Mad Lizard Mambo (29 page)

The male roared a challenge at me, his mouth black with bubbling blood and acid. Long strands of torn tendon hung from his muzzle, a piece of gristle hanging from a lower fang. He crouched, gathering his low-sloping haunches beneath him, then lunged, his massive jaws cracked unnaturally wide open and right at Cari as she sent two expended shells flying from her shotgun’s barrel.

She wasn’t going to make it. She was too slow or the dog was too fast. Either way time counted it, the
ainmhi dubh
would be on her and Ryder before she could get another shot off. Ryder’s Glock was refusing to load, the magazine hitting something, or he was angling it wrong.

And I was too far to do anything other than scream at the
ainmhi dubh
to stop.

I don’t know where the words came from, but they were dark and bubbling, a tarry gush of unsidhe I couldn’t keep inside of me. It stole my breath away, sucking the air from my lungs, and I coughed, choking on the wrongness in my throat, but the dog jerked his body sideways and planted his feet, his sharp talons flaking the rocks beneath his broad paws.

And they all
paused
.

The smaller
ainmhi dubh
padded toward the male, snuffling up along his flanks, then lowered their heads, teeth bared at Ryder and Cari. The panic in me grew, and my breath hitched, hiccupping the words staggering off my tongue. The male lurched, his claws kneading at the loose gravel, but he held steady when the stream finally trailed off, and we were left standing in a very deadly silence.

“Oh
Dios
.” Cari crossed herself, then flicked her fingers at the male dog, warding him off. “What are they waiting for?”

Ryder
knew
. Ryder in his filthy sidhe way
knew
I’d grabbed at the dogs’ cut mental leashes and was holding on for dear life. He took in a short breath and caught my gaze, giving me a small smile when I tilted my head. I saw him, but for the life of me, I had no idea how I was going to let go without killing all of us in the process.

“Kai, focus on me. You’re doing fine. Think of what you told Malone and just breathe. I can help you get out of this… to let them go.”

Ryder’s Singlish cut through the unsidhe roiling in my head. I looked over at him, realizing my knees were aching from being slammed into the hard ground, and my wet skin itched where it was sticking to my shirt.

“You’re lost in this, yes? You don’t have to say anything. You just need to concentrate.”

Nodding was too much effort. So was swallowing, but my throat was dry, cracked from the torrent of sick I’d just thrown out. The air was too hot and everything was too close. I blinked, and my face tightened from the ripple of my muscles moving my eyelids.

“Hold them with you,” Ryder coaxed. “Please.”

“Trying, Your Lordship,” I whispered. “Just… please….”

I shut myself down, my focus pinned to the roiling crimson eyes fixed on my face. My blood still burned in me, moving with a rush of stink and acid. I’d become a crucible, cupping a foul smelt of pot metal forged by a man I’d hate until I exhaled my last breath.

Holding the dogs scared me, and I was choking on my growing fear, but I held firm, staring the dogs down, because I’d be damned if I’d give in to Tanic’s creatures. I’d come so damned far from the battered, mewling meat puppet he’d made me into, and I wasn’t going to let his monsters drag me back down into that existence.

“Cari, slowly edge over to where Kai is,” Ryder coaxed her. “We’re blocking the
ainmhi dubh
. We’ll want them to have a clear egress once Kai lets go.”

The fear in her eyes when she looked at me was possibly the worst moment of my life—beyond anything my father had done to my body and mind—because I saw the break in the trust she had in me, and I couldn’t hold my head up when she shuffled by.

I never knew my heart could break into so many little pieces.

“Listen to me, Kai.”

Ryder’s hand on my back kept me from falling apart. His breath on my cheek held me up, and his soft murmurs sanded down some of the sharp edges cutting me open from the inside.

“It will be fine.”

His whispers were ice on the heat of my thoughts, skittering across the molten surface of my panic. The dogs felt like they were stitched into me, tugging at the razor-sharp threads running through my brain. A sharp pain flared up behind my eye when the dog shook his head. His muzzle peeled back, and his long black-spotted teeth mocked me with a vicious smile. I
felt
him trying to shake loose of me, the serrated binding running through us sawing away at my brain—physically catching angry hooks into the squishy gray meat trapped inside of my skull. The flares were rapid-fire and searing, making me long for an ice pick to dig out the teeth chewing me up inside. I looked away from the
ainmhi dubh
and caught my reflection in the glassy black rock.

If Cari’s fearful glance broke me, then my father staring back at me in the bowels of Oighear Bhais was my undoing. Startled and angry, I jerked in shock, and then the shale chips under my feet gave way, sending me tumbling back into Ryder’s side.

My mind tore apart when the
ainmhi dubh
wrenched free, and I grabbed blindly at the sidhe lord, unable to do anything other than scream helplessly from the pain running through me. The smaller dogs howled, challenging me or the male, but I couldn’t tell which. Hell, I couldn’t tell where my skin ended and my pain began.

The male wrenched away, rolling his shoulders and twisting about. The line tugged again, sawing away another chunk of my brain, and the pain exploding behind my eyes was too bright, too strong to bear. Something wet dribbled out of my left nostril, and when I wiped at it, I drew my hand back to find it covered in blood.

Another tug and the inside of my skull
sloshed
.

“Can’t… hold them, Ryder.” Sucking in air, I tried to fight the
ainmhi dubh
for control. The two smaller dogs whined, trapped in the power struggle between me and the male. Something… slipped, and my spine rippled with agony as the male tore free.

They slid away from me, as black and viscous as the unsidhe I’d somehow found in the recesses of my brain. The dogs burbled, flowing over my bones, biting into my brittle joints as they surged out of my control. The bond between us unraveled, snapping back into me with a lashing wail, and I tasted blood, a river of it pouring down my gullet to sit in my bile-swollen belly. The world spun, dimming with each heave of my chest until all I could see in front of me were the black dogs’ vivid scarlet eyes. I fell… and kept falling… unable to find the ground but caught in a red-lit amber.

“Cari! Now!” Ryder seemed to be screaming inside of my head, his angle-chopped Singlish sliding around in the clotted sludge left in my skull.

Gunfire filled the chamber, echoing reports and gunpowder stings slamming into my too-tight skin and broken mind. Malone shouted something indistinct, and Cari’s shotgun carried on its booming replies to the fleeing
ainmhi dubh
snarls. The dogs were running, running hard and free. I wanted to go with them, be with them, but I was trapped as neatly as I’d been when stretched out over Tanic’s worktable for him to peel apart. It seemed like a forever before the crevice was thick with silence again, and I sagged in on myself, hung up over Ryder’s left elbow.

“Malone, grab that pack. I need to see to Kai.” Ryder shifted, holding me fast, his arms wrapped tight around my chest and his knee shoved up against the small of my back. I blinked, still unable to get the crimson out of my vision or the hurt out of my heart. “Cari, he’ll need some water—”

“No, she….” I couldn’t talk around my tongue. It felt swollen and stuck to the roof of my mouth. “Scared of me, Ryder. She’s
scared
of me.”

“I’m not scared of you,
guey
,” Cari whispered softly, a shaky warmth in the cold filling my bones. “But that doesn’t mean I’m not fricking terrified.”

“WELL, THERE
wasn’t much left of him, was there?”

To say Malone was stating the obvious would have been… stating the obvious. Of course there was nothing left of the Hunt Master. He’d been a smear on the rocks from the moment he lost control of his pack—a pack he’d been given by the bastard who’d made me. I’d always thought of Tanic as my father, but after the invasion of my mind by his foul lurchers, I was beginning to have my doubts about what exactly he’d used to impregnate my mother. I had more in common with Tanic’s Wild Hunt than I did the unsidhe remains oozing out from under Cari’s soles.

I was as weak as a wet kitten and about as grumpy, but I’d won the argument to keep pressing forward since we’d only twenty minutes of hard walking in the maze of fallen tunnels and sheltered crevices to get to Marshall’s proposed dig. Our advantages were we had a map, and Oscar Bennett was down one Hunt Master and the pack was in the wind. I didn’t know what else he had up his sleeve, but I wanted to get what we’d come for and get the hell out before he ambushed us again.

As for the dogs, we were far enough from any settlements for me not to worry about the damned things taking down a human, and with the nightmare herds stalking the southern road, the black dogs would probably die out before they became any kind of threat.

If not, then I’d come back for them.

And with any luck, I might even be able to kill them.

Ryder and I were holding up the rear while Malone and Cari tromped on ahead. It wasn’t the best of situations. In fact, I hated it, but common sense told me I’d need at least half an hour to catch my breath, and the ache in my brain apparently alarmed the sidhe lord to the point where he was willing to abandon his search. I, on the other hand, had no intention of being tucked into bed and spoon-fed chicken broth until I felt well enough to head back to San Diego.

I didn’t drive through all of that crap only to turn tail just because my maybe-father’s long, bony fingers reached into my brain and dug around looking for the apricot pit he’d left there.

“You can talk to me about it,” Ryder whispered behind me. “Nothing you say will go anywhere beyond us.”

I glanced back at him, my shoulder blades pulling tight from the tape and gauze he’d slapped on my weeping scars. He smiled, a gleam of benevolent understanding in the murky stillness, and I shook my head at his poking. The smile dimmed a bit, but a brush of his fingers on my side more than made up for the loss of warmth. My skin was taut and oversensitive, and Ryder sure as hell wasn’t helping, leaving fire trails wherever he touched.

“I’m….” I’d planned on lying. Fully intended to flash my teeth at the blond haunting my every step and lie my ass off about the discomfort knotting my intestines, but my brain had other ideas. “I… didn’t expect the dogs to…
fuck
. They
executed
him, Ryder. Just like they did that guy out in the ruins. Just to stall us. Who does that? Who kills their own people?”

“And you wonder why I think you would be a good lord for my Court.”

Ryder hooked his fingers into a belt loop on my torn jeans, slowing my step. Coming up against me, he was a brush of heat away, branding me with a long, simmering line down the left side of my body.

“For all your coarseness and threats to do me harm, I know you would never shoot me. Not like that. To defend us, yes, but not… you weren’t responsible for his death.”

“I was just going to clip him,” I explained softly. “I figured if we could break his concentration, the
ainmhi dubh
would sever their pack bond with him and run. Eating him? That wasn’t… I couldn’t stop them, Ryder.”

I didn’t know how to tell him I’d felt the black dogs creeping around in my mind, their hunger digging through my memories until I was sick from the images slamming into my thoughts. Apparently I didn’t have to, because he sighed heavily, then said, “You fought with the unsidhe for control of the pack, didn’t you?”

I debated denying it, but the truth was too raw to scrape over, so I nodded, grateful for the smoky gray light coming through the fissures above us because there were enough shadows to hide in. “I… I was so damned scared they were going to eat you and Cari. Ain’t going to lie. Scared down to my toenails and then they were just
in
me…. Pele’s breath, I just wanted them to
stop
. Nothing else.”

“Your eyes turned… red, like an
ainmhi dubh
,” Ryder confessed. “It was a… tell, of sorts.”

I snorted. “Great, now I’m becoming one of them.”

“Not necessarily,” he replied, stepping around a fall of rocks. “I’ve seen the same thing happen to my grandmother when she casts an intricate spell.”

“That’s about the same thing.” I made a face. “Sebac.
Ainmhi dubh
. Kind of hard to tell the difference if you’re comparing soulless predator to mindless eating machine.”

Ryder said something, but his words were lost beneath Malone’s excited shout. The passageway turned in, angling down into the dark. Cari swore, either at Malone or something ahead, and I limped forward, using the butt of my shotgun to steady myself on a boulder jutting into the passage.

The turn was sharp, a hard left hook heading us back toward the ruined city outside, and the ground grew uneven, veined with cracks wide enough to catch on my boot heel. We were out of the crevices scalloping the front of the mountain, and I turned on my link light to see where I was going. Ryder kept tight on me, his fingers still hooked into my belt loop as I carefully picked my way to Malone and Cari.

“He’s got to shut up,” I grumbled while Malone continued to make odd noises ahead of us. “Boy might as well send up a flare gun and tell Oscar where we’re—”

Another turn in the path and we worked around a house-sized boulder lodged against an unyielding brick and mortar wall. Sliding through the gap between the rock and another wall, we emerged into a massive chamber and the darkness fell away, a curtain of black pulled back with a quick shift in angles and light.