Blood Red (9781101637890) (36 page)

“We must eat,”
the voice whined.

“Then eat deer, you rotten bastard,” she snarled back. “There's plenty of deer in these hills. Bears, too. That's no excuse for murdering hundreds of innocent people, and you very well know it.”

A really sickening thought was rearing its head in the back of her mind.
You have murdered my sons and my wives, he said . . . but said nothing about daughters. Oh . . . ugh . . .
Her gorge rose.
What if his daughters
are
his wives?

She almost threw up a little. That would certainly explain why they all looked . . . misshapen and sickly. Blood magic tended to magnify everything, not just what you were trying to do with it. You took enough risks of defects and sickness when you mated fathers and daughters, anyone who bred animals knew that. Add blood magic to the mix, especially if he was doing blood magic to ensure fertility. . . .

Bile rose in her throat. So did the determination to not let a single one of these monsters live,
especially
the leader. He must not be allowed to get away, or he would find a way to start this all over again. She got the coach gun in her hands, and made sure the pistols were at the ready.

“He has to be getting more of his . . . gah . . . followers in place,” Dominik whispered.

So he figured it out too, and can't bear to say “children.”

“The question is . . . how many, and where are they going to come from?” she replied.

She had just finished that sentence, when she got her answer.

“NOW children!”
howled the voice from the cave, and four of the shifters rushed from the cave straight at Rosa.

She got the first with the coach gun right as it cleared the mouth of the cave, for the entrance was narrow enough that only two could pass it at a time. She hit it in the head and shattered its skull, and dropped the coach gun at her feet as the body went down. The coach gun hadn't hit the ground before she had pulled both pistols and fired. The first pistol missed, the second hit the shifter's shoulder, and sent the shifter spinning into its sibling, knocking them both over into a tangle of limbs, and leaving her with only one to fight for now.

She had just enough time to throw up her left arm to keep it off her throat. It was small, no bigger than a real wolf, but that was big enough as it leapt for her. Its jaws closed on her arm as her right hand closed around the hilt of her dagger.

The jaws never clamped down far enough for the teeth to do more than bruise her flesh. As soon as it bit down, it realized it did
not
want what it had caught.

Between the cloth-of-silver and the wolfsbane oil, the shifter reacted as if it had gotten a mouth full of coals. It yelped in pain, spat her arm out, then frantically tried to leap away again as she slashed for its throat with her dagger.

She missed the throat, but got a good cut in on the shoulder. It yelped again, and scuttled back to the other two that were still standing.

Behind her, she could hear and feel Dominik fending off more shifters with his spear. She reached behind her for
his
pistol, blindly; got her hands on it, and pulled it out of the holster and fired it into the face of the unwounded shifter that finally untangled itself from the wounded one and rushed her. It went down and didn't move.

She got her other dagger into her left hand, and waited. The two shifters limped back and forth in front of her, warily; trying to work up the nerve to attack her, she suspected. They were both small. All four of the ones on her side were small. Females? Adolescents?

She heard the same sort of strangled yelp behind her as the shifter that had tried to bite her had uttered, and at the same time, Dominik was pushed back against her with a little grunt. That seemed to embolden the two facing her.

The both leapt for her at the same time. One went high, going for her throat, and one went low, for a leg. Evidently they weren't too bright. Or they thought the protection on her arm was a fluke.

She let the shifter have the leg, and rather than trying to save her throat, she grabbed the other shifter as it impacted her, driving
her
back against Dominik's back, and pulled it into a one-handed bear hug as it tried to bite her throat out and had the same reaction the other'd had to her arm. Suddenly realizing she had the upper hand, it squirmed and kicked at her with clawed hind-feet. She plunged her dagger into its belly, cutting viciously downward.

It screamed, and ripped itself away, trailing intestines. She slashed at the face of the one trying to somehow bite her leg without getting a mouth full of silver and wolfsbane. She managed to cut right across its eyes, blinding it.
It
screamed and shook its head wildly, backing away until it ran into the cliff-face.

The one she'd disemboweled had fallen over. It was still moving. Shifters were resilient. It was trying to push its guts back into its own body with its nose . . . then it began writhing and spasming—

She snatched up the coach gun from the ground, jammed a cartridge in, and shot the blinded one. She broke the breech, reloaded and turned to the one she had disemboweled. It had gone to half-form, and was using clawed hands to stuff its guts back in. If she gave it enough time—it
might
just heal, even though the wounds had been made with silver.

She didn't intend to give it enough time. She aimed carefully, and blew its back open.

Then she reloaded and turned to help Dominik.

He had three. Or rather, had had three. One was practically cut in half at his feet with the silver dagger lying on the ground beside it. One was impaled on the boar spear and was trying to claw its way past the guard to get to him.

The third was shaking its head and acting as if it was choking.

She shot the third one. At the same time, Dominik heaved the spear rapidly back and forth in a sawing motion, and the last shifter fell off it, spine cut.

They leaned together, panting. Now that it was over, Rosa felt as if she was going to drop to her knees and never stand up again. Her leg hurt. Her arm hurt. Her throat hurt. The shifters had not managed to mangle or crush what they'd bitten, but they had bruised her to the bone, and she figured Dominik was in the same shape.

And she was exhausted, so exhausted she was shaking.

They had been picking off the shifters for hours; that hadn't been so bad, really, it had been like killing birds chased toward you by beaters. But this—this had been a real fight, and the worst odds she had ever had in her life.
We did it. We actually lived through it . . .

And then there was one.

But even though her limbs felt as heavy as if they were made of stone, and just about as responsive, she managed to reload the coach gun, then the three pistols, and pass one of those to Dominik. Because there was still one more shifter in there.

The leader. The father of the clan.

Her guts roiled and revolted at the thought.

But she stood up straight, and faced the cave opening. Dominik turned and joined her, shoulder to shoulder.

She swallowed hard, twice, trying to get her throat to work. It
hurt.
It hurt to swallow, and it hurt to talk. It was a good thing the shifter hadn't bitten down any harder. “Come—” she said, hoarsely, and scarcely above a whisper. “Come—”

She shook her head. She couldn't get a word out. Dominik patted her back with the side of the pistol he was holding, and took over.

“Come out, monster!” he called, defiantly. “Come out and face us! We've killed your children! Don't you want our blood?”

A snarl split the air like the sound of tearing cloth.

“Don't you want your friend?” the creature bellowed, voice choking with rage. “Come in after me! If you are lucky, you will see him die before I rend you limb from limb!”

“Can the
zâne
hold him off?” she whispered.

He shook his head. “I think so . . . but I don't know. And anyway, even if they can, we can't let that creature escape. We have to go in there after him. If he gets away, he'll just go somewhere else, and breed himself a new pack.”

Dominik was merely echoing her earlier thoughts. They would have to go in after the “father,” the sorcerer who had started this all. They had no choice.

The shifter was not waiting for them in the entrance, but then, they hadn't expected him to be. Their mystically enhanced memory showed them that this cavern was more than just a simple cave, it was a cave complex.

From the entrance it broadened out into a fair sized room, one with three tunnel entrances at the back of it. There were a few thick piles of rags and bracken in here against the walls. There was no sign of the
zâne
or of Markos.

There was also no sign of the shifter.

The cave . . . stank. The smell was unbelievable in here, and she wondered how anything with a canine nose could bear it. Unwashed, filthy human; unwashed, filthy wolf. Rotting meat. Feces and urine—evidently when the weather was bad, they just picked a corner and relieved themselves in it. Smoke, from somewhere deeper in the cave. Blood. Old blood, and ominously, fresh blood. All of the stench concentrated by the cave's natural humidity.

Rosa looked to Dominik. “Right, left, or center?” she asked.

“We know he's going to try and kill Markos,” Dominik replied. “We need to get to Markos as soon as possible. You know he's the one who is going to find us, not the other way around.”

She concentrated on the images that the
vâlva ba˘ilor
had put in their minds. It took a moment to orient herself, but as soon as she had, it was all as clear as if it was her own memory. “Left,” she said instantly, and Dominik nodded. Now that she had all the images sorted out in her head, she knew exactly where Markos was. They would have to traverse the left-hand tunnel, past one of the places where the shifters slept and ate, past one little appendix cave (and she had no idea what they used
that
for), and take a right. Markos was in a second little finger cave, off the main cavern tunnels.

And there were dozens, literally dozens, of places where the chief shifter could ambush them.

On the other hand . . . we know that. And we know where those places are.

Dominik closed his eyes a moment, perhaps to settle the path in his head as she had, then opened them. “Let's go,” he said.

He took the lead; she let him. He had the crossbow ready and loaded, and had the good instinct or good training to keep it aimed where his gaze went. She had the coach gun; kept her eyes on what was behind them as well as what was to the side. The cave was as bright as if someone had illuminated it to their bespelled eyes, and there was no way that the shifter could know that.

But he had been killing for a long time. If he was the original shifter of this pack, he could have been murdering for decades. He had a lot of practice in dealing death.

So have I,
she thought grimly.

Often in caves, there was the sound of dripping water. There was no such sound here. Possibly it was a “dead” cave, one where the water source that had formed it had diverted or dried up, leaving behind formations that had turned brown and lifeless. The floor was littered with trash, mostly leaves and branches; piles of what looked like leaves, dead bracken, and rags had been heaped against the walls to make what looked like crude beds. So, was this where some of them had slept?

It was hard to tell, but in the image in Rosa's head, this cave was huge, and there was enough room for a couple of hundred of the creatures to have bedded down comfortably without having to sleep in the entrance-room.

Maybe this is where the ones supposed to be on guard slept.
That hadn't done them much good against the Old Man and the
iele.

But there were those three entrances ahead of them, and the shifter could emerge from any of them at any time. So they made their way, eyes darting in every possible direction, listening hard for the slightest noise, step by cautious step toward their goal. Rosa had a certain amount of practice in keeping her heart from racing with fear, but poor Dominik must be having trouble hearing over the noise of his pounding in his ears. They both tried their best to walk silently, but the trash on the floor made it difficult.

I don't know how the shifter could do any better, though.

Nothing leapt out at them once they reached the leftmost tunnel entrance and moved into it. Rosa kept her eyes behind, though, since there was absolutely no reason why the shifter couldn't have been hiding just inside one of the other two tunnels with the intention of coming at them from the rear.

At least the floor was clean here. But again, that worked as much in the shifter's favor as theirs. He
could
slip up on them from the rear, silently.

At least the tunnel was narrow enough here that there was no chance he could be waiting to leap out of hiding from the side.