The Wild Rites Saga Omnibus 01 to 04

by Anna McIlwraith

  Fatima made a distracted sound of assent. “What say you, sorcerer?”

  Shadi turned to Fatima and nodded slowly; his hair was moving on its own, glossy waves coiling snake-like in the confines of his braid, the way Seshua’s did when he was angry, or like Telly when he was getting ready to do something you probably wouldn’t like. Both thoughts tightened Emma’s chest. Shadi looked for a moment like he was listening to some faraway voice no one else could hear, and then his hair stopped moving.

  “I think it is safe to go on,” he said. “There is a chance these wards may alert their maker to our presence, but we were always intending to make contact, were we not?”

  Leah grunted. “We were never even sure there’d be anyone to make contact with.”

  “This is proof then,” Red said. “Let’s see if these wards get any easier to move through farther up ahead.”

  It was slow going at first. They were hiking uphill through increasingly dense forest with rocky terrain underfoot and moving through metaphysical molasses. Shadi muttered under his breath in a language that sounded to Emma like Latin, going a bit faster than the others, which gave her an idea. When they all opened the Call, flinging the magical awareness of their beasts outside of their bodies — in Emma’s case, her magical awareness of everyone else’s beasts — they could move through the wards just fine. There was nothing for the Call to sense, confirming Shadi’s suspicions that there was no one nearby monitoring the wards at least.

  Thankfully they only had to travel about half a mile with the magic of their beasts open and beating at Emma like millions of freezing cold stinging wings; after that the wards dissipated. Fatima speculated that the magic ringed the mountains they were heading into.

  In spite of the more challenging terrain, they moved faster. Shadi kept hold of his bow and reclaimed the pouch of arrows from Emma; the going was too steep for her to get much practice in anyway, and without the bow, she made better time. At least she thought she did. When Horne called a halt and she looked up and focused for what seemed like the first time in ages, the clearing they’d come to was gloomy with dusk, and Emma realized she mustn’t have been setting as good a pace as she thought.

  “Are we stopping for the night already?” She asked Horne, looking from him to Leah and catching her breath. It had been a steady climb up through the foothills for the past hour or so, and Emma was breathing hard with the effort. No one else was.

  Horne gave a halfhearted laugh. “Already. Yeah. We sure are. It’s getting dark and there’s a decent sized stream nearby, this is as good a place as any to make camp.” He let the big pack slide from his shoulders and rolled them as though working the kinks out. Emma did the same, as did Fern when he moved up beside her.

  It’s not that dark, she sent, keeping her eyes on her pack as she took out her canteen. We could keep going a while yet, if not for me. I thought I was doing better today but —

  “You are,” he interrupted her, voice pitched low. It made her look at him. His large, dark eyes were fixed on her. We made better time than anybody expected. Em, we’ve walked over twenty miles today.

  She blinked at him. “Oh.”

  “Yeah.” He shook his head, a wry smile lifting one corner of his mouth. Trust me, nobody wants to walk any farther today.

  Now that they were finally stopped and everyone was beginning to offload packs and set up camp, Emma could see they were tired. Not as tired as Emma was, but Horne wasn’t the only one trying to work the knots out of his shoulders and back, and Red especially had a tightness around his eyes and mouth that Emma recognized as pain. The arm must still be giving him grief. And he’d carried one of the big hiking packs all day.

  As he let his pack slide to the ground, he met Emma’s eyes and popped both brows. Still worryin’ about me?

  She shot him her sweetest fake smile. Would I do that?

  That made him laugh, banishing some of the tension from his face, which was good.

  “It is very weird when you people do that,” Horne said as he snapped one of the tents out. “You know that right?”

  Fern made an amused sound. “When we do what?”

  Leah snorted and came to help Horne with the tent. “Feeling jealous? Wanna pledge?”

  Horne’s gaze shot to Emma. After a wary look, he smiled slowly, shaking his head. “No offense chica ,” he said to Emma, “But the last thing I want’s someone seeing into my head. Nobody needs to know how often I have those impure thoughts about about Cindy Crawford.”

  Emma gave him a confused smile. “Who’s Cindy Crawford?”

  “Aye aye aye,” Horne lamented. “You are young.”

  “And Cindy Crawford is not,” said Leah, “Not anymore. She’s still smokin’ though. But then I was human in the eighties, so of course I think that. Dunno what your excuse is.”

  Horne’s reply was impassioned and wholly in Spanish, so Emma had no idea what he said. But Leah laughed. Emma left them to it. It was cute seeing them together, and it had also given her the willies thinking about being bound to yet another shapechanger. Just how many heads could she be expected to see to see into before it got weird?

  Okay, it was already weird. Before it drove her batshit crazy?

  Of course, Fern was merged with her, and she was too tired to shield even just a little bit. You’re already at four, and not crazy yet, Fern sent. Five if you count me, even though we aren’t bound by the pledge. Six if you count Seshua being bound to you, although I guess you can’t see into his head.

  Emma crouched, fumbled the zip of her pack, trying to get to her parka. She was cold all of a sudden. Seven, she sent. If you count Alan, it’s seven.

  Fern appeared at her side with a little rush of displaced air and put his hands over hers. I’m sorry. I didn’t think.

  She twined her fingers through his and stared at their joined hands. You didn’t do anything wrong. I’m okay. I’m terrified, for you and all the others that are bound to me, and for myself because I don’t know what I’m becoming. That’s all.

  He gave a bitter half laugh. That’s all, huh.

  She squeezed his hands and met his eyes. Seshua told me that the way to protect the people I love is with power. He told me to find more of it, if I could. That’s the reason we’re here, but I didn’t know what he meant, not really. Saving Ivan — was that about power? What about suddenly having fangs? Power scares people, is that really what I want, for everyone to feel like Horne does, afraid of me poking around in their heads like a vampire —

  Fern took her chin in a grip strong enough to surprise her into silence. His black eyes glittered with cold stars. These people love you, he sent. That is where your power lies. Katenka and Kahotep love you — not because the Pledge cured the wasting disease, but because of what you sacrificed for them before you ever accepted the pledge. You could have taken Ivan’s pledge and let him disappear, and instead you took a chance and brought him with us even though nobody knows how stable he really is. You treated Red like a person before you were ever immune to his curse. And for some reason, when I bound you with the Enam-Vesh, you treated me like an equal and not a burden or a slave.

  Emma forced herself not to look away from him. I think you’re forgetting the part where I shot you. Twelve times.

  He shrugged and dropped his hand. We’ve had this conversation before. I bound you against your will, you shot me. It was fair and my judgment stands: you treated me like an equal and not a burden or a slave, and there will be no more argument on this account.

  Funny, that was usually her line.

  His tone softened. These people aren’t afraid of you, Em. They’re loyal to you. And they love you. It’s another kind of power, a better one.

  She picked the next thought out of his head and smiled in spite of the tears stinging the back of her nose. But it can’t hurt to find some more of the garden variety power, can it? The ka-pow kind.

  He nodded, face solemn. Ka-pow.

  Emma had the coldest bath of her life that
evening in the stream nearby; Fern would’ve joined her out of solidarity, but he dealt with the cold about as well as she did, and she forbid him from entering the water when he could just go into the woods, change, and change back again burned clean by the magic. The only other person in their party who needed to bathe the old-fashioned way was Shadi. Since he was pretty old-fashioned himself, he took himself downstream and around a bend to give Emma privacy.

  She didn’t need it. It was too damn cold to take her underwear off, and she only waded in long enough to rinse the sweat off and wet her hair before clambering out again, shivering so hard she couldn’t walk a straight line.

  Leah handed her a towel — smaller than a bath towel but bigger than anything Emma expected them to have packed. It wasn’t big enough to wrap around her, so she got to work scrubbing the water from her goose-pimpled flesh and swearing under her breath. When she was done, Leah held the towel up in front of her so she could strip her wet underwear and sports-bra off, and she shimmied into the dry change of clothes waiting for her faster than she ever thought possible. Didn’t matter that she was still a bit damp; the fresh clothes felt like heaven, and donning socks and boots was a near-orgasmic experience.

  Of course, her hair was wet, heavy and everywhere. She’d caught it up in the towel and managed to keep it off her nice dry clothes, but it was so long Emma suspected it would never dry. Then she had an idea.

  “This is probably a stupid question,” she said to Leah and Fatima, who looked around at her with mild interest. “But do either of you have a really sharp knife?”

  Fatima’s droll stare was priceless.

  When Fern woke Emma up the next morning before dawn, she discovered her hair was even longer than it had been before she cut it. It now reached the tops of her thighs. She could only feel dull surprise, however, as two other matters were far more pressing.

  The first was that something had come to their camp in the night.

  The second was that Emma could feel its call, driving her to follow across the mountains.

  29

  Fern was a lot better at shielding his thoughts within the merge than he’d allowed Emma to realize. It was because he was Aranan, and she was not, and for that he was thankful. For one thing, if she was Aranan he’d have no free will left — Aranan females simply weren’t wired to preserve their male mate’s autonomy while bonded, which had afforded them greater chances of survival in the very distant past but hadn’t been working out so well for the last millennium or so.

  It had worked when the Aranan had been a strictly matriarchal species; with the rise of patriarchal societies across the globe, fewer Aranan males were willing to sacrifice themselves to the bond. And the males were the carriers of the venom that initiated the bond, so if they didn’t want it, it couldn’t be forced on them. Because the female’s will was always stronger in the bond, it was almost unheard of for a male to force the Enam-Vesh upon a female — indeed, it had been Fern’s sister Cara to come up with the idea for Fern to force it on Emma. Culturally and biologically, the notion was anathema to him.

  His sister had been right when she prophesied that Emma’s status as Caller of the Blood meant she could be bound with the venom, but that her humanity would prevent her from asserting dominance in the bond. Fern hadn’t been so sure, but it was true in a way; Emma had been remarkably reluctant to exercise any power over him. Cara thought it was because Emma was even weaker than she’d anticipated, and could not understand why Fern didn’t exploit that weakness.

  Cara would never understand that Emma was dominant. And the only time she had ever used that power over him was to protect him from losing his mind when she gave herself up to the ritual with Alan. Fern had realized why he’d reacted so badly when she did it: because, although he’d been raised to understand the lack of will a male had when bonded, he’d never experienced it. He’d lived under his sister’s rule for almost a hundred years, and she had done terrible things to him, and he’d been conditioned to accept it. Hardwired to accept it. But he wasn’t bonded to Cara. And he’d started to get used to things being different with Em.

  Then she’d used her power to shut him out. After that, things got confused; he remembered black horror, a sense that his mind was broken, not right. Depression descended like the pall of plague. If he’d just been dealing with the trauma of knowing what had happened to her but not being able to be there for her, it probably would’ve gone differently, but he was dealing with his own trauma as well, and it took him too long to figure it out.

  Scratch that — he didn’t figure it out. She collapsed at the Roadhouse and Red Sun demanded he merge with her to shield her from Alan’s call. Merging with her burned away the depression, and the brain fog, and the shroud of unseen night haunts that seemed to cloak him in perpetual mental twilight. Then he could think.

  What might have happened to them if they never left the ranch, never discovered Alan was trying to get his claws into Emma’s mind? Would Emma have eventually used her power to force him to merge with her, reestablishing their rapport and healing the rift? Or would she have kept hoping, believing in him, wanting to give him space to come around on his own. Fern wasn’t sure, not completely, but he thought the latter. He thought she would’ve wanted to give him the freedom that she’d taken away from him when she shut him out. Because she refused to abuse the power she had over him.

  Right now though, he was thankful for her humanity in another way. She was dominant, but she was human, and he could shield from her even while merged. Right now, he was shielding like a bitch, because he didn’t want Emma to know just how scary she was acting.

  She had been in a light trance from the moment they woke up that morning. She didn’t seem to be aware of it. She was lucid and warm, but she was far away as well, and she’d donned her boots and started walking away from their camp before Ivan was even done explaining they’d had an intruder overnight. Before she’d even put her jacket back on.

  Recovering from the surprise, Fern had tightened his mental grip on the merge, sending a mild, wordless suggestion of stop-where-are-you-going. She stopped and turned to him, hair shifting like a living cape.

  “They are in the mountains,” she’d said to him, tone reasonable and not at all the moony, vague voice of someone under compulsion. The only discordant note was that she’d dropped her contractions. “They are calling to me, and I am going to them.”

  “Who’s calling you?” Red had said.

  She’d looked at Red and Fern had known she was under some foreign influence for sure; her pulse rate stayed the same, her gaze remained mild, her cheeks didn’t flush with warmth. She looked at Red the way she’d look at someone asking her for directions on the street. Because Red could sometimes be a knucklehead of the first order, he didn’t notice anything different about the way Em looked at him.

  “The children of the shadow cat,” she’d said with a shrug. “Shall we go now? I know the way.”

  Red had tried to insist they carry on toward Ukok Plateau. Fern had felt that subtle shift in her that reminded him of a bell being chimed in his head, ringing along his bones, silent but for the vibration of it, and her eyes had turned black. Not black like his eyes, which were after all normal eyes — hers absorbed the light, as though they weren’t eyes at all, but openings to some other place and time, and something alien gazed out of them with blind indifference.

  When her eyes turned like that, she looked empty and terrifying, and Fern was very glad he could keep that thought from her.

  As her eyes bled back to normal, she spoke. “There is nothing at Ukok but bones.” A frown creased her brow, and Fern almost felt like she was arguing with someone — or something. Then her brow smoothed out and she turned from them. “There is nothing at Ukok but bones,” she said again, walking away.

  Once again Fern had used the merge to keep her still. He’d braided her hair while the others packed their gear. Sinking into the bond and immersing himself in her thoughts in a way he rarel
y allowed himself, Fern found her mind normal but completely occupied with one repeating thought, like a mantra: into the mountains into the mountains into the mountains into the —

  He could almost hear the droning chant of some spell behind the words, but no matter how far he sank into her, it remained elusive. He shared as much with Red Sun.

  Beneath the mantra was a warm, fond emotion, directed mostly at Fern’s hands in her hair. He didn’t share that with Red. Further investigation proved that Emma could be momentarily distracted with questions, which she answered without depth, but her gaze never strayed from the southeast and the mountains they’d been intending to skirt.

  Leah tried to get her to eat, and she wouldn’t. “Here,” Fern had said, holding her hair with one hand and the other out for the food. “I can eat her share and funnel the energy for her. For a while.” Leah nodded angrily and handed over the dehydrated bacon.

  As Fern had wolfed down a third helping delivered by Leah and finished Emma’s hair, Shadi came over, a length of leather thong in his hands. “I can bind her braid as I do my own,” he said, eyes troubled. “It will prevent it from unraveling.” When they were done, the rope of her hair swung to the backs of her knees.

  Fern had checked the stitches in the wound on her right arm — the scabs were thick, the flesh wasn’t swollen or red, but he thought the stitches would be okay for another couple of days, so he left them. Then he dressed her in her parka and they decamped. They spent the rest of the day following her into the mountains at a pace that left little breath for conversation. Leah made it her duty to supply Fern with a constant stream of food; when he questioned how their supplies were going, she gave a dismissive sniff and handed him yet another canteen of the electrolyte mixture.

  Of course the hunters of the group weren’t concerned with supplies. And, Fern had to admit, he needed the calories. Without the extra energy, and without him pushing energy into her, he suspected he’d be watching the fat and muscle evaporate off the both of them before his very eyes.