“Never heard of that one.”
Rigan shrugged. “It’s not real common, but there was a sketch in one of the old books. It’s about the size of a man—and can disguise itself as a person if it wants to—but in its true form, it’s got a dog’s head and four red eyes.”
“How do we kill it?” Corran asked.
Rigan rubbed the back of his neck. “The old books didn’t say. But it’s a good bet that iron, steel, and salt won’t make it happy.”
Between them, they carried an impressive array of knives, swords, and stakes, as well as the salt mixture, a bag of iron filings, pouches of herbs for spells, and some vials of green vitriol that burned flesh on contact. Few creatures natural or unnatural could stand against their weapons or Rigan’s magic, but the randomness of luck and fate could change the outcome of a hunt in a heartbeat.
Corran and Rigan glanced at each other and walked forward. They moved as silently as possible up the dirt lane, and as they closed on the barn, a familiar, sickly-sweet smell hung in the air.
More bodies, Rigan thought. Not fresh ones, either.
Corran wrinkled his nose, showing that he caught the scent, and came to the same conclusion. He gripped a steel sword in one hand and an iron knife in the other. Rigan had his sword ready as well, and the knife he held had runes carved in the handle and the blade that might offset any magic the creature possessed.
Rigan and Corran threw open the main doors and heard an echoing bellow from inside. Enough light came through the cracks between boards and an opening to the loft above to reveal the majority of the large open first floor. A heap in one corner covered with flies suggested what had become of the real wheelwright. His tools lay scattered across the floor, and the worktable had been overturned.
A powerfully built creature crouched in the middle of the workshop, muscles tensed to fight. The monster stood, revealing itself to be the height of a tall man, but more powerfully built. Leathery gray skin with patches of sparse brown hair covered its naked body. Its arms were muscled like a dockhand, with equally massive thighs. The feet looked like the paws of a big dog, while the hands had thick fingers that ended in claws. The wolf-like face and head and the four red eyes confirmed Rigan’s guess. Capcaun.
Training and practice had Rigan moving left while Corran went right. The capcaun tracked them both, showing no sign of fear. Rigan grounded his magic, calmed his thoughts, and raised one hand, focusing all his will on his intention.
A stream of fire lanced from his hand, striking the capcaun in the chest. Rigan set his jaw and narrowed his gaze, widening the flame jet, forcing it to burn hotter. The smell of burning hair filled the workshop, and the capcaun roared in anger, but though its skin blistered and charred, the fire did not destroy him.
Rigan’s heart pounded in his chest. They had agreed to lead with their strongest defense, seeing no reason to get hurt working up to a magical assault. He knew with certainty that the fire would have immolated a normal man, and more than one type of monster would have fallen to the flames as well. Yet the capcaun stood before them, damaged but undeterred.
Corran and Rigan charged, swords leveled. The capcaun swung a massive arm sending Rigan flying backward. Corran struck from behind, bringing his blade down with enough force to sever a man’s arm, but the creature’s thick skin turned what should have been a maiming blow into a deep gash.
Rigan rose to a crouch, then ran at the monster at full speed. The capcaun blocked the sword with its forearm, nearly tearing the weapon from Rigan’s grip. His spelled knife sank into the creature’s belly, and Rigan spoke the words of power to activate the runes even as the beast’s arm sent him sprawling.
Corran came at the creature again as Rigan continued to chant, and he tackled the capcaun from the rear, striking for the neck with his iron blade. Corran cut deep, and the iron burned the creature’s flesh, sending up tendrils of foul-smelling smoke. The capcaun roared again, and Rigan saw that the glowing runes of the spelled knife had grown brighter, while around the blade, sunk hilt-deep into the monster’s body, the flesh changed color from a corpse-gray to a livid purplish-red.
Corran grappled to stay on the capcaun’s back, sawing at its thick neck with his iron knife. The creature tried to buck him off, but Corran hung on, wild-eyed and resolute.
“Get free!” Rigan yelled, and Corran gave one more jab with his knife and spike before he leaped clear, scrambling to get beyond striking distance of the monster’s powerful arms.
Rigan mustered his magic once more, and this time, he sent it toward the spelled blade sunk deep into the monster’s innards. He concentrated on force, not fire, sending a narrow stream of cold white power to meld with the glowing runes, stretching along the blade and then into the capcaun’s body, where he released some of the pressure that concentrated the power and allowed it to expand.
The capcaun shrieked as its abdomen distended, and its whole form shook. In the next instant, bloody gobbets and a spray of gore rained down, propelled by the force that had torn the monster apart from the inside. The explosion slung bits of flesh and bone at them hard enough to bruise, and the backlash sent Rigan staggering.
When Rigan’s head cleared, he realized that blood soaked him from head to toe, dripping from his hair and plastering his clothing to his body. Corran, too, looked like he had escaped a charnel house.
“Damn, what did you do?” Corran shook off the pieces of monster that clung to his face and arms.
“I might need to rein it in a little, next time,” Rigan admitted. He withdrew the vials of green vitriol from his belt as Corran took out the salt from his pack. Together they used some of the wheelwright’s ruined tools to scrape together as much of the monster’s body as they could. Just in case the capcaun could magically reform from its scattered bits,
“Did you know capcaun could take someone else’s form?” Corran asked, reaching up to pick a piece of bone from his hair.
“The stories weren’t very clear on that point,” Rigan replied, trying to scrape the worst off of his ruined shirt with the back of his blade, screwing up his face in distaste as he swallowed back bile.
Corran laid down a circle of the salt mixture around the bloodied chunks, then poured a liberal amount over the savaged flesh. Rigan retrieved his knife, and sloshed green vitriol onto the pile, watching in satisfaction as it began to burn through the corpse. The head of the creature they stuffed into a burlap sack as proof, figuring they could burn it once they reached the village.
Corran glanced over at the decomposing heap that had been the real wheelwright. “Poor bastard,” he muttered. “Probably never saw it coming. Looks like he’s been dead quite a while.”
“So why did the girl say that some of the villagers helped the monster?” Rigan asked, watching the capcaun’s remains smoke and sizzle until he was satisfied that the creature would not revive.
“If they saw it, maybe they agreed to provide victims to save themselves,” Corran replied, wiping down with a rag he found on the workbench. “Or maybe it controlled them. We probably won’t know unless we run into another of these things—which I’m hoping won’t be for a long, long time.”
They walked back in silence to salt and burn the bones of the victims. Corran bent down to mark sigils on the bones with the ochre, black, blue, and white pigment from pouches on his belt. Before they were outlaws and monster hunters, they had been undertakers, as had their ancestors. While Rigan’s abilities to do magic and confess the dead were inherited from their mother’s side, both brothers shared the grave magic essential to their trade.
Rigan sprinkled the salt, aconite, and amanita mixture over the skeletons which would set their spirits free. Corran gathered enough wood for a small pyre. As Corran struck flint to steel to put spark to kindling, the image of the young girl they had seen in the shed flickered beside the pile. With her were four boys and girls, who stared at the brothers with dark, solemn gazes.
“It’s over,” Rigan told her. “The creature is dea
d. He can’t hurt anyone else. You can go now. All of you—you can rest.”
The girl nodded, her gaze sad.
“Tell us your names,” Rigan said. “That way, we can let your families know that you’ve gone on.”
“Annie.”
“Benny.”
“Cora.”
“Thom.”
“Betta.”
Rigan nodded, committing the names to memory. “Go now,” he said, and then as Corran set the pyre ablaze, they joined their voices in the chant they had said so often over the bodies of the dead before they left their profession behind. The fire rose higher as the song continued, but as the sparks climbed into the sky, the ghostly images thinned and faded, then vanished altogether.
“Let’s collect our money and get out of here.” Corran twitched his shoulders uncomfortably beneath his shirt that was stiff with blood. “I imagine they’ll be happy to be rid of us. We smell like a slaughterhouse and look like something out of a nightmare.”
“I’ll make a note of what worked, in case we run into one of those things again,” Rigan replied as they walked back the dirt lane. Getting thrown by the capcaun had twisted his back, and he could tell that Corran noted his limp with a worried glance.
“That’s nice. Right now, I want a hot bath and a warm dinner, then a clean bed,” Corran said. “And the next time you decide to blow a monster up with your magic, give me time to get well away from the blast.”
“We’ll need to get more salt soon,” Rigan remarked. “Probably good to get Aiden and Elinor to be on the lookout for more aconite and amanita as well since we can’t count on finding a patch of those whenever we need them.”
The walk back to the village to collect their fee gave Rigan time to think. From the set of Corran’s jaw, he guessed his brother turned the matter over in his mind as well. They found the mayor who hired them in the pub, surrounded by the village elders. The mayor looked up as the brothers entered, and he smiled in a way that did not reach his eyes.
“Did you find the ghost? Could you get rid of it?”
Rigan caught a warning glance from Corran, but his temper burned too hot for him to care. “We found the ghosts—all five of them. And the monster who killed them. Did you know the wheelwright was the creature? Did you give him the children to save your own skins?”
For an instant, shock and fear glinted in the mayor’s eyes before cold calculation took over. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Rigan’s slammed the burlap sack down on the table, and the men jumped, sliding back in their chairs. The rest of the crowd in the common room fell silent.
“I think you knew,” Rigan said, looming over the mayor until the man had to crane his neck and his multiple chins to see. “The ghosts said people in the village helped the monster. Supplied the children for it to eat. Who else could go unnoticed for so long?”
“You’re crazy. That’s… insane,” the mayor sputtered.
“You found them? The missing ones?” A man stood near the back of the pub. From his clothing and the dirt streaks on his pants, he looked like a farmer, probably stopping for a meal after bringing goods to market. His broad shoulders and muscular arms spoke of hard work, and while sun and hardship had weathered his features, Rigan guessed the man might only be a few years older than Corran.
“We found the skeletons of five children, dumped in the pond near where the ghosts appeared,” Corran replied, anger clear in his voice.
“One of those that went missing was my Annie,” the man said. “Is it true, Mayor? You knew?”
The mayor’s pale, fleshy face flushed and sweat beaded on his forehead. “No, of course not. They’re lying—”
“We killed the creature,” Rigan continued. “A capcaun. It can take the appearance of someone else, like the wheelwright. But it couldn’t have snatched that many children without help. So I’m guessing that someone made a deal—sacrifice a few children, keep the monster away from everyone else.”
The townspeople looked on in horror, and while Rigan’s magic did not let him read minds, their reactions came too naturally to be false. The mayor, on the other hand, sat tensely in his chair, gripping the armrests.
“Is it true?” one of the mayor’s companions asked, a tall man with gray hair and prominent cheekbones who from his clothing might have been a shopkeeper. “You told us the guards searched for them. You blamed it on wolves or Wanderers.”
“What about my sister’s boy, Benny?” a man asked from near the bar. “He went to fetch water and never came back. Did the monster get him, too?”
“Annie. Benny. Cora. Thom. Betta,” Rigan repeated and saw the faces of the customers go pale. “You never told us any of their names. They did, when their ghosts confessed to me.”
By now, most of the men at the other tables were on their feet. The mayor’s companions pushed their chairs back even farther, leaving him alone at the table.
“You could have found that out from anyone,” the mayor said. “It’s a trick. We hired you to get rid of a ghost, and you want more money.”
“We didn’t make this up.” Rigan reached into the bag and pulled out the head of the capcaun. The mayor’s associates scrambled away at the smell, as if only now realizing why both Rigan and Corran were drenched with dark, dried blood.
“What deal did you offer it?” Corran asked, placing a hand on the mayor’s shoulder to push him back down in his chair when it looked like he might bolt. “A child every so often, if it would ignore your cows and sheep?”
“You don’t understand.” Fear shifted to anger and the mayor’s round face reddened. “It might have murdered us all. I’d never seen anything like it; no one had. How was I to know it could be killed? It wasn’t greedy. Just a brat now and again, nothing anyone would miss.”
“Nothing we’d miss?” Annie’s father took a step toward them, fists clenched at his side. “I miss my Annie. My wife almost went mad with grief.”
“You tell my sister she don’t miss Benny,” the man at the bar said, slipping down from his stool to close in on the mayor.
“I’m the mayor. It was my decision. I had to do what was best for everyone—”
“Lettin’ a monster live among us and kill our children was ‘best’ for us?” A large man with arms and shoulders like a blacksmith came to stand next to Annie’s father. “I was one of the people who searched all night for those kids, and here you knew where they were, knew what happened to them all along? Served them up like a sacrifice?”
“You’d have done the same thing in my position,” the mayor argued.
“No, I don’t think we would have,” the blacksmith said.
“What about the ghosts?” Annie’s father asked. “Where are they?”
“We’re undertakers,” Corran replied, still keeping a firm hand on the mayor’s shoulder. “Once they saw the monster die and told their story, we helped them pass over to the After.”
The grieving man swallowed hard and nodded. “So they’re at rest now?”
“Yes,” Corran said. “And we burned their bones as well as the monster’s body, to make sure they won’t come back.” He nodded toward the severed head in the middle of the table. “Should burn that too.”
“Not yet,” the blacksmith said. He seemed to be a man others followed because five or six of the pub’s patrons had come to stand shoulder to shoulder with him. “Not until everyone’s seen it and knows what he did.”
The mayor’s gaze flickered from one man to another, and he licked his lips. “We can work this out—”
Annie’s father kicked a chair halfway across the room, and the noise made everyone jump. “All right then,” he said. “Give me my Annie back, and we’ll call it square.”
“I can’t—”
“Of course you can’t!” the grieving father roared. “You can’t because you paid a monster with her, and then thought you’d get rid of her ghost by having these two send her on. But you didn’t figure ghosts could talk, did you?”
By now, a dozen angry men circled the mayor, whose former companions had abandoned him and now looked on in shock and horror. Corran and Rigan stepped back.
The pub owner came out of the kitchen, and his gaze went immediately to the brothers. “I need a word,” he said, with a twitch of his head toward the room behind him. Corran and Rigan exchanged a dubious look but followed him.
Whatever Rigan had expected, having a fistful of coins shoved at them wasn’t part of it. “Here,” the pub owner said. “Since you won’t be getting’ your pay from the mayor, and you more than earned it. Some of us thought there was something wrong about those children going missing, but there was nothin’ to prove it. It’s a harsh truth, but it had to be told. Now people can move on.”
“Thank you,” Rigan said, pocketing the coins. A glance told him they totaled twice what the mayor had promised.
“Best you leave by a different route,” the pub owner said, with a wary glance toward the other room where voices rose. “I saw the mayor talkin’ with two rough fellows who got here not long after you went off to do what you did. Didn’t like the look of the men, or the look on the mayor’s face.”
The pub owner swept his gaze over them, taking in their dirty, worn clothing, their weapons and their bag of gear. “I imagine the guards think ill of what you do,” he said. “It looked to me like the mayor struck a deal with those strangers, and since you two are the only other folks not from around here—”
Shit, Rigan thought. Bounty hunters.
“We appreciate the warning,” Corran replied.
The pub owner smiled. “I never did trust the mayor. Can’t say I dislike seeing him get what’s comin’. As for your horses,” he went on, “I had my stable boy lead them out the other way, to the back road. Don’t know where you’re going, and you might have to wind around a little, but didn’t think with what you’d done you wanted more trouble.”
Rigan opened his mouth to thank the man, but the pub owner shook his head. “We owe you for settling this. Now git, before those ruffians come back looking for you.”
Vengeance Page 2
