Taming the Beast (28 page)

Roderick sat very still for several moments, clinging to Michaela, thin and soaked and frozen through, and feeling the reverberations of the approaching riders in the very air around them both. He could not comprehend what was happening.

“No.” Her whisper was incredulous, terrified.

Beneath Roderick's shredded tunic, the metal link began to burn against the skin of his chest.

It could not be. It was a myth, a ridiculous superstition.

But then his eyes squinted against the silver and gold glow growing between the treed blackness of the forest road, not quite touching it as it moved and bloomed between the arching branches. A sizzling wind preceded the light, and it smelled of incense and blood and…coin.

“No,” Michaela murmured again, her fingers tightening their hold on his shirt. She, too, stared toward the glow, her eyes wide, her breath coming in ragged gasps. “No.” She pushed away from him suddenly and gained her feet.

“Michaela,” Roderick barked. “Come back!”

But she was already stumbling toward the middle of the road, directly into the path of the looming, advancing glow, the disembodied, hellish roar. A trumpet blast echoed, like the screams of a hundred tortured souls.

“Lie down, Roderick,” Michaela called back loudly but calmly. “Do…do not look at them! Mayhap they will pass you by.”

Roderick knew she was giving him the old instructions from the legend, but he would not leave her standing so small and alone in the middle of the road, her shoulders squared, her chin lifted.

“They'll not pass
you
by!” Roderick shouted. He struggled to roll to his hip, to get his leg beneath him. “Michaela, help me up!”

“No!” The glow touched her face now, stretched out endlessly into the depths of the forest at their backs, reaching long tendrils through the trees and into the sea mist. She flinched as her face brightened, as if she could feel the light. Roderick could see her beautiful profile from where he was crumpled uselessly at the side of the road—her eyes appeared blackened, sunken. Her fear hollowed her cheeks. “Whatever you do, my love, stay down!”

But Roderick could not obey her. He began dragging himself to the nearest tree. Perhaps once there, he could pull himself aright, thieve a branch to—

An icy hand gripped the back of his neck with skeletal fingers, pushing his head into the deep, wet leaves beneath him. A voice full of frost and death hissed in his ear.

“Mayhap we should heed Miss Fortune, my lord.”

Roderick turned his head with a hoarse cry, and Harliss, her thin, gray hair plastered to her skull, smiled a corpse grin at him. Her dagger point dug into the flesh beneath his chin.

“'Tis the Hunt, you know. A dangerous lot. We shall be very still, very quiet, you and I. After they've killed her, I shall deal with you myself, at last, you ungrateful, wretched, spoiled boy. And then…and then I shall go home. Magnus is surely wondering where I've been.”

Her bony forearm was across the back of his neck, the length of her tall, spindly body covering his. Roderick tried to throw her off, but it was of no use. He was too weak from his battle with the sea.

Mayhap only yesterday, Roderick would have damned himself for his weakness. For being overpowered by Harliss, helpless to move, to fight, to even stand. But now, his mind only worked, trying to devise a way to protect Michaela.

Not only from the gray harpy that clung to him, but from the band of riders now materializing out of the glow, out of a storm cloud, out of the blood of a thousand centuries.

“Michaela,” he choked, surprised at the weak whisper that came from his throat.

“Shh,” Harliss hissed into his ear, and then rubbed her frozen, leathery face against his cheek. “It will all be over soon….”

 

Michaela felt the dissolution of her knees, saw the black peppering of dots before her eyes and tried to blink them away.

She could not faint. She
would
not.

But the sight approaching her—a hundred riders on horses that looked to be the size of dragons, some even snorting black smoke with tosses of their giant, reptilian heads and black, glossy, sightless eyes, their hooves running six feet off the ground; hounds as big as calves, shaggy and coal black, their eyes red and glowing, their teeth shining alabaster sparks as they gnashed and snarled their torturous cries, circling and swooping around the band with great leaps and bounds, over, under, around.

The leader headed the damned party on a silvery steed made of nightmares. His rich, brown hair was impossibly long, hanging over one shoulder to fall to his waist. His arms—thick as branches from the oldest trees—were bare beneath his mail shirt, which sparkled like sunlight on water. In his hand he brandished a broadsword that looked to be as tall as Michaela herself, and his shield, like the wheel of a cart, hung at his side.

Yes, the leader was terrifying, but his party…Michaela felt her reality whirling into madness as her head tipped back on her neck and she looked upon the rider's companions.

They were…
monsters
. Some gray with rotten and bloated flesh, a noose around the neck of one, a gaping wound erasing the side of a skull of another. Some were black, burnt, as if they had just stepped from their own funeral pyres, their eyes startlingly white and shot with blood, their lips and ears melted away. One had horns sprouted just above his ears, and his eyes looked to be gouged out. One had the scales of a fish over his entire head and face, and a forked, black tongue that flicked the air in anticipation. Creatures missing limbs, men with their torsos ripped wide, their innards looped over their arms like the train of a gown. Michaela saw one man-beast, small, hairless and leathery brown, sitting on the pommel of another monster's saddle, eating what appeared to be a human hand. He caught Michaela's eye and raised his head to smile at her hungrily with tiny, bloodied, pointed teeth.

Surely Michaela looked upon Hell's honored guests, for each was a greater horror than the next. All except for the leader, and the man who rode behind him, a golden rope leashing him to the leader by his neck. This man looked almost human, save for his alabaster skin, his white-blond hair, his eyes that held no color, only black. He sat on his steed stark naked, and every inch of him was pearly white, ripped muscle. He stared at Michaela as if she was a small brown mouse, and he was a cat crouched in the tall grass, biding his time, waiting to pounce on her, his mouth around her neck and…

The leader's booming voice shook Michaela from her trance and he jerked viciously on the golden tether. As the rope tightened then slacked, she saw the deep scorched ring gouged around the pet's neck. “She is not for you, Alder.”

The white-skinned man rocked in his saddle and sent the leader a growl, but to Michaela, he gave a sensuous smile with his full lips, the only spot of color on his person.

And then she saw that his eyeteeth extended in dagger points—fangs—as white as his hair and skin.

Michaela cried out and stumbled backward. She wanted to look toward Roderick, to assure herself of his safety, but she dared not take her eyes from the hideous band before her.

“You are not Agatha Fortune,” the leader accused, his voice cracking like the splitting of a great tree. “And yet…you are.”

“I am her daughter,” Michaela choked. “Michaela.”

“Michaela?”
His eyebrows rose and a slight smile played about his lips. “Michaela. Michaela Fortune. You have something that belongs to me, yes?”

Michaela shook her head jerkily. “No. No, I have naught. I only ask that you leave…leave me in peace. Do me no harm.”

“Ahh,” the giant rider admonished. “You have a possession of mine. A thing I left in your mother's care, a promise for your father's life. It is here—I feel it. A part of me.” His hand went to his chest over his mail, and although Michaela knew she should not have been able to see a void so small, so minute, her eyes clearly picked out the circle of black in his shirt.

A circle, where one piece of mail was missing.

Michaela shook her head madly again. “I don't have it. I…I lost it.”

“You
lost
it?” the leader taunted. “That is too bad. I told your mother that I would return for my possession, and that recovering it would ensure Walter Fortune's black life, as well as hers and your own. If you no longer have it…”

“My father is a good man!” Michaela cried. “Not the man he once was!”

“It matters not,” the leader reasoned. “A bargain is a bargain. Perhaps you haven't lost it after all, yes? Perhaps you…gave it away?” To Michaela's horror, the man's blazing eyes went to the darkened tree line, where Roderick lay.

She turned her head, and saw Roderick at the base of a dead, rotted tree, Harliss sprawled atop him, her blade at his throat. As the leader turned his attention to the wood, the glow of the band spread over the ground, illuminating Roderick and his captor.

“What have we here?” the leader said mildly. “Perhaps Michaela Fortune hopes to trade your life for her father's, soldier. She gave you my link, did she not?”

And Michaela could not stop her soft, helpless weeping.

 

For several moments, Roderick had fooled himself into thinking he had fallen unconscious from his injuries. That what he was experiencing at the wood's edge—Harliss atop him, his life blood throbbing against the jagged edge of her blade, the hellacious group of fiends standing judgment before Michaela in the road—was nothing more than an insane nightmare. But when the leader turned eyes to him, when Roderick, too, flinched from feeling the band's glow slide over his skin, he knew he was horribly awake.

“I have your link, Devil,” Roderick called out as loudly as his awkward position would allow. “Around my very neck. Come and get it!”

The demon laughed as if highly amused by the challenge, then his eyes narrowed, his head tilted. “I know you,” he said contemplatively. “I have seen your face before.”

Before Roderick could answer, Harliss screeched, “You stay away! Stay away! He is mine! When he is dead you may take him back to Hell with you! In the name of…in the name of God, do I command thee!”

The riders in the band howled and screamed, the hounds bayed, the dragon horses reared and pawed at the air.

The leader's attention was only for the gray old woman now. He held up one palm slightly toward her, his brow furrowed as if in concentration. Then his hand snapped closed in a fist.

“
Harlis-s-s
,” the leader hissed. “You dare call upon the name of God to defend thee?”

“How do you know me?” Harliss choked. “You know me not!”

The leader gave a brief chuckle. Then he cracked the leash in his hand like a whip, and the tether loosened and rose up from around the snowy-skinned man's neck and head.

“Alder,” the leader said smoothly, and raised the now-coiled leash to indicate Harliss. “That one, you may take.”

The naked man gave a guttural snarl and leapt into the air from his saddle. He bounded over the road and into the fringe of trees on all fours, his skin glowing, his muscles rippling, and he pounced upon Harliss, tumbling her away into the blackness like a cat with a ball of twine.

Roderick heard Harliss scream, but the sound ended in an abrupt, watery rip. Then he heard drinking, slurping, chewing, echoing through the forest.

Roderick struggled to a seat against the crumbling tree trunk, and then pushed with all his might to stand. Michaela dashed from the road to his side, shrugging under his left arm to support him. Roderick gripped her shoulder tightly, pressed a quick, almost defiant kiss to the crown of her head, while never taking his eyes from the demonic party.

The Hunt leader watched them both with something akin to amusement, but his words were for Roderick alone. “Give me my link, soldier.”

Roderick reached into his tunic and snapped the chain with one swift pull. Swinging up the ends to pool in his palm atop the glowing, throbbing metal link, he held it tight in his fist for a moment, thinking.

“You will do us no harm if I return it to you? You will leave us?”

The leader's eyes flamed and he only held out a palm.

“Give it to him, Roderick,” Michaela whispered urgently. “It belongs to him.”

Roderick tossed it through the air and the leader caught it with an easy swipe of his fist. The chain slithered away to the ground and dissolved into the mud, and the giant, glowing man placed the link in his shirt gently, delicately. Bright gold light burst from it for an instant, causing Roderick and Michaela to throw up arms to shield their faces, but then the dumb metal faded into the obscurity of the thousands of links surrounding it.

The leader then looked at Roderick as if he could see into his very soul. “Yea, I have seen you. You, who fought with your men, who watched them fall, who sacrificed”—the leader looked down at Roderick's half leg—“your own flesh so that others might live.”