Mothi slammed both axes into the beast’s sides below its ribs, and the oolfur howled in pain. It turned, slashing its claws at Mothi, but Sif was there, turning one of the blows on her shield. She chopped at the other hand with her axe, deflecting it enough that instead of ripping into her son, the claws left only shallow cuts across his belly.
Bullets smashed into the oolfur, rocking his body this way and that. I fell on it from above, pinning it to the ground beneath the weight of one foot, talons as thick as fence posts from the other skewering it through the abdomen.
I rolled to the side in midair and dove at the bear-woman again, talons snapping out, wings stretched wide. In the moment before I struck her, Luka leapt, teeth closing around my throat, claws digging into my chest. I twisted to the side, ripping at him with my beak, and we slammed into the ground together, sliding hundreds of feet through the lifeless dust. I continued ripping long strips of flesh from his back, but Luka held on, hot blood flowing from between his jaws—my hot blood. The bear-woman thundered up to us, her face savaged and savage with spite. She fell on me like a pallet of bricks, claws and teeth flashing in the sun, and I staggered against the cart, almost dropping Kunknir and Krati.
In the roadway, my head spun, and I reeled for a moment, but long enough for Vowli to twist in my grip, pressing my talons out of his body and rolling away. He slashed at Mothi with one clawed hand and leapt for my back, jaws opening wide.
I staggered again as Vowli fell to his knees, jaws closing on nothing. Althyof whirled past me, daggers already out and performing their air-ripping cartoon dance. My vision swam, while disorientation at having all three parts of myself thrust together into one body again made my head spin.
“Hank! Are you okay?” asked Jane.
“Dizzy.”
Althyof sang a trowba and danced around Vowli in his graceful way. Vowli’s eyes narrowed into slits, and his head darted this way and that, looking for the giant bird that had accosted him. Althyof lunged in, the cadmium red aura of each dagger stretching impossibly long as if reaching for the oolfur’s body. He slashed his daggers across Vowli’s chest and left two long jagged stripes in their wake.
Vowli roared and shot to his feet with drops of blood splattering the ground around him like rain. He slashed at Althyof and at Mothi to keep the two at bay.
“Ehlteenk!” shouted Meuhlnir from behind me, as his hammer whirled by to slam into the oolfur’s head. “Aftur!” As the hammer leapt to his hand, the lightning he’d called for arrived—a blinding blue-white flash of electricity that came in sideways and fried the fur from Vowli’s back in a circle the size of a pie plate.
“The Dark Queen is coming,” I said. “I tried to slow them down, but…”
“How can we deal with all three of them at once?” asked Jane. “Vowli’s bad enough!”
Vowli twitched and shrugged, long, thin cuts erupting across his chest and back. The Alfar. The invisible Alfar attacking in tandem. The oolfur roared and slashed a circle of clear space around him.
“This is a delaying tactic,” I muttered. “He knows we can’t kill him before the others arrive.”
“Haymtatlr!” yelled Jane, holding my phone. “Haymtatlr, can you seal the entrance?”
The phone chirped, and for a moment, everything was still, even Vowli, and all eyes turned to my wife. “Now, why would I want to do that? It’s so much fun watching you play together.”
“They want us dead, Haymtatlr. If we’re dead, who will entertain you?”
In answer, the phone chirped, and the screen went dead.
“Weapons! Were there weapons in the yellow section?” I asked.
“Nothing I recognized,” said Meuhlnir.
“We need more firepower.”
Vowli snarled and feinted toward Althyof but leapt at Mothi and Sif instead, landing between them. He snapped at Mothi and back-handed Sif. She flew across the road and landed in a heap and didn’t rise. Mothi screamed and swept his axes in singing arcs toward Vowli’s chest, but before they made contact, Vowli lashed out with his foot, kicking Mothi in the solar plexus and driving him into the wall.
“The scroll,” I muttered, patting my body for the scroll case. “Where is the scroll?”
Meuhlnir and Yowrnsaxa rushed into the road, calling out in the Gamla Toonkumowl and striking at the oolfur with their weapons.
“No, Hank!” snapped Jane. “You nearly passed out last time. What help is that?”
“Something else! We need something else.” I turned and sprinted past Sig, down the hall, and skidded into the dining area. The scroll lay on the mattresses, still open, and next to it was the scroll case. I scooped them both up with one hand and ran back to the garage. As I ran, I read the runes from the next page—this time without any confusion—and a cold smile spread across my face.
I rerolled the scroll and put it back in the case, slinging it around Sig’s neck as I went. Chanting the triblinkr, a momentous power coursed through me. I stripped off my gun belt and jerked the mail-shirt over my head.
“What are you doing?” Jane demanded.
“Get all our gear into these carts. Protect Sig and above all, be ready to move.”
“Hank—”
I stepped past her and tossed the hat and cloak into the cart as I went. Half-naked, pain lancing through my joints now that the cloak was off, half-blind, I smiled and screamed my challenge at the top of my lungs.
Vowli darted a glance at me, and a lupine smile cracked his features.
“Everyone back,” I said, my voice growing thick.
“Hank, what are…” Althyof’s eyes went wide as they tracked up to where my face now was—much higher than it had been.
“Go,” I growled. I grew at an astonishing rate, limbs thickening, lengthening, muscles bunching like the Hulk, but I didn’t turn green. You can’t have everything.
Vowli threw back his head and howled. In the distance, someone answered him in kind.
With a determined grin, I finished the triblinkr, and my skin rippled as my bones popped and rearranged themselves. Thick brown fur erupted from my skin, and I fell forward, onto all fours. Even hunched over as I was, I towered above the others—they came to my front shoulders. My claws clacked on the road’s surface, and the scent of blood—both Vowli’s and Mothi’s—ignited my drool response. As the prayteenk—the change—flowed through my body at the cellular level, my human emotions shrank, replaced by things more primal, more savage. I glanced down at my body, reminded strongly of Kuthbyuhrn and Kyellroona, and the comparison pleased me. Keri and Fretyi crouched next to me, one on either side without any sign of fear, and growled at the oolfur.
Vowli sank into a crouch, snarling and snapping his teeth. He circled to my left, and I shook my shaggy head, saliva drooling from my maw in ropy strands. A chuffing noise—or maybe a hoarse bark—was coming from my mouth, and as Vowli leered at me, a primal rage exploded in my heart, and I roared. As if it were his cue, Vowli pounced, jaws snapping.
I rocketed forward, sinking low and angling my head upward to slip underneath his attack. My jaws snapped open wide without conscious thought, and I lunged toward his neck, aiming my jaws with animal instinct. Keri and Fretyi darted forward, mouths gaping wide, and stormed at Vowli’s legs.
Vowli yelped and tried to twist away in midair, but my lunge was too quick, too precise, and my jaws snapped shut around his throat. I reared back on my hind legs, towering to my two-legged height of close to twenty feet, pulling his feet from the floor to remove all his leverage. The pups let go and circled us, growling and snarling.
Vowli thrashed and clawed at me, but my thick fur and skin resisted the worst of his efforts. I shook my head, like a dog worrying a chew toy and threw my weight back, jerking him this way and that. I wrapped my arms around his torso and crushed him to my chest. My claws dug into his skin, and he thrashed against me, growling and trying to push away.
My skin tingled and itched where he had clawed at me, and out of the corner of my eye,
I saw Jane staring at me intently, effort etched on her face—healing the damage as fast as the oolfur could inflict it.
I kept at it, pulping his torso with my arms and compressing his neck with my jaws. My breath came fast and hard, a growling bark punctuating my efforts.
Until that moment, I’d been functioning on animal instinct alone, and it occurred to me that I could do a better job crushing him if my weight was on top, and I didn’t have to waste energy keeping us both upright. As if I were an Olympic wrestler, I lifted Vowli higher into the air, twisted to the side and drove us both over with my rear legs and on to the ground. We rolled with the force of it, and I heaved my bulk over, rolling him underneath me, and stabbed down with my front paws, piercing his skin with my claws. The muscles in my neck bulged, grinding my fangs into his flesh, and locking my jaws.
His breath exploded out of him in a mournful, desperate howl, and I grated my jaws together with all the strength I could muster, closing his throat even further. He battered my head and neck, but I had one of his arms pinned beneath us, and he had no leverage. I bore down, using my rear legs to drive my weight into him.
“Help him!” shouted Meuhlnir. “Or Vowli will heal!”
In an instant, my Isir companions surrounded us, stabbing and chopping at Vowli’s body where they could. John stepped closer, holding an improvised spear of broken pipe and stabbed down, again and again, screaming all the while. It was hard to make out his words—his rage and pain blurred them together—but his hatred of the oolfur I had pinned beneath me was clear. Keri and Fretyi tore chunks of flesh from his legs, worrying at his thighs.
Even with all our efforts combined, Vowli struggled back from the brink of death, eyes blazing with a new hatred. A howl erupted from his throat, and this time, the answering howls were much closer and followed by the roar of a bear.
“It’s not enough!” shouted Veethar. “Can you bind him, Althyof?”
“What? Bind him? There is no time!”
“What do we do?” asked Jane, stepping out of the garage.
I growled deep in my throat, hoping she’d understand I didn’t want her out here. I didn’t want her anywhere close to Vowli.
Then I saw what was in her hand. Kunknir.
“I…” she started. “I don’t think I can do it. Not this way.” The Isir glanced at the pistol and turned their heads away.
Althyof stabbed both daggers into Vowli’s side and straightened. “I will do it,” he said, holding out his hand. “But you must tell me how to work it.”
Jane handed him the pistol and showed him how to release the safety lock on the slide and how to squeeze the safety built into the grip. “Don’t worry about aiming, put it to his head and pull the trigger.”
Vowli lashed back and forth beneath me, bleeding from a multitude of wounds, unable to breathe, unable to get away. Althyof knelt next to him, eyes hard. Vowli’s eyes rolled side to side, seeking escape, seeking help, but enemies surrounded him, both old and new, and we gave him no quarter. Althyof leaned forward and pressed Kunknir’s muzzle against the side of Vowli’s head. As he pulled the trigger, he spat in the oolfur’s face. The report deafened me, and sparks flew as the round ricocheted from the paved surface of the road.
Vowli arched his back beneath me, going stiff all at once. His breath rattled from his chest. We kept at it a moment longer, stabbing, rending, chopping, biting.
At the end, what remained of his head hung from his neck by tatters of flesh and bone, and blood slicked the roadway beneath us. The strength of my ursine musculature had wrought havoc on his body, and that, added to the weapons of my friends, had done massive amounts of damage to his mutated flesh. All of it conjoined with the .45 caliber slug from Kunknir that churned his brain to mush must have overcome his unnatural healing.
His blood tasted sweet in my mouth. I forced my jaws open, fighting against the animal instinct to feast on his flesh.
I crawled off him, feeling free of pain for the first time in almost a decade. Keri and Fretyi danced and yipped around me, lupine mouths seeming to smile. I stood on my hind legs, threw back my head, and roared in victory. When I opened my eyes, Sig stood in front of me, dwarfed by my standing height and by my bulk. His eyes were wide.
“Dad? Can you hear me?”
I winked at him and turned to the side a little, so I could fall to my paws and nuzzle him.
“Cool!” he said. “You sort of resemble Kuthbyuhrn, Dad, but he’s cooler looking. Anyway, Mom said, and I quote, ‘Get your bear ass back into the right body and get dressed so we can get the h-e-double hockey sticks out of here.’”
I made the sound Kuthbyuhrn had made on many occasions—the sound I had equated with bear laughter—and trundled toward the garage. In my mind’s eye, I cast the runes of the triblinkr for shape-shifting, fixing my human form in my mind. I forced sounds out of my throat, doing my best to chant through an ursine throat.
As I shifted back to human form, the blindness and pain came back with a vengeance, and I staggered against Sig. He wrapped an arm around my waist and took as much of my weight as he could. I gazed at him with my good eye, amazed at how tall and strong he’d grown in the past year. “Get his cloak!” he yelled.
Althyof ran from the garage, holding both the cloak and the floppy hat he’d enchanted to deal with my loss of an eye. As the cloak settled on my shoulders, the pain receded, and as the hat settled on my brow, I closed my eyes for a moment, and the peculiar, three-hundred sixty-degree vision reasserted itself.
“Come on!” said Jane, as she guided me to the cart holding most of our stuff. “We’ve got to get a move on.”
I threw my gear on while I explained the cart’s operation. “Whoever drives the second cart, you’ve got to stick close to me.”
My phone chirped. “There is no need for all that drama, Hank,” said Haymtatlr. “If you flick the third switch in the series of switches on the dash of the second cart, it will follow the lead cart without input from its driver.”
“Autopilot, eh? Good. That will make it simpler.” We piled into the carts, and I took the controls while Jane slid in beside me. Meuhlnir, Veethar, Yowtgayrr, and Althyof got into the back seat of our cart. Mothi slid behind the controls of the second cart and flipped the switch Haymtatlr mentioned. Sig sat beside him, while Yowrnsaxa, Frikka, Skowvithr, and Sif climbed in the rear. John stood, in a daze, eyes tracking between the carts and Vowli’s corpse. “Come on, John,” I said. “He’s dead and going to stay that way.”
“I…I don’t know… He said he had the power over life and death.”
I nodded. “If he’s grown into anything comparable to the Dark Queen and Luka, I imagine that he said a lot of things that weren’t strictly true.”
John nodded, the confusion in his eyes clearing. “Yes, I’m sure that’s the right of it.” He slid into the back of the second cart. “Let’s get going.”
Fretyi and Keri stood, heads ping-ponging between Jane and me in the first cart and Sig in the second for a moment before jumping into the seat next to Jane. I drove out of the garage but paused in the middle of the roadway. In the distance, the roar of thousands of voices and the stomp of twice as many feet resounded from across the complex. “They are inside,” I said. “Where do I go? Haymtatlr, I need to get the preer running. Where do I go?”
My phone chirped, and the sound was akin to a door slamming shut. I took the orange guide from the seat next to me. “What can I ask it? What name would the place have here?”
“We need the control room.”
“There are other colors than what Haymtatlr used in his little rhyme,” I murmured. “I’ve seen yellow, and an orange roller door with a purple stripe. Brown leads to the mechanical apparatus behind the preer. The yellow led to that security monitoring room. But remember ‘run the white?’”
Jane shrugged. “Can’t hurt to try.”
“Unlocked white door, avoid any other living beings,” I said to the guide. It vibrated in the affirmative, and I drove a
way at top speed, the second cart tucked in behind me like a coal car behind a locomotive, matching my every twitch of the controls in perfect synchronicity. We could hear the Dark Queen’s army howling and screaming as they raced through the complex.
The guide led us through a labyrinth of roadways, and I followed its instructions faithfully. A screech and a howl echoed from behind us, followed by a cacophonous outcry of rage and hatred.
“My brother and the Black Bitch have found Vowli,” Meuhlnir shouted over the wind of our passage. “They will be after us in a moment.”
I already had the controls as far forward as I could make them go, but despite that, the cart slowed. I glanced down at the dash; the power light was dark. The second cart whipped around us with no sign of slowing.
“What’s wrong?” shouted Jane.
The cart drifted to a stop, with the other cart still racing off at full power. “Haymtatlr, stop the other cart! My cart has lost power.”
The second cart kept right on going. Sif waved her arms in great, wild arcs, and when she saw we were watching, tossed her medicine bag off the back. The bag hit the road’s surface and bounced to a stop, while the cart carrying my son and half our party dwindled with distance.
“Sig!” Jane shouted. “Haymtatlr! Haymtatlr, talk to me!”
The phone chirped. “Is there a problem?”
“Yes!” Jane and I shouted in unison.
“Oh, my! Whatever could be the matter?”
“Our cart has failed, and the second cart is going on without us,” I yelled.
“Yes,” said Haymtatlr.
“What? What do you mean ‘yes?’”
“Everything is functioning as intended. There is no cause for alarm. Jane and the others will be fine.”
“Jane? She’s standing next to me! And what do you mean the others will be fine?”
“I’m taking them to a place of safety. Are you sure Jane is not in the other cart? My calculations indicate that Jane would ride with her son with ninety-seven percent confidence.”
Blood of the Isir Omnibus Page 92