Alaskan Fury (11 page)

He had Seen it, and he had
entrusted her with knowledge of his gift, knowing that, should the others of
her Order ever discover it, he would join the beasts on the rack. 
Follow
your heart, little one, and not even the seat of the Holy Matron will hold
dominion over you.
  Every one of his predictions had come true thus far,
even the seemingly-ridiculous one of gaining Segunda Inquisidora at the age of
twenty-six.  She still marveled at that, and made the trek for his counsel
every chance she got. 

She had also sworn on her
mother’s blood to keep his secret.  For, while it was a thousand times more
common than, say, a phoenix, the life-liquids of a Seer had dozens of different
applications for the betterment of the Order.  Looking-glasses, headpieces,
meditation bowls…

…or the tiny crystal scrying-goblet
she carried sheathed in a padded slip of silk in her backpack.

Closing her fist around the
bloodied stone, Imelda considered. 
Sometimes,
her Padre’s words
returned to her,
one must fight fire with matches.  
And, in this case,
the matches came in the form of a wolf’s blood, their only real lead in all of
this.
 
Reluctantly, she bent to her pack and slipped the faceted
faestone goblet from its pouch—its vibrant violet surfaces catching the glare
of her flashlight in unspeakable, heart-searing brilliance. 
All right,
wolf,
she thought,
time to show me your djinni. 
She dropped the
bloodied pebble into the goblet’s bowl and went to the river for water to
complete the scrying spell. 

As she bent to fill the bowl, she
casually glanced up the river in the direction the wolf and djinni had been
traveling before their sniper had missed his target. 
Missed
, she fumed,
an
expert marksman
, almost as if the damned wolf had a spell of
diversion
wrapped around—

Imelda froze.

She glanced down at the bloodied
stone, even then sitting in the dry bowl of the goblet, then at the gray, silty
water that slid by only inches beneath the violet faestone artifact.  Slowly,
she lifted her hand away from the river.

Too many things were not adding
up. 

First the djinni, then the
blood-pact, then the
disappearance
…  And to top it all off, one of her
Hunters, a born sniper, a man who could pit a
cherry
at a
mile
,
had missed.  From across the river.  Six hundred feet, tops.  No breeze.

Very carefully, she plucked the
bloodied stone back out of the crystal goblet and considered it.  Her instincts
were unusually good.  So good, in fact, that she had become the youngest Sister
to make Segunda Inquisidora in the history of the Order.  After another
moment’s debate, she slipped the faestone goblet back into its silken case and
returned it to her backpack. 

Zenaida had given her an order,
true, but Imelda wasn’t going to make it to the seat of the Holy Matron by
being a fool.  Besides, on paper, she and the magus were of the same rank.  If
Zenaida wanted to try and argue seniority, let her do so before a tribunal in
Rome, where a hundred of Zenaida’s kind had died in the very basement beneath
their enclave.

As an afterthought, Imelda
dropped the blood-caked stone into a collection tube and, twisting on the
plastic cap, tucked it into a vest pocket.  Then, turning, she picked up her
radio and called in the helicopter to come get her.  The two fugitives had been
going north along the river.  Zenaida be damned.  Imelda’s gut told her they
were headed towards the mountains, not back to Anchorage. 

And, since this had officially
become Imelda’s operation as of ten minutes ago, she would run the mission how
she saw fit and, if it came to that, deal with a tribunal later.  She knew who would
meet her end in the basement, should Zenaida challenge her.

‘Aqrab lifted the wolf—easily three
or four times his weight, despite her tiny size—into his arms and ducked into
the frigid forest to find cover.  While all other-Realmers felt cool to
‘Aqrab’s Fourth-Lander heat, his magus’s body was
cold
, much colder than
a normal First-Lander body should have been.

“Void-walking, in your condition,
was not the wisest thing you’ve ever done, mon Dhi’b,” he muttered, setting her
down beside a fallen log and looking for enough wood to light a fire.

They follow you by air,
the winds breathed, as he gathered tinder.

‘Aqrab froze.  Their pursuers had
followed them riding their iron beasts of the sky.  Biting his lip, he looked
up at the breeze as it played amongst the darkened treetops, then back down at
his sleeping magus.  If he lit a fire, would they see the smoke at night?  And,
more importantly, would they see the
flame
?

“Little wolf,” he growled,
crouching beside her crumpled, pallid form, “Wake up and warm yourself, or I
will be forced to do it for you.”  He knew she had a dozen different spells she
used to keep her body warm, and also knew that whatever had happened, they were
no longer working.  He also knew what her reaction would be if she woke to find
herself snuggled naked against his hot Fourthlander body, her frozen clothes
hung to steam from a branch above him.

The magus did not respond.

“You told me not to touch you,”
‘Aqrab cursed, glaring at her.  “Wake up.”  He was not a magus, at least not by
First Lander standards.  He channeled the creative power of the Fourth Lands,
flirted with Law whenever he got the chance, but he could not cast lasting,
time-based spells without use of a wish.  He could not, therefore, cast the
shields, barriers, and wards that his magus wove so effortlessly around herself,
as easily as breathing.

He also knew the magus was
perfectly capable of sealing her own wounds, as evidenced by the smooth skin
beneath the mangled, bloody holes in her garb, but he could not tell without
touching her whether or not she had removed the bullets from her body, or what their
makeup had been, or whether she was still being poisoned by some unknown
substance.  “Mon Dhi’b,” he growled at her pale, limp form.  “You’re not
leaving me much choice.”  The last thing he wanted was to be caught groping the
Fury in her sleep.  That could get…unpleasant.

Off in the distance, he heard
gunshots.

‘Aqrab glanced to the west, where
the sound had come from.  A group of stone-working fey had taken up residence
in the hill where the ursine couple had died—a crusty old feylord who’d gotten
himself expelled from the Second Lands and the six descendents that had chosen
to go with him.  ‘Aqrab knew they would die to the last before being taken by
Inquisitors.  “Mon Dhi’b,” he muttered, eyes blindly seeking out the shadows of
the creek through the trees, “this is a very inopportune time to take a nap.”

If she heard him, his slender
waif of a magus showed no sign.  In fact, her breathing had dropped to barely a
whisper in her chest.  He peered at her, trying to determine the extent of the
damage, but his eyes could not adjust to the unnatural blackness of a First
Lander night.  Aside from the greater darkness of her bloodied clothes, he had
no idea what was wrong with her.  It could be Inquisitor poisons, could be a
loss of blood, could be the cold.  “Mon Dhi’b. 
Kaashifah.
”  He put his
hand to her shoulder and shook it.

Still no response.  Her head
lolled softly to one side, exposing her slender neck to him.  Had she sealed
all of her wounds?  Had she forgotten the bullets?  Were they even then seeping
their poisons into her veins?  He
hated
the darkness of the First
Lands.  He could not
see
.  Reluctantly watching the west, he produced a
small flame in his palm and held it over her.

What he saw made his heart
shudder to a stop.  Her skin was too pale, her lips too blue.  Her fingernails,
too, shared that odd, too-dark hue.  Her blood was soaked into the fabric
covering one hip and had slicked down an entire leg, freezing into hard,
rumpled folds of crimson cloth.  And, now that he looked carefully, there was
ice forming in her hair, on her lashes, in her clothes, at the corners of her
fingertips…

The breezes were flitting in the
branches above, almost as if invisible spirits were clinging to the trees,
watching.  Biting his lip, he closed his hand over the flame, putting it out. 
Looking up at the rustling treetops, he ventured, “These ones who are looking
for us…  They are coming?”

Soon, soon,
the winds seemed
to whisper.  Even then, he could hear the telltale whine of a boat engine out on
the river.  While innocuous before, since it was a sound often heard in the
fishing community of Skwentna, the sound now filled him with dread, for no one
traveled the river at nightfall, at the onset of winter, with hazardously low
water and chunks of ice to capsize the unwary.

‘Aqrab glanced down at his magus,
her body much too cold, and then at the forest around him.  He considered
taking her back to the firelands, but instinctively knew she wouldn’t survive
another trip so soon after her last.  He thought about yanking her to the
half-realm, but knew that, with as much blood as she’d lost, the shock might be
too much for her. 

The whine of the boat engine was
growing louder, echoing against the trees.  Hastily, he began piling frozen
moss, dead leaves, branches, grass, and debris over his magus.  Once he was
satisfied she had been concealed, he twisted to the half-realm and waited.

The crystalline white dunes
spread out in all directions, overlaid by the glittering black trunks of spruce
trees and birch.  All around him, the winds whistled through the sparkling
structures, impossibly swaying their crystalline forms back and forth as they
fretted and danced above, so thick they could almost be seen as glittering
wisps of color.  Focusing, yet again, on his magus.

What did
she
do to
receive their attention?
he thought bitterly.  He’d spent countless years
in captivity and had never so much as heard a whisper, yet she had received
warning twice in as many days.  Reluctantly, he tore his eyes from the swirling
winds and waited for their pursuer to show itself.

For long moments, nothing
happened.  Then, in almost utter silence, black shadow slipped in the gray sky
overhead.  ‘Aqrab frowned.  Was it dipping to meet him?

Run!
the winds screamed
suddenly,
shoving
him away from his magus, pushing him into a jog. 
Twist
to the Fourth Lands, fool!

…fool?  Since when did the winds
have the audacity to call a
djinni
a fool?  ‘Aqrab stumbled to a halt
and looked up at the iron beast.  He could barely hear the thrumming its blades
made as they cut the air.  Then the sound of gunfire echoed around him,
spitting up crystalline shards of obsidian at his feet.  Seeing that, ‘Aqrab
frowned.  It was almost as if the skyborne beast was
watching
him.  But
that was impossible.  Safely ensconced in the half-realm, he was but a mirage
upon the cold face of the First Realm.  He backed a few feet out of their range
of fire, only to watch the iron beast twist in the sky to face him.

…twist in the sky?

Since when could anything but a
dragon see a djinni in the half realm?

Unless…

‘Aqrab felt his throat go tight. 
If they were using a dragon’s eyes in the iron beast, they would see him even
better at night.  And he’d led them right to the wolf.  He turned from his
magus, then, horror lacing his veins, and ran, trying to get them to give
chase.  The iron monster turned in the sky and followed, its silent glass
windows a deeper black against the darkness as it peppered the ground with
metal.

  Just before he hit the end of
his tether, he twisted to the firerealm and prayed.

Imelda ordered the helicopter
down on the frozen creekbank, beside the jagged hole in the ice. 

“He must’ve tried to cross,” her
scout, Jacquot, yelled as he ducked his head and met the helicopter.  He still
wore his wetsuit, his face steaming in the red glow of the helicopter
interior.  Chuckling, the Frenchman said, “Le
démon gigantesque
m
ust have found he was not as light on his feet as he thought.”  He
shook his head amusedly.  “Le connard.”

Her skull already pounding from
the painful thrumming of the rotor blades, Imelda grunted and ducked out of the
helicopter to walk to the creek’s edge.  Her gut was still telling her there
was more to the story.  Light though he was, what kind of demon of the flame
would chance walking across
thin ice
in the First Realm, when he could
simply twist to the half-lands or the firelands to travel the same terrain, out
of danger?  When she grew close enough to see the cracked ice with her
flashlight, she stopped and frowned.

A trail of water droplets led out
from the break, though she could see no footprints in either direction.  To
Jacquot, who had followed her to the water’s edge, she said, “And the wolf was
never seen?”

“La louve has not yet shown
herself, Inquisitrice.”

Imelda frowned and shone the
flashlight into the forest on the other side of the creek, back towards the
Sleeping Lady and, beyond, Anchorage.  That she had been correct in seeking the
djinni to the north was a small victory, but one that she was sure would haunt
her later, when Inquisidora Zenaida learned of her ‘disobedience.’  Imelda took
a moment to study the swamp grasses lining the creek, then lifted her light to
examine the forest beyond.  While she could not be absolutely positive at this
distance, she could not see a trail of melted footprints and frost-less leaves
leading from the woods.  The djinni ran an average temperature of 80 degrees
Celsius—about 175 degrees Fahrenheit in this incomprehensible land of fools—and
one of the things she’d noticed upon searching the wreckage of the gunbattle
had been that, wherever the djinni went, he left melted frost in his wake.

She twisted, shining her light
into the forest where the djinni had disappeared.  She started following the
now-frozen water spatters into the woods. 

“You believe la louve was here,
ma mie?”

Imelda hesitated at a clump of
burned grass.  Beside it, blood had congealed and frozen on the iced, silty
ground.  She crouched beside it, getting a better look.

“Tell me, Jacquot,” she said,
picking up a crimson-stained leaf.  “What color is the blood of a djinni?”

Jacquot frowned at the leaf. 
“Djinn do not bleed, Inquisitrice.”  Once they’d discovered they were dealing
with a Fourth Lander, he had spent hours with Imelda in the library, pouring
through every article the Order had on flame-demons, finally helping her to
narrow it down to a djinni.

Imelda lowered the leaf back to
the ground and considered the blood.  It, combined with the blood she had seen
spattered across the span of over a mile, left little for the wolf, if any. 
She shone her light around the area, found the spot where the djinni had knelt,
his knee-impressions two melted divots in the jagged crystals of the
hard-frozen mud of the creekbank.

So the djinni had attempted to
save the wolf.  Imelda shone the light once more on the cracked surface of the
slow-moving creek.  The wolf, being heavier than the djinni, had fallen through
the ice.  Had he been
carrying
her across the creek?  It made no sense,
because aside from the area directly around the blood, there were no massive
footprints melted into the ice.  So how had a
wolf
walked across ice
that thin, only to fall in halfway?  Then, once immersed, how did she get
out
again without breaking the rest of the ice?

Leveling her light once more on
the djinni’s footprints, she got up and followed them into the forest.

They stopped beside a man-sized
mound of torn-up mosses, branches, and dead leaves.

“Weapons!” Imelda cried, drawing
her pistol.  She fired three shots into the pile, then hesitated when it didn’t
move.  Beside her, Jacquot had his rifle up, the barrel leveled on the mound of
debris.  “Guard,” Imelda told him, slipping to a crouch and picking up a nearby
stick.  Using it at a distance, she pried mosses and debris from where the
djinni had piled it around the wolf’s body.

And it
was
a body.  She
straightened slowly, eying the pale visage of death beneath the forest
detritus.  So that was why the wolf hadn’t shown up on radar.  It was dead. 
The wounds she had given it were ragged holes in the meat, not even bleeding. 
Imelda nudged it with a foot, then tucked her gun back into its holster. 
Squatting beside it, she shone the light into the corpse’s face.  As she had
noted back at the Sleeping Lady, the dead woman appeared to come from one of
the purer lines of Arabic descent. 

Carefully, Imelda leaned forward
and put her fingers to the wolf’s neck, just to be sure.  She counted a full
minute with no pulse.  She waited three, just to be sure.  As she moved away,
her light flickered off of a bit of silver clinging to the woman’s neck, mostly
hidden by her frozen sweater.  Frowning, Imelda considered it, but made no
motion to reach for it. 

“Shall we take the body back with
us?” Jacquot asked.  He had not lifted the muzzle of his rifle from the
corpse’s face.

“Our Order has no use for a dead
wolf,” Imelda said.  She gestured at the chopper.  “Go radio Inquisidora
Zenaida.  Tell her the wolf is dead.”

Jacquot made a courteous bow and
jogged off through the woods, toward the creek.  Imelda waited until her scout
was out of sight to retrieve the pendant from around the wolf’s neck.  Though
crude and worn, the silver symbol almost reminded her of an elaborate, winged
sword.  The emblem nagged at her somehow, tickling the furthest corners of her
mind.  She had seen something similar before, she was sure.  But where?  It
wasn’t a djinni symbol.  The djinni loathed metal weapons of any sort, and
instead did battle with their words.  She rolled the symbol in her hands,
considering.  It felt old.  Ancient, even.  She spent minutes staring at it,
wishing desperately that she could wrench that knowledge from whatever cubby
she had tucked it, however many years ago.

Behind her, she heard Jacquot
returning at a jog and, on instinct, tucked the symbol into a pocket, to be analyzed
later.

“La Inquisitrice wants to know of
the wolf’s symbol, ma mie,” Jacquot said, slowing beside her.  He handed a
radio out to her.

“What did you tell her?” Imelda
asked, taking it.

“I said I was unsure—I left
before we searched the body.”

Imelda nodded and depressed the
SEND button.  Eyes on Jacquot, she said, “It looks as if the djinni took the
symbol, Segunda Inquisidora.  There was nothing on her body.”

Above her, she thought she saw
Jacquot stiffen ever-so-slightly.  So he had seen.  Damn.  Fortunately, Imelda
knew that man had the good sense to keep his mouth shut.  He was a bright
soul.  He knew Imelda bore no responsibility to report to the Segunda
Inquisidora out of anything more than courtesy, and he knew better than to
stick his foot into Order politics.

Inquisidora Zenaida cursed on the
other end of the radio. 
“We
needed
that talisman, Imelda.  He could
have escaped to the firelands by now.  Did you get a good look at it, at least?”

“There is nothing here to suggest
that anything was actually
keeping
him here in the first place,
Inquisidora,” Imelda growled.  “Perhaps this djinni was simply friends with the
wolf.”

Zenaida cackled into the radio. 
“Have
you ever even
met
a djinni, you camel-toed bitch?  Not only do they hate
the First Lands, but the only ones who can stand their word-weavings are their
own kind.  It’s like oil and water.  A djinni would throw a wolf into a rage
simply by opening his mouth.”

Imelda found herself prickling
all over again.  “This is an open band, Inquisidora.  Mind your tongue or I
will cut it off.”  Every member of the Order within range would have heard the
woman’s disrespect—and Imelda’s reply.

For a long moment, there was
utter silence on the other end of the radio.  Then, softly, Zenaida said,
“You
will remain tasked to the djinni until you bring him home.”
  The
transmission ended with static.

Imelda grunted and returned the
radio to Jacquot, who was giving her an odd look.  “Is there a reason why we
lied to La Inquisitrice?”

“She’s a power-hungry concha,”
Imelda said, grateful to her Paraguayan friends for the perfect word to
describe the cunt she worked with.  “That, and I’d bet my pistol it isn’t what
is binding the djinni.”

Jacquot raised both eyebrows, but
nodded.  “As you say, Madame.”

She sighed.  “Still, we must test
it.”  Dragging the symbol from her pocket, she held it up between them.  “Would
you like to do the honors, Jacquot, or shall I?”

The Frenchman eyed the talisman
as if it were the head of a viper.  Crossing himself, he said, “The ‘honor’ is
all yours, ma mie.”

Imelda grinned at the Frenchman’s
reaction.  While she herself found magic despicable, Jacquot would rather die
by fire than touch an article crafted with it.  Of all the twenty-one members
of her team, Jacquot was one of three who refused all ‘augmented’ gear.  He
would
get into a helicopter, if given no other alternative, but he always made
certain no part of it contacted his skin.

“Very well,” Imelda said. 
Gripping the symbol in a fist, she said, “Djinni of this talisman, I claim your
service and I call upon you to grant my wish.”

She thought perhaps the breezes
increased in the branches above, but it could have been her imagination. 
Imelda tried again, in Arabic this time.  She tried three more languages, then
sighed and dropped the talisman back into a pocket. 

“It did not work.”  She could not
tell if Jacquot was grateful or disappointed with the result.

Imelda shrugged.  “Perhaps there
is something else the wolf carries with her that we’ve not yet seen.”

Because Jacquot would not touch
the body—he belonged to one of the stricter sects of the Order who would not
even profane their skin with the flesh of the cursed—Imelda told him to go
looking for traces of the djinni as she began to roll the already-stiffening
corpse onto its back alone.  Imelda spent a good several minutes searching the
wolf’s body, looking for some sign of how she had simply vanished.  She found
nothing.  The woman’s pockets were completely empty, and she had carried no
backpack that they had been able to find.

That bothered Imelda.  How had the
wolf planned to survive the trek through the forest?  She had been back to the
Sleeping Lady, of that Imelda was sure.  The generator had been shut off, and
the clothes the wolf now wore were identical to the ones that were now missing
from a precautionary photograph she’d taken of the cabin after she’d ransacked
it. 

So where had the wolf been
planning to go without food, gear, and matches?  She had to have had some sort
of safe haven in mind, somewhere to the north.  A cabin or a lodge, somewhere
between here and Denali National Park?  …Or beyond it?  Encompassing over nine
thousand square miles of federally-owned wilderness, no private dwellings were
allowed within the boundaries of the vast park itself.  It was
possible
that demons had created a safe-haven somewhere within, but not
probable
. 
As one of Alaska’s greatest tourist destinations, the entire park was carefully
patrolled by overzealous rangers who were known to stop their helicopters to
pick up a single piece of trash that had blown off of the park’s only two-lane
roadside.

The djinni’s goal had to be
before
the park…didn’t it?  They couldn’t possibly have been planning to go
over
the Alaska Range.  After all, there were literally dozens of fishing lodges, hunting
retreats, and recreational cabins between Carboy Creek and the Alaska Range. 
But which one had they been aiming for?  The tiny woman’s blood-drenched
clothes left no indication of their destination.

Eventually, Imelda stood up,
disgusted, and retrieved her pistol from its belt.  She slapped a new magazine
of silver into its base and sighted down the barrel at the wolf’s head.  Her
research had suggested that a djinni had a meager supply of Fourthlander magic
to use at whim, which meant a djinni had some ability to heal, even without use
of a wish, and Imelda wasn’t about to take chances that the duo were somehow
more friendly than Zenaida suspected.  After all, not even a djinni could patch
together someone’s skull, if it were properly blown apart. 

She was tightening her finger
upon the trigger when a sudden, icy breeze nudged her from behind, shoving her
forward a step, tracing frigid fingers down her neck.  The winds had picked up
around her, and what Imelda had at first taken for rotor-wash she quickly
discovered was something else entirely.  Wind wrenched at the treetops
overhead, slapping branches together in its force.  Then, from behind, light
seared the darkness suddenly, too bright to have come from any human source. 
Imelda twisted, gun in hand.