The Wild Rites Saga Omnibus 01 to 04

by Anna McIlwraith

  “Oh, don’t fret so, boy,” said Alexi, clearly satisfied. “We simply haven’t had time to return them to their rightful queen. No use wasting a good death or two when it serves little purpose, especially when there are others who deserve it so much more. The harpies were merely hostages; they can go home in time, and it costs us nothing. You, on the other hand, need to be punished.”

  “You can’t hurt us,” said Anton hotly. “Or is your word truly worthless?”

  “Not worthless, rebel. Specific.” Alexi’s eyes were saucer wide with something awful like excitement. “You are safe so long as you cooperate, but only until we bring you before the king, in the presence of your human palatine. She wants you unharmed until next she sees you, and I had little choice but to oblige her. After that, well…” Alexi spread his hands wide and shrugged.

  Telly spoke softly. “You would dare to challenge me openly?”

  Alexi turned those bright serpent eyes on Telly. “Not me, old friend.” The words were heavy with scorn and the weight of centuries. “And certainly, Seshua would never dream of insulting you in such a way. But the priesthood is far more powerful, and has no such need for caution.”

  Telly’s eyes narrowed down to slits. A thin growl rattled in his chest; Bruce echoed it. Telly’s hair shifted around his face, stirred by the hot, dry breath of his magic like grass in a baking summer wind, and power trickled out to rival Alexi’s, filled the room like a warm breeze at high noon.

  “It is not a good idea to remind me of that, Alexi. Your priesthood’s power will be its doom.”

  Alexi held his ground. His cool lips thinned. “I suggest you stand down. We’ve had this argument before. And if you break the terms that the girl negotiated for you, you forfeit our agreement and your lives are mine.”

  Telly snarled, bearing his teeth, his blue eyes paler than ever. “You know you couldn’t take me.”

  “No, but I could take these two,” he gestured at Anton and Ricky. “Myself or another. There are many guards, and only one of you. They would die.”

  Telly knew it was true, and so did Anton and Ricky. Telly’s magic died to a whisper, his hair falling in front of his eyes, hiding the way the blue had bled away to cloudy white in the building rush of anger and power. There was nothing for it; they were safe for now, so long as they behaved. They couldn’t try anything and risk lives, and they couldn’t risk leaving Emma to the sole mercy of the jaguar king and his ill-appointed allies.

  If ever there was an ally you could not turn your back on, it was Alexi.

  And he was just waiting for an excuse to hurt them.

  The serpent priest cocked his head, waiting. Anton and Telly exchanged glances. None of them noticed the smoldering rage on Ricky’s face, his eyes turned to burning embers. It had been a very long time since Ricky had been exposed to the crippling politics of the ancient courts and tribes, and he was beginning to remember just how damn much he hated it. It was the only thing he and his brother ever had in common. Aside from Emma.

  Alexi signaled the rest of the guards to come forward as he himself stepped back. He had seen the resignation in Telly’s face; they would all go quietly, willingly. For now.

  As an escort of guards moved to surround the three captive men and the dog, Kal suddenly whirled and held up a hand to halt their march from the chamber. His red-amber eyes scanned the room, the look in them growing steadily more suspicious.

  Alexi frowned. “Kal?”

  Kal ignored him, his gaze sweeping the guards. “Where is Fern?” He growled the words.

  Alexi arched one thick dark eyebrow. “Fern?”

  Kal looked at him then. “The Aranan.”

  The tall, pale man was nowhere to be seen.

  15

  “No way am I wearing that. Not willingly. No way.” Emma stared at the handful of string beads that the golden maiden claimed was a dress of some kind. The maiden blinked black eyes at her, confusion plain on her face.

  “You must look presentable.” This was the third time she’d said that. Maybe it was all she knew how to say.

  “Don’t you have anything else?” Emma could see for herself the maidens had plenty else; the vaulted chambers they had brought her to were like the dressing room for some kind of prehistoric princess. Hides and bead curtains hung from the high stone walls, and thick furs cushioned the ground underfoot — and at least a dozen very modern clothing racks looked terribly out of place against the savage finery, lining one right hand wall. In the far left hand corner sat a huge antique vanity, covered in jars and pots that looked old and arcane, but scattered throughout were various plastic tubes and tubs of cosmetics and beauty products.

  A little makeup, she could handle, but bearing her boobs for all to see was too much. Not that the maidens had any problem with doing so. There were thirteen of them, Emma had counted, and only a handful even wore anything on their top half. It was slightly disconcerting. No wonder the maiden with the beady dress looked at her so strangely.

  “Something, you know, less see-through.” Emma tugged at the hem of her t-shirt, for the first time self conscious she wasn’t wearing a bra. How on Earth had she managed to bluff her way through several large, intimidating men, only to be embarrassed by a pintsized ocelot maiden?

  The maiden blinked again, frowning at the bundle in her hands. Her eyes were comically large. She would have been kind of cute if she wasn’t trying to take Emma’s clothes away from her. Not only could Emma definitely not wear a handful of string beads, she couldn’t undress in front of the maidens, at all. It wasn’t just her body she wanted to hide.

  Shit. What was she going to do?

  “Come.” The maiden turned, still frowning, and padded over to a trio of clothing racks, copper hair swishing like tinsel behind her. Reluctantly she hung the bead dress on a hanger and then shoved the rack away from her. “Here. Better?” She gestured at the rack now in front of them. She looked unhappy.

  Emma inspected the items on the rack. They were better, but not by much. She needed something with a waistband, and something else with enough fabric to drape down and hide a waistband. She couldn’t exactly stick the gun down her underwear.

  She spied a pair of shorts. Black leather shorts. More like hotpants. She groaned inwardly.

  “How about these?” Emma took the shorts down and held them up hopefully. The maiden narrowed her thickly fringed eyes. The other maidens, gathered on the other side of the room and waiting patiently for who knew what, all murmured together unhappily.

  The maiden sighed, looking disgusted. “American women. Always in pants.” She waved Emma to the side and then swept several items off the rack all at once. “But you have to pick from these, no exception. I have been kind. You wear one of these, no argument.” The maiden shoved the armful of clothing at Emma and stalked off.

  Emma’s heart fell as she examined the maiden’s choices. Nothing could possibly hide the shape of the gun bulging out the back of her waistband. She really didn’t want to give the gun up — even if she hid it away somewhere in the maidens’ chambers, she’d never be able to find it again. Besides, it was the one thing save for the clothing on her body that belonged to her, and the maidens planned to take the clothing away, too. Without it, she would be naked no matter what she chose to wear.

  Submitting felt too much like giving up altogether. She couldn’t do it.

  She glanced over to the maidens. Some of them watched her, but most of them were deep in conversation, whispering in a language she couldn’t understand — nonetheless, she got the feeling they were talking about her. The one who had been choosing her wardrobe looked angry and frustrated. It certainly wasn’t hard to annoy them. Maybe they weren’t used to people saying no to them.

  Or maybe they just weren’t allowed to torture her for not doing what they wanted.

  Confident they weren’t paying her too much attention, she padded over to another rack and started sifting through its contents. This one held fur cloaks, of every kind imaginabl
e: some of them were enormous, some mere mantles of luxurious decorative hide, designed to be worn around the shoulders. Emma found one that looked the right size. It would hang to the floor, and it should drape around her shoulders, but it wouldn’t drag and weigh her down and it wouldn’t cover her front. This was about compromise. The cloak was a beautiful, rich sable brown, the fur thick but not very long, so with each movement it seemed to gleam and ripple as though it were alive. It was a shade lighter than her hair, but dark enough, she hoped, to camouflage the gun.

  Just don’t think about what it used to belong to , she thought grimly.

  She snatched it off the rack and hurried to the other racks before the maidens noticed her. She hung up everything from the bundle the maiden had given her, except for a tiny golden string bikini. If the maidens were going to accept her outfit with the cloak, she had to be wearing almost nothing underneath.

  “What are you doing?” The maiden’s clear voice trilled out. “You can’t wear that! It’s too —”

  “What about this?” Emma turned and held the bikini and the tiny shorts out in front of her.

  “This is better.” The maiden narrowed her eyes, cocked her head contemplatively. “Once you have been bathed and had your hair done and makeup done, yes, I think it will do.” She sighed. “Must you wear the cloak as well?”

  Emma clenched her teeth. “It’s called a compromise. I wear something smaller, but I get something else to cover myself up if I need to. And,” she added angrily, “I can push it over my shoulders so I’m bared for the entire world to see, if need be.”

  The maiden frowned up at her. “You are beautiful. You must be displayed accordingly. Why does this anger you?”

  Beautiful in makeup, sure — she knew a few neat tricks thanks to the many makeup artists of Instagram, and she was fine with how she looked without it, but that wasn’t the point. “I’m not a piece of property. I’m a person.”

  Those huge eyes blinked slowly. “You are both.”

  “Jesus!” Emma took a few steps back, staring at the maiden’s impassive face. “You people are sick, you know that right?” When the maiden merely frowned, Emma covered her eyes with the bundle of fur cloak in her hands, unable to bear the sight for a moment, just trying to breathe. “I can’t believe this.” She raised her face, lowered her hands. “This is so totally illegal.”

  The maiden’s face softened. “This world is not the one you know,” she said gently. “You do not understand, but you will.”

  Emma shook her head. “Easy for you to say. You’re not being held against your will.”

  The maiden looked almost sad; then her eyes hardened, like pools of alien starlight. “We are tied to the king, bound to him, by old magic. Old curses. We have served the royalty of the jaguar race since well before Seshua was even born, and we will be bound to his successor, bound to all of them for the rest of time.”

  Well, shit.

  “Jesus.” Emma blew out a breath. “I’m so sorry.” Then she frowned. “Um. Who is Seshua?”

  The maiden blinked her enormous eyes. “He is the jaguar king.”

  So he had a name. Seshua. Pretty name; probably not a pretty king.

  Emma narrowed her gaze at the maiden. “What’s your name?”

  The maiden stared blankly for a moment. Then her chin came up a fraction, and her chest expanded. “I am Felani, chieftain of the ocelot maidens.” Those dark eyes flashed molten. “And the others,” she gestured behind her with a sweep of her arm. “Rish, Tarissa, Mata, Iztanita, Fezesh, Tikira, Latesh, Lirita, Fiza, Shala, Toleni, and Makena.”

  It was Emma’s turn to stare blankly. “I’m never going to remember all those.” Let alone who they belonged to; all the maidens looked the same. The only one she recognized out of the pack was Rish, whose cruel, haughty expression was unmistakable.

  Felani surprised her by laughing, clear and high like a bell, but it didn’t touch her smoldering eyes. “No matter. You may simply call us maidens. Certainly, none who dwell at the palace would deign to use our names. Come,” she waved for Emma to follow her as she padded across the fur-strewn floor towards an archway at the far end of the chamber. “You must bathe.”

  That did not sound good. Still, she wanted to keep Felani talking; the maiden was more forthcoming than anyone else had been so far.

  “So,” she said as Felani paused to draw aside the heavy tasseled drapes hung across the archway. “You’ve served the jaguars since before your current king was born, and you’ll serve them for the rest of time? You’re serious? All of you?” She glanced around at the waiting maidens, nearly identical to each other — but they had names. They presented the illusion of a hive mind, blank and unfeeling, but they were people, individuals with thoughts and fears and worries.

  Felani nodded. “Yes.”

  “That makes you immortal.”

  “Yes.”

  “And eternally screwed,” Emma said.

  The maiden’s hands paused on the tasseled rope she held, eyes widening with mild outrage, but Emma gazed back at her unapologetically. “Come on,” Emma said. “You got the raw end of the deal, just like I’m getting, right?”

  Felani stared at her, the tension seeping out of her body, the outrage dying in her eyes. The emotion that replaced it was tired and very, very old. “Oh, for Coatlicue’s sake.” She shook her head, looking disgusted. “No one has told you why you are here, have they?”

  Emma suppressed a frustrated groan. “No,” she managed to say evenly. “They’ve been too busy trying to kill me.”

  Felani sighed. “They are men, you are a woman. It would not occur to them to explain things to you.” That wasn’t entirely accurate, since Telly and Anton had tried to do their fair share of explaining, but Emma supposed it was true enough when it came to the bad guys.

  “That’s very old fashioned of them.” Emma didn’t try to keep the sarcasm out of her voice.

  “They are hundreds of years old,” Felani said flatly. “You have no idea.”

  Well, she did have a point there.

  The bath had enough bubbles to satisfy Emma’s modesty, but she’d drawn the line at having the maidens actually undress her. They respected her wishes — which was a damn good thing, because otherwise there was no way she could keep them from knowing about the gun. It now sat buried in the pile of her clothing, old on the bottom, new borrowed stuff on top, the gun snug between the folds. The innocuous pile sat next to the long oriental screen which Emma had undressed behind.

  She might have to share a bathroom with thirteen ocelot maidens, but at least she had been allowed to use the perfectly modern toilet all by herself. That had been a blast.

  Emma blinked sweat out of the corner of her eye; the bath was almost unbearably hot, and the steam turned the room into a sauna. The smoky skin of the maidens glistened, but the heat didn’t seem to affect them. Then again, they were all half naked, and they weren’t in the water. They perched around the rim of the sunken tub, listening with wide eyes and solemn little faces as Felani spoke to Emma.

  “Caller of the Blood,” Felani said with a rich, rolling accent. She passed a glass jug to the maiden behind Emma, which the maiden then filled from the faucet and began rinsing Emma’s hair with. “This is not only your title, but the very power which marks you, which is yours to summon. You may not be able to use it yet, you may not know where it comes from, but it is inside you, much like the beast inside all shapechangers.”

  Emma tipped her head back and endured the annoyance of someone else washing her hair, blinking water off the ends of her lashes, watching Felani intently. “Caller of the blood. What does it mean to call blood?”

  Felani looked at her, face suffused with alien knowledge. “It is an ancient expression which has lost much with the translation. To call blood is to call forth the essence of life. It is not literal, you understand. Magical, if that makes more sense to your modern sensibilities.” She bent a hand to the water in the tub, and idly trailed fingers through the fro
thy bubbles. Perspiration glittered on her dusky skin. “To speak of blood in this sense,” she continued, gaze far away, “Is to speak of the thing which makes us what we are, the energy, the spirit, the mystical force, yet these terms denote something outside of the physical. You humans have many words for it, many ways of separating the physical from the magical, but we have only one term to stand for all. To call blood, is to call forth the magical in the physical, for that is what the beast is.”

  The maiden met Emma’s eyes. “The power to call the magic in the blood is not what makes you the caller of the blood, however. All shapechangers have the power to call, though in most, it is diluted, so that it is merely a whispering of power. But the older and more powerful of us can truly call it if their will and their blood is strong enough. That is how rulers are born and made.” Felani paused, studying Emma. “Only you, however, will be able to speak to that power universally. That is your birthright.” Her face softened. “It is all right. We do not expect you to understand.”

  Emma gnawed at her lip. The thing was, she did understand. She didn’t just understand, hell, she knew what it felt like, to put her hands into the magic Felani spoke of, to feel something inside of her reach out to it and touch it — to use it to save her best friend’s life. Of course, she didn’t understand how she was supposed to do it without help. At the motel, Telly had opened the way for her — and despite his and Anton’s explanations, she still didn’t know what he had done. How the hell was she supposed to learn how to do it on her own?

  “Why can’t I open the call myself, if I’m supposed to be the caller of the blood.”

  There was a long pause, and Emma looked up from contemplating the bubbles to find a strange expression on Felani’s face. Something like embarrassment. Something wary. Felani shifted uncomfortably on the edge of the tub, the movement echoed by the rest of the maidens.

  Emma was missing something here. She narrowed her gaze at Felani. Hard to look tough in a tub full of bubbles, but she gave it her best. “Tell me why. Please.” She ground out the last word between clenched teeth as the atmosphere in the room managed to somehow grow heavier. Given the amount of steam already hanging in the still air, it was a feat.