The Wild Rites Saga Omnibus 01 to 04

by Anna McIlwraith

  “Help me,” she said. “Help me keep them safe.”

  He nodded once, humanity bleeding back into his face. “Yes, my lady.”

  The coffee was strong and Emma’s anxiety was even stronger, so there was no chance of sleep for at least a few hours. She took advantage of the quiet time to shower in the smaller second bathroom, wash and dry her obscene amount of hair, and find fresh clothes and underwear in her backpack.

  Emma brought Fatima more coffee — just tea for herself — and they talked a while about how things fared in the jackal kingdom. More babies conceived, more shapechangers returning to the royal city to live and trade, new joy breathed into their religious observances now that the gods were beginning to reawaken, according to Fatima. The good news was welcome. After, Emma went over the contents of her backpack by torchlight, listening to Ivan tapping and clicking away on his devices at the table. Once he made a call, murmuring softly in Russian for a few sentences, listening for a minute and then hanging up. Emma wondered what he was doing, but didn’t want to interrupt him, so she let him be.

  When Leah and Horne emerged from the connecting room, arms full with their shoes and weapons, they went straight to Ivan to confer with him in hushed tones. He pointed a few things out on the tablet screen — Emma was pretty sure he was talking navigational stuff, though she didn’t understand it — and then they changed watch. Well, Fatima and Shadi did; Ivan stayed up, though he moved to an armchair and let Leah have his seat. After a brief, whispered argument, Fatima took the connecting room and Shadi propped himself in the second armchair. Given how many centuries Shadi had spent as a horse, sleeping mostly standing, he was either being gracious to the point of pain or afraid to lie down. Emma suspected the latter.

  For her part, she was afraid to close her eyes and try to sleep, afraid of more dreams, so she retrieved the iPod from the pocket of her jeans and curled up on the sofa with another cup of tea. Flicking through the menus, she found the list of most recently played.

  Looked like Alexi had been going through a biiig Nine Inch Nails phase. An album of theirs she’d never really listened to much after buying it. But what do you know — there was some Hole there, too. Emma had listened to a lot of Hole over the past month on her new device back home.

  Not that there was any home, any more.

  She tucked her feet up, sipped her tea, and hit play on The Fragile. Eventually she drifted into a thick sleep with no dreams.

  When she woke, it was to the feel of Fern’s mind nudging hers and the sound of Mike Patton’s vocals blasting through the iPod’s earbuds. Groggy, she yanked them loose and caught Red’s voice. “Almost six,” he growled under his breath. “Jesus.”

  “You needed it.” Leah’s voice. “Go take a shower, old man, you need that too.”

  Emma got her eyes open all the way in time to see Red lumbering back towards the bedroom. The rooms were still dim, but the ambient city glow beyond the windows was tinged with gray. Shadi slept on, legs hanging over the side of his armchair and bow angled across his lap; Emma heard the shower in the connecting room going. Fern was perched on the arm of the couch, dressed in cargo pants and thermals similar to hers and hair tousled from sleep, and he was watching her.

  Stretching, she stifled a yawn. Looks like you woke up before Red did. No wonder he’s pissed.

  Fern shrugged, his amusement suffusing the merge. He might be pissed, but I’m less worried about him now. He really did need the sleep. Fern’s mental touch sobered. I have no idea how you slept through Faith No More.

  She held a hand out for him to help her sit up, and he did. I got a couple of hours. She rolled her shoulders. I feel okay. Just need coffee.

  He went to the hotel room’s phone. And breakfast, he sent as Emma’s stomach growled on cue. “I’m ordering food up,” he said out loud for everyone else’s benefit. “Any requests?”

  There were a lot of requests. Might have been because nobody knew when their next real meal would be. The giant hiking packs contained dehydrated food supplies, protein bars, vitamin C and salt pills, and although the shapechangers would be able to hunt, it wasn’t going to be pleasant fare. In theory Red could always bail them out if they needed to resupply, but they were planning to avoid doing so as much as possible, because of the risks inherent in Traveling and rematerializing in well populated places. Not only did they want to avoid scaring the general populace, they needed to avoid rumors that might lead the serpent priesthood to them. Nor could they jump back and forth between trekking through the wild in search of traces of the Brotherhood during the day and spending the night in modern luxury with room service — too many unpredictable variables involved in transporting eight highly conspicuous individuals in such a fashion. The idea was to disappear, not get caught on someone’s phone and go viral.

  While Fern ordered the food, Emma got up and switched a lamp on and started rummaging for fresh clothes for Red. In one of the big packs she found cargo pants long enough for her to use as a sleeping bag, which could have been intended for either Red or Shadi — Red was wider through the waist, but living with over a dozen men for the past five months, Emma had learned that hip circumference for guys fell within a pretty narrow range in spite of their overall build. But the size of the gray thermal shirts confirmed it was Red’s stuff. There were socks and underwear too. Moving fast, she managed to deposit the clean clothes in the bedroom — pulling the right sleeve of the thermal shirt inside out the way she’d seen him do, so it’d be tucked out of the way when he put it on — and she got out just as she heard the water shut off. She did not want to be caught holding his underwear — even if it wasn’t technically his yet, since he’d never worn it — when Red opened the door. Probably wearing nothing but a towel.

  When Red emerged from the bedroom, clean and dressed all the way down to his boots, Emma’s stomach did a backflip and her face flushed with heat. She hadn’t realized just how exhausted and filthy he’d been; now he did not look exhausted and filthy. Now he looked like a force of nature, sharp eyed and vital and mountainous. The gray thermal fit snug and the color was light enough to reveal every plane and slab of his torso; when he moved it wasn’t so much a ripple of muscle as a tectonic shift. His reddish-blond hair was still wet and spiky from his shower, moisture glinting in his short russet beard, and the hot water had warmed his skin so that his scent of pine and leather threaded ahead of him as he moved to the dining table.

  He glanced down at the various maps and charts spread across the table, as well as the tablet that Leah was still working at, and ran a hand across his rough chin. “Where’s Ivan?”

  “Picking up passports from Yevgeny’s contact in the city,” Leah said, pushing back from the table. “We’ll have them for you, Em and Fern. Just in case.”

  “What about the rest of you?” Emma asked.

  Leah shrugged. “We’ll survive. Yevgeny has contacts throughout Europe, so we can get passports or transportation back to the states if need be, but right now it’s not our top priority to cover everyone’s asses. Just yours.”

  Before Emma could protest, there was a knock at the door and a voice called out in Russian. Shadi swung to his feet with an arrow knocked to his bow as though he hadn’t just been sleeping, and maybe he’d been faking, but Emma didn’t think so; there was a rush of displaced air and Horne appeared at Emma’s side, bringing some of the cold from the balcony inside with him, and across the room the connecting door opened and Fatima came in with her hair in a towel and a wary expression in her dark eyes.

  Leah held a hand up for them to wait and went to the door. A few moments later, Leah rolled the breakfast cart in, and the feeding frenzy began.

  Emma had the presence of mind to save a plate of food for Ivan. When he came in ten minutes later, the cart was empty, and he accepted the plate with a frown and murmured thanks as he went to the table and started briefing Red Sun on the locations of their initial jumps. Red didn’t need to have physically been to a place to Travel to it, but he
did need an accurate picture and knowledge of where in the world the place was. That was what Ivan and Leah had been doing most of the early hours. There were satellite images, maps and even some real-time feeds from security cameras in more populated areas. From what Emma could understand of what they were saying, most of what they’d worked up was an extensive contingency plan, but if all went well they’d be Traveling straight into the wild and hopefully not encountering a single soul.

  Except, maybe, the Brotherhood. If they even existed.

  While the others packed up and went over the rooms removing any trace that they’d ever been there, Fern helped Emma get ready. He braided her hair — extra tight to keep it back, since it had grown another half an inch overnight and would likely unravel from its braid by nightfall, not that Emma wanted to admit that out loud. He convinced her to add another pair of socks before putting her boots on.

  He tried to help her change the bandage on her arm, but the bite had scabbed over during the night, and didn’t need dressing.

  Then they both slipped into their shoulder holsters and donned matching dark green parkas that would make drawing their guns a last resort, the kind that were puffy and light as air and capable of keeping a body warm in a blizzard. Fern was more resilient when it came to temperature than a human, but his kind still struggled with subzero conditions. Red wore his motorcycle jacket, as usual. Everyone else wore standard hiking gear, but Shadi’s Gore-tex jacket was sheepskin-lined to keep him warm without impeding access to his weapons. When Emma complained that she didn’t get a less cumbersome coat, Shadi quietly explained that as a sorcerer, he could regulate his temperature to a fair extent. So Emma was stuck with the marshmallow coat.

  I have the same coat, Fern sent, mental voice warm.

  He wasn’t going to tease her out of her bad mood. You’re probably wearing one just so I don’t feel like the village idiot.

  Comfort pulsed through the merge, making Emma’s breath come easier against her will. He didn’t tell her it was okay to be scared, or that he didn’t want to go either, or that it was for the best; he didn’t say anything at all, he was just there, and it made more of a difference than anything else could have.

  She blew a deep breath out through her cheeks and looked around. “We ready?”

  Red stepped up beside her and gave her a wink before addressing the rest of them. “Hold onto your butts.”

  25

  Emma had known it would be cold. That was why she was wearing such a ridiculous jacket, after all. But this went beyond cold. If Hell froze over, she thought, it wouldn’t get as frosty as this. It stole her breath — after that first gasp, her lungs just refused to work for a moment.

  It was dawn, and it was another world. There were mountains, and a lot of rocks, and ice and mud and cloudy sky. There was the sound of trickling water and wind rushing through far off trees, and the cries of birds, and the whir of tiny insects. There were strange flashes of orange in the distance; Emma blinked and exhaled a plume of fog, and realized the bright orange fire on the mountains was the rising sun reflecting off the snow and ice.

  Red Sun had materialized them on a wide shelf of rock that sat in a mostly dry stream bed, and the shallow gully stretched off in either direction, while its sides were tumbled with rocks and climbed gradually to a plain of yet more rock interspersed with scrub and grasses. In the distance, there were trees. Emma registered all of it, still steadying herself on her feet, but mostly she was struck by the cold.

  Leah whistled. “May as well be on the moon,” she said. “Except the moon’d probably be warmer.” In spite of her tone, her eyes were sharp and she scanned the surroundings without looking like she was doing so. The rest of them were doing the same. Leah, Horne, Fatima and Fern all had the giant hiking packs — Fatima was dwarfed by hers but no less able to take its weight. Shadi had tried to take it from her when they were loading up, but he’d almost lost a hand; a pissed off jackal warrior was a scary one. Emma suspected the only reason he didn’t try to intervene when Leah strapped one of the big packs on was because he knew she’d slept with Horne. Horne, who was actually down with the twenty first century, had ignored Shadi’s judgmental demeanor. Shadi had a long way to go. But everyone would get their turn at carrying the mammoth hiking packs.

  Everyone except Emma, of course. She could lift the big packs, but had no illusions about how far or how fast they’d travel with her bearing one of them.

  As Leah, Horne, Fatima and Ivan fanned out at a slow walk, scanning the immediate area, Emma took deep breaths and tried to adjust to the temperature. Fern stepped behind her and put his arms around her shoulders, tugging her back against him and resting his chin on the top of her head. Her backpack was sandwiched between them, but Emma was pretty sure someone had offloaded a bunch of the stuff in it to a different pack; it didn’t seem very heavy and wasn’t bulky at all. She’d have to do something about that later, but now wasn’t the time to bitch about being treated like a human.

  She glanced at Shadi, standing motionless nearby, eyes closed and brow creased in concentration. He was human too. Probably more human than Emma was, not that she wanted to think about that too hard. Or maybe they were alike: magical humans, as Fern had said. Emma wasn’t sure if he was using magic or just the regular five senses to get a bead on the immediate area.

  As though he sensed her watching him, he opened his eyes and looked straight at her, a slight smile touching his lips. He’d trimmed his beard at the hotel, so it was close to his face but still thick and glossy black, and his hair was back in a braid that disappeared down the collar of his jacket. He almost looked modern. Except that in one hand he held his bow and three arrows.

  Fern’s heat took some of the edge off her shivering. Although he was more resilient than her, he was cold too, and his beast wasn’t built for temperature regulation. Emma curled her hands around Fern’s arms, tucking her cold fingers into the bend of each elbow. Remind me again why we’re doing this instead of staying warm and toasty in a library somewhere, going over Kahotep’s notes and having Red jump us back and forth when we need to?

  Fern pushed a little more of his energy through the merge, warming her for a moment. Because we need to disappear. And the only place to hide from telepaths is someplace there aren’t any people with minds for them to read.

  Emma nudged his energy away — he needed it to keep himself going. She sighed, shivering. Right. She turned to Red. “So just how far from civilization are we.”

  He tracked the others with narrow eyes. “Bout six hundred miles from the nearest town, no roads for five hundred. Offroad vehicles can go where they may, but it’s usually just tourists on guided trips, and none this far into the wild. We’ll hike to Ukok plateau, give ourselves a feel for the land and allow me to establish some safe spots we can jump to if the need arises. Take a couple of days. Then head for the mountains unless we find something at Ukok that points us elsewhere.”

  “Because we need to disappear,” Emma said.

  Red looked down at her, and then glanced up to meet Fern’s eyes. Through the merge, Emma felt the weight of Red’s stare, felt the press of his power like cold pennies against her eyelids. She could’ve sworn he and Fern were communicating somehow, but Fern’s mind was calm with the murmur of immediate concerns: it was cold, would Emma be warm enough, how far did they have to travel, what would the terrain be like, would he be able to convince her to hand her backpack to someone else if she got tired — no — how long could they stay merged like this before it started to affect their sanity…

  She swatted him on the arm. I resent that.

  I’m serious, he sent, capturing her hand in one of his own to warm it. I mean, it’d be a pretty bitter irony if staying merged drove us insane, since being separated for too long does the same thing, but I just don’t know. I’ve never known any bonded Aranan — he stumbled mentally, just a second of hesitation, too fast for Emma to catch the thought he cut off — to be able to ask them.

 
Emma untangled herself from his arms and turned to face him, glancing up at the vast sky before dragging her attention back to Fern. What were you going to say?

  He hunched against a gust of frigid wind, black hair blowing across his eyes. My parents. I was going to say I’ve never known any bonded Aranan except my parents. But I didn’t know them long enough to ask about the Enam-Vesh, so yeah. Doesn’t matter. He tipped his chin up and looked past her. Looks like we’re about to move.

  Emma turned as Leah and Ivan approached Red Sun. They both had complicated navigational hardware in hand — Emma couldn’t think of the pieces as compasses, they were too fancy. Leah talked, showing something to Red on the device while Ivan tinkered with his, frown in place. Emma didn’t quite understand what Leah and Red were saying, but they understood it, and that was what mattered.

  Maybe it should have been scary being stranded in the wild and dependent on those around her for survival, but in so many ways that statement summed up the last five months of her life. Besides, she was no stranger to hiking through the wilderness, and she could navigate if she needed to. She knew to head north and she had the coordinates for the capital of Altai in a little plastic book in her pack. But Red was tied to her via the pledge bond, so was Ivan, and she was tied to Fern via the Enam-Vesh — if she ended up stranded and lost, then it would be because all three of them were dead, which meant she was dead, too.

  That thought was scary. It was terrifying. But what they were about to do — set off into the wild, no borders or fences, no limits or restrictions — that was an adventure.

  It didn’t feel like an adventure by the time they’d been hiking for almost six hours across rock-strewn Siberian steppe. The landscape was beautiful yet somehow monotonous — the mountains never seemed to get any closer — but the terrain was so rocky and random that Emma couldn’t let her attention wander for even a moment lest she twist an ankle. The first time she tripped, she caught herself in time; the second time she tripped, looking overhead as the piercing cry of an eagle split the frigid air, Red caught her. He dematerialized so fast there was a whump of displaced air, then rematerialized in front of her, clamping his arm around her waist and cursing. There was no third time. Emma kept her eyes on the ground ahead.