The Wild Rites Saga Omnibus 01 to 04

by Anna McIlwraith

  “Master,” Robert’s voice, quiet and respectful and not screaming. Why wasn’t he — oh, wait, she was the only one who wanted to scream. Emma blinked, chin trembling — and then Alan let her go. She dropped to the floor, hit her knees and shins hard and swayed, right hand hovering above her left arm, couldn’t touch it, she’d die if she touched it.

  “Master, I apologize, but there is something. A word with you?” Robert glanced down at Emma and then walked away, and Alan followed.

  They bent their heads together, Alan stooping, listening, nodding. So Robert hadn’t intervened to stop Alan hurting her. He almost broke her arm. She’d felt the terrible, easy strength in his hand as he squeezed, almost unaware of how hard. Almost.

  And what the hell were they talking about?

  A black, sinking feeling claimed Emma’s heart.

  By the time Alan and Robert were finished, she’d managed to stand up. Her left hand worked fine, but anything else sent wrenching tendrils of pain through her upper arm, so she pinned her left wrist in the crook made by her right thumb and forefinger and held her hands crossed at chest level like a pathetic impression of the Virgin Mary. But she wanted her hands in front of her.

  She felt so very bad-ass — maybe for her next trick, she could whimper and curl up under the table like a wounded dog.

  Maybe for Alan’s next trick, he’d make her.

  He approached but stopped a few yards away. A lock of hair had fallen over his brow, but it managed to make him look more beautiful, less human, less real rather than more.

  He put his hands in the pockets of his well fitted slacks, as though it would make him look less intimidating. “We didn’t get to the part where I tell you my diabolical plan, did we?”

  Emma couldn’t appreciate the glint of humor in his quiet eyes. “It’s Katenka, isn’t it? Something’s wrong with Katenka.”

  One fine eyebrow arched. “Why ever would you say that?”

  “Damn you.” Emma swallowed thickly, squashing the insult that leapt to her tongue. Indulging in anger and fear wouldn’t do her any good, and hurling abuse at Alan wouldn’t kill him. Unfortunately.

  Alan glanced sideways at Robert. “Interesting, yes?”

  Robert nodded, eyes on Emma.

  “Go then,” Alan said. Robert padded away, and the sound of the steel door closing behind him almost pushed Emma over the edge and into tears.

  Only Alan’s narrowed gaze held her in check. Even with the lock of mussed hair on his brow, he still looked smug, in a blank sort of way.

  “You’ll see your wolf princess again soon.” He moved toward her and she darted backwards, but he kept going past her. “I promise. But now, there is something I want to show you. Come along.” He stopped when he got to the far wall with its steel door and big, screened observation window. The white remote was in his hand.

  “Come,” he beckoned her. “You’re about to find out exactly why I brought you here.”

  Red Sun spat into the dirt. “Why the fuck did he bring her here?” He turned away from the sight that spread out like a gray cancer nestled in the vast ravine between the mountains. “He could have taken her anywhere. Jumped a plane, we’d never have found her. Why here?”

  Here was a three mile uphill hike from where they had parked the cars. Here was a pine-topped cliff that descended into the torn valley below with a steep scrubby face and more than one blind patch of thick, low tree cover. Here was an ugly crack in the face of the Russian wilderness, where a sprawling concrete compound occupied most of the available surface area down in the ravine, only thin moonlight draping its edges with illumination. A service road curved away down the length of the ravine like a pale ribbon, back in the direction of the riverbed where Fern had made them stop; they had come overland rather than risk that route giving them away.

  “He doesn’t know we can track her,” Seshua said, still looking out at the compound below. “And you are assuming, Red Sun, that this place is merely a convenient bolthole, fortified with mind magic, nothing more. I do not think it is just that.”

  Red glanced at Seshua’s nearly invisible profile. The jaguar king had gone marble and quiet, moving with the economy of ancient stone turned to hot flesh; Red knew something similar had happened to himself, just as it had Horne and Andres, Marco, and Alexi. Nothing to do but think and assess and plan and calculate the odds and the variables and the blind motherfucking luck they’d need to get into the compound alone, never mind get Emma and the princess out.

  Dark irritation bled into Red’s voice. “You think this is a permanent base for them.” Speaking of blind luck. “Explains how they got to us so fast. They were practically next door when we arrived.”

  Anton came up beside them, binoculars in hand. “Emma never mentioned Alan having any connections here.” He unsheathed the binocs and lifted them, adjusting the scope.

  Red grunted. Telly had said that the names and addresses Em supplied when they went hunting for Alan months ago all turned out to be bogus. Alan had been careful even before he knew what Emma was.

  Gods damn Telly. Never listened to a word of advice out of anyone’s mouth, and then when he finally did he took it so goddamn literally there was no going back. No wiggle room.

  Not for the first time, Red offered up a colorful prayer to the little fucker, wherever he may be — but he didn’t expect a reply anytime soon. That wasn’t so bad. It was knowing Em was probably doing just the same thing and hoping, pleading for an answer, that made Red clench his one meaty fist until his bones creaked and his rough, calloused palm bled.

  Low shapes moved restlessly through the trees; Yevgeny and his wolves, all eight ocelot maidens, scouting in animal form. Red doubted they’d find anything useful, the compound was magically sealed and bound up with a layer of mental shielding tighter than a — well, it was tight, that was for sure. If Red needed anymore confirmation, he had only to glance at Alexi where the serpent priest paced at the edge of the cliff.

  Now there was one angry sonuvabitch.

  Somewhere in the darkness, Fern cried out. Red heard him thump to the ground and ran in the direction of the sound. Fern was already picking himself up by the time he reached the skinny kid.

  “Fern. What gives?” Red took his arm, peered into Fern’s pale face.

  Fern shook his head. “She’s been hurt. Her arm. Not badly, I just didn’t expect it.” Fern’s features twisted. “I should be expecting it. God.” He stifled a sound that sat just the other side of sane, the wrong side.

  “Hold it together, my man,” Red whispered. “She’s a tough cookie.” Fern nodded and moved off, and Red let him go, glowering. The bond between him and Em was their only ace in the hole, but what was it gonna cost Fern? He was losing it, and it wasn’t the lack of contact with Emma — especially not now they were so close. Unfortunately, it was something a hell of a lot more human. Emma wasn’t the only one changed by the Enam-Vesh.

  Red heard a low, lilting murmur. One of the maidens had changed back, was talking to Seshua and Fern. Seshua didn’t look happy about it, and neither did Rish; Fern looked downright miserable. Red listened as Rish explained there were several entrances to the compound, but none of them were manned with ground guards. Lots of cameras, though, and plenty of heavy firepower likely manned from inside. No one walking the perimeter, conveniently waiting to be picked off. No one had expected such, but still.

  Yevgeny trotted into the small clearing, tail down. He went to the cliff edge and whined.

  Seshua went to Horne and Andres, where the two guards sat assessing their supply of weapons and explosives. Ivan, Yevgeny’s second in command, was busy wiring said explosives. Nearby, Marco and Leah discussed tactics, heads together; they’d speak up if they had anything worth hearing.

  Seshua crouched near the duffel bags full of guns. “If we wanted to blast the outside defenses, how much explosive would we need exactly?”

  Ivan grunted. “More than what’s here, but if he can take me, I can go back for more
.”

  Red stopped a few paces from them. “I can jump straight to Yevgeny’s sanctuary.”

  Horne nodded his agreement. “Nowhere near enough here to take out all those guns.” He glanced up at Red. “How much can you travel with?”

  “I never measured. Wouldn’t matter. I’d keep going back ‘til I got enough of the shit to blow this place out of the ground, if that’s what we need.”

  “Perhaps not with Emma inside,” Seshua said. “It’s not good enough. We don’t know where she is. Fern can’t pinpoint her, can only feel her down there somewhere. ” The jaguar king blew air out through his teeth, dragged a hand through his hair. “We’ll have to wait until Fern speaks to her again. Perhaps she’ll be able to give us a better idea of where she is now, or what they want with her.”

  Thick silence descended. Nobody wanted to talk about what the vampires could possibly want with the caller of the blood. With Emma. No way of knowing, pointless to agonize over — though perhaps it was just a personal vendetta for Alan, reclaiming his stolen girlfriend. His prize. Eyeing Seshua, Red reflected that Em seemed to inspire that reaction in a lot of men. Funny. First glance, she didn’t seem like anything special, but then —

  “We’re going to wait? ” Alexi’s voice hissed through the quiet, sibilant and deep, vibrating with cold rage. “That is our grand plan? Wait for her to give us a clue — or die?”

  Wow. Frigid air whipped through the clearing, and it wasn’t the wind with its promise of rain. Red squinted against the freezing, stinging magic and focused on Alexi’s face.

  Red plucked a cigarette from the front pocket of his vest, jammed it between his lips and willed it to light. The tip flared against the darkness. “Got a better suggestion, serpent priest?”

  Alexi stalked away, to the cliff edge. “I do not need a better suggestion in order to criticize yours.” He looked out at the dull, filthy shape of the compound. “But I’m working on it.”

  Red took a long drag, exhaled through his nose in two long plumes, and started to get that feeling. Something big was coming: something bigger than saving the princess, than Emma being taken, than Telly leaving them all just as the alligators got ass-deep.

  Something unstoppable, and irreversible.

  24

  Emma stood in front of the second observation window — the one inside the white room which could be looked in upon through that first screened window she had seen when she entered the big room that now lay at her back — and she didn’t get it.

  Beyond the glass lay a vast expanse of concrete, walls, floor, ceiling, all concrete — all wet, as though it had been recently hosed. It looked like a chunk of underground parking lot minus the struts. There was even a set of big steel doors, big enough to admit a sizable truck.

  “I don’t understand.” She cradled her left forearm on her right, the bruises from Alan’s manhandling pulsing with a thick, dull ache. The wound on her right hand snarled louder, but she was reluctant to ask for painkillers. “What am I supposed to be looking at? You brought me all the way here so I could tell you that for a man who wears tailored suits, your interior decorating skills suck, is that it?” Her voice was tough and cracked; the strain of too much adrenalin, injuries, panic and terror was starting to shake things loose. Things like her sanity. She ached to reach for Fern’s mind, but didn’t dare, not this close.

  Alan leaned against the smooth white tile wall. “I do so love your American sense of humor, Emma.” He didn’t look like he loved it. “Have patience. We shall see soon enough. For now, I need to explain a few things.” He took a deep breath. He had his arms crossed, and two fingers tapped briefly against the bulk of his biceps.

  Finally, he spoke. “I was barely twenty years old, three years a monster, when I met a shaman in the Ukraine. He was a shapechanger, one of the snow leopard people — they were known as shadow cats then. I had of course known all my life of such as him, but never encountered his kind. He fought savagely and I was nearly killed, and I retreated, impressed by his strength. I watched him. Watched his clan. It was the first time I ever heard the prophecy of the caller of the blood. The first time I looked at these other creatures and coveted what they had — knowledge, and the power it brings. They knew who they were.” Alan paused, watching Emma with eyes pale and honeyed in the harsh light.

  When she didn’t react, he continued.

  “Time carried me on. I slaughtered humans and shapechangers alike, albeit with varying degrees of ease or difficulty. My kind spread more fully throughout the world, built rudimentary societies out of the necessity of progress. The next time I heard word spoken of the prophecy, I was in Spain, and I remembered. There was talk, and it amounted to nothing; I was a very different creature by then. Wealth and war had changed me just as it changed the world, and I was never sure I liked the change in either overmuch.” He sighed. “I spent the next thousand years building an empire, insurance against a future which seemed to hold either spectacular doom or a distasteful lack of it, and I could never have anticipated it would be both. Not like this.”

  He fell silent, and Emma took the bait. “Like what?”

  His gaze was on her, yet far away, as though seeing a different time or place. Power made his voice echo faintly when he spoke. “Chaos is the lifeblood of the universe, Emma, but when I scrape the surface and look beneath, what I find is order. Order to your civilizations, your societies, your economies, everything you people do is, at bottom, the same.” His lips thinned. “Contrary to the editorializing of doomsday prophets and mediocre journalists the world over, despite all your fears and anxieties as a race, your world is stable. You have no idea how stable. You think that because there are a few countries at war, guns on the streets, killers walking free, you think this is a threat to order? Nuclear warheads that will never be fired? At least a few of you know what the real threat is — the certainty that, like locusts, you will devour the earth and leave nothing behind but dust. You have made it easy for my kind to hide yet destroyed the need to. Hunting is easy.” Those thin lips twisted and he looked away from Emma, throat working once, twice; then his face calmed into placid lines. “Hunting is no more. To hunt is to run, chase, to risk something in the pursuit of glory, and those days are over. Now, we wade into a pliant, idiot sea and take what we will. That is not hunting — it is harvest. I starve, with everything I could ever wish to fill my belly at my feet, but that will change — it will take hundreds of years yet, but hundreds of years is nothing to my kind. And my kind cannot eat dust, Emma.”

  Emma thought about telling him his kind could eat shit for all she cared.

  In the end though, she kept her mouth shut.

  His eyes met hers. “The shapechangers feel it too, they are simply too human to do anything about it.” He pushed away from the wall and paced, and Emma turned to keep him in front of her. “That is the irony, you see.” Hands clasped behind his back, shoulders and hips in sinuous sync, stalking. Eyes filled with pale light. “The shapechangers have you — sent down to them through the ages, through fate and time and destiny, a savior, the key to their dying souls. But I am the one who will use you to save us all. Even them, I have nothing against them, though you’ll not go back to them.” He said it so casually, as though he’d forgotten himself, but Emma knew better.

  He might be fucking insane, but he would never forget himself. She could pretty much count on that.

  She pressed her back to the glass. Sweet Jesus, but Alan was seriously messed up, and not in a way she could take advantage of.

  He stopped pacing, looked at her. Really looked. “Your face, Emma. You cannot truly be so shocked. The things you must have seen by now.” His gaze flickered down her body and up again, just a fraction of a glance. “The things you must have done.”

  Her mouth dried up. Heat rose in her cheeks, seemed to roar inside her head, she could think of nothing witty to say to throw him off. “What do you want from me,” she managed to say, hoarse and shaky.

  His gaze drifte
d beyond her, but she didn’t dare turn and give him her back, not even to see what he was looking at. There was nothing there beyond the observation window, just concrete. The danger was in front of her.

  “I want you to help me bring about a new Dark Age, Emma,” he said, gaze coming back to rest on her. “Bring on this apocalypse that fascinates your kind so. But I need to know what you’re capable of. I have, in the past century, discovered many of my own shortcomings in the matter to which I am about to introduce you. Namely, I cannot control them.”

  Gibberish. He was talking gibberish. But Emma’s back flushed with cold fear anyway. She swallowed thickly. “Them?”

  He nodded. “Perhaps you will have more luck. This one’s fresh, only a few months. The wolves are always the worst, you see, so if you can rein him in, I’ll be very impressed.”

  Wolves?

  Emma blinked and he was suddenly inches from her, too fast for her to see, to get away. Her heart nearly stopped. He bent his head slightly, curiosity in his eyes, anger in the hard line of his mouth. His voice when it came was quiet and terrifying, but what he said was worse.

  “When we searched for you in California, and found nothing, we decided to ask some of the local shapechanger clans for their cooperation. It wasn’t as forthcoming as we would have liked. This one held up particularly well under torture, so I took him home. Enjoy.”

  With that, Alan grabbed a handful of Emma’s hair and yanked her around before she could get her feet under her, opened the door to the vast concrete chamber, and shoved her through.

  The door slammed shut behind her. She fell against it and turned to look, but there was nothing to see, the chamber was empty — but the huge steel doors in the opposite wall were moving. Swinging inward.

  And there were sounds. Low, shapeless sounds, and the scrape of something sharp against concrete. Somebody yelled, short and urgent.