Alaskan Fury (46 page)

“You wear a symbol of God’s
favor,” Imelda commented.

“I do,” Zenaida said, pride rippling
through her words. 

“How did you come by it?” Imelda
said.

Zenaida smiled.  “I killed a
dragon-ancient that had lost its mind and was eating its way through the towns
along the Mediterranean.  I fought that battle for six days, and still have the
scars from its breath.”  She peeled a bit of shirt from her perfect stomach to
show a nasty pink-white scar that took up one half of her upper torso, then
dropped it again, obviously proud of her accomplishment.  “I was the first of
my kind to receive that honor in eleven thousand years, and I earned it before
my eighteenth birthday.”

You lying snake.  Only a
Fury’s blade will scar another Fury.
  Imelda nonetheless returned her
smile.  “So what did you do to lose it?”

The pepper-shaker dropped from
Zenaida’s hands.  After staring at the shaker for a moment, Zenaida lifted her
head to face her slowly, and there was Death in her eyes.  “I never lost it.”

“Oh?”  Imelda brought out the
wolf’s pendant from her pocket.  Instantly, Zenaida froze, watching the pendant
like one would watch a poisonous serpent.  Pointing to the sword flanges,
Imelda said, “This is upside down, and there’s too many feathers on the wings. 
Did you have to re-create it from memory?”  She tisked.  “That much
detail…must’ve been difficult.”  She tucked the pendant back into her shirt. 
“How long
did
you wait after they were all dead to make yourself one?  A
year?  Two?”

Zenaida cocked her head at Imelda
in that odd manner of a cat analyzing an ant.  “Do you have
any
idea who
I am?”

“Impostor, comes to mind,” Imelda
said, crossing her fingers over one knee.   She leaned back and said, “Or were
you thinking of something else?”

Zenaida’s fingers tightened on
the pepper shaker and it cracked in her palm, driving glass into her hand. 
“You think you know everything,” she sneered.  “You think you have it all
figured out.  You have no
clue
.”  She hurled the two halves of the
shaker across the room, where they exploded to fine dust against the bricks of
the cafeteria fireplace.  When she turned back to Imelda, her hands were
shaking, and there was fury in her stone-gray eyes.  “You have no idea what
they did to me.  They
deserved
what they got.  The
whole system
was corrupt.”

“So you fixed that,” Imelda said
conversationally, “by killing them all.”

For a long time, Zenaida simply
stared at her.  Then, slowly, she said, “You’re not going to live through the
night.”

“Oh?” Imelda said, though her
heart was already pounding, knowing that, should the woman decide to kill her
here, in the cafeteria, there was absolutely nothing she could do to stop it.

A slow smile spread over
Zenaida’s lips and she leaned forward.  Before Imelda could react, Zenaida’s
hand shot forward like a viper and caught her by the collar of her shirt.  With
all the easy power of a Third Lander, Zenaida dragged Imelda forward across the
table, so that they were eye-to-eye.  Imelda, unable to resist the woman’s
demonic strength, went stiff and pulled her head as far away as she was able,
her heart sending jolts of adrenaline through her shaking limbs with every
frantic beat.  As Zenaida effortlessly held her in place, she casually reached
into Imelda’s pocket and retrieved the wolf’s pendant.  Pulling it free and
fisting her hand around it, Zenaida smiled at her and said, “Just like your
Padre
didn’t live through the night, last night.” 

Imelda felt her entire body go
still and cold.  Her voice barely a whisper, she said, “You wouldn’t touch my
Padre.”

Zenaida laughed and released her. 
Yanking a napkin from the dispenser, she wrapped it around her wounded hand and
stood, tucking the wolf’s pendant into the narrow pocket of her skin-tight
jeans.  “Go check his cabin,” Zenaida said.  “Then come back and tell me that.”

Imelda forced herself to steel
her responses, not to give anything away.  “I will,” she growled.  “And if
you’ve so much as
touched
him…”

Zenaida laughed harder and turned
to go.

“So you’re turning down my
offer?” Imelda demanded.  “Threatening those I love, trying to
poison
me…  Those are offenses that will get you executed before a tribunal, Fury. 
Especially when they find out you’re not really an angel, and that you grow a
fucking beak when you fully change form.”

Zenaida’s back tensed.  Very
slowly, she turned back to look at Imelda with her cold gray stare.  The
dual-reality sensation was stronger, now, the sense of déjà vu almost making
her nauseous. 

“You’re just a sad, stupid mortal
who thinks she’s smarter than God,” Zenaida said.  She laughed.  “It doesn’t
matter how smart you are.  I’m still going to be alive ten thousand years after
you’re dead.”  Looking Imelda up and down in a sneer, she said, “And about your
bargain.  I don’t need her name.  I recognize the pendant.  She was one of the
worst.  I’m going to enjoy killing her mate slowly, before I make her eat his
heart.”  Dropping the bloody napkin back on the table, disdainfully showing
Imelda her now-healed hand, she turned to go. 

At her back, Imelda said, “It’s
not the wolf that fell.  It’s you.”

The patronizing half-smile that
Zenaida gave her over her shoulder made Imelda’s blood run cold.  “The monkey
gets a cookie.”  Then she strode off, leaving Imelda alone with the wad of
crimson that the Segunda Inquisidora had left on her table.

Looking at the napkin, Imelda
smiled.  Folding it neatly, she put it into her pocket.  Then she retrieved her
newspaper from the seat beside her and resumed reading.

Herr Drescher arrived a few
minutes later, lurching back and forth as he stumbled through the cafeteria, a
brown paper bottle-bag in his hand.  Imelda slapped the newspaper down and
frowned.  “For the love of—Drescher, I
told
you you were done for the
day!  You drunken imbecile.  Give me that!”  She stood up and yanked the paper
bag out of Drescher’s hands.  “Sit down. 
Eat
something.”  She gestured
to her plate of food.

“So sorry, Inquisitorin,”
Drescher slurred, slumping against her table.  “All I wanted was one more—”

“Just sit down.”  Imelda grabbed
him by the shoulder and shoved him into a chair across from her, then pushed
her plate at him.  “Eat that.  How long’s it been since you had a meal?”

“I can’t remember, Inquisitorin,”
the German slurred, picking up a fork.  Around a mouthful of mashed potatoes,
he said, “He’s not in the basement.”

Imelda’s heart suddenly
stuttered.  “You’re sure?”

“Looked three times,” Herr Drescher
said.  “Even asked the fucking wereverine.  In between telling me to go fuck
myself, he gave me the general idea that your Padre never saw a rack in the
basement.”

Imelda remembered the new
addition that Zenaida had commissioned, a temporary structure outside that
could be used to hold lesser-priority captives until room was cleared
downstairs.  Had she been using it to conduct
inquisitions
?

“Go check the temporary storage
shed,” she whispered.  “I will meet you on the tarmac in twenty minutes.”

Herr Drescher’s blue eyes
widened, but he nodded.  After a few more bites of mashed potatoes, he got up
and lurched from the table, crashed into a potted plant, then stumbled and
caught himself before he fell. 

“Just go to bed!” Imelda shouted
after him. 

She waited another two minutes
after the German had barreled through the double-doors leading back to the
barracks before she picked up the brown paper bag and followed him.  She took
the fastest route to her room, unlocked the door, and eased her way inside. 
The first thing she smelled was Jacquot’s cologne, but, upon flipping on the
light, discovered Jacquot was not in attendance.  Instead, as she skirted far
around the living-room to give her a good distance between herself and the
bathroom, she noticed a plastic bucket in the bathtub.

Her heart beginning to hammer, seeing
nothing else amiss in her room, Imelda reluctantly started into the bathroom.

The bucket was lidded, with a
note taped to the top.  Imelda shut the bathroom door and locked it, then determined
that no one was hiding behind the shower curtain before she gave the package
her full attention.  Written in a delicate, flowing script, it said, “A gift
from your Padre.”

Imelda considered the bucket for
several moments.  The dual-reality static fuzz was like a thousand shards of
glass behind her eyes, and it was difficult to see more than a small patch in
front of her. 

She knew she didn’t want to open
the bucket.  The last thing in the
world
that she wanted to do was open
the bucket.  Yet she also knew she had to.  She had to
know
.  Shakily,
she reached out, pried up the lid.

The lower third of the bucket was
filled with crimson.  Half-immersed inside, she saw a bloody heart.

Imelda dropped the lid back onto
the bucket and fell to her knees, a wash of revulsion rising from her gut.  A
moment later, she retched onto the tiles of her bathroom floor. 
She’s just
trying to scare me
, she thought frantically.  That could have been anyone’s
heart, anyone’s blood.  It wasn’t necessarily Padre Vega’s.

But, deep down, she knew it was.

For the first time in her life,
Imelda’s intellect fell entirely to the wayside at the sudden, insane rush of
fury that surged within her at Zenaida’s abomination.  Eyes fixed on the
bucket, she carefully got back to her feet.  Trembling, she stumbled back into
the living room, then dropped to her knees beside the trash bin.

The static buzz in her head had
become a throbbing, light-bending roar, but Imelda felt none of the usual pain,
so deep was her rage.  She could barely see the teabags, snack wrappers, and
toiletries as her fingers dug through three months’ worth of the discarded
remnants of a hasty, frantic, on-the-move life.  Her migraine was an agonizing
roar when her fingers found the stone and plucked it out.

She took the tiny gray river-rock
over to her faestone goblet, dropped it in, and carried it, shaking, to the
sink.  The gleaming violet stone shifted to a deep and luxurious crimson upon
contact with the water she flushed over the pebble.

Try this one on for size, concha.
 
Imelda brought the goblet to her lips, reveled in the glass-shattering pounding
in her head, and drank.

Immediately, the crystalline
shards in her head dulled as she found herself in two places at once.  The wolf
was sitting in a cave, watching the djinni regale two strange men of some
bardic tale…

Track it,
she willed the
magus. 
You’ll only get this one chance.

Then the spell was fading, and
Imelda would have had to consume more blood to strengthen the link.

When it was over, Imelda waited
for long minutes, wondering if the magus had caught her invasion.

Kaashifah was doing her best to
ignore the
third
disgusting ballad that the two First-Landers had coaxed
from the djinni that night, when suddenly her world shifted.  Like someone had
grabbed her by the heart, blood, and veins, and
tugged
, she felt
something arc out of her, into the night, and froze.

Immediately, she grasped that
thread of energy with her mind and started to follow it back to its source.

“—our lord laid his lyre upon her
lips—” the djinni sang.

“Quiet,” she snapped,
concentrating.  The magic was like a silken cord from her heart, traveling
south.  A very weak thread of seiðr.  She could have cut it, easily, but knew
that only someone possessing her blood could make such a connection, and none
of her friends had ever seen her bleed.

“—o’er the gentle thrusting of
her hips—”

“Shut
up
!” Kaashifah
shouted, the djinni’s moronic ramblings dangerously close to breaking her
concentration.

“Would you stop interrupting him,
cockroach?”

The thread, slender as it was,
threaded its way back over the Alaska Range, through Willow, then Wasilla, and
into a mountain-locked valley…

“—to which she tittered and said,
“Why sir—

She could
almost
see it. 
Something nestled in the valley.  The image was so blurry…  Already, the magic
was fading.  If she couldn’t establish a link…

“—I’ve never
seen
such
silver fur—”

“Would you shut
up
, you
stupid.
 
Pig-humping.
 
Djinni
!”

‘Aqrab went stiff and the cave
began thundering with, “You have reset your—”

“Manuke khara.  Beast.  Slave. 
Shakl il nahaan.  Ogre.  Wald il dhuroot.  Goat buggerer.  Girly-man. 
Bastard.  Toe-sucking son of incest.  I
don’t have time for this!
”

“You have—you have—you have
reset—you—you have reset—you have—you—you have reset—you have—you have reset
your seven days—
please let me breathe mon Dhi’b!
”

“Open your mouth again and I will
sing you a
song
,” Kaashifah snapped.  “I’m busy.  Shut up.  Just shut
up.  Someone is
scrying
on me.”

The djinni, who had fallen to his
hands and knees, gasping, nonetheless lifted his head to pant at her with a
frown.  The dragon, likewise, looked interested.  Thunderbird continued to pick
at the roast beef.

“I can almost see it,” Kaashifah
said, straining to make the link.  “It’s a…”  She followed the tiny thread to a
large, many-building structure with a helicopter sitting out front.  “It’s got
a helicopter…”  She frowned.  The land was so hard to
see
.  Almost as if
the whole area was covered with some sort of anti-scrying spells.

Deciding not to waste any more time
trying to identify the land, she dropped through the roof and followed the
thread into a living-room, where a woman was standing before a sink, a faestone
goblet in her hand.

“Who is it?” the dragon asked.

She scowled, remembering the
woman all-too-well.  She had to be
stupid
to give her this kind of
opportunity.  Wrenching her
own
cord across the space, using the woman’s
feeble spell of seiðr—ingested blood, from the looks of it—as an anchor, she
bound it tight around the woman’s skull, weaving it through her senses like a
spiderweb.  The woman gasped and fell to the tiled floor, the goblet shattering
upon the sink.

Satisfied, Kaashifah backed out. 
Now, with a more
solid
cord between them, her surroundings came into
view.  “It’s a group of buildings.  There are big cottonwood trees, and a
road…”  She squinted, trying to see the road signs, but finding nothing.  She
picked a direction and started following it.

Daintily inserting a piece of
roast beef into his mouth, Thunderbird said, “It’s three miles from the
highway, up Eklutna road, on the right hand side.  It’s shielded from the road
by a stand of cottonwood trees and is at the end of a long, winding gravel
driveway.  There’s a little green duck painted on the mailbox, left from the
previous owner, but otherwise it’s completely unmarked.  Rather slippery
driving in winter.  They’ve got a great big satellite dish out on the garage
roof that gets good cable.”

Kaashifah blinked, her
concentration lost.  Turning slowly to Thunderbird, she said, “What?”

He shrugged.  “I’m assuming it
gets good cable.  It’s big enough.”  He flicked a piece of gristle aside and
took another bite of roast thoughtfully.  “I wanted cable, but they told me I
live too far from their coverage area.”

The dragon frowned at him.  “Why didn’t
you move to town?”

Thunderbird gave him a flat
electric stare.

“Oh.”  The dragon chuckled.  “
That’s
right.  You are inept.”  Meaning that Thunderbird had never learned to
shape-change into something without the unearthly glow to his iris…probably because
he found it complimented his robes.  The dragon, meanwhile, had downformed to a
rakishly handsome human body…

…that was conspicuously one inch
taller than the Thunderbird.

Being gifted shapechangers, aside
from the stink of magic and the slight diamond to his irises, Kaashifah could
no more tell that a dragon was sitting against the wall than the djinni could
see through his illusions of earlier.

“How could you
possibly
know that?” Kaashifah demanded.

Thunderbird shrugged.  “It’s my
continent.”

“You mean, all this time, you
knew
exactly
what was hunting us, and where they
lived
?”
Kaashifah demanded.

The Athabascan man gave her an
irritated look.  “You never asked, wolf.”  He picked a piece of roast from his
teeth.  “Besides.  You’ve been
fleeing
them.  Why should you care where
they
live
?”

“I’m going to utterly destroy
them all,” Kaashifah said.  “Dragon.  If I wish you a djinni’s service, will
you remove my curse?”

Instantly, ‘Aqrab’s head came
up.  “Mon Dhi’b, that’s not—”

“It was
your
interference
that made it come to this,” Kaashifah said, without looking at him.  Still
focusing on the dragon, she said, “Will you remove my curse for three wishes?”

“I will twist them back on you, I
swear,” ‘Aqrab snarled.  “Promise
not
to remove her curse and I will
grant
you a wish.  A good one.”

“‘Aqrab, damn you!” Kaashifah
snapped, spinning on him to glare.

“I’ll take your bargain, djinni,”
the dragon said.  “One good wish is worth a hundred twisted ones.”

Immediately, the djinni began to
chant, wrapping his bargain in Law.

“‘Aqrab,
why
?” Kaashifah
cried as the room began to fill with violet light, caught between tears and
fury.  “Why do you betray me like this?”

‘Aqrab ignored her and dictated
his terms—terms which left absolutely no leeway in that the dragon would
never
remove the wolf from Kaashifah’s blood.  “Do you accept?”

The dragon licked his lips.  “I
accept.”

Immediately, the cave began to
rumble with Fourthlander magic as ‘Aqrab boomed, “As agreed, so decreed, the
bargain has been made.”

Plucking a grape from the pile,
Thunderbird laughed.  “This should be amusing.  What will the greedy little
hoarder wish for?  A few more piles of gold?  A cartload of gems?  A dozen
pretty maidens?  A
unicorn
?”  He popped a grape into his mouth and
leaned back to watch with a smug grin.  “This should be fun.”

“Djinni,” the dragon said
smoothly, “I wish Thunderbird was at the South Pole, locked in a massive cube
of ice.”

Thunderbird’s brow had just
started to form into a frown when the djinni winced, then stiffened and violet
energy swirled out from his body, wrapped the Thunderbird, and his electric
eyes widened only a moment before he vanished.

“Ah,” ‘Aqrab said, nervously
glancing at where Thunderbird had reclined only a moment ago, “I hope he
doesn’t take that personally.”

“Let him,” the dragon said.  He
moved to the recently-vacated blanket and began picking at the grapes that
Thunderbird had left behind.

Kaashifah was having trouble
seeing through her Fury.  “‘Aqrab,” she whispered, her entire body shaking in
rage, “I need to talk to you.  Outside.  Alone.”  She turned and started
towards the mouth of the cave without him.

‘Aqrab gave her a wary look as she
passed him, then reluctantly followed her out into the snow.  “You are still
convinced you must kill me, mon Dhi’b,” he said, as soon as they were alone.  “I
couldn’t take that chance.”

She ignored him and continued to
walk, plowing her way across the mountainside, floundering, so angry she didn’t
care, just kept going.  Kaashifah had a thousand curses she wanted to wish upon
his head, a thousand ways to scream herself hoarse for his betrayal, but in the
end, all she could do was simply drop to the snow, tears stinging her eyes. 
She had been
so close
.  She’d thought that she had finally, after two
thousand years without her wings, succeeded in regaining her Fury.  It had been
within her grasp, and this djinni, this
man
, had yanked it from her
reach.

“I trusted you,” she whimpered,
watching the djinni’s presence melt the snow at her feet.

“No you didn’t,” ‘Aqrab growled.  “Just
last night, you told me you were going to kill me.”

And she had, too.  Kaashifah
opened her mouth to deny it, then just pulled her knees to her chest and
dropped her face into her hands and let the tears come.  Why had she thought he
would allow her to regain her Fury, after so many centuries of twisting her
wishes on her?  What had possessed her to think of him as anything other than a
word-weaving djinni? 

Because…

Because something had changed.

“I trusted you,” was all she
could manage to say.  Why it hurt so badly that he had done what she should
have
expected
him to do from the beginning only left her in all the more
agony.  Her shoulders began to wrack around her as her lungs unwillingly sucked
in air to let it out again as long, low wails, the strange new pain in her
chest increasing as she considered how stupid she had been, how obvious that he
had simply been leading her along, weaving her around his little finger, luring
her into complacency.  It had been obvious…  But why did it
hurt
so much?

She felt ‘Aqrab drop to his knees
in front of her and reach out.  Putting both his big hands on her arms, he
asked softly, “Do you still?”  He sounded desperate, anxious.

Kaashifah laughed desperately and
closed her eyes with a shake of her head.

“What if I offer you a final
bargain?” he asked, reaching up to touch her chin, to lift it.  “What if I
remove the wolf?  Would you trust me then?”

Kaashifah hesitated, her body
still shuddering.  She lifted her gaze to meet his, wiping her face with a
trembling hand.  “What?”

“A bargain to remove the wolf,”
he said, his eyes tender…and nervous.  “Would you trust me then?”

There was only one thing he could
want from her, one thing she hadn’t given.  “You want me to bear your child.”

The djinni flinched.  “Ah, well,
for the bargain, I want you to swear to me that you will not take my head when
I remove the wolf, and I will make it so.”

At first, Kaashifah thought she
had heard wrong.  Then, when she rewound it in her mind, she blinked at him. 
“You just want me to swear…”  There were a
thousand
different ways to
kill someone aside from taking a head, and, as a twister of words, he knew
that.  Granted, there were a lot fewer ways with a djinni, but the fact that he
wasn’t specifying that she couldn’t ‘kill’ him was glaring.  Stunned, she
whispered, “You’re not weaving words.”

‘Aqrab gave her a timid smile. 
“Trust, Kaashifah.”

Barely able to form the sounds,
she managed, “You would give me back my Fury…if I swear not to take your head?”

“Shall I wrap it in Law?” ‘Aqrab
said.  He looked uneasy, but didn’t retract his offer. 

“Why?” Kaashifah demanded.  “Why
now?  Why after so
long
, ‘Aqrab?”

“I made a mistake,” he said
softly, watching her.  “I would correct it.”

For a long moment, Kaashifah
simply stared at him.  Was he truly offering what it sounded like?  The one
thing she had wanted for two thousand years, and it was to come from the hands
of a
djinni
?

Kaashifah tried to think of ways
he could be cheating her, ways that he was twisting the truth, but nothing
came.  Very softly, she said, “You speak truth?”

“I can do nothing but.”  ‘Aqrab
tentatively reached out, touched one of her hands, brought it into his warm
palm and caressed it.  His violet eyes fearful, he said, “You already have my
heart, little wolf.  I may as well learn to trust my conqueror, for the
alternative is…unspeakable for a djinni.”