Wild Card

by Mark Henwick

  I dived forward at the twisting forms. Alex sensed me. He slowed, inviting attack. Noble took the bait. His teeth sank into Alex and for a fraction of a second his body was still and his back was to me. I lunged and closed my jaws around his neck.

  It was too early for that fleeting sense of victory I felt. Noble’s neck was massively muscled and his whole body reacted to the danger, whipping me around as he tried to dislodge me or get a bite on a limb.

  The good part was he had to let go of Alex to do that. Alex came straight back in, missing the throat, but getting his teeth into Noble’s face.

  Noble outweighed either of us, but not both together. He had to try and end this quickly. He was still more powerful than we were, and he ignored me for a moment to concentrate on slamming Alex against the ground like a rag doll. Alex rolled away, ripping a huge section of Noble’s skin and fur off the side of his face as he did.

  I just bit harder. There was blood leaking over my muzzle and into my mouth now, and nothing he could do that would make me let go. Other than die.

  Noble tried to lift and twist to get his jaws on me.

  And the Naga that came over the lip of the trail fired twice.

  The rounds were soft-nosed. They went through Noble, deforming as they struck, spreading out and tearing an ever-increasing hole through his abdomen, breaking through his back and punching me in the belly. The metal was so spread out it didn’t pierce my skin, but it felt like a horse had just kicked me.

  My jaws spasmed and my head jerked.

  I heard Alex’s howl and another shot.

  I felt the break. It was such a subtle thing, a click rather than a crack, as my teeth bore down on Noble’s spinal column and suddenly severed it.

  The effect was immediate. He lost control of that huge body.

  I sensed Noble’s mind reaching out with disbelief. The feeling of inhuman nothingness crumbled. Hate and anger poured out like a ruptured damn. Then fear; a massive tide of cold fear sweeping up through his mind as his vision darkened.

  I felt the presence of many, but it was just two faces I saw: Melissa and Barbara Green. I wrenched my jaws in the opposite direction, satisfied as the flesh tore. And then I let go, scrabbling to get free from the hulk of his twitching body.

  I howled.

  A marker. No exultation. No triumph. A crushing sorrow, for all his victims.

  It was done, he was dead, at last.

  Alex’s wolf joined me, stood over the body of the Naga.

  But Alex was wounded. Blood was running down his flanks, wounds from Noble’s teeth and a bullet.

  Change. Damn it. Change now!

  The world wobbled. I slumped forward, human again, clumsy with arms, legs going in the wrong direction.

  “Alex,” I croaked as I swayed upright, “change.”

  He did, and it looked worse on his human form. He knelt exhausted in the packed and bloodied snow.

  I spat and wiped the gore from our faces.

  “It’s all right,” he mumbled.

  “I’ll tell you when it’s all right,” I replied, and gore or not, I kissed him.

  The strongbox heaved, but it remained closed.

  The sensations of eukori distracted me, but I concentrated on sensing his body, feeling the injuries. Nothing life-threatening, and I felt as if I was going to float away in relief. There was a lot of damage though. Ribs broken, muscles torn, bleeding inside.

  I couldn’t fix it all. The bleeding I could stop. I didn’t have Bian’s abilities, but instinct guided me and veins began to close and heal. I could do nothing for the ribs; they’d have to heal by themselves and until then, they’d be painful. The muscles were somewhere in between—healing, but slowly.

  After ten minutes I rocked back onto my heels. We were both shivering.

  “Change back,” I suggested.

  He shook his head. “Not a good idea when you’re injured. It takes a lot out of you. More chance to open something that’s partway healed.”

  “Then we’re going to have to borrow clothes for you.”

  Noble’s coveralls were still there and the Naga’s snow parka and boots completed a strange ensemble.

  While he was dressing, I trotted the short way down the trail where my clothes and backpack had been abandoned.

  By the time I got back, Alex was listening to the Naga’s comms system and frowning.

  “It’s chaos,” he said. “I think they had some helicopters due in, but they’ve been grounded. They still have people on the mountain, but no command structure.”

  “I’ve got to get down and help Gray and Ursula. You can’t help me there in your state.”

  I pulled my gear from the backpack and continued dressing while I spoke. We moved to the back of the burning cabin, the chewed-off part of the mountain stretching down below us, full of rocks and edges.

  “I’ll shift Noble’s body down on the skimobile somehow,” he said. “We can’t leave it up here.”

  “The pack could always come up and get it.”

  He nodded, but I could see he was going to be stubborn on this.

  “We good?” he asked tentatively.

  Are we good that I’m alpha on four legs, he meant. It was freaky how it flipped with our forms, but I guess normal wasn’t ever going to apply to us.

  “We’re better than good.” I zipped up and hugged him close. “You saved me.”

  He tried to quiet me, but I went on.

  “I couldn’t have lived with myself if I’d killed Emily.”

  It wasn’t just that. I couldn’t put it into words yet. It felt right. He would look after me as a wolf. With Diana’s help I’d fix my Athanate. It worked. It gave me back the hope that’d leaked out over the last few days.

  I wanted nothing more than to feel his arms around me, but the sun was touching the mountaintops. What I had to do was getting more dangerous all the time.

  “What we have works, Alex. I can live with weird. We all make sacrifices.”

  He snorted. “As long as we don’t die by it.”

  “If it’s my time, it’s still a fine day to die.”

  He grabbed my face. “Don’t go fey on me. You’re going to live. We’re going to live. Promise me.”

  Tears froze on my cheeks. I wouldn’t make promises I couldn’t keep. Instead, I kissed him hard.

  “I love you,” I said.

  Then I turned away, and telling myself this was positively the last time today, I threw myself off the cliff at the rocks below.

  Chapter 72

  You’re not flying, you’re falling. Never forget that.

  The wind screamed my old Ops 4-10 instructor’s words as I braced the batsuit and hurtled down the mountain.

  Alex had questioned my reasons for bringing the suit. My answer had been because sometimes you need to get down a mountain quickly. There wasn’t a quicker way. Base jumpers did it all the time. Of course, they had the advantage of studying the mountain first. I didn’t have that luxury.

  My team was too spread out, too weak. Ursula was too high up; she’d have Nagas all around her in the forest. Gray was hampered by having to protect Emily. But what the Nagas wouldn’t be expecting was someone as well trained as they were coming up behind them. That was my assignment, and I was going to make it count.

  If I could get down in time and in one piece.

  My options were as stark and balanced as a mathematical equation. I could pop the parachute right now, or keep going, using the batsuit to angle my fall.

  With the chute open, I’d still get down quickly and I’d be able to guide myself pretty much anywhere I wanted to go. I’d also be a slow-moving target silhouetted against the darkening sky for any Naga who wanted to shoot.

  With the batsuit, they probably wouldn’t even notice me, and if they did, they’d never have time to shoot. I’d pop the chute only to slow down at the last possible minute—as the Ops 4-10 slang suggested, use it like a brake.

  Fine. Just so long as I could clear the next rid
ge of pines which was rushing up toward me like a barricade of dark knives. Anything can be lethal if you hit it hard enough. My stomach knotted and I fought to keep myself spread-eagled when what I wanted to do was to tuck up in a ball.

  I forgot to breathe and my heart forgot to beat.

  I got lucky again. A twitch to the right sent me through the smallest gap in the trees, and still, the slap of a branch against my toes almost sent me wheeling out of the sky.

  By the time I’d gotten my heart working right again, I had my first view of the ranch. Still way over the pines.

  Coming down on trees? Broken ground? Doesn’t matter. Never try and stretch the glide. Pick the least worst place. Concentrate on getting down in one piece.

  More good advice from my instructor that I was going to have to ignore; there were Nagas down near the ranch and I wouldn’t have a weapon until I retrieved mine from the cemetery.

  The instructor was right.

  With the sun down behind the mountain now, distances became hard to judge and I got it wrong. The angle wasn’t good enough and I should have deployed the chute sooner.

  There are a couple of ways I could get to the cemetery, I thought as I crashed through the tops of the last few pines, my chute slowing me just enough.

  One of them was to be carried in a pinewood coffin.

  When the world stopped tumbling, I was barely six feet off the ground and the chute was wrapped around one of the tallest trees. I’d made it with nothing more than scratches and bruises.

  I hit the release and dropped into the snow.

  There were Nagas coming to find out what the noise was. The snow had drifted chest high in the cleared area and I had to run in slow motion, wading through it to get to the curving shield of the yew trees.

  I could hear their cautious, crunching footsteps in the darkness as I knelt by my cache and dug down. I felt the shape of the bag. My fingers were becoming number and number with the cold, till they were clumsy as hooves. I’d forgotten gloves. Stupid. Stupid. And the zipper was frozen as well.

  The first one came around the side, about fifty feet from me, pointing a gun in front of him. He couldn’t see clearly, and was quite rightly unwilling to make himself a target by shining a flashlight. He could just about see the chute moving in the wind, and that kept his attention.

  With my wolf eyes, I could see him easily enough.

  I got the zipper open, one link at a time.

  A second Naga came around the other side. A third slightly behind him. All of them focused on the chute and the darkness under the pines. They were easing around the edges of the clearing. I had a few seconds before they realized what the chute was, and saw my trail in the snow.

  My hands found the cold MP5 and I slid it out quietly, automatically checking the safety and single shot selection. I’d left it with the magazine in and the silencer attached.

  Just in time. The first one stopped. He’d seen my tracks and started to swivel toward me.

  Tap. Just one shot—no time for the triple hit routine. He was still falling when I fired at the other two. Tap, tap. The one unintentionally shielding the other. Tap.

  Both hit. Falling. One screamed, the sound bubbling horribly with blood.

  Back to the first. Tap, tap into his body.

  Again on the others. Tap, tap.

  I waited. No movement and no sound meant nothing yet.

  Reaching behind me, I pulled the rest of my gear out of the bag. My harness, the comforting bulk of the HK Mk 23 in a holster, a knife, a couple of grenades and some spare ammunition. The Colonel’s TacNet system. Not exactly as much as I wanted going up against an unknown number of Nagas, but as much as I was going to get.

  There was still no movement from the Nagas. I took a chance and quickly unzipped the batsuit, dropped it and hurriedly shrugged the harness into place. Then I crept over to the bodies, keeping low to the ground and scanning in every direction.

  There was nothing to see, other than darkness in the snow and a few wisps of steam coming off the blood. Nothing to hear but the lament of the wind. And nothing to smell but death.

  I couldn’t see their faces, to my relief. Even Nagas are people, and I have enough to haunt my nightmares already.

  I checked for pulses without success, took their ammunition and hid their weapons beneath a tree.

  Then I started running. Gray would be making for the ranch, coming down the mountain in a curve. We’d had enough time on the drive out here to look at a map and get a feel for the layout of the ground and the possible routes down.

  I switched the TacNet on now. There was a risk that a base system could get an ID and location on me, but the comms talk suggested the Nagas on the mountain had lost contact with command. I flicked through the channels and found encrypted conversation on one. I tried the standard encryption option that the Naga at the top of the mountain had set on his comms system, and it gave me an entry. They weren’t skipping between options. Sloppy work, but I wasn’t complaining. And the Nagas didn’t have the comms discipline of Ops 4-10. This group was getting seriously twitchy.

  “Fox One-Oh-Oh, this is Fox One-Two-Oh. Still no contact Groups Lima and Kilo.”

  “Shit,” someone swore into an open mike.

  “Shut up,” a voice with authority said. Sounded like a sergeant to me. “Fox One-Oh-Five, update.”

  Silence.

  “Fox One-Oh-Five? Fox One-One-Seven?”

  The one who’d sworn spoke again. “They’re behind us, Sarge. They’re at the ranch.”

  “Shut up!”

  The Naga sergeant was getting rattled. His command circuit had gone silent. Teams on the mountain had disappeared. I assumed that’s who Kilo and Lima were.

  I had no idea what experience his troops had, but I knew the feeling of being out in the cold and dark, alone against an enemy that seemed more powerful with every passing minute. An open comms policy meant they all knew their promised extraction team wasn’t coming. Now they had someone behind them.

  Give it up now. Go home.

  “Fox One-Oh-Oh, this is Fox One-Three-Oh. I have contact with vehicles turning off Route 85. Eighteen vehicles. That is one eight vehicles.”

  The pack was coming back, but with the state of the road, it could take them anything up to an hour to get here.

  Another few seconds of weighing the odds, then I heard the sergeant again.

  “Fox One-Three-Oh and Fox One-Two-Oh, Fox teams West and North, clear to proceed to alternate extraction point three. Report passing Fox team East.”

  “What about us?”

  “If you don’t can it, Fredricks, I’ll fucking plug you myself.”

  Silence.

  The sergeant was staying put at the moment, but he was having trouble controlling his own team, let alone any others. Fox team South would be the nearest to the ranch, on the south side. That’d be where he was. I’d guess that Fox team East was being left in place to cover the route to extraction point three. There was a road out there on the east side and they probably had trucks waiting. It was a retreat, but an orderly one. Much more orderly than I’d like.

  I slowed down. I didn’t dare run straight into them, and although there’d been nothing on the comms, I’d bet long odds that the sergeant had turned some of his team around to make sure they’d see anyone coming up behind them.

  Things were still in my favor. If they’d had their normal mission preparation, I’m sure they’d have included IR scopes, but life had gotten more rushed for the Nagas recently. It was likely that they couldn’t see in the dark, but I could.

  I spotted their outlying scouts ten minutes after the TacNet went quiet, and I just made it in time—there was a call on the TacNet about movement up the slope. That had to be Gray or Ursula.

  I drew a bead on the nearest scout.

  Everything seemed to happen at once.

  There was gunfire over to my right. Without thinking about it, I used it to mask the quiet sound of shots with my silenced MP5. One down
and one missed—the second scout had jerked his head around to see what was happening behind him.

  Gray broke cover, fired two more quick shots down at the Nagas and disappeared.

  What the hell was that about? A diversion?

  Gray and Ursula must have joined forces.

  The problem was, the Nagas were alert. No one chased Gray. But the scout I’d missed reported the direction of my incoming fire accurately and I saw movement on my flanks.

  If I got surrounded, it was all over. I moved back as quickly as I could without exposing myself, trying to outflank their flankers.

  There were more shots from above, but they weren’t aimed at me. It couldn’t tell if that was Gray firing or the Nagas.

  Damn!

  What was going on? If Gray was firing, I was sure he didn’t have Emily with him. Ursula must have Emily. That meant this had been a diversion for her to get past. Had Gray’s appearance done enough? Or had my attack ruined their plan?

  This was the old familiar fog of war, and it forced me from the strategic goal of getting Emily safely away, back to the basic tactic of making sure I wasn’t captured. What I wouldn’t have given for Julie and a couple more like her with me.

  I wasn’t sure how stretched out the Nagas line was. Maybe I could get past them. I slipped down a bank and started making my way up to the left.

  Almost immediately I stopped and eased into cover. There were the stealthy sounds of someone moving quietly ahead of me. I’d been flanked already. Their line must have been longer than I thought.

  I still had the edge. With my wolf eyes, I could see the warmth of their bodies and they couldn’t see me. I hoped.

  I held my position and felt my concentration flow down into the MP5, along that matte black barrel and out into the cold night. All I needed was a smudge of body heat to cross in front of me and I had one dead Naga.

  Then I could hear a second person, a third, a fourth. Little squeaks of snow underfoot. Sighs as their passing brushed snow off the pines. Breathing.

  And I could feel the Call.

  Not Alex. Ursula.

  I took the pressure off the trigger.

  Ursula could sense me too, but I couldn’t tell her that there were three Nagas closing in on her. She had wolf senses as well, so maybe I didn’t need to tell her. I crept sideways, feet coming down softly, toe first, side first, like a cat’s paws, soundless.