The House That Jack Built by Robert Asprin & Linda Evans

Even expecting the worst, Skeeter lurched, the shock took him so hard. The dusty room, the sun-baked mountains beyond the broken windows, swooped and dove for a long, dizzy instant. Skeeter clutched at the open doorframe. He heard his voice, distant and strange, saying, “I’m gonna break the neck of the bastard who did this . . .”

Julius had been gut-shot. He’d clearly survived the fatal wound long enough to reach camp and Paula Booker, because someone had taken stitches before he’d died. Kit’s hand settled on Skeeter’s shoulder. “I’m sorry, Skeeter.” The scout’s voice had filled with a compassion that would’ve touched him, had the pain not been so sharp and terrible.

“Dammit, Kit! That boy wasn’t even seventeen yet!” Skeeter jerked around, half-blind and not wanting Kit to notice. He was set to stride out of the monstrous little room, to get outside, to breathe down some fresh air, when he noticed Sid Kaederman. The detective had come up quietly behind them to peer past their shoulders. Even through Skeeter’s blinding grief, Sid Kaederman’s sudden deathly stillness brought Skeeter’s instincts to full, quivering alert. He’d seen that kind of lethal tension before, in one or two of Yesukai’s most deadly warriors, men who would’ve cheerfully slit a friend’s throat for looking crosswise in their direction. The look in Kaederman’s eyes set the tiny hairs along Skeeter’s nape starkly erect.

Kaederman was staring down at the bodies. And for one unguarded moment, Skeeter glimpsed a look of naked shock in his cold eyes. Skeeter followed Kaederman’s gaze and realized he wasn’t staring at the murdered down-time teenager, but at the other corpse, a man who’d been shot several times through the back, by the look of the wounds. Kaederman’s sudden stillness, the stunned disbelief in his eyes, set inner alarms ringing.