by Faith Hunter
I could shift, but Beast would be underwater too. And would die.
The wolf pulled me deeper, placed a paw on my belly, pushing me down.
I fought. Struggling to get away.
I needed to breathe. I needed to breathe. Breathe. Breathe. Breathebreathebreathe. There was no air. The water was deep and dark and sluggish. I had mud in my eyes and ears, and my butt was buried in it, dragging a trail deeper. There was no light. Werewolf claws pierced my belly.
Give in. Stop fighting, Beast thought at me. Pull body to paws and fire.
It was not an intuitive action. And I had no idea if the gun would work in muddy water. But I did it. I stopped fighting to get away and drew my body tight, crunching down toward my feet. I couldn’t see him, but I could feel him. I shoved the muzzle of the nine-millimeter semiautomatic into the first hard thing I found that wasn’t me. And fired. The wolf let go.
It was too dark to see and I wasn’t sure which way was up or sideways, disoriented by the cloying mud. Once again I had to let go and stop fighting. Hardest thing in the world. Hardest thing ever. Harder than fighting. Harder than dying. To not move and not breathe. Panic clutched at me with suffocating fingers.
But I let my body relax. And I started to float. I was ready to breathe mud long before my butt broke the surface. I was facing bottom and had to writhe upright. The breath I sucked in then was part slime, part air, and part water. It was glorious. I coughed, sputtered, coughed some more. Spat mud that left a grainy coarse film in my mouth and nostrils. My teeth ground on it like fine sandpaper. And it tasted like rotten leaves and clay and dead fish. I wiped my eyes, blinking against the filth that coated them and scraped my corneas.
Eli was standing ankle-deep in mud onshore and he tossed me a rope. Mr. Prepared.
I wrapped it around my left wrist, because I was still holding the nine-mil in the right, and I let him haul me ashore, which mostly meant him dragging me through a trough of mud until I was far enough on what passed for dry land to crawl out of the watery furrow and struggle to my knees. Again. Eli started laughing, and I looked down at myself in the dusky light. In the sunset and moonrise, I was covered in a slick, slimy layer of dark brown mud. I coughed and sputtered some more.
Brute trotted up, laughing at me, tongue lolling. Behind him lay two dead wolves, one reddish and one black. They had died in wolf form and showed no signs of morphing back to human, which was a good way to keep Eli out of jail for murder and Brute off an animal control officer’s death list.
I made it to my feet, Eli not offering a hand up, holding on to his rifle, which was a good thing.
I was standing in six inches of mud and water, trying to find my balance, when the werewolf lunged out of the canal straight at me. Eli screamed, “Down!” bringing his weapon up toward me. I dropped, rolled, and brought up my handgun. Eli fired. I fired. My weapon didn’t. Misfire. The werewolf was directly over me. Jaws reaching.
Brute collided with him. Midair. I heard the thud of bodies over the gun blast. They fell, jaws locked around each other. And landed with me in the middle. Paws shoved me down, deep into the mud. Claws slicing me, them dancing on hind legs. One paw landed on my solar plexus and the last of my air ooffed out.
The water was a frothy, muddy mess all around me. I rolled, pushing deeper into the slick slime. Pushed away from the fighting weres. I came up within arm’s reach of the combatants. My lungs full of mud. I threw up muddy water. Breathing between each retch with a frantic, rubbery, tearing sound. I tasted blood, gagged, and vomited again.
Eli held his weapon, ready to fire, the night-vision scope doing nothing to help him differentiate the two mud-covered werewolves. I caught my breath, staying low to the surface of the water, and crawled through the canal, back to shore, again, still, miraculously, holding my useless, mud-caked weapon. I fell, gasping, on the beach. The roar of the wolves made my eardrums shudder.
They fought in hip-deep mud and water, two enormous wolves. Wrestling like grizzlies, biting, fangs raking, claws trying to keep purchase on wet fur, jostling in the water with supernatural speed as the sun set behind them. I smelled wolf blood and heard their harsh breathing, like broken bellows. I was shivering, hard shudders bashing through me. It was still winter. And I’d been in the winter-cold water too long. And I’d nearly drowned in mud. Twice. My body was reacting to the stress with a case of shock.
The werewolves fought onto shore, Eli backing slowly, not daring to take a shot, unable to tell the two wolves apart. Then one broke away. Rushing toward me. Jaws wide. Eli fired, the concussion echoing across the still water. The wolf stumbled. And Brute landed on top of him. Sinking his fangs deep into the back of other wolf’s neck. With a wrenching motion, he snapped the enemy wolf’s spine with a crack that rebounded across the black water.
Together, the wolves fell, slowly, to the beach. Brute didn’t let go, but worried the wolf’s spine, tugging, tearing, until there was no way that even the accelerated healing of a were could recuperate from the damage. Eli came closer, moving with the careful step and determined stance of the warrior. He placed his weapon against the skull of the dire wolf and said, “Now.”
Brute leaped back.
Eli fired. And fired. And fired.
When there was nothing but pulp left of the dire werewolf’s head, he stepped back. The wolf’s blood flowed into the canal water. Brute lifted his snout and howled, long and lonely. Again and again. No one answered. No wolf replied.
* * *
But across the canal I saw a silhouette framed in the sunset, the bloody, setting sun on one side of him, the bloody, rising moon on the other. It was another werewolf. Silent. Controlled. Watching. He met my eyes across the water, letting me see him, letting me know him. It was the lone wolf, sitting in the shadows of the trees, downwind, absolutely still. Beside him was a dog I recognized, her gaze as intense as the wolf’s. I thought about telling Eli, about getting him to shoot the wolf. But . . . the wolf wasn’t a threat. I knew that. He was a lone wolf, watching, living among humans in perfect harmony and control. I lifted a hand to acknowledge the gaze, and his place in the swamps. He dipped his head to me and turned slowly, trotting into the quickly falling night, PP at his side.
Half an hour later, I heard the whine of the airplane engine, and the coughing-thump as the propeller turned over. Moments later, from a mile away, a plane skimmed over the trees, rising into the air, flying beneath a bloody moon. I had no idea how he had masked his scent, but I figured Sarge was a wily old wolf and knew a trick or two.
* * *
It took the equivalent of a fire hose to clean us both off, Brute and me. The mud was caked to us, thick and dry, by the time we got to the hotel, and colder than a winter death, even huddled together in the floor of the pilfered wolves’ airboat. Which we stole with impunity. But finally Brute was white in the moonlight and I was . . . at least clean, though shivering so hard I couldn’t talk, even with Beast heating my blood. I managed to climb to my room and stand, fully clothed, under the scalding shower until I was warm again.
It was only then, as the memories of the battle recurred again and again, that I realized that Brute had saved my life. If the werewolf had landed on me, in his leaping attack, jaws open, he’d have caught my throat in his fangs and ripped my head off.
I owed the werewolf my life.
“Well, c-c-c-c-c-crap,” I said to the shower walls.
* * *
I was asleep beneath a mound of covers when I heard my door open. “Don’t shoot. It’s me,” Rick said, his voice a croak. He sounded worn to the bone, and when he crawled into the bed beside me, he was feverish hot, barely strong enough pull the covers over himself after he fell against me. Pea scampered between us, nestling into the angle of hip and thigh.
“Your virtue is safe,” Rick murmured, “this time. I honestly just want to . . . cuddle.”
He crawled in beside me and fell asleep against my shoulder. I curled my body around him, breathing in his cat-scent, absorb
ing the heat of his cat. Together, we three fell asleep.
Note from Faith: I hope you liked Beneath a Bloody Moon. I fell in love with the gulf years ago, and have wondered for years about the canals. For research on this subject, I talked with John Jensen, and was given privy to some of his groundbreaking research on the area. If you are interested, take a look at his forthcoming books, to be released from this site: www.EarthEpochs.com
The first of five books in the Earth Epochs series is Ancient Canal Builders of North America—Florida and Louisiana Harbors and Canals.
The second Earth Epochs ebook out in about November is Ancient Canal Builders of North America—New York Harbors and the Ancient Inland Waterway.
The third book is the disaster mechanism, cause and effect, due out in April next year: Earth Epochs—The Last Great Cataclysm—7,000 Years Ago.
Keep reading for a special preview of
BLACK ARTS
Available January 2014 from Roc!
Chapter One
Insanity’s Not the Point
The crash shook the house, sounding as though the front wall had exploded. I whirled as my front door blew in, icy wind gusting with hurricane force. My ears popped. The bed skirt blew flat beneath the bed. My Beast rammed into me, the light going sharp and the colors bleaching into greens. Beast-fast, I grabbed two nine-mils from the bed, off-safetied, and chambered rounds into both. Raced into the foyer.
The door was open, the knob stuck into the wallboard, the hinges bent. The glass of its small window was busted all over the floor. Again.
Gale-force winds rushed through the open door. No one stood there. Icy air whirled through the house with a scream. I heard windows breaking in back. My ears popped again. A table in the living room tumbled over. Daylight patterned the wood floor off the foyer and reflected off broken glass shoved by the wind into the corner. Not vamps, I thought. But I’d been a target for blood-servants and scions for months. This wasn’t the first such attack, but it was the first that had gotten this far. And then the frigid cold tingled up my arms, blue and golden, flecked with darker sparks of frozen force. It smelled like the air over a glacier, fresh and full of suspended, preserved power. It circled over me, tried to latch onto my skin.
My Beast rose and batted the spell away. Magic, she thought. Air magic. Angry, like storms rising on the horizon. Witches.
I advanced the few steps from my room to the front door, the frigid squall pushing against me. In my peripheral vision, I saw Eli at the top of the stairs, his hunting rifle in one hand, a blade in the other, a small subgun on a sling over his back. The former Ranger was wearing boxers, his dark skin slick with shower water.
There was no music in the attack, no wind instrument, no whistling, no singing, none of the usual methods air witches used when they attacked. And the wind seemed random, blustery, not the tornado of might from a focused attack. More like wild magic, the kind teenaged witches might toss when their power first fell on them, out of control and turbulent. I danced into the doorway and back, getting a glimpse out. Despair pelted over me, sharp and burning as sleet, as I identified him. Sorcerer Evan Trueblood, my best friend Molly’s husband, was standing in the street, attacking my home.
Eli raced halfway down the stairs, his bare feet placed with rooted precision, his wet skin pebbled from the cold.
“No guns,” I shouted to Eli.
“Are you insane?” he shouted back.
“Probably, but insanity’s not the point. It’s Evan.”
Understanding dawned in the set of his shoulders and Eli raced back up the stairs. I turned my full attention to the open door. “Whaddaya want, Evan?” I shouted.
The wind receded marginally.
“I don’t want to fight you,” I called out. “I know I’d lose.” Maybe. Possibly. Okay, not likely, not with Eli and Beast on my side, but why stir a frozen pot? My big-cat huffed with agreement. “Talk to me, Evan! Please!”
“Tell Molly to come out and I’ll leave your house standing.”
My eyes went wide. I hadn’t seen Evan’s wife, Molly, in months, not since I killed her sister. Instantly I felt my hand on the knife as the blade slid into Evangelina. Hot blood gushed over me. I blinked away the unexpected tears that the cold wind stimulated and the memory evoked. I had killed her. I’d had no choice.
The police in Asheville had cleared me. There had been a hearing two weeks ago, attended by me, my lawyer, Adelaide Mooney, two local vamps, the PsyLED hand of the law, Rick LaFleur, and lots of press.
Molly hadn’t come to my hearing. None of her sisters had come. I’d kept glancing to the back of the courtroom, hoping. But they hadn’t come. I had only seen two of the Everhart witches while I was in Asheville, and that was because of vamp business, not friendship. Molly’s friendship had died. And why not? I didn’t deserve to have a relationship with her.
Despite, or maybe because of, the media coverage of Evangelina’s dying, I’d been cleared of any wrongdoing in the same way anyone would have been cleared, anyone who had stopped an armed killer from talking more lives. But the feeling that I’d managed to hide from in the months since I killed Evangelina had roared up like hot flame and taken me over. I couldn’t get rid of the feel of her blood, hot and sticky on my hand. Even now, I wiped the back of my hand on my jeans, feeling the cooling blood, long gone, but as real to my flesh and nerves as if it still coated my hand.
I had survived the distance from New Orleans and my accidental binding by Leo Pellissier, Master of the City of New Orleans, but only by hours. I’d flown back on Leo’s private jet, the fastest transport available to me. And retched the entire way home, sick as a dog because of my Beast’s inadvertent binding to the MOC, one that put a deadline on how long I could be apart from him, and also how far away from him I could go, even for short time periods. Getting my legal problems settled had made me deathly sick, but maybe the nausea was only partly from the binding. Maybe the rest of the sickness had been because Molly hadn’t been there. Hadn’t returned my fifteen million phone calls to her cell.
“Send her out!” Evan shouted, and a burst of wind hit the house. It creaked under the pressure. Evan wasn’t attacking my house on purpose. He was losing control. He was so furious that his magic was operating on its own, ripping free.
“Molly . . .” I stopped as my voice cracked. I took a slow breath, bent, and set the nine-millimeter semiautomatics on the floor in the open doorway where he could see them. The rushing air nearly froze the skin on my hands. I stood and crossed my arms, putting my hands under my armpits to warm them. “Molly’s not here. I haven’t seen her,” I shouted to him. “Why would you think she’d come to see me? If Molly ever really forgave me, she would have called. Answered my calls. Texted me. Something.” I laughed shakily. “She didn’t.” My voice dropped. “Though why that would surprise me, I have no idea. I haven’t been able to forgive myself.”
Moments later, the wind slowed to a trickle. Something in my bedroom overbalanced at the change in pressure and shattered to the floor. I glanced back to see the bed skirt dropping down and a lamp on the floor. I shivered in the cold. Over my head on the landing upstairs, I heard a faint click. Eli readying a gun. I looked up and saw the barrel of the rifle angled down from the floor. Eli was lying prone, aiming into the doorway. “Put it away, Eli.” When he didn’t move, I stepped into the doorway, standing so he’d have to shoot me first, before any attackers. He cursed softly behind me.
I stood in the doorway, the sun’s glare hiding Evan from me, except for a silhouette. A huge bear of a silhouette, six-six and more. Squinting, I made out his red hair and beard, fire-bright, his flannel plaid shirt and jeans. Boots laced up.
I put up a hand to shield my eyes from the sun and studied him. His face was drawn and pale, nose red as if from crying. Dark circles puffed beneath his eyes. He stood less than fifteen feet from the freebie house I lived in. Molly’s minivan was behind him, sunlight bouncing off the chrome. Evan’s rattletrap red truck hadn’t made t
he trip; it had barely made the previous trip to the Deep South, even with an air sorcerer tinkering with it. Which meant that if Molly was traveling, it was by air or rental car. Or maybe bus. Train. Anyway, easy to track, no matter how she’d traveled. My investigational brain kicking in when the emotional one was in turmoil. I tried for something lighter than his unintentional attack on my house. “You coulda called, you know. I’d have told you she wasn’t here, saved you a trip.”
Big Evan looked bewildered. “Why would you tell me the truth? Where is she?” he whispered. Louder, he said, “Her sisters agreed that she wanted to put things to rights with you. She’d been talking to all of us about you.” His body wavered, and he put a hand to the minivan to steady himself. I figured he was drained by the magic, or maybe drained by trying to control his magic, and wondered if my house would still be standing had he really been trying to destroy it. He said, “She forgave you a long time ago. I told you that she forgave you.” He raised his head and met my eyes, his cloudy with worry, his leaning, propped body looking unutterably weary. “She even went to your trial, in disguise, so the press wouldn’t give her trouble. With the numbers of people, you never caught her scent, did you?”
I opened my mouth, but no words came. I couldn’t help the rush of joy that flooded through me. Molly had come? Did that mean she had really, truly forgiven me?
“I’ve looked everywhere. Her mother hasn’t seen her. There’s . . . no other place she could have gone. No other place. She just vanished.”
And then I realized Molly was missing. And the cold from Evan’s magic stabbed into my heart. Where was Molly?
The van’s back door, on the far side, opened, and I tensed, until I heard the scamper of small feet racing toward the house. I took a step out the door as Angie Baby rounded the front of the van and hurled herself at me. I caught her up in my arms and sank to my knees on the front porch. And then settled into a sitting position, Angie on my lap. Her arms tightened on my neck, holding me so close I could feel her heart beating fastfastfast in her chest. She smelled of strawberry shampoo and sunlight and love. A moment later Little Evan joined us, pushing onto my lap. He smelled of baby powder, prepackaged juice, and crayons. I pulled him into the group hug.