“Who got the spare bedroom?” I’d always thought that was an ambitious label for the little office with the twin-sized Murphy bed that flopped out of the only drywalled wall in her cabin—the bathroom was on the other side, and I was convinced the builders had only made that wall flat because they hadn’t been able to figure out how to install a toilet-paper holder on a log.
“Thad. Amber always claims the loft.”
“Always? I didn’t realize they came that often.”
“Almost every winter over the school holidays.” She slid me the judgy look I’d been expecting. “Don’t you talk to them?”
“No.”
I’d been at more of Amber’s swim meets and softball games than anybody knew, but I watched from a distance. Like a stalker, not a mom. It bothered me, but I wasn’t going to admit it. Mom wouldn’t understand. Oh, she probably grasped that my job was dangerous and would put anyone close to me in danger—I was worried that even coming here had been a mistake—but she’d told me more than once to get a new job. A normal job.
But I was good at this job, better than anyone else around, and with my fast healing and ability to sense magic, I was the ideal person to send after the magical. Having had special training and twenty years of combat experience didn’t hurt either.
Even if I did quit, as I’d done once when I married Thad, I would feel compelled to go back to the hunt every time something like those wyverns popped up. That was what had happened thirteen years ago. The regular authorities didn’t have what it took to deal with the magical.
“You shouldn’t have had a kid if you weren’t going to have anything to do with her,” Mom said.
“You know why I have to stay away from them. I’ve told you.” I gritted my teeth and focused on the road. “The same reason I don’t come here.” I lowered my voice to mutter, “I shouldn’t have come this time either.”
“It’s that bad here? Didn’t you like the cookies that Dimitri made? I thought they were good.”
“He made those? I assumed it was you.”
What kind of six-foot-six, yard-art-crafting landscaper had pastry chef ambitions? Dimitri looked like the kind of guy you hired to bounce people out of your strip club.
“When have you known me to bake anything using sugar?”
“You use dates and honey and maple syrup. It’s all sweet. I can’t tell the difference.”
“You’ve got a refined palette. Maybe you can go to culinary school when you get tired of being shot at for a living.”
“Sometimes, I do the shooting.”
“That’ll come in handy if you specialize in desserts and wield a frosting gun.”
“I’m sure that’s very similar to Fezzik, yes.”
“Fez-what?”
“Fezzik. From The Princess Bride. That’s the name of my gun. Nin said my weapons would have more power if I named them. My sword is Chopper, from Stand By Me. The dog that sics balls.” I reminded myself that Mom hadn’t met Nin—and probably hadn’t seen more than ten movies in her life. “I don’t know what the sword’s real name is. The zombie lord I killed to get it neglected to give me its pedigree.”
Mom shook her head. “When you joined the army, I thought you were going to be a pilot. I didn’t think I’d get a hitman for a daughter.”
“I’m a hitwoman, thank you.”
The first of the parking lots came into view. Thank God. I’d forgotten that keeping Mom safe from my dangerous life wasn’t the only reason I didn’t visit often.
“Go ahead and park in that one.”
As I turned off the road, Rocket barked, startling me.
“He wants the window rolled down,” Mom informed me.
“Sindari figured out how to do that on his own.” I fiddled with the controls—better to have the dog barking out the window than in my ear.
“Which of your weapons is that?” Mom eyed Chopper and Fezzik in the seat well behind me.
“I’ll introduce you to him later. He’s a new acquisition.” And he would be offended if I called him that. “A new ally,” I corrected.
A new friend, I added to myself, thinking of the therapist’s suggestion that I should make more friends. Did magical tigers count?
We parked, and I strapped on my weapons, having an inkling that I might need them. Mom slung a pack on her shoulders and fastened a special dog one on Rocket, who sat patiently instead of tearing off after the ducks loitering near the boat launch. She pointed toward a trail that headed through some reeds and tall grasses along the lake.
“Do you have water?” She touched her backpack, which appeared to have everything, including emergency flares and a hatchet strapped to the outside.
I took the bottle of carbonated lemon water I’d been drinking in the car and stuffed it in my vest pocket.
“You said it was a short walk,” I pointed out to her disapproving look.
“You shouldn’t go into the woods without supplies.”
“Can we do this without lectures, please? I’m having a rough week.”
She pressed her lips together, grabbed Rocket’s leash, and headed down the trail. I followed the brisk pace she set and tried not to think about how much time I might be wasting. If this acquaintance of hers couldn’t shed any light on that sigil, this whole trip would have been for nothing. Already, I wished I’d hunted down a forensics person to try scraping residue out of the vial to identify. But I still had that niggling feeling that whatever had been in there wasn’t listed in Wikipedia.
A familiar tingle went up my spine, a warning that someone—or something—magical was nearby. I paused to look out over the lake, its tree-filled slopes rising up on all sides. The sky was blue and clear, which made it easy to pick out the huge black dragon soaring over the ridge on the opposite side.
“Shit,” I breathed, almost calling Sindari for help.
But I caught myself. Since there was a limit to how many hours he could stay in our world each day, I had to save him for when I needed him.
“Mom?” I trotted to catch up and started to point out the dragon to her, but he’d dipped behind the ridge and out of sight. “Where does this trail go?”
“Around the lake. We’ll take a detour on the other side.” She pointed toward the forest the dragon had been flying over.
Wonderful.
We’d gone three miles and were almost halfway around the lake when Mom walked off the path to head inland. We’d passed several groups of hikers along the way, but I doubted we would see any more. There wasn’t any hint of a trail now, and if anyone else had been leading, I would have asked if she knew where she was going. But Rocket bounded ahead of us, apparently knowing where we were going. And Mom had warned me we were taking a detour.
My fingers strayed to my necklace and the cat figurine again. I could still sense the dragon. Now that we’d turned, he was dead ahead of us. He seemed to be staying in one position. Maybe he’d caught a raccoon and was enjoying a nice appetizer before the main course arrived. Did dragons eat humans? Or dogs?
“You might want to have Rocket stay close,” I warned. “The dragon who wrecked my Jeep is a couple of miles ahead of us.”
Mom frowned over her shoulder. “What’s he doing here?”
“He neglected to file his itinerary with me.”
“Is he hunting you?”
“I hope not.” I wasn’t cocky enough to believe I could have bested him if he’d truly wanted to kill me. My charm might keep me safe from fire, but he had all kinds of alternative magic he could hurl my way. Not to mention those fangs and talons. “Honestly, I don’t know why he would be. I’m not here to ki— deal with anyone. Just ask some questions of your mysterious acquaintance. How far away are we now?”
I tried to make that question casual and not let on that I was nervous about going deeper into the woods with the dragon out here. Not that we’d be safe if we made it back to the parking lot and the car. As I well knew.
“Not far. There’s a tunnel up ahead.”
“A tunnel? Like a lava tube?”
“Originally, I’m sure it was. Now it’s being used as a passageway.”
“By your acquaintance?”
“Among others.”
Before I could comment on Mom’s deliberate vagueness, Rocket zipped past us, planted his paws on a tree, and barked at a squirrel. The squirrel chittered back at him from the safety of a branch thirty feet up. Rocket waved his tail vigorously, barked again, and looked over at us.
“I think he wants you to do your part and get that squirrel for him,” I said.
“Squirrels are a lot of work to skin and debone for not much meat.”
“Gross. I was joking.”
“You’ve eaten squirrel before. Remember that stew we used to have when you were a kid?”
“The one you used to make on a campfire made in a sawn-off oil drum? Yes, and now I wish I didn’t.”
“Those were tight times. Sometimes, squirrels and asparagus scrounged along the roadside were all we had.” Mom kept talking, wandering off into some weird nostalgia territory, which had to be for her lost youth because she couldn’t possibly miss being broke and living in a bus, but something twanged my senses, distracting me.
The dragon?
No, I sensed more than one magical aura this time, spread out across the woods ahead of us. None of them were as significant as the dragon’s, but the number of them was disturbing. Ten? Twelve?
“Hold up, Mom.” As I stopped, Rocket caught up with us.
He bounded past, but then halted, nose in the air. His hackles went up, and he ran back to Mom’s side, growling at the route ahead.
And it was a route, I realized, noticing that we’d gone from tramping along unbroken ground to a trail again. Not one as substantial as the hiking path around the lake, but there were prints in the dusty earth, showing recent use. Some of those prints had been made by boots, but others had been made by large canines and still others by what at first I thought belonged to bears. But they were more similar to human prints, large human prints. Nobody on Earth had a foot that big. Were there trolls or orcs out here?
“What is it, boy?” Mom rested a hand on the dog’s back.
Rocket whined and growled at the same time.
“What species is your acquaintance, Mom? And is there a whole pack of them?”
“She’s a golem, and no. There is a village up here with a lot of the magical living together.”
“Such as werewolves?” The large humanoid prints could have been made by a golem, but not the canine prints. Those were too large to belong to the coyotes that roamed these forests. Even wolves wouldn’t have left prints that big. Not normal wolves.
“No. I’ve never met a werewolf.”
“I think we’re about to.” I could feel the auras of the pack drawing closer.
The sheer number of them made me uneasy, especially with Mom and her dog here. I would have suggested running back to civilization, but we were too many miles from the parking area and campgrounds, and werewolves could move a lot more quickly than we could.
“Do you have a gun or just that axe?” I waved to the hatchet strapped to her pack, one more suitable to cutting branches than clubbing hostile magical enemies.
I already had Fezzik out and was loading a magazine of Nin’s special cartridges. Even though I rarely hunted werewolves—they usually only killed livestock, and the government didn’t consider that enough of a crime to send out an assassin—there was some silver twined in with the other magical stuff in the ammunition.
“I’ve got a Glock in case the coyotes come after Rocket,” Mom said. “Up until a couple of years ago, I never saw anything weird in these hills, and coyotes and the occasional mountain lion were the only things you had to worry about. Maybe some black bears, but they’re usually easy to scare away. Rocket has a big bark.”
“I don’t think he’s going to keep werewolves away.”
Nor did the dog look like he had barking in mind, not anymore. Maybe he had a sense of what was out there.
Rocket tried to jerk away from Mom, but she caught his collar.
“Get him leashed up and stay here. I’ll go ahead and talk to them.” I hefted Fezzik meaningfully and didn’t miss the irritated look Mom gave me as I stepped past her. She wasn’t used to me giving her orders, but this was my expertise, not hers.
“I’m not letting you go up there alone,” she said. “Can we back down the trail? Maybe they won’t follow.”
I saw the first glimpse of gray fur between the trees ahead of us. My senses told me more accurately than my eyes that they were closing in on us from multiple directions.
One howled, an ear-splitting wail that wasn’t at all romantic, despite what the stories liked to say. It sent a chill down my spine. It was the sound of wolves on the hunt, not a friendly greeting or a mere warning that we should get out of their territory.
“They want something,” I said, sure of it. “Probably me.”
“You, why?”
I’d taken out werewolves in Idaho after one had contracted rabies and killed a bunch of people on the Washington border. I wondered if this pack knew about that.
“Because of my job.” I took a few more steps, hoping Mom would back away, and touched the cat figurine. “Sindari, I could use some tiger intimidation.”
Mist formed at my side as the wolves drew closer, massive beasts that were over four hundred pounds, their heads level with my chest. Fortunately, Sindari was even larger, and he glowed with magical power that should give them pause. Unfortunately, there was only one of him. I could pick out twelve werewolves now.
Mom let out a startled gasp, though I didn’t know if it was because of Sindari or the wolves.
One black male with yellow eyes stopped on the trail twenty feet ahead of us. He rose on two legs as he morphed into a human form, a powerful, tall, broad-shouldered, and noticeably naked human form. He had to be seven feet tall, maybe more. The alpha, I assumed, unless he’d been sent out as cannon fodder to speak with us. Maybe all the others were nine feet tall in human form.
Are we hunting wolves? Sindari’s gaze locked on to the one on the path, as his ears twitched, following the noises of the others. His magic would doubtless tell him exactly where they were even without sound.
That wasn’t the plan, but they’ve placed themselves in our path.
Canines are rude.
Yes.
I lifted my chin and met the werewolf’s cold eyes. “Will you let us pass? We’re not looking for any trouble.”
“You are well-armed for one who seeks no trouble.” His voice had an alien edge, the accent unplaceable, but I had no trouble understanding him. “Maybe you are here to hunt the pack, no?”
“No. Today, my weapons are for defense only.”
“Humans are always so full of lies. They spill out, like owl pellets hacked up in the forest.”
“I’m capable of lying without making gagging and coughing noises, actually. We’re looking to talk to someone out here. Not you.”
He tilted his head, glancing past me.
I hoped Mom wasn’t doing anything to draw attention. I could hear Rocket whining and growling, but I didn’t risk taking my eyes from the speaker. Even in human form, werewolves could move like lightning.
“We are the protectors of this forest,” he said. “If you wish to talk to someone, you must go through us.”
To either side of the trail, wolves prowled closer, all focused on us, all watching. I sensed from the leader that he wanted a fight.
I didn’t want a fight, not with my mother here, and not against so many. While I didn’t doubt my own abilities, I also wasn’t usually dumb enough to take on a whole pack at once. I wished I hadn’t been so focused on the dragon—I should have sensed these guys earlier.
“Will you let us go if we walk away?” I doubted it, but I wanted confirmation. Mom’s vague resource wasn’t so exciting to me that I would risk her life to get to him or her.
“The Ruin
Bringer fears to fight us?” He tilted his head to the other side. “This is not what I expected from you.”
“The name is Val, thanks. I only fight critters that commit crimes—or that pick fights with me.”
“Critters. You diminish us and belittle us. This is unacceptable. You shall not pass. Nor shall you run away. There are many who will be pleased to learn of your death, and our pack will grow in status when we slay you.”
“Or we’ll slay you, and your pack will be plucked apart by crows and vultures. Maybe owls that will later hack you up in pellet form.”
He threw his head back and laughed.
The attack came not from the front but the sides.
Be ready, Sindari warned me as four massive wolves rushed toward us.
Back to back, I replied, already firing.
The wolves zigzagged, trying to dodge my shots. They were fast, but not faster than Fezzik. All four of my first rounds thudded into the chest of one of the wolves rushing me. It yowled in pain as one of its legs gave way, and it tumbled to the side. The one beside it sprang for my throat.
I fired at its chest even as I ducked. More of Fezzik’s rounds thudded into fur and flesh.
The wolf snarled instead of screaming, jaws snapping, but I squatted lower to avoid them. Its momentum took it over my head, and Sindari, even though he was fighting his own battle, facing two that had come at him from that side, found time to leap up and eviscerate the wolf as it passed over him. His great claws slashed into its belly. This time, the wolf screamed, its entrails falling out.
In my peripheral vision, I saw the rest of the pack rushing in and spotted my mom with her back against a tree. She wrestled with Rocket’s leash even as she pointed her handgun at one of the wolves.
“I have to help Mom,” I shouted, warning Sindari that I was leaving his back.
She fired at a wolf, the bullet taking it square between the eyes. But the magical creature shook his head as if it were armored and that barely hurt. He snarled and crouched to spring.
As I charged toward Mom, yelling to divert the pack’s attention, I yanked Chopper out. I couldn’t fire, not when that wolf was so close to her.
The crouching wolf saw me coming and switched his target, springing for me instead. His powerful muscles bunched and propelled him straight toward my head.
Sinister Magic: An Urban Fantasy Dragon Series (Death Before Dragons Book 1) Page 9