A Summoner's Tale - The Vampire's Confessor (Black Swan 3)

by Danann, Victoria

  Kay was grateful for the knits Glen brought, especially the plain black cap with no braids hanging down. Each of the four searchers checked over the items in his pack while intermittently sipping the hot tea Litha had made.

  During the hours before the Whister arrived, Kay and Storm had decided together, talking in low tones while Ram slept, that one of them needed to stay with him. Just in case. They would divide up into two teams. There were four horses and they could move faster than men on foot. Storm would take Glen with him. Kay and Ram would go together. Able would have to stay with Litha because they needed his horse and Storm suspected the boy wouldn't object to pulling that duty.

  Both teams would stay in touch with Litha in case her pendulum picked up anything. The kid would see her working, but that couldn't be helped. And Black-On-Tarry elves weren't as ignorant about magick. Only fools who cloak themselves in the fashionable skepticism of modernity reject magicks altogether.

  The view out the windows had gone from black to charcoal gray. They were ready. They were eager.

  Storm stood up. "Let's get the horses." He kissed his wife and she held onto him just a second longer. "Good luck. Be safe."

  He smiled and nodded, but she could see his mind was already out the door. "Call me if you get anything."

  When they stepped outside the cottage Ram froze in place. "Did you hear that?" He quickly pulled off his hat and pushed his hair behind his ears. Nothing.

  "What did you think you heard?" Kay asked.

  "Can no' say for sure, but it sounded like wolves. Howlin'." Ram turned into the wind. "'Tis possible. Sound can go a long way if carried on the wind. But 'tis a strange time of day for such a thin' and it feels... odd."

  He put his hat back on and walked to the stable to help saddle the horses. He handed the Percheron's reins to Storm because the horse could carry someone his size all day without a strain. Glen drew the gelding because he was gentle and an easy ride and also because Ram didn't want to ask about Glen's experience with horses.

  Ram's mare could use more rest, but the same thing could be said about all of them. She was needed so she was going. Naturally Kay was riding the noble descendant of the horses of kings. Anyone could see he was infatuated with that horse and thinking about taking him home.

  By the time they were mounted it was light enough to see. Ram pointed toward the forest.

  "I rode that direction all the way to the edge of the preserve. She's no' that way. So I suppose we should split up and..."

  Litha interrupted as she jogged toward them. She finished his sentence. "Split up, but go that way." She pointed. They all looked in the direction she pointed as if they'd be able to see something besides trees. "Stay within a hundred yards of each other. She's somewhere in that strip."

  Litha clutched at the pendulum around her neck as they rode away. She went back inside, pulled the chain over her head, took the housing off then looked at Able. "I need you to be really quiet. Can you do that?"

  He nodded slowly and sat down by the hearth with a look that said I will wait quietly and watch closely.

  Just before the two teams came to an invisible fork, Ram said, "Call out to Blackie. He'll hear you before she does."

  The contractions were so close together they were just letting up long enough to give Helm a chance to breathe. When her body began pushing involuntarily she was amazed, but let instinct take over. She had the passing thought that she wouldn't know if something was wrong, not that she'd be able to do anything about it. When her uterus pushed, trying to expel the baby, Elora worked with it. When the muscles relaxed slightly, she stopped pushing and sat panting, waiting for the next wave.

  One of the strangest phenomena of reproduction is the surprise of a first baby. For many long months the intellect pretends to understand that a baby is coming. Preparations are made. Names are chosen. And yet, when a tiny human being arrives, it's a shock. The chasm between 'knowing' there's a fetus in gestation and greeting the miraculous result of that for the first time is an experience so transformative that no one is ever the same afterward. That is how Elora felt when she realized Helm was emerging from her womb.

  She reached down and felt the top of his head. When the next wave came, she waited for it to crest and then pushed as hard as she could. The baby's head slipped out and she held it in her hands. The next push was almost immediate. With that contraction she slowly pulled him from her body and then held him in her hands.

  Elora could tell by the movement on her left side that Blackie had come to his feet and was growling at the wolves. He had perceived some threat from them. It was then she realized just how completely vulnerable she was, blinded by darkness, reeking of blood and other fluids, wounded and holding a newborn infant in her hands. When Blackie grew quiet, she took that to mean that she and Helm weren't in immediate danger.

  Her uterus continued to contract while it expelled the placenta, but it no longer hurt. She remembered something from the hospital movie that she had seen before she had to remove Ram from the room; something about clearing the newborn's air passage of mucus. She put her finger in his mouth and swished it around the baby's gums to make sure there was no blockage. She took his slippery ankles, making sure she had a good hold, and held him upside down. The action made her wince because she disturbed the torn shoulder and caused it to start bleeding again.

  When she heard his little cry, so angry, so indignant, for the first time since the ordeal began, she gave herself permission to cry along with him.

  A stream of gray light was filtering into the den and she could make out shapes, if not the features, of the wolves. Since it was still too dark to see Helm clearly, she used her hands for eyes and felt all over his body. Everything was there; ten fingers and toes. Last she gently ran her fingers over his face. When she touched the tiny, beautifully shaped point of his ear, a sob bubbled up from nowhere.

  In a few more minutes it was light enough to see around her. The legs part of the pants she'd been sitting on had dried overnight in the winter air. She pulled the pants out from beneath her and arranged the dry parts next to her so she could lay Helm down.

  The wolves were clearly curious and wanted to come close enough to investigate. At one point Flame got close enough to lick the placenta and Blackie almost took her face off. She yelped/whined as she scurried back and then licked her muzzle; a sign of submission.

  Elora removed the puffy coat, her red knit sweater, and the knit cami she had worn underneath that. If she could crawl to the underground stream, she could wash him properly, but she had to have one arm to support her weight and one arm to hold the baby and her shoulder was beyond being able to do either one. So she used the soft cotton cami and the two wipes she had in her coat pocket to clean Helm up as best she could.

  She didn't know what to do about the umbilical cord, but instinct told her she needed to do something. So she took a shoe lace out of one of her boots and tied off the cord a few inches from the baby's beautiful and brand-new-to-the-world, little body. Then she chewed the cord in two on the other side of the knot she had made.

  She tossed the ruined cami away, wrapped him in the sweater and put her puffy back on. Leaning back against the rock that had been her birthing bed, she placed the baby on her chest, and pulled the puffy closed over both of them.

  "Don't worry, Helm. Daddy's coming. I can feel it."

  Exhausted in the truest sense of the word, she fell asleep again.

  Storm and Glen were trotting along, both keeping a keen eye for anything at all that seemed out of place. Every couple of minutes one or the other called for Blackie. Blackie knew them both and, like Ram said, he would come if he could.

  They'd been gone for nearly an hour when Glen said, "Hold on."

  "What?"

  "This way." Glen veered off just a few feet and swung down from Ram's gelding next to a tree trunk. "Look at this."

  He fingered a scar made by a bullet hole then pulled a utility knife out of his breast pocket. It took
less than a minute of digging into the wood to retrieve evidence that someone had been shooting.

  Storm looked at the bullet then scanned the area around them nervously, almost like he was expecting an ambush. "Ram told us hunting is forbidden and guns are illegal on several counts. We can't know if it's related to Elora being missing." He let that thought trail.

  "Hmmm." Glen started forward on foot, leading his horse. He'd picked up the trail and Storm thought for a minute that he actually saw the kid sniff the air.

  Within another twenty yards they came across the first bodies, partially covered by snow. The dead wolves were a mystery that had no context in the scene they were trying to reconstruct. Glen swiped at tears when he knelt down beside one of the wolves. Storm pretended not to notice, which wasn't hard because he was focused on the dead men. They looked to him to be mercenaries, not hunters. The fact that they had military-style weaponry supported that analysis.

  They'd both been struck by arrows which... These mercs couldn't have targeted her. It was unthinkable.

  A sense of foreboding started to form in Storm's stomach. Felt like he'd swallowed a battery operated, vibrating brick whole. He remembered that Elora said she had trained in archaic weaponry; something about her king's first line of defense. He'd never seen her use a bow and arrow, but when they were trying to teach her how to shoot a gun, she'd mentioned proficiency. If she said she could use a bow and arrow, it probably meant there was a room full of trophies and blue ribbons that existed in another dimension.

  Glen came up behind him. "Should we call?"

  "No." In spite of his strong desire to repel negative thoughts, he got an image of what would happen to Ram if the news was bad. "Let's... wait."

  Glen nodded in solemn understanding.

  Before they moved on, Storm decided to confirm the kills. He told Glen to backtrack and make sure there was only the one other guy they had passed a few yards back and that he was dead. Then he knelt down next to the one closest to him.

  Brushing snow off the corpse's collar, Storm placed two fingers on the neck to check for pulse. The man had frostbite on his face and it wasn't pretty. He thought he might be feeling a faint pulse, but was about to decide it was his imagination when the guy's eyes opened.

  He looked at Storm.

  "Who are you?" Storm demanded.

  "Who are you?" He countered in a voice so faint, hoarse, and wheezy he was barely understandable.

  "You have any idea how easy it would be for me to just break off your nose? It's brittle. And dead. Now let's try this again. Who are you and why are you here?"

  The guy tried to smile without much success. "If you're protecting her, you're on the wrong side of this, brother."

  "Protecting who?"

  "Elora Laiken. She's Laiwynn."

  Glen came up and moved on the other side of the body. Storm glanced up at Glen who simply shook his head meaning, yes, the guy was dead and, no, there weren't any more of them.

  Storm resumed the questioning. "I don't know what you mean. Spell it out for me."

  "Clan. All of them. Evil in the genes."

  "Evil?" The incredulity was evident in Storm's tone. Evil and Elora in the same sentence just didn't compute from his point of view. "You came to this dimension to kill her. And you did that because you think she's evil." Rystrome narrowed his eyes and looked at Storm like it was decided he was beyond conversion. "If you don't go back, will there be more coming?"

  Rystrome smiled as much as was possible with a face beyond movement. "By all that's holy I swear to you. We won't stop till it's done. If your people get in the way, they're dead, too. If you don't want a war, kill her."

  Storm's nostrils flared at that. For some reason his memory flashed on an exchange with Kay when Elora was new to their dimension and in critical condition.

  Kay had said, "You know that ‘Confucius say’ about being responsible for someone if you save their life?”

  Storm had replied, “Yeah?”

  Then Kay had said, “Well. It’s not true,” and laughed right before he and Ram went on leave for weeks leaving Storm at Jefferson Unit to and left Elora in Storm's care.

  Well, hadn't he just mused himself right into a mini-epiphany? It was true! He had kept her alive and then felt responsible to make sure she stayed that way. While he was comforting Ram, there was a part of him that wanted to rip the hero a new one for letting this happen. He'd turned Elora's care and feeding over to the biggest teenager who ever lived. What did he expect but disaster?

  No. That wasn't right. He couldn't blame Ram for the fact that Elora was headstrong, independent, and prone to life or death crises. She was a survival klutz. People around her needed to watch her and keep her from stumbling onto the sharp stick poking out of the ground.

  Storm stared at the man on the ground, feeling nostalgic about the days when all he had to worry about were vampire.

  "Glen." Storm talked quietly, not taking his eyes away from the assassin. "You go on ahead a few yards and see what there is to see."

  Glen didn't hesitate. "Yes, sir."

  He could hear Glen's footsteps receding by the combined sounds of snow crunch and dead leaves. Storm wasn't sure why he was trying to prolong the kid's innocence. He was almost ready to graduate which meant that he was on the verge of choosing. In a very short time, if he came to work for the Hunter Division, he would be learning that somebody has to do the hard stuff.

  When Glen's movement had faded away from earshot altogether, Storm broke the assassin's neck with a quick, practiced twist. He did it without either hesitation or remorse although he wouldn't call it fun and wouldn't like to stop and think about the fact that he was proficient because of practice. He'd never gotten used to that and suspected that the day he became calloused about such things would be the day he had become the darkness he was pledged to hunt.

  Storm took the Percheron's reins and followed Glen. He'd almost reached the spot where the trainee waited for him when the absolute quiet of the forest was transformed into instant chaos. The Percheron reared and jerked her reins out of Storm's hand so fast the leather straps dug welts across his palm. It all happened in the space of a second and then the horse was running back the direction they had come and not by himself. He was joined by Ram's gelding, the two of them hightailing with no thought of anything but "away".

  Thankfully Storm and Glen had worn the backpacks instead of strapping them to the saddles. It only took a second to see what had panicked the horses. Just ahead there was a Flintstones type structure and wolves were coming out of it. They were crouching and fanning out to herd the pair of intruders in the style of true pack teamwork.

  The wolves weren't growling or expressing obvious displays of menace. They didn't need to. Everything about their body language and expressions was frightening. They were threatened and acting accordingly. Based on what Storm and Glen had just seen, this pack had very good reason to be extra sensitive about trespassing.

  Glen said to Storm quietly. "Ease your pack off with as little movement as you can. The tranqs are loaded if we can get to them."

  "Why don't we just back away instead?"

  "Because there's a trail of blood leading from that tree over there to the inside of their den and I think it might be Elora's.

  "I count seven wolves. There are six cartridges loaded in each pistol. Try to hit them in the hindquarters if you can."

  Storm swallowed hard and began shrugging out of the pack. The wolves were advancing slowly. Step. Pose. Step. Pose. But the intensity of their stares told a story as old as instinct. The men were being regarded as one level of alert up from prey. They were regarded as hostile prey and the slowness of the wolves' movement could change in the blink of an eye.

  Storm could hear the zipper of Glen's pack and knew the kid practically had his hand on his pistol. Storm hoped, for the trainee's sake, that he was a good shot.

  As for his own defense, he found the main pocket zip and started to pull, but nothing happened.
He tried again. And again. After three tries the wolves were three steps closer and he was running out of time. There was no option but brute force. He jerked hard and freed the zipper, but also alarmed the wolves. As if they were a unit with one brain they sprang into action and ran at the men who were invading their forest home.

  Glen proved to be just as good at shooting as everything else he tried. Storm observed, again, that the kid was cool and composed as a field duty veteran. That undoubtedly aided him in the impressive feat of tranqing six wolves with six rounds in a matter of seconds. All in the hindquarters.

  That left Glen needing to reload and one very pissed, very large wolf still standing. Stalkson was beyond infuriated and determined that he would tear zipper man limb from limb and gloat while he dined on the liver.

  Storm pulled his tranq pistol free just as Stalkson Gray leaped at him and took him down to the ground. Storm was lucky the tranquilizer dart ended up in Stalkson's thigh and not his own. The sedative acted so fast that Stalkson never broke his intended victim's skin.

  While lying on the ground with a heavily sedated wolf on top of him, Storm was thinking how he had always expected to die at the hands of a vampire. Life was strange.

  Glen gently pulled the gray wolf off Storm.

  Storm got to his feet. "Thanks. Come on. Let's go see what we've got."

  Glen saw fear in Storm's eyes and suspected it wasn't fear for himself.

  "Are you scared?"

  Storm didn't want to dash off an answer to that question. He had the sense that this was an impressionable moment that could make a permanent difference in the kid's perspective and how he faced life and death. Given the trajectory of his career path, life and death situations were very likely a part of his future.

  Storm nodded and started walking toward the dolmen. "More scared than I've ever been. That woman is... special to me. And her husband? Well, I've known him since we were teenagers. I've been part of his team for what feels like a hundred years. There's nothing I wouldn't do to save either one of them pain."