by Barb Hendee
“My wife died last summer,” the man said, panting, fighting harder to free himself. “I have two young sons. I must get home.”
“If you’re not going to play, then neither am I,” Ratboy scolded, pinning the merchant harder against the ground. “Just make one guess. What am I?”
His victim stopped struggling and simply stared up at him in what appeared to be a mix of disbelief and confusion.
“Sorry . . . too late.”
Ratboy bit down quickly in the soft hollow below the merchant’s jawline.
The blood in his mouth was nothing compared to the life warmth filling his body as he fed. Sometimes he liked to rip and tear while his prey was still alive. Tonight the hunger was too strong for such playfulness. The heartbeat slowed in his ears, the taste of adrenaline and fear rose in the merchant’s flesh, then both faded.
Whenever it was over, there always followed a moment of melancholy for Ratboy, like a child’s last moment at a carnival, when lamps were snuffed out, the acrobats retired, and tents closed for the last time—until next year. He lifted his gaze to the road north. The hunter was out there, traveling toward him. It was just a matter of time.
Chapter Four
Just within sight of the coastline road, Ratboy traveled swiftly, slipping through the trees and constantly smelling the air for any hint of his prey, even though he knew she was still hours away. Just what did a charlatan vampire hunter smell like? Taste like? In an endless existence, anything new, any new experience was a rare and savory thing.
As night slipped away and the first streaks of dawn appeared over the ocean, he grew concerned, but not about where he’d sleep that day. Sea caves were easy enough to find, and in desperation he could always burrow under the forest mulch beneath the canvas tarp roped to his back. But what if she passed him while he slept? Indeed, she would pass him. He’d hoped to come across her camp while she slept, but the scent of few travelers drifted to him and none with the fragrance of a woman. What should he do?
He realized he may have underestimated normal human speed. So how far away was she? And when she awoke, how far could she travel in a day? He frowned, knowing the need for cover was becoming imminent. The road next to the tree line lay empty in both directions.
Ratboy crossed through the trees to the shoreline and looked around for a deep-looking cave or pocket in the cliff wall. Dropping over the side of the cliff, he scaled downward like a spider and disappeared into an ancient hole, crawling back and away from the light with no fear of darkness or whatever might already be living inside. He laid the pouch of coffin earth on the cave floor and curled around it on his side in the scant space. Then he pulled the loosened canvas over himself against any stray lance of sunlight that might somehow find him.
Logic told him that although he’d only traveled for half the night, she would not be able to cover the distance to Miiska left to her in one day. He’d sleep and then back track. One way or another, he’d intercept her and then bring her head back to Rashed as a taunting gift. Every time anyone in Miiska disappeared, Rashed blamed him. In truth, sometimes he was to blame, but not always, and certainly not for the tavern owner. Some grizzly old drunk offered little temptation to a killer like himself.
His eyelids grew heavy, and he lost his train of thought.
By late afternoon that day, Leesil’s narrow feet hurt, and his partial excitement about seeing their tavern began to wane. Even the beauty of the coastline and the sea running out to the horizon no longer filled him with awe. Such frantic hurrying seemed unnecessary. The tavern would certainly still be there no matter when they arrived. Magiere never pushed them like this when they were on the game. No, the three of them had simply traveled at a comfortable pace until reaching their intended target. He was getting sick of her constant nagging: “Leesil, hurry. Leesil, not far now. If we keep going, we’ll make it tonight.”
Even Chap looked tired of his cart ride and whined softly, eyes tragic with boredom, but Magiere wouldn’t allow the dog to walk yet. The old donkey looked near death. What was Magiere thinking? This sudden desire to be an honest businesswoman had changed her in unpleasant ways. Close to exhaustion—or at the moment what he decided would count enough for exhaustion—Leesil noticed the sun’s bottom edge meet the ocean horizon.
“Enough’s enough,” he announced loudly.
When Magiere, walking ahead of the donkey and cart, showed no sign of hearing him, Leesil stumbled theatrically to the roadside and dropped on the grass.
“Come here, Chap,” he called. “Time for a break.”
The elegant, gray-blue head of his dog jerked upward in hope, ears poised, eyes intently fastened on his master.
“You heard me. Come on,” Leesil repeated loudly.
Magiere heard Leesil’s shout this time and turned her head just in time to see Chap bounding out of the cart and back down the road to where Leesil sat. Her normally stoic jaw dropped slightly as she stopped in the road. The donkey and cart moved on without pausing.
“What in . . . not again,” she stammered, then caught sight of the escaping cart. She grabbed the escaping beast’s halter and pulled it to a stop. “You elven half-wit,” she called back to Leesil, dragging donkey and cart back to where he sat. “What are you doing?”
“Resting?” he said, as if asking for confirmation. He looked down at his legs stretched out comfortably on the ground, then nodded his head firmly. “Yes, most assuredly. Resting.”
Instead of lying down, Chap sniffed around the rough sea grass, stretching his limbs, then bounded off into the brush nearby. Leesil took his wineskin and slipped its carrying strap off his shoulder. He popped its stopper, then tilted it up and over his open mouth for a long, satisfying drink. The dark D’areeling wine always tasted slightly of winter chestnuts. It comforted him in ways he couldn’t describe, and that was likely all the comfort he’d get, unless Magiere stopped driving all of them with her stubbornness. But two could play that game.
Magiere stood dumbfounded, glaring at him, covered in road dust and in need of a wash.
“We don’t have time to rest. I’ve practically dragged you since midday as it is.”
“I’m tired. Chap’s tired. Even that ridiculous donkey looks ready to keel over.” Leesil shrugged, unimpressed by her apparent dilemma. “You’re outvoted.”
“Do you want to be traveling after sundown?” she asked.
He took another drink, then noted he, too, was in need of good bath. “Certainly not.”
“Then get up.”
“Have you looked at the horizon lately?” He yawned and lay back in the grass, marveling at the tan-colored, sandy earth and salt sea smell in the air. “We’d best make camp and find your tavern in the morning.”
Magiere sighed, and her expression grew almost sad and frustrated at the same time. Leesil felt a sudden desire to comfort her, until the ache in his feet reminded him what a pain in other regions she was being. Tomorrow would be—should be—soon enough, even for her. Let her stew over it if she liked, but he was not moving another step down the road until morning.
He watched Magiere’s gaze turn toward the ocean, noting the clean lines of her profile against the brilliant orange of the skyline. She glared out at the horizon as if willing the far edge of water to deny the sinking sun access and hold it there. Her head slowly dropped, just enough for her hair to curtain her face from view. Leesil heard, just barely, the soft sigh that came from her lips. He gave an exaggerated sigh of his own.
“It’s better this way. You don’t want to wake the caretakers up in the middle of the night.” He paused, waiting for acknowledgment or rebuke, but Magiere remained silent. “What if the place looks bleak and depressing in the dark? No, we’ll arrive like true shop-folk at midday or so and assess the place in broad daylight.”
She looked back at him for a moment, then nodded. “I just wanted to . . . something pulls me like a puppet.”
“Don’t talk like a poet. It’s annoying,” he retorted.
Leesil occasionally glanced over at the sun. Perhaps they had been in the gray, damp world of Stravina too long. There was a definite difference between wet and damp. Wet was thin salt spray blowing inland from a fresh sea, with an offshore breeze to gently dry you off. Damp was shivering in blankets that brought no warmth in some mountainside hut and watching the walls mold.
“Will we see this every night in Miiska?” he asked.
“See what?”
“The sunset . . . light spreading across the horizon, fire and water.”
For a moment, her forehead wrinkled as if he spoke a foreign language, then his question registered. She, too, turned toward the sea. “I expect.”
He snorted. “I stand corrected. You are no poet.”
“Find some firewood, you lazy half-blood.”
They made camp on the far side of the road that divided them from the shoreline. In reality, it was quite a distance down to the water, but the enormity of the ocean created an illusion of closeness. The last hint of daylight dropped below the horizon, and thick, wind-worn trees provided cover from the evening breeze. Leesil was digging through burlap bags in the cart for leftover apples and jerky when Chap stopped sniffing playfully about and froze into a stance of attention. He growled at the forest in a tone that Leesil had never heard before.
“What’s wrong, boy?”
The dog’s stance was rigid, still and watchful, as if he were a wolf eyeing prey from a distance. His silver-blue eyes seemed to lose color and turned clear gray. His lips rose slightly over his teeth.
“Magiere,” Leesil said quietly.
But his partner was already staring at the dog, and then at the forest in equal intervals.
“This is like what he did that night,” she whispered, “back in Stravina near the river.”
They’d spent a number of nights in Stravina near a river, but Leesil knew which night she meant. He pulled his hands out of the cart and put them up his opposing sleeves until he grabbed both hilts of the stilettos sheathed on his forearms.
“Where’s your sword?” he asked, keeping his gaze fixed on the trees.
“In my hand.”
Ratboy’s eyes flicked open, and the black, damp walls of his tiny cave disoriented him for a moment. Then he remembered his mission. The hunter. Time to backtrack.
As he emerged into the cool night air, he rejoiced in the feeling of freedom the open land offered. This was a good night. Yet part of him already missed Teesha and the odd comfort she created in their warehouse. “Home” she called it, though he couldn’t remember why any of their kind needed to make a home. It was her idea, with Rashed to back her up. Still, no matter how much he liked the open, he’d grown accustomed to the world they’d built in Miiska. Best find the hunter quickly so he could take his time killing, draining her, and then return home before dawn.
Below the cliff, the white sandy beach stretched in both directions, but he quickly turned away and scaled upward to the cliff’s top, fingers gripping the rough wall of earth and rock effortlessly. The beach might be faster traveling, but it was too open. Reaching the top edge, he swung himself up and was about to gauge his bearings when the scent of a campfire drifted to his nostrils.
His slightly tapered head swiveled, and at the same moment, he smelled a woman, a man, and a donkey. Then his nose picked up something else. A dog? Edwan had made some ridiculous comment about a dog. Ratboy hated Edwan almost more than he hated Rashed. At least Rashed offered valuable necessities—a place to sleep, a steady income, and the shielding disguise of normality. Edwan merely sponged up Teesha’s time and gave nothing in return. All right, so he had located the hunter and her companions, but that was a small thing. And what could he, Ratboy, have to fear from a dog, a tamed one traveling with its masters?
Quivering elation rippled through him. Had he found his prey so easily? Could this woman be the woman? Had she literally made camp within sight of his sleeping den?
Orange flames from the fire were just visible through the trees, and he wanted to get a better look. He dropped down to his belly and cast about for some way to cross the road unseen. The road offered no possibility of cover, so he decided to simply cross it quickly. In a blink, like a shadow from flickering firelight, he was across the hard dirt path, blending into the trees and brush on the far side. He crawled closer to view the camp.
The woman was tall, wearing studded leather armor, and looked younger than Ratboy expected. She was almost lovely, with a dusty, black braid hanging down her back as she poured a flask of water into a pot near the fire. Her companion was a thin, white-blond man with elongated ears and dressed almost like a beggar, who stood digging about in the back of a small cart and then . . .
A silver-gray dog, nearly the height of Ratboy’s hipbone, leaped to its feet and stared right at him, as if the foliage between them did not exist. Its lips curled up. The growl escaping its teeth echoed through the quiet forest to Ratboy’s ears. Something in the sound brought a strange feeling into his chest. What was this feeling? He hated it, whatever it was, and it made him pull back behind the thick trunk of a tree.
Edwan had said something about a dog.
A dog was nothing. Peering out again, he saw the woman grab her sword, and he smiled.
“What’s wrong with him?” Leesil asked.
Chap’s low snarling continued, but he stood his ground, not attempting to advance in any direction.
“I don’t know,” Magiere answered, for lack of anything better to say. And in truth, she didn’t know, but she was beginning to suspect the hound harbored some extra sense, some ability to see what she could not. “Get the crossbow from the cart and load it.”
For once on this trip, Leesil didn’t argue and moved quietly and quickly to follow her instructions.
Chap’s growls began rising in pitch to the same eerie sound he had made that night by the Vudrask river. Magiere moved toward the dog, reached down, and grasped the soft fur at the back of Chap’s neck.
“Stay,” she ordered. “You hear me? You stay.”
He growled in low tones but did not move from his place. Instead, his locked gaze shifted to the left and his body turned to follow.
“It’s circling the camp,” Magiere whispered to Leesil.
“What?” Leesil looked about, foot in the crossbow’s stirrup and both hands pulling on the bowstring to lock it in place. “What’s circling the camp?”
She looked at her partner, at his narrow face and wispy hair. At least this time he wasn’t drunk and had the crossbow loaded, but now she wished she’d told him more about killing the mad peasant. How strong the pale man had been, how terrifying . . . how she’d felt the strange hunger suddenly grow in the pit of her stomach. Afterward, the whole occurrence had seemed too unreal, and she’d passed it off as just her own mind mixing up all the trappings and tricks of playing the game too long. A bad encounter had made her slip into believing her own lies for a panicked moment.
And now she had no answer to Leesil’s question.
Chap’s white-and-silver muzzle rose, and she expected him to start wailing. Instead, his gaze started moving up and across, up and across, up and up.
“The trees!” she called out, crouching low behind the cart for fear of what a skulker might do from a high vantage point. She reached over the cart’s side, pulling Leesil’s belt until he crouched low. “It’s up in the trees.”
The dog’s ability to follow his position was becoming more than a mere annoyance to Ratboy. There was no way to try a flanking or head-on attack, so he worked his way over and above his target through the tree limbs. He inched along carefully.
“I’m going to bring your skin home for a rug, you glimmering hound,” he whispered, making himself feel better picturing the animal’s bloody silver fur draped over his own shoulders. Te
esha might even like the unusual, soft color.
But who to kill first? Ratboy had seen a few half-breeds in his time, and this male certainly carried some elven blood. The crossbow was little to worry about. It would hardly slow him down, even if the half-blood could shoot straight.
He could snap the dog’s neck quickly enough, landing on it first, but that would give the other two time to set themselves for a fight. No, first priorities were best put first—disable the hunter, then kill the dog and the half-blood. That way he could play with the hunter as long he wanted.
From his position on a sturdy branch, he focused on the hunter and leaped.
There was no warning. Leesil caught a glimpse in the dark, the blur of a faceless form passing overhead and down.
A wiry, brown-headed figure dressed like a beggar slammed into Magiere, knocking her to the ground. Leesil expected the attacker to tumble to the ground himself but, to Leesil’s surprise, the man did not fall, but landed firmly on his feet. And on impact, his fist was already in mid-swing downward.
“Magiere!” Leesil shouted. He barely finished spinning around to aim the crossbow when a loud crack sounded as the attacker’s fist struck Magiere hard across the cheekbone. Magiere’s head bounced against the earth in recoil. Leesil fired.
The quarrel struck low through the beggar’s back, point protruding from his abdomen, but he responded with only a quick shudder and turned toward Leesil.
A cry, high pitched enough to be human, burst from Chap’s throat as he launched himself into the beggar. Both figures rolled across the camp and over the fire in a mass of rapidly moving teeth and fur that scattered half the burning wood and kicked sparks up around them.
Magiere lay on the ground unmoving, as Leesil leaped out the back of the cart. By the sound of the blow, he knew she was likely to be unconscious. For a moment he was caught between stopping to check on her and following his dog to help finish off the intruder. Between a crossbow quarrel and Chap’s ferocity, the foolish intruder had only moments to live anyway. Still, he couldn’t afford to be caught with his back turned. He pulled another quarrel from the crossbow’s undercarriage, readying to reload as he started around the scattered fire, then skidded to a stop before he’d gotten halfway.