Alaskan Fury (18 page)

When the first of her meal came
off of the fire, Kaashifah ripped into it with a ravenousness that she normally
tried to hide from the djinni.  Unfortunately, this time, the infernal beast
seemed perfectly content to sit and watch her from the wall of the cavern, and
she no longer had the ability to force him to leave, so she steeled herself and
ate in front of him.

At her first taste, the Third
Lander went into a frenzy, and she almost lost control.  It took all of her
concentration just to chew.  By the time she’d finished, the djinni was still
watching her thoughtfully from where he leaned against the wall, requesting
none of her meal, and having none offered.

“You should eat more often, mon
Dhi’b,” ‘Aqrab said, when she wiped the last of the juices from her face.  “It
strengthens the Third Lander’s hold when your body hungers.”

She stopped, mid-wipe, and
scowled at him.  “If this is an attempt to trick me into making another bargain
with you, ‘Aqrab, you may milk your camel’s—”  She caught herself with a
strangled tightening of her throat, then glared at him.

“‘Trick’ you, mon Dhi’b?” the djinni
asked, amusement flashing in his violet eyes.  “It was a mutually beneficial arrangement. 
I got that which I’ve craved for centuries, and you got a meal.  In fact, I
would be happy to make it again, tomorrow night.”

He…would?  Her heart gave a hopeful
thump before her suspicions squashed it.  She peered at him warily for some
time, trying to deduce his game.  “What kind of ‘benefit’ do you glean from
touching my hand, ‘Aqrab?” she asked finally.

The djinni smiled at her.  “The
comfort of companionship.”

For a long time, Kaashifah
thought he was joking.  Then, realizing he was serious, she was once again
stunned by the radically different culture of the Djinn, in comparison to her
own people.  A Fury had her sisters, but they didn’t need to
touch
each other. 
They each had their own apartments, their own swords.  They saw each other at
meals, if the temple they were staying at provided them at a regular time. 
Otherwise, they came and went, alone and unmolested.

The Djinn, on the other hand,
seemed absolutely
obsessed
with the need to touch each other.  The very
well-being of their psyches seemed to depend on it.  The vile, pitifully
carnal, pathetically vulnerable little beasts.

Yet, if letting the djinni fondle
her hand once a night would in turn provide her with the sustenance she needed
to make it to the dragons’ territory as something other than a starving,
emaciated skeleton, Kaashifah wasn’t about to argue with his weakness.

“We might be able to work a deal,
djinni,” she muttered.

Immediately, his eyes brightened
and he sat up straighter, opening his mouth.

“
Later
,” she snapped. 
“For now, I intend to rip some bullets from my skin, and I would appreciate it
if you would avert your—” she choked on the word ‘filthy’ and hastily scrambled
to find another word, recovering with, “—pretty eyes.  I would remove my
clothes, and like hells am I going to have you watching me as…”  She trailed
off, however, as her mouth fell open, realizing what she had said.

The djinni, too, seemed likewise
affected.  He had cocked his head at her like he was having trouble
comprehending.  Stumbling, uncertain, he said, “Did you just say my eyes were
pretty
,
mon Dhi’b?”

Staring at him, seeing the
multi-hued purple striations of his irises that she had always secretly thought
to be beautiful, she blurted the only thing she could.  “No.”

A slow grin twitched the djinni’s
mouth.  “How long have you thought they were pretty?”

Since I caught you on your
ass, stuffing yourself with dates at Tafilat.
  She felt her face flush
hot.  Instead of responding, however, she feigned interest in picking a piece
of meat from between her teeth.  “I really have no idea what you’re talking
about.”

Which only made the infuriating
whoreson’s grin widen.  “A long time, then.”  He tisked, his beautiful eyes
dancing.  “Dare I say, since a certain oasis?”

She found the offending chunk of
muscle and flicked it into the fire.

But the djinni was not finished. 
Grinning, he cocked his head at her and said, “You had me completely convinced
for three thousand years you found the color ‘repulsive’ and ‘unnatural.’ 
Which leads me to wonder…  What
other
parts of me do you find beautiful,
mon Dhi’b?”

Kaashifah choked in her horror. 
“Furies do
not
find men beautiful.”

But he was watching her much too
closely, having that all-too-sharp look of a serval watching a hare.  With
heart-stopping accuracy, he noted, “But
you
do.”

Yes, the dragons would
definitely
get their chance at his services.  Hackles raised, face burning, she got up and
moved to the opposite side of the dwelling, putting the fire between her and
the djinni.  Without another word, she began ripping bullets from her flesh,
focusing on the pain to distract herself from the horror of his thoughtful
perusal.  Then she rolled to face the wall and went to sleep, ignoring all of
‘Aqrab’s further attempts at conversation.

Imelda had Herr Drescher and the
rest of her air-team in the chopper and lifting off ten minutes after the winds
had died.  Her ground team had already set out from the lodge they’d been renting
near Skwentna and would meet them on the river.

“What makes you still think the
djinni’s in the area, Inquisitrice?” Jacquot asked, very careful to keep his
gloved
fingers fisted on his weapon, and not on the helicopter’s built-in safety
rungs.

Imelda wasn’t sure.  With the
wolf dead, there really wasn’t any reason for the djinni to stay in the First
Realm.  Yet her gut had always served her well in the past, and it was telling
her that the djinni was still within range.  She leaned forward and tapped her
Italian bodyguard on the shoulder.  “We need to stop at the wolf’s corpse
before we go upriver,” she told Giuseppe.  Something about what her Padre had
told her about angels was bothering her, and her instincts were telling her she
needed to revisit the scene of the vision.

The even-faced copilot gave a
slight nod and spoke into his headset.  Herr Drescher grunted and rattled off a
loud and lengthy bit of German, after which, Giuseppe turned back to her and
said, “Herr Drescher says he’ll do it, but you must stay near the helicopter,
in case the winds come again.” 

It irked Imelda that the pilot
had the audacity to
decide
whether or not to follow her orders, but she
held her tongue.  Inquisidora Zenaida had put this crew together with the
intention of seeing her fail, and already, Imelda had not only succeeded, but
excelled
. 
Her group—all twenty-two of them, including herself—had come to be known as Los
Pesces Nieves in the North American Order.  The Snow Fish, in part due to
Jacquot’s love of ambushing their prey from the water, and in part due to the
meaning of Imelda’s surname.

Her biggest success, so far, had
been the phoenix.  Her predecessor’s team had been completely annihilated to a
man, their bodies still unrecovered.  Probably why, of course, Zenaida had
given Imelda the task, after only three hours upon landing at the Anchorage
International Airport.  Imelda, unlike her predecessor, had spent six months
compiling data, collecting information, forming strategy.

Women, it had quickly become
clear, had been their weak point.  The wereverine, fool that he was, had a soft
spot for the female form.  And, after all of her planning, the strike had gone
down without a hitch—except for the fact that there had been an extra werewolf
and a djinni that had
not
been in her reports.  Survivors, it seemed, of
some kind of massacre that had taken place on the phoenix’s property that
spring.

Imelda was still trying to figure
that out.  Some sort of struggle over territory, she was sure.  The wolves had
been on a rampage, killing everything within a twenty-mile radius, but all of
it had ended on the phoenix’s doorstep…

…with silver bullets.

So much had troubled her about
the forty dead werewolves that, the day before she was scheduled to finally
take her team in to make the strike, she did not sleep at all.  She spent the
night staring at the ceiling, wondering how many of her team’s faces would be
there to greet her at breakfast the morning after the attack.

And yet it had gone down
completely without a flaw.  The djinni couldn’t even be counted as a flaw, not
really.  It was an unexpected boon, something she had been completely not
expecting.  She was still racking her brain trying to figure out what the
djinni was bound to.  It had to be an object of some sort.  Something of metal
or stone, that a magus could tie a binding spell to.  Wood would work, to a
degree, but it wouldn’t hold a djinni’s soul-cord for very long, and after a
few days, would simply disintegrate.

She wondered again if it had
somehow been the winged symbol that had held the djinni in the First Lands. 
She’d had it tested, but the technician had
assured
her that, while it
seemed to have been used for magic, many times in the past, it was currently
free of spells or ties.

The whole situation bothered
her.  Why would a djinni even be in the First Realm anymore, in the first
place?  After the Order’s historic Incursions into the Fourth Realm in the
early 1300s, very few Djinn survived, even in their homeland.  They now spent
their time as far from humanity as they could get, some even moving into a
rumored Sixth Realm in order to escape the Order.  It was a sign of their
rarity that Imelda hadn’t heard of the capture of a djinni since the final
years of the Incursion.

And yet one appeared now, in
Alaska?  Bound, in all appearances, to a wolf?  There
had
to be
something she was missing.

She sat in thought as the
helicopter sped northward, all but silent on its fae-powered rotors.  Upon
crossing over the mountain and into Willow, the craft set out cross-country,
towards the Yentna River.  One of the niceties of the fey-powered machine was
that it never ran out of fuel.  The two beings powering the rotors rode on
their backs in a box above the cargo bay of the craft, locked in perpetual
drain.  A fact that Imelda had quietly failed to pass on to Jacquot, once she
had learned of it.  She was pretty sure that the Frenchman would never have
gotten
inside
the helicopter, were he to know that it carried a feylord
and her mate.

The big gray river eventually
came into view, even in the snow.  Eventually, the helicopter slowed, followed
by an argument in the cockpit.  The German began gesticulating, pointing at the
ground, while Giuseppe used icy tones in reply. 

Frowning, she leaned forward. 
“What’s going on?” she asked of Giuseppe.

The quiet, deadly Italian was
giving the German a dangerous look.  “Herr Drescher says this is the place
where you killed the wolf.”

She frowned and looked down.  It
looked
like the creek where she’d found the corpse, as much as she had seen from the
darkness that night.  “It looks about right,” she said.  “Do you disagree?”

Tearing his eyes from the German,
Giuseppe said softly, “It is not the location I was disagreeing with,
Inquisidora, but rather, Herr Drescher’s use of invectives.  I will have to
spend a few more hours in penance, to make up for his…extra…sins.”

Imelda raised a brow, then
decided she didn’t want to know.  To Drescher, she said, “Mind your language
and take us down.”

Herr Drescher laughed.  “As you
command, Inquisitorin.”  And a moment later, the helicopter was settling its
skids on an open stretch of snow-spackled beach, precisely inside the divots
they’d left the last time they’d visited.

As soon as the skids touched
land, Patricia O’Malley and Seamus Brennan jumped to either side of the craft,
guns at ready while Ian Lanport and Angus Ross alighted beside them, scanning
the area with infrared goggles.  Once they were in place, Imelda stepped from
the interior, followed by Jacquot and three of his crew, all of whom were
wearing drysuits and breathing apparatuses.

Though an inch of snow had fallen
and the scene had looked utterly different by flashlight, Imelda instinctively
strode through the forest to the place where she’d received the vision.  More
trees had fallen, the winds looking as if they had gotten increasingly violent
after their departure, leaving almost a sort of clearing where they had left
the body. She froze when she saw the corpse missing, the bits of bloody moss
tossed aside, half-buried in snow.

“That,” Jacquot said softly,
coming up to stand beside her, “is not what I expected to see, Inquisitre.”

Since when did djinni carry
around
corpses
?  Imelda stood there a long moment, considering.  Then,
suddenly, everything locked into place for her, and their recent jaunt through
the woods suddenly made perfect sense.  “She was its
lover
.”

“Les
démons de
flamme are known for their ardeur,” the Frenchman muttered.

“
That’s
why
it was haunting this realm,” Imelda snorted.  “It was with a woman.”  How could
she have not seen that before?  She shook her head and rubbed her temple. 
She’d been studying
war
for too long.  She’d forgotten that there was a
softer side to life, even in the twisted hearts of demons.

Unfortunately,
with its lover dead and her bones left—stupidly, now that she thought about
it—for it to take home with it, the djinni had no more reason to appear in the
First Realm.  She would have to return to Zenaida and report the mission a
failure, as the djinni had certainly taken the wolf’s body back to the
firelands with him.  If Zenaida argued with her, Imelda would simply tell the
woman where she could shove her attitude, which was squarely up her—

Suddenly, on her
earpiece, Giuseppe said, “
Inquisitrice, the second air-team has a heat
signature up ahead.”

Imelda frowned and turned,
motioning for Jacquot to follow her.  “What kind of heat signature?” she asked,
activating the radio at her throat.

“Looks like a plume of smoke,
issuing from a hill.”

Jogging back towards the chopper,
she said, “Don’t engage until we know what we’re dealing with.  We need to make
sure it’s not a camper or a last-minute boater.”

“The smoke is issuing from
inside
the hill, Inquisidora.”

Imelda glanced at Jacquot, who
frowned.  “Public land or private?”  There
were
, after all, plenty of
hermits who moved to the Alaskan Bush to build themselves little underground
cabins and disappear from the world.

“State land,” Giuseppe, after a
pause.  “Ortega says there’s no private cabins for miles.  Well off the river
or its tributaries.  Whatever it is, it wanted to be left alone.”

Imelda’s heart began to pound. 
“Sounds like another one.  Stay out of earshot.  I want the entire team in
position before we strike.  Have any idea what it is we’re dealing with? 
Mudrunners?  Fey?” she asked, breaking from the trees and jumping into the
cabin of the helicopter.  Once Jacquot and his team were back aboard and the
four guard had returned to their seats, Jacquot tapped the copilot’s shoulder
in a signal to go.

“We’re not sure.  The hill is
steeped in magic, but scans say most of it is natural.  Taken from a ley-line.”

Imelda grimaced.  “Fey.”  She
glanced at Jacquot.  “Iron.”

Jacquot nodded and had his crew
reload accordingly.  Then they were lifting out of the creek clearing, skimming
the trees as they raced north and east.