Death Becomes Her

by Michael Anderle

  She kept one of the long limbs and broke some of the smaller branches off of it. If she needed to defend herself, it wouldn’t be as good as a Bo, or better a pistol, but it would allow her the option to choose between close combat or not. Sure, she would survive probably anything the mountain threw at her, but she didn’t want to waste the time, energy and annoyance of fighting a cat up here and dealing with the scratches she figured she would receive, or a bear. With a good stick, it would just be ‘batter up!’

  One thing her new abilities didn’t provide was expert guidance in choosing the right path. She made one choice that ended up in a blind valley and no amount of superior abilities was going to let her go up that cliff without some tools.

  She lost some time, but it wasn’t overly concerning to her. Without the need for food and water, careful planning and packing became less a sensitive issue.

  With the lake in her view, she figured she was within ten to fifteen miles of the town.

  —

  The wind carries all sorts of knowledge, if you know what you are smelling.

  Alexi was in his bear form. He preferred it, actually, to anything human and for most of the time he stayed in it, especially during the winter. Hard to beat a thousand pounds of furry fat.

  The largest known brown bear in in the Carpathian Mountains was almost eight hundred pounds, so in his form he was about thirty percent larger than almost any brown bear in their area. Enough that he never had to deal with fights. When he had in the past, no animal was able to overcome the weight and intelligence difference.

  This morning, he was smelling trouble. He could smell the girl, she had been all over his mountain many times, but this time she carried another, a non-human with her. He doubted that she knew it; the scent had no flavor of fear that would almost be mandatory if she knew more about him.

  His area was claimed by a wolf pack out of Bravos, but his mountain was off limits. They didn’t bother him here and he wouldn’t go find them and make them eat their ass for claiming his area. He didn’t give it two seconds of thought who claimed his mountain. They could claim all they wanted, it didn’t hurt his feelings. However, coming onto his mountain was a completely different proposition and this new wolf was going to need to be looked into, especially since he was heading towards his lake.

  He started out of his den towards where his niece, Ecaterina, liked to spend the night. Wolves can be too temperamental, he thought.

  —

  Ecaterina was able to keep at it all day, Nathan admired her ability to move forward even under her own loaded backpack. It explained her shape, and all around excellent health.

  They had stopped for an early afternoon meal, nothing cooked just packed meats and cheeses she had brought along. They drank water and kept moving. They didn’t actually talk much as both enjoyed the outdoors too much and were lost in their own thoughts.

  As they neared the lake, Ecaterina took him a little away and up to a small clearing that provided some cover and a wonderful view. There was a small area already cleared for a fire with stones around in a circle and some wood under a tree.

  “You can set up your tent under either of those two trees to the right, I’ll set mine up under this group here.” She pointed towards a nice area under some pine trees.

  Nathan considered his replies and just shook his head in agreement, he might want to find out more about this woman, but being forward was probably not the best option. He felt sure it was the choice many guys had already selected and had failed miserably. Besides, he needed to figure out how to contact the owner of this mountain. He had been smelling him for the last two hours and knew he travelled here often. With the wind at their backs all morning and afternoon, he figured that whoever the bear was should already know he was around. Unless he was pretty far away and the comments from the guys back in the pub suggested that wasn’t true.

  He went to his area and took a few minutes to comb the ground and make sure no rocks, pine cones or anything that would make a pretty uncomfortable bed existed where he would setup his tent.

  It didn’t take him long to erect it and stow his gear inside. Ecaterina had a small, personal tent up under the other trees and had come out into the clearing where she was starting a small fire in a pit surrounded by logs used for seating.

  Fortunately, she was burning oak and not pine. He had seen a few of those on their trip up here, so that wasn’t too surprising. He much preferred the smell of oak to burning pine.

  He grabbed a small metal coffee pot and got out the grinds and filled the chamber. Topping it with water, he walked over to the fire and handed it to Ecaterina. She took the coffee pot and placed it to the side of the flames. She would wait until she had more coals before nestling it down in the fire to make coffee.

  There were beautiful sounds in the night, the owls, the wind, the occasional howl of nature in the distance and the crisp crackle and splitting of the wood as it burned.

  He wasn’t sure how long it would be before he would be checked on, but he figured that being asleep wasn’t the way to make a good first impression.

  They both enjoyed the night, the fire and the smell of the freshly brewed coffee. They didn’t speak much but enjoyed the time in companionable silence before Ecaterina wished him a good night, saying that she would see him in the morning.

  He had kept his eyes focused away from the fire so that his eyes weren’t blinded when staring out into the dark. While he watched Ecaterina go to her tent, he was able to tell that she was very specific where she placed her feet. He took a sip of his coffee and placed a mental flag on the map that said ‘here be traps’ by her area.

  After another hour, he decided to hit the sack himself. His eyes flicked over to Ecaterina's side, but he was old enough and had been through enough relationships to be able to rein in the stupidity of approaching someone with her skills at night. No matter how interesting she was.

  He got into his tent and lay on top of the sleeping bag. He let his senses roam and listen to everything around the area. He would sleep very lightly tonight. Plus, he had gone around the area an hour before and dropped his sensors. That would give him about a hundred yards of awareness and anything inside that he should sense.

  He could hear her soft breathing across the clearing.

  —

  Bethany Anne was enjoying her descent when the wind, which had been wafting up the mountain her whole way down brought new scents she hadn’t categorized before.

  She knew enough about humans, male and female, to pick them out of the smells but there was more to this than she had experienced so far.

  She had smelled two humans, a male and female much earlier in the day and a little later two more males. Now, she was picking up an animal of some kind. The problem was that none of the males had smelled completely human to her, and the animal seemed to share the scent with the three males.

  “Tom, do you have any ideas on the other scent that smells like a male human, but not really human, that I am smelling?”

  No. I understand the difference, but if it were a change that we had initiated I would be able to tell as they have certain olfactory results that exist when they consume blood and perspire the poisons back out of their bodies. The nuances you are smelling are not something I’m familiar with.

  “Could it be one of the other five, or God forbid, the seven making changes here?”

  She could tell he was thinking, and with the headache coming on he must be accessing the computer. “You’re giving me a headache, give it your best shot without figuring it to a level of perfection, alright?”

  Sorry, it seemed a good question and I didn’t stop to think about it affecting you. While it is within the realm of possibility that the unknown humans are related to the Kurtherians, I don’t think it is a high probability.

  “Un-fucking-believable. I don’t just have your race screwing us around, but now I’m going to have another race of modified humans with some other interstellar busybodies doing God kn
ows what to deal with. Michael completely failed to give me the appropriate updates, I think. Or, I didn’t think to ask what else was out there and it slipped his and Carl’s mind. Either way, are they aware of the vamps? If they are, are they friends or foes and will they attack as soon as they know I’m Michael’s?”

  Well, it would be difficult for them to say you are ‘Michael’s’ as he wasn’t responsible for turning you, I was. You haven’t drunk any blood recently, so you don’t have the vamp scent on you. It’s daytime and you’re not affected, unlike almost all of Michael’s children. I’m not sure they will have any idea you aren’t human at all.

  “Oh, is that so? Goody. Let’s go and invite myself to this little party below. Although I’d rather stay away from the animal if that is possible. Stick or no stick, I hate being a raging bitch when they are just being what God intended. Well, actually, considering the scent maybe a bit more than God intended.”

  She picked up her pace, deciding that it might be a little fun and informative to see what it felt like to jump twenty feet at a time, from boulder to boulder on her descent. At one point, she landed on some small gravel and her foot slipped off. Her adrenaline kicked in, and dropping the stick, she spun on her axis twisting in the air to face down. Shoving hard with both hands off of the boulder she flipped backwards to land on her feet below the boulder in a crouch.

  A little shaken about how quick her reactions had become, she stood for a second and thought about how fast that must have happened, and how fast it seemed like it went to her. She bent down, picked up a stick and held it as high as her head. Dropping it, she watched it hit the ground. Bending down a second time, she flipped it up in the air a foot and switched into high gear. Now, the stick seemed to lazily come down allowing her to reach out and snag just the tip with two fingers before it fell a quarter of an inch. Falling back into normal speed, her perceptions were heightened, but not so much that everything seemed to be in super slow motion like it was a second ago.

  Dropping the stick and picking up her staff, all she thought was ‘hmmm’ and started the long, ground eating jumps again quickly in the direction of the lake before slowing down when she was within about a mile. She decided to stay about half a mile away during the night and approach in the morning. There wasn’t a good reason to rush it and arriving at night just freaked people, and potentially non-people she thought, right the hell out.

  That night, she played with her speed to understand it better. Tom said it didn’t take too much energy and she was still increasing her reserves past her meltdown the other day.

  She was using her senses to take in all of the wildlife and noises she could hear. It became obvious that the animals knew about her as the area went real quiet when she came through.

  She figured she must give off some sort of dangerous vibe the animals would pick up on.

  It was a couple of hours past dawn when she decided to head off towards the people. She could both hear talking from that direction and smell the smoke.

  Then, she heard the gunshot.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Carpathian Mountains, Romania

  “Gott Verdammt that hurts like a motherfucker!” Nathan had been getting up to get another cup of coffee from the coffee pot that Ecaterina had set up this morning before breakfast when a bullet ripped through his shoulder flipping him around on his back on the ground, the report from the gun reaching him in his sudden agony.

  The shooter had to be at least a few hundred yards away for him not to have sensed them, and for the bullet to have reached him so far ahead of the sound traveling.

  If he hadn’t been getting another cup of coffee, that might have been a head shot. While he could heal pretty well, head shots were a dicey proposition and you might, or might not, come back with your brain screwed back on correctly.

  Instead of the wound starting to heal, it still hurt horribly. They had used silver in the frangible. That was going to be a cold-blooded bitch to get out. Well, at least it let him know he was up against other Weres. No one else in their right mind would use silver in a bullet because it was expensive and truly a poor substitute for other alloys and a right pain to make.

  Ecaterina had dropped her plate and shimmied over to her tent, grabbing her rifle and then sliding behind one of the trees facing back towards the direction the shot had come from.

  Nathan wasn’t staying still. He was fighting the desire to change. The pain, due to the silver, was incredible but he had endured much worse in the war. He was trying to keep his anger tamped down. He didn’t want to lose Ecaterina. If these idiots showed up as wolves, that was going to tear it. She was going to have to be wiped or something else horrible and he really didn’t want to go down that path. He hadn’t known her long, but it felt like he had been a lover of her spirit for a century or more. Those that love the outdoors and breathe it as the life-giving essence it is, are rare. He didn’t want to lose this chance – if he even had one with her.

  But he needed to keep her alive to get that chance and he hadn’t brought much as a weapon up here. He hadn’t figured to be tailed by the wolves on a bear’s mountain. That was not very wise at all, and nothing he had seen so far had suggested this team were idiots.

  Until now.

  He grabbed his bowie from the tent. It had some silver in the blade, but not enough to truly harm a Were. That was why he had ten silver stakes with barbs. They went in very easily, but if you tried to pull them out you made a hell of a large, very painful, very much not easily healable mess.

  Kind of like silver frangible bullets. He wouldn’t cry any tears on their pain.

  He checked Ecaterina. She had almost ghosted into the underbrush. Incredibly well for a human, but she didn’t realize she wasn’t fighting humans and he could smell her from here.

  Taking off his coat, it left him with a dark, muddy brown and now red soaked long sleeve shirt. Better than staying in his coat while trying to be quiet out there. He started to head towards where the gunshot came from.

  He assumed these guys, he didn’t smell a female, must be from the local pack. He was able to pick up at least three distinct areas with his senses.

  He stopped, listening as it became obvious something was quickly coming at him from his left. Something running on four legs.

  Stupid fucking youngsters, he thought. Well, I don’t have the option of giving this one a chance to learn.

  Nathan moved to the right of a large pine putting the tree between him and the oncoming wolf.

  Thinking that it would be able to surprise him, the Were dodged around the tree growling and jumped for his neck, teeth bared ready to bring him down.

  Nathan calmly swung his right hand, with the knife, into the wolf’s neck as he dodged out of its way by going under the jump. As it yelped in pain from the silver, and the massive hole it had in its neck, it lost focus on landing properly and broke its right front foreleg.

  Rushing over before it could move, Nathan grabbed the snout and the back of the head and gave a guttural grunt as he twisted it quickly, snapping the vertebra. The wolf, little more than a young adult really, stopped moving.

  Nathan pulled his knife out, made the sign of the cross over the body and drifted into the woods again.

  A sudden scream got his attention and a second later a male voice came from back at the camp, “Lowell, we have the girl. We can end this quickly, or we can take our time. You’re not getting off this mountain. Sorry to say, but you seem to have picked a bad side to join, my friend.”

  Nathan was pissed, he was supposed to leave Ecaterina behind, he had an operation to focus on. The chance of her truly surviving this situation was getting infinitesimally small. If he died, she was surely a dead person. If he lived, but showed the UnknownWorld to her and she talked about anything, she was signing her own death certificate in advance. The chance that he could take out the two… No, he could sense three now, other Weres without her getting hurt in the process was becoming highly unlikely.

&nb
sp; What did the SWAT teams back at home say about this? Oh yeah, it sucked to be the hostage.

  They, however, had attacked both of them. For that, they were going to die. The question was only how soon. They would need to kill him to stop that eventuality and since they had obviously planned on that happening, it rather made the outcome a choice between them or himself. He always bet on the home team. But how to help Ecaterina?

  As he was circling back around to the campsite, he heard one of the guys yell, “Bitch!” Nathan heard a smack and a thump as a body hit the ground.

  “Nathan, I can’t say that she will die quickly and cleanly, can’t let that attack go. But now she is going to have to wake up. What do you say, you want this quick or shall we draw this out? I can always hurt her slowly and painfully.”

  Good for you Ecaterina, thought Nathan. She wasn’t willing to take no shit from anybody. He wasn’t sure how they had caught her, but Weres in their natural habitat whether as humans or wolves, could almost ghost across the ground.