by Неизвестный
Turning, he raced back the way he’d come, to the circle of pine trees where he pushed through the change. As soon as he had morphed back to his human form, he pulled on his clothing, then strode to the five-door garage where he kept his outdoor equipment: some of it for his business—leading wilderness expeditions—and some of it for maintaining the property around the lodge.
With a short-handled shovel slung easily over his shoulder, he strode back to the place where he’d pawed the earth.
His human senses were no longer as keen. But he dragged in a draft of the forest air and looked around carefully before beginning to dig in earnest, scooping out the dirt and piling it to the right of the hole where he could easily replace it when he was finished.
When the shovel scraped against something hard, he widened the hole around the object. Then, using the shovel as a lever, he pried up a metal box, which he hauled out and set on the ground.
Obviously, the box was private property, but it was buried on public land. With the shovel blade, he whacked at the padlock securing the top until the hasp broke. Then he knelt and lifted the lid.
What he saw inside made his breath catch.
CHAPTER TWO
AS SHE HURRIED toward her workstation in Vandar’s cave, Kenna slid her eyes left and right. When she was sure nobody was looking at her, she said a silent little prayer to the Great Mother that she would get through this day without incident.
Prayer was forbidden in this place of horror, and she knew that if anyone realized what she was doing, they would report her to their master. Then she might be the next victim of his bloodlust.
Great Mother, what had she come to? A slave quaking in her sandals.
She hated herself. Hated her existence. Yet she saw no way to escape.
A few months ago, she’d had choices for the future. Marriage—to the right man. Or not, if that suited her better.
Until she’d been carried away to this nightmare place, she’d been a free citizen of Breezewood. Her father owned a shop that sold well-made sandals and boots to nobles and common people alike. After finishing her education at the city’s school for adepts, she had worked for two years, using her talent to cure leather for the merchants who had paid for her schooling. With her obligation fulfilled, she’d become a tutor in the house of a powerful man named Cardon—one of the leaders of Breezewood.
His children had shown signs of early psychic talent, and he and his wife, Donda, had wanted to give them a head start in the school for adepts.
So they had asked the teachers who would be a good tutor, then hired Kenna. She’d only been in the household a few months, but she had already met a number of highborn men who were attracted to her—men who might want a pretty young wife with powers, a wife who would improve the chances of advancement for their own children.
She pressed her hand against her mouth, wondering if she was remembering her old life accurately. Or was she just trying to distract herself from the horrors of the present?
She’d been on a visit to her parents when Vandar’s warriors had burst through the city gate and swarmed up the cobblestone street. They’d grabbed Kenna and taken her away with twenty other unfortunates.
Now she was afraid that death at Vandar’s hands was the only way she would leave this outpost of Carfolian hell. That might be a relief, because life as one of his slaves was no life at all.
Around her, others hurried down the corridors of the huge cave, each of them alone in the crowd.
When they’d arrived, Vandar had tested each of them in a horrible ceremony where he probed their minds as he drank their blood. If they had no psychic powers, their lives would be hard, because they were only good for manual labor. They would likely be slaughtered quickly, or work themselves to death at an early age.
But if they had powers, then the evaluation was trickier. He wanted to use the talents of his slaves, but if he discovered an adept was strong enough to challenge his authority, that person might be killed on the spot.
Kenna had almost met that fate. During the selection ceremony, she had sensed his mental jaws clamping onto her mind, and she had instinctively tried to pull away. But he’d been stronger than she was. And he’d held her fast.
Maybe that had saved her life, but now she was a slave in the most basic sense of the word.
At first, alone in her narrow bed at night, she’d thought about trying to escape under cover of darkness and flee across the black plains that surrounded the cave. Beyond were the badlands, full of lawless men who belonged to no city.
She longed to risk that route, but she couldn’t make herself leave the vicinity of the cave. No one could, and she was sure it was because Vandar had put some silent orders into their heads that kept them chained to this place.
As she passed the dormitory where she slept with twenty other women, she repressed a sigh.
She couldn’t go there now. Unless she was too sick to work, and that was risky, because a sick slave might easily become a dead slave.
Her job was in the library, a large room by cave standards, with desks and wooden tables and shelves of books lining the walls.
The volumes were on many subjects, and most of them came from the old times. Today books were copied by scribes, but these volumes had been made by another process that she didn’t understand.
In the library, she hurried to the wide worktable where a volume lay open. It was about something called chemistry. The words meant very little to her, but she wasn’t there to read and understand a complicated subject from the past.
The book had been damaged by dry rot, and the edges of the paper were crumbling. Deftly she used her telekinetic skills to even out the rough places. Then she dipped her horsehair brush into a pot of preserving solution and swished it across the page. It was impossible to give the paper an even coat with the brush alone, but she could smooth it out with her mind, leaving the thinnest layer of transparent film on the page.
After she had smoothed out the coating, she used her telekinetic skills again to dry the paper. When it was no longer sticky, she went on to the next page, repeating the process. As she did the purely physical part of the job, she thought of Bendel, the man who had died so publicly a few days ago.
She had seen him stealing food, and she had thought he was taking a terrible chance for a little bread and fruit.
But she hadn’t warned him to stop. Because that could get her into trouble, and she’d known he wasn’t worth it.
With the brushwork finished, she began the psychic part of her task again, thinning out the preservative. The process was tedious, but she knew that she could be doing far more unpleasant work, like cleaning the toilets or burying bodies.
Instead, she got to sit in a room alone for most of the day, engaged in her special project, a luxury in this communal environment.
She heard a bell chime nine times and knew that she still had three hours to go before she could stop for the noon meal, which she would eat in the communal dining room with the other women. In this place, men and women were separated at meals and at work, to keep them from forming relationships.
Taking a short rest, she stretched her arms and legs, sipped some water from a pottery mug, and went back to her task.
She was about halfway through the chemistry book when a shadow filled the doorway.
Glancing up, she saw a man named Wendon giving her a speculative look as though he were considering whether to send a horse off to auction. He was short, with thinning hair, and it was rumored that he had been with Vandar for years. Whether that was true or not, he was certainly one of the adepts who worked most closely with the master.
When Kenna saw the smirking expression on his face, her hand froze.
“Vandar wants to see you.”
Fear leaped inside her, and she couldn’t stop herself from gasping out, “Why? I’m working as fast as I can on these books.”
She knew she wasn’t slacking off at her job. Had one of the other slaves reported her for s
ome real or imagined infraction? Or did someone in the cave want to get even with her? That was always a possibility. Maybe someone thought that she was getting off too easily.
“The master will tell you what he wants when you get there. Hurry up; don’t keep him waiting.”
She jumped up, her hands suddenly clammy.
Her heart was pounding as she followed Wendon out of the room and down the hall toward the master’s quarters.
A flash of movement in the late summer woods made Talon freeze.
Pivoting to the right, he saw a white police cruiser with a shield on the side driving slowly up the access road to his converted hunting lodge.
As the cruiser pulled up at his front door, Talon set down the Husqvarna chain saw he’d been using to cut up a fallen log for firewood. Then he removed his safety helmet and pulled off his leather gloves before walking out of the woods.
Two gray-clad cops wearing Smokey the Bear hats had gotten out of the black-and-white and were striding toward the front door of the lodge when they heard his heavy boots crushing the dry leaves.
Both of them turned toward him, each with his service revolver within easy reach.
“Talon Marshall?” one of them asked.
As he drew closer, he saw from the speaker’s plastic tag that his name was Eckert. The other one was Milner. Eckert was blond. Milner was dark. Both of them were around six feet tall, square-jawed men with military-short haircuts and the spit and polish look of young cops poised to move up in the ranks.
Talon knew they were sizing him up, too, seeing a dark-haired man in his late twenties, about their own height, dressed like a lumberjack—in a plaid shirt, jeans, and chaps to guard against a leg injury with the saw. Not that Talon was ever careless with the Husqvarna.
“Yes. Can I help you?”
Eckert pulled out a notebook and flipped it open. “We’d like to ask you some questions about that box you found in the woods.”
Talon shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “I already told the desk sergeant everything I know when I turned in the damn thing.”
“When you find over a million bucks under a bush, there are going to be questions,” Eckert said.
Talon sighed, wishing he’d never dug up the damn box. But once he’d known something was under the ground, he’d been compelled to do it. “What do you want to know?”
“We want to see where you found it.”
He gestured toward the fallen poplar behind him. “I’m kind of busy.”
“You can get back to work as soon as we identify the spot where the box turned up.”
He could see he wasn’t going to get out of this without giving them what they wanted.
Eckert looked down at his notebook. “The box was in the middle of the woods?”
“Yeah.”
“What were you doing out there?”
“Hiking.”
“You run wilderness trips for a living?”
“Yeah.”
“And the box was buried?”
“Yes,” he answered, trying not to sound impatient.
“How did you happen to find it?”
Right. Would anyone besides a werewolf have known where to dig? Not unless they knew where to look.
“The forest floor was disturbed. I was curious. When I started poking around, I figured something was down there. Maybe a body.”
“Let’s have a look.”
Talon shrugged. Since he’d found the buried money, he’d realized that it wasn’t far from an old dirt road that ran through the forest.
“Do you want to duplicate my original route on foot? Or do you want to drive?” he asked.
“Drive,” Eckert said immediately.
Before they could suggest he ride in the back of the cruiser, he said, “I’ll lead you.”
He backed his four-wheel-drive hybrid out of the garage, reversed direction, and angled around the cop car before starting down his drive.
After leading them onto the two-lane highway in front of his property, he slowed down to find the track through the woods. It was badly rutted, and he wondered what it was doing to the cops’ suspension, but that wasn’t his problem.
Fifteen minutes after they’d started, he pulled to a stop near the place where he’d found the box.
The two officers followed him into the woods, where they all gathered at the place where Talon had dug up the box.
“Right there.” He pointed.
Milner squatted down and ran his hand over the leaves. “I can’t see anything.”
“I put it back the way it’s supposed to be.”
“Uh-huh.”
He kept from clenching his fists, because he didn’t want to look like he was guilty of anything. He wasn’t, unless you counted being a nonhuman monster.
“And you found this—how?” Eckert asked, watching him carefully.
He’d already answered that question when the cops first arrived, but he went through it again. “The forest floor didn’t look natural.”
“You must have good eyes.”
He shrugged. “I’m good at reading the natural environment. That’s my job.”
Both cops nodded.
Eckert kept his gaze on Talon. “And what motivated you to turn in the money?”
Ah. The sixty-four-thousand-dollar question.
“Good citizenship,” he snapped. “I assume you got an inventory from the bank, and the cash was all there.”
“How do you know it was from a bank?”
“I don’t! I was making an assumption.”
“Yeah, we traced the serial numbers to a Phoenix National branch. And thirty thousand bucks were missing.”
“What are you suggesting?”
This time it was the cop who shrugged. “The guy who buried the box could have held some out.”
“I didn’t keep any of the money,” Talon said. “Did you find my fingerprints on it?”
“No.”
So what were these guys really thinking? That he and someone else had pulled off a bank job in Arizona, and now he was trying to make sure he didn’t get nailed for the crime? Or that he had killed his partner?
If so, why would he have turned in the loot? It didn’t make sense, but maybe cops were constitutionally suspicious. He wanted to ask if they’d checked his schedule for the day of the holdup, but he figured the less he said, the better.
“Anything else I can help you with?” he asked, making an effort to keep his voice conversational.
“We just needed to have a look at the crime scene,” Eckert answered.
And get my reaction to the missing money, Talon silently added.
“Okay. I’m going back to work now. Just continue up the road. It comes out on the highway a couple of miles from where we entered the woods.”
Before either of them could answer, he climbed back into his four-wheeler and started the engine, wishing he’d never found the damn box, because he had the feeling that it was going to cause him more trouble.
CHAPTER THREE
KENNA HAD BEEN to the private quarters of the master only a few times before. As she followed Wendon through a stone arch, the walls changed abruptly from mud blocks to narrow wooden boards, nailed together, painted with a variety of scenes and illuminated by candles set into iron brackets fixed to the wall. Some of the decorations were just designs of swirling colors. Others depicted people and animals. She walked past pictures of men harvesting grain, swimming in a river, and herding cattle. Some showed both sexes working at various trades. The scene of a shoe-maker’s shop made her eyes blur. Blinking, she struggled to focus on the murals again, to keep from thinking about the end of the journey.
How many years had it taken to decorate these hallways? And when had it been done? As far as she knew, none of the artists still lived in the compound. Had Vandar worked them to death, or drained their blood when they no longer pleased him? Behind Wendon’s back, she clenched her teeth.
He led her around several turns, until th
ey came to a wide wooden door where he knocked and waited.
When Vandar called, “Come in,” Kenna felt goose bumps rise on her arms.
The adept opened the door and said in a voice dripping with ceremony, “I have brought you the woman you requested.”
There was a low answer of acknowledgment. Wendon faded back, put his hands on her shoulders, and pushed her forward. When she stumbled inside, the door closed behind her, leaving her alone with the master.
She was vaguely aware of an ancient, patterned rug under her feet, rich draperies hanging on the walls, and several low-slung easy chairs, grouped in a circle.
Her gaze zeroed in on Vandar. He was sitting in a leather chair with a high back. One metal spoke of a leg came down to several horizontal pieces like the shafts of a wheel.
His feet moved, swinging the chair body back and forth as his glittering eyes focused on her. She had been twenty yards away when he’d killed Bendel. Now she was closer, much too close.
She longed to look away yet she kept her gaze focused on him. If he were a man, she would have called him handsome. He looked like a noble who was entirely comfortable in his surroundings, and he appeared to be young—no more than a man in his thirties. But it was said that he had lived much longer. Maybe hundreds of years.
She had no way to verify that, or anything else besides the cruelty and the power tactics she had seen for herself. But she knew he was so much more than he appeared to be.
Pressing her hands against her sides, she struggled to keep from trembling as her gaze darted to his mouth.
She hated Vandar. And she hated her fear of him. Probably, he knew that.
When he climbed out of the chair and walked forward, her heart stopped, then started again in double time.
As she stood in the center of the room, he circled her, giving her a close inspection. “Move your arms away from your body.”
Somehow she made her muscles work, standing with her arms sticking out stiffly as he traced the indentation of her waist, then raised his hand to cup her breast.