The Wild Rites Saga Omnibus 01 to 04

by Anna McIlwraith

  Somewhere a voice inside her started chanting that this wasn’t happening, wasn’t happening, wasn’t happening — Alan planted her butt on the unforgiving chill steel table, hand still in her hair, and reached across his hips with a hand hooked into claws and this wasn’t happening and he tore his slacks from his own body one-handed, they fell like a shed skin, underwear with them, and this couldn’t be happening and —

  “Do you offer yourself as sacrifice,” he said, lips red, fangs white, “Your blood upon the altar of my body, your spirit upon the altar of my will?”

  Grief and denial knifed through Emma with a physical weight, twisting her like a rag. Black dots swarmed her vision. And then her mind flashed on a memory so crystalline it nearly cut her: Telly’s face so close to hers their lips nearly touched, his eyes white with power, their light warm like sunshine. I want to give you something , he’d said, there on the stones of the jaguar king’s sanctuary in the moments before he’d taken her out of this world and tied her to him forever. There’s a door inside, a wall. You don’t know it’s there, but you can open it. Just think of it. Just bring it down for me.

  For a second she thought she smelled engine oil beneath the blood. She thought, just bring it down for me. She caught the echo of someone screaming like it was the end of the world, and it sounded like Fern. She looked at Alan, met his eyes, stared down the yawning void of his gaze and knew she would never be ready.

  “Yes,” she said, clenching her teeth. “Yes, I do.”

  Magic seized them both, pure and hot like molten iron pouring in a rush from her to him. Emma shut her eyes and drove her nails into Alan’s arm, and then he dragged her forward and slammed her onto her back and finished it. She wasn’t ready, never would be, and she shrieked and hit him with her weak left fist. He thrust forward again, huge and painful, grabbed her wrist and held it down. Then he bent over her and sank his teeth into the skin just above her breast.

  Her blood hit the air and the world went red. Magic pulsed like an electric shock from the soles of Emma’s feet to her aching scalp. And then it all stopped.

  All of it.

  Gone.

  Emma blinked.

  Where the hell was she? Where had she been?

  Why couldn’t she remember?

  She tried to flex toes she couldn’t feel. Tried to focus in a darkness so pure it hurt. Her heart seemed to slam in her chest with an uneven beat, not a pulse at all but a muted tide that tugged and pulled out of time with her breath. She couldn’t quite feel her legs; she was weightless, held suspended, and the only thing anchoring her was a dull, cold throb just south of her stomach that made her skin crawl if she thought about it too much.

  In fact, there was something she ought to be thinking about, something she ought to remember, if she just tried hard enough — something bad. Something terrible. The worst thing. Her mind shied away from it though, the same way her hands paused just shy of her stomach when she —

  She could feel her hands — she could feel the mark on her hand, hot and crawling with life. It was like that thought made the rest of the world solid: light bled into being, soft and red. Something like sand swirled and hardened under knees. Warm air lifted her wet hair away from her shoulders and face, tasting of stone and moisture and smoke, a humid smell, a smell like fire underground — and then the sound of distant drums hit her, and the sloping cave walls swam into focus, and recognition brought hot, shocked tears to her eyes.

  I’m there, she thought, looking down at her right hand. The river beneath the river. The place out of time where only gods walked — the place Telly had taken her when he gave her the mark.

  It couldn’t be.

  The black starburst mark in her palm pulsed with unearthly red light, glowing and flickering, and the sensation was like holding a giant moth in her fist. She realized the mark was the source of the light. With shaking legs, she stood.

  From somewhere behind her, a dry male voice said, “Emma.”

  Her shoulders sagged with disappointment. Her abdomen gave a hard, twisting throb, and she swayed. “You’re not Telly.”

  She heard footsteps — two sets, whispering in the sand that covered the cave floor. “No.” The voice this time was female, heavy with compassion and regret. It made Emma’s heart hurt. Displaced air swirled and eddied around her, caressing her bare skin — Wait a minute, she thought. She looked down: she was naked. Why hadn’t she noticed that before? She wrapped her arms around herself, unable to summon the energy to feel embarrassed. All she felt was cold, in spite of the warm air.

  She kept her head down, stared at the dim shape of her feet, and didn’t know she was going to ask until the words were out. “Is he here?”

  The rough edge of a skirt or robe swished into view, stopped. The fabric looked dark. It pooled around bare, clawed toes, and Emma’s heart sped like an afterthought.

  “No,” said the robed figure in a male voice. “He’s not.” Emma heard the shifting whisper of flesh and fabric at her other side, but couldn’t bring herself to look away from those clawed toes. She didn’t really want to see. If it wasn’t Telly, she didn’t want to see.

  “Then what am I doing here?” The red light of Emma’s marked hand dimmed to embers. Her skin flushed with goosebumps and her vision darkened. Unbidden, her gorge rose, and dull pain bloomed between her legs, but her entire body felt as though it wasn’t altogether there, like it was somewhere else — and if it was somewhere else —

  “No, no no no,” the female crooned — and then what felt like a blanket landed on Emma’s shoulders, firm hands smoothing it down, tucking it under her chin. “You have to stay for a little while. Telheshtevanne is not here, Emma, but he would want you to stay.” Strong, feminine fingers took Emma’s chin in their grip and lifted her face. “If he knew, he would want that very much.”

  Emma met the eyes of the female, and stopped breathing. The hair was longer, blond, and dead straight, and the eyes had more of an upward tilt, and the bridge of her nose was thicker — but it was Emma’s face. Not the reflection Emma recognized in the mirror every morning, not her real face, but somehow she knew it was her true face.

  Red light flared in a blinding burst from Emma’s right hand. She closed a shaking fist on it, muting the glow. “You’re me,” she said, voice wavering.

  The woman shook her head. “No.” She smiled, an off-kilter version of the smile Emma sometimes saw in photographs. “But we wear the same face, because the gods are sentimental about these things.”

  As though that made any sense. “Are you a god?”

  Almond-shaped eyes darkened; the creases at the corners of the woman’s mouth deepened, turned the smile mysterious. “No.”

  Emma remembered to breathe, and glanced at the robed figure beside her. Two hands, weathered and brown, were clasped in front, and a cavernous hood hid the features of the male from view; in the flickering red light, it looked like there was nothing inside the hood but night.

  Emma glanced back at the woman who wore her face. “Is he?”

  The hooded figure said, “No.” With a hint of warmth that might have been laughter. Emma shot him an unfriendly look — the gods tended to have a weird idea of what constituted a joke. Of course, he said he wasn’t a god.

  That didn’t mean she should believe him.

  She took a deep breath and drew the blanket tighter about her shoulders. Her wrists hurt, her head throbbed. Damn it, something was seriously wrong here. “If you’re not gods and neither am I, and gods didn’t bring me here, then what the hell am I doing here? Telly —” her voice broke, she swallowed, went on. “He told me only gods walked the river beneath the river, and the only reason he could take me here was because he was a walking god. Different.”

  Emma’s doppelganger nodded, parted her lips to speak, but a wave of nausea hit Emma. She doubled over, her vision swam for a moment, and she had to blink until the world stopped spinning. She felt weak, light headed, and her insides…they ached.

  S
he focused on the woman. “I don’t feel right. What’s happening to me?”

  The woman’s dark eyes narrowed and flicked up as she glanced at the hooded man. Her gaze came back to Emma. “You are coming to power. The gods have seen fit to grant it to you personally. That is why I was summoned.”

  Coming to power. The ritual. The ritual. She knew what that meant, but there was a blank, colorless hole in her mind where the knowledge belonged.

  “And who are you?” Emma asked.

  The woman smiled with Emma’s smile. “My name is Arima. I was the last caller of the blood. The one who died.”

  Emma’s fingers went nerveless and the blanket slipped. She clutched at it clumsily. “The last.” Arima nodded. Emma shook her head. “Nobody ever told me there was another.” She swallowed past the feel of her heartbeat climbing her throat, sluggish and wrong. “They never told me about you. I don’t understand. The prophecy, if it was fulfilled, why —”

  The hooded man said, “Arima was taken before her time. That is why we are here now.” Arima looked up at the robed figure, face serene, and the man’s voice went on. “To ensure it does not happen so with you.”

  Emma opened her mouth to speak, but Arima held up a hand. Her eyes turned glassy and bright. “I never had the chance to use my power,” she said, and glanced up at the hooded figure. “For anything other than to bind him to me, keep him with me, for all time.” Sharpness flickered across her features, twisted, turned bitter. “I was afraid,” she said almost to herself. Then her face softened, and then she turned back to Emma. “It will be different for you. You are better. You will survive.”

  Emma’s heart beat faster. “What do you mean? Different how? Survive what? ” She looked from Arima to the hooded man and back again, panic curling high in her stomach. Her vision dimmed again. Something low, deep within the cradle of her hips, twisted with a bright and crystalline agony. She sucked in a breath. “What the hell is happening to me?”

  Arima moved closer to Emma, close enough for Emma to smell woodsmoke and some dark perfume she couldn’t place. Arima’s voice echoed as though from the bottom of a well. “You are still human, and we are not gods. We cannot summon you to the river whole.” The corners of the woman’s mouth turned down. “Your body…We have kept you from remembering. You have been brave. But you must remember now, and go back.”

  Without knowing, Emma knew — awareness swirled within her, dim shapes behind a veil. She smelled cologne and copper and meat, sucked her breath in, heard a sound in her mind like the echo of an animal bellowing rage to the sky. Arima leaned forward and rested her brow against Emma’s.

  “I’m afraid,” Emma said.

  Arima reached up, smoothed hair away from Emma’s face. “It will not be the same for you. That, at least, I can do.”

  Emma felt herself slipping away, magic like a tide, pulling at her abdomen, something huge and hungry rushing along behind it. Like an avalanche. “What do you mean?”

  Lips brushed her forehead. “You’ll see.”

  Emma heard klaxons howling a deafening alarm, and then there was one blinding second of sheer, screaming terror as she fell back into her body, Alan’s hands pinning her down, Alan hulking massive over her, face smeared with her blood and eyes wild with golden insanity.

  Then their eyes met, locked, and Emma knew what to do .

  His eyes widened. His rhythm faltered. A frown began in the crease between his eyebrows. Emma locked her ankles behind Alan’s legs, clenched her body around him, and grinned.

  “I’m back,” she said, and bit him on the face.

  Cheek and lip and the crease of his mouth gave way beneath her blunt teeth. Alan snarled in her ear, deafening, and reared back; Emma’s jaw spasmed with the effort of hanging on, but then Alan’s blood jumped into her mouth and mingled with her own and sealed the magic of the ritual, and power like a furnace sun hit them both.

  Alan roared in shock, slammed his hands against the steel table, helpless to stop now, she could feel it. She heard the heavy vibration of adrenalin and elation and fear thrumming through his thoughts as though they were her own — and for a moment she couldn’t breathe with the weight of him in her head, cold gold light battling the scorch of magic roaring through her body. It filled her up, pushed at her skin, tighter and tighter; her lungs expanded with a tidal gasp, she exhaled and screamed but it wasn’t enough, there was too much, she had to do something had to get rid of it —

  A door inside her opened, and everything she was ever meant to be rushed out to meet the power, and suddenly she didn’t need to think about it. She reached out with the magic of the caller of the blood, her mind and heart uncoiling, and opened the call.

  It broke over them in a freezing flood and Alan screamed again, face white and eyes pure gold with panicked fury. “Stop!” Terror broke his voice. “Emma, the call, stop it! ”

  She ignored him, barely heard him, didn’t want him, didn’t care about him.

  She wanted Katenka .

  Dim little flicker of light, cherry scent like rotten fruit. Emma poured magic down the bond of the pledge and drowned the girl in it, filled her with it, dark and ripe and shining — for a second she tasted sweet, clean blossom, but then Alan jerked her forward and slammed her back against the table and her head connected with steel. The world turned black, shot with pulsing gold, and when she opened her eyes again and feeling came back to her body Alan had hold of her hair and he snarled into her face with a double row of thick, white fangs.

  “You will obey me, caller of the blood.” His thoughts like blood, thick and red, but no longer heavy enough to drown in. His anger beat at her but couldn’t bruise.

  She opened her mouth, laughed with a voice that wasn’t sane, sucked in a breath to say, no, when one of the chamber walls blew in. Concrete and plaster spewed outward, fragments flying at Emma and Alan, his body protecting hers from the worst — and then, in a howling gale that had nothing to do with nature, the dust cleared.

  Alan drew away and then grabbed her by the arm, started to drag her off the table, but her legs wouldn’t work and pain speared through her. But she barely noticed any of it, because Alexi, pale and terrible, stalked through the blown-out wall and over the rubble and roared.

  Then he flung his hand out, and Alan’s chest exploded. Gore splattered Emma in warm chunks. Alan staggered back, his hand convulsing around Emma’s arm, and he pulled her from the table even though bits of rib and lung were flapping around something purple that pulsed like a heart, was a heart.

  Emma’s heart began to slow — Alan was trying to stop himself bleeding out. She realized almost too late what that meant.

  Alexi came towards them, hair flying in the hurricane of his own magic, and cold power hit her and washed over her like the march of a million frozen teeth. Alan made a noise like nothing Emma ever heard before, rage and pain and the promise of death. She felt Alexi’s mind hit Alan’s and the result was like being flash boiled in acid: Alan’s mind flared golden, molten, furious and vast and then it locked down away from Alexi’s power. But it wasn’t going to be enough; Alexi came at them, incandescent with pale green light, scars slashing his face into livid lines of fury and eyes like miniature blazing suns.

  Alan jerked Emma from the table and staggered backwards with her, she stumbled, and the world burst apart in running rainbows of color exploding behind her eyes. Her skin screamed in the freezing grip of the call and it was all she could do to keep breathing. She forced her heart to beat faster and pushed to her feet, turned to Alexi, the sight of him so bright and terrible it made her eyes water.

  She didn’t realize she was reaching out with her mind, with her power, her power, until she did so. ALEXI, YOU CAN’T KILL HIM! THE RITUAL, WE’LL BOTH DIE! A second later the shock of it hit her: her whole body thrummed and sang with the glorious feel of her mind touching his — he was heat and steel and coil upon coil of loss and longing and grief — and something blank and black and hungry, some deathless yawning maw of ha
tred, and everything in Emma yearned towards it.

  Shock transformed the glowing marble of Alexi’s face. His mind roared to a deafening boil, eyes narrowed to twin orange slits. Those narrow blazing eyes flickered over Emma for a second, then squeezed shut, and when he opened them next his mouth twisted with feral intensity, the scars like lightning jagging across his flesh.

  He heaved the steel table aside and sent it flying into the adjacent wall, plaster and concrete raining down. “Let her go, ” Alexi hissed at Alan.

  Alan hissed back, nothing human about it, a ragged chunk of skin flapping at the corner of his mouth. “She is mine. ” His hand bit into Emma’s arm, jerked her back a few more steps. “ And you are dead. You cannot kill me, and you cannot kill every last one of my men. Whatever you are playing at, it’s not —”

  Crashing glass drowned out his next words as the observation window to the holding cell exploded outward, a crystalline storm with a white wolf at its center. Emma’s heart leapt, then soared; Katenka sailed through the air and landed four to the floor and skidded, gathering herself, muzzle wrinkling in a broad grinning snarl and then she was airborne again. If Alan ever had a chance to move he didn’t take it, and Katenka smashed into him, her shrill roar of triumph like terrible, wonderful music.

  Emma spun away as Alan went down, and she landed in glass and pebbled shards of concrete. She barely felt it. Her entire body was electrified and pulsing, power coursing through her in a swift red flood, golden light shivering at the edge of her vision, Alan’s thoughts pushing through her, and Katenka’s clean animal triumph cutting through that, and Alexi, white-hot beneath the ice of his power, descending on her like a storm, like —