Alaskan Fury (12 page)

An
angel
was standing
behind her, formed of wisps of frost and vapor.

“
Our sister of vengeance
,”
the radiant entity whispered to her, words so deep and so powerful Imelda heard
them in her soul.

Immediately, Imelda fell to her
knees, making the sign of the cross upon her chest.  “Mother of God,” she
whispered, in awe of the angel before her.  It looked to be not one, but a
thousand of them, their faces fluctuating, moving, changing, but there was no
mistaking the heavenly radiance searing from their wings and their sword.  She
crossed herself again and bowed her head and whispered the Prayer to Saint
Michael.  She was still finishing it when Jacquot came jogging up, panting. 
“What was that
light
, Inquisitrice?”

Imelda ignored him, finishing the
final plea to the archangel, her fingers clutching the cross at her chest.  “…O
prince of the heavenly host, by the power of God, thrust into hell Satan and
all the other evil spirits who prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls.
Amen.”  When she looked up, the vision was gone.

“You summoned the demon?” 
Jacquot sounded wary, and he was keeping a distance, his rifle up, staring
nervously at the frosty shrubbery in front of her.

Slowly getting back up from her
knees, still in shock, Imelda shook her head, still awash in wonder.  Our
sister of vengeance.  The angel had spoken to her.  Given her a message.

“Madame Inquisitrice?”

Still silent, Imelda looked down
at the corpse.  Around them, the wind was whipping in the trees, tearing
branches from above to come cascading down around them.  Imelda barely heard
it.  Her heart was still pounding with the joy of meeting one of her Lord’s
messengers.  “I was just given a Sign, Jacquot.”

Jacquot eyed the treetops
cautiously.  “A Sign, Madame Inquisitrice?”

“An angel,” she whispered, her
eyes still fixed to the place where the vision had disappeared.  “It came to
me.”

Now Jacquot was eyeing
her
with caution.  Tentatively, the Frenchman said, “Messengers often appear to
God’s Chosen, Inquisitrice.”  Doubtless, she could see him thinking, a possible
cause behind her spectacular rise through the ranks of the Order.

The thought that
she
was
one of God’s Chosen left Imelda with a sudden wash of joy that she quickly
squashed.  Pride was the first step before the Fall.  Taking a deep breath, she
released the cross at her neck and replaced the gun to her hip.  “This is to
stay between the two of us, Jacquot.”

Jacquot nodded, and, with a wary
glance at the forest around them, said, “Then if you do not mind, ma mie, I
would retreat from under these trees.”

With the crash of a falling birch
only a hundred feet distant, Imelda readily agreed.  She jogged to follow
Jacquot as he ducked through the creaking, howling stand of birch, and was
already well out of the forest, on her way back to the helicopter, when she
realized something was heating through the bulletproof lining of her
chestplate.  Frowning, she dug her fingers into her pocket and pulled out the
wolf’s talisman.

It was hot to the touch.

She hesitated, turning back,
glancing at the wind-whipped forest.  Another birch tree fell with a massive
crash, snapping limbs from a spruce and shearing a stand of willow in half.

She hadn’t shot the wolf.

Her bodyguard slammed a heavy
hand on her shoulder, startling her.  Gesturing to the cockpit and the German pilot
who was even then struggling to keep the helicopter stable, Giuseppe, a former
Italian mobster-turned-warrior-of-God, cried, “We need to get out of here,
Inquisidora!  If we don’t lift off now, the winds will tear us apart.”  Even
then, another massive birch—unstable, and without tap-roots in the six inches
of loam that was the extent of Alaskan ‘topsoil’—came crashing down like a
titan, this time landing in the creek only fifty feet from the helicopter’s
rotors.  Another quickly followed, on the other side of the creek.

Pocketing the talisman once more,
Imelda hurried after Giuseppe to board the chopper.

“Sit down and hold on,
Inquisitorin!” her older German pilot rumbled at her.  “This Ficker is trying
to pull us into die Bäume.”  He bent to his controls and started yelling in German,
though if it was to her or his copilot, who was hastily strapping in beside
him, or to God in general, she had no idea.  All she knew was that the
helicopter was lurching dangerously towards the edge of the forest, and the
pilot’s German was getting more frantic. 

The next few heart-stopping
moments had the rotors within feet of the twisted branches jutting out from the
birch and cottonwoods before they spun up enough to lift them out of the
wind-whipped gully, scraping one of their skids on the canopy as they pulled
free.

“Du Hurensohn,” the graying pilot
howled, laughing and shaking a fist at the trees pulling out of reach beneath
them, “Deine Mutter schwitzt beim Kacken!  Fick dich!  Fick dich!  Lutsch’
meine Eier, Mutterficker!”  Still laughing, he slapped the helicopter’s dash
like he was congratulating an old friend, then started babbling to the copilot
in loud, happy German.

“In English!” she cried.

Her flat-faced Italian bodyguard
glanced over his shoulder at her and said, “Herr Drescher says that we are free
of the trees, Inquisidora.”

Imelda raised an eyebrow, for she
was pretty sure she’d heard something about a whore in there, but wasn’t about
to argue.  Though she was not skilled in the art of piloting aircraft, she’d
seen plenty of crashes to know that, had one of those rotors contacted one of
those trees, her night would have gone from bad to worse.

“Begin a search pattern,” she
growled.  “Start here, move in concentric circles outward.  The djinni can’t
have gone far.”

Giuseppe calmly relayed her order
to the pilot, who was still yelling and shaking his fist at the ground.  Upon
hearing her command, the big man turned suddenly in his seat, his blond, hairy
face filled with disgust.  “I’m taking this Schlampe home, Inquisitorin. 
Look
at the trees.  It’s a Chinook.”

A Chinook was, Imelda had learned
after six months of living in this unpredictable part of the United States, the
native Alaskan word for ‘warm wind.’  It was volatile and sudden, and was
responsible for ripping apart entire airfields in its passage, tumbling Bush
planes and helicopters into piles like discarded toys.  It had been responsible
for 70-degree temperature shifts overnight, and had been known to tear the
roofs off of the local schools.  It could also last for entire weeks.

Cursing, Imelda said, “Fly around
it.”

“Fly around the
wind,
Inquisitorin?”  Herr Drescher laughed.  He gestured a hairy arm at the ground,
where even then, more trees were twisting and snapping in the breeze.  “Of
course.  Just tell me where the wind is not while I keep us from rolling us
into the treetops.”

“This was not on this morning’s
weather briefing,” Imelda snapped, watching birch trees bend dangerously in the
forest beneath her.

“Then let us put in our
complaints to God,” Herr Drescher said, “and allow me to take us back home
before I lose control of this Hure again.”  He had already turned the
helicopter around and was heading back toward the enclave hidden up in the
valley below Eklutna Lake.

Imelda glared at him.  The
Germans were…infuriating…to work with.  They were loud, boisterous, irreverent,
liked to drink, and did not take orders well.  She also knew, however, that
Herr Drescher was one of the best men at his job, and she probably already owed
her life to him that day.

“Very well,” she muttered, as if
he were waiting for her response.  “Take us home, then.  We shall await the
fading of the winds while you pray for forgiveness for your transgressions of
speech.”

“My what?” the blond German
yelled back at her over his meaty shoulder.

“Your foul mouth!” she yelled
back.

“Oh!” he laughed.  “That.”  He
shook his head.  To his copilot, he chuckled a long string of German, then said
to her, “As you command, Frau Nieve.”  Gaining loft, Drescher tilted the nose
forward and they were plowing through the air with great speed, though still
sliding sideways due to the sudden force of the winds.  As they flew, Imelda
once more reached into her pocket and pulled the wolf’s talisman free.  It was
still warm in her hands, though that could easily be attributed to her own
body-temperature.  Had she imagined its heat?  Had she really seen the Lord’s
messenger?  Somehow, she knew the two of them were linked, yet she had not the
first idea of what ‘our sister of vengeance’ meant.  Was it the name of a
saint? 

She would have to
consult her Padre.

Chapter 6: Breaking
the Ice

‘Aqrab paced the sands until he
absolutely
could not
wait any longer and twisted back to the First Realm
fully ready to kill anyone who stood in his way.

The helicopter, to his relief,
had moved on.  The sun had partially risen in his absence, though trees were
down on all sides, almost as if a tornado had hit.  Further, all around him,
the wind was screaming in the branches, slapping at the spruce boughs, creaking
as trees rubbed against each other.  It was also warmer, now, above freezing.

‘Aqrab’s heart stopped, however,
when he saw that the moss around his magus had been disturbed.  Not only that,
but she carried two new holes in her belly and chest, each oozing a tiny
trickle of blood.  Blood that she could not afford to lose.

 “Mon Dhi’b!” he cried, dropping
to his knees beside her.  He laid his palms over her newest wounds and pulled
the scraps of silver free.  He sealed the flesh with the rub of a thumb, then
put a hand on her neck, felt for a pulse.

At first, he found none.  ‘Aqrab,
however, had had three thousand years to learn the quirks of a Fury’s
existence.  When wounded past the ability to fight, they slowed, their bodies
relaxing until their breaths could come at days apart, or centuries.  As long
as they still had the blood of Furies within their veins, they could continue
to live in a form of stasis until they received help, or healed—or their
enemies finished the job.  To quarter the body or to cut off the head was the
easiest way to drain a Fury of her power, but these fools, thinking she was a
wolf, blessedly hadn’t known that.

It took an eternity, long minutes
of holding his breath, praying to every god ‘Aqrab knew as the wind flailed at
the trees above him, before he felt his magus’s slow, languid heartbeat.  A
single thump beneath his fingers.

He was so relieved he bent his
face to her forehead and touched her brow with his.  “Mon Dhi’b,” he whispered
to her pale, sleep-slackened face, “you are one lucky little wolf.”  With that,
he hauled her from the bloodied mosses and tossed her over his shoulder. 
Grunting at her weight—even after hauling her through the Fourth Lands, ‘Aqrab
still hadn’t grown accustomed to the heaviness of the Third Lander she carried
in her veins—he headed northeast at a lope, staying well away from the main
waterway of the Yentna River.  He had seen the boats—without roads or highways
in the Alaskan Bush, he knew their enemies would be using the water in lieu of
pavement. 

That, and the iron monsters of
the sky.  He was still unnerved that they had seen him in the half-realm. 
That, according to everything he knew, should be impossible.

He ran from morning until
nightfall, skirting creeks and waterways, walking as far and as fast as he
could while the winds continued to thrash the trees around him, knocking the
occasional spruce or birch from its shallow root system, sending it crashing to
the ground in a cacophony of snapping limbs and whipping branches. 

Sometime around noon, it began to
rain.  A fast, sideways, biting rain that felt like a hail of cold needles
jabbing him in the skin.

‘Aqrab had always hated the
rain.  He shuddered as the first droplets hit his head and shoulders, draining
the Fourth Lander magics from his body as they oozed their way down his arms
and chest to leave steaming violet puddles on the ground in his passage. 
Normally, he would have simply twisted to the half-realm, or, even better,
disappeared to the firelands completely, but with his mistress barely clinging
to life on his back, he had to endure.

By nightfall, the winds had died,
but ‘Aqrab simply could not take the slimy, cold, filthy feel of the water any
longer.  After much searching, he ducked under a pocket carved out beneath the
roots of a fallen cottonwood tree and dragged the magus in after him.  While
cramped, it was a blessed relief from the exhausting, energy-draining tug of
water against his skin.

“You survive all that, mon
Dhi’b?” he asked, touching her neck once more.

That she had not stirred at all
throughout the rainstorm, despite the fact he’d closed her wounds, was not a
good sign.  It seemed to take centuries to feel her heartbeat, and ‘Aqrab could
not be sure, but it almost seemed as if she were slipping
further
into
stasis.  Had he missed a wound?

Frowning, ‘Aqrab stretched her
out in the muddied clay in front of him and summoned a flame upon his palm so
that he could see her.

His heart stopped.  Where her
lips had been blue before, now they were
white
.  “Mon Dhi’b,” he
growled, rolling her over and pushing aside her icy-cold sweater to locate a
wound she’d taken just below the right breast, “you need to tell me these
things.”  He had not found it earlier because the bullet had made a clean exit,
its entry and exit points hidden by the curve of her breast and the strap of
her bra, the flow of blood so slowed that, throughout the day, only a pink spot
had appeared upon her sweater on either side of her torso. 

He winced, seeing that, wondering
how much of the blood of Furies still resided in her veins.  With her this
drained, those two tiny pink spots were precious.

What was worse, she was
cold
. 
Her hands, her face, her neck…all of it was as ice.  And her fingers…  They
were tight curls of bone, refusing to be pried outward, as stiff as a corpse.

That
convinced him.  “You
will hate me for this, mon Dhi’b,” he growled, closing his fist over the flame,
“but I am running out of options.”  A Fury couldn’t die of frostbite alone. 
But a Fury who had been shot, her lifeblood lost due to an enemy’s wound,
might.

He set a tiny stick afire and
lodged it into the half-frozen clay nearby, giving him enough light to see by. 
Still, he hesitated.  To physically
undress
her…  Such was, for a Fury,
an act of war.

Yet wrapped in icy-wet cloth, her
lips white as death, she wasn’t about to undress herself.

Besides. 
She
had been the
one to declare that war, three thousand years earlier, when she tried to chop
off his head.  All
he
had been doing had been enjoying a quiet day under
the palms, sprawled out on a blanket, sucking on dates.

Hiding in the First Lands, he now
recalled, because he’d just suffered yet another colossal failure with the
latest djinni woman that had laughed and abandoned him, after he couldn’t
consummate their union.

He narrowed his eyes down at the
magus.  Certain things, he decided, were going to be rectified.  Soon.

Not while she slept, of course. 
But soon.  He had spent too long without, and her perfect, slender body had
taunted him for over three millennia.  He wondered if she realized that was
part of the agreement of truce.  Probably not.  She seemed quite certain that
he was celibate, which was probably better for both of them, at least for now.

For now, he would satisfy himself
with holding her body against his own, pretending she slept in willing
contentment, instead of teetered on her death bed.

At least, he decided, she
wouldn’t be able to punish him with shadow when she woke. 
He
now held
that particularly distasteful ability, though he kept it as far from his
awareness as possible.  And, while she still could—and would—certainly make his
life miserable in
other
ways, he was free of tasting the poison of the
First Lands in his system ever again.

Besides, he had always wondered
what the little wolf’s body felt like, skin-to-skin.  He would have to remove
his sirwal, of course, since the silk may get in the way of heat transference. 
An entire layer of silk…  He shook his head.  No, couldn’t have that.  His poor
little wolf was
much
too cold for that.

Perhaps it was with more
eagerness than necessary that he found the hem of his mistress’s prim,
long-sleeved, turtle-necked sweater and pulled the muddy, sleet-crusted thing
from her body.  Doing the same with her boots and heavy denim pants, he hung
each of them on a root above him, where they would dry from the heat of his
body.  Then he hesitated, debating over whether or not removing her bra and
underwear were truly necessary.

Necessary, no.  Delightful?  Yes.

And thus, while that rational
corner of his mind started babbling of wings of light and radiant swords, he
stripped the last sodden articles of clothing from his mistress’s body, then
removed his sirwal.  Then, spreading out on his back upon the frozen ground, as
naked as he’d sprung from his mother’s loins, ‘Aqrab pulled the little magus up
over his chest and wrapped his arms around her back.

Immediately, his face twisted in
distaste at the combined wetness and iciness of her body—there were few things
in the world that he considered more repulsive than water and cold.  The whole
experience was not as enticing as he had expected.  Much, in fact, like taking
a man-sized tuna from a fishmonger’s freezer and embracing it against his naked
flesh.

Removing his sirwal, he quickly
realized as disgusting droplets of water began melting down his skin and
catching in the folds between his scrotum and his thighs, had further not been
his wisest idea of the last twenty-four hours.  Gritting his teeth with
distaste, for a djinni would rather smear himself in filth than wash with
anything other than clean sand, he nonetheless continued to hold her. 

After an hour, the last water
upon her body had evaporated as steam, and ‘Aqrab was able to consider the
odd-yet-pleasant feel of a Firstlander woman’s cool flesh against his own.  He
even allowed himself to relax, watching her.

His magus looked so much…less
bitter…when unconscious.  It is why he’d gotten caught so many times, on those
sleepless nights he spent studying her in her sleep.  She looked almost…pleasant. 
Even white-lipped and pale as a corpse, she had a certain…serenity…about her. 
Something she never maintained in life.

At least not when she looked at
him
.

Grimacing, ‘Aqrab busied himself
with other thoughts.  He began feeling along her thigh and leg, trying to
locate the first two wounds the Inquisitors had given her.  They weren’t
difficult to find.  Each bore a solid lump of metal beneath the flesh, like a
hard knot that ground against bone.

The little fool.  She’d sealed
her wounds over the silver.  Probably an act of desperation, then.  He glanced
at her face, knowing that she didn’t have the strength to endure him slicing
those wounds open, especially not with something as crude as a rock or a sharp
stick.

The wounds would doubtless
continue to pain her—if her past run-ins with Inquisitors was any measure,
whatever silver leached into her muscles before she removed the bullets would
continue to aggravate the Third Lander for weeks or months beyond. 
Unfortunately, until she woke, his little angel of vengeance was stuck with
them…

‘Aqrab frowned, realizing for the
first time that his wolf no longer wore her pendant.  Had the Inquisitors taken
it?  Then he winced, realizing that, in the last twelve hours of being dangled
over his shoulder,
he
might have lost it.  And, without her Lord’s token,
she was going to have a more difficult time of directing her power. 

Remembering how long his magus
had worn that pendant, and how violently she had reacted the one time he had
tried to touch it, ‘Aqrab decided that, yes, it had undoubtedly been taken by
the Inquisitors.  Which, of course, would make her that much more intent on
bringing them all to their knees and chopping off their proffered heads.

The silly, rash little beast.

After the third hour passed and ‘Aqrab
saw no visible change in her condition, he decided he might be able to aid her
progress somewhat.  Focusing on her face, which had regained but a modicum of
its color, he began to seep Fourth-Lander magic through their soul-cord, into
her body.  It wasn’t much, but it might be able to help her begin rebuilding
her Fury.

“All right, little magus,” ‘Aqrab
muttered, as Law began to strain at his senses, in warning.  “That’s all I can
do for you without a wish.”  Indeed, if he were to drain any more that night,
the lords of his land would probably come looking for him.

Not, he thought unhappily, a
place he wanted to be, as his father would be amongst them, and the last thing
he wanted to do was explain to his sire why he was giving out free boons to a
heartless little wench that had tried to chop off his head and would happily do
so again, the moment she had her sword.

Warmth of the Mother
, but
he was tired of the gods meddling in his affairs.  The miserable dick-lickers
that they were, they were probably watching him from their thrones, drinking
date wine and being fed the fruit of pomegranates by a thousand luscious
virgins, laughing at the stupid djinni who had unwittingly twisted his own
words into a curse.  A Fury.  The Goddess be merciful, he was being forced to
celibacy—or settle for a Fury.  Him.  A djinni.  With no alternative but a
hot-tempered, utterly-unreasonable, brash, uncompassionate, violent, arrogant,
holier-than-thou
Fury
.  Angel of vengeance.  Death from the skies. 
Handmaiden of War.  Warrior-Priestess of Horus.  Great Justice of the Pact, who
had slain thousands with a simple swipe of her sword.