Highland Moon Sifter (a Highland Sorcery novel) (2 page)

She grabbed them up, shaking out mouse droppings and went over to the large hearth and eased down. The pain in her side flared and she felt more blood flow down the side of her leg. That coupled with the scratches in her shoulder and she was in a bad way. How was she ever going to fight off the Sifts and then stop them from ever being born like this?

Body tensing, Bekah waited the sharp agony out until she could draw a breath again when something caught her eye.

Jack pot.

It wasn’t much, but it was something.

An iron poker lay in the cold ashes at the bottom of the fire place. Whoever had last tended a fire here, had discarded the poker. When her fingers closed around it, the cool ashy iron felt like salvation.
 

Clutching it to her chest, she let her eyes close for a second, only a second. She wouldn’t drift to sleep. That would be unforgiveable, no, deadly, in these circumstances, but sleep found her nonetheless.

She ran in her dreams, always running, always hiding, in dark desolate echoey alleyways, through unused sewers and worker tunnels and empty shopping malls. To be caught meant death
at best. At worst, it meant being kept alive long enough for sport.

While the Sifts had a penchant for human flesh, they delighted in the hunt, herding and manipulating their prey to exhaustion, playing—a noxious, half-blind-sagging-bag-of-skin cat to their human mice.

In her dream, Bekah slipped across slick cement and fell forward to her stomach. Cold bloated fingers clamped around her ankle instantly.

Her eyes snapped open, separating dream form reality, uncertain for a moment which was which.

The fingers were still at her ankle, warm and clammy, moving up her calve.

“Unmaker,”
it hissed. “We exist. We always exist.” Rancid breath washed across the air, ashes blown from a funeral pyre. It spoke of her intent. It knew what she’d jumped into the time rift to do.
Unmaker.
She was going to see to it that Sifts never got the chance to be made in the first place. And they knew it.

Heart pounding, she stayed utterly still, letting the Sift taunt her, tease her. It’s what they loved. Didn’t its mother ever tell it not to play with its food?

Sniffing her, its bloated half-blind puckered face pressed near her bloodied hip. Its fat tongue flicked out, rough wet sandpaper lapping along her flesh, licking up her blood. Bekah swallowed thickly, fear and nausea blending into a harsh mix. The folds of sagging skin draping the Sift’s neck wobbled across her skin. Bekah sprang, jabbing the iron poker point first into its blubbery temple, the thin bone beneath so fragile for a monster. She rolled away out from beneath its razor claws.

On her knees, in too much pain to get to her feet, she pressed all her weight onto the poker, gouging into the malformed head. Gray blood pooled around the shaft.

The beast squealed, head pinned to the ground, arms flailing to catch her.

Bone crunched, the skull breaking beneath the soft folds of skin.

Bekah screamed, more of an anguished groan, pushing, pushing, with everything she had left in her, which wasn’t much, but if she let go now, she was dead.

It was her or the beast and she was not going to let the human race down. Not while her heart still pumped. Everything around the edges of the room grayed, became kind of floaty, the same gray of the brain matter bubbling out of the beast’s mouth. All her senses narrowed down to a crystalline focus of her pulse pounding in her temples, her weight bearing down, pushing, pushing, even though the Sift had to outweigh her by at least fifty pounds. Her sweat-slickened palms slipped on the iron bar, the cracking of bone—all graying—so very very gray.

All she knew is that she was not giving up. She wasn’t cut that way. She was a survivor. She’d survived worse than one smelly Sift that thought it could stop her.

There was too much riding on her shoulders. Too much. Way too frigging much. She was the only one left who could stop it. But it was too much.

She pressed and pressed and pressed until the gray turned to black.

Chapter Three

Bekah awakened to the worst smell ever known to the world and gagged, vomiting onto the packed earthen floor. Dead Sift. They smelled bad enough alive, but brain matter seeping into the dirt? There just wasn’t a cesspool equal to the raw stink of that.

She hurt everywhere, side mostly, but the claw scratches had stiffened up her shoulder overnight considerably. She was a mess. A mess with no help in sight. She’d really counted on the Healers of the Limont Clan to get her back to fighting form.

She pulled herself up, wincing, and scooted away from the fallen beast and vomit. If only she could get away from its stench as easily.

Okay, so what now? She took stock of the situation. The village had been abandoned. Partially burned. On purpose or by a random strike of lightning without anyone present to put out the fire? Nature could do as much damage—if not more than man. Just look what nature had created with a Moon Sifter’s dark magic? Sifts sprang into her century like maggots on a rotting corpse.

So the village had already been abandoned. By the looks of things, three or four years ago, which meant her placement of landing in this century had been way off.

Of course it had. Why should she begin having good luck now?

The time rift from the early twenty-first century in Charity Greve’s Seattle apartment had been different. Large and volatile. Not that anyone from 2083 had seen a Sorcerer’s time rift, but it hadn’t been anything like Alexander had described it should be.

It had been a cyclone, earthquake, and hurricane rolled into one, which didn’t immediately disperse the moment Toren and Charity were sucked up into it.

The rift had held much longer, even longer than what they’d calculated would be only minutes. Minutes that would give Col Limont the chance to jump in and set things right.

But he’d missed his opportunity. For what? Love?

He’d seen Lenore drop in the fire that erupted in Charity’s apartment and he’d gone back for her.

Not seeing any way around it, Bekah had taken the leap, and, well, here she was. After meeting Col, she’d wondered all along if the task would be left to her. Perhaps it was better this way.

She saw it in his eyes.

He was never going to kill his brother.

It
was
better this way. She would do what Col couldn’t.

If she survived that long.

If she could avoid the remaining Sifts that long. She’d killed one. How many more could there be?

What she wouldn’t give for her pulsar right now, but since nothing material could come through a time rift, her gun was lost to her.

She needed weapons, food, clothes, shoes—and medical attention. Wasn’t like there was a drugstore down the street to forage through, so first things first. There had to be a water source near or in the village.

An hour later, she’d made a thorough search through the remaining cottages and came up empty as far as clothing or weapons, but she did find the village well and a couple of cooking pots, a rock she thought was flint, and even a water skin to carry the water in once she boiled it. She set out to build a fire. She’d boil the fabric scraps from the overturned chest and use them to bind the cuts on her feet until a Healer could do the job properly. She couldn’t risk infection.

She was exhausted and shaky, her wounds taking their toll from the amount of energy she’d expended and blood she’d lost.

Building a fire was harder than she’d thought, even with the flint she found. She considered leaving off the task. The smoke could lead the Sifts right to her. Of course her scent left a trail through the forest anyway, even as hard as she’d tried to hide it with mud. But, still, the risk of dehydration and infection were just as likely to finish her off too. Besides, she could coat herself in the ash to further mask her scent.

Her hands shook with each strike of the poker across the flint. After many frustrated attempts, she had a fine blaze and two pots of water purifying. She threw her make shift bandages to sterilize in one pot.
 
The other pot would be for drinking.

She stabbed the end of the poker into the fire and stared at the dead Sift. It looked as gruesome dead as it had alive, blubbery skin over lean muscle. Without the eyes looking any different with the thin layer of skin, it could be staring straight at her ready to pounce and she’d never know it. She kept sneaking glances at its still chest to make sure.

Tearing her gaze away, she began to work on the guard’s cloak. There was plenty of material for to use as bandages as well as a covering.

She had to rest up, drink the boiled water, or she’d be in no condition to take on the Moon Sifter. Who was she kidding? At her best, she wasn’t a match for his kind of dark magic.

That’s why Col had been their best bet to go back here. As his brother, Shaw would never suspect him as an assassin.

But even Moon Sifters could die from a blade if she got close enough.

Or even had a freaking blade.

She had one more thing here to do. Then she’d set the dead Sift on fire and burn the cottage down around it, and be on her way before the other Sifts caught scent of her trail. Best to double-back and go to the witch’s castle, hope that Shaw Limont was there, and finish what she came to do.

The end of the poker glowed orange. Setting her teeth together, Bekah pulled it out of the fire, breathing heavily. She had to do this. No one was here to do it for her. Frightened, but resolved, Bekah placed the hot poker across the first slash over her hip and screamed.

Chapter Four

She was right back where she started, at the witch’s castle. At least this time she was somewhat clothed. She’d torn a strip off the bottom of the cloak to belt around her waist. She kept it loose to keep from chafing across the wounds she’d burned closed. At least the gashes were no longer bleeding, but the burned skin hurt with every footstep. At least the belt kept the loose folds from falling open every time she let go of the cloak. Every sound she heard in the forest set her skittish nerves on alert, fearing the Sifts were on her even though she’d stood downwind next to the burning cottage she set ablaze so she’d smell of smoke to hide her scent.

At the moment, she rested on her belly on a slight knoll above the dark stone of the tall stark castle. Black birds darted around the crenellations, screeching beneath bruise-swollen clouds that seemed ready to bust wide and drop buckets of rain.

It was a strange castle, seeming to rise straight out of a flat clearing surrounded by a hilly forest. There was no castle yard or secondary walls, just the building itself with tall imposing double doors as an entrance. The only visible guards were stationed outside the doors. The witch was obviously confident in her witchy wards.

The stables across the yard was the only friendly appearing structure, and also seemed to be the area where the mercenaries not on duty preferred to hang out.

Very few people moved about the castle. From what the hold-out survivors of her time gathered from history, the witch didn’t like nor need many people about her. She retained a handful of guards—hired mercenary types—and a few washerwomen, servants and cooks from the small village a few miles beyond the forest.

The mercenaries Bekah got, but why any of the village women would want to enter inside the witch’s liar was a mystery. Must be one doozy of a medical plan Aldreth offered. Either that or the witch left the village unharmed in exchange for services.

She watched a handful of women leave the castle through the large doors and step onto the pathway past the stables and into the forest that would take them to the small village. She had to get inside that castle and her best chance looked like infiltrating it as one of the village women.

Bekah pulled up to her knees, ready to creep through the forest and follow the women when one of the large doors pushed open again. Bekah lowered back down to watch who came out next since there hadn’t been much activity except for the women.

Even without the two guards bowing their heads in deference to the man stalking out from behind the door, she’d have known who he was.

The physical resemblance to his brother Col was unnerving. They even moved with the same prowling man-on-a-mission stride.

Shaw Limont. Moon Sifter. The destroyer of magic’s balance. The maker of monsters.

If she’d been able to carry her pulsar through the time rift, she’d shoot him right where he stood.