Bobcat: Tales of the Were (Redstone Clan) (19 page)

“Let’s
look,” Joe answered already moving to one side.

They
moved closer in unison, peering into the cavern, moving in tiny increments. If Bob’s guess was right, the entrance had been warded to prevent anyone or anything from coming or going. If he was right, the cavern would be empty.

Sure enough, when he and Joe peered in from opposite sides of the opening, only dark emptiness met their gaze. The tiny amount of light that filtered down from air vents allowed them to see into the far recesses of the cavern and it was well and truly empty. So far, so good.

At that moment, the earth shook again, a little more violently this time. Once again, Bob looked first to make sure Serena was covered. Two of the soldiers had her between them, sheltering her under their hunched bodies. Bob bent over, protecting his head as best he could while the mountain rumbled its displeasure. He could almost feel its anger at being disturbed, and yet…

There was a feeling of deliberate purpose in the tremor as well. Bob had never been overly religious or magical in any way, but he felt something as a section of the cavern’s entrance crumbled before him. A big rock narrowly missed hitting him and he stumbled back in surprise, his cat reflexes taking him out of the path of danger just in time to see the cavern entrance break up on one side, the evil glyphs winking out of existence as the wall of rock and earth they were bound to crumbled.

Hot damn.
If he hadn’t thought it before, he now
knew
the Lady was clearing the way for them.

The tremor ceased and Bob looked up to find
that everyone seemed to be all right from this round of dust and rocks pelting them. Serena popped up and he went to her side. Joe reorganized his group and was at Bob’s side a moment later.

“Same thing as before,” Bob reported. “The tremor broke the spell. We can use the cavern. I think the Lady wants us to. It’s like She is clearing our path.”

John nodded, having joined them. “I feel it too. Koma Kulshan rumbles to the Great Spirit’s design. She is angry, but helpful to those of us who seek to help Her.”

“That’s good because w
e need a place to stash Waldo. A big rock hit his ankle. He’s not going to be able to move for a while.” Joe looked back at the man who stood on one foot, holding his assault rifle in one hand and bracing his arms against the rock wall beside him with the other. The man who had been smiling as he flipped sizzling fish only an hour ago now looked pissed, and more than a little embarrassed.

“Damn. I missed that. I didn’t think anyone was hurt,” Bob admitted.

Joe shrugged. “Why do you think we call him Waldo? Dude is like a chameleon. Blends in whenever he wants. But he’s too hurt to go on. We can leave him here in the cavern and I would suggest leaving your lady too. She’ll be safe with him to guard her.” Joe smiled at Serena, who was bristling a bit at Bob’s side. “Or maybe she can guard him. Either way, I don’t want to leave anyone on their own down here. It would be good to leave a team to guard our back trail.”

Bob turned to Serena, ignoring the other men for a moment. “Much as I want you by my side, he does have a point.” Bob reached out, tracing her soft cheek with the back of one finger. She met his gaze and he saw understanding begin to replace
anger. Her gaze still held a healthy dose of fear, but she was gaining strength even as he watched. “Waldo can’t go on as he is and someone needs to stay with him.”

“It makes sense for me to stay,” she finally admitted in a small voice. “Even I can defend a cave with only one entrance.”

He held her gaze for a long moment. “You’re one in a million, sweetheart.” He leaned in and delivered a hard kiss, not caring who watched. This was his woman. His mate. The perfect match for him in every possible way. This latest situation only proved it. He was so proud of the way she had discovered her own strength. He drew back, looking deep into her eyes. “I love you with everything that’s in me.”

“Back at’cha, big guy,” she replied, kissing him once more, l
ightly, before she stepped back, removing herself from his embrace.

He was kind of glad she had taken the first step away because right then, he wasn’t sure he could’ve made himself move away first. He really did love her. This si
tuation only reinforced how perfect they were for each other. He also had to believe that the Mother of All was looking out for them. He had to have that elusive thing Father Vincenzo had always counseled him to seek—faith.

Bob sent a quick prayer up to the Goddess as Waldo moved painfully toward him. He would have to pass Bob to reach the cavern entrance. Bob watched the other man draw closer, evaluating his injury with practiced eyes, but Waldo paused in front of him.

“I won’t let anything happen to her.”

Bob held the soldier’s gaze. “See that you don’t,” he said quickly, trusting the soldier to do his duty and protect the innocent. Serena was vulnerable, but she was also strong. “And don’t underestimate her. She has a backbone of pure steel. She’ll help. You just need to give her a chance. Don’t forget, she’s a predator at heart too.”

Bob knew Serena heard his words as he looked over Waldo’s shoulder to meet her gaze. She smiled at him, the suspicious glint of tears in her eyes. Bob refocused on the man who stood painfully in front of him.

“Understood, Alpha.”

The fact that Waldo had used the respectful title for him meant something among shifters. It meant the soldier had accepted the task given by someone of higher rank that he respected. He would do all in his power to fulfill the Alpha’s expectations of him. It was a promise and a symbol of the hierarchy that made their society work, and even thrive.

Waldo nodded once more and moved on, his gait painful to watch as he entered the cavern. Serena lagged behind, waiting for Bob to meet her at the opening. He pulled her into his embrace for one last kiss.

“Free Jezza and then come back to me,” she whispered, nearly breaking his heart. “Waldo and I will make sure nobody gets past us.”

Bob looked over her shoulder and met the eyes of a giant wolf. Waldo had shifted into his animal form and Bob could see he was already getting around better on four feet than on two. He was also as dark as midnight. When his eyes closed, he just about disappeared from view. A chameleon indeed.

He kissed the top of her head and made himself release her. “Stick with the wolf and stay safe for me, kitten. I’ll be back before you know it.”

He let her go and moved to follow
the rest of the soldiers. He was at the back of the group, but he would have to take his place on point as soon as they were out of sight of the cavern. Only he could see the magical traps, and everyone was moving cautiously until he got back into position.

Bob looked over his shoulder right before the passageway turned and saw Serena wave once before she disappeared into the cavern. He sent up another silent prayer to the Mother of All to keep Serena safe and rounded the bend, taking his place at the front of the expedition.

Bob called a halt when he saw broken timbers up ahead. The breaks were fresh. As if the old beams had fallen recently—perhaps in one of the earthquakes they had been experiencing. Was this more divine intervention? Bob could only shake his head in wonder. If he was right, the timbers had served as a barricade against the danger he had seen marked on the map.

He signaled for the rest of the team to wait while he went ahead and checked out the large, newly-opened passageway. About twenty feet in he saw it. A dark so deep even his superior
night vision couldn’t penetrate it. He dropped a pebble into it and heard the rock bounce off the walls for a long, long way downward until the sound just faded out. The shaft was deeper than he could easily gauge. A mantrap if he’d ever seen one.

Bob backtracked and cleared the timbers from the entrance, scooting them to the sides of the dirt walls.
He and the guys with him would recognize the timbers on the ground, but it was likely nobody else would think anything of them. Judging by the newness of the breaks in the old wood, the fall was fresh. The enemy troops probably hadn’t been able to get past the barrier and if there had been magical warding on the area, it was gone now.

It was easy to get turned around inside a cave system. Bob was betting on that—and the fact that the path had changed without enemy knowledge—to consider this a viable strategy if they ended up encountering a large force. Bob told the team what he
had found and each of them looked suitably grim, but also intrigued by the new possible weapon in their arsenal. They would use anything they could to come out on the winning side of the battle ahead.

They continued down the main passageway, and Bob thankfully didn’t see any more magical glyphs. What they did see was sign
s of occupation. Footprints on the dusty ground. Many of them. Skid marks where things had been dragged recently. And sounds started coming to them. The sounds of men talking in low voices and moving around quietly. The sound of metal. The sharp scents of oil and gunpowder.

Joe
sent him a questioning look and Bob knew the lieutenant was asking whether there were any magical telltales. Bob shook his head in the negative and moved back from the point position. He had to leave the military decisions to the lieutenant and the men he had worked with for years. They were too good a unit to interfere with.

Bob fell back while the military guys sorted themselves out and found himself next to John the werewolf Alpha. The ground had been rumbling under them for a while now, but there hadn’t been any more big earthquakes. It was as if the mountain was complaining, but not yet up to full tantrum strength yet. He only hoped they were out of the tunnels before it got to that point.

“You may not act like it, but you are a wise man,” John surprised him by saying. “I like the way you lead, but also listen. If we survive this, I think my Pack would benefit from a closer association with your Clan. And there are things your Clan could gain from my Pack as well. Eyes on the border, for one.”

Bob considered his words very carefully. Alliances like this weren’t really decided on his level, though he usually did a lot of the background investigation. Ultimately though, it was Grif who made the deals. He was the Clan Alpha.

But Bob had seen the Pack in action and so far, he liked what he’d seen.

“If we get out of this alive, you’ll have my support, Alpha.
”

John nodd
ed, understanding the step they had just taken toward a more formal alliance. There wasn’t time for anything else as the soldiers began to move. Joe signaled to them and Bob and John moved forward to go wherever the lieutenant would lead.

“My guys are taking the cavern. The three of us are going to see what Jezza’s been up to.”

They crept along the passageway, past the soldiers who had pre-positioned themselves at the mouth of the large cavern. Bob could hear enemy soldiers inside the larger space, but there weren’t any stationed at the entrance. As he drew closer and saw the crumbled rock and bloodstains, he thought he understood why. Somebody had been standing there during the last tremor and gotten clobbered. The rest of them were standing clear for now, which was lucky for the assault team.

The three of them edged past the opening, keeping to the shadows. The cavern had low lighting, but it wasn’t enough to reach out into the passageway and expose their presence.

Once past that hurdle, the path was relatively clear to the main entrance and the staging area that had been carved out of the mountain right there, at the entrance to the old mine. Bob went first, looking for signs of magic. He halted the moment he peeked around the last bend. The entire staging area chamber was lit by a hazy reddish glow. This wasn’t the bright, fiery red of the glyphs, but a dark, almost brownish red. The color of old blood. Sickly. Putrid. Evil.

He took a cautious peek around the side of a crate that had been left just in front of the natural bend in the wall and realized the source of the glow wasn’t a glyph. It was a man. A mage.

Holy shit.

If ever evil walked on two legs, that was it.

Bob ducked back behind the curve in the wall to catch his breath. He’d seen a lot in that little moment of tableau.

A guy who had to be
Jezza was tied to a chair. Bloody. Bruised. His blood flowing into a little river that had been carved into the earth beneath his feet. A channel in the form of a circle went around the chair, Jezza’s blood flowing freely into it as he was slowly drained from a hundred different shallow cuts all over his body. The chair acted as a conduit, allowing the blood to gather on the straight lines of its legs and back, flowing from there into the channel on the floor that glowed red with magical power.

The mage stood in front of
the chair, doing something that seemed to pull a golden light out of Jezza’s tortured body. Was the mage stealing Jezza’s magical energy as well as his blood? Bob wasn’t sure, but it definitely looked that way. Bob had listened to the priestess of his Clan enough to know such things could happen.

All he knew was that it had to be stopped. The evil mage couldn’t have any more of Jezza’s
blood…or power. If he did…

Bob spoke one word that he knew would start an inescapable, but necessary cascade.

“Go.”

Bob stood and walked into the staging area, facing the mage and drawing his attention. Behind him, he was counting on Joe to give the order for his guys to attack the cavern full of soldiers. Once engaged with the mage, Bob couldn’t afford any distractions.

“Who the fuck are you?” the mage asked, annoyance in his tone. “Get the fuck out of here!” The mountain trembled, grumbling loudly.

“Can’t,” Bob said, moving closer. He didn’t know what he could do against a mage, but he had to get the man to stop draining Jezza.
The mountain continued to protest, shaking violently this time. The ground seemed to roll under their feet.

“Who the fuck do you think you are?”

The mage had a definite eastern accent—maybe New York or New Jersey—and seemed incapable of forming a sentence without the word fuck in it. Bob filed that information away for later. It might help trace the origins of the bastard—after Bob ripped him to shreds.

To that end, Bob took off his
T-shirt as he walked toward the man across the large open expanse. The mountain quaked, the volcano rumbling in the distance as the mage funneled pure golden energy from Jezza, into himself, and then that warped, brown-red magic went into the ground at his feet—into the mountain. Making it angrier by the second.

Bob
somehow knew what had to be done. The magic flow had to be stopped. Not only to save Jezza, but to quiet the mountain. The mage was using Jezza’s power to augment his own, morphing the golden light of Jezza’s magic into the rusty red color of the mage’s before sending it into the mountain, waking the slumbering, volcanic giant.

*

Back in the cavern, Serena heard the rock scream to life as the quakes started again. She covered her ears and her head, noting that Waldo had morphed back to his human shape to protect her. When the world didn’t stop shaking but the cavern seemed mostly intact, she looked up, sensing something. Something was…

A blast at the back of the cavern signaled the arrival of intense heat. And light. Golden red light and baking, blistering heat. Lava.

Sweet Mother of All.

“We’ve got to get out of here or we’ll be baked alive,” she shouted over the rumbling of rock.

The lava was flowing sluggishly, pushing upward from beneath them, toward what she had thought was another of the many vent shafts in the immense cavern. Only it wasn’t a ventilation shaft. It was the lava tube that would lead to the very top of the mountain.

If the pressure from below built up enough, hot lava would fill this cavern on its way toward the sky.

Another crack and boom and suddenly a slab of rock separated them, near the entrance to the cavern, from the lava. Cool, solid rock stuck upward between them and the dangerously hot molten rock, shielding them from the worst of the heat. As if the mountain was trying to protect them, even as it was driven toward blowing its top.

Waldo was dressed in his soldier gear once more, the wolf having retreated to allow the soldier to take point for the moment. She was glad.
She needed his advice right now, not his wagging tail.

“The rest of the group has made contact with the enemy,” he reported, tapping his ear.

She knew he still wore the little device in his ear canal that apparently stayed there whether he was in wolf form or human. It allowed him to hear what the rest of his team were up to, via the short range radio it contained.

“The second cavern held about a dozen soldiers. They’re being dealt with,” he reported. “Your mate, the Alpha and the lieutenant are engaging a mage at the mine entrance.”

“I don’t think we can stay here.” Serena looked at the glow of the lava reflecting off the cave walls. It was almost too hot to breathe.

Waldo seemed to consider. “Agreed. My ankle is bad though. I can’t move too fast.”

“That’s okay. We’ll go slow.” She moved to his side, putting herself under his left arm, leaving his right arm free to hold and shoot his rifle, if necessary.

They made their way down the passageway. It was cooler here than in the cavern, but the temperature throughout the mine had changed dramatically over the past few minutes. The noise level was incredible. She heard the low rumble of lava moving behind solid walls and prayed the rock walls would hold until she and Waldo had passed.

And then she heard the sound of gunfire. Ahead of them, she heard men calling out and a few screams. Staccato blasts and the ping of bullets ricocheting off solid rock.

“Firefight ahead,” Waldo said grimly. “Better hold up a minute and see if it dies down.”

He guided her to a more or less defensible position near a secondary mineshaft that had broken timbers lining its walls. She could see a dull glow of red from somewhere below a small ledge. Lava was flowing down there somewhere and she suddenly realized that wasn’t a ledge.

“This is the bottomless pit Bob saw marked on the map,” she told Waldo. The other man didn’t look too surprised, but a calculating light entered his gaze
as they settled in to wait.

*

There were two guards near the mine entrance that turned around when they heard the mage speak, but so far, they weren’t doing much to stop Bob’s advance. They seemed confused. Like they weren’t sure if he might be one of their guys. They didn’t seem to seriously think anyone could have snuck up from behind—from within the mine itself. That hesitation cost them.

Gunfire erupted from the direction of the troop cavern and Joe popped up from behind a crate to plug two holes in the gu
ard nearest him. The other guy fell shortly thereafter, getting off only one wild shot that ricocheted around the cavern for a bit before falling harmlessly to the dirt floor. All the while, Bob moved closer to the mage.

That was when the real fun began. The mage seemed to realize Bob was a threat a split second later and launched a fireball at him.

Bob sprang forward, calling on all his feline agility and strength. The fireball missed, falling in the spot where he’d been a moment before. But the mage was fast. He had another blast of magical power aimed at Bob before he could blink. And this one hit.

Or rather…it hit the cross hanging around Bob’s neck. The magical cross that allowed him to see magic. Apparently it also shielded him from magic as well.

Not only did the cross stop the bolt of energy, it reflected it back toward the mage, making him stumble.

“What the fuck?” the mage raged, seemingly surprised and royally pissed off at the sudden turn of events.

Bob didn’t let anything slow him down. He covered the big empty space on steady feet, even as the mountain continued to vibrate with suppressed anger. He was bare chested and planning a quick shift to his cougar form as soon as he saw an opening he could exploit. His pants and boots wouldn’t hinder him too much. The boots would simply fall off when his feet turned into paws, and the pants would either follow suit or be easily wriggled out of shortly after his shift. He just had to time it exactly right.