“Treat them well,” Swansong said. “Hurting them puts you onto the shitlist of some powerful, scary individuals.”

Etna tried to make a globe, but her body convulsed and tensed, and she dropped it. It landed on the field below her.

“Trying to scare us?” Contender asked. He winced, touching his neck. It looked like talking hurt. Good.

“Individual one? Me. They’re my brothers.”

“You sound juvenile, grandstanding like that,” Contender said.

“Because they’re ex-Slaughterhouse Nine,” she said. “All of us are one big unhappy family of not-to-be-fucked-with.”

Her words were a growl at the end there.

“Who?” Vulturehawk asked Contender.

“Remember what I said when we did the Navigator job?” Contender asked. “Some days are good, some days are bad, and some are bloody by necessity.”

“Throw away all the good days and all of the bad days, and make every day bloody,” Swansong intoned. “Make every day a bad day for someone else. Then you fit in right alongside the Slaughterhouse Nine.”

“Not how I would have put it,” Contender said. “But sure.”

“I wasn’t trying to help you explain,” she said.

Our footing was slippery. What had been snow, ice, and frozen dirt was now closer to ice and slick frozen dirt, after Byron’s downpour.

“Your second issue?” Swansong asked. I had the distinct impression that she was taking all of her frustration and the pain of her missing foot and channeling those things into her words. She enjoyed being scary and this kind of taunting served. “They have brothers.”

“We dealt with them,” Contender said.

They were edging closer. Paris’s every movement was calculated, I noticed. He was like a magician, timing his movements so he acted when people were distracted. He put others between us and him, and the moment we were engaged and reacting to other people, he’d start moving again. He had a dart in each hand but he didn’t throw them.

“You got lucky. Our powers got wiped out by whatever that was. Now we’re at, hm… I’d have to use my power to get a feel for where we are.”

“Seventy-five percent,” I said, testing my own flight.

“Harbinger,” Swansong said, keying her voice to be something closer to haunting, “think you can beat all of these guys when your power’s working again?”

“Injured, so no,” the Harbinger said.

Swansong turned her head, shooting him a glare.

“Give me four rocks I can throw and my power at eighty percent and sure.”

“Thank you,” she said. She turned to face Paris’s group, while still talking to him, “I’m intimidating them and you throw a ‘no’ out there? And Jack said you were one of the scariest of them.”