The Wild Rites Saga Omnibus 01 to 04

by Anna McIlwraith

  Emma looked to Red. “Do we know where we’re going yet?”

  Seshua glanced up but oddly said nothing, gaze going from Emma to Red, before returning to the papers in his hands. Kahotep and Nathifa both had their heads close together, bent over the table, thumbing through more papers. Red moved his weight off the desk and came to stand next to Emma.

  “First off,” he said, “I need to Travel back to Black Pine and hope Zach hasn’t left the shop early to head back to the ranch.”

  “Oh my God. Zach.” Emma felt ill. “I can’t believe I forgot. Jesus. What if he —”

  “That’s why I’m going back,” Red said, voice slow and soothing. “Even if he found the place deserted and lost his shit, he’s human. He won’t be hard to track. I’ll take him to Rain, and then I’ll come back here for the rest of you.”

  Emma looked around, pulse calming after the shock of being reminded about Zach. “Who’s the rest of us? And where are we going? And where did you take Rain and Katenka?”

  “Patience, flower.” Red rolled his shoulders, and Emma heard several things pop and crack as he did so. He shot a look at Fern that Emma couldn’t read and dropped his voice.“Where I took Rain and Katenka is where we’re going, and where we’re going is to the wolves in Russia. I’ll let them know we’re coming when I drop Zach off.” He paused, dark eyes narrowed on Emma’s face, searching and waiting.

  Of course Red had taken the wolf cubs to the Wolf King of Russia. Emma was relieved. She looked over at Seshua, who had raised his head to watch them. “And you’re okay with this?”

  The jaguar king arched one thick brow, gaze gone predatory. “I’m going with you. So yes.”

  Emma nodded. “Fair enough. Who else?”

  “My lady commander,” said Shadi, drawing himself up to his impressive full height. “I go where you go.”

  My lady commander? Emma stifled a groan. Then had to stifle a laugh as Fern’s amusement bubbled in her mind like champagne. Stop that, she sent, stepping on his foot.

  “Horne and I,” Leah said, and Emma flashed her a grateful smile.

  “And,” Nathifa said, straightening up from the desk and massaging her lower back, “We’d like to send one of our finest warriors with you. You could use an extra fighter, and having a jackal with you strengthens the link to Kahotep, should you need to draw on his power.”

  Glancing from Nathifa to Seshua, Emma could tell they’d already discussed it; Seshua’s body language said he’d accepted. He didn’t look happy, but then, when Seshua was happy it was usually a bad omen. “Okay,” Emma said to Nathifa. “Thank you.”

  The queen inclined her head and then turned to Kahotep, placing a gentle hand on his face. He looked down at her, love shining in his one eye, and Emma flushed with embarrassment and fixed her gaze on the desk with all its papers and leatherbound books.

  “I will see to it that all is ready for their departure,” Nathifa said to Kahotep. She let her hand drop and moved around him. When she passed Emma, she reached out with a brief touch of her fingers on Em’s elbow. “I will see you again before you go.” Then the queen was gone, handmaidens trailing after her.

  “It’s a pity you cannot stay,” Kahotep said. “I understand completely that you have the jaguar kingdom’s protection and allegiance, but you would be most welcome in Egypt as our personal guest if ever you craved a change of scenery.”

  Kahotep’s liquid brown eyes were sincere and devoid of guile, and Emma was certain he meant the invitation to be innocent — that was the jackal king’s nature. But she doubted Seshua saw it that way. Sure enough, Emma tasted ozone, felt the brush of Seshua’s power like a warm breeze.

  This was why shapechanger royals didn’t hang out all that much.

  Emma jumped in before a full on pissing contest could start. “You’ve already been too generous, Kahotep. We endanger your people just by being here. I promise we’ll visit again when this is all over, but for your sakes we should really get our asses into gear.”

  Kahotep blinked. “Get your asses into gear?”

  Red snorted a laugh, and Emma kicked his leg with the side of her foot. “Hurry up and get out of here,” she clarified.

  “Ah.” The jackal king nodded appreciatively. “Well, before you do, you should perhaps take a look at my father’s papers.” He handed over a sheaf of thick papers, just a handful of the reams that obscured the desktop. They were so old they felt velvety yet somehow oily at the same time, covered in scrawls of handwriting, symbols and diagrams. “He spent most of his life traveling the world in search of something that might lead him to the Caller of the Blood. He did uncover quite a lot of information related to the prophecies, which could shed light on your newly awakened powers. You’re welcome to take it all with you, of course,” Kahotep went on. “Seshua seems to feel it may be of value to you. Some of the notes are written in Coptic, which our jackal warrior can translate for you while you are on the road, as it were.”

  Shadi cleared his throat. “I am quite capable of translating Coptic, also.”

  Kahotep looked pleased. “Of course. My apologies. Excellent. Anyway, quite a few of the entries are in English. And you’re in luck, most of the notes are in various Eastern European tongues, so it’s likely you’ll be able to find someone at the Ruskiy wawkalaki court to translate those for you.”

  He was practically glowing with excitement over finding a use for for his father’s extensive research, and a use that could help Emma too — she could feel it through the link that the pledge had forged between them, and his enthusiasm was infectious. She realized he’d been raised for this, to be a scholar and a statesman, like his father. His father was gone and had been for centuries — killed by Kahotep’s uncle, Khai Kaldun — but going through his papers and books was a way of recapturing the relationship he’d lost. Could she really take these papers from him?

  Reading her line of thought, Kahotep’s eye glinted and his face shimmered with the presence of his beast, sharp and lean. “Khai kept this all locked away, every single thing that belonged to my parents,” he said, voice holding a faint echo of something dark and inhuman. “Since I could never have defeated him without you, it is only fitting that I share these. Besides, my father searched for most of his life for the Caller of the Blood, or some clue to where she might be, if she even existed. He did it because he loved my mother the way that I love my queen.” Kahotep lifted one shoulder in a shrug. “Again, my queen lives, and is with child, because of you.”

  He grinned then, happy and free. She beamed back at him and then turned her attention to the papers in her hand so that he couldn’t see the tears she suddenly had to blink away.

  The first few pages were just lines and lines of scrawl in foreign languages, and glancing at the piles of papers and journals sprawled all over the desk, Emma couldn’t imagine what all of this mysterious stuff could even be — when it came to the prophecies of the Caller of the Blood, the jaguars hadn’t exactly been chatty. She was about to ask Seshua what he’d found that might be useful to her when she looked down at the page full of drawings and diagrams she’d uncovered in her shuffling and froze.

  The sketch was of a stylized animal design, at once sharp and lyrical and clearly tribal in nature: an equine shape with an almost surreal, Pisces-like quality, surrounded by ornamental vinework. There were other animals and strange figures. The notes on the page were in another language, but Emma didn’t need to be able to read them; she knew what it was.

  It was a tattoo, and she’d seen it before.

  16

  “I’ve seen these before,” Emma said, leaning in. “I had another vision of Arima just before the serpent priests attacked. I thought it was just a dream, but maybe she was trying to warn me. She had tattoos just like these.”

  When there was nothing but silence, Emma looked up to find everyone staring at her.

  “Em honey,” Red said. “What are you talking about?”

  She looked from Red to Seshua and then to Fern, an
d swallowed. She opened her mouth, searching for the words, for how to explain what had happened to her when Alan forced the ritual on her and she blacked out and had the first vision…

  White light flashed; white noise filled her head. Emma squeezed her watering eyes shut as the atmosphere in the room crackled with shapechanging magic. Someone shouted, weapons chimed as they were drawn, and then Emma opened her eyes to see something dark and monstrous unfurling from the fading light.

  The irony of shapechanging magic was that it conserved metaphysical mass, not physical mass, so that Fern’s energy signature translated to a tarantula the size of a small room: twelve feet of legspan, eight in height, twelve feet of height when rearing back on his four hind legs, which he promptly did. His other four front legs pawed the air as he flexed mandibles the size of Emma’s arms and hissed, and Seshua ducked just in time to avoid being swatted like a fly. The front legs came up in an instinctive aggressive display, and Emma crouched automatically a moment before all four of Fern’s front feet came down with more weight than made sense, caging her beneath his huge dark segmented body.

  He hissed again, whole body vibrating with threat, and Emma craned her head back to get a worm’s eye view of his fangs arcing forward.

  Red Sun’s voice boomed through the chamber: “Everybody get out! ”

  Kahotep and Seshua knew what to do — they obeyed. The others took their cue and fled after them.

  Red was last, and as he slammed the door behind him, his voice burst into Emma’s head: I’m trusting you to handle him sweetpea, but if you need me, you will call. It wasn’t a question.

  That was good, because Emma wasn’t yet capable of proper speech. Her heartbeat was slowing; Fern’s change had burned away most of his panic attack, but they were still merged. His mind lay over hers like a fog, thick and still, and quiet now.

  She let her head fall, and just concentrated on breathing for a moment. It was nice to no longer feel like she was having a heart attack. Fern stepped sideways with an eerie stop-motion quality to the movement, putting more of his body towards the door, bringing the legs on one side of his body closer to her. His limbs were a bit thicker than her arms, but looked almost three times that due to the long, stiff hairs that covered almost his entire form. The hairs held his color markings: black banded with brown. Emma realized the same color pulsed beneath her own skin, darkening her hands and arms. Must be the merge.

  Not bothering to try to talk to him — it usually took him a while to get mental speech back after he changed, and since they were merged, he would calm if she was calm — she lowered herself slowly to the thick rug and stretched out on her back underneath him. It was like looking up at an alien landscape. Fern’s abdomen and carapace had a dusty, leathery appearance, with odd seams and striations she couldn’t fathom the reason for.

  Because the Aranan had their own ancestral language, Fern had never been able to tell her which species of tarantula he was — their names were completely unrelated to human taxonomic classification practices. Given where he’d been born, and his physical characteristics, Emma was pretty sure he was an exceptionally dark T. Blondi specimen. He was mostly dark brown to black in color, paler brown at his leg joints, darker at the tips of his feet and around his abdomen and face.

  Tarantulas used gills to breathe, so there were no signs of respiration. The only movement he made was to twitch his mandibles back into the tucked position.

  Emma took deep breaths and let them out through her mouth, trying to stay relaxed. Poor Fern. He’d been blindsided by her memories, and she’d been so focused on the drawings and the visions that she hadn’t been shielding even the tiniest bit. She knew he had to face her memories eventually, but she’d imagined it happening very differently.

  Fern shuffled in place, shifting one long foot dangerously close to Emma’s head. Without thinking she reached out to shove him off the way she would with the jaguars. The thick hairs on his leg were wiry and stiff like bristles, and she remembered they could cause her damage a split second before Fern noticed the touch and startled into rapid motion.

  Legs shifted and thumped all around her and she rolled up into a ball to protect herself. Fern! Watch it!

  You touched me! His mental voice was almost normal, only a hint of the flatness his beast caused in his thoughts.

  You were about to stand on me, she pointed out. She uncurled from her protective huddle and examined her hand. It doesn’t look like I suffered any ill effects from contact with those hairs. Like most tarantulas, Fern’s legs were covered in hairs that could cause extreme irritation upon contact, and Emma had no idea how severe the irritation would be given his size. Her hands were still darkened with the echo of the tarantula, though, and she wondered…

  Maybe it’s the merge. Hold still a second.

  Fern’s incredulity turned to outright shock as she placed her hand back on his leg. No, I think it’s okay, she sent. The merge is protecting me. He felt so solid beneath her palm. For some reason, she always thought of Fern’s beast as being fragile in a way — terrifying, alien and breathtaking, and capable of destruction in a way the jaguars and wolves and jackals weren’t, simply by virtue of his size — but also fragile. Silly really. Regular tarantulas were delicate creatures that could die from falling off a bookshelf, or from exposure to the wrong temperature or humidity level. Magical tarantulas, on the other hand, were much more robust.

  Emma smoothed her hand down the spiny hairs, marveling at the way they sprang back up. Then white light flashed and her hand was empty, and she sat back on her butt and found Fern crouched next to her, naked and shaking. His eyes were so wide she could see the whites all the way around.

  “Hey,” she said. “That was interesting. Sorry about your clothes.”

  He just stared at her for a moment, his mind blank. And then he sobbed, once, squeezing his eyes shut, and suddenly Emma was floored by the chaos of his emotions beating at her through the bond. She understood then that she’d been careless and ignorant — she’d thought his reaction to her touch was fear for her safety, when in fact it was shock that she had touched him at all, because she never touched his beast.

  “Never’s a strong a word,” she said, as gentle as she could, wanting to reach out to him again, instead pouring as much warmth and reassurance into him through the merge as she could muster. “I didn’t think it was safe to touch you, because of the hairs.” She held her hands out; they were normal once more, no shadow of Fern’s beast.

  A small sound escaped him and it almost broke Emma’s heart. He opened his eyes and met her gaze. “I thought you hated my beast,” he said, voice so low she could barely hear him.

  She tucked her legs beneath her and gave him a hard look, in spite of how much she wanted to comfort him. Comfort clearly hadn’t done him any good so far. “I thought you’d accepted that I had a hard time adjusting, and it wasn’t about you or your beast, but about me. You did a pretty good job of convincing me. Did something change, or have you always felt this way?”

  Guilt flashed in his black eyes. Emma nodded. “Okay,” she said, and came to her feet, holding out a hand for him.

  Automatically he took it and stood, looking down at her in confusion until he read her through the merge. Then he dropped her hand and stepped back. “No,” he shook his head hard, hair swishing across his eyes. “You have nothing to prove.”

  “Not to myself, no. Will you do it, or do I have to make you?” When he took another step back, eyes wide again, Emma reflected briefly upon the irony that she was the one who’d had the panic attack, but here she was trying to soothe Fern’s feelings. He caught that thought and looked even more guilty than before.

  Emma sighed. “It is totally understandable that you feel this way, but we can’t afford to be divided, to doubt each other now. We spent the last month doing that and now we’re facing a war with the serpent priests and we’re homeless and I don’t even know where most of my friends are. I’m not doing this to prove something. I’
m doing this because you need it, and I know it because I am what I am, and we are bound.”

  He stayed still and silent long enough that Emma started to have a hard time not taking notice of how naked he was. Then he blinked at her. You’re kinda scary, you know that?

  She huffed. “That’s what Anton said. Quit stalling.”

  Okay. He hesitated, heart in his deep black eyes, and then white light flushed through his skin, his arms banded with black and smoky brown, and he disappeared in the blinding flash of the change. For a second his silhouette was stark and man-shaped against the light, like a photo negative. Then his human shape dissolved and eight giant legs boiled out of the light as though the spider was crawling up through a crack in the fabric of the world.

  Emma was suddenly face to face with a tarantula the size of a small elephant. She had to crane her neck to look up at him as the light died and all eight of Fern’s feet settled to the rug with a dry, rustling sound; he reshuffled his legs and knocked a book off the end of the desk. Eight eyes glittered like polished jet in the lamplight. Emma knew he wasn’t “looking” at her so much as his eyes took in the whole room, her included, but it was hard to shake the habit of looking someone in the eye.

  She did feel his attention on her through the bond, and he was lucid. His curiosity fluttered like moth-wings in her mind. Your eyes are black, you know, he sent. From lid to lid.

  She wasn’t surprised — or interested. So long as she didn’t have to see it, she didn’t have to think about it. You usually take longer to be mentally “here” when you change, she sent. Do you think the merge has affected that?

  Maybe, he replied cautiously. More likely it’s you. Your powers at full strength. Mated Aranan can merge the way we do, and they don’t experience any improvement in the mental transition. He unfurled both mandibles and stroked one over the other once, twice, in a thoughtful motion that Emma found kind of adorable.