Blood Red (9781101637890) (29 page)

Then again, running off was probably the smartest thing they could have done, and it certainly got them out of the way of the fight. Having a couple of rearing, thrashing horses in that melee would have been very. . . .awkward.

Dominik mounted his horse, and he and Markos trotted off down the game trail; the thudding of hooves in leaf litter quickly faded to nothing. Now alone, Rosa went to examine the bodies.

First she slid and scrambled all the way down into the cave; there wasn't much light coming in from the entrance at all, and she didn't have the advantage of Markos' superior night vision. So once on relatively level ground, she closed her eyes for a moment and concentrated. This spell didn't come easily to an Earth Master; it was generally more of an Air or Fire ability. A simple Earth Magician couldn't have done this, it required a disproportionate amount of power than an Air or Fire Mage would need to supply.
Come on. You've done this before.
Earth power didn't
want
to produce visible effects. Earth power preferred to make things grow, not glow. But when she opened her eyes again, her hand was glowing as brightly as a lit candle, or two.

She held it above her head, so as to avoid blinding herself, and waited while her eyes adjusted to the cave. It wasn't a very deep one, and after a moment, it was easy to see the gypsy boy's body, brought unceremoniously down into the cave and left in the middle of the floor.
Brought,
not dragged: an important distinction. There was no sign of dragging at all, no smears on the rock, and given how the throat had been torn out, there would have been. And the body itself was in a heap, not pulled straight, as it would have been if it had been dragged. She moved to the body, knelt beside it with her hand casting light on it, and examined it. The shifter must have brought the body here in its half-form, then dumped it.

Then fed. That was what Dominik had meant by “not pretty.” It looked as if he had done the feeding in full wolf form, which would correspond with Markos finding him asleep. Wolves generally slept after a heavy meal.

But there it was. The creature had not just killed the boy, it had fed on him.
Fed.

This was the worst sort of shifter. One that not only killed humans, but ate them. And given that the beast had brought the boy here in half-form, he didn't even have the poor excuse that the wolf had taken over. He had knowingly brought the body here, knowingly gone full-wolf, for the purposes of feeding on the body. Obscene. Cannibalistic.

She had seen all she needed to see. She extinguished the light on her hand, and made her way slowly, slipping in the loose rock, back up the slope to where the shifter lay.

She paused beside him, and examined him with a frown on her face. He looked . . . wrong. Not in the way that shifters always looked in the half-form, twisted, warped amalgams of beast and man, but wrong in other ways. Diseased. As if, even in human form, there would have been things obviously wrong with him.

The fur was patchy—
mangy,
she would have said, if it had been a true wolf or a dog. The skin where there was no fur had swaths of red, roughened, flaking areas. The face—she was used to the half-wolf, half-human faces of the shifters in this form, and this creature . . . the skull was strangely flattened in front, and the eyes set too close together. The claws were yellow and brittle, and looked unhealthy. The tail had lost half its fur. In fact, the
only
area of fur that looked healthy was the band around its torso that represented the wolfskin belt that all sorcerous shifters used for their transformation.

She caught a glimpse of something glittering around its neck, and reached down, fingers catching on a thin chain hidden in the patchy chest fur. She pulled. It broke. And as she pulled it off the body, she was strangely unsurprised to find there was a little copper medallion dangling from it.

A medallion that showed the Stag of St. Hubert, with the inverted cross between its horns.

That was two of these medals now. Both found on shifters in Romania—in Transylvania, to be precise. There was something going on here, something
besides
the usual “sorcerer uses blood magic to become a shifter.”

One such medal could have been a fluke, but two?

One—well, a sufficiently motivated magician could very well have had the medal made just for himself. Or he could have made it himself. It wasn't that hard to carve wax into a medal form, press it into clay, and pour in some molten copper.

Two identical medals meant someone had made a more permanent mold, one that could be reused, and then had them cast or cast them himself. Two identical medals, found miles and miles apart, meant someone was giving them away to shifters.

Why?

Just how many more were there?

And what did this mean?

Was there a sorcerer out here who was taking like-minded fiends and teaching them? Turning them into—what? A kind of counter-Bruderschaft?

Or had the plot to do so only just begun?

T
HE
sound of many horses pushing through the forest alerted her to the arrival of Dominik, Markos and . . . whoever they were bringing with them. They were coming at the trot, so there was a dull rumble of hooves on the ground, and the noise of horses that were less skittish than the cart horses pushing their way through the underbrush on either side of the game trail.

Dominik was in the lead as they came up the defile, with Markos on a borrowed horse behind him. The borrowed horse was even more stolid than the two cart horses were; it clearly did not care what was on its back, as long as whatever was there wasn't actively sticking teeth or claws into it. When Rosa invoked Earth Magic to touch its mind, she was amused to discover that all it was thinking about was whether there might be something to eat when they got where they were going.

And behind him was a procession of mixed gypsies and villagers, mounted singly or double on horses and ponies. They gypsies all looked stricken; the women were weeping, and the one woman that Rosa thought was the boy's mother was nearly collapsing with grief.

At least she'll have a body to bury now.
Cold comfort, but what was worse? Always wondering what had happened, or knowing the truth? In Rosa's experience, it was uncertainty that was the harder of the two.

Rosa moved off to one side, discretely out of the way, as soon as Dominik came into view. Really, at the moment, she didn't want to be seen at all. It wasn't that she felt at all guilty—how could she have done anything, when they hadn't even reached the village when the boy was killed? But
her
presence was a complication that simply didn't need to happen, and wouldn't, if she stayed out of the way. She let Dominik be the one to show them the shifter, and take the gypsies down to the cave to deal with the boy's body. Dominik had been the one who had been talking to them after all . . . and if they assumed that Dominik had been the one that killed the shifter, that was fine with her.

They all left their horses at the top of the scree tied to a couple of scrawny saplings there. Then they divided into two parties; Markos led the villagers, and Dominik led the gypsies. The gypsies solemnly got torches out of bags tied to their saddles, as the three village men huddled in subdued and nervous consultation around the shifter's body. Two of them were the old men who had seen her talking to the
haus-alvar.
She had a pretty good idea they knew exactly what they were looking at. In the folktales she had collected, there were plenty of stories of shifters.

It must be a shock to actually see a dead one.

Dominik got out a little tin matchbox, pulled out a lucifer match, and struck a light to one of the torches; the rest lit theirs from the first once it was properly burning. They all made their way gingerly down the scree and into the cave—and as she had pretty much expected, almost immediately wailing and lamenting echoed hauntingly out of the cave mouth and up the slope. It put a cold chill down her back to hear it, for it sounded as if spirits were crying from deep inside the earth.

Well, at least now they have a body to mourn.
Dominik emerged from the cave mouth and scrambled his way up the slope, as Markos joined the three villagers at the shifter's body. Dominik paused there as well, and that was, she considered, her signal to join the group.

They all turned to look at her as her feet rattled a little stream of stones down toward them. From the looks on their faces, the three village men expected some answers out of her. But they waited until she had joined them before speaking.

“So . . . you are the monster hunter then?” said one of the two old men, looking at her with a piercing gaze. “The one that Markos Nagy told us about? Even though you are a woman?”

“I am,” she affirmed, and turned the lapel of her coat so they could see the Bruderschaft badge pinned there. “I have been with the Brotherhood of the Foresters in the Black Forest since I was a child.” At their puzzled looks, she realized that their knowledge of geography probably didn't extend past Sibiu. “That is in Germany, a long way to the west past Sibiu, past Budapest.”

That got nods of recognition, and she continued. “The Brotherhood was formed to kill monsters. They rescued me from another like this one—” she toed the dead shifter. “It had murdered my grandmother. They learned that I was born with the magic of the Earth, which is what they use to fight these creatures, and took me in. I have been one of them ever since.”

Another frown of puzzlement creased all three brows. “But . . . you speak as if you come from here—” said the second old man hesitantly. “Your speech is just like ours, and even people from Brasov sound different from us.”

She nodded. “Magic gives me the gift of tongues,” was all she said. They all nodded sagely. So . . . they were all familiar
enough
with magic to accept that statement—or else they were just going by “the gift of tongues” mentioned in their tales and in the Bible.

Then again . . . there was a half-wolf shifter at their feet. How was the “gift of tongues” any harder to believe in than
that?
It was actually not so bad having to explain all of this to people who were “backward” and “old fashioned” if not “medieval” by the standards of the folks living in cities.
If I ever need to hunt a shifter or other terrible creature in a city, I could have a hard time keeping out of trouble with the police.
How would you explain to a policeman in, say, Hamburg that you were hunting something out of what he considered to be a fairy tale?

Well, even if one or two of these men had had doubts about what was roaming their hills, they had none now. Something that solid and real lying at his feet was likely to make a believer out of the most hardened of skeptics.

And this is a part of the world where they take witchcraft seriously.

“And you—studied to do this sort of thing?” asked the third, and slightly younger man. He was middle-aged, rather than old, and seemed a bit dazed by all of this. “You are a woman!” He said it as if it was an accusation, which was—well, it was something she had heard before when hunting. As if a woman was completely incapable of doing anything other than being a victim.

At least he didn't say, “You are a girl!”

“The Brotherhood has several women in it,” she said, and pulled the coach gun from the sheath on her back. “I don't need to be strong, I just need to be properly armed, trained, and prepared to kill. It doesn't take being a man to shoot, and shoot well. And like a gun, magic does not care if the person using it is a man or a woman.”

The first of the old men burst into laughter at that, and slapped his leg. But the laughter cutting across the gypsies' mourning sounded brittle and fragile, and the old man cut himself off rather quickly. “Pardon,” he said. “That was unseemly, and rude, even if they are gypsies down there. They still have feelings, and they have lost a child. But she certainly put you in your place, my friend! She reminds me of my Tatya! Especially the day I found her skinning the wolf she had shot at the back door! ‘
Do you think I was going to wait for you to come home, old faker?'
she said,
‘The wolf wouldn't!'”
He laughed again, only this time, more of a hearty chuckle behind a formidable moustache.

“This is Petrescu,” Dominik said, quickly, nodding at the first old man. “And Vasile—” the second “—and Lungu.” That was for the middle-aged man. “Petrescu is the mayor of the village.”

Markos nodded. “I went to the inn to see who in the village wanted to come to see what we had killed, because there was always the chance that this
thing
, when it was a man, had lived in the village. These three thought they had the best chance of recognizing it, if so.”

“And I saw you speaking to the—” Petrescu paused, and shrugged. “Well, you know. At the inn. So I knew you were a magician. We have not seen a real magician, not a good one anyway, for a long, long time. We had a witch—a good witch—” he added hastily. “But she died before she could take anyone as her successor. Some of us can
see
things, the little things that aren't animals, but no one has been able to use any magic here for a very long time.”

She thought about that a moment. “Fifty years?” she guessed. “Fifty years since you had a magician, and not a witch?” She thought that the “witch” had probably been a herb-wife with a little Earth Magic. Just enough to make her medicines more effective, and to allow her to get advice from Elementals, when they chose to speak to her.

He nodded after a moment of thought. “Probably that much. It was in my father's time, for sure.”

“And you don't see anything familiar in this creature?” she asked.

All three men shook their heads vigorously. “Nothing about it,” Petrescu said for them all.

“Do you know anyone in the village with a habit of wearing a copper saint's medal?” she asked cautiously.

That elicited a laugh and headshakes. “We might be poor by what city folk have,” Vasile said, with a snort. “But we have our standards! No one here would make a saint's medal out of
copper.
That would be an insult to the saints!”

So . . . whoever this was, he didn't hide himself in the village. He either lived in another village, or more likely, had a cave somewhere in these hills.

That might be the explanation for why the killings started forty years ago; a shifter had arrived here from somewhere else, then discovered the area was fundamentally unguarded. With no one around who could see magic to track him, as long as he retained human intellect and muddled his trail accordingly, he would have been safe from purely human hunters. But could this shifter be
that
old?

She looked down at the body. There was no sign of graying hair, but that didn't mean anything, not really. Old wolves only got gray around the muzzle, and this thing's muzzle was all but bare.

But age had other signs. The skin got delicate, easily bruised. Old people lost hair. The regenerative capabilities of the shift wouldn't be able to fix all that—shifting didn't make you younger. And maybe that was why this shifter looked so . . . shabby. The scaly, rough and red patches of skin, the patches of lost hair—even the deformed-looking skull—those might all be signs of age. It might be that the half-form, the one that was the strongest, but was also the hardest to control, was showing the similar signs of age that the human form would.

It seemed that Petrescu was thinking the same things. “This creature could be that old,” he said. “It looks like an old man that is falling apart, in a way. But if it
is
that old, how could it manage to kill?”

“It only killed a boy,” she reminded him. “The other victims, at least the recent ones—they were undoubtedly alone, but were they also young?”

Petrescu pulled at his moustache, and turned to Lungu. “Well, we know it was killing people on the road, and from other villages, so we don't know exactly, but—”

“Even an old wolf can kill a man if he sneaks up on him,” Lungu said with authority. “I am the best wolf hunter in the village, and I have seen wolves with gray muzzles tear the throats out of strong young men who were not wary enough.”

“There you are, then,” Petrescu said, with a nod. “This thing could be that old, maybe. How young can they turn, like this?”

The horses stirred uneasily where they were tied. They didn't like being this close to the shifter corpse . . .

Or maybe they didn't like being this close to Markos.

“This is a sorcerer,” she explained. “Or—was. I was taught that they shift by means of spells, spells that take blood. Human blood, for a spell this strong.” She sheathed her coach gun, dropped down beside the body, sitting on her heels, and drew her knife, pointing out the wolfskin band around the thing's waist. “You see this? See how it is different from the rest of his hide? When he's a man, that's a belt, a belt he keeps next to his skin, under his clothing. They use a wolfskin belt, blood, and a magic ritual, these shifters—I would rather not go into any more detail than that. But that is how they become the wolf and the half-wolf, and I have heard of sorcerers as young as fifteen being able to transform. So if you are asking me, could
this
creature have been the one responsible for forty years of killing, all by himself?”

She looked up, to see all three of the men nodding, and looking anxious.

“Well then, I have to say it is possible.” She stood up and sheathed her knife, then rubbed the back of her neck under her hair. She was constrained to tell the truth. It was possible. But there were a lot of things wrong with that theory. “I have never
heard
of a single sorcerer being able to kill one human a week for forty years—and yes, that is how many deaths there have been, that is why we are here—but it isn't impossible.”

“That many!” Vasile swallowed hard. “But—why?”

“Well . . . there are other reasons for killing besides feeding, as this one did.” She wondered if they thought she was somehow inhuman for being able to discuss such a thing dispassionately, but the truth was, this was all old to her, where it was new and raw to them. “The spell to shift requires blood constantly to renew, and the strongest for that is human blood. That is the likeliest answer, but there are others, as well.”

“Such as?” Petrescu asked. Of the three of them, he seemed the most interested.

“It depends on what other magic he was doing. He may have been paying some demon in blood and lives for protection, and that might be why you were never able to catch him,” she pointed out. “Once a sorcerer has shifted like this, he keeps shifting. I have never heard of one who shifted only once, then stopped. But when you start killing your fellow man, you attract a lot of attention. Protecting himself with the help of a demon might be why you were never able to find him.”