The maiden cocked her head at Anton, blinked. Her lashes were copper, a shade darker than her hair. Emma would have been jealous if she’d given a shit about that sort of thing just then.
“You know how, Antonio.” The maiden’s voice was surprisingly deep. Bruce lifted his nose out of Emma’s crotch and uttered a long, low sound that wasn’t quite a growl.
Anton’s eyes narrowed; he obviously did know. Well, that made one of them. No, wait — judging by the look on Telly’s face, that made two of them. Ricky looked just as lost as Emma felt.
Ricky looked across her at Anton. “Anton?” Ricky pitched his voice low for privacy, even though everybody could hear him. “How did they find us? You said we were safe.”
Kal gave a short grunt of a laugh. It would have been a scoff if his voice wasn’t so deep it turned into a growling cough. A big cat sound. Emma was used to Ricky being a big cat, but it was still an alarming reminder she was actually surrounded by them.
Anton looked away from Rish, and stared over the top of Emma’s head at Ricky. His face was grim and expressionless. “They got to Selena. Probably tortured her and her people to find out where they were supposed to meet us. She was the only one who knew we would be at the motel.” Anton’s green eyes slid to Rish, and somehow the maiden did not just drop dead from the force of raw hatred in that look. Good for her. Then again, maybe she had a lot of practice at withstanding that kind of look. In any case, she held his gaze steadily, and didn’t refute what he’d said.
Anton took it as confirmation. “You broke over one hundred and fifty years of treaty, just to find us.” His voice was thick with contempt and disbelief.
The maiden smiled, a fake and deliberate movement. It looked practiced. Perfect, but practiced. Her golden eyes shifted to Emma. “To find her,” said the maiden in her rich accented voice. “And not just to find her, but to take her. We could have waited, but taking her from you when you arrived at Selena’s safe house would have broken truce just the same. Better to be expedient. After all, the king is waiting.”
“If you’d waited, you wouldn’t have had to torture her.” Anton’s body vibrated with tension. Emma felt it like an angry line down her left side.
“Who says we tortured Selena? We are not idiots. Selena would never talk. But she cares for her people a great deal. Far more effective to seize some of her many orphans instead, young ones without the strength to resist.” Rish smiled like the cat who’d found the cream, and Anton paled.
“Perhaps such a trespass against truce might be rectified, had we returned Selena’s people to her with only a little harm done,” Rish mused, enjoying Anton’s silent rage. “But the truce is nothing to us. Selena has no power.” The maiden shrugged, with one shoulder, another fake perfect gesture.
Anton radiated heat now like a furnace. “If that was true, you’d have broken truce long ago. You are idiots. You don’t know a thing about Selena or her people.” Anton looked like he wanted to say something else; his throat worked, but he didn’t continue. The maiden didn’t seem fazed by his insults. On the contrary, she seemed to enjoy making him angry.
Emma cleared her throat. “Who’s Selena?” Anton’s eyes flicked to her; in the darkness of the van, they were the color of palm leaves in deep, damp shade. They softened a touch when he looked at Emma.
“Selena is the Harpy Queen,” said Anton, voice catching. “She was the only one of our allies powerful enough and willing to keep you safe. She rules several kingdoms north of the border.” He glanced at the maiden as he said this, as if to remind her.
“Selena is a harpy?” Emma asked doubtfully, already anticipating feeling stupid.
“She’s a harpy eagle. Harpy Queen is her title. She was forced out of South America a long time ago.” Emma expected him to elaborate, but he didn’t.
She frowned. She wanted to ask more questions, but it seemed insensitive. Besides, by the sounds of it, this woman had been targeted for helping Anton and Telly, her people attacked and some even abducted so the jaguars and the maidens could find them. So they could find her.
Try not to dwell on that , she told herself. Not if you wanna stay sane.
Her head hurt, everything hurt — she’d spent half the day unconscious but her bones ached with exhaustion, as though she was coming down with something. She’d done things she never thought possible, and she felt wrung dry by it. Every question just seemed either pointless or unanswerable. They’d been captured. People had been kidnapped and terrorized just for wanting to help them, for wanting to help her.
What would happen to them? To Ricky?
Panic flared, intensifying the sick throb of her temples, and she closed her eyes and tried to breathe. Breathe, she told herself, swallowing against her rocketing pulse. Just breathe. Dear God, just —
“Emma, honey,” Telly drawled conversationally. “You wanna hear a bedtime story?”
One of the maidens gave a delicate snort. Emma opened her eyes and glanced to her left. Telly straightened his legs out and crossed his ankles, tilting forward to meet her eyes.
Somehow his gaze anchored her, made her hammering heart slow down. “What kind of bedtime story?”
“The story of how all shapechangers came to be,” he said with a half smile that left his eyes sly and cool. “The origins of their kind. Unless Ricky’s told you this story before.”
Emma shook her head, panic forgotten. “No. Tell me.”
So he did. And as his voice wove the kind of spell that needed no magic, Emma closed her eyes and settled a little more into the bend of Ricky’s shoulder, threading her fingers through Bruce’s shaggy pelt.
Myth
Once upon a time and not so long ago, when the Earth was wild and so were all its children and not a single language alive today had been invented, the god Wolf fell in love with a human woman and worked a great magic so they could be wed.
Well, that’s what the wolves say — but the leopards say it was the god Leopard, and the ravens claim god Raven was that first lover magician, and the jaguars say the god Jaguar was the one.
Anyway, Wolf fell for woman, but woman was human and Wolf was deity. Woman was made of flesh and bone, and that mysterious substance that runs through mortals like a river, bearing the lifeforce upon its current — blood.
Wolf, however, was made of dreams and power, the breath of the blizzard and the weight of the avalanche and the crunch of breaking ice in spring. In him, all the psychic threads of joy and suffering that wove through his four-legged people came together, he was the knot where two worlds met, the world of the All and the world of the Wolves.
He was more powerful than we will ever understand, but he could not wed the woman as he was — although he could appear to his love in the form of her kind for a time, he could not stay that way, and he could not ask her to wed a beast and a shadow.
Worse, she was mortal and he was not. Eventually he would lose her forever.
Nor could he give himself or his people up, and become human — to hunt with spear and stone instead of fang and claw, and see with only two eyes instead of a thousand, to kill for food rather than the sweet benediction of the sacrifice. He could no more turn himself into something he was not than he could do for the woman. Something else had to be tried.
So the god Wolf clothed himself in the form of his people and came to the woman when the moon was full and high, and together they forged a great spell, the First Pledge. Sharp fang to flesh, he tasted her blood, taking a part of her into himself. Blunt teeth to fur, she took it back, and the pledge was complete — a gift, a wish, a sacrifice, and a vow to bind it all.
For, you see, Wolf was a creature of magic and so could not bleed — but by giving him her blood, the woman changed him.
Taking it back, she changed herself.
From that moment forth, the god Wolf was also human and the woman was also wolf, not one or the other but both and able to change back and forth at will. Finally they were free to wed.
But the pl
edge meant this too: that Wolf became a little bit mortal, having been changed by a mortal, so that although he never aged he could now be killed; and the woman became a little bit magic, so that unless she was killed, she would never die. Their children, too, possessed the magic of the change, as did the child of any union with a shapechanger.
As years flowed into centuries and centuries into millennia, many races emerged alongside and in between the human races, until all of the old wild gods had traded immortality for love.
All but one.
11
The white van and Anton’s pickup truck were just over a mile away when the gray BMW with California plates and a shattered taillight pulled over on the side of the road opposite the motel.
Impossible to get any closer; police cruisers filled the small parking lot. A yellow line of police tape stretched across the broken front window of one motel room, and outside, a sparse crowd of rubberneckers and startled motel residents milled with an air of unexcited curiosity.
Nobody noticed the plain, unobtrusive looking man who stepped out of the car and headed for the motel. A hot wind ruffled his brown, well groomed hair, picked at the hem of his tailored jacket, making him narrow his dark brown eyes against the dusty air. It wasn’t simply that he was plain and unmemorable; he would not have been noticed had he been eight feet tall and clothed in an outlandish shade of lime green, because Robert was cloaking his presence with hypnotic suggestion. The fact that he was naturally an uninteresting man to look at merely made the job easier.
The police had been there a while; most of the uniformed officers stood at ease outside, waiting for the detectives to finish up, making sure no civilians wandered too close. Unseen, Robert pushed the door to the reception area open and walked inside.
A weak gust from the airconditioning patted his face. One uniformed officer stood by the reception desk, where the clerk had his head bent over some paperwork. Neither man saw him approach, though the uniform was staring straight down the short, well lit hallway. Straight at him.
He stopped at the small reception desk and gave the police officer’s mind a gentle push. The man — officer Kilworth, read the nametag on his breast pocket — turned to the clerk.
“Stay right here,” he said. “I won’t be a minute.” The clerk nodded and officer Kilworth set off towards the parking lot, a nagging feeling at the back of his mind telling him to go and check if there was any more information he was supposed to obtain from the clerk.
Robert could have stood at the reception desk and questioned the clerk without getting rid of the cop, but the extra effort it would take to keep his own voice from breaking the hold would prevent him from probing the clerk’s mind. It wasn’t the clerk’s answers he wanted; it was the psychic evidence behind them. Besides, he preferred not to use unnecessary force — it simply wasn’t practical.
He cleared his throat and the clerk jumped in his seat, as Robert seemed to the clerk to appear out of thin air. “I need you to answer some questions.” Robert’s voice was soft and rich, and it carried within it an irresistible hypnotic command.
The clerk was instantly pliant. He was not a puppet, nor was he unconscious; he was simply ready to do this one thing that had been asked of him. If he had not been answering police questions for the past hour, it would not have been so easy, but the man was already in the right frame of mind. It only needed to be enhanced.
Robert reached into his jacket pocket and pulled a printout of a digital photograph. The picture was of a young woman who didn’t know the shot was being taken; she was eating lunch in a park, trees visible in the distance, people walking their dogs. She appeared to be gesturing to somebody, though they weren’t in frame. She had long dark hair that hung well past her shoulders, medium height and build, large brown eyes in an attractive face.
“Have you seen this woman?” Robert asked the clerk, holding the picture up. The clerk’s eyes were blank for a moment; then he frowned as the question and the photograph registered, and he began trying to remember.
It was enough for Robert. He could sense the cold spots in the man’s mind where someone had manipulated the sensory input, effectively blocking themselves and anything else they chose from sight. It wasn’t memory erasure of the sort which Robert would have to employ when he’d finished asking his questions, no; the clerk hadn’t seen something and then had the memory removed, he had never seen anything at all.
Robert could sense, in disjointed flashes of sensory recall, the clerk going over his memory of the hours before he heard the window of the motel room breaking. He had seen nobody, but the fact that the key to the room was missing, and the room had shown signs of being inhabited, meant somebody must have gotten past him somehow.
The clerk had gone over all of this with the police officers who questioned him, all still fresh in his mind. If Robert had showed up half a day later, he might not have been able to tell the man’s mind had been manipulated at all; it was a hard thing to detect, nowhere near as obvious as the deliberate altering of an existing memory. But Robert was very good.
He put the printout away. “What’s your name?” He asked the clerk.
“Daniel. Dan.” Dan stared up into Robert’s face attentively.
“Dan, you’re going to forget we spoke. When I leave, you’ll forget what I look like; you’ll forget you saw me. Go back to your paperwork, Dan. You’ve been daydreaming.”
Dan put his head down and blinked as though he had forgotten what he was doing. Then he mumbled to himself and started filling out the form in front of him, oblivious of Robert padding away in the direction of the motel rooms.
A small mental push cleared the two detectives from the room so he could have a look around. In the bathroom he found what had warranted the crime scene more than one detective; splashes and smears of blood had dried to sticky maroon on the linoleum tiles. A torn up shirt and the remains of a pair of jeans lay nearby, tagged and waiting to be bagged as evidence, identifiable only by the materials with which they had been made. Otherwise, they were just scraps of cloth. Robert hovered over them, crouching, careful to keep his shoes out of the blood.
He recognized the moth-eaten appearance of the fabric; somebody had changed their shape and forgotten to strip off first. The magic had disintegrated the clothing, dissolving all but thin handfuls of it, shot through with holes, like Swiss cheese. Robert couldn’t piece the puzzle together, didn’t know why there was evidence of violence and hasty shapechanging, but he didn’t particularly care; he recognized the psychic scent of her on everything in the small bathroom. Emma Chase had been here.
One set of captors had brought her here, and yet more had come and taken her away — the motel room itself reeked of jaguar musk, as well as a few unidentified scents that didn’t concern Robert. He was just thankful the jaguars had seized her. If the two rogues had escaped with her, there would have been little hope of finding her again — but he and his boss both knew where the jaguar king’s people would take her. At least the jaguars were predictable.
Robert swept the room with his gaze one last time, standing in the doorway to the bathroom. The blood wasn’t hers, so who the hell did it belong to? There would be no trace of Robert when he left this place, no evidence of his presence, which was a lot more than could be said for the shapechanger who had recently bled out all over the floor. And if the poor bastard had been changing his shape at the same time as losing all that blood, well, then the lab technicians analyzing it were in for a surprise. There would be jaguar blood there, as well as human. A shapechanger in human form would have perfectly normal DNA and blood makeup, just as in animal form, but in between was a different story.
Robert shook his head. None of his concern. He was curious, but he had things to do. A lot of things.
In much the same way as Emma’s captors and, later, their attackers must have done, Robert cloaked his presence once again as he passed the clerk, and officer Kilworth, who had returned to his post. He crossed the road and left the
motel behind. He regarded his smashed taillight with dull dismay.
Settled behind the wheel, Robert took his cell phone from the glove box. Wasn’t prudent to wear it whilst engaging in psychic activity, the things tended to get in the way. Even on silent mode, if it rang, he’d have to cloak its presence as well as his own — even a silent ring tone would register somewhere in the sensory consciousness.
Robert speed dialed the first and most used number in his contacts. It rang out nine times before it picked up, a beep signaling the remote connection. A cultured male voice answered.
“Yes?”
“The jaguars have her.”
“And the men with her?”
“Taken alive, as well, though there was evidence of violence of some kind. Blood, shapechanging magic. Nothing to suggest she was harmed.” A curt, satisfied sound from the other end of the line. Robert continued. “I’ll go to their sanctuary, it shouldn’t be hard to find them from there. They have what they want, I doubt they’ll see any need to hide her away or cover their tracks.”
A sigh, cut short. “You’re quite right. This is good news, Robert. As good as it gets, anyway.” There was silence as Robert waited for him to say more, but he didn’t.
“Sir?” He asked finally. Yet more silence. Robert didn’t bother to prompt again. He was accustomed to waiting.
After a time: “She called me.”
“Emma, sir?”
“Emma. Yes. I was busy, but only for a few moments. If she had let it ring longer… but she didn’t.”
“Would it have made a difference, sir?”
“No. I don’t think so. Find her, Robert. I’ll be there when I can.”
Robert didn’t bother with a reply. Alan had already hung up.
12
From what seemed like miles away, female voices murmured, and a deep male timbre answered them. Emma tried to ignore it; she was tired, and so warm. She didn’t even care that the ground was hard and rough.
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