Verena's Whistle: Varangian Descendants Book I

by K. Panikian

  “Do you see something?” he whispered to me.

  “No,” I whispered back. “I’m just being paranoid.”

  He nodded and we crouched down at the lip of the crater. The snow in the clearing looked fresh and new. Obviously, the scientists were long gone. I softly described what Theo saw at the moment the portal opened and pointed to the north side of the clearing, where the besy had gone.

  Owen looked down into the clearing for a long moment. “It is a good vantage point,” he said finally, “if they are down there and we are up here, firing down at them. However, and I admit I know nothing about how their minds work, but unless the leader is a completely inept military commander, he won’t bring his whole troop to check out your bait and stand there, in this killing field, like a nice big target for you.

  “He’ll instead send one or two guys to check the bait. If it’s legitimate, he may come himself to investigate. He’ll leave the rest of his force in the cave. There is no point in bringing them here.”

  “You’re right,” I agreed. “So maybe we split our forces? Some do the bait plan here; some attack the cave?”

  “Maybe,” Owen answered carefully. “Can we go see the cave?” he asked. “Or is it too risky?”

  “We can go, but I want to approach differently than last time. I want to try an angle where maybe we can see into the cave.”

  “I’ll follow you,” Owen replied.

  I led us all the way back to the snow machine, and then we drove another few miles up the ski trail. Owen kept his gun out and I turned my head back and forth, scanning the trail and the woods on either side.

  We stopped again when I saw a creek on the east side of the trail. That’s what I was hoping to find. “Now we find out if our boots are as waterproof as they should be.”

  Owen grimaced and followed me. I stepped down into the frozen creek bed carefully. The water was still flowing in the center of the bed, trickling down in tinkling, icy waterfalls. I tried to keep my feet in the water without breaking the ice too much and I slowly climbed upstream. It was very slippery and my feet got colder and colder, though they stayed dry in my boots.

  Finally, I paused and checked the GPS on my phone. I was surprised I still had a signal. The cave was just over the ridge ahead. I climbed out of the water and motioned to the ridge with my finger over my lips. Owen nodded and we crept up the snowy slope, staying low. At the top, we dropped down flat on the ridge, hidden under the boughs of a large fir tree.

  The cave opening was about 20 yards in front of us. The sun was high in the sky behind it, so we couldn’t see inside the dark entrance. So much for my new angle. The snow was trampled and muddy in the glade. I didn’t see anything moving.

  At the far edge of the clearing, there was large plastic bin. It was knocked over onto its side and I could see it was empty inside. There were some black rocks in the snow in front of it. I pointed it out to Owen and he waved his hand, acknowledging he saw it too. He stared down at the glade for a little while longer and then he was ready to go.

  We backed slowly down the ridge, stepped carefully, quietly into the creek again, and began to move downstream. The walls of the creek bed kept us out of sight but also from seeing anything that might be approaching. It was a strange feeling of safety and vulnerability.

  Finally, I saw the prints in the snow where we’d climbed into the water and I knew the snow machine was just out of sight. As I slipped and slid out of the water and into the snow, I froze in place. Owen froze beside me and cocked his head, listening.

  There it was again, a low, growling sound. I pulled my crossbow up and peered around us through the trees. I didn’t see anything. It must be by the snow machine. I pointed in that direction and then I pointed to Owen. He nodded at me. Then I pointed to myself and a spot a little farther downstream and mimed my fingers walking. He nodded again.

  I sidled along the slope, trying to keep my bogged down, snowy boots from slipping back into the stream. When I was about ten yards away from where I’d left Owen, I turned back to him to check. He was watching me and seeing I was set, started to climb out. I turned and crawled up the wall of the bed, staying low, my crossbow in front of me.

  At the top of the slope, I hid under a snowy bush. I could see the snow machine on the side of the trail just a few feet away. I could also see the canine face of a psoglav sniffing around the machine and growling. The bes was about the size of a small bear. It was upright on equine legs and its human arms kept reaching out to touch the machine before it pulled them away. It growled again and its gray, iron teeth gleamed sharply.

  Suddenly it stopped dancing around the machine, lifted its head, and stared with its one eye directly at my hiding spot. I didn’t think it could see me under the bush, but maybe it could smell me? I wasn’t sure if I could move my crossbow into position and aim before it would be on me, so I stayed perfectly still.

  It stared in my direction, its eye glowing red, and bared its teeth again. It let out a sharp, doglike bark and moved one hoof forward when a gunshot echoed along the trail, startling me and it. The psoglav turned its head to follow the noise and another shot rang out. Neither appeared to strike it and it looked back in my direction, confused. I swiftly aimed my crossbow and fired, striking it in the center of its chest.

  It whined and human hands reached up to finger the quarrel. It staggered but didn’t go down. I reloaded as quickly as I could, pulling another bolt from my waistband. Before I could fire though, it took a giant leap backward and landed in the snow on the other side of the sled. It started edging toward the forest.

  We couldn’t let it go back to the cave and warn the others. I fired again but missed as it ducked behind the snow machine. I whistled a sharp, “Come” at it. Unlike the bukavac by the lake, this monster heard me. It cocked its pointed ears and took a few steps toward me before it froze. I called it again, “Come!”

  It started to walk toward me, obviously reluctant. Its hooves dragged in the snow. Its gold spark dimmed in front of me; I was losing it. I drew my nightingale knife from the scabbard hanging from my neck and held it ready in front of my body. I took two more steps toward it and then whistled at the same time that I darted forward. I slashed twice, diagonally across its body. The second strike made contact and I felt the blade bite deep into its chest. It gurgled and fell to its knees. I bent and in a quick movement, gashed its throat open and stepped back, avoiding the bloody spray.

  It toppled the rest of the way to the ground, whined, and was still.

  I looked up and saw Owen right beside me, also holding his knife at the ready. His gaze was fierce.

  “It’s dead,” I said needlessly. My voice shook a little. I was suddenly very dizzy; my legs were shaking. I dropped to my knees in the snow.

  Owen dropped beside me. “It’s the adrenaline rush,” he said quietly. “It will pass in a few minutes. Try to take deep breaths.” He rubbed my back in a slow circle and I inhaled as deeply as I could and let it out again. We knelt like this for a while and slowly the blackness receded from my vision; my hands stopped trembling, and I felt my heart rate slow.

  Finally, I cleared my throat and said, “I’ve never killed anything before, I guess. That didn’t happen with the bukavac.”

  “It’s totally natural,” Owen answered and, after a last brush on the top of my head with his hand, stood. “What do we do with this body? And the blood on the trail?”

  I stood as well, “I have an idea.”

  I pulled the spare container of diesel from the storage area under the snow machine seat and then dragged the psoglav into the middle of the trail, away from any overhanging branches. I made a slight depression in the snow, like a small bowl, and smoothed the sides into ice. Then I dumped a minute amount of the diesel into the bowl.

  I skipped a few steps back and removed my gloves, then lit a spark at the fingertips of my right hand. I sent it to the ice bowl of gasoline and it ignited with soft whomping noise. I whistled the burning fuel into the air and
into a ball and then, with a shrill signal, sent it hurtling through the air at the body of the psoglav. The fire covered the body and consumed it.

  I watched the psoglav burn in a wave of flames and black smoke, keeping my whistle low and continuous. At one point, I caught a flicker of movement in the branches of the tree opposite me, through the smoke. It looked like a young man. Then an owl. When I looked again though, there was nothing there.

  In the end, the fire died out, leaving behind a greasy, charred mess in the snow and a smell of burnt hair in the air. We pushed the ashes to the side of the trail and then buried them under the snow. I dug out the iron teeth and packed them under the seat. Hopefully, by the time anyone found the spot, it would look like someone just set a campfire beside the trail. No bones or bone fragments to be seen.

  We kicked snow all over the trail, covering the blood. Whether the besy would be suspicious, if they passed by, was another matter. They would certainly smell the blood and ashes, even if they couldn’t identify them. Would they notice the loss of a psoglav from their ranks? We had no way of knowing.

  Finally, we climbed back onto the snow machine to head down the mountain. I was still feeling a little unsteady, so Owen drove. I rested my head against his broad back and closed my eyes. My feet were icicles in my soggy socks.

  BACK at the house, we stored the snow machine in the garage and then stripped off our wet gear in the entry. My feet were still very, very cold. The rest of me was chilled as well. I told Owen I was going to take a bath and he suggested the hot tub instead.

  I dug my swimsuit out of my suitcase, put it on, and then snagged a couple of towels from the hall closet. I checked my phone and saw that Theo and Julian ended up driving into Chelyabinsk after all. They would bring take-out home for dinner.

  I looked out the sliding glass door on the deck and saw Owen there in boots and a swimsuit, and nothing else, wiping snow off the hot tub cover. I watched him for a moment; the definition in his back was hypnotizing as his muscles stretched and released. His skin was a golden tan, though I could see creeping red across his shoulders where he flushed from the cold. I felt myself flush in turn, my insides overheating. His curling, brown hair was falling into his eyes again and I watched him toss his head back. He looked up and saw me in the glass and stopped moving, staring back at me.

  I felt embarrassed to be caught ogling and moved my hand in a sort of half-wave. Then I slid open the door, stepped into my boots, and helped him pull off the cover.

  As I slid my feet into the hot water, I let out an involuntary gasp. Prickles of sensation ran up my legs and my nerve endings felt like they’d been shocked. After a moment though, the sensation became pleasant and I settled all the way in to my shoulders, my back against the hot tub wall. I started to feel warm for the first time in hours. I closed my eyes and breathed in the steam, relaxing.

  I felt the water move as Owen settled across from me and our knees touched. I left my leg where it was and his rested more fully against mine. His leg hair tickled. I suppressed a shiver.

  We sat quietly for a few minutes and I kept my eyes closed, my held tilted back on the edge of the tub. The weak winter sunshine was warm on my face. The air smelled like chlorine and pine needles. Finally, I opened my eyes and blinked. I looked at Owen and met his intense gaze. His brown eyes were lustrous in the sunshine. I could see depths of almond and honey. Mmm.

  He sat back and I snapped out of my musings, shaken, as he put his sinewy arms up on the edge of the hot tub on either side of him. “That was intense,” he said. “The way it looked and moved, the mix of the different animals; it was creepy. And when my bullets didn’t hit it, I had a few moments of feeling pretty afraid.”

  “It was a psoglav. They like to eat people.” I’d never seen one in real life before either. The human torso part had been really disturbing.

  “What happened with the gun?” I asked. “I couldn’t see.”

  “I have no idea. I fired. I heard and felt it fire two times. But the bullets just disappeared into thin air. I’m a pretty good shot, especially at close range like that; there’s no way I would have missed.”

  “So maybe guns aren’t going to work against the besy. Too much magic,” I mused.

  “Looks like I need crossbow lessons,” Owen agreed. “Your whistle worked though.”

  “Yeah,” I said, pleased. That had been an exciting development. “I couldn’t affect the bukavac though, remember?”

  “I was thinking about that,” Owen said, “on the sled ride home. I wonder if the bukavac was sort of deaf? It had that piercing scream. Maybe it’s deaf as a defense mechanism, so if two of them get together, they can’t kill each other that way.”

  “Oh yeah,” I said thoughtfully. “That makes sense.”

  “If we ever see another one, we can dissect it and check.”

  “Gross,” I said and splashed some water at him.

  “That’s gross?” he said back. “You slit that thing’s throat with one swipe!”

  “That was gross,” I agreed.

  “No, I take it back,” Owen said. “It was awesome. You were awesome. I was standing there staring at my useless gun while you shot it full of crossbow bolts like some kind of medieval badass. It was beautiful.” He sat back again and said softer, “You’re beautiful.”

  I let the jetted water push me a little bit toward him and he stretched out one arm and wrapped it around my waist, pulling me to sit next to him. He left his arm there; his hand felt like a brand on my hip. “Is this okay?” he asked and I nodded.

  We both looked out at the view, the sunset stretching waves of purple and orange across the valley.

  I turned my head to look at Owen again and then leaned in to kiss his cheek. His skin was warm against my lips. “Thanks,” I said. His eyes kindled.

  Just then, a banging sound on the glass door behind us made me jump. Owen reluctantly pulled his arm from my waist, trailing his fingers along my skin. I looked and saw Theo waving and wriggling his eyebrows at me.

  “We’ve got pizza!” he yelled, his voice muffled by the glass, and motioned us inside.

  We climbed out and I helped Owen cover the hot tub again. Inside, wrapped in my towel, I hurried down the hall to get dressed.

  When I made it back to the kitchen, the guys had two pizza boxes open and were standing around eating with paper plates. I snagged a pepperoni slice and a mushroom slice and perched on a stool.

  Theo was in the middle of describing the ingredients they’d found. It sounded like they had everything they needed. The naphtha ended up being camp stove fuel. The saltpeter had been the trickiest. They talked to three different hardware store guys before deciding that the better bet was a health food store, since it could be used as a pickling and canning agent.

  Theo talked to Zasha too, and got a list of lab equipment for mixing volatile materials, which they’d picked up from the hardware store as well. He was going to start messing around with everything in the morning, over the fire pit in the back, and Julian was going to be his notetaker.

  Owen then shared our day’s adventure.

  “One down!” was Theo’s cheerful response at the end. “Did you see its teeth? Were they really iron?”

  “They’re in a bucket in the garage,” I answered.

  “Sweet!”

  “I think the plan to attack the cave is a good one,” Owen said. “The entrance is narrow, so directing the fire straight into it should block anything from escaping.

  “After seeing and fighting two of these creatures now, I vote for anything that thins their ranks a few at a time, instead of a fixed battle,” he added.

  That got a head nod from everyone.

  Chapter 16

  In the morning, I woke up to a muffled boom. I jumped out of bed and ran down the hall. In the kitchen I saw Owen standing by the mudroom door, looking into the backyard.

  “It’s just Theo and Julian,” he said, turning to me. “Looks like they decided to get an early start this m
orning.”

  “Do they still have all their body parts?” I asked, smoothing my hands through my tangled hair, trying to turn it into less of a cloud around my head.

  “I don’t see any blood, so probably,” was Owen’s answer.

  I went back down the hall to brush my hair and teeth and then in the kitchen again, asked Owen if he’d had breakfast yet. He offered to help and we whipped up some scrambled eggs, bacon, and fried potatoes before calling the two men in from outside to eat.

  They came in talking a mile a minute, cheeks pink with cold. They both paused simultaneously to inhale the bacon smell before sitting at the counter. Then their argument continued. Julian wanted to be more scientific about the ingredients, changing the proportion on a sliding scale. Theo wanted to toss stuff into the pot according to his intuition.

  “Which method resulted in the explosion earlier?” I asked.

  “Julian’s!” was Theo’s triumphant answer. “By the way,” he added, “Zasha’s going to stop by around lunch time with some copper jars from her lab. I told her I couldn’t find any at the store and she said they had extra around. Wikipedia says the Byzantines stored their Greek fire in copper containers.”

  “Does she know what you’re doing?” I asked, concerned.

  “No, I just told her I was trying to make this special kind of fertilizer to give to the homeowner here, as sort of a thank you gift.”

  “Hmm,” was my dubious answer.

  “We’ve gotten good at making stuff that explodes. The trick is to make something that doesn’t explode until you light it,” Julian mused. “I wonder…” he stood and walked to the sink to rinse his plate and then grabbed Theo again. “I want you to do what you just did on the last one, but wait to add the quicklime. Let’s leave the rest boiling in the pot for a minute and then add it.” They headed back out the door. I heard Theo retort with “Byzantine scholars say…” before the door shut on their voices.