The hunters were getting close. Their footsteps disturbed the shallows and sent Thomas messages about the behaviors of their feet. Putting his back to a broad cypress, Thomas listened and waited. One of them was breathing just steps away. The body it belonged to spoke, and suddenly the rippling water stood perfectly still. The blue in Thomas’s eyes flushed away. He secured his small bag of loot about his waist and relaxed his muscles, smelling the air. His ears twitched at the subtle change in the air. With much speed, he pivoted his body around on his left foot, leaving his cover. With his right hand he successfully deflected the thrust of a spear, seized the attacker’s arm and swung him face-first into the trunk of the cypress. The hunter fell into the shallows as Thomas leapt upon him, hoping to silence him with a disarming blow before his companions caught up. As his palm struck the water’s surface, Tom lost sight of his target. Caught by surprise, he spun around in place, searching the darkness with golden eyes alight and ears erect.
Then he saw it, in the dark amid the cypresses and creeping moss: the shadow of the hunter, growing large. A pair of cat eyes blinked at Tom. The rolling snarl of a panther warned Thomas to prepare to defend himself. A prudent expert of improvisation, Thomas raised his clawed fists and returned a stern bark. The hunter, a Jaega werecat, crouched and picked up his spear, then sprang.
Farther away, the village high priest sat quietly, his back to the fire, and took two beads in his hand—one red and one black. They began to move about his knuckles and palms, fighting for the territories surrounding his joints. His eyes watched them carefully. Two and a half decades of practice guided his interpretation as his ancestors spoke.
Tom ducked his head and thrust himself into the body of the hunter, causing his spear to miss its mark. The hunter choked for air as Tom seized his legs and slung him to the shallows. Taking the opportunity to remove some troublesome arrowheads from his torso and extremities, Tom caught his breath and stretched his limbs, poising for his opponent’s next move. The hunter got to his feet and turned to Tom. Baring his fangs and clutching a red crystal hanging about his neck, the hunter growled.
The red bead in the high priest’s hand slowed momentarily—the black one running vicious circles around it. The priest noticed and sat up straight, startled by the unexpected change.
The hunter hissed loudly and then stepped back a few paces from Thomas, shutting his eyes and holding out one hand as he began to call to the crystal.
Tom poised lower, ears pivoting in every direction. The hunter knew magic, and Tom couldn’t interpret his language. The skin of Tom’s upper right arm tore in uneven rows and he barked in surprise. Snapping his eyes to the right, he caught sight of a disturbance in the shallows, like the steps of a low-lying animal, but there was no visible creature. Thunder hurled another club, and the sky burst with light. Thomas roared in anger as another streak of ragged tears ran down his left thigh. Growling and spitting, the hunter charged Tom and swatted with his claws. Forced to ignore his mystery wounds, Tom reacted, redirecting the hunter’s attacks with bursts of green jade.
The red bead came to life and began to chase the black one back across the priest’s fingers, forcing it around and across the palm in erratic, jagged paths. The priest relaxed and watched with confidence as the spirits began to show the red bead favor.
The hunter changed his tactics and began to snatch at the pouch around Tom’s waist. Vexed, Tom stepped into the hunter and ripped into his chest with a left swipe and then barreled him backward with a direct palm to the stomach, kicking up one foot to blast water into his face.
Blinded momentarily, the hunter stumbled back and swung at the air ahead of him, just in case Tom was preparing to rush him. Clutching the red crystal once more, the hunter paced around, winded, while his unseen allies took turns harassing Tom.
As hard as he tried, Tom couldn’t fight back against the magic to which the hunter had resorted. Feigning submission, he allowed his curse to recede, just enough to lend him his human voice. He hoped the hunter was too distracted by confidence to consider Tom’s motives.
The black bead slowed and allowed the red to catch up. The spirits were certainly favoring the priest’s wishes. Barely alive, the black bead wobbled in place as the red one moved in a lively manner across the priest’s digits.
Confused by the smirk on Tom’s face, the panther stopped and did not approach him. Instead, his eyes probed the intentions of Tom’s muscles.
“Viridi ignis,” spoke Tom, holding out one hand. Sea-green fire leapt from the jade and encircled his fist. “Ignis circuli,” he continued. The fire jumped swiftly from his hand and flew wide around the hunter and into the dark, banking right and drawing a circle around the two combatants. In the green light appeared three luminous spirits—three spectral alligators that fled from the fire and into the darkness.
The hunter hissed and whipped his feline tail against the shallows, frustrated that his ploy had been discovered.
“Ignis cutis!” Tom commanded. The fire again burst from his hand and swarmed across his body, setting him alight and guarding him against the advances of the hunter’s malicious spirits.
Before the panther could snatch up his spear again, Tom was transformed and upon him, prepared to end the confrontation. An attempt to strike Tom was foiled. Tom seized the hunter’s arm before it had fully extended and twisted it hard, lifting the roaring cat off his feet and into the air while the shoulder broke loose. Before the hunter began to fall again, Tom smashed a palm into his chest, sending him spinning to the shallows. One heavy stomp upon the middle of the hunter’s back, and he did not stand again.
Wasting no time, Tom extinguished himself, checked to see that his pouch was intact and fled into the dark.
The red bead suddenly stopped in place and did not move. The high priest’s eyes widened. The black bead wobbled faster and faster and suddenly fell from his hand, landing on the ground and rolling away into a corner. The old man’s eyes lay on the black bead for a few long moments. Who was this wolf?
With much haste, the priest stood, standing over his fire, eyes shut, and began to speak to the currents of smoke and ash that rode the banks of his broad cheeks. After a moment, he fetched a small bottle and took a sip from it, holding it in his mouth with a grimace, before spitting it out into the fire. He repeated this twice more, before setting down the bottle and taking up a long oak staff, which was decorated with many red crystals. Each time the priest inhaled, he rattled the crystals and thrust the butt of the staff into the ground. Each strike of the staff summoned a clap of thunder. Coals blazing bright with each hammering of the staff, the fire responded, inhaling in unison. After four strikes, smoke from the fire changed course, and drew into the priest’s open mouth. Another plume swept round his feet, spilling over his thighs like a waterfall turned on its apex. Long strands of black hair upon his head grew wispy and grey, the ends braiding and unbraiding, stretching long, evaporating and reappearing. Pinched by his slowly blinking eyes, small furls crept out from between the lashes.
With another thrust of the staff and a long whoop, the priest’s body became a dark, hazy cloud of ash, and with great speed, flew from his deer hide dwelling and into the dark, the rain falling behind him in a rolling curtain as he sprinted faster than humanly possible.
Tom swore loudly each time a cypress stump beat his shins and toes. Every so many strides he would have to pause, flip the heavy, soaked strands of hair from his face, and squint hard through the swamp to remember in which direction the shore lay.
Faint calls bounced off the trunks of the cypresses. More hunters were on their way. Tom didn’t have enough resources to handle them all. Wiping the iron-flavored moisture from the corners of his mouth and swatting at the moss clinging to his arms, he chose the clearest path ahead and took quick, irregular bounds in that direction.
Above, thunder rolled hard and heavy against the fabric of the heavens. Between flashes of lightning Tom took crucial glances ahead, desperately trying to memori
ze the way in the mere seconds he was allowed.
Another bolt cracked and lit the swamp. A dense, foggy smoke impeded Tom’s path. He could see no further than a distance ten trees away. He smelled ash. What was burning?
From nearby there came a voice. “Boy! There you are!” It was Tom’s owner.
“Captain Lapuente, I’ve been looking for you,” Tom lied quickly and convincingly.
“That’s a good boy. You get the talisman?” the man asked, failing to notice the bleeding wounds on Tom’s body and face.
“Yes, Captain,” Tom answered, “but the others are far behind me.”
“Yes, I know. Dead, probably. Let’s not waste the opportunity they gave us, ah?” Lapuente said, making hurried sweeping gestures with his hands, frequently looking over his shoulder and tugging at his long, thin beard with agitated, ringed fingers. His other hand moved to the hilt of his sword in its sheath. Tom noticed that it wasn’t Lapuente’s sword, rather, one that belonged to a man named Gaspar de Mota, another werewolf of Lapuente’s collection.
“They cannot all be dead, surely,” Tom pressed. He shook his head to sling the swamp water off his eyelids.
“Fool boy! That sorcerer followed them out and told the swamp to swallow them whole! The roots rose up and snatched them all. I tried to save them, but there is only so much one rescuer can manage. I mourn them—all good men. Estão com Deus. Hurry now, hurry,” he urged again, picking his feet high up and tromping forward to meet Tom. “Hand me the talisman, boy.”
“I am to be freed,” Tom reminded Lapuente, taking a small step away. He rested one hand on his hip pouch to guard the talisman from sight.
“What was it you said?” Lapuente asked facetiously, flashing his slave ring—the stygian silver one on his smallest left finger, engraved with the Scriptic curse, Ego sum dominus. Any time he wished, Lapuente could speak the curse and tighten the silver collar fastened around Tom’s neck. It was a favorite instrument of Lapuente’s, for it kept his otherwise physically superior crew on a short leash.
“It was a deal,” Tom insisted, not so much trying to change Lapuente’s mind as he was trying to stall. His eyes swept the cypress trees, hoping the enemies of his enemy were not far away. Fairly sure that Lapuente didn’t know how to use any other magic than that of his slave ring, Tom considered risking a quick assault on the man. It might cost him some of the skin of his neck, but Tom knew he could disarm Lapuente in moments and escape easily. But what if the captain decided just to kill him instead?
“I think you are the one in debt, boy. I could have left you in Charleston. They would have hanged your unfortunate soul.” Like a curious bear about to prod a beehive, he drew Gaspar’s saber and brandished the authoritarian ring. “Don’t tempt me, boy,” he warned.
Tom’s ears detected something unusual and his gaze snapped up over Lapuente’s right shoulder. Something had moved in the shadows. A tickling brush of ash made Tom’s eyes water. Again he smelled something burning. Without warning, the smoke thickened and surrounded him. Shutting his stinging eyes, he hacked loudly and tried to take steps forward to escape the suffocating cloud. Unable to see or breathe, he reached into his pouch and retrieved the item that had put him in the situation to begin with—an arm band made of deer hide, decorated with the vertebrae and skull of a snake, in whose horned head rested a large red crystal and from whose jaws hung two falcon feathers. Sliding it up high on his right arm and fastening the thongs tight, Tom realized he didn’t know the words to speak. He tried Scriptic, the language of magesmiths, to no avail. Hoping that the band’s designer knew Gresh, the skin-changer dialect, he tried the only thing he could think of.
“Ta! Ets roheh, gra’das’i!” he commanded. Much to Tom’s surprise, the talisman responded to the elementary incantation. The red crystal between the snake’s eyes grew bright, and the vertebrae rattled. A fierce wind whipped up, clearing the smoke out of his way and lashing the shallows violently. Some of the older cypresses complained as their trunks bent.
Tom opened his eyes and jumped backward with a start. Lapuente’s arms flailed within inches of his face, his body covered in smoke as if being consumed by a swarm of black gnats. The captain’s saber cut the air, whistling as it trimmed off a lock of Tom’s hair. Lapuente, fatigued, his thrashings weakening, stumbled up against a cypress. The smoke left him, and when a blast of lightning lit the swamp, Tom saw that Lapuente had been dried up like a fruit in the sun. With what sounded like a last moan of pain, Lapuente’s chest caved in as if it were made of sand and the rest of his body followed, cracking to pieces and fragmenting until he fell apart.
The figure of a sprinting man ripped through the swamp and skidded to a halt, the feet thrusting forward, digging into the shallows as if it were solid ground. One arm dragged the surface as the legs fought to slow the body down. A curtain of rain followed, catching up to the man by command. A thick deluge pounded the swamp and the sky clouded over. The man who had come sprinting from the dark, a priest named Laughing Tree, stood no more than a few steps from where Lapuente had been before the smoke had appeared. His eyes looked upon Tom with the weight of eons. His adornments—beaded robe and talismans—thrashed in the wind. His smoky head of hair and smoldering eyes fluttered off into the gales. He smelled of ash and earth. For a moment, Tom thought he was in the presence of a ghastly envoy of the underworld. Tom did not move. Neither did the priest. Amid the roar of the wind, the rasp of water and the rumble of thunder, youth and age stood their ground while the time and space between them buckled with tension.
The priest’s eyes were the first to break contact. Turning his head, he spun to face to his left and raised his left arm to brandish his oak staff. The shallows receded, being quickly sucked away into the dark. Tom turned to his right, eyes moving from the priest to the darkness and back again, not ready to trust anything.
Yelling something incomprehensible to Tom’s ears, Laughing Tree poised as a stream of water streaked through the cypresses and pounded against him like a battering ram. Acting just quickly enough, the priest halted the stream with a raised palm, wrangling with it by using a counter spell and exploding the animated stream into a shower of thick, mucky rain. Then, holding his oak staff aloft, he whooped and called a bolt of lightning from the sky, channeling it into the staff and firing it into the dark like a gun. The crackle of the charged bolt stabbed Tom’s eardrums and singed the trunks of nearby cypress as it struck the shallows in the distance, flashing bright and booming like the concussion of a thousand gunpowder kegs bursting at once. Clouds of warm steam rose from the evaporating swamp water. Tom shielded his eyes and turned away as another stream of water responded to Laughing Tree, striking at him like a coiled cobra.
A young woman appeared from whence the water had receded. She looked to be of the priest’s own race but was dressed much differently. Her hair, long and dark, was pulled up tight and knotted, so that it stood tall in a crest like a Roman helmet. It began at the top of her forehead and ended just above where the back of her skull met her neck. There, the untied ends of her hair were pulled together into one single braid that tapered off the crest and hung behind her. Looped around her neck were tall, heavy stacks of bejeweled necklaces shaped like discs; they hung low enough to conceal all but the suggestive contour of the underside of her breasts. An elegant sash wrapped round her waist, draped to mid-thigh at its longest. At her hip, wrapped in her sash like an infant, was a cluster of corked bottles, and next to it, tucked against her waist was a ritual dagger made of whale bone. Her skin faded from grey-blue to cocoa as she stepped closer. Her steel irises became dark brown; she narrowed them and her nostrils flared, jostling a small gold hoop clinging to her septum—a miniature counterpart to the large golden rings adorning her ears. The staff she carried, which was covered and bound together by marine growth and doubled as a daunting polearm, passively drew water up from the shallows around her feet and played with it as a child might play with a Maypole. A steady stream wound around the staff’s h
eadpiece, a barnacle-encrusted anchor, and formed a perfect, swirling droplet that lingered above the tip of the weapon, bubbling and sloshing like a spring or fountain.
Laughing Tree, having dispelled the aqueous assault, looked upon the young woman in a manner that expressed a pained resignation. His facial muscles tightened and cracked the red, yellow and black paint on his face. He withheld his aggression, but Tom could not determine why. Static filled his old eyes like charged, crystal globes, and his oak staff popped off bolts of electric current here and there, lashing the cypresses like the broken reins of a speeding horse’s bridle. The priest’s anger buzzed in the air, but he yielded to the sorceress. Wasting no time, Tom hurried to the young woman, a mermaid named Oi’alli, whom he’d been expecting. The two fled to the nearby shore under the cloak of rainfall.
Six years before Molly Bishop met Thomas Crowe in Barbados, Captain Marcos Lapuente stepped into the front parlor of a shady, one-room hovel in Mazara del Vallo, Sicily. He was greeted by a large, mustached man who ignored Captain Lapuente until he produced a bag of jingling gold coins. The large man showed Lapuente to the back of the inconspicuous little shack and knelt down to brush the dirt floor with his right hand. Sweeping away the dust and grit, the man found the creases he was looking for and pulled up the large stone tile covering the top of a staircase leading down into darkness. Lapuente, put off by the filth, reluctantly followed the man down the staircase and into the dark. At the bottom, he stepped down into about three inches of water, which he could not see, and scrunched his nose in displeasure. Many pairs of golden eyes watched him from behind bars as he followed the large Sicilian to the cell at the end of the pit. There, he found Thomas Crowe, leaning against the darkest corner of the pit, snarling at him and savagely guarding his only possession—a curious ring—which the Sicilian had been unable to take from him (and had a missing finger to prove it). Lapuente, impressed, had bought Tom on the spot.
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