Blood Red (9781101637890)

by Lackey, Mercedes

  She resisted the urge to turn and run. If she did that, she had no chance at all. Her only option was to figure out where the boar spear had gone, and get her hands on that. Maybe—maybe she could fend it off long enough to back her way to the cavelet where the zâne were. They might protect her as well as Markos. Or they might not protect her, but the shifter might not be able to bear the power that surrounded them, and she would be safe. . . .

  Safe? There was no place safe in this cavern! There might not be any place safe in the country with this thing after her!

  Safer, then?

  If she could just get to that possible sanctuary, it would give Markos time to recover, and maybe give them both time for the blood-born power imbuing the monster to wear off. Maybe time for her to think of some magical offense or defense. Maybe she could collapse the cave roof on him. Maybe—

  “Oo a shpiri, ’irl,” came from between the shifter’s misshapen lips. He laughed, as she stared at it without comprehending what it had said.

  He passed a blood-smeared paw over his face. As she watched in nauseated fascination—still moving backward, step by careful step—he pushed and pulled on his jaw, his teeth, and his lips. The flesh and bone deformed and reformed, and he continued to poke and prod at his face, until at last, he had something more like a human mouth—except for the pointed teeth—and less like a muzzle.

  He yawned hugely, with a popping noise as if something was settling into place, then grinned hideously. “I shaid, you have shpirit, girl,” he repeated, in a voice that was half the whine of a canine, and half a peculiarly unpleasant, nasal human voice. “You are the firsht to fight me off for more than a moment or two in fifty yearsh. And you have magic.”

  He laughed, as if that was uproariously funny.

  She didn’t answer him. In her experience, not talking in cases like this was the best answer. It made men want to fill the silence with their own voice, and she might learn something that would save her and Markos.

  . . . her and Markos. Because Dominik still was not moving, and she feared the worst.

  The beast yawned again, but this time he looked angry. Yet he kept his temper. “Shpeak up! No?” He snarled, a sound like rotten canvas tearing. “You don’t want to know who I am? I will tell you anyway! I am Bertalan Kaczor!”

  Hungarian? That was unexpected. . . .

  Not that there weren’t Hungarians in Romania. The Austro-Hungarian Empire claimed this part of the world, after all. But—this part of Romania tended to be mostly native Romanians, with little islands of German Saxons . . .

  He peered at her, and his mouth turned down in a rictus of a frown. “What? A magishian, and you do not know my name?”

  “Well, you don’t know mine,” she retorted, hoping to keep him talking, rather than attacking, while she backed toward presumed safety.

  He frowned. “Austrian girl—”

  “German,” she corrected.

  “Aushtrian, German, all one,” he snarled. “You think you have sheen shorcherersh, but you have never sheen one like me!”

  He flexed the muscles of the uninjured arm, and laughed. “I am sheventy yearsh old! I have been hunting theshe parts for fifty yearsh! I have been building my pack for all that time, until we have become the shcourge of the land!”

  She decided to dare a taunt at him. “I don’t see a pack now,” she stated, matter-of-factly.

  The growl that rumbled up out of his chest made the hair on the back of her neck stand up, and made her insides turn to water. “Peashantsh!” he snarled. “I should have known better. You cannot build a palash out of mud!” He took three enormous steps toward her, making her back up hastily—but not in the direction she wanted to go. He had forced her slantwise, toward the cave wall and not the tunnel that led to where Markos was. “You, on the other hand . . .” He laughed. “You are a magishian! I will catch you, and break your legsh sho you cannot run, and make you my breeding cow! You will be a fine bitch for my new pack!”

  The horror of it struck her like a hammer, and froze her where she stood. He howled with laughter to see it—literally howled, throwing up his head to let out a bloodcurdling wail of triumph.

  Which ended, abruptly, in a scream of pain and rage as Markos in wolf-shape slashed at his hamstrings from behind.

  She threw herself to the side, rolled, and came up several feet away to see that Markos had dashed out of reach of those terrible claws, and toward where Dominik lay. She got to her feet and ran in the other direction, where she might, just might, find one or more of the weapons they had lost. Behind her, she could hear the combat as Markos used his lower stature and wolf-speed to good effect, not standing and fighting, but dashing in to slash with his fangs and dashing away again. In wolf form he was just as fast as the sorcerer, and he was harder to hit than a human, since he was lower to the ground.

  She searched frantically for a weapon. There! The coach gun lay against the rock wall! She dashed for it, praying that nothing had been smashed out of order or blown up when it went off on impact.

  The moment she put her hands on it, she let out a wordless prayer of thanks. It was intact, despite having discharged when it struck the rock. She broke the breech, fumbled out the spent casing and fumbled in a new shell, and looked up.

  The shifter was trying to pen Markos into a niche near Dominik, and he was succeeding. His arms were long, and Markos couldn’t get past them. And each time the shifter moved closer, he had a better chance of catching Markos.

  “Hey!” she shouted. “Half-breed cur!”

  He whirled and stared at her. She was on fire with terror, but she couldn’t stop now.

  “You want me?” she taunted. “Nyald ki a seggem!”

  It was the worst phrase she knew in Hungarian. She prayed it would goad him into rushing her.

  It did.

  With a scream of rage, he charged. She held her fire. I’m only going to get the one shot. It has to count. . . .

  Halfway to her, he flung himself into the air in a tremendous leap, arms spread.

  She waited, watching him sail through the air. It seemed as if he was floating there, moving with impossible slowness, as she waited, her heart pounding in her ears, until the last . . . possible . . . moment.

  Then her finger twitched on the trigger, and the coach gun roared, and kicked back into her side, discharging the entire load of silver shot into his chest, throat and face from no more than a yard or two away.

  Blood and flesh spattered her, and then he hit her.

  Down they went onto the stone floor of the cave. She felt a blow to the back of her head, and saw nothing but black again.

  But the terrible weight on her was smothering her, and she woke again with a strangled gasp, then began trying to push the impossible weight off herself so she could breathe. The stink of him was driving her mad, the effluvia of his blood magic so intense she wasn’t sure if she was going to choke on her own vomit or from lack of breath.

  Then a feral growl made her freeze. She looked past the mangled remains of the sorcerer’s head and saw Markos.

  But not the Markos she knew.

  His eyes were mad, his hackles up, and his lips lifted in a terrible snarl. He stalked toward her, stiff-legged.

  The words of the little alvar rang in her memory. There is a danger. If the man runs as a wolf for too long, the man is lost forever in the wolf.

  “Markos!” she said, sharply, which only elicited a rising growl from him. She swallowed her fear and nausea. She had to reach him. “Markos,” she said, as coaxingly as she could, around a lump of sick horror and bile. “Markos. It’s me. Your friend. Rosa. Remember me?”

  The wolf continued to stare at her, fangs bared.

  “You believed me, when no one else did, when everyone else said we had killed the only shifter. Markos, you believed in me. And I believe in you!” She put all the pleading
she could into those words. “I do not believe you are lost in the wolf! Come back, Markos! Come back! Remember who you are and come back!”

  She kept repeating the words “Come back” and his name, over and over, and projected as much of the Earth Magic that allowed her to reach the minds of animals as she could, bringing up images of him at the Graf’s parties, on the trains, laughing at jokes, reading something, looking thoughtfully out a window. She refused to believe he was lost. She refused to believe she would survive the shifter only to die at the fangs of—

  Slowly, his lips dropped over his fangs. Slowly, a vaguely puzzled look crept over the wolf’s face, as if he was hearing something he didn’t . . . quite . . . understand . . .

  And then—he leapt.

  And covered her face with wolfish kisses, cleaning the blood from her cheeks and eyes.

  That was when she let herself pass into unconsciousness.

  “Rosa. Rosa.”

  Something was licking her face. No, it wasn’t licking her face, it was—washing her face. It wasn’t a rough wet tongue, it was a rough, wet cloth.

  “Rosa. You must wake up. You must wake up now.”

  Feebly, but with irritation, she pushed the cloth away and opened her eyes. The spell must still have been working, for the cave was as bright as if daylight were pouring in.

  Her head felt just as bad as she would have expected, from having been hit against a stone wall twice and a stone floor once. Markos was sitting next to her, or rather kneeling, a battered bowl of water next to him, and a bit of cloth in his hand.

  He seemed to be—mostly naked.

  Well of course he is. He was a wolf, and his clothing is somewhere else.

  “Can you stand?” Markos asked her anxiously.

  He looked terrible. He looks as bad as I feel, she thought. There were healing cuts and bruises all over his neck, face, arms and chest. Both of his eyes had been blackened. She levered herself up a little on one elbow, and saw that he had found the remnants of trousers somewhere, mostly rags, but enough to keep him from being completely naked.

  They both stank. And she was covered in blood and bits of shifter. Markos had been cleaning her face off, for which she was very grateful now that she came to think about it.

  “I think so,” she said, gingerly feeling the back of her head, and relieved only to find a lump, and not anything worse. “But I’d rather not.” She didn’t want to get up. She really didn’t want to be awake. She didn’t want to think about Dominik. . . .

  “You have to,” Markos said urgently, his brows creasing as well as they could, with all the injuries to his face. “I can’t get Dominik into the saddle by myself. His leg’s broken.”

  “What?” she gasped, sitting up so quickly she got flashes in front of her eyes and her head screamed at her. “He’s alive?”

  “He has a harder head than you. He was just knocked unconscious,” Markos replied, getting an arm behind her shoulders and holding her upright, as her head went from screaming to merely throbbing. “But I can’t get him into the saddle alone. I wouldn’t ask you to do this, but I really need your help. We have got to get the horses and get out of here to get him—you—me some real help. I’m afraid if we stay here much longer we’ll be in no condition to leave.”

  He had a point. A good one. A broken leg was no joke, and neither were blows to the head. What she needed to do was get herself moving and figure out just how badly her head had been rattled.

  Groaning, she turned herself over so that she was on her hands and knees, then slowly, carefully, managed to get to her feet, with Markos hovering anxiously as if he was unsure whether or not he should offer to help. Once on her feet, she looked around the cave.

  Her head throbbed, still, but it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. All right then. I can get things done. Maybe Dominik can manage to make it a little better, too. . . .

  The dead shifter was over to one side; by the smear of blood, Markos had dragged him off of her, which was kind of him. She wasn’t sure how she would have reacted if she had awakened under the body.

  Probably screaming a great deal.

  “Are you all right?” Markos asked anxiously.

  “I have been better,” she said, “But I have also been worse. But Markos, are you all right?” She turned her attention to her friend, and took his shoulders in her hands, turning him to one side and the other, a little to examine his injuries. Then she took his chin in her right hand and tilted his face about to get a good look at what had been done to him there. “In the name of God, what were they doing to you? And why?”

  “I’m not sure,” he admitted, as she let him go. He was a little flushed, but soon cooled down. “The chief one, Bertalan—he kept trying to get me to bite his children. He seemed to be under the impression that a bite from a true, born shifter would allow his children to shift without the need for casting the spell.” Markos made a face.

  “And does it?” she asked, without thinking.

  “Of course not!” he said crossly. “They kept beating me and cutting me, to make me bite. I finally gave in and bit them, and of course nothing happened. The taste is something I thought I would never get out of my mouth. And when that didn’t work, he talked about breeding me to his wives. Daughters. Ugh, they were both. Granddaughters, too. Actually I think the ones living that weren’t his captives were all his granddaughters at this point.”

  Markos looked as if he was going to gag, or throw up, or both. She didn’t blame him. She felt nauseous too, and it wasn’t all due to the blows on the head.

  “It was all just. . . .” He shuddered. “It was like a nightmare. It was worse than a nightmare. If I could have ripped open a vein with my teeth to make it stop, I would have. It wasn’t even a day and a night, and I thought was going to go mad. And then—”

  His face relaxed. “Then . . . the zâne came . . .”

  Tears began to fall from his blackened eyes, and he broke down. Awkwardly, she put her arms around him and he sobbed on her shoulder. “Rosa, you can’t imagine what that meant to me. In the middle of this . . . this horror, these horrible, horrible people, in the middle of being tortured and told that a sorcerer was going to take my own mind away from me came—cleanness. Something clean, and good, and wholesome. . . .”

  “You did amazingly,” she murmured, meaning it. Poor Markos . . . and poor Dominik. This was a hard, terrible way to learn just how vile evil could be. At least she had been able to learn that lesson by degrees.

  “And they drove those—half human things out of my prison,” he continued, sobbing. “And stayed with me and tried to heal me. And they promised me that if they somehow got driven away, they would kill me. You can’t believe what that meant to me!”

  She shivered. She could believe it—and she only thanked God, silently, that she had never found herself in that position.

  She patted his shoulder, self-consciously, and held him until he recovered himself. It was a little strange, holding him like this, because there was nothing remotely sensual about it, even though he was half-naked. “I’m sorry,” he said, pulling away, and wiping his face with his hand, then wincing as he touched bruised flesh. “I don’t . . . I shouldn’t have lost control like that.”

  “Don’t be sorry,” she replied. “It’s all right.”

  He rubbed his hands over his arms self-consciously. “Let’s go get Dominik. He probably thinks we don’t care about him anymore,” he said, trying half-heartedly to make a joke.

  “I can hear you both perfectly well, you know,” came a cross-sounding voice from behind and to her right. “It’s my leg that’s broken, not my hearing.”

  Markos flushed. She noticed he blushed everywhere. It was rather charming, actually. She found herself blushing too, and sternly told herself to stop.

  “I’m getting stiffer by the moment,” came the increasingly irritated voice. “An
d if my calculations and my poor abused pocket watch are correct, it’s almost dawn.”

  The two of them separated completely, and turned to make their way around the grisly altar and to Dominik’s side.

  “How are you not screaming in agony?” she asked, kneeling down to look at his leg. She might not be a healer, but she had splinted a leg or three in her time. But she didn’t need to do anything at all. This was an expert job.

  “Healer,” he reminded her. “I can make most of the pain go away.”

  “I wish I could,” she grumbled—and managed not to wince away as he reached for her temple. Almost immediately, the throbbing subsided.

  “Don’t move fast. Don’t lift anything heavy. Don’t strain. You’ve still bruised your brain,” he cautioned. “And it will warn you if you are doing something stupid.”

  “So I will try not to do anything stupid,” she replied, putting one of his arms around her neck as Markos did the same on his other side. “Does getting you to your feet count as stupid?”

  He didn’t answer . . . but her head did ache a bit, warningly, as she and Markos hauled him upright.

  They managed to get him up on one foot between them, and with his arms draped over their shoulders, hopped him through the cave. “Who splinted your leg?” Rosa asked, as they passed into the outer cave.

  “I splinted my leg. Once Markos dragged that disgusting creature off you and made sure you were only knocked out and would come around in your own time, he rooted through the trash out here and found me some sticks and rags to tie it up with.” He glanced over at Markos. “And some rags to tie himself up with.”

  “I left my clothes hidden out there in the woods when I came to investigate the area,” Markos said, going red all over again. “But I wasn’t going to leave the two of you alone just to find them!”

  They made their slow way out of the cave and out to the open area where they had fought the last of the shifter children. It was, indeed, dawn. That was where Rosa and Markos left Dominik, with some better branches to tie his leg up with, while Rosa went to get the horses and Markos shifted to wolf to find his clothing. By some miracle, the horses were still there, although they had eaten every scrap of food there was to find within reach of their reins, as well as the bag of oats. She filled her water bottle and Dominik’s at the little stream, after drinking her fill. The horses regarded her with mild impatience, as she mounted one and took up the other’s reins to lead him, as if to say “It is long past time you came to get us!”