Hugh hopped onto Bucky’s back and nudged him into a walk. The stable girl followed. He pulled his legs up and stood on Bucky’s back.
She grinned. He dropped, swung his leg over, and rode Bucky with his back to the stallion’s head, facing her.
“How did you learn to do that?”
“Practice. Lots and lots of practice. The man who raised me came from steppe country. A place with mean horses. He taught me to ride when I was little.” Voron had taught him many other things, but horses had been the first lesson.
“Can you teach me?”
“Sure.”
A piercing scream rolled through the orchard from the right. Hugh jumped off Bucky.
“Help! He’s got the dogs!” A man screamed. “Help!”
A wolf howl rose from the woods, floating above the trees.
Hugh tossed the rope to the girl and lifted her onto Bucky’s back. “Get to the castle,” he ordered. “Tell any Dog you see to send Sharif and Karen to me.”
The girl nodded.
“Don’t throw her,” Hugh warned.
Bucky snorted and took off toward the castle.
The body of the dog sprawled under a bush. Blood stained the brown and white fur. Next to the dog, Sharif crouched, leaning close to the ground, staring unblinking at the crushed bushes and red-stained leaves. Karen, the other shapeshifter, dropped to all fours on the other side and took a long whiff.
Shapeshifters had their issues, but Hugh never agreed with Roland’s disdain for them. He understood Roland’s position well enough and recited it with passion when the occasion called for it, but when it came down to it, shapeshifters made damn good soldiers and that’s all he cared about.
He braced for the uncomfortable flash of guilt that usually flared when he thought Roland was wrong. It never came. Instead the void scraped his bones with its teeth. Right.
“He got some bites in,” Karen said softly, her voice tinted with sadness. “Good boy.”
Sharif bared his teeth.
The dire wolf was big and old. One of the shepherds had snapped a polaroid of him two nights before when the beast prowled the tree line, studying the cows in the pasture. From the paw prints and the pictures, the old male stood more than three feet at the shoulder and had to weigh damn near two hundred pounds, if not more.
Wild wolves didn’t follow the strict alpha-beta pecking order people assigned to them. That structure was mostly present in big shapeshifter packs, because hierarchy was a primate invention. Instead wild wolves lived in family groups, a parent couple and their young, who followed their parents until they grew up enough to start their own packs. But this beast was solitary. Something happened to his pack or they ran him out, and now he was a lone wolf with nothing to lose. A night ago, he tried to take a cow. The dogs and guns chased him off. Then the magic hit.
The old wolf was a smart bastard, smart enough to figure out that when the magic was up, guns didn’t bark. Still, he stayed away from the pasture and went for the easier target instead, a ten-year-old girl picking pears from the ground in the orchard while her parents were on ladders harvesting the fruit.
A dog’s job was to put itself between the threat and the human. The two dogs with the harvesters did their job.
Hugh and the shapeshifters had found the first dead hound at the edge of the woods. The second was here. Now it was up to human Dogs to settle the score.
“Heartbeat,” Sharif whispered.
Hugh reached out with his magic. The dog was a mess, torn and bitten, but a faint, barely-there heartbeat shivered in his chest. Hugh concentrated. This would be complicated.
He knitted the organs together, repairing the tissue, sealing the blood vessels, mending the flesh like it was fabric, muscles, fascia, and skin. The two Dogs by his side waited quietly.
Finally, he finished. The dog raised his head, turned in the brush, and crawled toward them. Sharif scooped the hundred and twenty-pound hound up like he was a puppy. The dog licked his face.
“Blood loss,” Hugh said. “He won’t be walking for a bit.”
“I’ll carry him,” Sharif said. His eyes shone, catching the light.
“We’re only a mile in. Take him back and catch up,” Hugh told him.
The werewolf turned smoothly and ran into the woods, silent like a shadow, the huge dog resting in his arms.
Karen took the lead and they followed the scent trail deeper into the woods.
If he never saw another rhododendron bush until his next life, it would be too soon, Hugh decided. The damn brush choked the spaces between trees and getting through it wasn’t exactly a cakewalk.
They pushed their way through the latest patch. The endless rhododendron finally thinned out. Old woods stretched before them, the massive oaks and hemlocks rising like the thick columns of some ancient temple, cushioned in greenery.
A shadow flittered between the trees, trailing a smear of foul magic. An undead.
The day was looking up. Hugh grinned and pulled his sword out.
The undead dashed right and stopped.
Another smear appeared on the left. Two. If it was Nez’s standard rapid reconnaissance party, there would be a third, each piloted by a separate navigator.
Karen waited next to him, her anticipation almost a physical thing hovering in front of her.
“Happy hunting,” Hugh said.
She unbuckled her belt with the knife sheath on it, unzipped her boots, and gave a sharp tug to her shirt. It came open. She dropped it on the forest floor. Her pants followed. A brief flash of a nude human, then her body tore. New bones sprang up out of flesh, muscle spiraled up them, sheathing the new skeleton, skin clothed it, and dense gray fur burst from the new hair follicles. The female werewolf opened her monstrous jaws, her face neither wolf nor human, swiped her knife from her clothes, and sprinted into the woods to the left.
Hugh went in the opposite direction, toward the foul magic staining the leaves. The smear hovered still for a moment, then moved north. Run, run, little vampire.
Another vampire to the far right, closing in fast. The undead moved in silence. They didn’t breathe, they didn’t make any of the normal noises a living creature made, but they couldn’t hide their magic. The foul patina of undeath stood out against the living wood like a dark blotch.
The front bloodsucker played bait, while the one on the right would close in from the flank and try to jump him. They didn’t realize he could feel them. This wasn’t the Golden Legion. The Masters of the Dead would’ve just met him two on one. These were likely journeymen, piloting younger vampires. The undead were damn expensive, and the older they were, the higher the price tag ran.
Didn’t want to risk the budget, cheapskate? It will cost you.
Hugh ran through the forest as fast as the terrain would let him, jumping over the fallen branches. Let’s play.
The ground evened out. Hugh sped up.
The bloodsucker in front of him darted in and out of the brush, flirting.
Hugh dashed forward, pretending not to feel the undead gaining from the right.
Trees flew past. The flanking vamp was almost on him.
The first bloodsucker jumped over the trunk of a fallen tree. Hugh tossed his sword into his left hand, planted his right on the rough bark, and vaulted over it.
The undead from the right leapt at him before he landed, as he knew it would. The vamp came flying out of the bushes. Hugh braced and rammed the reinforced gauntlet on his right hand into the bloodsucker’s mouth, taking the full weight of the vamp. The fangs sank into leather and met the core of hard steel. The bloodsucker hung still for a precious half-second as the surprised navigator processed the aborted leap. A half-second was just long enough. Hugh sank his sword between the undead’s ribs, slicing through the gristle and muscle to the heart. The oversized sack of muscle met the razor-sharp point of the blade and burst, as only undead hearts did, spilling blood inside the undead’s body cavity. Hugh jerked the sword free, shook the vamp off his hand like it was a feral cat, and swung. The blade cut in a broad powerful stroke. The undead’s head rolled into the bushes. The whole thing took less than a couple of breaths.
Fun.
With any luck, the journeyman piloting the vamp didn’t break connection. When a vampire died under a navigator’s control, the pilot’s brain insisted that it was the navigator himself who had died. Most became human vegetables. A few lucky ones survived but they were never the same.