by Jory Strong
“It’s a pack of pure animals,” Magena said. Her voice held concern over the proximity of the hyenas, and their unnatural behavior at venturing so close to territory claimed by a huge pride of Lions.
Twenty-five
A Lion in human form ushered them into the end dwelling. The front rooms were crowded with others. “Everyone having contact with Kerr has been quarantined here,” he told Magena.
“Good. How is your son now?”
“Weak, sweating. Only marginally worse than when I sought you out.”
“Has he convulsed?” Rebekka asked.
“No.”
“Is he conscious?”
“Yes. Come. I’ll take you to him.”
They passed through several vacant rooms before reaching an opening covered by a heavy elk pelt. The man pulled it aside to reveal a candlelit room, and a boy in his late teens curled into a fetal ball in the center of it.
The window was also covered, as if to minimize the possibility of disease being spread in an airborne manner. It muted the sound of the Lions and hyenas, but in such close proximity, the wild laughter and roars still seemed loud.
Both she and Magena knelt next to Kerr. Aryck crouched at her side.
The boy’s father took up a position opposite them. “He’s emptied the contents of his stomach and his bowels.”
Kerr began trembling. Shivering violently. His teeth chattering.
Magena touched a hand to his forehead. “Fever.”
She glanced at Rebekka. “He took down a young buck the hyenas injured but didn’t kill. The pack outside came upon him as he gorged himself. They chased him off the carcass and pursued him. He was already ill by the time he returned home.”
“Can he change forms?”
“Not again. He did once, to tell his father he felt sick and try to heal through shifting, but he couldn’t retake his lion form. There are cures, preparations I would normally make and dispense for these symptoms, but given what happened on Wolf lands . . .
“The pride has gold they can pay you with. Please use your gift so we can know if there are others who will soon fall ill.”
High-pitched, eerie giggles pierced the hide covering the window and stabbed into Rebekka. Sweat broke out on her skin.
A shudder passed through her, so noticeable Aryck placed his hand on her back. He stroked her spine in a calming gesture, murmured soothingly, “You’re safe. Whatever has stirred them up and brought them this close to the Lions won’t bring them any closer.”
Rebekka fought to keep from shaking. If Kerr carried disease then it was already among the Lions. If the hyenas were sick then she would call them to their deaths and possibly expose those outside to virus-borne plague. And if she refused to use her gift, she would have to reveal a secret that in all likelihood would lead to her being blamed for what happened on Wolf lands as well as what happened here.
They would kill her. Perhaps they would kill Levi and Aryck as well.
She was damned by any choice she made.
The hide covering the doorway pushed to the side. A white Lion with pale blue eyes entered.
Rebekka knew the shaman by the swirling brands on his face. He sat, allowing the hide to fall back into place and once again serve as a door.
Despite his sightless eyes, she felt as though he’d come to serve as witness to the proceedings. A last glance at the fur-covered window and she made her decision. The risk of doing nothing was too great.
She removed the amulet. As Aryck took it from her, it felt as though ice shattered and splintered in her chest, the blast of it so sharp and intense it doubled her over.
In self-defense and instinctive reaction she placed her hands on the Lion teen. Warmth flowed into her, but it was mild, tepid, and she knew immediately that unlike the Wolves and Jaguars she’d healed, the Lion was nowhere near death.
The knowledge came to her not just because there was no battle between shaman and ancestors, no drums beating in either this world or the place Aryck called the shadowlands, but because the boy’s need didn’t absorb her gift. Touching him didn’t stop the frigid emptiness from spreading, as if some unseen cavity was opening up inside her.
She remembered thinking as she healed the Wolves that her will and gift were just another name for a part of her soul. So she concentrated, consciously gathering what she’d always called her will, and it was like reeling in a part of her that traveled outside of her body and was her gift.
Heat replaced the icy emptiness until the only reality was the sick Lion. Then, as she’d done with the Wolves, she looked for the source of illness and its cause.
She touched the teen’s lips and jaw and throat for infection pooled in saliva. His forehead for the encephalitis-like inflammation. She found neither.
Her hand moved lower and he moaned in pain when she reached his abdomen. There was infection there. By the amount of it she thought it had been building for some time, perhaps ignored while he was in lion form, or perhaps—
A memory clicked into place. She recognized the ailment as a burst appendix. It was rare among Weres but she’d encountered it once before, soon after moving to the brothel Dorrit managed.
Rebekka drew on the power that had first come to her after accepting the amulet, pulling heat from the core of the Earth—or perhaps the fires of a demon-filled hell—to burn away the mass of infection rather than call on the boy’s own body to fight it.
Time lost all meaning. Nothing existed outside of healing until the boy rolled away, breaking the physical contact.
Reality returned in a rush of frigid cold and horror. Outside the dwelling came a hyena’s scream abruptly ended.
The feeling of ice in Rebekka’s chest grew muted, diminished as though the danger close by had melted away, the intensity fading with the deaths of the hosts carrying it. What remained felt like a single shard driven through her heart, leaving her with a sense of it well beyond the eucalyptus grove, somewhere deeper in the forest. It winked out completely when she took the amulet from Aryck.
Rebekka started to rise to her feet. Magena stopped her with a touch to her arm. “What was wrong with the cub?”
“A burst appendix causing a large pocket of infection.”
“Good,” Magena said but didn’t relax. “Will you accompany me outside to examine the dead and injured?”
Rebekka’s skin felt clammy, coated with guilt. The image from the Barrens rose in her mind, human bodies burning on wooden pallets, and, following it, the Elk she’d seen in Wolf lands.
She didn’t want to see evidence of the urchin’s horrible gift. She’d known when she elected to heal Kerr that any choice she made damned her.
But like that one, there was no denying Magena’s request. “I’ll go with you.”
Aryck helped her to her feet. She found comfort in the feel of his warmth at her side, in the way he threaded his fingers through hers.
Some of the guilt and fear lessened when they emerged from the dwelling and learned none of the Lions had been killed. But the horror remained at the sight of the hyenas who’d been slain when they left the forest and were attacked by the pride.
“Touch the dead first,” Magena advised. “So you’ll know the disease if it’s present in the Lions. I’ll order anyone who had contact with the hyenas to gather in one place, regardless of whether they have injuries needing a healer’s attention.”
Rebekka nodded her acceptance of the suggestion. She went to where the closest hyena lay on ground saturated with body fluids.
She crouched at the head. Aryck crouched with her, holding out his hand in an offer to take possession of her necklace.
Rebekka steeled herself for the awareness of plague that would strike when she gave it to him. Suppressed both gasp and shiver as it came.
This time relief was mixed in with awareness. She couldn’t be certain, but it seemed as though what she’d felt earlier was the same, as if the pocket of disease remained in the same place.
The thought gave he
r pause and made her palms dampen. If she had the courage, could she find the source and either heal the carriers or see them destroyed by the Weres?
Magena joined them at the side of the dead hyena. Rebekka let the question go, forcing herself instead to lay a hand on the animal’s forehead.
Like the Wolves, there was massive inflammation of the brain. But unlike them, it had manifested differently, into something like rabies and yet not rabies, even if the hyena’s unnatural behavior mimicked it.
Rebekka placed her fingertips on the hyena’s muzzle. Immediately there was the same horrifying sense of connection she’d experienced when she touched the Wolf pup, the same sense of recognition, as if the virus massed in the saliva and tried to come to her hand so she might carry it to another host.
The taste of disease filled her mouth. Thick and viscous.
She scrambled to her feet, managing only a few steps before bending over and retching.
Clamminess returned to coat her skin. She knew in that instant she couldn’t go on carrying the full burden of the secret.
Aryck enfolded her in his arms, nuzzling her cheek and whispering kisses across her ear. “What can I do to help you?”
“You’re doing it,” she said, pressing against him, hugging him tightly as his strength bolstered her own until she could move away and kneel next to a second corpse.
Magena and Aryck both joined her. She was conscious of the Lions milling, gathered and held in groups. Most of them remained in their animal forms, though the grand matriarch and shaman weren’t.
Fires had already been lit in preparation for burning the bodies. Rebekka touched the hyena’s forehead and muzzle before removing her hand and saying to Magena, “I needed to be sure. They both carry the same virus. It’s like rabies but not quite the same. Their saliva is full of it.”
“Do you wish to touch more of them?”
Rebekka couldn’t suppress a shudder. “No.”
She stood and looked down. But instead of seeing spotted fur and the distinctive shape of a hyena, she saw the slick black fur of a dog killed by settlement police years ago in the San Joaquin.
You brought the rabid dog here, little healer.
Forget now, until it’s time for you to join the game.
It was as if she’d come full circle, except this time she wasn’t the little girl told to forget or the adult who up until days ago didn’t know who her father was. She might be a pawn still, but even pawns had choices.
She glanced at Aryck, her eyes lingering on the amulet in his hand. She’d given him her body, taken the risk he’d turn away from her in disgust and call her a liar when he saw the tattoo.
He’d done neither. Now she had to trust he’d accept her once he knew she was fathered by a demon and gifted with something terrible by her father’s enemy.
In the distance she could feel plague, still seemingly where it had been before. It was only a matter of time before it spread.
“I’m ready to check the Lions now,” she told Magena. “One with an open wound would be best.”
“All but the most seriously injured healed themselves by shifting before I could tell them not to,” Magena said, worry in her voice as she led Rebekka to a tight knot of Lions surrounding a fallen pride member.
The young male was too weak to lift his head but his eyes followed Rebekka as she came to his side. Broken bones protruded from both front legs and blood pooled beneath his torn flanks and chest.
Despite his injuries, he was calm, trusting. She touched the places where teeth had ripped into his hide and found nothing but stinging pain. It was the same where the bones had been crushed and broken by powerful jaws.
Cautiously she said, “I’ll check others after I heal him, but I don’t sense any of the virus in his wounds.”
This is the same as what occurred on Wolf lands, Aryck thought as he surveyed the scene around him, the ground littered with dead and the pyres burning with those now being thrown to the fire.
This was the end result of weapons targeted at individual species. Only instead of Elk and Wolf, this disease was meant for Hyenas. There could be no other explanation.
The hyenas had stood no chance against a Lion group swollen to three or four times its normal number as the individual family prides gathered as they did each year at this time. And yet they’d come—infected by something like rabies but not contagious across species lines as rabies was—attacked, and been slaughtered because of it.
He didn’t believe it could be coincidence that two previously unknown diseases had struck so soon after the humans trespassed and began salvaging in Coyote lands. It was clear to him they were meant for the Weres.
A glance around and he knew it was clear to the Lions as well. Several males climbed to high perches in the eucalyptus trees. They wore skin instead of fur, and each carried a drum strapped to his back.
Their hair was in dreads, marking them as the shaman’s apprentices. And though Aryck had never witnessed it, the Jaguar elders occasionally told stories of days long gone, when humans from Europe arrived and brought with them diseases that wiped out clans and packs and tribes. When drums beat, not in a summoning of the ancestors but in a shaman call for others to enter the shadowlands and share news of the danger threatening all of them.
War with the humans now seemed inevitable. Those in the encampment would die and eventually someone would come in search of them.
The Weres could ensure there was no trace of their involvement, but they couldn’t hide the truth. Not when there were gifted humans who could enter the spiritlands and speak with those killed, and necromancers who could summon any souls that lingered and hear their testimonies.
He sought Rebekka with his eyes and found her a distance away. Pride filled him as he watched her healing the last of the Lions who’d been too severely injured to change forms.
She would survive the ancestors’ trial. He didn’t doubt it, not after all she’d done for the Weres.
He’d expected to have more time with her before he told her what Nahuatl and his father said. He’d thought after a night of lovemaking his confidence would be hers and she’d want to stay and be his mate.
There was no delaying it now. Duty to the pack required him to accompany the Lions as they followed the hyenas’ trail and sought evidence it had crossed a human’s.
He felt sure they would find it, and when they did, he would need to return to Jaguar lands. After the human encampment was destroyed, except for those left behind to patrol, the Jaguars would move to their winter camp.
For Rebekka to accompany him, she would have to agree to go through the rite. It could be done in their winter territory. There was a sacred grove of trees and a cave where the bones of the Jaguar dead were placed.
Worry crept in as she finished her task and came to him. He’d wanted more time, but even as he pulled Rebekka into his arms, Chátima, the Lion enforcer, was at his side, saying, “We leave now to see what we can learn by following the hyenas’ trail. You’ll accompany us?”
“I’ll catch up to you. I need to speak with Rebekka first.”
Aryck led Rebekka to a place where they could speak privately if they were careful to keep their voices low. After fastening the amulet around her neck he took her hands in his. They trembled as if she feared what he might say, and her eyes held a worried, haunted look.
Every instinct demanded he soothe and reassure. Comfort and drive all fear from her life.
He leaned in, touched his mouth to hers. Licked the seam of her lips.
She opened for him on a low moan. Her tongue greeting his, sliding, twining, making him begin to harden.
He deepened the kiss. Extended it. Drew it out and never wanted it to end, though he knew it had to. Others depended on him for their safety, their lives.
His lips clung to hers. He couldn’t seem to pull away and so he said what he had to against the sweet softness and carnal temptation of her mouth. “If we find evidence the humans are responsible for the d
isease on Were lands, we will destroy the encampment. If that happens, the Jaguars will retreat to the most remote and inaccessible portion of our territory. I want you with me. I want you to be my mate.”
In anticipation of her reaction, he freed her hands and imprisoned her in his arms. “But you must agree to go through the Rite of Trial before you can return to Jaguar lands.”
She stiffened, her hands going to his chest, pushing. “Haven’t I already proven myself to the Jaguars?”
“Yes, but without the approval of the ancestors you can’t be made part of the pack.”
“The same ancestors you claim are responsible for making outcasts? You speak of them as though they’re divine beings who have the right to judge. As if in death they’re somehow more infallible than in life.”
Fear of losing her filled Aryck. He was handling this badly. Desperation seized him and made him speak without thinking. “Will you still wish to be my mate if I’m made outcast by the ancestors? Do you want to one day offer me the same choice you gave Levi?”
As soon as the words were out he knew it’d been a mistake to say them. He slammed his mouth down on hers to prevent her from answering, to keep their argument from escalating as it had the first night she was in Jaguar lands.
He kissed her with all the raw emotion churning inside him. Knowing he had to leave, not just to see to his duty, but before he made things between them worse. Before she gave him an answer he didn’t want to hear.
Against her lips, he said, “The ancestors had a hand in your being brought to Were lands. It was because of them I went to Oakland instead of another male from our pack. It can’t be coincidence you’re here, at this time when your gift is desperately needed. They will judge you worthy. I’m sure of it. Think on it while I’m gone.”
With one last kiss he released her. “You are the only female I’ve ever considered taking as a mate,” he said, then turned and loped away, telling himself he hurried to follow the hunting Lions, and not because he was afraid to stay longer.
Is Aryck right? Rebekka wondered, watching him move with easy grace through the eucalyptus grove. Did the ancestors who played such an important role in the lives of the pure Weres mean for her to be Aryck’s mate? She’d had a similar thought. Only instead of the Were ancestors, she’d been thinking of her father.