I opened my mouth to shout a warning, when something skitter-skittered across the pavement. The dwarf must have stepped on a soda can. Violet froze at the noise, one of her hands still in her purse. Then she bolted.

Didn’t look back, didn’t check to see what the noise was.

She just ran.

She got maybe twenty steps before the man grabbed her by her frizzy blond hair. Violet shrieked in pain and turned to flail at him, her hands arced into claws. He let her slap at him. Those sorts of blows would mean nothing to a dwarf. Magic and weapons were the only things that got their attention. Violet paused half a second to draw in another breath to scream. That’s when the man punched her in the face—hard. I heard the crunch of bone a hundred feet away.

Violet moaned, and the man hit her again. Her head snapped to one side, and she fell to her knees, retching.

The dwarf kicked her in the stomach, and the force lifted Violet off the pavement and threw her ten feet. She hit the hood of a rusty pickup and slid to the ground. She didn’t move.

The dwarf cracked his knuckles and advanced on her again. He picked her up and splayed her out on the hood of the pickup. The motion snapped Violet out of her daze, and she moaned and looked at her attacker. One of the dwarf ’s hands dropped to his pants. He wasn’t using a gun this time. The dwarf was going to beat Violet to death—after he raped her.

I was fifty feet away and closing fast. I wasn’t trying to be quiet, not anymore, but the dwarf was too intent on opening his fly to hear the swish-swish of my sneakers on the wet pavement.

But the deep, throaty roar of a vehicle rumbling to life somewhere behind me made him turn. The dwarf spotted me running at him, zipped up his pants, and stepped back. Waiting. Just waiting. Violet lay on the hood, her hands underneath her, trying to find the strength to push herself up, to run away. Blood covered most of what I could see of her face, and the bottom half of her nose was no longer in line with the top part. Her glasses barely clung to her face.

Since the dwarf was focused on me, I slowed my steps to a walk. When I was ten feet away, I stopped, palmed the knife hidden up my left sleeve, and studied the man before me.