Sword of Dreams (The Reforged Trilogy) by Erica Lindquist, Aron Christensen Page A

seemed to drain out of the room. She felt suddenly hot and prickly all over, as though she had just taken another shot of Frag.
    "How long has he been waiting?" Alexa gave her unconscious secretary a hard shove. He groaned and curled into a ball at the corner of the bed. She kicked her way out from under him and wrapped herself in a thick, wine-colored robe.
    "A few minutes," Harrell told her. He frowned with the left half of his face. "It was very hard to wake you, Miss Carmine. You had too much last night."
    She did not have time to argue with him. Besides, Harrell might have been right. Alexa could remember nothing of the night before. But if she did not give Logan Coldhand what he wanted, Alexa suspected she would be spending a lot of memorable nights in prison. She ran from the bedroom and into the adjoining office. The stone floor was cold and hard against her bare feet.
    Alexa leaned over her desk and told her computer to open the call. Coldhand appeared on the screen, sitting so still in the shadows on the other end that Alexa half wondered if it was a photo-mask. The Prian bounty hunter looked just as he had the last time he had been on Glaw: short, dark blonde hair framing those glacial pale blue eyes that alternately made Alexa want to run in stark terror or else rip off his clothes.
    Right now, she could do neither. Alexa Carmine, the self-made smuggler queen of Glaw, needed to remain a more useful ally than a bounty.
    "What do you need, Coldhand?" she asked. Did the quivering in her stomach come through in her voice? "More phenno? It's hard to move goods off Glaw right now. There's a burst covering the whole eastern hemisphere tomorrow."
    "No. I need information, Carmine."
    "What kind of information?" Alexa asked suspiciously.
    If Coldhand was after one of her smugglers, giving him information would cut into her profits and could make her look unreliable to the other captains. The answer came after a tense moment, the delay between transmissions from Glaw to wherever the hunter was.
    "I'm not interested in any of your people," said Coldhand, perhaps reading Alexa's fears in her voice. "I'm just verifying a theory. Has anyone new come into the Glaw tunnels?"
    "A lot of people come and go every day. Can you be more specific?"
    Another transmission delay. Coldhand seemed to be considering how much to reveal to Alexa. She could not blame him. If he ever tipped his hand too far, if he ever revealed some useful vulnerability, it would be a lot safer to remove the hunter than to keep working with him.
    "There would be a lot of them, probably upward of a thousand, and many would be Arcadian," he said at last.
    Carmine thought about that, drumming her long red nails on her desk. "I had a large group of passengers come through a few months back. Not in the numbers you're talking about, but two or three hundred. I noted them because almost all of them were bird-backs. I don't like it when anyone makes trouble in my tunnels."
    "Came through? Are they still on Glaw?"
    "No. They left again a few days later on another ship. Nice Narsus thing, custom job. Crewed by more bird-backs," Alexa said. "The whole thing was more than a little strange."
    "Tell me." Coldhand's voice was icy and intense, like being falling into cold water.
    "The fairies had money. Enough to pay for fuel and supplies for a long flight. But they were going to Prianus. If they had money, why fly out to that God-forsaken place? Anyone with enough color leaves Prianus and never goes back." Alexa realized what she had just said and fell uncomfortably silent.
    "Like me," Coldhand said a few seconds later. "Did they do anything while they were on Glaw?"
    "Do anything? Anything illegal, you mean? No. They were quiet and kept to themselves. They all stayed together in one of my caves and never complained."
    When Coldhand received her answer, he did not seem surprised. He nodded once and cut the transmission without another word. Alexa flopped down into her chair and