Lackey, Mercedes - Serrated Edge 05 - Chrome Circle

by Chrome Circle [lit]

  It almost made a foray into one of Charcoal's holdings into a tempting idea.

  She disengaged her awareness from the Gate carefully, making sure to leave behind no traces that she had been there. No magical "footprints" or "fingerprints"; nothing to betray her presence.

  Moving that circumspectly took time. She only hoped that Tannim had been able to find the physical opening out there in the mist, since this Gate was pretty much a washout. Of course, they could always go back to the plain and try the other pocket of the Unformed that Gate went to. They might have better luck there.

  Behind her, she heard Tannim stirring, the shh-ing of denim on the hood of the Mustang. Good! He must have found the opening into the next domain. They could compare notes, make some further plans.

  The sound of fabric sliding over the metal ended with the faint thud of sneakers hitting the soft, white sand of the ground of this place. She was turning to greet him when a hint of movement out of the corner of her eye caught her attention.

  Is there something out there? She peered into the mist, trying not to think of anything in particular, but whatever had been there was no longer there.

  She still wasn't certain if the momentary curdling of mist had been the result of the mist "wanting" her to see something, or if it had been something very real slinking through the fog, when Tannim screamed.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Tannim slid off the hood of the Mach I feeling rather pleased at how quickly he had found the entrance he'd been searching for. He was straightening up, his defenses momentarily down, when the mist-thing streaked out of nowhere and sank its teeth into his arm.

  He never got more than a glimpse of it; his brief impression was of a long, lean creature about the size of a Great Dane, as white as the mist, and impossibly fast.

  It was possessed of an obscene number of sharp, white teeth, thin as razor blades, most of which seemed to be scraping his arm bones.

  Maybe it was a giant white shrew, or a wild dog or an albino weasel. More likely it was someone's worst nightmare. That was certainly the way Tannim felt when the thing's teeth met in his arm as it knocked him to the ground.

  He screamed, unable to stop it, no macho posturing or stoicism—he screamed.

  He didn't resist the fall, he continued it, rolling over on his back and kicking at the beast as hard as he could with both legs, feet planted firmly in the creature's belly.

  The thing let go of his arm as the breath was knocked out of it in a fetid puff, and the force of his kick sent it sailing over his head.

  Into the side of the Mach I.

  The monster screeched like a chainsaw ripping through an oil barrel. For a moment, it hung over the front fender, body convulsing as it encountered some of the protective spells. It screamed again, and a crackle of energy arced across its body, a tiny display of fireworks that obscured whatever the beast had looked like. Not that he was in any shape to notice details.

  In fact, he wasn't in much shape to notice much of anything, since he was lying on his side, eyes unfocused, trying not to scream loudly enough to attract another one of the creatures.

  The thing hung on the fender for a few more moments, then it slid to the ground and burst into flame.

  Within seconds, as Shar ran toward him out of the mist, hands ablaze with magical energies, it was gone, leaving nothing behind to show it had ever existed. Except, of course, for the ragged remains of his shirtsleeve, which hardly amounted to more than a few ribbons of cloth over the armor.

  And the bleeding puncture wounds, where the beast's teeth had gone through the armor.

  He clamped his teeth shut on his own pain and stared at the sluggish blood dripping down his arm in shock as the pain turned to numbness, though he knew that state was only temporary. The shock was not only because he had been wounded, but because he had been wounded through the armor.

  Shar dropped to her knees beside him but did not touch him. "Is that arm broken?" she asked, her voice tight.

  He shook his head, unable to speak, for now the pain began all over again, worse than before, and his arm felt as if he had—he had—

  Ah, God this hurts!

  With that assurance, Shar carefully picked his arm up by the wrist, and with one crooked finger, deftly made a slit along the joining of the top row of scales. The armor peeled back from his wounded arm, revealing a half-circle of wide, oozing punctures, all of them turning an ugly shade of purple around the edges.

  "Is that poison?" he asked in pain-filled and masochistic fascination.

  "No," Shar replied absently, "just fast bruising. Mother taught me some Healing; I'm not in her league, but let me see what I can do."

  * * *

  Shar's reaction was automatic and immediate: I've got to help him! Without a second thought, she dashed in the direction of the scream, war-magics ready and burning to be thrown, only to see Tannim go over on his back and flip his assailant against the fender of the Mach I.

  That was the end of that; Shar didn't need to watch the beast convulse and burst into flames to know that it was finished.

  She dropped down beside him and went to work, ignoring the blazing mist-creature, although she thought it was a species that she recognized. The beast, before it had vanished, seemed to be one of the guard creatures Charcoal had created, or else something cooked up along the same plan. Charcoal did that sort of thing on a regular basis, rather than recruiting other creatures to his service. In fact, when she was young, he had made a habit of going to pockets of the Unformed specifically to create such monsters and chimera, bringing them back to his own domains to serve as watchdogs. Madoc Skean had gone Charcoal one better, creating the Faceless Ones the same way. Both of them preferred the expenditure of personal energy in order to obtain servants that were utterly loyal. The only trouble with these little expeditions was that it was quite difficult to keep the new creations rounded up. They always lost one or two every couple of trips, leaving the creatures roaming the mist, waiting for unwary prey.

  That explains why Father had a Gate set here, she thought, as she engaged the little set-spell that parted Tannim's armored scales and slit it along the top of his wounded arm. This pocket of the Unformed must be particularly sensitive. The mists were not uniformly psychotropic, and those who used them to create living creatures kept the locations of the best mist pockets as a valuable resource.

  She couldn't help but notice Tannim's start of surprise at her ability to open his armor. But at the moment her greatest concern was with his damaged arm; if that creature really was one of Charcoal's "shrogs" (her father's "clever" name for a thing based on shrews and dogs—what an idiot), the wounds could and would go septic in a heartbeat, and there wasn't exactly an emergency room with antibiotics handy.

  She sank quickly into a Healing trance, held her hands around the wounds, and forced Healing energies into his cells. She worked from inside out; that way she wouldn't Heal the wound only to leave the infection still active inside. There was no telling if there were any more of the creatures nearby, nor when they would appear if there were more, but Tannim's injury had to be dealt with now.

  As she penetrated his defenses, she realized something else.

  There was something very erotic about this; it was the first time that she had Healed anyone other than herself of a serious injury. Shar had closed up other peoples' cuts and soothed abrasions, but this was deeper, much deeper. She was aware of him in a way that she had never experienced with anyone else; the touch of her hand on his arm sent pulses of sensuous electricity through her arms; she felt what he felt directly, from the tiny ache where he'd hit the back of his head, to the caress of the silk-smooth armor over the rest of his body, including the places where it was so closely fitted that it held swelling down.

  Hmm. They didn't allow for it to expand much, did they?

  She had never been so aware of a male in her life, or on so many different levels. Not the level of telepathy; neither of them were telepaths. No, this was on a vi
sceral level, where the instincts lived. Was this how an empath felt? Small wonder most of them got into Healing of one sort or another and pursued all Arts of the body.

  She wasn't good enough to mend the bites completely; she cleaned out the sites of possible infection, dulled down the pain, and stopped the bleeding. Then she accelerated the cell growth as much as she had the skill and the power to do. In another day, he would have a half-circle of mostly healed punctures, and in two, a half-circle of tiny scars.

  She got into the car for a bottle of water and washed the blood off him with it, then got a pad of gauze from the first-aid kit. Figuring that nothing preventive was going to hurt, she dabbed each wound with a spot of antibiotic salve, then wrapped the arm in a thin layer of gauze and resealed the armor over the whole.

  It was only when she looked up from the final motions of sealing up the scales that she looked up to see his expression of complete disbelief.

  "How are you doing that?" he asked, voice a little harsh from the screams, but harsher still with suspicion. She would have been a little hurt by that suspicion if she hadn't been well aware that she would feel the same if a secret of hers had been uncovered. "How did you know how to unseal my armor?"

  "Very rapid deductive reasoning," she replied as she let go of his arm, and he flexed it to test it, wincing at residual pain. "You're Chinthliss' pupil, there are only a limited number of ways you can seal armor like this, and I know all of the ones Chinthliss uses. The easiest would be the most logical, since you're obviously going to have to get in and out of it at least once a day, and you might have to get into it when you're hurt. Like now. So I tried the first spell, and it worked."

  She tilted her head to the side and waited for his reply. It wasn't long in coming.

  "Oh—" he said, "but—Chinthliss told me that no one had ever had armor like this."

  "He was right," she told him. "No one has. Most people simply work spells into standard armor. A few more have enchanted Kevlar, or something else high-tech. No one has ever combined anachronism, high-tech, and magic to make something like this. But there are still only a limited number of ways armor like this can be opened."

  Tannim sighed explosively. "Well, damn. And damn it again; he told me the armor wouldn't stop everything, but I'd gotten kind of used to it doing just that."

  Shar nodded, with sympathy this time. She recalled the time that she had first discovered that she was not invulnerable in her draconic form. It had been a painful revelation. Literally.

  "It's not going to stop everything—maybe in your world, but not here. Any time you have a situation where there's a seam, there's a weakness," she told him. "I still have scars on my ankle to prove the truth of that."

  "I'm sorry," he said, as if he meant it. "You shouldn't have scars anywhere."

  She held her breath, and looked up, to meet his intensely green gaze. "Oh," she said, unable to think of anything else.

  What are you doing, Shar? You're a kitsune, you're supposed to be unpredictable, wild, willful. What are you getting yourself into?

  Just because you've always found this man fascinating, intriguing—just because he's the only male you've ever imagined trusting at your back—and at your front—that's no reason to sit here like a love-struck ninny, gazing into his eyes.

  That's no reason to want to kiss him. Or to pull him right down next to you on this relatively soft ground and finish stripping off that armor.

  Like hell it isn't!

  "Bloody hell!" said a voice just above her head. "What was that 'orrible screeching?"

  Tom Cadge had his nose stuck out of the open window; apparently he'd managed to figure out the mechanism to lower it. Both she and Tannim jerked upright; he with a curse as it jarred his arm, and she with a curse for a different reason entirely.

  "Nasty piece of Unseleighe work," Shar said, as she got up off the ground and offered Tannim her hand. He was not too macho to accept it, or to accept her help in getting to his feet. "It bit Tannim," she continued, trying to sound matter-of-fact.

  "I'll be all right," Tannim added hastily. Then, in an undertone, "I will be all right, won't I?" he asked Shar. A stray lock of hair fell over his worried eyes, and his complexion was pale. "I don't feel all right."

  "Don't play any tennis with that arm for a little, and go have a Gatorade. You're just in shock," she assured him. "In fact, it might not be a bad notion to move the car just to that opening you found, and then sit there for awhile. The intersections of domains tend to be rather chaotic and stressed, and I think perhaps that the Mach I won't make as much of a disturbance there." She gave him a sharp look, as she noticed that he was leaning very heavily against the side of the Mustang. "I can drive, if you can direct me."

  "I think maybe you'd better," Tannim replied honestly. "I really don't feel very good at the moment."

  He went around to the passenger's side and opened the door with a little difficulty. She slid into the driver's side and found the keys waiting in the ignition. As soon as she settled herself, she cast another long look at him, and did not like what she saw. Pale and sweating, he was obviously still in a lot of pain, and very shocky. "Here," she said, fishing behind the seat for another Gatorade. "Just tell me where to go, and I'll get us there. You rest—and when we get there, you should take a longer rest."

  "I'm not going to argue," Tannim told her, as he leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes. "Not at all. Forward, about two o'clock."

  She followed his directions, murmured between gulps of Gatorade, through the absolutely directionless white mist. Finally, the rock wall of the boundary loomed up in front of them, gray and smooth, rather than craggy as a natural rock face would be. "Right," Tannim said. "I mean, go right, along the wall. You'll find it in a moment."

  She did; in fact, she spotted the place where the opening was by the turbulent swirling of the mist ahead of them. The mist itself was no longer white or drifting; stained with pale colors and random shifts of light, it eddied and flowed restlessly. It still avoided the Mustang, however, which was comforting; anything that lived in it would probably be as vulnerable to Cold Iron as the creatures spawned in the quieter areas.

  She parked the car and turned off the engine. "Rest," she told him. "The problem might just be a bit of shock; give your body and mind a chance to catch up with what I did."

  He started to protest, then evidently decided better of it. "How bad are ye hurt, lad?" Tom Cadge asked with evident concern.

  "Not too bad," Tannim replied, as Shar rummaged for a Gatorade of her own. "Been hurt worse."

  "But we are not going any further until you are completely ready for anything," she told him in a voice that would permit no argument. "I never got a chance to tell you back there, but we've got more than one choice. We can try this unknown pocket of Unformed ahead of us, or we could try something that has—well, risk. The Gate goes to one of Charcoal's smaller domains. He might be there, he might not—but it's a place I know, and I can get to neutral territory from there."

  He sipped his Gatorade, a lock of his hair falling over his eyes, as he sat in thoughtful silence. "So, the choice is the total unknown, versus a place where we know there's an enemy, one who may or may not be home right now."

  She grimaced, but nodded. "If it were me—I'd go for the mist. I haven't been in that particular place for a long time, and Charcoal may have laid some nasty traps for the unwary in there. And anyway, even if he isn't there, his serving-creatures will be, and I don't think I could pass them anymore. But I thought you ought to know that the option is there; you have as much say in this as I do. If you think we should risk the known danger for the sake of a known way out—"

  But Tannim shook his head decisively. "I'd rather take the unknown. You probably know Charcoal better than anyone else, and I'm strongly in favor of trusting an expert." He raised an eyebrow at her. "I take it that the rest of the destinations were equally unattractive?"

  She smiled thinly and recited the other four destinations.
His eyes widened for a moment at the mention of Red Magda and the Black Bard, confirming her guess that he just might know something about them.

  And they just might know something about him, too. I rather doubt that they want to make certain he gets invitations to all their weddings and bar mitzvahs.

  "The last possibility is to go back where we came from," she finished. "We could try the other settings on that Gate. The drawback is that if someone is following us, we might meet them."