Blood Red (9781101637890) (33 page)

She didn't run, but only because she saw Petrescu and Dominik astride a pair of exceptionally handsome horses, both bays with black manes and tails, coming toward her.

When they saw her, they urged their horses into a canter and pulled up next to her. Petrescu's eyes boggled, but he said nothing about her attire. He dismounted, and took some of her burdens from her, stowing oats and water bottles and bags in the saddlebags.

“Dominik,” she said, sternly. “You need to dismount too. Put these on.”

He didn't argue. She handed Dominik the leather garments and the weapons she had brought for him, one by one. He checked the pistol for being loaded, and strapped on all of the leather right there in the street.

“Now sign and address these,” she ordered, handing him the two letters. “One to your parents, one to Markos'.” He looked them over soberly, took the lead pencil she handed him and obeyed, sealing them with the gummed seal she had left inside the envelopes.

She gave all four letters to Petrescu. “If we are not back within three days, put these in the post,” she told him.

Petrescu's moustache quivered, but he took them and tucked them inside his vest. “I will go and pray to the Virgin and her Son that I may burn them tomorrow,” the old man said, fervently.

Dominik nodded, soberly. Then he distributed his weapons around himself and remounted. She was very glad that she'd taken the time to pack Hans' extra leathers along. She had hesitated for a moment at the time, but now she was glad she had left the weapons chest intact.

Petrescu offered her his cupped hands. As weighed down as she was with weapons, this time she accepted the help with no second thoughts about it making her look weak.

“Go,” was all Petrescu said. “Come back safe. God and the Virgin guard you.”

Wordlessly, they turned the horses' heads and cantered out of the village. She would have
liked
to gallop, but they needed to save the horses. They wouldn't gain anything by driving their mounts to exhaustion, then being forced to dismount and walk them the rest of the way.

They rode in silence. She didn't know what Dominik was thinking, but
she
was trying to figure out ways of tracking Markos down once they got close to the spot where he was, presumably, under siege—or being held captive. She hoped it was captive. Unless a miracle happened, and he was fighting from a protected spot, they would never get there in time to save him if he was under siege.

Or better still, let him be hiding somewhere, nursing his wounds and healing.

She unfolded the map and checked the little hard button of sand. It was still the same color. So at least things hadn't gotten worse for him.

If he's aboveground, I can borrow a bird's eyes to look for him.
A raven would be best. She could bargain with one of those; they were intelligent enough to understand the concept. And they loved dried meat.

But if he was underground? Because if, for some reason, he had taken to a cave—maybe to rest from an attack—how would she and Dominik ever find him?

Are there dwarves here? Gnomes? Surely there is some cave-dwelling Elemental I can call on . . .

The horses were magnificent, and if she hadn't been fretting herself to bits, she would have loved the ride; they had a canter that absolutely ate the miles. Soon the village was completely out of sight in the distance and they were long past the spot where the
vârcolac
had taken the dead gypsy. She consulted the map, and, now that it had been imbued with magical power, she persuaded it to actually reflect their surroundings, as well as giving their own location as two little dots moving across the parchment. It wasn't that hard, this was a little thing practically everyone in the Bruderschaft knew how to do, and it didn't take but a thought.
Be as we see. . . .

The parchment populated itself with pale grey mounds for hills and mountains, and little green spikes for trees. When that was done, it made two dots, one red, one black, for her and Dominik. She saw that they were about halfway there, and put it safely back inside her vest.

About ten miles; another ten to go. A bit more than half an hour.
It seemed that they had been riding for an age, and that they would never get there in time. Her insides knotted up. If they weren't in time. . . .

She glanced over at Dominik, who paced her stride for stride, grim-faced. He looked over and caught her eye.

It was hard to communicate when pounding across the hills, and neither of them, she suspected, wanted to shout. But he managed to get his face into an expression of inquiry that was pretty easy to read.
Do you have any idea what we are facing? Any plans?

She shrugged. He nodded.

They both turned their attention to getting as much out of their mounts as they could without exhausting them.

Finally they found their path taking them into deep woods, among hills almost tall enough to qualify as mountains. They followed streambeds and game trails, whenever they found something going more or less in the direction they needed. It was easier to follow the streambeds than the game trails, but it was rough going either way. They
had
to slow now, but the map was no longer nearly as much help, since they were practically on top of the sand-dot.

And that was when she had a brainstorm, and reined her horse in at a slightly clearer spot in the woods. Dominik immediately did the same. His horse blew out its breath in a snort, impatiently.

“What—?” Dominik asked, in a harsh whisper. She held up her hand, then pulled off her right glove with her teeth, and gently detached the sand-dot from the map. Leaning forward, she carefully transferred it to the center of her horse's browband and made it fuse there with a little magic. Keeping her fingers on it, she concentrated, willing power and intention not only into the bit of Markos-infused sand but into the horse's mind as well.
Follow, my four-legged friend. Follow where that leads.
She tickled the part of her magic that allowed her to get inside the horse's mind, and commune with him without words. She sensed he understood, and withdrew a little.

Around her the forest was—itself. There seemed to be nothing whatsoever sinister lurking within it. If she had not known better, she would never have guessed this was a place where Markos could be in danger.

Maybe whatever it is is very, very good at hiding.

She patted the horse's neck, trying to communicate her anxiety for a herd-mate without frightening him. Then she slacked the reins, and gently nudged the horse with her heels.

He threw up his head, a little startled for a moment, then, tentatively began to move through the trees, forsaking the game trail altogether. Dominik followed right at her horse's tail. She figured he knew enough about magic to have understood what she was doing when he saw it, and didn't want to break the silence with voices. Human voices had a nasty tendency to carry quite far in the forest.

One great advantage of being Elemental Masters in a situation like this was that wildlife tended not to call the alarm on their approach. An Elemental Master—especially an Earth Master—could move through a forest and attract less attention from wild things than a large predator, like a bear. And since their horses were not much bigger than deer, the soft sound of their hooves on the ground was not likely to give them away. Unless this peril had a nose keener than anything else in the forest, or was using birds to stand guard, it was unlikely they would give themselves away.

She linked herself to the little dot of sand as well, allowing herself to feel the “tug” as it tried to reach Markos. If the horse needed a little extra guidance, she would be able to give it. She kept the reins slack, and her hands light on them, for this fellow had shown himself to have a sensitive mouth.

But this horse was as clever and willing as their cart horse had been dull and recalcitrant. Now that he “understood” what was wanted, he was completely attentive to the signals to his mind, and stepped carefully among the undergrowth to find the easiest path to get where the sand was taking him.

She kept her eyes half-closed, trying to be as sensitive to the forest around her as she could, looking and “feeling” for trouble—was there any chance, any chance at all, that whatever Markos had encountered would have been careless enough to leave traces of itself?

Oh, may it be so,
she prayed fervently.

And then, as if her prayer had been answered, she saw it.

Unmistakable, and just joining their path ahead, barely visible through the trees. She would have seen it, regardless, once they had gone a little farther, but since she was looking hard for it, the signs screamed at her with their wrongness. She reined the horse in on pure reaction, her heart in her mouth.

Energy trails, like dried blood. The visible traces of
vârcolac,
shifters, users of blood magic. Not one. Not three or four. This was . . . a lot. Weaving in and out around each other, all going in the same direction. A dozen, maybe more.

Dominik pulled up beside her, and when she glanced at him, she saw his eyes were wide with shock. He looked over at her.

“We need to rethink this,” she whispered. She had not anticipated there might be
this
much opposition. She had never heard of that many shifters working together, like a real wolf pack.

Not ever.

This was unprecedented.

“Whatever we were thinking of doing,” she continued, her mouth dry, “Is clearly out of the question. We need some really original plans.”

Wordlessly, he nodded.

Rosa and Dominik lay side by side above a crack in the hillside. They were belly-down on sparse grass over a scant layer of soil, which in turn topped granite. Sun shining down on them seemed to give no heat, at least not to Rosa. She suppressed shivers at the sheer level of dark magic she could sense beneath them. A thin stream of somewhat noisome smoke barely wafted out of the crack in the rock. That crack served as the “chimney” to a cave somewhere far below. And in that cave was Markos.

That was what the sand-dot told them; the energy traces of the shifters told them that there were . . . a lot of them. It was like a murky, polluted cesspit down there.

There were so many of the shifters that, near the entrance of the cave, their trails all got muddled into one solid wash of horrid, sickening power, and all that Rosa knew for certain was that there were far more than a dozen.

Another problem was that there was no way to tease out individual trails without actually having something belonging to the shifter. So there was no way of picking them out individually to count them, either.

And there was the problem of traffic in and out of the cave. Energy trails faded after about a day, but who knew how many times the shifters had entered and left the cave during that time? All she could tell for certain was that there were far more of them than she and Dominik could handle with a straightforward attack.

By the smell coming up from that chimney-crack . . . this was their home den, the place from which they staged all their attacks. And they had been living there for a very long time. The stink of unwashed bodies, human and lupine, was enough to gag a goat. It was flavored with the smoke, hints of old blood and a touch of rotting meat. She wondered how they could
stand
it. Wolves had incredibly sensitive noses.

But maybe, since it was
their
stink, they liked it.

This was definitely where Markos was being held, and they knew, now, that he must be being held as a prisoner. There was no way a pack of shifters like this would have allowed him to join them, no matter how cleverly he tried. In fact, that might be how they had taken Markos prisoner in the first place.

She and Dominik couldn't tell exactly where Markos
was
in there, and all they knew for certain was that he wasn't dead yet. She felt her gut clenching, and forced back tears. To be so close to him, and not be able to think of a way to rescue him! This would need a full Hunt, and he would be dead long, long before she could bring a full Hunt here. Never had she felt more helpless—

Well . . . not quite never. The last time she had felt this helpless, she had been trapped in the pantry, with a shifter clawing through the door. . . .

. . . shifter, clawing through the door. All alone. Desperate. And reaching out, fueled purely by that desperation . . .

Wait . . .

It wasn't so much an
idea
as a . . . feeling.

Could I?
Should
I, that's more to the point.

What choice do we have?

“Let's get back to the horses,” she whispered. She wiggled backward from the crack until she was well away, then got carefully to her feet and stole quietly through the forest. Years and years of practice, plus her soft-soled boots, made her so quiet that she didn't even snap a twig. Dominik was a little more clumsy; despite his best effort, he kept stepping on branches, and rustling leaves—but he was smart enough to make his movements slow and deliberate, so that they sounded rather like a bear shoving his way through the brush, and not like a human at all.