The direction of the wind would hide its scent as it approached.
Brute showed his teeth and growled, the sound long and low. Turning his nose into the scents, trying to determine patterns and location.
He thought about the angel and the power that Hayyel had made available for him to draw upon. He sank into that hard, cold, distant place the angel had shown him. Darkness and light. The place of the void before and after time. He could get lost there, forever, if he wasn’t careful. But he needed to see what had happened ten minutes ago.
The grindylow chittered with what sounded like irritation as his angel-magic rose. It grabbed his ears and handfuls of hair with its paws. It mewled and yodeled softly.
Time and space twisted. Brute stepped forward and yet back in time, five seconds. A lifetime. The channel of time and space was a tunnel, like a curl of a wave open in front of him. He gathered himself and the moment before the wave would have collapsed, he raced through.
He dove the last few feet (Years? Seconds? Miles?) and landed in the woods, a hundred feet in front of the small house the Dwayyo called home. He was crouched in the trees, hidden behind branches that still carried the browned leaves of autumn. He wasn’t in a spot he had reconnoitered before, the angle more toward the east and about twenty feet higher, so he could see down into the clearing.
The Dwayyo was standing in front of the shack in a rough circle, composed of trees. The creature lifted its arms into the air and sang awyrd. It was a complex set of notes that seemed to have no equivalent to music as he understood it, but was more like the soft yowling of wild dogs combined with the hooting of monkeys. Around it—around her—wind swirled and gathered. Magic danced across the clearing, hovering over the pit filled with bodies. Theairworking gathered power, picking up leaves and twigs, dust and small rocks, becoming visible as the things around it were incorporated into the whirlwind.
The female might be going insane with rabies, and whatever other sick scent he could smell, but at this point she could still think.
Two small creatures toddled out of the house. They were spotted and furred things with claws and fangs. They were walking wobbly. Just young, or something else? That mad deer prion disease they had considered?
Killing a creature’s young, even sick young, went against his orders from the angel. Killing the mother would mean the pups were dead too, as they were too young to hunt on their own. One cub fell over and twitched. The smell of sickness reached him, carried on the scent of the pups. The disease carried by the Dwayyo had been transferred to the pups.
With a final note, the Dwayyo shoved with her front paws and the whirlwind raced toward the not-too-distant crest where the witch and the humans waited.
Fast as the wind, the Dwayyo followed, loping on four legs, fangs and claws fully exposed. Attacking. The moment the creature disappeared, Brute raced for the shack. Leaped over the two pups, now lying in filth. Landed inside. To focus on the small space.
Son of a bitch, he thought.
Liz
The wind rushed uphill.
Brute vanished in a spill of magic she could feel but not see.
Eli pushed her down and took up a protected spot behind a tree. Chewy lumbered to a bigger tree a good thirty feet away.
The wind increased in speed and abruptly cut off.
Liz opened aseeingworking.
She rolled to her feet. She shouted. “Whirlwind!”
Elimoved. He grabbed all the gear in one hand, her arm in the other, and shoved them against the tree he had been leaning against. In seconds, he wrapped a heavy flex around the tree, gear, and both of them.
Three seconds. It had been inhumanly fast. Nearly Jane Yellowrock fast. And it proved how changed he was, how different he was, since his assorted healings with vampire blood. He wrapped his arms around her, still tying them to the tree.
“Chewy get over here!” she shouted.
Chewy hollered with what sounded like glee and strapped himself to his own tree.
The trees all around began to whip.
“Chewy!” she screamed.
“He ain’t coming,” Eli said, his voice battle hard.
The wind began to roar, a freight train in a forest. Tornado.
Though her face was pressed against bark, she pulled her amulet necklace around and pinched a special, one of a kind,hedge of thornsamulet between a finger and thumb. Hoping to provide them some protection.
Thirty feet away, Chewy was tied to the tree and was crouched down like a boulder in camo-overalls. Laughing like a maniac.
