as accustomed to the disaster itself. Most of the time, I was out of my head when the mayhem happened—a fact I’d always dreaded. I had never realized before how much I’d also relied on it.
    It had been terrifying but also strangely comforting to know that death for me would simply mean failing to wake up from one of my fits someday. It meant knowing every time I heard the familiar rushing in my ears that this might be the last time, but it also meant being pretty sure that I wouldn’t see the end coming. Yet I’d almost seen it tonight.
    And this is how you deal with it? I thought angrily. Five hundred years and this is the best you can do? Freaking out because your damn weapons failed? Because you finally met an opponent you don’t know how to kill?
    I got up, furious with my body for its weakness, with myself because I hadn’t anticipated this, hadn’t realized after getting my ass kicked by the fey once before that it damn well might happen again. I didn’t know their magic, didn’t understand their weapons. A weapon to me was the reassuring weight in my hand, a sword, a club, a gun; how the hell could I fight people who had the very Earth and sky on their side?
    I didn’t know, but I knew one thing. Ifsubrand was alive, he could die. And I really, really wanted him to die.

Chapter Eight
    I awoke to the smell of freshly brewed coffee and frying bacon, which was impossible. But since I needed to get up anyway, I rolled out of bed—and fell three feet to the floor. I hit with a thump that didn’t do the crick in my neck or the knots in my back any good.
    My eyes crossed, focusing on a huge pair of smelly socks. They reeked badly enough to act as a kind of smelling salts. I sat up, fully conscious, and bumped my head on the underside of a table.
    In front of me was a wreck that I vaguely identified as the living room. Blankets and old quilts had been thrown everywhere, clothes and bags of personal items had been piled in a heap by the cellar door, and a trail of huge, muddy footprints led from it to the hall. They obliterated most of the rug but skirted a waterlogged mattress.
    The footprints had three toes each, pretty standard for mountain trolls, so I relaxed. I assumed they belonged to the large lumps curled up in a couple of wingback chairs in front of the fireplace, snoring loud enough to bring down what remained of the rafters. I ignored them for the moment, and stood up, my back cracking like old knuckles.
    The edge of a quilt trailed off the tabletop, and I recalled what I’d been doing up there. Claire had been sprawled in the middle of the mattress when I