The Wild Rites Saga Omnibus 01 to 04

by Anna McIlwraith

  Shadi moved to the next seat down so that there was an empty seat either side of him once more. He inclined his head at Red. “I mean no offense,” he said, but didn’t offer any more explanation.

  Red shrugged. “None taken. You gonna tell us why you’re sitting here with two legs instead of four?”

  “There is very little to tell. I was cursed. I broke the curse. I am here.”

  Emma cleared her throat and gave him a pointed look.

  His mouth tipped in a rueful smile. “All right. There is a little more to tell.” The smile fell. “I was cursed as punishment for my misdeeds. I was a good sorcerer and a better assassin, but I was never a good man, so my misdeeds were many. The worst was my last. The king of the magi bespelled me to live as a beast so that I might —”

  “The king of the magi?” Emma leaned forward. “Your own father cursed you?”

  Shadi shook his head. “I said I was a prince of the magi. My father was king when he died, when I was a boy. Kingship was based on more complicated things than blood, so I remained a prince as I ever had been, and a new king ascended to my father’s place by right of power whom I bore no relation to. May I continue?”

  Emma sat back. “Sorry. Yes.”

  He flashed a grim smile and then was serious again. “He cursed me to know what it meant to live dependent upon a master, without luxury or privilege, or power, and the only way to break it was to give my life for another, willingly and without thought for personal gain.” He spread his hands upon the tabletop and stared at them. “I thought it meant that only in a selfless death would my soul be freed so I could move on to the next life. I had the courage to die, of course. But how do you give your life without thought for personal gain when you know that in doing so you set yourself free? The curse was a trap, and one I deserved. The only way to sacrifice myself, without doing it for the sake of breaking my own curse, was to forget that I was cursed at all.”

  Oh, shit, Fern said mind to mind.

  What? Emma asked.

  Fern addressed Shadi, his voice soft. “How long did it take you to forget you were a man?”

  Shadi looked at Fern with hard eyes. “One hundred years.” He looked away.

  Fern pressed ahead. “And can you remember when you were cursed? The year?”

  “I can remember everything, in a way. The years before I lost myself are clearer than the others. I have memories from after that, though — and I remember the long journey I made with the mares from this country to yours, not long ago, and most everything since. But those memories are different.” Shadi met Emma’s eyes. “I asked one of these jackal guards what year it is,” he said softly. “I was not surprised. I have watched the world change, even if I was hardly aware of doing so, and there has been much change.”

  Emma fought not to squirm in her seat. “And?”

  He sighed. “The year I was cursed was the Christian year twelve seventy-five.”

  Emma took a moment. “You were a horse for seven hundred and forty years.” He nodded. “And for six hundred and forty of those years, you didn’t know you’d ever been anything but a horse.” He nodded again.

  Kahotep spoke up, wonder in his voice. “But you broke the curse when you sacrificed your life to save the mares.”

  Shadi looked uncomfortable. “Yes, but you must understand, it was as the curse required — I had no thought for myself. I was panicked, and the scent of the smoke…” He shook his head. “I always thought that giving one’s life for another must be an act of honor, of courage, but in truth I was afraid and my senses had fled. I did not want to die, but the mares were screaming. I had to get them out. It shames me now to say that for the first hundred years, when I was still myself, it would never have occurred to me that the life I gave mine for needn’t be human.”

  Red shifted, putting his hand on the table. “Why were you cursed?”

  And that was the question Emma didn’t want the answer to. She’d thought Red’s curse was bad enough, and it was true he’d had it a hell of a lot longer and there was no escape clause, but Red was still Red. Seven hundred and forty years in a non-human body, six hundred and forty of them with a nonhuman consciousness, and the only way to break it was to commit the ultimate act of selflessness.

  What did somebody do to deserve that?

  Shadi came to his feet, chair scraping as he pushed it back; the jackal guards standing at ease near the entrance to the dining hall came to attention with the soft whisper of steel, and everyone at the table went tense.

  He looked Emma in the eye, features stamped with pride and regret and belligerence. “I was not a good man. I used my rank and privilege to take what I wanted. One night, I took the daughter of the grand master of assassins against her will.” He paused, his throat working like he’d swallowed something foul, and Emma kinda felt like she had too. “The assassins could not mete out any punishment befitting the crime, as I was trained not to fear death, and to care for no one, so there were no loved ones or friends to execute in my place. Instead they demanded the magi devise a suitable penance.”

  Looking into Shadi’s miserable face, Emma grasped Fern’s hand under the table and didn’t need to ask him to help her shield her reaction. Fern’s beast had no bandwidth for emotion, unless Emma’s life was being threatened directly, and he pushed its power through her, through the merge, dark and cool and calm. Her wrists darkened to gray banded with brown stripes, just a ghost of Fern’s beast, an echo of the change.

  Shadi took a step back, bumping into his chair, nostrils flaring. Red Sun’s mental voice intruded on Emma’s temporary calm: Your eyes are turning black, chicken.

  She looked at him. I know. But she eased her grip on Fern’s hand as she regarded Shadi once more, and let Fern’s power trickle back to him through the merge. “Sit down, Shadi.”

  He sat, hard.

  Emma bit her lip, trying to think of what to say. This was going to be uncomfortable with the others around, but Emma steeled herself. “You know what happened to me while I was in Russia, right?”

  Shadi looked like he’d been punched. He couldn’t meet her eyes. “You told me. Sefu. You told Sefu. I remember.”

  She felt all eyes on her. “For some reason you want to stay with me, to serve me,” she said to Shadi, the words feeling awkward in her mouth. “But I don’t know you, and I don’t know how I can trust you given what you’ve told us. Honestly I don’t know what to do with you.”

  Seshua went to speak at the same time as Shadi did, and Emma held a hand up. “Please, Seshua.” He glowered, but sat back, and Emma gestured for Shadi to go on.

  Shadi met her eyes and drew himself up in his chair, his bearing reminding her so much of Sefu that it made her stomach turn over. “I know what to do.” He nodded to himself, stood up again, and pushed his chair aside. Suddenly the air in the dining hall got thick, and Emma’s skin prickled with the spark of magic.

  The others felt it; Red leaned forward, Kahotep and Leah came to their feet, and Seshua snarled out, “What is the meaning of this?”

  Shadi’s hair unraveled from its ties and writhed around him like a living curtain. “I know the spell that was cast upon me. I will cast it upon myself and return to being Sefu, and you may decide then what —”

  “No!” Emma stood up so fast her chair fell backwards. “No you will not.”

  Shadi’s face was raw with sadness. “You do not have to keep me, I know things cannot return to how they were. But you will have the choice, and I will no longer be the man who did those things. I lived over six hundred years as a beast, and having been a man only a matter of hours, I do not believe it will take as long for me to lose myself again.” He closed his eyes and began to chant.

  “Oh for fuck’s sake,” Emma muttered. “Guys,” she said, looking around at the men as the mark in her hand woke up. “Hold onto your butts.” Then she let her shields down, took a deep breath that touched all the parts of her that were bound to them — to Fern, to Red, to Kahotep and Seshua, the
blood-red cord that tied them mind to mind and spirit to spirit — and slapped her marked hand down onto the stone table.

  The shockwave cracked the table and blew Shadi back. He hit the ground like a sack of potatoes — a very attractive sack of potatoes — at the same time as the rest of the men slumped unconscious in their seats.

  Nathifa and Leah had come to their feet and were hanging onto the edge of the table, blinking at Emma. Nathifa looked down at Kahotep. The jackal king had collapsed back into his seat with his upper body sprawled over the table, hair covering his face, bronzed arms akimbo.

  Emma let her breath out. “He should be okay. I can sense both Fern and Red through our bonds, and they’re just asleep, so…” She could also sense the merge with Fern, and was careful to hold a little tighter to it; it was a bit like holding someone’s hand when they weren’t holding yours back. She was still merged with him, but he’d been wiped out, without the chance to reinforce his mental grip.

  The queen nodded. “Huh.”

  Seshua started to slide sideways and Leah caught him, shoving him back into place. His head lolled forward. When Leah had managed to arrange him so that his head was cushioned on his arms on the table, she looked up at Emma with both eyebrows raised.

  “I can’t believe you just quoted Jurassic Park before knocking out three of the most powerful shapechangers ever to walk the earth. Not to mention horse-boy over there.” She held out her hand. “Gimme five.”

  Emma gave her five — with her left hand. Nathifa looked at them like they were crazy. “Jurassic Park?”

  “Yeah,” Leah said. “Seen it like a hundred times. Samuel Jackson’s the best.”

  The queen looked back down at her gently snoring husband. “Somehow that statement brings me no closer to enlightenment.” She cocked her head. “It’s quite peaceful in here now, isn’t it? Did you, by any chance, know what you were doing?”

  Ouch. That burned. “Kinda?” Emma ran her hands through her hair. “I’d done it before. Once. This morning. When the serpent priests attacked, their magic rolled everyone, immobilizing us. I acted on instinct then and broke their compulsion, at least for a while. It — my power, I guess — stopped their magic. I figured it might work on Shadi’s magic as well.”

  Nathifa arched a brow. “Kahotep was not affected like this, though, when you did it the first time.”

  “He wasn’t sitting three feet away from me when I did it last time either. But you’re right. This was different. I just… I felt them, all of them, stronger maybe because they’re here in this room with me. Felt the way their power —” She stopped, suddenly self conscious; if she were Nathifa, mated to Kahotep, how would she like it if someone talked about him this way?

  But Nathifa urged her on. “Felt what?”

  Emma put her hand on Fern’s head, smoothing his hair. His chin rested on his chest, and his ribs rose and fell with the rhythm of sleep. “More than I ever have, I felt the power that binds them to me. Like a cord, made of blood, and I’m the knot. I don’t know what I’m doing,” she admitted. “But the power does. And I’ll learn.”

  “Kahotep is doing much the same thing,” Nathifa said, a faint smile touching her eyes. “Feeling his way through. He says there is no instruction manual, so he must teach himself.”

  “That’s pretty much exactly what I told Red this morning.”

  Leah cleared her throat. “Truth be told, Seshua fares no different, from what I can tell. The jaguars have been tied up with the prophecies for centuries, but all they really know is, find the caller of the blood, bind the caller of the blood, ultimate power…”

  “And blah, blah, blah,” Emma finished for her. “No instruction manual.”

  Nathifa made a thoughtful noise. “Kahotep’s father was on a crusade of sorts, before he died, to find all he could about the powers of the caller of the blood. He was obsessed, he did extensive research. None of it’s useful to Kahotep, but there might be some things you want to take a look at, later.” She frowned down at Kahotep. “How long are they going to be unconscious?”

  Emma shrugged. Leah moved around the table to examine Shadi, prodding him with the toe of her boot. “You’re right,” she said, looking up with a grin on her face. “It is kinda peaceful. Do we have to wait for them to wake up, or can we eat now?”

  “I’m pregnant,” Nathifa said. “We eat now.” With that she moved around the table, uncovering the platters of cold cuts, fruit, bread and cheese, and pouring water for each of them into the small earthenware cups provided.

  Emma drained her cup and poured more, then loaded her plate, ensuring there was enough for Fern if he was hungry when he woke up. They’d only eaten a few hours ago at the most, but her stomach said hell yes, even to the weird, pungent white cheese. Somehow it paired well with the figs. At Leah’s pointed stare, she took a few more slices of some sort of roasted meat, aware that protein was protein even if you couldn’t identify where it came from.

  “So,” Leah said, refilling her own cup. “Seshua only partly filled me in when we were seeing to Marco and Horne. Glad to hear the maidens and the Salcedo brothers got to the airfield. Seshua says he’ll have Red Sun drop him in at the Arizona sanctuary long enough to contact them and secure the underground stronghold, but from there he doesn’t know where next. I say we go straight to South America to confer directly with Alexi.”

  “Whoa!” Emma put her food down. “No, really, no way. Not a good idea.”

  “Why?” Leah looked curious, not offended, which was good. “We have Red Sun. He can zap you and Fern to the other side of the planet before anyone even thinks of attacking you, and besides, you seem perfectly capable of defending yourself if the need should arise. It’ll be the last place the priesthood expects us to be, especially since they don’t know about Red’s handy upgrade, and we’ll be able to talk strategy with the one person who actually knows the weaknesses of the serpent priesthood.” Leah noticed Emma’s expression, mistook it, and shook her head. “We’d arrange a safehouse and a separate rendezvous point to minimize the risk of either you or Alexi —”

  “Leah,” Emma said firmly. “It can’t happen. The priesthood can find me no matter where I go, so the only way to avoid them is to stay ahead of them. Pretty sure walking into their territory is the opposite of staying ahead of them.”

  Leah frowned, crossing her arms. “I know it’s risky, but they can’t track us now — nobody’s that powerful. If we’d taken regular overland or air routes, sure, maybe, but they’ll have lost all trace of you by the time we get to South America. We’ll be hidden right under their noses.”

  Ah, damn. Emma remembered now; Leah hadn’t gotten the memo. “Leah, there’s something you need to know.”

  Leah arched a brow. How to explain with as few words as possible?

  And without triggering a major panic attack?

  Emma took a deep breath, let it out hard and fast, and dug her fingernails into her palms. “Okay. The thing is, when Alexi broke me out of Alan’s compound in Russia, I’d just completed the ritual and there was a dangerous overflow of power because the ritual didn’t go the way it should have. Alexi took the overflow from me, and it created a metaphysical link between me and him, which is how the rest of the serpent priesthood found me in spite of the safeguards on Telly’s land. With me so far?”

  Leah nodded slowly, a piece of fig forgotten in her hand, while Nathifa waited with eyes narrowed in concentration. Emma was actually glad to be filling the jackal queen in as well; she was a sharp and experienced strategist, maybe she’d be able to offer them something they wouldn’t have thought of on their own.

  “Okay,” Emma said again. “So, although Alexi spent the last month shielding the link between us from the rest of the serpent priesthood, obviously they found a way in, and found me. I don’t know any of this for sure, and I definitely don’t know this next part for sure, but I think the priesthood decided to launch a full revolt against Alexi because they found out about the link.” She spread h
er hands. “As you know, the serpent priesthood has some serious angst towards the whole caller of the blood prophecy thing, for reasons we’re not real clear on. I think all of that makes a pretty good case for staying as far away from Alexi as possible.”

  Not that Emma wanted to do that. But he’d made sacrifices for her freedom, big ones, ones she didn’t fully understand, and she wouldn’t throw that away no matter how badly she wanted to see him.

  Leah sat back in her chair and popped the piece of fig in her mouth, frowning while she chewed. “Alexi destroyed the serpent priesthood’s Anchor,” she said around her mouthful, then swallowed. “Whatever that means. And he did it to save you. That, the magic link you have to him, and the fact that the priesthood spurns the prophecy and has for centuries, is three strikes against him where the rest of the priesthood is concerned. I think you’re right. The serpent priesthood has gone to war over you. ”

  “Great,” said Emma. “Definitely not going to South America then.” She scrubbed her face. “Don’t know where we’ll go, but as soon as we know how Marco and Horne are doing we’ll get out of here — I mean that’s if these guys ever wake up —”

  “Do not be ridiculous,” Nathifa said gently. “You will stay, and rest, and have all your wounds tended to, and leave once you’ve recovered some of your strength.”

  “But the serpent priests —”

  “Cannot get here in less than twelve hours. You have time. And if they do come, you will be long gone by the time they arrive, and we are not without our defenses.” The queen’s eyes glinted, and she ran the back of her hand down Kahotep’s arm where he sat slumped over the table. “We are your allies, Emma, and in your debt. You will not deny us what little we can do to aid you.”

  Emma wanted to argue over that — in her own estimation the jackals owed her nothing, because it had never been their fault that she had to come to Egypt and take the pledge from Kahotep in the first place, and she couldn’t stand the idea of putting the jackals at risk.