Blood Red (9781101637890) (37 page)

Rosa elected to literally walk backward, mere inches from Dominik, coach gun at the ready. Step by careful step they made their way deeper into the caves, until they came to a spot where the tunnel branched.

They knew from their implanted memories that the tunnel joined up again, not twenty feet later. The trouble was that this was an excellent place for an ambush.

Dominik stopped, uncertain. She moved up next to him, sideways, keeping a wary eye behind, and touched his arm. She pointed to him, and indicated the left hand side of the tunnel, then to herself, and indicated the right. He nodded, and she mouthed the single word “run.” He nodded again. They separated, and at her signal each of them sprinted through the assigned segment, weapon at the ready.

She dashed the twenty or so feet, sweating, seeing nothing, but expecting to hear the sound of combat at any moment from his side.

But there was nothing but the sound of his boots on the stone.
Her
boots, of course, were soft-soled, and she had learned to run in a sort of gliding motion that barely lifted her feet from the ground. She startled him a little as they met at the join again, but not so much that she was in danger of a crossbow bolt in her direction.

She let out a sigh that he echoed, and they went back to their previous pattern, her walking backward, him forward, down the twists and turns of the tunnel. The floor had been smoothed and polished, but it looked as if it had been by water rather than by the work of man. When he stopped again, she knew they had come to the next obstacle. The cave would widen out into an actual room. There would be a rough stone platform in the middle, something like a table, except natural. Off to one side would be a narrow little tunnel the Elementals had, in their own wisdom about such things, assumed was a dead-end cavelet. That would be an excellent place for the shifter to be waiting.

Rosa had noticed, in the back of her mind, that the smell of fresh blood had been getting stronger as they approached the larger room. Now she suddenly heard Dominik making a strangled sound, and turned—

To see sheer horror.

There was a pile of bodies on that platform in the center of the room, and blood literally ran from the stone and pooled at its base. There were at least ten, because that was the number of heads she counted, in a state of numb disbelief. Possibly, there were more. The stumps of candles stood at the cardinal points around the stone platform. All the bodies appeared to be of women, most were young, and some appeared to be pregnant. None of them looked like the shifter-kin. All were dressed in rags and were in various stages of emaciation. Their faces were frozen in expressions of agony and terror.

And the effluvia of blood magic was thick on the ground and tainting the air.

Well . . . now I know where else he was getting “children” from,
she thought, swallowing down her nausea.
And where he was getting the blood-power to keep fueling the shifts.
Because the power had to come from somewhere, every time one of these monsters shifted form. Probably they were using their wolfskin belts as the storage point, since the copper medallions hadn't shown any sign of being the talismans.

Scuff marks and bloodstains showed where the women had come from—that little side-cave that the Elementals hadn't troubled to explore. It must have been a sort of prison, where the shifters had held women they had somehow captured instead of killing.

All the other, terrible reasons to keep prisoners raced through Rosa's head, and she was pretty certain that all of them were right. But one thing was absolutely certain. The chief reason had been so that they would have a steady supply of sacrifices for blood magic.

And while his offspring had fought his battle, the chief of the shifters had been killing his captives on his altar. All of them.

So now, he had the power of ten, a dozen sacrifices, all in his hands. What could he do with that much power?

“This . . . isn't good, is it?” Dominik whispered in a stricken voice.

“No,” she said grimly. “It's not.”

But across the cavern, she could see the dim reflection of what must be an overpowering golden glow that was as healthy and beautiful and
sane
as the miasma of the residue of blood magic was sickening and hideous and insane. That was the
zâne,
who must have mounted an epic set of protections around Markos when the chief shifter began his slaughter. That they were still there and had not left was at least an indication that Markos was still alive and being protected. She took heart from that, and strength of will from that glow.

“You see where we need to go?” she breathed to him.

He nodded. She put her hand on his arm, briefly, trying to comfort. He turned toward her a moment, and she didn't think it was the strange Elemental sight that made him look green. She squeezed his arm.

“Then let's go.”

It was hard, hard to turn her back on that light, on the promise of somewhere that wasn't a home to terrible slaughter, that wasn't literally awash with blood. But he needed that promise more than she did. He was not a fighter, he was a healer, a physician, and yet he had been fighting at her side for most of the day, only to be confronted by a sight that must be out of his worst nightmares. It was one thing to know
of
such atrocities. It was quite another to be thrust without warning into the middle of one. Every sense must be in revolt against such evil, and every instinct telling him to flee. He was probably holding onto courage and sanity by the thinnest of margins, and he needed that promise of goodness ahead of him.

Whereas she . . . well, while this might be the worst such slaughter she had seen, it was by no means the first. There were still patches of great evil in the Schwarzwald, in places where no man had ventured for centuries. The evil had slept, gone dormant, and almost undetectable—except to the evil that was akin to it. Man, or things that had once been men, still sought out those patches of evil, awakened them, and drew strength from them.

And then they strengthened the evil with death.

You never became inured to such sights, they never ceased to horrify, but they ceased to shock. And to a lesser extent, they ceased to sicken.

And at least those poor women are no longer suffering from their captivity at that beast's hands.
She reminded herself that she had seen people “rescued” from similar situations, and they were never able to be made whole again. Many of them had been driven quite mad, and never regained their sanity. Those that were not mad were haunted for the rest of their lives. Sometimes those lives were very short indeed, for they could not bear the nightmares, the days haunted by fear, the nights when they could not sleep and every tiny sound threw them into a panic. There was never, ever any peace for them, and they killed themselves in despair.

The priests said that those who killed themselves could never enter Heaven—whereas these poor, murdered victims
surely
had, having suffered enough Hell on earth during their captivity to expiate any sin.

So . . . who was better off? Those who had died like this and gone to Heaven? Or those who had been rescued only to seek death at their own hands, and were doomed to Purgatory?

She dragged her attention back to the here and now, as Dominik began his slow, painful traverse of the cavern. They were going to have to go past that dreadful altar in order to get to the next part of the cave, and the nearer they came to it, the worse
she
felt, and she assumed,
he
felt. If it had only been the emotional and the physical nausea and horror, that would have been bad enough, but they were both being infected by the spiritual horror, and, being Earth Magicians, by the defilement of the Earth itself. There had been deep magic here, that was now perverted and turned to wicked ends. They felt that and it sickened the power they held within themselves. She strengthened the shield around the two of them—suspecting that he had more than enough on his hands without trying to erect and maintain shields. That helped her; she hoped it helped him. Occasionally, they touched for a moment as they edged their way across the stone, and she felt him trembling.

Of course, that might just have been exhaustion too. It felt as if they had been battling forever. They hadn't eaten since they had started off from the inn—
she
had eaten before leaving, out of experience, but she doubted that he had—and they'd only snatched moments to gulp down water from the bottles at their sides. She knew hers was empty now, and his probably was as well.

All right then . . .

“Stop a moment,” she whispered, and he obeyed. She couldn't do this any closer to that terrible altar than they were now, and she didn't want to wait until they were past, even though this would be much, much easier in the gentle protection of the
zâne.
But there was no telling what might happen between here and there, and they needed the boost now.

She strengthened the shield until it was as good as anything she might build ritually, and extended herself down, down into the earth at her feet, forcing her magic and her senses far past where the Earth had been profaned and polluted. She did not have to venture as deeply as she had feared she might. And to her weak-kneed relief, she was lucky; one of the great power-courses of Earth lay directly below them!

Small wonder these mountains were the home to so many uncanny creatures, so many Elementals . . . small wonder they were far more numerous than in her homeland.

She touched that great power source, tapped into it, and brought it up as if she had tapped into a deep spring. She let the power flow through herself and into Dominik, taking the place of the food he had not eaten and the water they were both feeling the lack of. It wasn't a perfect replacement, but she sensed some of his trembling ease, and felt him standing up a little stronger, felt his stance firming. When she had brought up as much as her own power could safely control, she let go of that mighty stream, and she heard him sigh.

“Thank you,” he whispered. She nudged him with an elbow to signal he should continue, and their painfully slow progress began again.

Past the altar, and she tried to look at it no more than she had to.

The floor of this cavern was clean of everything but blood. She suspected that the chief shifter deliberately kept his “family” out of here, to avoid having confrontations over his captives. That shifter she had killed in that other part of these mountains came from this “family”—so what had happened? She doubted he had gone on his own. This was too . . . ideal a haven for their kind. Plenty of victims, shelter, everything they could want. Surely he had been either driven out over conflict, or sent out to look for a new hunting ground and another secure cave like this one.

Driven out, I think. If this is like a wolf pack, a strong male will inevitably challenge the father, and his choices, if he lost that fight, would be to die, submit, or flee.

Just as she thought that, she caught a flicker of movement at the entrance to the captives' cave.

And that was all the warning she had.

One moment, that flicker of movement. The next, all the breath was driven out of her as something hit her across the midsection, knocking the coach gun out of her hands and sending it across the room. It hit the floor and discharged, knocking a shower of rock bits out of the ceiling as
she
hit the wall of the cave and saw stars.

She fought to get her breath, gasping with no result for several agonizing moments before she managed to get her lungs and chest muscles working. Then she sucked in a breath of air with a sound like someone dying; sucked in another, and frantically looked back at where she had come from.

The shifter was in the middle of the room, glowing a sickly black-red with blood magic. She had never seen anything moving as fast as he was moving, and had never seen anything imbued with that much blood-power. He must have slapped the crossbow out of Dominik's hands the way he had slapped the gun out of hers, because Dominik didn't have it in his hands anymore. Somehow Dominik had managed to get the boar spear off his back and was being chased backward by the thing.

The shifter must have been watching his children fight, and learning what not to do. He didn't try to bite Dominik. Instead, he kept raking his claws at the healer, forcing him back each time. It would probably hurt him when his claws encountered the cloth-of-silver, but nothing like the way it would hurt when he bit. She fumbled at her belt for a pistol, but her hands were cold, and she couldn't feel the butts, and for a panicked moment, she thought she had lost both of the guns.

As if in a nightmare she saw Dominik's foot slip.

“Hey!” she shouted, jumping to her feet as the shifter
instantly
reacted to her shout, just as she realized her belt had twisted and the pistols weren't where they should have been.
“Hey!”

She pulled her pistols as the shifter whirled, saw her up, and launched for her. She fired both. The first missed completely. The second hit his shoulder. He yelped for a moment, but kept coming, and before she even had a chance to dodge out of the way, he backhanded her into the wall again. Both pistols went flying.

She hit the wall, and saw more than stars; for a moment she blacked out, and came around to the sound of a pistol firing. This time the shifter screamed, but there was as much rage as pain in the sound. The scream was followed by the meaty sound of flesh-on-flesh impact, then stone-on-flesh impact, and the clatter of metal on stone. She shook her head violently to clear the darkness from her eyes and saw Dominik slumped against the wall of the cave opposite her, head sagging forward on his chest. With a sensation of being stabbed in the heart, she saw he wasn't moving.

T
HE
shifter turned, and she fumbled out her silver dagger. It seemed pitiful against something that could move faster than she, and had been able to throw a big man into a wall with a single blow. She was absolutely galvanized with terror now, energized rather than paralyzed. Her heart beat wildly, but her hands were steady, and she kept her eyes glued on her enemy. Chills ran down her back at the look in his evil, yellow eyes, and her clothing and hair were damp with fear-sweat.

She scrambled to her feet, and backed her way along the wall. The shifter seemed in no hurry to attack her this time. And despite runnels of blood dripping down its shoulder in two places, he didn't seem to be handicapped by his wounds at all.

It had to be the blood magic, keeping him from feeling much from his injuries, even though they had been caused by silver.

The same deformed skull that the other shifters had sported marked this one, although its fur and skin didn't seem diseased. Its muzzle was more human in the half-form than theirs had been. It lifted its lip in a snarl as it stalked toward her.

She resisted the urge to turn and run. If she did that, she had no chance at all. Her only option was to figure out where the boar spear had gone, and get her hands on that. Maybe—maybe she could fend it off long enough to back her way to the cavelet where the
zâne
were. They might protect her as well as Markos. Or they might not protect
her,
but the shifter might not be able to bear the power that surrounded them, and she would be safe. . . .

Safe? There was no place safe in this cavern! There might not be any place safe in the country with this thing after her!

Safer, then?

If she could just get to that possible sanctuary, it would give Markos time to recover, and maybe give them both time for the blood-born power imbuing the monster to wear off. Maybe time for her to think of some magical offense or defense. Maybe she could collapse the cave roof on him. Maybe—

“Oo a shpiri, 'irl,” came from between the shifter's misshapen lips. He laughed, as she stared at it without comprehending what it had said.

He passed a blood-smeared paw over his face. As she watched in nauseated fascination—still moving backward, step by careful step—he pushed and pulled on his jaw, his teeth, and his lips. The flesh and bone deformed and reformed, and he continued to poke and prod at his face, until at last, he had something more like a human mouth—except for the pointed teeth—and less like a muzzle.

He yawned hugely, with a popping noise as if something was settling into place, then grinned hideously. “I shaid, you have shpirit, girl,” he repeated, in a voice that was half the whine of a canine, and half a peculiarly unpleasant, nasal human voice. “You are the firsht to fight me off for more than a moment or two in fifty yearsh. And you have magic.”

He laughed, as if that was uproariously funny.

She didn't answer him. In her experience, not talking in cases like this was the best answer. It made men want to fill the silence with their own voice, and she might learn something that would save her and Markos.

. . . her and Markos. Because Dominik still was not moving, and she feared the worst.

The beast yawned again, but this time he looked angry. Yet he kept his temper. “Shpeak up! No?” He snarled, a sound like rotten canvas tearing. “You don't want to know who I am? I will tell you anyway! I am Bertalan Kaczor!”

Hungarian?
That was unexpected. . . .

Not that there weren't Hungarians in Romania. The Austro-Hungarian Empire claimed this part of the world, after all. But—this part of Romania tended to be mostly native Romanians, with little islands of German Saxons . . .

He peered at her, and his mouth turned down in a rictus of a frown. “What? A magishian, and you do not know my name?”

“Well, you don't know
mine,”
she retorted, hoping to keep him talking, rather than attacking, while she backed toward presumed safety.

He frowned. “Austrian girl—”

“German,” she corrected.

“Aushtrian, German, all one,” he snarled. “You think you have sheen shorcherersh, but you have never sheen one like me!”

He flexed the muscles of the uninjured arm, and laughed. “I am sheventy yearsh old! I have been hunting theshe parts for fifty yearsh! I have been building my pack for all that time, until we have become the shcourge of the land!”

She decided to dare a taunt at him. “I don't see a pack now,” she stated, matter-of-factly.

The growl that rumbled up out of his chest made the hair on the back of her neck stand up, and made her insides turn to water.
“Peashantsh!”
he snarled. “I should have known better. You cannot build a palash out of mud!” He took three enormous steps toward her, making her back up hastily—but not in the direction she wanted to go. He had forced her slantwise, toward the cave wall and not the tunnel that led to where Markos was. “You, on the other hand . . .” He laughed. “You are a magishian! I will catch you, and break your legsh sho you cannot run, and make you my breeding cow! You will be a
fine
bitch for my new pack!”

The horror of it struck her like a hammer, and froze her where she stood. He howled with laughter to see it—literally howled, throwing up his head to let out a bloodcurdling wail of triumph.

Which ended, abruptly, in a scream of pain and rage as Markos in wolf-shape slashed at his hamstrings from behind.

She threw herself to the side, rolled, and came up several feet away to see that Markos had dashed out of reach of those terrible claws, and toward where Dominik lay. She got to her feet and ran in the other direction, where she might, just might, find one or more of the weapons they had lost. Behind her, she could hear the combat as Markos used his lower stature and wolf-speed to good effect, not standing and fighting, but dashing in to slash with his fangs and dashing away again. In wolf form he was just as fast as the sorcerer, and he was harder to hit than a human, since he was lower to the ground.

She searched frantically for a weapon.
There!
The coach gun lay against the rock wall! She dashed for it, praying that nothing had been smashed out of order or blown up when it went off on impact.

The moment she put her hands on it, she let out a wordless prayer of thanks. It was intact, despite having discharged when it struck the rock. She broke the breech, fumbled out the spent casing and fumbled in a new shell, and looked up.

The shifter was trying to pen Markos into a niche near Dominik, and he was succeeding. His arms were long, and Markos couldn't get past them. And each time the shifter moved closer, he had a better chance of catching Markos.

“Hey!” she shouted. “Half-breed cur!”

He whirled and stared at her. She was on fire with terror, but she couldn't stop now.

“You want me?” she taunted.
“Nyald ki a seggem!”

It was the worst phrase she knew in Hungarian. She prayed it would goad him into rushing her.

It did.

With a scream of rage, he charged. She held her fire.
I'm only going to get the one shot. It has to count. . . .

Halfway to her, he flung himself into the air in a tremendous leap, arms spread.

She waited, watching him sail through the air. It seemed as if he was floating there, moving with impossible slowness, as she waited, her heart pounding in her ears, until the last . . . possible . . . moment.

Then her finger twitched on the trigger, and the coach gun roared, and kicked back into her side, discharging the entire load of silver shot into his chest, throat and face from no more than a yard or two away.

Blood and flesh spattered her, and then he hit her.

Down they went onto the stone floor of the cave. She felt a blow to the back of her head, and saw nothing but black again.

But the terrible weight on her was smothering her, and she woke again with a strangled gasp, then began trying to push the impossible weight off herself so she could breathe. The stink of him was driving her mad, the effluvia of his blood magic so intense she wasn't sure if she was going to choke on her own vomit or from lack of breath.

Then a feral growl made her freeze. She looked past the mangled remains of the sorcerer's head and saw Markos.

But not the Markos she knew.

His eyes were mad, his hackles up, and his lips lifted in a terrible snarl. He stalked toward her, stiff-legged.

The words of the little
alvar
rang in her memory.
There is a danger. If the man runs as a wolf for too long, the man is lost forever in the wolf.

“Markos!” she said, sharply, which only elicited a rising growl from him. She swallowed her fear and nausea. She
had
to reach him. “Markos,” she said, as coaxingly as she could, around a lump of sick horror and bile. “Markos. It's me. Your friend. Rosa. Remember me?”

The wolf continued to stare at her, fangs bared.

“You believed me, when no one else did, when everyone else said we had killed the only shifter. Markos, you
believed
in me. And I believe in you!” She put all the pleading she could into those words. “I do
not
believe you are lost in the wolf! Come back, Markos! Come back! Remember who you are and come back!”

She kept repeating the words “Come back” and his name, over and over, and projected as much of the Earth Magic that allowed her to reach the minds of animals as she could, bringing up images of him at the Graf's parties, on the trains, laughing at jokes, reading something, looking thoughtfully out a window. She refused to believe he was lost. She refused to believe she would survive the shifter only to die at the fangs of—

Slowly, his lips dropped over his fangs. Slowly, a vaguely puzzled look crept over the wolf's face, as if he was hearing something he didn't . . . quite . . . understand . . .

And then—he leapt.

And covered her face with wolfish kisses, cleaning the blood from her cheeks and eyes.

That was when she let herself pass into unconsciousness.

“Rosa. Rosa.”

Something was licking her face. No, it wasn't licking her face, it was—washing her face. It wasn't a rough wet tongue, it was a rough, wet cloth.

“Rosa. You must wake up. You must wake up now.”

Feebly, but with irritation, she pushed the cloth away and opened her eyes. The spell must still have been working, for the cave was as bright as if daylight were pouring in.

Her head felt just as bad as she would have expected, from having been hit against a stone wall twice and a stone floor once. Markos was sitting next to her, or rather kneeling, a battered bowl of water next to him, and a bit of cloth in his hand.

He seemed to be—mostly naked.

Well of course he is. He was a wolf, and his clothing is somewhere else.

“Can you stand?” Markos asked her anxiously.

He looked terrible.
He looks as bad as I feel,
she thought. There were healing cuts and bruises all over his neck, face, arms and chest. Both of his eyes had been blackened. She levered herself up a little on one elbow, and saw that he had found the remnants of trousers somewhere, mostly rags, but enough to keep him from being completely naked.

They both stank. And she was covered in blood and bits of shifter. Markos had been cleaning her face off, for which she was very grateful now that she came to think about it.

“I think so,” she said, gingerly feeling the back of her head, and relieved only to find a lump, and not anything worse. “But I'd rather not.” She didn't want to get up. She really didn't want to be awake. She didn't want to think about Dominik. . . .

“You have to,” Markos said urgently, his brows creasing as well as they could, with all the injuries to his face. “I can't get Dominik into the saddle by myself. His leg's broken.”

“What?”
she gasped, sitting up so quickly she got flashes in front of her eyes and her head screamed at her.
“He's alive?”

“He has a harder head than you. He was just knocked unconscious,” Markos replied, getting an arm behind her shoulders and holding her upright, as her head went from screaming to merely throbbing. “But I can't get him into the saddle alone. I wouldn't ask you to do this, but I really need your help. We have got to get the horses and get out of here to get him—you—me some real help. I'm afraid if we stay here much longer we'll be in no condition to leave.”

He had a point. A good one. A broken leg was no joke, and neither were blows to the head. What she needed to do was get herself moving and figure out just how badly her head had been rattled.

Groaning, she turned herself over so that she was on her hands and knees, then slowly, carefully, managed to get to her feet, with Markos hovering anxiously as if he was unsure whether or not he should offer to help. Once on her feet, she looked around the cave.