Bite Back Box Set 2

by Mark Henwick

  Clothes were gathered by my team and thrown out into the darkness around us.

  Going to be hell getting dressed after this.

  Paige stripped and fumbled, helping me with my clothes.

  Nick was silent so far, apart from the sound of his feet stamping the ground. He began to circle, too narrow for anyone else to join yet, but growing that circle each pass.

  The halfies crowded around, stretching to see him. They’d heard all about it. The skinwalker, the dance. Even those that were drifting closer to their crisis lost their isolation, became part of the pack.

  Nick flung his arms out, turned one way, back again, growing the circle of his dance even more.

  He was an eagle. He hadn’t changed, but every set of eyes saw him as eagle. His movements captured the essence of being an eagle and threw it like a net over the halfies.

  I shivered. Now I sensed the pull of energy, like a wind whipping across the clearing.

  Nick started his chant, very low.

  Yelena urged Lynch to try and match Nick’s dance, and followed behind him.

  “Go,” I whispered, and gently pushed Paige to follow them.

  One fearful backward glance and she went.

  The cubs took up the chant and began shepherding halfies into the growing circle.

  The next second Nick was a cougar, then a bear, then a buffalo. He didn’t physically change, he wore the same skin, but we all saw the essence of the animals in him.

  The circle grew, taking on a life of its own. It passed outside the three bonfires, where flames leaped and tossed sparks upwards into the black sky.

  The others couldn’t dance like Nick, but it didn’t matter. He led them. They copied him. A little of the magic of the dance flowed through everyone.

  The smell of pine burning filled my nose. The roar of the fires blended with the chanting. It was warm. Smoke from the fires curled through the line, gathering a dancer here or there into its cloudy arms, releasing them again. The dance threatened to lose cohesion.

  But the Call began to pulse within the chant. Everyone listened to the Call, pulling them forwards, keeping them in step.

  And in the Call, there were no packs, no divisions. Nothing but the dance and pain, fear and courage, hope and despair, all twisted around each other.

  We are one pack tonight, I’d said. I hadn’t meant it quite so literally.

  I stayed at the center, feeling the press of expectation on me being shaken and cleared by the drumbeat of stamping and the ebb and flow of the chant.

  My borrowed eukori showed me my team, even as the smoke obscured them. Nick and Ursula, Yelena and Olivia, Ben and all the others, whirling around me like stars.

  And the presence of the place. The darkness waiting beyond the reach of the flickering light.

  Sacred areas, Martha had called them.

  Somewhere up here, the Denver pack had killed Alex’s girlfriend, Hope, and buried her. She hadn’t been able to change. Through Alex, I’d seen. I’d seen her screaming with pain, tearing her own flesh, begging them to kill her. How many others? Felix had been here since Denver was founded. And before him, the Arapaho peoples. Their wolf clan.

  This whole hillside was covered in graves.

  I could hear their voices on the wind, feel their touch.

  Dance the spirits out of the air.

  That was what I’d asked Nick to do last time. But they weren’t in the air. They were in the ground. The whole hill was alive with them. They slipped between the trees of the forest, blue streamers drifting in and out, as if the forest itself were breathing. Flowing like waves, like a tide, higher and higher, reaching up across the rocky expanse to join us.

  Smoke billowed around the dance, stirred by the passage of bodies, spiraling, taking forms of its own that danced themselves up into the cold night air. Every foot that stamped down sent up a puff of smoke that shuddered with the dance and twisted into shapes. Figures wheeled in the flickering light of the bonfires, figures of smoke and cinders, figures with the bodies of humans and the heads of animals. Buffalo, moose and horse; bear, wolf and cougar. Horned and fanged. Cloud dancers, passing through and around and between the humans.

  No one else seemed to see them.

  And with every stamp, sharp rocks cut feet too used to boots and shoes.

  We anointed the ground with our Blood.

  Pain was the heart of the ritual. But not that pain.

  Olivia had been in pain from her body’s attempts to change. I had been in pain from the torture that I’d endured.

  Some of the halfies were feeling the same pains that Olivia had, but it wasn’t enough.

  Last time, I’d called up imagery from my first change and thrust it at Olivia. This time it wasn’t enough. I pushed it at the halfies and it seemed to slide past them and lose its form like the cloud dancers.

  I gripped the necklace, but it had no more secrets. It had already told me that I would master my way.

  How?

  How to heal them?

  The same words seemed to bubble out of the necklace, words in a language I did not know.

  I will master my way.

  Heal? Like I tried to heal Jen?

  In desperation I stopped trying to push images at the halfies.

  I reached through them all, right through them, to Olivia.

  I found her memories of the ritual. The pain, the despair, the mind numbing shock as she fell, and while she fell, she changed.

  More skilled than when I’d torn memories from Jen, I pulled. Pulled back through the group. And her sensations and memories spread like wildfire through the tinder of the halfies’ minds.

  Ben and the cubs felt it.

  Nick felt it and changed. Cougar.

  Ursula. Bear.

  Olivia. Wolf.

  Halfies struggled to stand with legs suddenly bending the wrong way, tried to catch their falling friends with hands that had no fingers, tried to shout with voices that soared instead into the sky.

  My head changed. Scents suddenly became more complex and layered. The dark was streaked with heat that I could see.

  I howled and a great shout erupted from the tree line.

  Were emerged, shedding clothes and changing. Blurs streaked up the hill to join the turmoil of new wolves emerging from the smoke.

  And, in front of me, stood my own cloud dancer.

  I shed my wolf.

  In the depths of the night, living in the flickering light of the bonfires, I saw her as I’d seen her in Alex’s photo, the image I held in my heart so that she would never be dead. She was bronzed and raven-haired, cloaked in sun and laughter.

  “Hope,” I said.

  She stood in front of me and I ached to hold her, with a memory of pain and a desire to comfort that was Alex’s.

  “Sister,” I whispered. “Sister-wife.”

  She seemed to rush at me. I opened my arms, but I could not hold her. A freezing wind blasted through me, coldest on my lips, my cheeks. On the tears leaking from the corners of my eyes.

  “Amber? Amber? Are you okay?”

  Chapter 37

  Bitter Hooks was chaos after the ritual. Even the Denver pack who’d seen the original ritual in Carson National Park had harbored doubts.

  Maybe it’d been a coincidence.

  Maybe Olivia had just changed on her own.

  Maybe this was going to be a disaster for the Denver pack.

  However it had happened, and no one asked me what I thought, tonight’s ritual had been a complete success. Even our gatecrashing were-cougar, Lynch, had changed, though I definitely credited that to Nick rather than me.

  Bitter Hooks shivered to the sounds of werewolves tearing up and down through the forest for the joy of it. Werewolves don’t usually howl, but tonight was an exception.

  I managed to find Ben, leader of the cubs, and like the rest of my team, a complete believer from the start. They had more faith in me than I had in myself. I got him to change back to human and promise to get
every name, every contact number for the former halfies and make sure each of them had the others’ information. Sort of like a graduation ceremony. Their alphas might not like it, but while I was hot news, no one was going to challenge my requests. After all, I wasn’t weakening their bonds with their packs. Just making sure they had connections to other packs.

  Small beginnings. I had no more than a hazy idea of where it might end. A loose association of Were? The alphas wouldn’t thank me for getting them involved in politics and making them attend the new Assembly, but Emergence had to be on behalf of all the supernatural races. As syndesmon, this was my duty.

  Just need to tell Felix and the other alphas I was doing it. Maybe not tonight.

  My work done, Yelena and I got dressed and left. Party poopers.

  I’d predicted there would be problems with the clothing. Yelena ended up shoeless and wearing someone’s bright green vest that was a size too large. My clothes, shed later than everyone else’s, were in one place. That was lucky because I was barely aware of dressing. A reaction had set in and I was so tired I couldn’t walk properly.

  “Diana will kill me,” Yelena hissed as she half-carried me down the mountain.

  Wolves escorted us, leaping and bounding around us, friendly monsters standing four feet tall, rubbing against us, gently—so they thought. We were both staggering when we finally cleared the trees and made it to the car.

  I slept on the way home; a fitful sleep, haunted by beautiful cloud dancers I could not hold.

  There were still guards on the gate at Manassah, but at four in the morning, it was silent inside.

  “The others will be coming soon,” Yelena said as she deposited me in the living room.

  “No. Don’t wake them,” I said. “I just want to sleep.”

  I wasn’t sure if that was still true. I’d been exhausted at Bitter Hooks, and now I was suddenly itchy. Restless. I wanted to prowl.

  She laughed. “I don’t need to wake them. You stay away from your House for a month, they won’t be able to sleep through your return. Neither will you. You’ll sleep better afterwards, though.”

  Her voice sounded oddly far away.

  I shivered.

  Come.

  I blinked. Had I said something?

  Manassah lay around me. Not silent. Beating like a heart. The night was the whisper of silk flowing across my skin and the taste of my marque on my lips.

  I remembered the first time I’d felt this, on the way in to the charity ball, drinking in the sensation. The exhilaration of the hunting predator and the fear of what I was becoming.

  Fear no longer.

  Come.

  Pia and David stumbled into the room, eyes wide and bright.

  My House closed about me and it didn’t matter how tired I had been. Their nearness was like fire in my veins. The last thoughts of sleep vanished.

  “Mistress,” whispered Pia, burying her face in the crook of my neck. Behind the press of her lips, I could feel her fangs manifest. And David’s too, as he pressed against me. And Yelena’s.

  Yesss.

  I hugged them tightly; David and Pia were still warm from their beds. Yelena was as chilled from the night as I was.

  I shivered and soaked in their warmth, their closeness.

  And yet David and Pia’s marques were wrong. I had known that already, but now it felt like gripping rose thorns. I needed them to match me exactly. Needed it. Like I needed air.

  My House.

  My neck felt loose, my head lolling back against Yelena. I grabbed David and Pia by their hair, holding their faces against my throat.

  “Feed,” I urged them.

  Tongues against my skin. Hot. Soft. Little ripples of pleasure snaked through my body.

  Fangs brushed my neck. Anticipation burned, exploding upwards.

  “Now. Now!” I gasped, unable to breathe with the storm rushing up through me.

  Two pairs of fangs sank into my neck.

  Yelena bit my upper arm, long fangs seeking the deep radial artery. Her pleasure shone through her eukori to me and fueled my own need.

  “Yes.”

  They pulled, and I felt my Blood searing through them, scalding them.

  All their eukori merged and overlapped, flowing through me as my Blood flowed through their taryma, down into the Athanate organs at the base of the neck.

  My own damaged eukori blended with theirs. I could feel the difference, sensing them directly rather than relayed through Yelena. They could tell too. Layers of pleasure doubled, one over another.

  No wonder Yelena said Athanate have orgies.

  And beneath it all, the thorn-gripping sensation of wrongness began to melt away. David and Pia’s marques began to swing slowly into line with mine as my Blood pulsed in their veins.

  The moment their marques settled with finality on mine sent a bell-clear, shocking pulse of pleasure through all of us.

  David’s head went back. His eyes rolled up and his fangs slipped out. He would have fallen if not for Yelena’s grip on him. Pia groaned, but she stopped biting and licked my neck on both sides, her aniatropics stinging me as they sealed the wounds she and David had opened.

  We staggered and fell onto the sofa.

  “David?” I asked, my voice rasping. I gripped his feverish face, and he murmured something unintelligible.

  Yelena cradled him carefully. “Just too much, too quickly,” she said confidently. “He’ll be fine.”

  We slipped from the sofa to the floor. I didn’t want to let go of them, any of them. If I did, I thought maybe the feel of that Blood ecstasy, that bone-deep satisfaction, would also slip through my fingers and be gone.

  And they weren’t Jen and Alex, or I’d have torn my clothes off and there would be a lot more than holding happening.

  They knew it. Yelena was grinning as she teased me with kisses on my shoulder.

  Pia was worse, if anything. The silk T she slept in was long enough to be a dress, but somehow it had ridden up her body. And it was about as concealing as breath mist on a glass.

  “Hussy,” I said.

  We laughed, but I didn’t miss the quick exchange of looks between Yelena and Pia.

  Oh, yes?

  Something serious in all the fun.

  Pia had drawn the short straw. She spoke solemnly as she combed fingers through the ends of my hair. “You need to choose your Diakon. Other Houses already think it’s strange that you’ve delayed this long. That maybe it shows you’re still damaged.”

  Our eukori were still tangled. She was scared that I would choose her. Ashamed that I knew she was scared.

  I’d been expecting this. Not tonight, but certainly while I was in Denver. I kissed her brow. “I’ve learned that sometimes, the duties of the Diakon are split between people.”

  “In large Houses,” Pia said.

  “Or special circumstances,” I countered. “I need you to be Mentor to Aspirants, Pia.”

  “Zamenik, we call it in Carpathia,” Yelena said.

  Pia was still scared, but being a Mentor was what she’d trained for. As Mentor, she’d failed David badly, but I trusted people who learned from their failures more than those who’d never known failure.

  “Yes, Mistress.” Her face serious, she stretched across me to kiss Yelena, acknowledging my implied decision.

  I confirmed it. “I need you, Yelena, to be my Diakon. Is it a different name in Carpathian?”

  “It’s the same.”

  “And sleeping beauty here.” I kissed David’s closed eyes. They were twitching as if he was dreaming. “I guess he’ll have to be in charge of technology and stuff like that. You have a Carpathian name for them, too?”

  “Yes. We call them IT managers,” Yelena said.

  We laughed again, and David stirred. His jaw clenched suddenly, but then he relaxed back.

  “No one feels like changing into a wolf suddenly?” I asked. A prickle of worry wound its way around my stomach. Athanate created new Athanate by biting hum
ans with the intention to change them. That simple intention activated Athanate glands to produce the complex brew of prions that infused a human and started the change. Weres lacked the fangs to deliver the infusion. They started the change in humans through…how had Alex said it? Repeated intimate contact.

  David biting me definitely qualified as intimate. A lazy pulse of pleasure beat in my throat.

  Pia pursed her lips. “We’ve never had a hybrid before, but I’m guessing Yelena and I are too old as Athanate to respond, even if you’ve given us an infusion of hybrid Blood. I’ll monitor David, of course, but if he becomes hybrid, so be it.” She shrugged. “Same for all of us. I would welcome it to be closer to you. More importantly, as Athanate, you cannot deny your House your Blood, whatever the consequences.”

  Yelena snaked her way along my side. “Or your bite,” she said and pulled the green vest off.

  “I claim priority.” Pia pushed her away. “I have been with her longer.”

  “I am Diakon!”

  “Big deal.”

  They tussled playfully, waking David.

  “Go on then.” Yelena pouted and wrapped a dazed David in her embrace. “I will look after him.” They kissed. Serious kissing.

  Pia was unconcerned. She wriggled underneath me and tugged my face down against her neck.

  “It’s time. Feed, Mistress,” she breathed.

  My fangs manifested with a surge.

  Yesss.

  Chapter 38

  I dreamed I was a lake, high in the mountains, fresh and clear and sparkling in the sun. Blue sky reflected in my still waters and a cool breeze kissed my face. I woke alone in bed, drifting gently up from sleep, feeling completely renewed and calm.

  My eukori stirred, stretched out like a cat, and then slowly faded like mountain mist.

  That was a huge improvement. And no pain.

  I was healing, and the strong scent of my marque hung in the air, resonating powerfully deep inside me. That was deeply comforting. I felt like I could face anything today.

  Today?

  It was broad daylight. Half the morning was gone.

  I jumped out of bed in a panic, grabbed a bathrobe and ran to find out what was going on.