The walk was pleasant and uneventful. Elora had come to love the forest in all its guises, cool and gray as much as warm and clear. There was no noise except for an occasional blackbird or the crunch of leaves under Elora's feet. Even though Blackie weighed as much as most people, he always seemed to navigate terrain soundlessly.
They were about fifty yards away from the dolmen when Elora saw Point Wolf coming straight toward them, but so slowly that he froze into a pose between each step. His head was down, neck elongated, eyes locked in concentration. Like he was stalking prey.
At about the same time, Blackie wheeled around to face behind her, the way they had come, and growled low in his throat.
There was no way to guess what was back there, but, judging by the way Blackie and Point Wolf were behaving, it was bad. In a heartbeat she made her choice, deciding that the prudent thing to do would be to put some distance between her and it before taking the time to turn around to see for herself.
She sprang into a sprint and headed straight for the dolmen where there would be cover, and yelled for Blackie as she propelled herself forward.
When she came alongside Point Wolf, she was about twenty-five yards away from the den. She stopped and started to turn and look, but didn't make the full one-eighty before she heard automatic gunfire.
It was a sound that brought back a flood of hellish memories from the day her clan was massacred right in front of her eyes. Her brain processed the truth of it lightning fast. There was nothing generic about what she was hearing. It was the exact same sound.
She leaped for a tree trunk to her left that would be large enough to shield her body, but in the process, she felt fire tear through the soft part of her right shoulder above the armpit. A yell ripped out of her throat involuntarily, but it was partially drowned out by Blackie's snarls. She couldn't do a conclusive assessment on herself, but she thought the bullet had torn through, without lodging. If she was right about that, it meant that it would be painful and bloody and take a while to heal, but not deadly unless infected and not treated. So, okay, it could be worse. I guess.
Point Wolf began a series of sounds that almost sounded like a code. She'd learned a lot about wolf communication through vocalization during the time that she and Blackie had sat nearby quietly observing various expressions of barking, whimpering, whining, growling, howling, and snarling. She had even picked up nuances such as the bark-howl and growl-bark.
This was different. It was a message that she would describe as a quick, staccato growl-bark-howl. So far as Elora could tell, each set of three sounds was identical in its repetition although, to be fair, she was in too much pain to be purely analytical.
"Blackie. Stay."
She didn't want to take any chance on Blackie running into the line of fire. How in Paddy's name did these shooters get into the New Forest? Who were they? What did they want? Good questions best left for pondering at leisure another time. Whoever it was and however they came to be there, they were advancing toward her position. She knew it.
Elora lifted her hand to reach behind her for an arrow and had to bite down on her own tongue to keep from yelling out the pain. She knew two things: that she had to use the bow and that it was going to hurt. A lot. So she readied herself with a mental lecture. Stiff upper lip as they used to say in her own world. No time for a full-blown meditation.
Catching the bow midway up in her left hand, she nocked an arrow and took a deep breath - one that she could hold for a minute. In one motion she stepped out from behind the tree, pulled the bow string taut and located her target. In the blink of an eye she had counted three and noted that one of them was wearing Ralengclan plaid. She aimed for the one closest to her.
All she could think about was the danger to the baby, so vulnerable on the front of her body. The bow was shaking badly because of the strain on her shoulder, since only half her muscles were reporting for duty and the pain wasn't helping. Knowing that she couldn't afford to miss, she begged her body to steady the weapon and, in a moment that was magical, she watched the bow pull into perfectly controlled aim almost as if she was watching the event occur in slow motion from outside her body.
Her mind was racing. She couldn't wait to confirm the hit. She had to get closer to the cover of the dolmen. The second the arrow was released she was running, again yelling at Blackie to come with her. Under her breath she said, "They must have found that damn machine and figured out how to use it. Better than we did."
Normally the dog and his mistress were evenly matched for speed topping out at about twenty-six miles per hour, but she wasn't usually running with a bullet wound. She knew she had two things on her side. First, she'd had the distinct advantage of over a year to adjust to the physics of the dimension and learn how her body responded to that environment. Second, she wasn't trying to run and shoot at the same time.
She gritted her teeth and chanted to herself. "Fast arms make fast legs. Fast arms make fast legs."
When she was within fifteen yards of the wolf den, she found herself facing an entire pack of wolves barreling toward her with their ears flattened and blood in their eyes. She turned her back to them and, still holding the bow, threw her arms over her mid section to protect the baby, but they parted around her and ran past without slowing and without touching her. She ducked behind the tree to her right. Her heart was beating faster than she could ever remember and she was breathing hard.
That level of terror was a new experience for her. Helm. Even when her family was being murdered, even when she was dying in a giant tumbling meat grinder, she had never been so afraid before.
She peeked out, trying to keep as much of herself behind cover as possible so that she could assess the situation. It looked like she'd hit her target in the chest. Practice makes perfect. Point Wolf had been trying to bring the wounded man down, but had been thrown away again and again. Maybe the guy knew that if you ever went down in a fight with a wolf it was over. One of Point Wolf's legs had taken some damage from the repeated slamming to the ground and he was limping, but still coming for the guy with the wholehearted commitment of an uninjured wolf. Flame and one of the lower level males had run straight toward him to assist and started circling. When the alien brought the gun up, Point Wolf didn't hesitate. He sprang for it.
Canines instinctively react to a human with stick-like objects in hand and usually run away, but he was a wolf in full blown fight response who was absolutely prepared to attack a man raising an extension to his arm. The wolf knocked the gun away but took three close range bullets in the process. Flame and the other male took the man down and clamped down on his neck.
Elora heard the screaming, but couldn't bring herself to feel sorry for a guy who was trying to murder her and the baby she was carrying.
When the man went silent and still, Flame sniffed and nudged Point Wolf a few times. But Point Wolf didn't move. She whimpered then lifted her nose high in the air and howled long, low, and mournful. The male with her joined in immediately.
Elora nocked another arrow, again stepped away from the shelter of a fat tree trunk and let fly a lethal projectile that would end the life of the second alien. She saw it drive through his neck. While he reached to feel and see what was happening with his neck, three of the other wolves rushed him and took him down. He got off a series of rapid fire shots, maybe involuntarily, and one of the wolves screamed out.
Wanting to try for a dash to the dolmen, she peeked out and didn't see the third man, so she darted another five yards before pulling up to check on the whereabouts of the last attacker. With a short burst of speed she made it to within ten yards of the safety of the ancient stacks. Her shoulder was killing her, but she couldn't stop to think about that at the moment.
Looking around the tree she saw the bodies of wolves and men strewn around haphazardly, but no third man. The forest had gone very quiet. After the combined sounds of battle: gunfire, screaming, snarling, growling, howling, it was eerie. She heard Blackie's growl at the same
time she heard a slight rustle behind her.
"Looking for me?" She wheeled around to see the third and last alien and knew by the look in his eyes she wasn't going to find any pity there. "If you still pray to gods, do it. You have less than two seconds left in this world. Or any other."
Suddenly the quiet was filled with a snarling so loud it was almost deafening. Stalkson seemed to have come out of nowhere and was now threatening the intruder with a ferocity that would give a nightmare pause. Stalkson's aggression was so extreme and startling it caused the man holding her at gun-point to look away - just long enough to give Elora the opening she needed. She grabbed for the gun at the same time Blackie went for the human's hamstrings.
Blackie may have been a domesticated breed of dog, but there was enough instinct left in him to know what to do. While Elora worked to wrestle the gun away, the alien's finger found the trigger and squeezed off three rounds. One went between Elora's legs and missed altogether. One grazed the fleshy part of her thigh. The last caught Blackie in the hind quarter, chipped his hip bone and lodged. When Elora heard him yell, she yanked the gun away.
Stalkson saw his opening and leapt for the guy's throat, puncturing the carotid.
The man caught Stalkson in his arms and threw him away before falling to his knees and grabbing at the intermittent stream spouting from his neck. The wolf scrambled up and would have been right back on him, but Elora intervened. She put the Ralengclan on the ground, then going to her knees, went into a protective huddle over him. She knew he was going to die, but needed to get some answers first.
She looked back over her shoulder at Stalkson who let her know he didn't like it one bit.
"No," she said, looking him in the eye and letting him know in no uncertain terms that, of the two of them, she was alpha.
He licked his muzzle and looked mad as hell, but he didn't advance.
She turned back to the man on the ground, who was bleeding out quickly, and asked a simple question.
"Why?"
Blood trickled out of the corner of his mouth. "The only way to be certain there will never be another Age of Laiwynn."
Elora's brows drew together. "You're willing to die to make sure my clan never has power again?"
"Anyone not Laiwynn is willing to die to insure that."
"It was that bad?"
He looked at her like he couldn't believe she was asking that question. "You don't know? Are you taunting me or telling me that you really are naive?" He read the expression on her face and tried to laugh, but coughed up more blood. "A sequestered princess living in a bright bubble of illusion." His smile looked ghoulish with a mouth full of blood. "Your clan is a scourge that takes everything, even people: wives, little ones. Our children don't even know what dignity is." He tried to spit out blood.
She shook her head. "No." Elora didn't know if she was wincing more from the pain of the wounds or from the knowledge that dying men don't lie. One thing was certain. The man who came to kill her believed he was telling the truth.
He slanted his eyes in her direction and pinned her with a look of hatred that she could see originated in the very depths of his core. "Never again."
His last breath exhaled on those words.
Elora turned to Blackie. He looked at her, but didn't make any attempt to move. While she was trying to figure out what to do next, she started to feel little bits of biting sting on her hands. She looked up at the sky as tiny icicles continued to fall, pricking her face. Sleeting!
"Really?!? Thanks a hell of a lot!" She yelled up at the sky, knowing that no one was going to hear but the wolves - the ones that were still alive.
They had been marvels, their single-minded focus trained on protecting the pack. They never spent one second's worth of energy worrying about harm to themselves individually. Wonderful, noble creatures.
"We need help."
Looking at Blackie it was easy to see he concurred. Blackie had small arcs of lighter hair over his eyes that mimicked eyebrows. Right now they were arched. That was when she remembered the sat phone and reached for it, but it wasn't in her pocket. She would have loved to say it fell out in the heat of battle, but the truth was that she'd forgotten to pick it up. After she'd promised to take it.
Ram was going to be fit to be tied. She could almost hear him cursing in Irish. She knew he'd find her even if she'd been carried to hell and dropped in a sea of fire. She just couldn't say when.
"I know you're going to be mad that I forgot the gods cursed phone, but you couldn't possibly be any angrier about it than I am. Right now."
Pulling away from the construction site for the night, Ram touched a button on the steering wheel that turned on the car radio. Sleet expected, possible snow. He looked up at the clouds and, as if prompted by his inquisitiveness, bits of ice began hitting the windshield. He was ten minutes away from a B road. That was a two-lane narrow highway that usually comes with curves, lots of them; the kind they loved to feature in commercials for cars with 'fine German engineering'. B roads were romantic and old school in a land-forgotten-by-time sort of way, but all it took was one timid driver and you could be stuck going very slow for a very long time.
The temperature was dropping fast. He didn't know if the front was unexpected, but he did know it was unexpected by him. They didn't exactly keep a TV or radio on at the cottage. They didn't even have a TV or radio at the cottage.
He passed a pretty farm and flicked his attention back and forth for a few seconds between the road and a farmer who was trying to herd sheep toward a large shed. Ram pitied him and every other poor devil who was caught out in such ugly weather by necessity. Even as he thought it, he knew that, in half an hour or so, he would be one of those poor devils. There was no getting around the necessity of leaving his car at the New Forest gate to ride the rest of the way on horseback.
He pictured Elora at the cottage he'd called his real home as a boy. In his mind she was sitting on the leather couch in front of the hearth, the light from a roaring fire reflecting in her turquoise eyes, the faux sable throw pulled up to her neck, and tucked in all around. He smiled just a little thinking that she might have a mug of hot cocoa pressed to her pretty lips. He would brave a lot worse than a little sleet and snow to get home to that picture and a kiss from those cocoa-warmed lips.
When he got to New Forest, he would stop at the pub and buy a roasted chicken and some new potatoes, peeled and brown roasted. They would sew them into a burlap sack that he could tie on his saddle then he'd hurry home before it got too dark to see at all. The cloud cover would mean no moonlight and it would be slow going with a smuggled flashlight. He'd ridden to the cottage at night before, on a fool's errand, but he wouldn't do it again voluntarily. There was no way to even count all the things that could go wrong with that.
He had ridden the gelding and left him in Liam's stable. Elora preferred Ram's horse. Who wouldn't? She was fast and sure footed with a smooth gait that didn't rattle a rider's bones. Ram couldn't stand the idea of leaving his mate without the best means of transportation available and, in the New Forest, the best means of transportation was unquestionably his own gray mare.
Watching the sleet hit the windshield, he wished to Great Paddy he'd thought to keep gloves in the car.
There was no way to tell which hurt worse, the fire in her shoulder or the sting in her thigh. Elora told herself it was irrelevant because either way she was going to have to get up. The temperature was dropping fast and she couldn't just sit there and freeze to death.
The sleet had started coming down as hard as rain. By the time Elora made it to her feet, the ground had iced over. When she took a first step her feet slipped out from under her and she came down as hard as you would expect of an alien with her weight differential; at this stage of her pregnancy that was two hundred sixty-six pounds.
When she felt herself falling, she twisted at the last second before she hit the ground so that she landed on her back and not on the baby. That was the good news. The ba
d news was that the jolt to her damaged shoulder and thigh sent waves of pain through her that were temporarily paralyzing. The fact that the impact had also robbed her of breath for a full minute of panic seemed so minor in comparison that it was hardly worth mentioning.
She lay on the icy ground waiting for the pain to subside, thinking that the fall was going to leave one of those bruises that would start out black then go from that to dark blue to purple to green to yellow. It was going to be around a while. She knew all about bruises like that.
Doing a quick checklist assessment with self, she went over the list. She had two bullet wounds, an injured dog, no sat phone, record breaking sleet, and the temperature was plummeting. At least she had a base line to work with. Can't get any worse.
She sat up. That was when she felt a sudden gush of liquid followed by the shocking feel of warm fluids running, spreading down her pants leg. Her first reaction was to suppose she had involuntarily wet herself as a sort of post-stress release.
Her second reaction was to wonder if it was her water breaking. She asked herself how she would know the difference. She'd never had a baby before. Still, on some level she did know the difference and knew that she had better get her thoughts together because the checklist had just been revised.
Now she had two bullet wounds, an injured dog, no sat phone, wet pants in freezing rain, temperature plummeting... um, oh, yes, and a baby coming.
Ram's quiver, the one he'd had since he was a boy, was crushed in the fall and would probably leave a fine outline of its own in the form of a bruise imprinted on her back. She hated to leave his bow behind, but sentimentality over inanimate objects was a luxury she just couldn't afford at the moment.
A Summoner's Tale - The Vampire's Confessor (Black Swan 3) Page 14
