The Wild Rites Saga Omnibus 01 to 04

by Anna McIlwraith

  She didn’t give voice to the other fears. Like the feeling that he was fed up with her for taking her role in the shapechanger’s world so seriously. Or the cold voice in her head that told her very quietly that he probably thought she was ruined now, after Russia.

  “It’s the proximity to the rest of the jaguars,” Anton said. When Emma stopped and blinked up at him, he gave her a nudge with his hand on her lower back to get her moving again, just like he would’ve before Russia. “Like you said, it’s been five months. Before we came here — before I found you guys — Ricky had suppressed the change for a long time, to make himself harder to track. He’d been doing it the whole time he’d known you, going as long as he could without changing, then skipping town for a few hours to take the shape of his beast when he couldn’t hold off any longer.”

  Yeah, and didn’t that just burn a little? Before Anton showed up, she’d thought she was the one person who really knew Ricky, and all the while he’d been living a secret life. Partly it was to prevent anyone from his past from finding him — but it had also been because he suspected, in his heart, what Emma was, and he was trying to protect her, too.

  They came to a stop at the post and rail fence. Emma couldn’t see the horses; they would be over the rise, at the bottom of the pasture where autumn rain runoff had encouraged thick, sweet grasses.

  “I don’t get it,” Emma said, shielding her eyes from the sun so she could look Anton in the face. “Isn’t he doing better now that he isn’t suppressing his beast? I thought this was better for him.”

  “It is,” Anton said. “But what I’m saying is, you always knew him as mostly human Ricky. Now he’s less human. And he’s surrounded by the rest of us. Some of us are a lot less human than others.” He said it matter of fact. “Increased aggression, quicker temper. Possessiveness.”

  “So you’re saying…”

  “That shapechangers are assholes.” Anton raised his eyebrows. “You’re telling me you hadn’t noticed?”

  Emma tried to look innocent. “I thought it was just you guys.”

  He laughed, another genuine laugh — that was twice now. “Seriously though. We’re worse, because we’re cats. Overcrowding stresses us out, and stress makes us aggressive. The wolves and the jackals evolved to live in packs — we didn’t.”

  Emma nodded. “But in human books and movies, it’s always the wolves painted as the vicious ones. Even though real wolves live in extended family units, and form close bonds, and cooperate on a daily basis.” The wolves she’d met in Russia were definitely vicious, but there seemed to be an order to it — as opposed to the jaguars’ incessant bitching and snarling and tail swishing.

  Ricky had never been like that, though. Emma hugged herself against the cold; the temperature seemed to have dropped, although the sky was still cloudless.

  “Here.” Anton shrugged out of his blue flannel shirt, baring his loaded shoulder rig and wrist sheathes with knives the length of Emma’s forearms, and offered the shirt to her. “Unless you wanna head back inside.”

  “No.” She took it. “I mean thanks, I think I’ll stay out for a while, wait for the horses.” The shirt was deliciously warm, which was good, and smelled like Anton — like weapons and citrus and some faint, dark cologne — which was something. Emma didn’t know if it was good.

  Anton crossed his arms as much as his rig would allow, and looked back toward the house, giving Emma way too good an opportunity to observe how much muscle he’d packed on over the last five months of training at the ranch. Then he looked back and caught her staring. Whoops.

  He frowned. “Something wrong?”

  “I don’t know. Are you even supposed to have muscles, y’know —” she sketched a hand through the air near his upper arm. “Like all up in there?”

  He raised an eyebrow. “You’re not the only one who’s been training to let off steam the past month.”

  Suddenly embarrassed, Emma cleared her throat. “Training with Red,” she started to explain, but he cut her off.

  “Is better for you. He pushes you, and doesn’t hold back as much. More important, you don’t hold back with him, which you did with me.”

  “That is not true —”

  “It is,” Anton said, smiling. “It was cute, but it made you hard to train.”

  Before Emma could think of what to say to that, a harsh equine scream cut the air, followed by the thunder of hooves. Emma grabbed the fence rail with both hands, ready to leap over, when four shapes crested the rise of the pasture.

  “Oh my God,” she said. Anton started to laugh.

  Two small wolves — one pure white, the other black and gray — and one shaggy dog sprinted through the yellow gold grass towards Emma and Anton, with Sefu barreling after them, mane and tail flying. The stallion snaked his head down and snapped at the white wolf’s tail; she barked and put on a burst of speed. The gray wolf’s tongue lolled out of his mouth, and he swerved wide to avoid the stallion’s hooves. The dog, who was smarter than the rest of them, loped along out of range with his ears flopping happily.

  Emma backed away fast, Anton following, as Katenka and Rain reached the fence and leapt for their lives, claws tearing up dirt and grass as they launched themselves into the air. Airborne, lean bodies stretched long, ears back and jaws open in matching grins, they were breathtaking. Landing, they were twin balls of rolling fur and flailing legs.

  A moment later, Sefu came to a dramatic halt just inches shy of the fence rail, skidding sideways on all four hooves and tossing his head. The stallion blew the sweat from his nostrils, stretched his neck and head high, and screamed again before whirling to commence his victory dance. Meanwhile, Bruce slowed to an ungainly trot and then squeezed under the fence on his belly, sprawling at Emma’s feet and looking satisfied. A moment later Sefu’s two mares had appeared over the rise, walking at a sedate pace and looking bored, their hindquarters swaying from side to side on every step.

  “Teremun told you not to mess with those horses,” Anton said to the wolves sprawled out in the dirt, sides heaving and mouths open wide. “They grew up with jackals, and they take no shit.”

  Rain rolled to his feet and paced to stand behind Emma, a defensive gesture, but his ears were forward and he was still panting. Emma rubbed his ears where the gray blended to black. Katenka rolled onto her back and proceeded to turn her white coat brown with dirt by twisting from side to side. She made a very ladylike grumbling sound as she did so.

  Some princess.

  Anton lowered himself to his haunches and addressed Katenka directly. “We’re on high alert now, princess. No running the ranch without an escort.”

  Katenka came to all fours with an argumentative look in her green eyes that Emma recognized, and Emma managed to shrug out of Anton’s shirt just as the wolf princess disappeared in a flash of white light and a naked fourteen year-old girl replaced her.

  The glare she turned on Anton was all royalty, though. So was the way she let Emma settle the shirt over her shoulders and fasten the first few buttons without so much as acknowledging Em’s presence.

  “With all the new guards on the ranch, he —” Katenka indicated with a lift of her chin in Rain’s direction, “needs to run, just as I do. The ranch is safe, is it not?”

  Anton had stayed in his crouch, so he had to look up at her. “It is safe, but there’s still a small risk, and you are royalty, the heir to your line, and she —” he nodded towards Emma, “is our world’s axis. Safe isn’t good enough for you, you’re worth too much.”

  It was a good speech, Emma thought. Katenka held Anton’s gaze for a long time, just to let him know she wasn’t truly backing down; she looked wild and unforgiving, even draped in Anton’s shirt. She hadn’t put her arms through the sleeves, as though she was still too wolf to notice them.

  Eventually she looked deliberately away from him and met Emma’s eyes. The first thing she said was in Russian: short, sharp, and with feeling.

  Then in English. “It sucks to b
e us, doesn’t it.” A sniff. “I never would have convinced my father to let me come here if he knew there was a chance the ranch was vulnerable to attack.” Not I never would have come here, just never would have convinced my father. Katenka had been sick her whole life, before Emma came along, and the wolf princess clearly intended to make up for lost time no matter the risks.

  But Emma and the others would never have let Katenka come if it wasn’t safe, either. “It’s just a precaution,” Emma said, burying her fingers in Rain’s fur. “No one who means us harm can get to the ranch.”

  But they were wrong.

  7

  Emma was dreaming. She knew this because it was high summer and she was on her parents’ farm.

  She was striding across the yard with a feed bucket in one hand and the remains of a piece of buttered toast in the other, and her mother’s voice drifted through the mild morning air as Amelia Chase growled at the dogs to behave or they wouldn’t get any damn breakfast. The dogs knew mom’s tone too well to believe her.

  Ahead of Emma, the pastures stretched dry and golden in the dawn light, and the mares danced, tossing their heads and kicking up dust as they caught sight of Emma with the breakfast bucket. Emma banged the bucket with her fist — the toast was gone — and called out a greeting to the mares.

  Her voice was high, thin, and young. So young.

  She was eleven, and it was the morning she left to visit her Aunt Chase in Oregon for the week. Less than two days later the farm would be ashes and her parents would be dead.

  Nope, she wasn’t doing this. She could usually wake herself up from this kind of dream. Come on, wake up, wake up, wake up —

  The horses were gone, the sun was gone. The farm was still there but everything was covered in white — Emma had a bad moment when she thought it was ash, but it wasn’t ash, it was snow.

  Then she was standing in the kitchen of her parents’ home, and everything was still covered in snow — the counter, the refrigerator, the barstool Emma sat on to do her homework, the sink and the faucets and the cupboards, the dishes in the drying rack. There was a light dusting of powder along the tops of the framed drawings hung above the refrigerator; done in crayon by a tiny hand, Emma could no more translate what the images were supposed to represent than she could Egyptian hieroglyphs.

  When she was eleven, those babyish drawings embarrassed her.

  She was not eleven now.

  I know what this is , she said. This isn’t a dream.

  Emma heard a small noise behind her and turned around, and looked straight into a face that was almost her own. The eyes were slightly wider apart, and the bridge of the nose was broader, and the hair framing it was dark blond instead of inky brown.

  Emma’s heart leapt like a startled horse. It was Arima, the last caller of the blood. The one who died.

  Arima , Emma said, caught by hazel-brown eyes the exact same shade as her own. I thought I’d never —

  Arima put her hands on Emma’s shoulders, gaze fierce, and Emma’s voice dried up. The last caller of the blood wore a simple linen shift that left her arms bare, and Emma saw what had not been visible when Arima appeared to her in the other visions — her arms were covered in elaborate, beautiful tattoos of a style that looked almost tribal but was soft and ornamental at the same time. Twisting lines suggested animal shapes, but before Emma could get a good look, Arima shook her.

  Arima, what is it?

  Those hazel-brown eyes blazed; she said not a word, but her grip tightened, and tightened, fingers digging in, and —

  Emma woke up.

  Her breath was loud in the silence, but she didn’t think she’d woken anyone else with her stifled gasp.

  Partly because shapechangers were clingy and partly because the ranch just didn’t have enough beds, Emma shared a king size with Felani, Fern, and a rotating roster of maidens. It had been weeks since she’d woken up beside Fern in the morning and almost as long since he went to bed at the same time as her, and that night was no different, but she was surprised to find his slight weight beside her now.

  She held her breath, wondering if she’d woken him, but — there.

  She closed her eyes in the dark and let herself drift for a moment on the unguarded tide of his mind. No dreams right this minute, his mind was a quiet murmur in her thoughts. He took up less space in the bed than he used to. Smelled like something she could never quite define; like clean cotton sheets, like security. Like home.

  But he also smelled sad.

  Maybe that’s what the dream was about, Emma thought, guarding her mind so she didn’t wake him.

  Maybe it was borne of her feelings of helplessness and grief and loss; Arima representing Emma, unable to speak. The snow blanketing everything it touched, like the depression that had fallen over her and Fern. It covers everything. We’re suffocating under it.

  If she could only reach in and lift it out of him —

  Fern made a noise in his throat, still asleep, and Emma eased away from him before she disturbed him.

  And now she needed to pee. Dammit.

  There was a maiden lying across her legs and another curled up in ocelot form on the floor next to the bed, but Emma managed to wriggle and hop her way around them in the dark without falling over and waking everyone up. She’d had plenty of practice. Her horrible purple cable knit cardigan was hanging on the bedroom door peg, and she grabbed it before slipping out — the temperature had dropped that afternoon and the bright October sky had clouded over with iron gray, so she’d worn leggings and a thermal tank to bed instead of the usual oversized t-shirt. Shapechangers didn’t feel the cold, and Emma hadn’t really felt it either, since coming to the ranch in high summer, but that was changing. Autumn was definitely on the way out.

  There were two huge jaguars lying in the dim hallway outside her bedroom door — both at least six feet long from nose to rump and big enough to ride — one black, one gold. Both pairs of eyes gleamed, reflecting the light at the other end of the hall. The gold one came to its feet in less time than it took her to blink, fixed her with its unwavering stare, and opened its mouth, whiskers arcing forward, taking her scent.

  Emma froze, heart pounding in her chest in spite of herself, before the black jag switched its tail once and the gold lowered itself back down. She thought she recognized the black as Raul — he had a broader nose than the other two black jags. She nodded at him and padded off to the bathroom, shrugging her cardigan on. One of the new guards, the gold one, she thought. The others were used to people being up and about the house at all hours.

  Emma used the bathroom, washed her hands, rinsed her mouth; the waterproof digital clock in the shower (necessary with as many people vying for shower time as there were) told her it was eleven past three in the morning. Which was just great, considering there was nothing like a bad dream to ensure you never got back to sleep, so she was up for the day. Night. Whatever. Yawning, she inspected her bruised ribs in the soft light over the bathroom vanity — except there were no bruises. She poked. No tender spots. She leaned in, lifted her tangled hair away from her face, and squinted into her own eyes.

  Her eyes were still hazel, no sign of turning black. Her skin was lightly tan thanks to hiking and riding outdoors. Her dark hair was shoulder length — she’d roped one of the maidens into cutting it for her, in spite of Felani’s protests — and it fell in clumpy waves, one side sticking out farther than the other. That’d teach her to sleep on it damp. She looked like she felt: weird, tired, and out of her depth, but human. She put her hands on her hips.

  When had the awful purple cardigan started wrapping all the way around her midsection? When had she gotten those lines around her mouth? She thought of Fern, with his gaunt face and visible hip bones. The dance sweats had fit him, gone through the wash and out the dryer, and he was currently sleeping in them. He looked good in them.

  But Emma didn’t want people to have to buy new clothes for her because they were worried she was killing herself with h
er own grief.

  She was awake; might as well eat. She headed to the kitchen. The steak Leah made her yesterday had seemed to make the nausea go away, and the rest of the day’s meals had gone down nice and easy, so Emma was looking forward to raiding the fridge — so focused in fact that she almost jumped when she stepped into the kitchen and found a huge dark shape hulking by the window.

  The silhouette was Red Sun’s. It was a familiar shape to find in the kitchen at this hour, but he usually had the light over the stove on. Tonight he stood in darkness, leaning forward with his hand on the edge of the sink, looking out the window. Emma closed the kitchen door behind her and padded over to stand beside him. That was when she saw what he was looking at.

  Snow. Everything beyond the window was gray except for the dark swirls of night you could glimpse as sheets of snow twisted and whirled, flurrying by. As Emma stared, inexplicable dread curling through her.

  Red Sun’s energy brushed against her like the hum of an electric fence as he spoke quietly. “The guards are heading out to move the cars, put snow chains on.”

  Emma watched as the hunched shapes of the jaguar guards — smears of darkness in the swirling white, with maybe a shovel or two visible — marched into view and down the drive.

  “Surely we can’t get snowed in this early in the season,” Emma said, comforted by Red’s presence. “It’s just a freak cold snap, not a blizzard.”

  Red grunted, still looking out the window. He seemed to be watching the snow, not the guards. It was beautiful. Emma was content to stand in silence with him; they’d spent a lot of nights here in the kitchen or on the back porch, when Emma couldn’t sleep, sometimes talking, sometimes not. It was peaceful. It was the safest she ever felt these days.

  She let his warmth chase the dregs of the dream away, and shifted her weight to one hip and leaned against his good arm, as she sometimes did. His energy broke over her, stronger than usual, sharper — like pop rocks except all over her body — and his arm was rock hard beneath her head and singing with tension.