Ayra’s shoulders sagged as she tugged free of my hand. “You’re probably right.”
After one last longing look at the slowly retreating storm, she started for the truck. An urgency from deep inside told me to get her out of here. I didn’t breathe easy until she climbed in and closed the door. Eyeing the shadow of the large raptor in the feathery boughs, I made my way to the driver’s side.
As I started the truck, she made me lean forward so she could check my back.
“You’ll live,” she said, voice hard once again.
“Are you sure?” I asked in a mock-serious tone.
“Despite being incredibly foolish—but brave—I think you will.”
I grinned. “You think I’m brave?”
“Oh, yes, such a brave werewolf to take on a bird for me. It was quite gallant.” Her sarcasm stung.
“Well, it was a very large bird.” I made a gesture with my hands as to how big as we walked.
“It certainly was. And your restraint was admirable.” Beneath the sarcasm I detected a hint of humor.
I scoffed. “Restraint? Me? I think he was the one restraining himself.”
An eerie foreboding worked at the hairs on the back of my neck. I hid it with a smile. Maybe I’d been reading too many Stephen King novels in all that spare time I’d had at the temple. Something deep down told me that wasn’t it at all. I put the truck in drive and took off fast enough to spin the tires on the wet grass. Even after we pulled out onto the highway, I couldn’t shake the feeling of being watched.
Chapter Six
Killing for pleasure is not instinct, it is an illness; insanity. The insane must be put down lest they threaten us all.
~Uppskera Journals
Ayra
Not even the comforting scents of pine trees and earth could shake the horrible feeling that woke me. My phone vibrated beneath my pillow. I dug it out and squinted against the soft glow of light as I peered at the screen. A text from Sonya.
On my way to a newly bitten in Pinehurst, Idaho.
Dread suddenly made my body feel like it weighed a ton. Sonya, the seeker, the yin to my reaper’s yang. She found them and tried to help them control their wolves before the next full moon. I went in and cleaned up if they couldn’t or wouldn’t. Only three days remained until the full moon, not much time to teach someone to control something out of control. Swallowing hard, I sat up. My first reaping could be within a matter of days. There would be no sleeping now.
I crawled more than stepped out of my tiny backpacking tent. Vidar had invited me to sleep in the cab or bed of the truck but I’d refused. The near kiss in the rain almost had been a mistake of epic proportions. He wanted to kiss the reaper, not me. If that weren’t true, he would have kept in touch with me, and he would have come back sooner. Before I had promised to marry another.
Darkness still lay heavy over the forest. I stepped out into it and stretched, trying to shake the feeling. The rain had died down to only a misty feel in the air. My souped up varúlfur hearing told me Vidar still slept soundly in the bed of the truck. Deep in my gut, a terrible feeling remained, like maybe more than my phone had woke me. I listened beyond Vidar, searching for I don’t know what. The dark held only the normal sounds of a forest: owls, mice, a fox. It couldn’t be the eagle. We had driven over a hundred miles after that encounter. So soon after a perceived threat to its nest, it wouldn’t have flown this far away. In moments the fog of sleep cleared and I realized the feeling hadn’t come from an outside source.
Deep in my soul something pulled at me, something dark. The urge to go toward it grew so powerful I took a step. With each waking breath my awareness sharpened. Two breaths later I realized it wasn’t a what that pulled at me, but a who. Somewhere out there a newly bitten had lost control of their instincts, had become a condemned. They had done unspeakable things to people. I felt it like I’d stepped into their head for a moment. Worse, they were going to do it again, soon.
I peeled my clothes off and tossed them back into my tent. If I went for my motorcycle, Vidar would wake up. The risk wouldn’t be worth it. If I was right, and the pull I felt was the reaping, I didn’t want Vidar anywhere near where I was going. Or more specifically, near me when I did what had to be done. With concentration, I sharpened my sight into that of a wolf, and crept slowly away from our camp. Once I was far enough away that he wouldn’t hear me if I stepped on a branch, or feel the change in my power, I reached for the ground.
A thought was all it took to make my molecules heat up and slide around to shift me into a wolf. I landed in the pine needles with two white paws. Soft fur rippled over my muscles as I moved, insulating me from the rain. All four legs pumping, I plunged into the forest at full speed. The feel of the condemned amplified, not because I grew closer, but simply because I had shifted into a wolf. The hunter instincts in me woke with a ferocity that made my breath catch. I had to get to this person before they hurt anyone else. And I knew they would, I could feel it, as though I was connected to them. I ran faster.
One mile ticked by beneath my paws, two, three. Trees whipped by. I crossed two different roads. Four miles passed. Being a daily runner, I knew the feel of each mile by the thrum in my muscles. The pull took me deeper into the forest, back the way Vidar and I had come from. My hopes of having this done and over with before he could wake and realize I’d gone fled with the fifth mile. The misty air would dampen my scent a bit, slowing him down when he did wake and try to track me. But it wouldn’t stop him. I had to hurry.
The urge to kill surged inside, but it felt hollow, removed. With a touch of relief that quickly turned to horror, I realized the urge wasn’t mine. The condemned was on the hunt, and somehow, I had tapped into his mind. No, not tapped, I had been sucked in, as if by a whirlpool. He wanted to slash, rend, kill. This wouldn’t be his first. He’d killed when he was human. The urge rose in him like an addict jonesing for another hit.
For a heartbeat, I saw through his eyes. He stood at the top of a hill in a forest. Below him in a dark meadow he could just make out the outline of a cabin. Smoke rose in lazy drifts from the chimney. A sickening excitement coursed through him.
I poured all my power into my legs, using all that energy I had absorbed from the lightning strike to go faster. Trees and underbrush blurred as I flew by. My paws barely felt like they touched the ground. Time seemed to stand still regardless of how fast I moved. The power signature of the condemned continued to pull at me like a magnet. Still, it took several minutes before the terrain started to resemble what I’d seen through his eyes. As I broke through the trees at the top of a hill, I felt another power. Though similar, this one wasn’t the condemned. The similar nature told me it was a shifter. The musky smell with an altogether different tang to it told me it wasn’t a wolf. I knew other shifters existed, but I’d never seen one.
I had no idea what I was about to rush into, but it didn’t matter. This was the place I’d seen through the condemned’s eyes. I knew it even before I heard the screams. The toxic feel of his power reached out to me stronger than ever. It wasn’t just that this man had lost his battle with sanity when he’d first changed. He felt corrupt, evil. Being bitten didn’t do this to people. This man had to have started out this way. The urge to end him rose in me. It tried to eat away at my reason.
Not knowing what I’d find in that cabin, I plunged down the hill. All that mattered was getting there and stopping him. Ferns and pine boughs parted before me, barely brushing my fur. Exposed roots and webs of ivy passed beneath my paws without the slightest snag. Nothing could stop me. I felt like a force of nature. Not even the stifling fear of having to kill someone could slow me. I wouldn’t let it.
The smell of blood tainted the air, weighing heavy on it like an impending storm. A silence fell that was somehow worse than the screams. I tried to run faster, but I couldn’t. As it was, the scenery flew by so fast the trees were only a blur. Scent alone kept me from colliding with them. Could I be knocked unconscious no
w that I was the reaper? I wasn’t sure. Finally, my paws scraped across the steps of the cabin’s porch. I dropped my head and launched into the door shoulder first. The doorjamb exploded, sending shards of wood flying, and the door blew open. Yellow light from a fire in the open fireplace made the grisly scene glow. My human brain took a moment to process what my wolf eyes saw. Or maybe it was just that my brain didn’t want to register it.
The walls and floor looked like someone had splashed buckets of red paint everywhere. While my sensitive half wanted to believe that’s what it was, my instincts new better. The smell was unmistakable and overwhelming. A mangled body reduced to meat, blue muscle, and glistening bone lay on the floor. Another draped across a couch, enough left of it for me to recognize it was a woman. Fresh as the blood smelled, I had just barely missed the slaughter. All reluctance I had to kill this condemned fled.
Something thudded toward the back of the cabin followed by a distinctly inhuman grunt of pain. Could there be someone left alive? Gods, the other shifter I had smelled! I plunged through the cabin, relieved for the open floor plan that left no question as to which way I needed to go. After a skidding turn through the kitchen, I saw a back door gaping open. A heartbeat later, I ran through it and out into the night. The growl of another of my kind made me dig my claws into the deck to halt my desperate flight.
A scent so strong and musky it stung my nose yanked my gaze to the right. Crumpled against the cabin wall not ten feet away lay a large black bear. It had to weigh more than twice what I did. Looming over it, clutching a baseball bat, was the source of that which had pulled me here. The bat looked tiny in the naked man’s meaty hands. Well, naked save for some kind of chest-mounted action camera. His muscled body was so tall and broad, it was easy to see how he’d taken on a bear and won. The man was huge, and coming from someone who grew up around Icelandic descendants, that’s saying a lot. Blood splattered in erratic patterns across his flesh, thick and clumpy in places, suggesting meatier bits clung. None of it looked like it belonged to him.
Wild eyes slowly made their way to me. Lips pulling back from his teeth, he dropped the bat and took a step toward me, growling. His body began to blur; the sign he was about to shift. Being a newly bitten, his transformation was slower, more like molasses pouring from one container to another, rather than water. I leaped on him before his form could turn solid again. His flesh—so like cotton candy in his in-between form—parted with ease. Despite the fact that he easily outweighed me more than the bear, I bore him to the ground with the force of my will and power. The electricity still coursing through me from last night’s lightning strike added an unnecessary edge.
By the time he solidified, my muzzle was deep in his chest cavity. I gripped his rapidly beating heart in my fangs and shook my head. Hot blood sprayed down my throat and across my chest. I didn’t stop shaking until his heart stopped beating.
A roar unlike anything I’d ever heard cut through the fog of my killer instincts. Fangs bared, I lifted my head from the steaming cavity of my kill. The bear had regained his feet and now stalked toward me. Part of me knew I should shift back to human form and tell him I wasn’t the enemy. He wasn’t the bad guy here, I could feel that in his power, his energy. I think he’d been trying to stop the condemned. But with my kill still fresh on my tongue and another threat approaching, I couldn’t quell the instinct to fight.
I stalked toward him, my paws squelching in the blood that covered the deck. The sound tugged at me, trying to raise something like regret. It slowed me down. I had shed that blood. The growl vibrating in my chest faltered. Thoughts, reservations, guilt, all tried to surface through the instinct. My steps slowed even more.
The bear cocked his head and roared at me again. Aggression spiked in me, pulled a warning growl up with it. Trying to push it back down only made it worse. With a grunt, the bear hopped on its front paws, then reared up to stand on its hind legs. His huge paws swiped the air in a warning of his own. Such a show of aggression made me lose what little control remained in my grasp. My muscles bunched in preparation to leap.
From within the house came a masculine cry of surprise, then the pounding of footsteps. Both the bear and I froze and stared one another down. There was no way that man on the floor could be alive. Could there be other survivors in the house? I hadn’t heard anyone, but I’d been completely focused on finding the condemned. The press of the power of one of our kind from within the house told me it probably wasn’t a survivor. This power had a comforting familiarity to it.
Oh, Odin. Not him, not here, not now.
A figure darkened the doorway onto the deck before I could make the decision to run. Muted starlight shone on wide hazel eyes set over six feet from the ground. The shadows made his skin look like obsidian, all shiny from running and working up a sweat. He had to have been running like the fires of Helheimr had been chasing him to make it here so soon after me. Those eyes went from me, to the body behind me, to the bear, and back to me.
“Easy, Ayra. The berserkr isn’t your enemy. At least I don’t think he is. Are you?” Vidar asked, with a heavy threat on the last two words.
Berserkr. Gods, to hear him called that made it real. The Norwegian word for werebear, though it translated more closely to “bear skin”. Iceland didn’t have them, so my ancestors hadn’t given them their name. Damn, I was looking at an honest-to-Odin berserkr. That wondrous thought brought me completely back from the edge of instinct.
The air rippled with the berserkr’s power as he shifted back to human form. Hairy as he was, he honestly didn’t look a lot different. I kept my eyes averted from the flash of pink flesh I saw at his crotch. No easy task considering I was still in wolf form and reached exactly that level. Damn tall men. It wasn’t that I was averse to seeing the reproductive parts of a man, just not this man, and certainly not now.
“No, I’m not. The question is, are you mine?” the berserkr asked in a gravelly voice.
Vidar held his hands up before him as he stepped out onto the deck. “Definitely not. She came here to try and stop what happened inside,” he said.
The berserkr’s bushy eyebrows pinched together like caterpillars about to do battle. His heavy gaze moved from Vidar to me. “You’re the uppskera everyone has been talking about.”
“She is,” Vidar answered for me.
“Yeah, well, she needs to work on her timing.”
“Easy. She’s new at this and is doing her best,” Vidar said through a growl.
The berserkr looked from me, to him, and back to me. “Starting a pack already?” He sounded as if that idea concerned him.
“No. Every reaper has their verndari,” Vidar said.
Bushy beard pulling up into a sneer, the man shook his head. “Whatever that means. Just be careful it doesn’t mean the same thing. The reaper should be reaping, not gathering others to them.”
I made a scoffing noise. “People don’t gather to me, they shy away. You have nothing to worry about there.”
The man’s eyes narrowed down to slits before he waved a hand in dismissal. “We’d better not. This is my town. I’ll take care of this,” he said over his shoulder as he strode back into the cabin.
I wanted him to fight me, yell at me for being too late, anything so he didn’t leave. Facing Vidar after what I’d done was too much. Covered in blood and gore, I had to look every bit the monster some of the old stories made the reaper out to be. Hel, I felt every bit the monster. I had just torn into a man’s chest cavity and shredded his heart. That he had been a bad man didn’t make it much better. The ease with which I’d executed him—and the lack of remorse I felt over it—disturbed me. It should have been hard to kill a person.
Light from the open door glistened across the massive pool of blood spreading over the deck. It dripped through the boards, splattering in a rhythmic pattern on the ground beneath. Bile stung the back of my throat. I shifted to human form and launched to my feet. At the edge of the deck, I had to stop to throw up. My int
ention had been to run into the forest as far from Vidar as I could. But, running and vomiting are bad combinations, and I already had enough nasty shit on me.
The thought made me look down. Blood and thicker things covered me so thoroughly it looked like I wore a skin-tight red shirt. One that grew stickier by the moment as it coagulated. The sight and thought made me vomit until I had nothing left. Dry heaves continued to convulse my throat. My knees gave out and I hit the deck hard enough that it hurt even through the numbness trying to grip me. It felt good. I didn’t want the numbness, didn’t deserve it. A man lay dead because of me. That should hurt, a lot.
I was so distracted that I didn’t hear Vidar approach. He bent down next to me before I knew he was there. The feel of his hand on my back made me jerk, not because he had startled me, but because I didn’t deserve his gentle touch. His skin made a peeling sound as it came away from mine, which made me dry heave a few more times.
“Ayra, are you hurt?” Vidar said in a tone so soft it was almost a whisper.
I had to get clean. Once the heaves stopped I focused my hearing on the forest. The rush of water revealed a river not more than a long sprint away.
“I’ll be right back. I have to get clean,” I said.
Leaving felt wrong, but I couldn’t stand another moment of being covered in blood and bits. I dropped off the deck, shifting into a wolf in mid-leap, and hit the ground running.
“Wait, Ayra—”
Vidar said more, but I pinned my ears against my head and refused to hear it. I ran with everything I had, not caring that I left bloody paw prints behind. Better he see that than the horror I no doubt looked like. That was precisely what I hadn’t wanted, the reason I had tried to push him away. At least he hadn’t seen me kill the man. That was something, I guess. Though the sky was beginning to lighten with the coming of dawn, I didn’t need it to find my way. The fresh, clean scent of the water drew me to it like a beacon. In only heartbeats the cacophony of water tumbling over rocks greeted me. The brush gave way to the most beautiful ten-foot wide silver strip of water I’d ever seen.
Twice Turned Page 9
