by Lexi George
Sweat poured down her face and stung her eyes. She was exhausted but the kith were tiring, too. Unconscious and injured animals lay in heaps on the ground. A Doberman limped off on three legs. Other animals followed.
Beck wiped her brow and looked around. Two coyotes remained. They were baiting the bear. Hank smacked one to the ground. Growling, he chased the other one into the brush. Toby went after them.
Beck dropped the tree limb and sank to the ground. Verbena collapsed beside her.
“It’s over,” Verbena said. Her voice sounded hoarse. “We won.”
A twig snapped and Earl Skinner stepped from behind a tree. “I wouldn’t be counting your chickens just yet, baby sister.”
Verbena jumped up, her expression wary. “Earl.”
There were half a dozen men and women with him, all with the sly, narrow-faced Skinner looks. Damn. The decoy group; Beck had forgotten about them in the excitement of the fight.
Earl slapped one of the men on the back. “Told ya if we bided our time she’d be ours for the taking.”
Beck struggled to her feet and hefted the tree limb. “Go away. There’s been enough killing for one day.”
“I want that gold.” Earl jerked his thumb at Verbena. “Git over here, shit for brains. Don’t make me come after you.”
“Leave her alone,” Beck said. “You want the gold, it’s yours. It’s back at the house.”
It was a bluff. She didn’t know squat about demon gold. For all she knew, it had dissolved in a puff of ash along with Elgdrek. She hadn’t stuck around long enough to find out.
Earl spat. “Them demons ain’t gonna give us diddley unless we do what they say.”
“The demons won’t be a problem,” Beck said. “I killed one of them and I got the other one in my pocket.”
“Hear that?” Earl nudged his nearest kinsman. “She’s got a demon in her pocket. Bet mine’s bigger.”
The Skinners laughed.
“Don’t you ever get tired of waving your dick around, Earl?” Beck said.
Earl’s amused expression vanished. “Tell you what I am tired of. I’m tired of you treating me like a dumbass. You ain’t kilt no demon and you don’t give a damn about my worthless sister. You want that gold for yourself.”
Verbena took a step back, her eyes wide. “Is it true? Are you after the gold?”
“No,” Beck said. “Don’t listen to him.”
“You think a bunch of strangers care about you more ’n your family?” Earl said. “Now, git your skinny ass over here and make yourself useful for once.”
Verbena shook her head. “I won’t. I heard what they said. You’re gonna hurt me.”
“Aw, hell, Beenie, I’m your brother. Blood takes care of blood. We got your back. Right, y’all?”
The Skinners made noises of agreement.
Verbena hesitated, fear and uncertainty plain on her face.
“Hell with this,” Earl said. “I’m done being nice.”
He lifted his arm and Beck saw the gleam of metal.
“Look out,” she cried. “He’s got a gun.”
She dropped the stick and tackled Verbena as the gun went off. The bullet thudded into the forest floor, missing them by inches.
Furious, Beck rolled to her feet. “Drop the gun.”
Earl laughed. “Or what? We got you outnumbered and you ain’t armed.”
He whirled around at a noise. “What’s that?”
A large, gray animal launched itself at Earl from the bushes.
“Toby, no,” Beck screamed.
Earl squeezed the trigger, and the dog crumpled at his feet.
The rage simmering inside of Beck boiled over. Watery hands plunged out of the ground and grabbed the Skinners by the legs. The gun sailed out of Earl’s hand and behind a tree as he was jerked off his feet and buried up to his waist in the dirt. Cursing and screaming, the rest of the Skinners were dragged down beside him, planted in the ground like a bunch of butt-ugly tulips.
Beck ran over to Toby. He shifted and sat up, holding his injured leg.
“You’re bleeding like a stuck pig,” Beck said, hunkering down beside him. “How bad is it?”
“Just a flesh wound.”
She handed him Verbena’s bandanna. “Tie this around your leg. We’ve got to slow the bleeding till we can get out of here.”
BOOM. BOOM.
“What’s that?” Earl’s voice was shrill. “What’s that noise?”
Evan had heard the commotion. When it rained, it poured.
“Shift back, Tobes,” Beck said. “It’ll be easier to walk on three legs.”
“Can’t. Too tired and wrung out.”
BOOM. BOOM.
“Coo-kie.”
Shit. She had one nerve left, and Evan was stomping all over it.
“Cookie? Who’s Cookie?” Earl said.
“Let’s get you on your feet,” Beck said, ignoring Earl. “We need to get out of here.”
“Here, let me help.” Verbena looked at Beck and flushed. “I owe you.”
“You git your ass over here and dig us out, Beenie.” Sweating and straining, Earl tried to pull himself out of the ground. “You hear me?”
The rest of the Skinners added their two cents’ worth, which mostly consisted of a lot of cussing and name calling. It would take a sensitivity coach a month of Sundays to make a dent in the Skinners’ lack of couth.
“No,” Verbena said, shouting them down. “I’m through with you. Dig yourselves out or stay there till spring for all I care.”
Turning her back on them, she helped Beck get Toby to his feet. He draped his arms around their shoulders. Together, the three of them started for the road.
The cries of the Skinners faded behind them, and the woods became quiet but for the crunch of their feet on the leaves and the strained huff of their breath. No more taunts from Evan, no more nerve-racking booms and thumps and crashes.
Beck should have been relieved, but the unnatural silence stretched her nerves tighter and tighter. Where was Evan? He hadn’t given up. She knew better than that. He was playing with them, a cat toying with three mice.
The forest held its breath, waiting.
“Something’s coming,” Toby muttered. He paused to catch his breath in the hollow between two tree-covered slopes. “Feel it?”
Oh, yeah, she felt it. A dark, brooding force was headed their way, something cold and deadly; something single minded and tenacious.
Beck swallowed. “It’s Evan. He wants Haggy.”
“It ain’t Evan,” Toby said. “This here’s something worse.”
What could be worse than Evan and the Neanderthal twins?
The morkyn. Beck’s heart lurched into a crooked rhythm. They’d found out about Elgdrek. They were coming to avenge his death.
OhGodohGodohGod. She tried to think, but her brain was mush.
A thought trickled through her panic. Leave, she should leave, lead the demons away from Toby and Verbena.
The sound of a gunshot made her jump. She stilled, listening. Somewhere in the forest, a large animal bawled in pain. She heard the howl of a coyote, followed by a man’s startled shout.
“That sounded like Hank,” Beck said. This was her excuse to get away, to separate herself from Toby and Verbena. “I’d better go see.”
“Let me,” Verbena said, darting away.
So much for that idea.
Beck tightened her arm around Toby. “Come on, let’s keep moving.”
They took a few steps and the hillside in front of them rumbled and broke away. A hulking creature rose out of the dirt and leaves. The smell of wet and rot choked the air.
“Hello, Cookie,” Evan said, looking down at them from the shoulders of the mud monster.
Beck’s stomach did a queasy flip. Evan’s skin was red and oozing, and pockmarked with blisters. She had done this to him.
“You look terrible, bro.”
Evan’s swollen, peeling wreck of a mouth curved. “Gee, I wonder why
.”
The ground shifted again, and a second monster rose out of the ground. A tattered bit of blue cloth hung around the ugly creature’s muscular neck.
It was Baldy, the other guard. Evan had called in reinforcements.
“No more games, Cookie,” Evan said. “Give me the bottle or I’ll turn Ragluk and Algg loose on you. Trolls are always hungry and not very picky about what they eat.”
Wonderful; Meat Hooks and Baldy were flesh-eating trolls. This day just kept getting better and better.
Beck closed her hand around the bottle in her pocket. A long, gray tongue shot out of Baldy’s mouth, coiled around Toby’s waist, and lifted him off the ground.
Toby pounded his fists against the rubbery binding. “Let me go, you ugly sum bitch.”
“Shake the bottle again, Cookie, and it’s snack time for Algg,” Evan warned. The troll retracted his tongue and gave Toby’s wounded leg a hungry, lingering sniff. “Or you can stand there and watch your friend get eaten alive.”
“Beck?” Toby’s voice went up a couple of notches.
Beck opened her senses. There was an underground stream nearby, but it was buried deep beneath earth and stone, and she was tired, so very tired. She couldn’t use Conall’s ring. It was fused to her frozen hand. She couldn’t shift and leave Toby. Algg would make a Happy Meal out of him.
“Okay, you win.” Beck held up the hot sauce container. “Take the damn bottle. Just don’t hurt him.”
Ragluk snagged the jar from Beck with a flick of his long tongue.
“I thought you’d see it my way,” Evan said, taking the container from the troll. “You’re too soft, Cookie. That’s your problem.”
“I don’t suppose you’d give me and Toby a head start before you open that bottle?” Beck asked.
“Sorry, Cookie.” There was genuine regret and something like sorrow in Evan’s eyes. “No can do.”
He had his hand on the bottle cap, about to untwist it, when the morkyn attacked.
Chapter Twenty-one
The demon streaked out of the trees, black and formless as the darkness at the bottom of a well. Beck had never seen anything move so fast. There was no time to react, no time to move. It was simply there. Beck felt its pulsing rage. It wanted blood and death.
A claw flashed out of the darkness, and the troll Evan rode bellowed in pain. A red line formed across the troll’s distended belly and widened, like a gaping, grotesquely lipsticked mouth. Ragluk’s innards spilled out of the wound and onto the leaves with a wet, sickening plop. The troll stared at the steaming gray mass at his feet, an expression of dull incomprehension on his blunt, ugly face.
The troll toppled over and Evan jumped free. His right leg crumpled under him as he fell. Evan grunted in pain and dropped the bottle. It rolled away. Hot sauce slopped against the glass, engulfing the wraith inside. Evan screamed in pain as he and Haggy began to burn.
With a roar, Algg dropped Toby and attacked the morkyn. The troll was strong, but his movements were slow and ponderous. He swung a ham-size fist. The shadow darted out of the way. Again, the troll attacked, and the dark blur danced aside. The demon was toying with the troll, pitiless and relentless, a killing machine.
Beck looked around. Evan had vanished. The hot sauce bottle lay abandoned under a bush. Snatching it up, she shoved it back in her pocket and ran over to Toby.
“Let’s get out of here,” she said, tugging him to his feet.
“Becky, wait—”
“Not now, Toby.”
She pulled, half carried Toby up the hill, terror giving her strength. Something, morbid curiosity, maybe, made her look back, like Lot’s wife.
The little glen was coated in sheets of ice. The demon circled Algg once, twice, three times. Blood spurted. The troll bawled like a wounded calf and crashed to his misshapen knees. The claw flashed again and the troll’s head hit the leaves with a muffled thunk.
The demon turned in their direction. Cold and hate and power poured from the black cloud in sickening waves. It had taken out the two trolls in a matter of seconds, and they were next.
Beck threw Toby over her shoulder in a fireman’s carry and ran like hell. She forgot about being tired and injured. It didn’t matter that her heart chugged like a diesel engine from terror and exertion, or that her legs burned from the strain of running with Toby’s extra weight. She kept going.
Which way was the road? Her feet sank in the thick carpet of leaves, slowing her down. Her muscles screamed. Tomorrow, she would be sore.
If there was a tomorrow; the back of her neck prickled and her nerves shrieked in warning. The demon had followed. The temperature plummeted, and the air crackled with the energy and fury of a building ice storm. Trees groaned and shattered around them, sundered by the morkyn’s arctic passage.
Don’t think about it. Don’t look back. Move your ass, Damian, or you and Toby are done for.
Twilight was fading. Sweat stung her eyes, making it hard to see. She tripped over a log and fell. Toby rolled free, clutching his wounded leg with a muffled curse.
A blast of cold swept over them, riming the ground with frost.
“Run, Toby,” Beck said. “Get away. Run.”
Darkness enveloped her and Beck screamed as she was lifted in an icy, iron grasp.
“Calm yourself,” a dispassionate voice said. “You are safe.”
The mantle of gloom dissolved and she was in Conall’s arms.
Relief surged through Beck and, on its heels, disbelief. “Conall?” She stared up at him in shock. “I thought you were a demon.”
“I tried to tell you.” Toby sat up with a groan. “But you wouldn’t listen. I recognized his scent.”
“Why didn’t you say something?” Beck said, struggling in Conall’s grasp. “You scared the hell out of me.”
“I was occupied.” Conall set her down and stepped back. His cold gaze moved to the scratches on her cheek. “You are hurt.”
“It’s nothing. Toby’s been shot.”
Conall picked Toby up and threw him over his shoulder. “A female demonoid named Cassandra brought me here in her truck,” he said with glacial calm. “She is waiting for us some distance down the road.”
“Cassie?” Beck said. “How do you know Cass—”
Conall grabbed her arm and pulled her close. The world shifted and blurred and they were standing in the road by a long-bed Chevy Silverado.
Beck stepped away from him, irritated by his caveman manner and Ice Man attitude.
“Look here, buddy,” she said. “I don’t know who planted the bug up your butt, but I don’t appreciate being manhandled.”
“Now is not the time for discourse,” Conall said. His black eyes were cold and hard as flint. “We will discuss this later.”
“I don’t have anything to say to you.”
“Perhaps not, but I have a great deal to say to you.”
The driver’s side door opened and Cassie Fergusson climbed out.
“I see you found her.” Cassie’s gaze moved to the man on Conall’s shoulder. “That a sack of flour you carrying, or Toby?”
“Har de har har,” Toby said as Conall shrugged him to the ground. He balanced on his good leg. “Earl Skinner shot me. Next time I see that little weasel I’m gonna tie his dick in a knot.”
“That must’ve been some party.” Cassie jerked her thumb toward the eight-foot cargo hold. “I got four naked guys and an injured bear in the back. There’s a girl with them.”
Hank and Verbena. Beck hurried to the back of the truck, glad for the excuse to get away from Mr. Freeze.
Verbena sat cross-legged on the truck bed beside the wounded bear. Hank’s eyes were open and he was panting. The fur on his left shoulder was bloody.
The members of Beelzebubba huddled together under two blankets, looking cold and miserable.
“What happened?” Beck asked. She climbed over the tailgate with some difficulty due to her petrified arm.
Sam, the drummer in the band, spok
e up. “Two men were in the woods with guns. They shot Hank.”
“Would’ve kilt him, too,” Verbena said, “ ’cepting these here coyote fellers runned ’em off.”
“Kith or norms?” Beck asked.
“Kith,” Sam said. He stroked the soul patch under his bottom lip. “They were hepped up on something. Kept shifting back and forth like they couldn’t control it. Whatever they were on made them crazy.” He shook his head. “Hank wasn’t the only one they shot. Them idiots was shooting at anything that moved. I’m pretty sure they killed Lloyd Hagenbarth’s boy, Phil.”
Phil Hagenbarth was dead? He was twenty-two, and a nice young man. He drove a beer truck with his dad. Beck felt sick. How many kith had been hurt and killed because of Charlie’s poison?
“What are you guys doing out here, anyway?” she asked. “It’s a long way from the bar. You coming from the Peterson party?”
Sam shook his head. “Don’t know anything about a party. Hank likes to run these woods. We were having a good time when all of a sudden he growled and took off. He came back a little while later, and that’s when them idiots shot him.” Sam’s eyes glowed hot in the gloom. “Me and the boys went after the bastards. I hamstrung one of them.” His mouth curved in a vicious smile. “He’ll walk with a limp from now on.”
“They got away?” Beck asked.
“Yeah,” Sam said. “They jumped in a car and took off. We shifted and got Hank out of there.” He gazed at the bear with a troubled expression. “What we going to do about him? We can’t take him to a hospital, He’s too weak to shift.”
“We’ll think of something,” Beck said. She sat down near the tailgate to give the bear and the band members plenty of room. “Thanks for helping Hank.”
“My ass is cold,” Bill the sound guy complained, shifting with an audible pop.
Harry and Joe shifted too. Three tawny gray coyotes aimed identical laughing grins at Beck.
“Sorry,” Sam said. Hair sprouted on his face, and his nose and jaw lengthened. “Can’t help it. It’s a pack thing.”
Beck picked up one of the discarded blankets. She felt not the slightest urge to shift. She was too tuckered out. On the plus side, coyotes took up less room in the back of the truck.
