Mad, Bad & Dangerous

by Cat Marsters

  She was.

  * * * * *

  Bael flew, his dragon wings beating the air because the air itself offended him. His blood sang, every cell in his body screaming with rage.

  He couldn’t remember ever being so angry but the worst part was, he didn’t know what he was really angry about. His own stupidity and humiliation? Or Kett’s hideous betrayal, at the same time carelessly impersonal and terribly, pointedly specific?

  Howling with rage and misery, he incinerated a small wood and watched with feral enjoyment as the living trees crackled and burned. A village nestled in a valley nearby, and he considered it with detached cruelty. He could destroy the whole lot, burn houses, people and livestock. Let them fry in their own skin, watch flesh heat up until it boiled, bathe in their screams. He was miserable to the point of pain, why shouldn’t everyone else be?

  The air full of screams, the scent of charred flesh, rivers of blood and pain and fear. He slaughtered them, he did it for fun, he massacred them…

  With a jolt of revulsion, he shook himself out of it. Was this how Striker had become so terrible, so powerful and so dangerous? Was this why he’d rampaged through Euskara twenty years ago, murdering Magi and stealing their power, flattening cities, roasting people alive—just to mirror his own pain?

  What the hell could have hurt such an inhuman man so badly?

  He found himself on the ground, back in his human body, staring at the scryer in his palm. It glowed red then the face resolved into Striker’s visage.

  “Who the fuck are you?” he asked.

  The same shock of fear and disgust ran through Bael, but far less powerfully than it had before. “Why did you do it?” he asked.

  “Do what? Who are you?”

  “Kett’s— I’m…a friend of Kett’s,” Bael said through the bad taste in his mouth.

  “Oh yeah.” Striker’s mouth twisted cruelly. “You ran away.”

  “You murdered hundreds of my people.”

  Striker shrugged, as if he couldn’t see what the two things had to do with each other.

  “Why did you do it? You flattened the city of Vaticano twenty years ago. You stole power and tortured innocent people. Why did you do it?”

  Striker shrugged again. “What are you, a groupie? I did it ’cos I wanted to, kid. I enjoyed it. I’d do it again—”

  “No, you bloody wouldn’t,” came a female voice, the voice of the brunette at Nuala’s house. Chalia. Chance’s mother…

  Understanding stabbed Bael in the heart.

  “You did it for her,” he said slowly. “Because she hurt you.” With every word he became more certain, the knowledge creeping into him like fog.

  Striker’s face turned to granite.

  “Because she did something to you,” Bael went on. “Because she hurt you so badly it screamed inside you, and all you wanted to do was make everyone else feel as much pain as you. To hurt and maim and burn and slash and kill, because that’s what she did to you. And she never stopped you. She stops you now but she didn’t then. And you went on sucking power out of people so you could destroy more and more, bigger and bigger, until you’d destroyed a city and killed thousands—”

  A jolt of power suddenly surged through the scryer, like the shock from ungrounded metal, making Bael flinch and lose his thread.

  The view on his scryer tilted, as if someone else had taken hold of the device, and Chalia’s face appeared, pale and shocked.

  “It was you,” Bael said, and her lovely dark eyes swam with fear and guilt and pain.

  “What did you do?” Bael asked her.

  Her hand went to her throat, lovely and unlined even twenty years after Striker had burned and destroyed cities in her name.

  “I got engaged to someone else,” she said distantly. “Who are you?”

  “Baelvar.” The world had narrowed to the scryer in his hand and the anger pulsing through him.

  Chalia regarded him through the scryer. “You’re Kett’s mate, yes? The Nasc. With power.”

  Bael clenched his fist and looked away.

  Striker laughed softly. “What did she do?”

  “Someone else,” Bael said.

  “Ah,” he said, but Chalia looked shocked.

  “Kett? She’s not the cheating type. Is she? Why would she—you must have been mistaken,” she told Bael, who bristled.

  “I saw her with him,” he said, “and unless she sat on a snake and he was sucking the poison out, then I don’t think I was mistaken about what they were doing.”

  Striker started laughing.

  “It’s not funny,” Bael said, and to his horror his throat swelled as if he was going to cry. “Look, she was just making a point. She doesn’t want to be mated to me. She never did.”

  “Ain’t the sort of thing you can break, kid,” Striker said.

  “Well, it is. She broke it,” Bael said. The tears were still threatening, so he added, “That’s all. I just wanted to know. Sorry to disturb you,” and let the scryer fall from his grasp, breaking the connection.

  Striker’s laughter faded on the evening breeze.

  All for the love of a woman. Striker had stolen power and killed thousands in anger because his woman had betrayed him. He’d become this vicious killer who gleefully committed genocide because he felt like it, and all because a woman had broken his heart.

  Bael shook himself, trying to escape the specter of his own future, and flew on.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The lion had been a bad choice. Kett knew it, but she still kept on in the same shape, climbing over sheer, slippery rocks to cross the mountains.

  She’d broken Bael’s heart and destroyed perhaps forever her own chance of happiness. Not to mention ever having sex again. And for what? To prove her own independence? To make a damn point?

  You never learn, Kett Almet, she cursed herself as rough rocks tore at her paws. Ever stop to think maybe you’re the one cursing yourself?

  When are you going to stop fighting?

  For a long moment she paused, tired and hurt, resting on her haunches on a rare piece of flat ground. Maybe she should give in, go back to Bael, explain and apologize and settle down to…what? Not ordinariness. Life with Bael might be infuriating, maddening and humiliating, but it would also be exciting, passionate and stimulating. It would be…fun.

  Maybe—

  Something whined past her ear, too fast and too straight to be an insect. Instinct had her on the ground instantly, her feline ears twitching and swiveling, her head whipping around to see where it might have come from.

  She didn’t see the shapes at first, but she heard the voices.

  “A lion? Up here?”

  Hell. She knew this had been the wrong shape. Too conspicuous.

  The hunter’s voice was oddly familiar, although she couldn’t place why. She tried to scent him, but then heard the bark of half a dozen dogs, hunting hounds, their scents coming sharp on the wind. If she hadn’t been so preoccupied she’d have noticed them before. Dammit!

  She ducked and changed into a gryphon, a quick shift, changing only half her body, claws and wings and beak—

  A second shot zipped toward her, so close it ruffled her feathers, and she leapt into the air.

  “A gryphon!”

  “Hiding with a lion? Not likely!”

  “It’s the shapeshifter! We found it!”

  Panicked, Kett darted, trying to gain speed, but while a gryphon was graceful and swift in the air, takeoff was a problem. Should have gone for an eagle, she thought as she darted under a hail of crossbow bolts.

  One ripped into her flank, making her falter, and she lost height. The hunters whooped—why are they looking for a shapeshifter? Who are they?—and the dogs bayed. They were close, their scents strong in her nostrils, their claws scrabbling on the bare rocks below her. Kett flapped desperately, pain swamping her, twisting away from the dogs.

  She didn’t see the scrawny tree in her path until it was too late, and its branches slammed in
to her ribs, scraping through the fur and feathers. She fell, breathless, into the tiny, rocky gully from which the sorry tree grew.

  The dogs yelped in excitement and raced over, snapping and swiping at her, trying to reach into the crack in the rock that both protected and trapped her.

  “Sir!” someone yelled. It was a man in hunting gear, his face twisted by an ugly scar running from temple to jaw. “Lord Albhar!”

  Kett’s gut twisted, because she recognized this man. She’d given him that scar.

  These people were Federación.

  A dog lunged at Kett, snarling, spittle flying at her, and she snarled back, snapping with a beak that was turning into a mouth. She needed to get airborne again, and if she could just get away from these dogs—

  “Are you sure?” asked a male voice, out of breath and elderly.

  “It can’t hold its shape, sir, look! It’s definitely changing! Either it’s the shapeshifter or it’s Nasc.”

  “Well, either will do,” said the voice she supposed to be Lord Albhar’s, and she looked up to see a bearded man staring down at her from behind the dogs, a cruel light in his eyes. He took out a scryer from a pouch on his belt, and while the dogs whined and scraped at her with their paws, he calmly concentrated on the little rock.

  “Bael,” he said. “Where are you, dear boy?”

  * * * * *

  Determined not to turn into the sort of Mage who destroyed things just because he could—determined not to turn into Striker—Bael kept his murderous rage confined to the reaches of ordinary hunting. All right, so there’d be a few villagers feasting extraordinarily well on the dead creatures he’d left behind—some of them ready-roasted—but at least he wasn’t running around murdering people, and that had to be something.

  He was in split forms when his scryer buzzed. Var, loping along as a hunting hound, trotted over as Bael answered the scryer. He’d have been a better hunting companion if he’d been able to fly, but a vicious brawl with a surprisingly violent wolf had left him with a rip across the back that would have been agony with wings. Bael himself wasn’t faring hugely better, his ribs aching from getting too close to the death throes of a stag with giant antlers.

  He was tired, aching and bruised, but the fights had made him feel a whole lot better.

  “Bael,” Albhar greeted him, looking oddly excited. Bael felt a twinge of unease, as inexplicable as the knowledge he’d felt for certain earlier. Was this part of his long-elusive Mage power? Did it only manifest once he’d found—and lost—his mate?

  No, she was never your mate, she was never—

  “Where are you, dear boy?”

  “Not sure. Galatea, Iberia maybe. Somewhere around the border.”

  “Ah, such a shame you’re not closer. You’ll never guess what we’ve just found.”

  “A cure for the common cold?” Bael muttered, not really caring.

  “Much better. We’ve found the shapeshifter who killed your mother.”

  Bael stilled. Here was a creature he could vent his rage on. Legitimately.

  But did the shapeshifter really kill her? asked his conscience. What if it really was the kelf?

  Which is more likely? he challenged, and got no answer.

  Besides, he really wanted to destroy something.

  “Are you sure?” he asked, his voice sounding distant.

  “Oh, quite sure,” Albhar said. “It’s tried to change its shape already, but we caught it anyway. The dogs are trying to take chunks out of it now. No, drop! Leave! Leave! Good dog. We need it alive.”

  “Do you?” Bael asked. “Shame. I feel like killing something.”

  “Well, if it’s any consolation, it will be dead by the end of the—no! I said leave! LEAVE!” Albhar strode forward, and the scryer’s picture wobbled as the old man bent forward and grabbed a dog, hurling it bodily out of the way. Bael heard the creature whine and whimper as it hit the rocks. “Hells, it’s taken a chunk out of the thing’s shoulder. Won’t bleed to death, will it, do you think?”

  He seemed to be addressing someone else—one of the knights stationed at the Vyiskagrad castle, Bael supposed. He really ought to keep track of how many knights he had, and where. But not right now.

  “No sir, shouldn’t think so,” the knight was saying.

  “We need its blood. Needs to be flowing.”

  “Oh, we can keep it alive that long, sir. Not until the new moon, isn’t it? Still need the second creature, don’t you?”

  “A second creature?” Bael asked, frowning. “There’s more than one shapeshifter?”

  “Well, of course, boy,” Albhar said, turning the scryer back to his face. “There can’t be only one creature in all the Realms that can change its shape!”

  Some of the knights chuckled. Var nudged Bael’s thigh with his nose.

  “You never mentioned a second—” Bael began, but Albhar cut him off.

  “Don’t you worry about it, boy.”

  “Don’t call me boy,” Bael snapped.

  “Oh come on, Bael, this is a great day. We’ve been searching for this creature for twenty-four years, ever since—”

  “It killed my mother, yes, I know. But my father always said—”

  “Don’t you want to come see it? Face it?” Albhar’s expression was sly. “We need it alive for the rest of the week, but you can rough it up as much as you’d like.”

  “Sure,” Bael said, attention diverted effectively. “I could do with beating the shit out of something.”

  “Well then. Just as long as it’s left alive.”

  It killed your mother. Familial loyalty be damned, he just wanted to hurt something. “Highest cell, tallest tower,” he said. “Let it freeze. Let it starve. Keep it alive just enough for it to be awake to feel the pain.”

  Behind Albhar, his men cheered. The old man grinned with a glint in his eye Bael had never seen before. But he didn’t care. Here was a chance to vent his anger, his misery, his pain.

  “I’m going to make that thing suffer,” he said, and Albhar smiled.

  * * * * *

  By the time he arrived in Vyiskagrad, Bael’s thoughts had turned from the shapeshifter’s suffering to his own.

  His ribs and back ached like the devil, so he’d decided not to fly to Vyiskagrad. It took three days to get to the First Bridge to Asiatica, and then a further day and a half to cross the vastly hot, empty deserts of Ægyptus to the Vyiskagradian border and the Vyishka mountains. The constant sway and jolt of the carriage sent pulses of pain through his body.

  He’d never much liked the castle in the mountains, huddled like a vulture above precipitous drops and vicious peaks. Perpetually cold and icy, it never seemed to be touched by sunlight. The dark gray stones loomed above the high, twisting pass, along which he now rode on a hired mount. To either side of the narrow shoulder of rock that was the castle’s only approach by land was a gorge several hundred feet deep on one side, and so low on the other that the bottom couldn’t even be seen. The distant roar of rushing water gave the only clue that it didn’t drop into infinity.

  Bael rode on, his back and his ribs aching. He’d twinned with Var, the better to heal, but despite the disciplines his father had tried again and again to teach him, he’d never been any good at conquering pain. His father had insisted it was all in his head. Bael was pretty sure it was mostly in his ribs and his back.

  His head ached too. He put it down to the altitude and the days of uncomfortable traveling. Anger still throbbed dully through him, a background pain he wasn’t fully rid of, but it wasn’t the bright, burning flame it had been a couple days ago.

  He rode into the courtyard, his headache worsening, and dismounted from the horse. As ever, despite the forbidding cold, the courtyard was full of people but to Bael it looked horribly bleak. The mountains loomed behind the castle, itself a hulking, dark gray brute of a building. The tallest tower stood out against the bruised yellow sky and Bael tried to summon some enthusiasm for beating the shit out of the shapeshifte
r within, but all he really wanted was a hot bath and a soft bed.

  And a warm woman. He’d sampled the female company at every inn along the way, but not one of the girls he’d tried had solicited a reaction from him. Anger, tiredness and alcohol were hell on a man’s libido.

  “Bael!” cried Albhar as he strode into the high, dark Great Hall. Overhead, the dusty remains of tapestries fluttered in the constant howling draught. Bael wondered if the place had always been so dismal, or if it just seemed so because of his mood. “You took your time! I thought you’d miss the moon tonight and we’d have to wait a month!”

  “You could’ve proceeded without me,” Bael pointed out, and Albhar’s smile shifted just the tiniest fraction.

  “Oh no, of course not. Culmination of your father’s life work. Couldn’t do it without you. Do you want to see the creature? It’s truly pathetic. Hardly eaten a thing in days. I think it’s sulking. Hideous thing— it’s all infected where the dogs bit it on the shoulder, stinks like hell.”

  “You know what, I’m really knackered,” Bael said. “Think I’ll just—”

  “No, boy, come and see it. Don’t you want your revenge?”

  Personally, Bael wanted to sleep more than he wanted revenge, but he didn’t expect Albhar would appreciate that. Besides, the men were crowding ’round, excitement evident on their faces. They wanted to see more blood spilled.

  “Just keep it alive,” Albhar reminded him as they ascended the many, many stairs to the top of the tower.

  “Yeah. I might go for a nap first,” Bael said. “You know, so I can have a proper go at it.”

  “Have two goes,” Albhar said, a vicious, excited light in his eyes at the prospect. Bael realized the old man really wanted to see the creature suffer, and he wasn’t sure that want was entirely motivated by revenge. This shapeshifter business was bringing out a malicious side to his former mentor he hadn’t seen before.

  “Here,” said Albhar eventually, gesturing to a thick oak door so old and heavy it had the consistency of granite. There was a small hatch in it, opening inward, stained with the remains of many slimy meals. “Here’s your shapeshifter.”

  He opened the door and Bael peered through the gloom. At first he didn’t see the creature lying on the floor, naked and gray with cold and malnutrition. The cell was icy cold and stank of many things he didn’t want to name, not least the infection in the creature’s hideously swollen shoulder.