Hunter's Moon

by Bevill, C. L.

  “I don’t suppose we get to order next time,” she said.

  Taq chuckled. “I think the snake was expecting you to have a go at him. Most new prisoners do. He can change his skin in an instant, makes it hard to grab him. And he does bite. The venom won’t kill our kind, but it’ll make us sick.”

  “I’ll remember.” Claire sniffed the sandwich. It smelled like it had been sitting on a plate for a few hours. The bread was thick and not processed. The ham was fresh. The cheese wasn’t American. It didn’t matter because she was hungry. She ate steadily, trying to control her chewing. The snake had said there would be no food for her the next day. This was going to have to last. She ate the eggs and half the sandwich, saving the rest for the next day.

  When she was done, she tried to get Taq to speak to her again, but he wouldn’t. Possibly he couldn’t.

  Claire couldn’t do anything about that except to methodically check every inch of her cell for a possible method of escape or weapon. She needed to keep occupied because there was no way of knowing how long she’d be in this place.

  The one thought that brightened the moment was that if her father was the Bloodletter, then he would be coming for her. Even if her father wasn’t the Bloodletter, he would be coming for her.

  The clock was ticking down.

  Chapter 4

  The gaze of the wolf reaches into

  our souls. – Barry Lopez

  Claire woke up to more screaming. It wasn’t her own, though she’d much rather it had been. Then the awful questions that immediately followed the screaming wouldn’t have been gushing through her brain. Who is screaming, what did they do, what does the Council want from them, what are they doing to the person? Am I next?

  She tried to ignore the screaming but couldn’t. The snake had been by again, virtue of another paper bag on the stone floor propped on the bars. Perhaps he’d forgotten about his mandate, but somehow Claire didn’t think this was the case.

  Wrapping her arms around her shoulders, she crouched on the plastic mat and tried to find her center. The screaming came from a faraway distance, but regardless of the distance, it was the agonized shriek of someone who was in the worst kind of pain. The kind of pain might involve a hand reaching into someone’s gut and pulling out the intestines inch by incrementally excruciating inch. The hair on the back of Claire’s neck began to rise.

  “Claire,” Taq’s voice said.

  Claire lifted her head and sniffed. For a brief moment, she could smell him. It was musk and an intrinsic attribute that touched her. The absoluteness of it made her forget everything for a transitory twinkling of time. The scent curled around her shape and poured over her entire being. She gasped, and the gasp turned into a sighing breath of much needed oxygen. Then it was gone.

  “Claire?” he repeated more urgently. Noise followed. It sounded like he took a step toward her. Then there was abrupt silence. He had stopped, doubtless stopped by the bars.

  “I’m awake,” she said. Her head was spinning, and the awful screaming had finally stopped. It was almost like the time she and her sister had consumed three bottles of Auntie Sheree’s blackberry brandy. They should have stopped at the second bottle, and Auntie had been furious with them for weeks. But her head had spun like a top drifting on a cloud far above them. Her head was spinning in the exact same manner.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  Claire pushed to the back of the cell, wanting to separate herself from encountering that scent again. She didn’t know what it meant. It seemed like more trouble, and more trouble was something she didn’t need at the moment.

  “I’m all right,” she whispered.

  “I thought—” he said, and the last word simply cut off.

  “What are you?” she asked.

  “A were, just like you.”

  “That I could tell by smell. But just now, I smelled … something else.”

  Silence.

  “It was an odd scent,” Claire said as she touched the stone at the back of the cell. It was cold and had a hint of moisture. It seemed almost to vibrate. “I don’t think I’ve smelled its like before.”

  “Just a were,” he repeated.

  Was that a hint of desperation she’d just heard in his voice?

  “You know who I am, you know whose daughter I am,” she said.

  “I’m a bear,” Taq said, ignoring her statement and her question that wasn’t quite a question. “Lots of bears from Alaska. There’s a clan of polars and grizzlies there. Fierce weres. They don’t care for weakness. The cold climate doesn’t cater to weakness.”

  Claire thought about it. “My father doesn’t care for weakness in the clan,” she said. “He’s always pushed us to be more than ourselves. He wanted us to shove ourselves outside the envelope.”

  More silence.

  “I suppose he was trying to prepare us,” Claire surmised. “Do you know what he did that was terrible enough for the Council to take his children hostage?”

  “He was…is…independent,” Taq said, his tone tinged with apparent admiration. “He thought that the Council was close-minded, that too many weres were suffering needlessly. There was even the suggestion of coming out to the human world.”

  Claire considered the idea. There already were humans who knew about weres. Necessity made it a fact. Some of them were friends. Some of them were mates. It was understood that some of the human governments did regular business with the shifter world. The rest of the humans would probably freak. Nevertheless, outing the existence of weres was an eventual inevitability. A hundred years before, the world population hadn’t been large enough to make a difference. People vanished. Stories were told. But now, thanks to the Internet and cell phones with cameras, information, photos and videos could be broadcast worldwide in an instant. People explored every inch of wilderness simply because they could. They didn’t leave inuksuit like the Inuit, but they created their own markers in the way of YouTube and Facebook.

  One day someone would capture a video on their cell phone of a were changing from human to animal form or vice versa. The video might be disregarded as special effects from a Hollywood studio. At first. Then one crazed were would do it in the middle of Times Square in New York City. Or in front of Buckingham Palace. Or on Parliament Hill in Ottawa. Then the proverbial cat would be out of the bag and people would wonder if John Landis had known all along when he had directed An American Werewolf in London.

  “He’s not that way any longer,” Claire said defensively. The father she knew kept to the northern parts of Manitoba. He minimized contact with outside groups. He made their life comfortable, livable, and yet continued to train the weres in methods of self-defense. Once Claire had thought it ridiculous, but that was before Martinez had marched into Manitoba with a group of humans and dozens of tranquilizer darts. Dad knew it might come one day. He didn’t know when, but…

  “Yes, he is,” Taq disagreed calmly. “And you’re the bait.”

  “The Council wants my father,” she stated. It wasn’t something she hadn’t thought of before. The Council didn’t want her. Unless they had a longing for her collection of T.S. Eliot and Sylvia Plath poetry.

  Braydon Bennett. The Bloodletter. Somehow she wasn’t particularly surprised, although she thought that her mother might be more suited for the role of the most legendary were in the shifter world. She could totally picture her mother holding a battle axe dripping with crimson gore. Her mother could be completely cutthroat. The last time they’d played Uno, she’d hit Claire with five draw four cards in a row. Five! Her own mother! God help everyone if she had a knife in her hand.

  Claire suddenly chuckled.

  Silence. Obviously, Taq didn’t know what to think of a prisoner who laughed without provocation. Then he laughed too, and it was a sonorous noise that reverberated down the hollows of the passages. “I should have known,” he said after the laughter died away, “that the Bloodletter’s daughter wouldn’t be whimpering in a corner.”

&n
bsp; Oh, she wanted to whimper in the corner, and she would, if she thought it would do her any good. “That’s me. No whimper. All fight. You’ll remember when they do whatever it is that they’ll do to me.”

  “They won’t—” He growled and it was as if he’d suddenly gone bearish.

  “Please,” she said. “Let’s not lie. This is a terrible enough place without lies.”

  This time the silence was punctuated by the sound of growling a long way away.

  Claire wanted to cover her ears with her hands and hum a nonsensical song.

  “You know some of the Inuit,” Taq said. “Where you’re from, there’s The People. You do know that Inuit means The People.”

  Claire didn’t think he was asking questions. Not really.

  “They’ve a sad and tested life,” Taq went on. His deep voice was addictive. It made the muscles inside her want to relax and collapse into a state of bonelessness. He waited for her to understand that he was about to tell a story. It was reminiscent of the way the Inuit told stories to their children. When Claire couldn’t listen as a human, she often listened from the shadows of the woods as the Inuit told their stories around their fires. The wolf was clever at hiding while the tales were narrated.

  “It’s said that Sedna is the creator goddess of all things marine,” Taq began, and she closed her eyes so that she could see the pictures in her head. “She was the beautiful daughter of the creator god, Anguta, and once, she was misled by a great seabird, a fulmar, into becoming his bride.

  “The fulmar flew the beautiful daughter away, using his fantastic wings to fly them far to the north, where few dwell and fewer survive. When Sedna came to his gigantic nest, she realized she had been tricked by a cunning bird god and called out to her father to rescue her.

  “Anguta battled bravely as he fought his way north. The fulmar came to the command of the great seabird god and attempted to repel Anguta. But eventually Anguta waited for a long dark night when the fiercely blowing snows would cover his tracks.

  “Where he could not force his way into the fulmar’s nest, he snuck his way in and rescued his daughter. They were gone by the time the sun finally tipped its nose over the distant horizon.

  “When the fulmar found that Sedna was gone, he created a huge storm to upset their kayak and kill them.

  “But Anguta was somewhat selfish. When he knew that the storm would kill them both, he threw his daughter into the seas to appease the fulmar. She reached for the side of the kayak, but Anguta cut her fingers off. She and the fingers sank to the bottom of the sea. She became the goddess of the seas and her fingers turned into the seals, walruses, and whales.” His voice trailed away.

  “That’s a god-awful story,” Claire said.

  Taq chuckled. “Most of the Inuit stories are,” he agreed. “You have a good idea of how hard their lives can be.”

  “I heard another version of that story,” Claire said. She cleared her throat and began it like she had heard one of the Inuit from Tadoule Lake tell it. It was a cautionary tale, as many of the Inuit stories were, and one was meant to listen to all the details so that one could absorb the wisdom from it.

  “Sedna had her loyal dogs with her. She rose from the ocean depths and found her father asleep in the kayak. She had her dogs chew off his hands and feet. Of course, Anguta woke up at that point, and cursed everything, the Earth, the seas, the world, the universe, and everyone else, too. The Earth decided to destroy Anguta and swallowed him up. It swallowed Sedna and her dogs, too. Sedna, her father, and her dogs all live in Adlivun, a place deep under the world where the dead go to live with Sedna, Anguta, and the dogs.” She paused to let the words sink in. “It’s hell, or a version thereof.”

  There was silence for a long minute. “That trumps my sea goddess story,” Taq finally said. He sounded amused.

  “It seems apropos.” Claire looked around her, focusing on the craniums decorating the walls that were dimly lit from a single muted light. They were under the world, and there were all manner of dead with them. She didn’t have her dogs, but she did still have her fingers. And she still had one canine. Herself.

  * * *

  Shade stumbled away as he rounded the last set of circling stairs. He almost threw himself through the door that led to that part of the dungeons. It wasn’t the deepest, darkest part of the pits, but it was close enough.

  Someone waited for him. Shade nearly snarled before he saw that it was Yves. Yves had been his friend for ten years, almost from the moment he’d wrapped the shield of the Council around his shoulders. Yves was a Frenchman and a wolf shifter, and sometimes Shade wondered if the French part came first. Regardless of his ethnicity, Yves was ever his friend, having saved Shade’s life multiple instances. He’d even saved him from himself upon occasion.

  Shade shut the door and locked it. “Tell that bastard snake not to skimp on her food,” he growled.

  “Be a little more obvious, mon ami,” Yves said. He leaned against the opposite wall and toyed idly with a row of femurs. “She won’t die if she misses a meal.”

  Shade looked away from Yves and took a step back from the heavy door, staring at it. He didn’t really want to look at his friend. He didn’t want to look at anything but Claire. He wanted to sink into those pale blue eyes and drown there. It was all part of the rope he was using to hang himself with. He was damned if he did, and damned if he didn’t.

  “You should tell la petite fille were,” Yves advised. “Tell her who you are and why she needs to be patient. Her father is coming. The winds of change are roaring through the towering peaks above us. The Earth will shudder.”

  Shade glanced around. He sniffed for a moment. “I can’t even get a message out now. They’re watching everything. The keeper keeps his gate well guarded.” He thought about it and added, “Except when thrice-damned Pitch slips out occasionally to go to that dive he likes so much. I’ll have to wait for an opportunity. She’s safe enough down in the hole. No one but the three of us knows where she is, and the Council isn’t really interested in speaking with her. They’ve no reason to torture her for information.”

  “It’s said that the Bloodletter is in the city,” Yves said. “Looking for his children. Seeking an audience with the Council perhaps?”

  “He’s not that stupid,” Shade snarled. “He’ll have to trust that I’m keeping her safe for the moment.”

  “Oui.” Yves nodded. “She’s safe, but what happens if our side loses?”

  “The snake will free her,” Shade said, “and get her out one of the exits.”

  “You should tell her,” Yves repeated. “You’re playing a stupid game with your mate.”

  Shade’s head shot around and he glared at Yves.

  “Yes, yes, I know.” Yves smirked. “I’d have to be blind, deaf, and stupid not to know. You act a certain way with every were you meet for a full ten years, and then you suddenly become un imbécile.” Yves waved his hands. His long brown hair spilled around his shoulders, and his blue eyes twinkled with amusement. “They say the biggest weres fall the hardest. And you, mon ami, are one of the biggest weres I know.”

  “Shut up,” Shade said without rancor. “Tell me what the Council is doing.”

  Yves looked pointedly at the locked door. “Crowing like little chickens. Scarlotte threatens with her bone monster. Quincy sharpens his knives. Renard flicks his gray hair over his shoulder like a horse flicks its tail at flies. Do you know I’ve never seen Renard change? What kind of horse is he? Perhaps one of those pretty Appaloosas that all the little girls like so much. With many spots on its rump.”

  Shade sighed. “It’s probably the kind with a hundred sharp teeth like a Carcharodon megalodon. You don’t want to piss him off, or you’ll be one big horsey snack.”

  “I don’t want to piss off any of the Council,” Yves admitted.

  “Who was screaming?”

  “One of the new humans who wouldn’t kowtow to the Council,” Yves said shortly. “They put him in with one of t
he dark ones.”

  Shade snarled. “The dark ones. Weres who cannot control themselves. I’ve heard stories about these weres. They are the ones that inspired Bram Stoker’s tales about creatures who drank blood.”

  “Not much left to clean up,” Yves said with distaste. “I don’t know how the human writer even got enough gossip from the villagers to plant the idea of a long-dead human who rose from the dead and enjoyed a good pint of warm blood. I prefer a good bottle of wine. French, of course.” Yves chuckled.

  “We’ve got work to do,” Shade said. “Tell the snake to watch her. Watch like he has eyes on nothing else.”

  Yves nodded.

  * * *

  Claire thought another day might have passed. The snake had brought another paper bag and two bottles of water. He’d included some packaged wet wipes, something she found very curious. He never said much to her, but his eyes studied her relentlessly. She found them somewhat chilling. The solid green color that seemed to glow in the dark, was intersected by an elliptical pupil that was nothing but a solid black line. Like a cat. No, like a snake. A human-sized snake.

  “I don’t see it,” he said and the s in the word see came out as a hiss.

  “See what, Parselmouth?” Claire snapped.

  The snake smiled briefly. “Now I see it.” He clicked his tongue. “Harry Potter fan. That’s ironic. Snakes are always the bad guys. I’d like to see a writer do a good snake for a change.”

  “Master Viper in Kung Fu Panda,” Claire said. The Furious 5 were the bomb in the eight to ten-year-old range of the clan. Three families in the clan had satellite dishes, and those were the popular houses to go visit on a given afternoon. But most homes had DVD players, and there was a hugely popular lending library of DVDs.

  “That’s a cartoon,” the snake said. “Hardly counts.”

  “Kaa in The Jungle Book,” Claire said promptly. “The book, not the Disney movie.”

  “Beginning to really appreciate the appeal more.” The snake took two steps back from the cage. “You have a preference for something? I might be able to make it happen. Chinese food?”