“Surrender!”
Zee managed another blow. It drew blood. His opponent staggered and one of his swords dropped to the earth.
Vivian’s heart leaped in hope as she again focused on a shift, this time making the remaining blade disappear altogether.
And then, so unfair, more warriors swarmed over the fence, an army of loose-jointed figures with fresh blades.
“Surrender!” the swordsman facing Zee shouted again, brand-new blades shining in his hands, as the wave of reinforcements swept up behind him.
“Vivian, go!” Zee shouted, bracing himself for a hopeless defense. One last swing, and the onslaught bore him to the ground.
There had to be a way to fix this. Vivian grabbed the first image that came to mind and started the shift. The men began to sprout white feathers, to shrink. Their noses grew sharp and beaklike, their necks elongated.
The transformation was almost complete when an override struck her brain with an agony that nearly blinded her. Her legs felt like rubber; nausea surged in her belly. But Zee was going to be killed and she tried again. This time the pain dropped her to her knees, whimpering.
“Pitiful,” a woman’s voice said. “And stupid. Now give me the box.”
Vivian couldn’t move. Breathing was an agony that threatened to blow her head apart. Even the blood traveling through her veins created too much sensation. She willed herself to run, to do something to save the Key, but movement was beyond her.
She felt the box taken from her hand.
No more clanging of swords, no thudding of fists or grunts of effort. Nothing but her own too-loud breath.
When the voice spoke again, she tried to get her eyes open, but the light stabbed like daggers and the first attempt turned her stomach inside out.
“Get her out of my sight,” the voice said, dripping with disgust.
“It would be easiest to kill her.” A male voice now, accented and unfamiliar.
“Leave her alive. She may yet be of use. The rest of you—bind the warrior before he wakes.”
Hard hands grasped Vivian’s arms and dragged her to her feet, sending brand-new daggers of agony stabbing into her brain. The Voice of command was too far away for her to reach; her muscles didn’t belong to her. Bracing herself against the pain, she managed to stiffen her knees, force her eyes open, but then the hands lifted her and flung her through an open doorway.
The pain was beyond enduring and all the world went dark.
Nine
The sun had already dropped behind the mountain, laying heavy shadows beneath the trees. Soon it would be full dark. Morgan was racked by indecision. If he kept going, he risked losing the trail, blundering through the forest with nothing more than a blind hope that he’d somehow stumble across his quarry. But every time he thought about stopping he saw Jenn’s hands stretched out to him, the hope fading out of her eyes.
His fault—because he had been too slow to act today, and because of what he’d allowed to happen a year ago.
He’d been short on funds, and against his better judgment brought a young hothead hunter out looking for bear. After a long day of hunting and coming up empty they’d stumbled across a dying Sasquatch. What had happened to bring the creature down, Morgan couldn’t tell. Maybe it was wounded; maybe it was just sick, or old. It lay on a creek bank with its legs and feet trailing in the water, stinking to high heaven. When it saw them it struggled, briefly, trying to get to its feet but falling back and staring up at them with damn near human eyes.
And the imbecile hothead killed it. Not a mercy shot to end its suffering, or even a quick knife kill. No, the idiot began carving away at the neck with his hunting knife, carried away by the idea of lugging the head home as a trophy. Morgan had time to hear a near-human scream emerge from the creature’s throat, to see the eyes cloud with pain and fear before he’d put his own shotgun to one of those eyes and pulled the trigger.
He’d been uneasy ever since then about the man-beasts, and now the innocent were paying the price.
Trying to keep his emotions locked up tight so that his mind would be clear, he’d pushed himself all day long, moving as fast as he could without risk of losing the trail, not stopping to rest. He ate power bars from his backpack to keep up his energy. Drank water from the canteen. Welcomed the pain of overworked muscles and the creeping fatigue as a small punishment for an unforgivable failure.
At the edge of a small meadow he paused as his nostrils caught a hint of skunk gone bad. There were several large depressions in the grass and another smaller flattened area that could have been made by Jenn’s body. He saw no signs of blood. Maybe the creatures were more humane than the humans and his worst fears would not be realized.
Fingers tightening around the shotgun, he searched through the gloomy shadows for the trail. At first, his eyes passed right over the thing half buried in moss beside a decaying cedar. Just another bit of log, or an earth-covered rock. He had begun to follow the trampled grass out of the cleared space before his brain registered what he had seen.
Sick with remorse and dread, Morgan retraced his steps and knelt beside the body half buried in the leaves. He brushed away the debris to reveal Carpenter’s face, eyes open and staring blankly at the darkening sky. The old man’s face and hands were the color of a ripe plum. Dried blood clotted around a jagged piece of shrapnel embedded in his forehead, gift of the exploding gun. Blood matted his once-white hair.
The cause of death could have been brain injury and loss of blood from the head wound. If he had actually died hanging over the beast’s shoulder as his swollen face implied, then they hadn’t deliberately murdered him, had only dropped him off when they found him dead and even had the decency to cover him.
Which meant Jenn could still be alive.
Morgan’s weariness lifted in a burst of hope and renewed energy. Maybe he could still find her before dark. He didn’t want her to spend the long night hours as a prisoner, startling at noises in the dark, terrified of what her captors might do. He shut his mind against all of the possible harm that could come to her, willing his nerves steady and his mind clear. He could not afford to make any more mistakes.
Carpenter deserved a decent burial and his granddaughter would need that sort of closure, so Morgan took care to register the landmarks that would enable him to find the place again. He hadn’t gone far before a sound that had been just at the edge of his hearing became audible.
Running water.
Somewhere nearby there was a stream, and his quarry was headed toward it.
Morgan abandoned the trail and picked up his pace. Too dark now to catch the signs, but if he lost the trail he could backtrack to the clearing and try again by daylight. If they were heading for the water, it would be easy to find footprints in the soft earth at the margin of the stream.
As the sound of the water increased so did the stink, the air seeming to thicken with it. It spurred him to greater speed. He was on the trail; he had a chance to rescue the girl and at least partially pay for what he had done. This time he wouldn’t freeze if the hairy man-monkeys looked at him wrong. If they threw his shots off target, he’d tackle them with his bare hands. And if they killed him, what was death to him? A small thing, his life. He would be more than willing to trade it for the girl’s safety.
It was a noisy little creek, maybe ten feet across, cut deep into the earth. A pool about twenty paces downstream was edged by shallow muddy banks, lousy with footprints that would have given a Squatch hunter wet dreams, but Morgan didn’t even look at them.
Jenn lay half in, half out of the pool. A ray of light shafted through the trees and illuminated her face. She was moving, thank God, and her dark eyes were open. During the endless seconds it took for him to reach her they seemed to follow him, judging. One of her boots was caught under a branch that had lodged against two submerged rocks, anchoring her body in the stream with torso and head floating in the pool. Her long hair rippled with the moving water. Her arms were spread, palms open, much as they had been hours earlier when they had been stretched out to him, beseeching.