Hugh ran at the giant, snapping magic around the field to spot-heal those nearest to him.
The Dogs sliced and ducked, darting close to the beast to land cuts to the legs and arms, and running away. The tikbalang raked the ground with its claws, trying to grab them.
Hugh got there just as the massive monster went in for another pass. The Dogs scattered out of the way. To his left, Sam slipped on the blood. Clawed fingers closed over him. This required precision. Hugh lunged at the hand and sliced at the rough flesh of the furry forearm. The hand fell open, clawed fingers limp. He’d severed the flexors.
The tikbalang screeched.
Sam landed on the ground. Hugh grabbed him by the shoulder and shoved him backward, out of the way.
The tikbalang backhanded him. Hugh flew, tucking himself into a ball, and hit the grass. The impact rattled his ribs. Blood from the puddle on the grass splashed on his face. Hugh rolled to his feet.
Four of the remaining six creatures were dead. The reception lawn was a hellish mess of blood and corpses, and when he saw the figure in the white dress, it almost didn’t register. Elara was walking toward the tikbalang. Blood, bright, alarming crimson, drenched the hem of her bridal gown, climbing up the white fabric as it soaked through.
Hugh sprinted to her.
She walked between his people and stopped in front of the massive beast.
The tikbalang dove at her, jaws open.
Magic snapped out of Elara, lashing Hugh’s senses, a focused torrent unlike anything he’d felt before.
The beast tried to abort its attack, but it was too late. Her power touched it. The colossal creature reared, as if hit, swayed, and collapsed on its side, motionless. The two remaining tikbalang dropped dead.
Hugh halted in front of her. Elara turned, her face unreadable, picked up her blood-soaked skirt with her right hand, and waded through the gore out of the battlefield to her tent.
Silence reigned.
Elara ducked into her tent. All around them Elara’s people were staring at the carnage. He saw pain on some of the faces, fear, sadness. He didn’t see surprise.
“Start the cleanup,” Hugh ordered. “Keep whatever we can scavenge from the beast, take blood and tissue samples, burn the solid remains, salt the blood, and hose this mess down. And get us another damn cake. We’ll have the reception at the castle.”
His voice snapped them out of their inaction, and by the time he reached the tent, everyone was moving.
Hugh walked inside. The tent stood empty. A red-stained gown lay on the ground. He caught a hint of movement behind a screen to his right and crossed over to it.
“Were your people hurt?” Elara asked from behind the screen.
“Nothing that can’t be fixed. Want to tell me about this?”
“What do you want to know?” She sounded tired.
“Who did this, why, and will it happen again.”
“The Remaining. They think it’s a real marriage.”
“And?”
“They’re afraid I might have a child.” She gave a short, bitter laugh. “They will do everything they can to stop it. So, yes, it will happen again, and when it does, I’ll handle it. We both have baggage. You have Nez and I have them.”
Elara fell silent. Hugh stood by the screen, feeling something he couldn’t quite identify. A new troublesome feeling that pulled on him. He felt an urge to fix things somehow, and it irritated him that he couldn’t. He looked at her bloody dress and that irritated him even more.
A few years ago, he would’ve enjoyed the fight. Something fun to break up a boring ceremony. Right now, he would be celebrating a win, halfway into his first drink with a girl on his lap. Instead he was standing here, feeling whatever the hell he was feeling.
The void carved a path through his bones.
“It was a nice wedding.”
“Was it?” she asked quietly.
“It was.”
He walked out of the tent. She was a fucking harpy, but she just married a man she hated and had to walk through blood and kill instead of cutting the cake at her reception. She needed a few moments of privacy, and he would give them to her. Even he wasn’t that much of a bastard.
5
Something was wrong with the forest, Hugh decided. Magic sped up the tree growth. That was an accepted fact. Five-year-old growth looked like twenty-year-old trees. The woods swallowed any abandoned property, and people in the forest towns spent a fair amount of their time trying to keep the wilderness from encroaching. But this place was something else.
An ancient wood spread on both sides of the path. Massive white oaks with trunks that would take three people to encircle. Hemlocks towering a hundred and thirty feet above the forest floor. Rhododendron and mountain laurel so thick, he would need to chop it down to get through. This forest felt old and rugged, soaked in the deep currents of magic.
Life thrived between the branches. Squirrels dashed through the canopy, birds sang, and quick feral cats slithered through the brush. Here and there a pair of glowing eyes blinked at them from the shadows as their party rode through what once was a two-lane rural road and now was little more than a few feet of asphalt, just wide enough for the horses and the truck to pass through.
The dual engine truck burned gasoline during tech and enchanted water during magic. Like all enchanted engines, it made enough noise to wake the dead and their top speed would be about forty-five miles per hour, but faced with dragging the salvage back by hand, Hugh had decided not to look a gift truck in the mouth. The sluggish vehicle lagged about two hundred yards behind them with the main body of his party, but its distant roar didn’t travel far. The forest smothered it, as if offended by the noise.
Bucky loved the woods. The stallion kept trying to bounce and prance, his tail straight up in the air. Hugh held him in check. He didn’t feel like prancing.
Yesterday, after the wedding, instead of getting drunk and celebrating, he’d walked through the second reception site, which Elara’s people quickly set up inside the castle walls, reassuring, healing those who needed it, and expecting another attack. Elara had made an appearance, in a clean dress and her hair still perfect as if nothing had happened, and did the same, moving through the reception area, smiling and asking people about their children. They passed each other like two ships in the night, uniting briefly to cut the second cake, a carbon copy of the first one, which confirmed what he had already suspected. The Departed had expected trouble.
The void crept closer with the evening, and by the time the subdued celebration finally died down and Bale found him wanting to get drunk and celebrate, it was gnawing on him with sharp icy teeth. Hugh knew that the moment booze touched his lips and he felt fire and night roll down his throat, he wouldn’t stop. The lure of a numb stupor, where the void was a distant memory, was too strong. But Hugh had to stay sharp, so he told Bale no. He went to bed alone. Vanessa was still sulking, and he didn’t care enough to look for her. Seven hours later, at sunrise, he was on horseback and out the gates. There would be no moat without the salvage.
Ahead, the two guides Elara sent with him halted their horses. Hugh rode up, Sam at his heels. He would’ve preferred just one guide, Darin, the one barely in his twenties and obviously starstruck at being invited to lead twenty Dogs into the wilderness. It wouldn’t have taken much convincing to get Darin to spill Elara’s secrets, which was probably why his lovely wife saddled him with Conrad, who was in his fifties and had that unflappable quality farmers and older tradesmen got with age. He would be a tougher nut to crack.