The Wild Rites Saga Omnibus 01 to 04

by Anna McIlwraith

  “All of you.” Seshua shifted Alan in his arms, and Emma spotted the gun in Seshua’s other hand, held against Alan’s temple, the dull black of the metal barely visible against Seshua’s cobalt skin.

  “We are all that remain conscious.” Hearing his voice, Emma suddenly recognized Robert, Alan’s personal assistant. The small plain man was unassuming as ever, save for the assault rifle strapped to his body. Robert held his hands out at his sides. “Even your senses can detect the truth of what I say,” he said to Seshua. “There are four more of our men, three wounded, one dead.”

  Seshua hoisted Alan higher. “Drop your weapons.” The men exchanged glances, then let their weapons clatter to the floor. Seshua relaxed visibly, but Emma knew it was a lie. He cocked his head, like he was scenting the air, or listening to something no one else could hear. “Aye,” he said finally. “You do not lie. Now tell me, if you want your lord to live, what brings you to my sanctuary to steal away my prize?”

  Robert blinked, face blank. He glanced at Emma, the first one to even acknowledge she was there. “You ask as though you don’t intend to kill us all anyway.”

  Alan gurgled, and Seshua growled. Emma took a shaky step forward.

  “Not if I have anything to do with it,” she said.

  Seshua’s head came around and he pinned her with a dark look. “Pequeña , get away from here. It’s not safe for you.” Judging by the look on his face, he was the one she wasn’t safe from if she didn’t get her ass back under cover.

  She balled her hands into fists. “Do they want me dead?” She gestured towards Robert and the other men. “If they’d wanted me dead, they would have shot me when I first walked out in front of them all, and none of this would have happened.”

  Seshua made a frustrated noise, somewhere between a groan and a snarl. His black mane bristled, and his grip on Alan tightened. Alan’s heels scraped at the floor.

  Emma swallowed audibly. “Let them go. After they tell you what you want to know, let them go.”

  “Emma…” Seshua snapped his teeth together. “They have brought violence to my people.” He bit the words out. “This one captured your mind and would have destroyed it, merely to possess you.”

  She set her shoulders. “I can’t let you kill them. Just because they turned out to be… Not who I thought they were, doesn’t mean I can watch you kill them.” Even if they’d killed people. Even if thinking about Alan’s earlier mind-fuck did scare the everloving shit out of her.

  Seshua’s eyes burned electric blue. “You are human and I am not. I deal with threats to my security however I see fit, and I say they die.” Seshua hiked Alan higher up against his chest and repositioned the gun.

  “No! ” she screamed, and everyone jumped. Seshua glared at her, outraged. She met his stare with her own. “Your way gains you nothing but revenge, but my way gets you information. They can’t talk when they’re dead, and they won’t talk if they know that’s how they’re going to end up.”

  “I don’t care about information.” Seshua’s voice dropped an octave, and his power seeped out from him like a hot, humid wind. He was finally losing control, or letting it go. His beast breathed through the room and it wanted blood. Emma took a deep breath of the suddenly hot, damp air, and braced herself.

  “I care, Seshua. I want to know why they’re here. I want to know why I’ve never known that Alan —” she closed her mouth, opened it, tried again. “Seshua. If I watch you kill the man I’ve been dating for the past three months, it will break me.” She took another few steps forward, held his gaze, tried to make him understand. “I won’t come back from something like that. I won’t come back to you, ever.”

  His face turned arrogant. “I can make you.”

  She shook her head. “No, you can’t. You can kidnap me again, you can hold me here forever, but you can’t fix me if I break inside. Do you understand me?” She tasted blood, realized it was running out of her hair and down her face. Charming. She clenched her jaw. “Seshua, do you understand?”

  He was silent a long time, face fighting to stay blank and arrogant, but finally he let out an anguished growl and a string of curses in Spanish that Emma had no hope of translating. “Fine, we will have it your way.” He did not sound happy about it. “They will go free when they tell us why they have come — and you and I will negotiate the price later, of my granting you such a grace.”

  Emma ignored that last; he could think what he liked.

  Seshua pinned Robert with a look that told him just how unhappy he really was. A bigger man might have flinched, but Robert stayed staunch.

  “Your word that we are left alive and go free?” said Robert.

  “My word that you are left alive and go free, if you answer our questions and then drive away from here and never return. If you dare to come back here, my people will eat you alive, and then nothing my little human can say will save your sorry hides.”

  Robert nodded. Emma ventured the last remaining steps until she stood less than ten paces from the king. Fury radiated off him in waves of charged air, like a mild electrical current, like the feel of a battery against the tip of her tongue.

  Alan stirred, turned his head towards her, and with one open eye he gazed at her. She trembled, but his gaze was just his gaze; no crushing force behind it, no push at the edge of her mind. He looked half dead already, pale and waxen and bloodied, but he was still Alan.

  “Is this why we were dating?” she asked him, feeling small and stupid but needing to know. “Did you know all along what I was, was it all just a lie?”

  Alan licked his lips slowly, but said nothing. Robert cleared his throat.

  “We suspected,” Robert answered for him. “But we were never sure. Your meeting was coincidence. Alan only began to wonder later. It was not engineered.”

  “Bullshit.” Coincidence. She knew about coincidence.

  “I speak only the truth. Why would I lie? It makes no difference to him whether you think your relationship was genuine or not.” He sounded so reasonable. She would never know if it was the truth.

  She turned to address Robert directly. “Did you know about Ricky?”

  He nodded. “Yes. Everything.”

  She stared at Robert for a moment, feeling Seshua growing steadily more restless. She decided she didn’t know how else to say it, and just spat it out. “Are you vampires?”

  Robert’s calm veneer faltered. He licked his lips. “I am not.”

  Emma narrowed her eyes. “But is he?” She jerked her chin at Alan.

  “We don’t use that name. Alan’s kind is known as aneshtev —”

  “But is it true?”

  “Somewhat,” Robert hedged.

  “Somewhat?”

  “It is complicated, and my lord bleeds out onto the floor while we talk.” Robert let out a frustrated breath and looked at Alan, whose one open eye now showed only white.

  “Shit,” she said with feeling. “Seshua?” He looked at her and his face was blank, neutral. He obviously didn’t care if Alan died in his arms or not. “You can take it from here,” she said.

  He never missed a beat. “Do you know what she is?” Robert looked like he didn’t want to answer. “Do you?”

  “She is the one you name the caller of the blood,” Robert said carefully.

  Seshua growled as though he couldn’t help himself. “And why do you want her?”

  Robert answered too quickly. “Anything that can control an enemy is valuable.”

  Seshua narrowed his eyes. “That’s a very sensitive thing to volunteer, under your circumstances. Tell me why you want her, and do not lie to me.”

  Robert licked his lips again, glanced down at Alan for a long moment. Then he lifted his eyes to Seshua, and they were very grave. “Kill me if you must. I won’t answer you this truthfully, not at any cost, and any other answer I could give you would not satisfy you. Know that if you do choose to kill us, you will pay the price for it in the lives of your own people.”

 
Emma gaped at him. He was willing to die rather than give that information away, whatever it was — or he was banking on Emma having a tighter hold on Seshua’s leash than she actually did. Seshua looked like he was trying to decide whether he was happy Robert was giving him an excuse to kill him, or unnerved to be facing a fight with people who had nothing to lose.

  Anton saved him the trouble. “I hate to interrupt, guys,” he called out from behind the bar. “But Alexi’s dying.”

  34

  Seshua swore emphatically. “Bring him out here,” he called, then turned his attention to Robert. “Get out of my sanctuary, and do not return. Rest assured that by the time you’ve found a way to save your lord’s life, my forces will be restored, and by the time you can even think to coordinate another attack, I and all of value that I possess will no longer be here. Your kind will not catch us so unawares again.”

  Heart in her mouth, Emma turned at the sound of movement behind her and found Anton and Ricky dragging Alexi around the other end of the bar, pulling him by the shoulders. Why weren’t they carrying him? Then again, they looked terrible; hair matted and clumped with ash and plaster dust, skin smeared with soot and blood. A lump rose in Emma’s throat; at least they’re alive, for fuck’s sake . She clamped down on the wild voice in the corner of her mind that threatened to start screaming and never stop. Had to keep it together.

  Seshua dropped Alan and the body slumped sacklike to the floor. The king stood to his full height, towering above the bar, long toes gripping the counter top. “Take him. Leave your weapons.” The king held out a hand and a guard obediently handed him a much bigger gun from behind the bar. Robert crept forward and, with Seshua’s two guns trained at the top of his head, bent to gather Alan into his arms.

  The smaller man lifted Alan like a sack of wet, red rags and straightened, the muzzle of a submachine gun in his face. He didn’t bother to look up at Seshua, but turned to Emma. The look he gave her was plain and unsettling. It said he’d be seeing her again, no matter what the king said, and something in her chest gave a sickening twist. She had a feeling she’d be having a fit of hysterics about this sometime later. Then Alan and his men were escorted at a distance from the Roadhouse by some of Seshua’s remaining guards — who didn’t look happy about it.

  The front doors — what was left of them — closed behind Alan’s men and one of the jaguar guards turned to Seshua. He looked like he couldn’t believe they’d just let the enemy walk out. “Shall I activate the day armor?” Seshua nodded and the guard crossed quickly to the end of the bar where the door led to the back rooms of the Roadhouse. He disappeared.

  A moment later there was a terrible sound, metal crashing down around their ears, as steel shutters slammed down along every inside wall of the Roadhouse. But Emma barely noticed, because Ricky and Anton had finally stretched Alexi out on the bullet and glass-strewn floor, and his broken body was all she could look at.

  Sweet. Merciful. Mother of God. Emma’s knees wobbled hotly. So much worse than Alan.

  Alexi’s stomach and sternum looked like they had simply exploded from the inside out; organs bulged out of the red and white soup that should have been muscle and connective tissue. His torso was an open mess, but worse, Emma could see his body trying to knit itself back together. Strings of flesh and ligament crawled slowly across the gleaming ruin of him, only to dissolve like cotton candy, as though his body simply couldn’t summon the strength to heal itself.

  Alexi’s jaw strained as he clenched his teeth in silent agony, his brilliant yellow eyes staring up at nothing, watering. His skin mottled, deep shades of green and black and gray, and scales shone iridescent in the low light from sputtering electrical banks and the burning remains of the stage. His features were still human, but his body didn’t want to be. It wanted to change. But it couldn’t.

  “What happened to him?” Emma felt her voice like her ears were stuffed with cotton. Numbly, she saw the door that led from the back rooms of the Roadhouse swing open, saw Fern stagger through, naked and dirty. He stopped. Instantly his mind was a warm, quiet presence in hers, but he stayed against the wall.

  Emma walked over to Alexi on legs that were the only steady part of her body. Ricky and Anton looked up at her. Even their faces were white with shock, beneath the blood smears.

  Seshua was suddenly a hot presence behind her. “Exploding rounds,” he said calmly. “If you were going to hunt dinosaurs, you’d do it with the ammunition the vampires were packing.”

  Emma looked up at Seshua’s face, and horror burned the back of her throat. She had been the one to spare them. She didn’t like Alexi, and didn’t understand why he seemed to hate her — but would she have spared Alan and Robert, knowing what they’d done to him?

  “He can’t survive,” Seshua said. “He shielded my body with his own, took the worst of it, did his duty even though we have never held any great love for each other.” The king knelt, looked Alexi plainly in the eye, and when he spoke his voice was heavy and rough. “You will be buried as befits a great warrior, serpent priest.” Seshua stood up, and motioned to one of his guards.

  “Wait,” said Emma, but the king ignored her. He took the curved sword that the guard held out to him. “What are you doing?”

  “He can’t survive, but his body will try. I will end it so he can die with dignity.” Seshua went to push past her, but she planted her feet.

  “You can’t be serious,” she snapped. “You have to let him try to heal. Telly was hurt almost as bad, and he healed.” Didn’t he? Emma looked around frantically for a second, but Telly was already on his way over. He left the woman and the two boys with another man who had appeared and was comforting them, and approached, his bare upper body whole and perfect.

  “See? Why can’t Alexi heal like that?”

  Telly took her hand. “I wasn’t shot up as bad as he is. And,” he dropped his voice, “I’m not the same kind of creature. I’m not technically a shapechanger. I can heal a lot of things, but for him, this is a killing wound. His body can’t knit the damage, can’t regenerate the tissue and replenish all that blood, not all at once.”

  “Don’t you people keep any medical equipment around here, for emergencies?” Her voice got louder and louder. “If we could transfuse him wouldn’t he —”

  “There’s no such thing as a transfusion for a shapechanger. It sucks, but you have to let them finish it, Emma.” Telly squeezed her hand, but it wasn’t comforting. She shook him off.

  “That’s totally unacceptable. You can help him change. Can’t any of you help him?” She looked around and didn’t like what she saw; pity, regret, resignation. Useless , she fumed mentally. Coward bastards —

  Seshua went to touch her and pulled his hand up short. “He’s too powerful. The only ones close enough to Alexi to be able to connect to him and call his change are the rest of the serpent priesthood, and they remain in South America. If he cannot change on his own, then none of us here can help him.”

  Oh, yeah? “What about me?”

  Seshua hesitated, his face unreadable. “You have no connection to him,” he finally said. “Your powers are not yet active. I don’t think you could do it, pequeña .”

  “You don’t think?” She stared into his face, and he stayed silent — electric blue eyes soft with pity. With condescension.

  That did it. She dropped to the ground beside Alexi, and the smell of his blood rose all around her, laced with the dirtier, nastier smell of ruptured organs. Her vision swam for a second, and her throat convulsed, but she hung on.

  “Pequeña , you can’t —”

  “Either help me, Seshua, or leave me alone.” She looked up at him, had to crane her neck to see his face. “What is your problem? Why won’t you try?”

  Seshua balled his hands into fists, his grip on the sword handle making the leather creak, nostrils flaring with frustration. “You do not understand. He would not want this. Rouse him and see for yourself.”

  Alexi’s eyelids fluttered
, only a slim line of white visible beneath them. He didn’t seem conscious. Anton and Ricky had peeled the linen shirt away from his ruined body as much as they were able; Emma reached out and touched his bare shoulder. His skin was freezing.

  “Alexi?” Emma said. His eyes opened; they rolled and then found her. He stared at her for a heartbeat. Then, without warning, he burst into frenzied motion, bucked, pushed himself away from her, breath wheezing, massacred chest and stomach bubbling and slopping about.

  “Alexi, stop!” He was going to upend all of his internal organs out onto the floor, and that was something Emma did not want to see. “Stop it!”

  He stopped, or lost the strength to keep going, but his eyes stared out of his waxen face in horror. He croaked, choked, coughed up blood and spat it out. “Keep away from me.” His voice sounded like he’d eaten glass.

  Emma stared at him, dumbfounded.

  “I know what you’re thinking, I can hear it.” Alexi swallowed, and something in his open chest gurgled. “I would rather die than owe my life to you. Seshua,” he glanced up at the king. “Do it. Finish it now.”

  Seshua looked from Alexi to Emma.

  Alexi roared. “You bastard!” His face contorted with pain and rage, and a flicker of his power seemed to flutter in the air and then subside like a passing breeze. The anger remained, smoldering in his eyes.

  “Alexi,” Seshua began, but never got the chance to finish.

  “Do not presume to reason with me, Seshua, you are hers already!” Alexi choked again, grimacing. Then he turned that terrible look on Emma. “You see? I will not allow you to touch me. Everything you touch is —” he broke off, coughing. Finally he licked blood off his lower lip and closed his lids over burning yellow eyes, panting. His voice when he spoke again was a mere thread of sound. “It was his own fault.”

  Emma frowned. Was he talking to her? He opened his eyes again, and they were fixed on hers. Okay, so he was talking to her. “I can smell it on you. He tried to invoke the ritual, and only got halfway.” He laughed softly, and Emma began to understand. “You accepted. Altar to your sacrifice, worthy vessel; keeper, caretaker, commander. He cannot help but give you what you want.” Alexi sneered and it turned into a grimace as he drew a long, wheezing breath. “I’ll not be yours. Not even a little. Stay away from me and let me die.”