“How many is that now?” she asked in a low voice.
“Four out of the fifteen left. That’s eleven yet to go.” He was breathing hard; from fear or fight-stress, she reckoned. So far as she knew, he had never fought, much less killed, anything before.
“Breathe deeply and slowly,” she advised. “The tenser you are, the more like you are to miss the shot.”
The cave had gone ominously quiet. The light was fading in good earnest now; overhead the sky had gone from light blue to the color that Rosa associated with the Virgin’s robes, and there was just a hint or two of a star. It was rapidly getting cooler. But their eyes were having no trouble adjusting to the darkness. Curiously, it was nothing like the way she saw things outlined in Earth power—although that was definitely a component, with everything that was alive faintly haloed with golden light, the half-faded blood magic a kind of loathsome, black-red skin on the surface of the ground. No, this was very much like a bright twilight, except that everything was in its proper color rather than in shades of blue.
She picked up a faint scrabble of claws above them, and elbowed Dominik hard, jerking her head up.
They separated a little, both of them starting to breathe quickly. At the last minute, as if they were both thinking the same thing, she sheathed the coach gun at her back and he holstered his pistol, seizing the boar spear from where it was leaning against the rock while she drew both her silver daggers.
The scratch of claws right above them gave them a hint of warning; they flung themselves back and to the side, and an enormous shifter plummeted into the space between them.
He was in half-form; he had to have been to have been able to climb the steep side of the hill and negotiate the rock above their cleft. As he fell, or leapt, and landed between them, he lashed out with claws to either side of him. They were both immediately assaulted with an incredible stench. Rosa wedged herself against the rock as hard as she could to avoid his claws.
He was incredibly fast, even if he did look as malformed and sickly as the rest—misshapen skull, mangy fur, rough and patchy skin. He might look diseased, but he certainly didn’t move like he was diseased. Rosa maneuvered for space and jumped back, but Dominik charged in with the boar spear.
Dominik either had incredible luck or incredibly good aim; he got the shifter right beneath the breastbone, and knocked him off-balance at the same time. Putting his back into it, Dominik ran the shifter into the rock wall; the spearhead bit into him and he screamed and clawed at the shaft. In half-form, these particular shifters seemed to have a particularly tough hide. Either that or the spear-point had dulled. Well, it was heavily plated in silver, and silver wasn’t known for keeping an edge well.
Rosa had been keeping half an eye on the cave entrance, and dropped a dagger as another shifter, also in half-form, rushed out, coming straight at her. She didn’t have time for the coach gun; she barely had time to reach for the pistol and shoot. And she wasn’t nearly as lucky as Dominik; the bullet hit the creature’s shoulder, eliciting a scream, but not dropping him.
He continued for her. On impulse, she dove straight at him, or rather, for the ground in his path.
That was the last thing he was expecting.
As he skidded to a halt and tried to grab her, her hands hit the ground and she tucked and rolled, somersaulted between his legs, and came up on her feet behind him. She had just enough time to unholster and unload her second pistol into his back, blowing a huge hole in his spine, when more scrabbling behind her made her whirl, pulling the coach gun off her back at the same time.
She caught a third shifter in wolf form in mid-leap with the blast of silver shot. She dodged to the side as the body hit the place where she had been standing.
Just as Dominik finished his with a savage twist of the spear. The shifter pinned against the rock choked, shuddered and went limp.
She gathered up her dropped weapons, rushed back to him and put her back to the rock as he pulled the spear loose and turned to face the open. She was shaking with fear now. She had never had to face this many foes with only herself and a partner. This would be the perfect time to rush them; all four guns were discharged, the crossbow was lying just out of reach, and all they had to hold shifters off was the spear.
Silence.
She quickly loaded the coach gun. “Get the crossbow,” she whispered, and with the spear at the ready, Dominik edged over to where it was lying in the middle of the open space. Rather than pick it up, however, he kicked it over to her with a sideways boot of his foot.
It skittered across the rock, making an unnaturally loud clatter. She snatched it up, and waited for him to get back.
Dominik edged crabwise back to her, and under cover of his spear, she hung the crossbow on his belt, reloaded the pistols and thrust one back into the holster beside it. He might not be good with it, but so far, at the close quarters they had been fighting, it didn’t matter.
The cave, the cliffs above them, and the area before them all remained still, and silent.
After a while, as her rapid heart rate slowed, she swallowed down nausea. It stank out here.
There was the horrible smell of rank feces from the gut-ruptured shifter Rosa had gotten in mid-jump, and from the one Dominik had stabbed. Virtually all of the shifters had involuntarily wet themselves as they died, so there was the stench of urine as well. The bodies smelled like the worst possible combination of unwashed human and filthy canine. And over all was the smell of tainted blood.
Dominik must have been thinking the same thing. “At least they’re dead,” he muttered under his breath. “I’m glad we dragged most of them away. I don’t think we would be able to breathe otherwise. How many left?”
“Eight to go,” she said loud enough to carry to the cave, making a strong effort to sound completely casual, as if this was something she did every day. And she took care to speak in Romanian. Time to see if she couldn’t unnerve them a little. After all, they’d cut the pack down from over forty, although the pack would not be aware it had been with the help of Elementals. “I wonder if these idiots know that I am Red Cloak?”
“I’m not sure they’d know what that meant,” Dominik replied, following her lead. “I think it’s only the dogs of Germany, Austria and Hungary that wet themselves when they hear that name.” He tsk’d. “If they knew it, they’d have run before we even got here.”
“If they let our friend come out, I might, possibly, pull back long enough to let them run for it even now,” she said, carelessly. “That’s not to say I wouldn’t come after them eventually, but at least they’d have a head start.” Was there any chance she could bluff them into abandoning the cave and Markos, and running?
Then again—how much of a bluff would it be? She and Dominik and the Elementals had whittled them down to a bare fraction of the original pack.
“And what do you want with the wolf-man?”
The voice that echoed out of the black cave entrance was deep, and angry, and very loud. She couldn’t tell what emotions made it sound so tight and gravelly. Fear? Maybe? She could hope. Fear would be much better for her purposes than rage. But there wasn’t any uncertainty there that she could read.
“He’s my friend,” she said. “And an Earth Magician. As, I have no doubt, you already know, sorcerer. You should have reckoned by now that we will do whatever it takes to win him free of you.”
There was a very long pause.
“You have murdered my sons and my wives,” came the reply. Ah, now she recognized the emotion. It was anger. But, unfortunately, not rage. Anger was something that fueled the ability to think as often as not. There was a calm underlying this anger, a deadly calm.
“And you lot have been murdering for decades. You have the deaths of hundreds on your hands. We have a long way to go before we’re even,” she called back, just as calmly.
But she whispered to Dominik whe
n the silence fell again. “I think he’s stalling for time, to get a better ambush set up on us. We must stand back to back, and get a little more into the open. I’ll face the cave, you face the opening; I don’t think they’ll try going over the top of the cliff again, it takes too long and they can’t see us as well. We might get a rush, soon.”
The edged together out into the space in front of the cave. At least there was a breeze blowing now, blowing some of the stench away.
“We must eat,” the voice whined.
“Then eat deer, you rotten bastard,” she snarled back. “There’s plenty of deer in these hills. Bears, too. That’s no excuse for murdering hundreds of innocent people, and you very well know it.”
A really sickening thought was rearing its head in the back of her mind. You have murdered my sons and my wives, he said . . . but said nothing about daughters. Oh . . . ugh . . . Her gorge rose. What if his daughters are his wives?
She almost threw up a little. That would certainly explain why they all looked . . . misshapen and sickly. Blood magic tended to magnify everything, not just what you were trying to do with it. You took enough risks of defects and sickness when you mated fathers and daughters, anyone who bred animals knew that. Add blood magic to the mix, especially if he was doing blood magic to ensure fertility. . . .
Bile rose in her throat. So did the determination to not let a single one of these monsters live, especially the leader. He must not be allowed to get away, or he would find a way to start this all over again. She got the coach gun in her hands, and made sure the pistols were at the ready.
“He has to be getting more of his . . . gah . . . followers in place,” Dominik whispered.
So he figured it out too, and can’t bear to say “children.”
“The question is . . . how many, and where are they going to come from?” she replied.
She had just finished that sentence, when she got her answer.
“NOW children!” howled the voice from the cave, and four of the shifters rushed from the cave straight at Rosa.
She got the first with the coach gun right as it cleared the mouth of the cave, for the entrance was narrow enough that only two could pass it at a time. She hit it in the head and shattered its skull, and dropped the coach gun at her feet as the body went down. The coach gun hadn’t hit the ground before she had pulled both pistols and fired. The first pistol missed, the second hit the shifter’s shoulder, and sent the shifter spinning into its sibling, knocking them both over into a tangle of limbs, and leaving her with only one to fight for now.
She had just enough time to throw up her left arm to keep it off her throat. It was small, no bigger than a real wolf, but that was big enough as it leapt for her. Its jaws closed on her arm as her right hand closed around the hilt of her dagger.
The jaws never clamped down far enough for the teeth to do more than bruise her flesh. As soon as it bit down, it realized it did not want what it had caught.
Between the cloth-of-silver and the wolfsbane oil, the shifter reacted as if it had gotten a mouth full of coals. It yelped in pain, spat her arm out, then frantically tried to leap away again as she slashed for its throat with her dagger.
She missed the throat, but got a good cut in on the shoulder. It yelped again, and scuttled back to the other two that were still standing.
Behind her, she could hear and feel Dominik fending off more shifters with his spear. She reached behind her for his pistol, blindly; got her hands on it, and pulled it out of the holster and fired it into the face of the unwounded shifter that finally untangled itself from the wounded one and rushed her. It went down and didn’t move.
She got her other dagger into her left hand, and waited. The two shifters limped back and forth in front of her, warily; trying to work up the nerve to attack her, she suspected. They were both small. All four of the ones on her side were small. Females? Adolescents?
She heard the same sort of strangled yelp behind her as the shifter that had tried to bite her had uttered, and at the same time, Dominik was pushed back against her with a little grunt. That seemed to embolden the two facing her.
The both leapt for her at the same time. One went high, going for her throat, and one went low, for a leg. Evidently they weren’t too bright. Or they thought the protection on her arm was a fluke.
She let the shifter have the leg, and rather than trying to save her throat, she grabbed the other shifter as it impacted her, driving her back against Dominik’s back, and pulled it into a one-handed bear hug as it tried to bite her throat out and had the same reaction the other’d had to her arm. Suddenly realizing she had the upper hand, it squirmed and kicked at her with clawed hind-feet. She plunged her dagger into its belly, cutting viciously downward.
It screamed, and ripped itself away, trailing intestines. She slashed at the face of the one trying to somehow bite her leg without getting a mouth full of silver and wolfsbane. She managed to cut right across its eyes, blinding it. It screamed and shook its head wildly, backing away until it ran into the cliff-face.
The one she’d disemboweled had fallen over. It was still moving. Shifters were resilient. It was trying to push its guts back into its own body with its nose . . . then it began writhing and spasming—
She snatched up the coach gun from the ground, jammed a cartridge in, and shot the blinded one. She broke the breech, reloaded and turned to the one she had disemboweled. It had gone to half-form, and was using clawed hands to stuff its guts back in. If she gave it enough time—it might just heal, even though the wounds had been made with silver.
She didn’t intend to give it enough time. She aimed carefully, and blew its back open.
Then she reloaded and turned to help Dominik.
He had three. Or rather, had had three. One was practically cut in half at his feet with the silver dagger lying on the ground beside it. One was impaled on the boar spear and was trying to claw its way past the guard to get to him.
The third was shaking its head and acting as if it was choking.
She shot the third one. At the same time, Dominik heaved the spear rapidly back and forth in a sawing motion, and the last shifter fell off it, spine cut.
They leaned together, panting. Now that it was over, Rosa felt as if she was going to drop to her knees and never stand up again. Her leg hurt. Her arm hurt. Her throat hurt. The shifters had not managed to mangle or crush what they’d bitten, but they had bruised her to the bone, and she figured Dominik was in the same shape.
And she was exhausted, so exhausted she was shaking.
They had been picking off the shifters for hours; that hadn’t been so bad, really, it had been like killing birds chased toward you by beaters. But this—this had been a real fight, and the worst odds she had ever had in her life. We did it. We actually lived through it . . .
And then there was one.
But even though her limbs felt as heavy as if they were made of stone, and just about as responsive, she managed to reload the coach gun, then the three pistols, and pass one of those to Dominik. Because there was still one more shifter in there.
The leader. The father of the clan.
Her guts roiled and revolted at the thought.
But she stood up straight, and faced the cave opening. Dominik turned and joined her, shoulder to shoulder.
She swallowed hard, twice, trying to get her throat to work. It hurt. It hurt to swallow, and it hurt to talk. It was a good thing the shifter hadn’t bitten down any harder. “Come—” she said, hoarsely, and scarcely above a whisper. “Come—”
She shook her head. She couldn’t get a word out. Dominik patted her back with the side of the pistol he was holding, and took over.
“Come out, monster!” he called, defiantly. “Come out and face us! We’ve killed your children! Don’t you want our blood?”
A snarl split the air like the sound of tearing clot
h.
“Don’t you want your friend?” the creature bellowed, voice choking with rage. “Come in after me! If you are lucky, you will see him die before I rend you limb from limb!”
“Can the zâne hold him off?” she whispered.
He shook his head. “I think so . . . but I don’t know. And anyway, even if they can, we can’t let that creature escape. We have to go in there after him. If he gets away, he’ll just go somewhere else, and breed himself a new pack.”
Dominik was merely echoing her earlier thoughts. They would have to go in after the “father,” the sorcerer who had started this all. They had no choice.
The shifter was not waiting for them in the entrance, but then, they hadn’t expected him to be. Their mystically enhanced memory showed them that this cavern was more than just a simple cave, it was a cave complex.
From the entrance it broadened out into a fair sized room, one with three tunnel entrances at the back of it. There were a few thick piles of rags and bracken in here against the walls. There was no sign of the zâne or of Markos.
There was also no sign of the shifter.
The cave . . . stank. The smell was unbelievable in here, and she wondered how anything with a canine nose could bear it. Unwashed, filthy human; unwashed, filthy wolf. Rotting meat. Feces and urine—evidently when the weather was bad, they just picked a corner and relieved themselves in it. Smoke, from somewhere deeper in the cave. Blood. Old blood, and ominously, fresh blood. All of the stench concentrated by the cave’s natural humidity.
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