Thesan’s shrieking laughter was almost enough to pierce eardrums. Sif clocked the woman over the ear soundly, mercifully cutting off the sound before it could reach glass-shattering levels. She dropped the slender girl in a heap in the snow, glowering.
“Well now you’ve gone and done it, haven’t you?” Sif shook her head at Thordin. “You and your over-large mouth.”
“Oh, shut up,” Thordin grumbled, reaching for Thesan. “Help me here, J.T.”
“Help you do what?” J.T. asked as he moved to help Thordin restrain their prisoner. “And what the hell are you talking about, putting Phelan’s soul back where it’s supposed to be? What happened out there?”
“It must have been when he went down at the line,” Thordin said, accepting a coil of thin rope that Sif produced from beneath her jacket. He started to bind Thesan’s wrists behind her, his expression locked in a grimace. “His head wasn’t here when it happened. He was trying to get a sense of something—said something wasn’t right. Then he just went down like a sack of rocks like I’ve never seen before.”
J.T. muttered a curse and shook his head. “I saw it, I was here, remember? Damn it all, I want to know about this soul shit.”
“If I had much of an explanation for it, I’d share it,” Thordin said, moving on to binding Thesan’s ankles. “She somehow stole it and was using it to blackmail her father—and if blackmailing her father with it didn’t work, she’d planned on turning it over to the Hecate.”
J.T. stared at her, abruptly sick to his stomach. “What?”
“Are you going to make me repeat that?”
J.T. shuddered and shook his head. “No. No, I guess not. I heard you, I just…how am I supposed to take that?”
“As bad news,” Thordin said. “Now get over here and see if you can somehow bind her soul.”
J.T. shuddered again, bile creeping higher in his throat. “I don’t know that I like the sound of that request.” Something feels wrong about it.
Thordin sighed. “Then try to bind her magic, at least. If she’s got enough to suck out Phelan’s soul from a distance, I don’t even want to think about anything else she’s capable of.”
J.T. took a slow, deep breath. “Right,” he murmured.
He knelt in the snow next to the prone woman, took another breath, and got to work.
