Wolf Hunted

by Kris Austen Radcliffe

  My house vanished. My garage, too, and Bloodyhood. Axlam’s car. I changed our angle to the world and we were in the woods, between trees I did not recognize, yet under the same blizzard-filled sky and among the same blowing snow.

  My deck—my house—was gone. The lake, too. No temperature changes. No real wind change, either. Just a move into the trees.

  The snow fell in sheets of blinding crystals and the wind howled as if he had moved us into the heart of the blizzard, and I was not near my home.

  I shook St. Martin. “What did you do?” There hadn’t been a burst of magic like when he stole the kids, or any sign that he’d moved us into a pocket land. My house might still be there. The trees could be an illusion.

  He snickered as he dangled from my hand.

  “Threatening Alfheim will fast-track you into a permanent, uncomfortable, elf-controlled existence,” I said.

  He gulped and slapped at my arm. The granite-hard shell around his fingers stung but he wasn’t nearly strong enough to do real damage. “Those little girls giggling on your deck looked tasty,” he croaked out. “My, grandma, what big ears you have.”

  He said those little girls on your deck as if he’d planned to take them, but hadn’t.

  Something was wrong—obviously the situation was wrong, but I was beginning to wonder if there was another unknown force at work here.

  “Your boss. I want a name.” He did not have a real genie on his side. He was too inept with his planning and his posturing. “I want locations of all spells meant to harm the wolves.” But then again, genies did like the incompetent. “And I want the children returned. Now.”

  He slapped at my wrist again, and tried to pull away his gun hand. “Put me down, you pathetic monster. Nobody loves you. Never have. Never will.”

  I gave him a good shake. “Your shell is keeping me from pressing into your skin.” I rolled my shoulder outward and used every muscle in my back and arm to crank his gun hand to the side.

  He shrieked.

  “Yet overpowering your bones is such a simple matter,” I said.

  “She killed my father!” he yelled. “Bitch needs to be taught her place!” No threats toward the children, only his predictable and pathetic daddy issues.

  I yanked him close so he’d feel my breath. “This stops now. Do you understand, insect?”

  “I’m going to catch the Sheriff’s girl,” he croaked out. “I’m going to catch that little elf and that puppy of hers. I’m going to put that murderer in a cage and I’m going to feed her those children one at a time. That’s what you all fear, isn’t it? That the true nature of the wolf will overtake the Alfheim Pack? And that the elves won’t be able to stop the resulting dismemberment?”

  He spit. It hit my cheek like it had already frozen.

  “That’s why my genie said to plan. That’s why he said to chip away at their mundane protections!” He swung his legs and tried to push me away with his feet.

  It didn’t work.

  “I’ll call those American immigration police!” he croaked out. “The ones who take babies without any dark magical help!”

  He was using every possible attack—magical and mundane. And if he really did work for a genie—or a genie worked for him—he literally had access to chaos.

  Chaos magic explained his erratic behavior. It explained the unpredictability and the ability to slam sideways into Alfheim like an eighteen-wheeler crossing a highway.

  “What’s your special town going to do when they show up just as the pack is changing to run the blizzard? What are you going to do when they find that bitch with blood in her mouth and the torn-apart bodies of Alfheim’s sweetest little ones?”

  All I needed to do was crack his shell. I could snap a few bones and render him unconscious.

  And pray his benefactor didn’t have other tentacles into Alfheim—which it might. St. Martin did not seem to understand that the kids were already gone, or that all of them had been taken, not just those closest to Axlam. That might have happened without him knowing.

  I swung him around and slammed his back into a tree hard enough to break his spine.

  He croaked out a laugh. “My genie made special arrangements for you, jotunn!” he yipped—and cowered down into his magical shell. He literally shrunk away into whatever connective space the magic controlled.

  I almost dropped him. Almost. But I had a grip on his aiming hand and control of his position and giving that up would give him the advantage—except his pulling back gave his shell room to work.

  And to turn inside out.

  Chapter 23

  Amber magic latched onto my face. Amber glue, or sap, or the vomit of a bug flipped around from where it surrounded St. Martin and snapped itself around my head like a bubblegum bubble popping.

  I gasped. Air moved into my lungs, but more slowly than it should. This wasn’t the oily low-demon-like rage magic my brother had used. This was barrier magic, the kind that keeps the mundane world at bay. St. Martin—no, his genie—had distilled it into a plastic bag he’d pulled over my head.

  I whipped St. Martin into the trees and clawed at the magic goo wrapped around my head. He vanished into the storm and hit a tree not too far away. The thud echoed through the hissing of the snow and ice. He groaned. I tried once again to inhale.

  The amber turned the grayness of the snow into a muddy brown, and the tree trunks to black. It amplified the roaring, both of my own blood in my ears and the blizzard’s winds, and what could have been a navigable woodland became a raging, watery cyclone.

  I got air. My exhalation vented below the magic and around the skin of my face and out around my ears.

  It had edges. I clawed at where the magic touched my hairline, looking for something to hook onto.

  But the amber magic didn’t so much have an end but a point at which it foamed—it would not touch my elven tattoos, but had filled in around the lines in a filigree that felt like a nest of glass under my fingers.

  What was on my face? I inhaled again, and felt air pull in through those little filigree holes—and I was pretty sure Yggdrasil and my Alfheim enclave markings had just unintentionally saved my life.

  St. Martin stumbled through the snow. He hunched as if the hit against the tree had done real injury, and swung his gun up once again. “My genie says you’re not a real jotunn, you liar.”

  He fired.

  A yellow and orange flash of light blossomed around the muzzle. A boom followed, one loud enough it would echo through the trees, even with the howling of the wind. And a bullet smashed into my shoulder.

  Flesh parted before its force, as did my clavicle. Bone fragments erupted into the non-parted flesh as the bullet, too, fragmented.

  Those fragments kept moving. Most embedded in my shoulder blade. One exited and struck my tricep.

  I’ve been shot before. I’d fought in the Civil War. I’d had a magic pike through my chest. But this was the first time my reconstituted body had to deal with a high-velocity, modern bullet.

  It wouldn’t kill me. I might bleed, and I might deal with the excruciating fire of the pain it caused, but I would not die.

  That is, if I could get enough air to not pass out.

  I dropped to my knees.

  St. Martin sneered once again, but then looked up as if he heard something my preoccupied body did not.

  He tipped his head as if listening to an earpiece, nodded once, and shot another bullet into the air.

  I gasped but did not fall. My blood dripped onto the swirling, pristine whiteness of the snowfall. And St. Martin grinned like the monster he was.

  The amber darkened, or my brain contracted what sensory information it would process as it prioritized surviving. I couldn’t tell which. I gasped again, and…

  Clockwork magic lifted St. Martin off the ground. Magic that filled the gray between the snowflakes with a blinding brilliance dimmed by both the amber suffocating me and the pain ricocheting through my shoulder.

  Dagrun, I thoug
ht.

  The elven magic contracted. Did St. Martin drop the gun? I couldn’t see. The amber stopped my attempt to inhale. Was I blacking out?

  “Gee…” I tried say. “Genie…”

  Dag’s armor flashed as she flipped St. Martin onto his back. He landed in the snow with a thud loud enough I heard it through the amber and the roar of my own blood.

  She punched a glowing fist straight into his face.

  I tried to gasp. I did. I wouldn’t die. I hadn’t yet, and magic bug glue on my face wouldn’t do it today. I’d survive…

  “Frank!” Other hands touched my neck along the edges of the amber. “He shot you.”

  Axlam’s glowing golden wolf eyes and extending canines appeared in what little I had left of my field of vision.

  She growled. “What kind of magic is this? Dagrun!” she yelled.

  “Sif…” I panted.

  Axlam wrapped her fingers around the sides of my face and yanked. “Dagrun sent her for the other elves.” The amber didn’t move. She yanked once more. The magic still did not move.

  Whatever Dag hit St. Martin with wasn’t enough, nor had he lost his gun. He rolled to the side and fired again.

  Axlam ducked. “I will string… his entrails… through the treeeees,” she shouted. Her fingers curled around the edges of the amber again, but this time, her now-claw-like nails dug into my skin.

  She snapped the murky amber and the chunk over half my mouth pulled off my skin as if she’d ripped off duct tape.

  I gasped.

  St. Martin fired again at Dag. She twisted with such speed she moved out of the way of the bullet and crossed the distance between them before he could compensate.

  Dag hit him with a straight-on jab to the nose.

  “Hold still,” Axlam said. “You bleed.” She ripped another piece of the amber off my face and fully uncovered my mouth. “Do not wiggle like prey, Frank Victorsson.”

  “He… said… he worked… for a… genie,” I gasped.

  Axlam whipped around. She was about to bound toward St. Martin, but I grabbed her arm.

  “He wants to feed the kids… to you, Axlam,” I panted. “After you… turn for the run.”

  She howled, but her more wolf-like traits receded. She was holding her wolf magic in check by sheer willpower.

  But some of that rage remained. She raked her nails over the largest piece of amber clinging to my face. If the magic hadn’t been there, she would have taken both my eyes.

  The amber cracked. She swiped again, and the cold, crystalline wind blasted against my now raw skin. The amber still clung to me, but I could see. I could breathe.

  I slowly stood. My head swam, and the whipping snow blurred the fight and Axlam, but I wouldn’t topple over.

  I bled and my shoulder had yet to stabilize or reset itself. “Stay behind me,” I said. “Stay out of his magic’s reach.” But I could still help.

  Axlam shoved me backward. “You bleed.”

  St. Martin rolled. Dagrun hit him with another bolt of elven magic, yet he continued to dance in and out of the increasingly thick storm. He continued to hold the gun.

  The blizzard hissed like a distant plane engine, or a nearby magical serpent. It was both mundane in its power and charged with duty as a veil—this blizzard, on this approaching evening, had taken on much more meaning than stay inside. A lot more.

  The gray of the storm was rapidly changing over to black. “How long before the moon forces you to change?” The sun, out there on the other side of the clouds, must have dropped to its low early-evening angle.

  Axlam fidgeted like a fighter readying for a bout. “Soon,” she said.

  A sigil sliced through the whiteout. St. Martin yelped.

  “Where are they?” I ripped the remaining large bits of the amber off my face. “That magic is still embedded in open areas of my tattoos.” Not that I could do anything about it now. I just hoped it didn’t burrow into my scalp.

  A rapidly-moving, body-shaped shadow flew toward us through the snow. Axlam responded before I did, and snatched the body around the neck just as I realized it was St. Martin.

  Even with Dagrun throwing him at us, he still managed to fire another shot.

  Axlam didn’t flinch or duck this time. She swung his body toward me. I caught his shoulder with my good arm, and flipped him over so he faced downward.

  Axlam and I slammed him into the frozen ground.

  His magic shell could only stop so much. His leg snapped, and likely a rib or two. He coughed. Maybe snickered.

  The hit hurt him, but it didn’t hurt his magic.

  The gloom and the snow blurred everything now, even Axlam, who was no more than four feet to my left. But I knew exactly what the glow coming off St. Martin’s carapace meant.

  He was powering up just like he had in the Admin Complex parking lot.

  I reached for Axlam. “He’s—”

  I reached, and touched blood. He’d shot her.

  She gasped and staggered toward me. And I knew why the bullet in my shoulder had fragmented the way it had. Why I could feel it embed itself in my bones.

  He’d shot me with silver.

  “Axlam!” I pulled her close and pressed my hand over the wound on her upper arm. The bullet had ripped through her blue jacket and grazed her upper arm. “It didn’t embed.” Maybe she’d be okay.

  “… change…” Axlam growled. She snapped. I ducked out of the way, but I knew if I didn’t hold her with us, she’d bolt into the trees silver-infested under a Samhain moon, frantic about her son, and without an elf to help her hold onto her humanity.

  I had to do something. “Concentrate on my voice!” I yelled. “Axlam!”

  St. Martin pushed himself up. A wave moved through the magic of his carapace, then shifted upward into whining brightness obvious through the blizzard.

  “Dagrun! We need to move!” I yelled. “He’s about to explode!”

  She manifested out of the blizzard as a goddess of ice and snow. Frost swirled around her armor-clad body. The cold had solidified as a Norse helmet over her head and face. And her elven hair, her purely magical prehensile ponytail, crackled with the power of the blizzard.

  Two hundred years in Alfheim and I had never seen the full glory of an elf in battle. I’d glimpsed it when Magnus pulled me out of Vampland. I’d seen it at a distance through a drunken haze the night Rose killed herself. But this was different.

  Dagrun, the Queen of the Alfheim elves, was, in this moment, the Warrior Queen of Midgard.

  She moved as if dancing with the storm in order to harness the torque of its winds. The blades of magic extending from both her fists pulled in the ice swirling in the air. A new sigil formed over St. Martin’s body.

  She slammed her foot into the back of St. Martin’s head.

  But even with all her speed, and the power of her magic, she didn’t see the shape of the blizzard’s maw above us. Axlam, growling from the pain of the silver and the coming moon, stood rigidly at my side.

  They were magicals. They probably felt the explosive bursting of St. Martin’s shell as it reached upward for the descending snout, but they didn’t see the teeth. They didn’t see the distant magic that was, somehow, manipulating the shadows between the ice and snow.

  The magic stored in St. Martin’s shell exploded. And that maw, that muzzle, snapped down onto the column, us, and St. Martin.

  And that muzzle pulled meat from the bone.

  Chapter 24

  I had to do something. Anything.

  The blast ignited the remaining magic amber embedded around my Yggdrasil tattoo. White hot fire raged across my scalp and down my neck, and merged with the remaining pain from my still-bleeding gunshot wound.

  I staggered backward, tripping over a branch or rock buried in the snow. I couldn’t break my fall. Not with my damaged arm. So I was about to drop, blasted off my feet by a carrion beetle’s exploding shell, and land in a way that might cause a snapped bone, or a concussion, or something worse
.

  Except I didn’t. I tripped. I lost my balance. But my back rammed against something glass-smooth and solid. Something invisible, yet tangible.

  Something amber-colored.

  The hole in my shoulder throbbed with a burning rawness. Random spikes of searing agony mirrored by the heat embedded in my skin. My vision wavered—or maybe the magic did. A pulse moved through the wall and for a microsecond—for less than a blink—I saw pews.

  Another searing blast of heat ignited the small spaces inside my Yggdrasil tattoo and formed a pattern of pain along my scalp, behind my ear, and down my neck. I felt the world tree in negative relief—it soothed as the world around it burned.

  I bellowed and punched the amber magic.

  The wall pulsed once more—as did the magic in my tattoo—except this time, the elven magicks on my person fought back.

  The World Tree would not be felled by a toad.

  Around us, outside the dome of amber magic, the blizzard rumbled like a distant tornado. Ice whipped through the air and into my nostrils even as the magic held it at bay. The wind stripped heat from my skin even as the dome stopped its push.

  But the World Tree cast its own protections. The pews returned as four rows of rough-hewn benches. Each looked to be its own tree, and just as much grown as it was shaped by tools. I stood off to the side with my back still against the “wall,” the front of this new space to my right and the entrance to my left.

  An altar grew at the front of the space, and like the door, the window behind it swirled with the icy pastels of the trapped blizzard.

  The walls of the dome fluttered, and though they obscured the raging snow outside, they did not conceal, and pulsed with figures carved from the same wood as the benches: Odin. Frigg. Thor. Baldur. Freya. Frey. Heimdall. Loki. Hel. The church of Yggdrasil reached upward toward Asgard, and…

  It reached outward to others. To spirits I did not recognize. Spirits of the land on which it stood. Other spirits that carried a sense of warm seas and sand, of trade and farming, of a rich world far from the Norse.