Magic Rises (19 page)

Blah-blah-blah. Please, tell me more about shapeshifters, Grandpa Hugh, because I just have no idea how they think. It’s not like I live with five hundred of them and end up sorting through their personal problems every Wednesday at the Pack court hearings.

“For a moment I thought you might be a real human being, but you proved me wrong. Thanks. It will make it so much easier to kill you.”

Hugh leaned forward. A strange light danced in his eyes. “Want to give it a shot?”

Anytime.
“Why, you want to show me what you’ve learned?”

“Ooo.” Hugh sucked the air in, narrowing his eyes. “Mean. I like mean.”

A strange low roar cascaded through the mountains, dying down to an odd note, almost like bleating if the goat making it were predatory and the size of a tiger.

“Damn it.” Hugh stood up on his throne. “I told them to stay the hell out of the ravine.”

I stood up. To the left the trees shook. Something galloped up the mountain slope straight for us.

“What is it?”

“Ochokochi. Big, vicious, carnivorous, long claws. They like to impale people with their chests.”

“They what?”

“They grab you and impale you on their chest. The shapeshifters spooked the herd. Stupid sonsabitches. I asked one thing—one damn thing—and they couldn’t do it right. The herd is heading for us. Normally I’d move out of their way.”

“But we have the horses.” Then I remembered—the path up to the meeting place was narrow and steep. We had seven horses, and getting them out and down the path in time to escape was impossible.

“Exactly. When the ochokochi go mad like this, they slaughter everything with a pulse.”

A dull thudding came from below, the sound of many feet stomping in unison. How many of them were there?

Hugh jumped off the throne to the ground. “They’re coming straight for us.”

I moved left, putting myself between the woods and the corral with the horses. The sound of thudding feet grew, like the roar of a distant waterfall. The horses neighed and paced in the enclosure, testing their tethers.

The trees shuddered.

“Don’t let them grab you.” Hugh grinned at me. “Ready?”

“No time like the present.” I unbuckled the spare saber at my waist, unsheathed it, and dropped the sheath on the grass.

The blackberry bushes at the edge of the clearing tore, and the woods spat a beast into the open. It stood about five feet tall, half-upright like a gorilla or a kangaroo, resting the full weight of its body on two massive hind legs. Long reddish fur reminiscent of chamois dripped from its flanks. Its front limbs, muscular and almost simian in shape, bore long black claws. Its head was goatlike, with a wide forehead and small eyes, but instead of the narrow muzzle, its face ended in powerful predatory jaws designed to shear rather than grind.

What the bloody hell was that thing?

The beast saw us and rocked back, opening its limbs as if for a hug. A sharp, hatchetlike ridge of bone protruded from its chest. Bits of dried crud clung to it, and they looked suspiciously like bloody shreds of someone’s flesh.

Go to the Black Sea, meet new people, see beautiful places, get killed by a mutant carnivorous kangaroo goat. One item off my bucket list.

I pulled Slayer from the back sheath. Hugh raised his eyebrows at the two swords but didn’t say anything.
That’s right. Hold any comments and questions till the end.

The creature opened its mouth, baring sharp teeth, and yowled. The terrible sound rolled through the clearing, neither roar nor grunt, but a deep bellow of a creature without power of speech driven by fear and bloodlust.

I swung my sabers, warming up my wrists. Hugh unsheathed his sword. It was a plain European long sword, with a thirty-five-and-a-half-inch blade, a simple cross-guard, and a leather-wrapped hilt. The hilt was long enough for one-handed or two-handed use. The beveled blade shone with a satin finish.

The bushes broke. More ochokochi burst into the open. The leader bellowed again.

Hugh laughed.

The monsters dropped to all fours and charged.

We stepped forward and swung at the same time. I moved left, dodging the charge, and sliced the beast’s shoulder. The creature screamed and swiped at me with its claws. I leaned back just enough to avoid it and spun the swords in a practiced butterfly pattern. The bottom blade caught the beast’s side; the top sliced at the side of its head. Blood sprayed. The ochokochi reared and crashed down, its legs jerking in violent spasms.

I spun my blades, surrounding myself with a wall of steel. One butterfly on top, one on the bottom. If they could bleed, they should feel pain. Here’s hoping they had enough brainpower to keep clear of the thing that hurt them.

A second beast rushed me. I cut. It bellowed in agony, twisted aside, sliced and hurting, and ran off into the woods. Banzai! I didn’t have to kill. I just had to hurt them enough to make them flee.

They came at me together, and I wove through the incoming rust-colored bodies, cutting and slashing. They bellowed and roared. I breathed in the aggression they exhaled and lost myself to slicing through muscle and ligaments. I’d done this hundreds of times in practice and in real fights, but no memory and no practice could compare to the pure exhilaration of knowing your life was on the line. One wrong move, one misstep, and they would trample me. I would die impaled or clawed to death. The fear stayed with me, a constant knowledge in the back of my mind, but it didn’t paralyze me, it just made everything sharper. I saw the ochokochi with crystal clarity, every strand of hair and every panicked and rage-maddened eye.

Hugh worked next to me. He moved with a smooth, sparse economy, the kind that can’t be learned in a dojo or in a mock fight. Hugh swung with an instinctual anticipation, a sixth sense of knowing where to land his strike and how to angle his blade for maximum impact, and when his sword touched flesh, the flesh tore. He cleaved bodies like they were butter, wasting no effort, moving without a pause, as if dancing to a rhythm only he heard. It was like watching my father. They called him Voron because death followed in his wake, the way it followed ravens in the old legends. If Voron was Death’s raven, Hugh was its scythe.

We moved in perfect unison. He tossed a body at me, I sliced it, drove one at him, and he finished it with a precise, brutal cut.

More ochokochi splashed against us like a furry wave.

Two beasts descended on me, pounding the ground in tandem, barely two feet of space between them. I had nowhere to go and I couldn’t stop both. I reversed the blades and stood.

They came at me, screaming. Twelve yards.

“Kate!” Hugh barked.

Ten. A moment too soon, and they would crush me. A moment too late and my life would be over.

Seven.

Five.

The breath from their mouths spilled over me.

Now. I dropped to my knees and slashed across their forelegs with both swords in a single cut.

Before they tumbled forward, the severed muscles and tendons failing under their weight, I pulled the swords to me and stood up. The two beasts passed on both side of me and crashed behind my back, crippled.

“Damn, that was beautiful!” Hugh shouted, pulling his blade from a shaggy body.

An ochokochi lunged at him, too fast for the sword strike. Hugh swung his left arm. The back of his fist hammered the creature’s skull. The ochokochi swayed and fell.

I had to avoid being punched by him at all costs.

There were no beasts within striking range. The wave of ochokochi had broken against us.

The remaining ochokochi fanned out, trying to flank me. I backed away until my spine touched Hugh’s. I had no idea how, but I had known with one hundred percent certainty that his back would be there to brace me.

“Getting tired?” Hugh asked.

“I can do this all day.”

The lead ochokochi bellowed. If they came at us all at once, we’d have a hell of a time protecting the horses.

Another roaring cry. The ochokochi turned as one and streamed in a rust-colored current to the right, through the bushes and trees away from us.

I exhaled.

“Looks like we dodged a bullet.” Hugh grinned.

I surveyed the clearing and the heaps of brown fur dotting it. “Do ochokochi count for the hunt?”

“No.”

“Damn it. There goes my chance for glory.”

“You’re out of luck,” he said.

I slumped forward, catching my breath, straightened, and pulled a cloth from my pocket. I had to clean my swords.

* * *

After the fight Hugh made no effort to talk. The sharing hour had passed, apparently, and we concentrated on getting the clearing back into shape.

At three o’clock Hugh pulled a horn out of his saddlebag and made a noise that would have made the dead sit up in their graves. Fifteen minutes later teams of shapeshifter hunters began trickling in. Curran and company were second on the scene after the Volkodavi. The brush rustled and the colossal gray lion pushed through it. The leonine lips stretched in a distinctly human grin. If lions could look smug, Curran did.

I raised my eyebrows. Carcasses of dead deer, tur, and goats were piled on Curran’s back. He shook, tossing them to the ground, the gray mane flying in the wind, and looked at me. And then at the pile of shaggy red bodies behind me. Hugh and I had dragged them all into a big heap on the edge of the clearing to make space and keep the horses from freaking out.

The lion shrank, and a man straightened in his place. “What the hell is this?”

“Hi, honey.” I waved at him from my perch on a rock and kept polishing Slayer with a little cloth.

Curran spun to Hugh. His voice was a snarl. “Did you do this?”

“I can only claim responsibility for half of the kills. The rest belong to your wife . . . fiancée?” Hugh turned to me. “You’re not married, right? What is the term?”

Oh, you bastard.

“Consort.” Barabas rose behind Curran. “The term is ‘Consort.’”

“How quaint.” Hugh winked at Curran. “No marriage, no division of property, and no strings attached. Well played, Lennart. Well played.”

Curran’s eyes went gold. “Stay out of my business.”

Hugh smiled. “Heaven forbid. Although you should know that if the hunt had a prize for the most elegant kill, she would’ve won it.” He turned away.

Curran looked at me. He’d never asked me to marry him. It didn’t come up. This fact hadn’t bothered me until Hugh rubbed our faces in it. Come to think of it, it still didn’t bother me.

I slid Slayer into the sheath on my back. “How did the hunt go?”

“Fine,” he said.

“Anybody hurt?”

“No.”

A lean gray wolf padded over and stopped next to Curran. Its body stretched and contorted, and Lorelei stood next to Curran. Nude again. Imagine that.

“It was a most glorious hunt,” she said. “Curran is amazing. I’ve never seen such power. It was . . .”

“I’m sure it was.” I waited for him to tell her to move. He didn’t. She was standing so close, their hands practically brushed. Neither of them wore clothes, and he didn’t tell her to move. He didn’t step away. A cold steady anger rose inside me and refused to dissipate. Nudity wasn’t a big deal to shapeshifters, but if a naked man stood that close to me, Curran would bite his head off.

I waited for him to react. Nope. Nothing.

“I wish you could’ve joined us,” Lorelei said.

I smiled at her.

Lorelei blinked and took a careful step back.

“I had my own fun right here.” I got up and stepped between them. Lorelei shied to the side, letting me pass. Curran made no move toward me. I checked his face. Blank. He was closed off. It felt like a door slammed shut in my face.

Say something. Say you love me. Do something, Curran.

Nothing. Argh.

Behind Curran, now-human Desandra put her hand in the small of her back, pushing her stomach out, and winced. Radomil was standing by her, saying something in a language I couldn’t understand. It must’ve been something funny, because she laughed. And then she subtly glanced to her left, where the Italians were sorting out their clothes. I glanced, too. Gerardo wasn’t looking her way. Her face fell.

My voice came out cold. “Your clothes are on that rock, Your Majesty. I folded them for you.”

“Thank you,” he said, his voice casual.

“Is something wrong?” I asked quietly.

“No.” A spark of frustration shone in his eyes and melted. There was my pissy lion. He was up to something. Somehow that didn’t make me feel any better.

* * *

The djigits sorted the game and tagged the hooves with different types of dye. We waited for the stragglers while the shapeshifters put on their clothes. The amount of game they had killed was staggering. Dozens of animals had lost their lives. I hoped they had ability to freeze the meat because thinking of all that game going to waste made me ill.

The team winner would have to be declared after the castle staff had a chance to weigh and sort the animals, but the prize catch was painfully obvious: a beautiful mature tur, at least two hundred thirty pounds, its horns like two curved moons. Hugh picked it out of our pile and the djigits made a big show of carrying it around.

“Will the hunter stand up and claim their prize?” Hugh boomed.

Aunt B stepped forward. Hugh bowed and presented her with the glass pitcher containing a plastic bag of panacea. Everyone applauded.

Aunt B smiled and passed the panacea to Andrea. “My gift to my grandchildren.”

Relief flashed on Andrea’s face. It was there for a mere blink, but I saw it. She hugged the pitcher for the tiniest second before handing it over to Raphael.

Clothes were put back on, horses were freed, and we began our descent to the castle. People around me seemed happier, calmer, satiated.

Curran walked in front of my horse. Lorelei must’ve sensed it wasn’t a good time to test my patience, and she had moved to talk to George behind us. Curran kept walking and I kept riding. Either something had happened on that hunt or he had hatched some sort of demented plan and was now following it.

We didn’t speak.

On my right Desandra chatted with Andrea about the hunt.