“I can hold my liquor.”
“Right. Sure you can. I’m going to sit and see if I can locate the boulders Brute told us about and set up a trap. You get to be bait.”
Brute chuffed with amusement.
With a wood splinter long as a human leg bone, Liz began scraping circles into the dirt and activating them. She put the pups into a small center one. Carved an outer one, that would double ring the pups. She dropped stones here and there, pulling them off her amulet necklace as she went. She was baiting a trap.
Brute figured it might save them. Or kill them all.
She sat down between the edge of the outer ring and Chewy and shoved her hands into the dirt.
Close by, something howled. Brute’s hair stood on end.
Eli
The howl echoedagainst the rock wall behind the shack, then faded. Silence descended on the open area, that strange, intense silence that falls on nature after some great storm, but this time without the dripping of rain or smell of ozone from lightning. He waited. His weapon was trained on the path from the shack to the crest of the hill, where Lizzie and Chewy were out in the open, unprotected except for any magics Liz might be able to draw up.
He breathed, his senses searching out in every direction. Nothing happened. Nothing moved. He scanned the trees, the rock face ahead, every shadow.
Ten minutes passed. There wasnothing.
The wind shifted lazily, and he caught the stench of rotted corpses.
So. Something.
Placing each foot with care, he approached the shack. Letting out a slow breath, he darted inside. It was empty, except for the dead creature propped up in the corner, in the darkness across from the door. Naked, internal organs well chewed, maggots, rot and filth. He’d been dead for at least a couple of days, though death looked different here, at this altitude, in autumn, from the way it did in a desert country. The body had clearly been dinner for the pups and the mama Dwayyo. There was enough left to determine that even if the man had started out life as a human, he hadn’t been one when he died.
Human-ish torso and abdomen, overdeveloped shoulders, human thighs and upper arms, hairy lower limbs. He had long claws at the tips of each finger, and his feet were shaped like long wolf feet, but with raptor-length claws on them. Where his face hadn’t been eaten away, he had fangs and a skull shaped like a large primate, but more along the lines of a gorilla or a large chimp, than human. And his head had been bashed in, repeatedly. There was a good sized rock nearby, dried blood on one side, with a bloody partial handprint on the other. The Dwayyo had killed her mate.
Maybe more importantly, she had eaten at least two humans. Partially gnawed human skulls were stacked neatly near the male’s elbow, against the back wall. Beside them was the skull of a big dog or a wolf. Humans, dead at the hand of a paranormal, meant he had an automatic license to kill.
Eli stepped into the clearing. Breathing deep to clean the stench out of his nostrils.
In the distance he heard another howl, long and echoing, and yet absorbed by the trees and the rolling hills. As the sound ululated away, Eli realized what had happened. The Dwayyo had gone around. It had circled back.
Adrenaline spiked through him. Using that little bit of extra speed he had been given as he healed, various times, that speed that came from drinking too much vamp blood, he sprinted back to the hill where he had left the others. Burst into the wind-ravaged space. But there was no wind. No Dwayyo.
Lizzie was okay. So were Chewy and Brute.
Liz had drawn several circles and attached them by lines to where she sat, inside a circle that wasn’t sealed. Her amulets and her battery stones were all around her, her hands were in the soil, eyes closed. He’d seen that expression before. She was searching through the ground for a source of power. A stone witch could take power from anything stone, but the good rocks were underground at least partially. Like the boulders back at the shack. Or bedrock. She was facing that way, not north, not east, but right at the shack.
Inside another small circle, surrounded by a larger one, were pups, one looking human-ish, like the body back at the shack. Without asking, Eli knew they were beneath a reversedhedge of thorns, a trap but a safe one, like a puppy pen. If something happened to them, anyone on the outside could break the working and get to them. There was another larger circle around them. He knew how her mind worked. The double circles were a trap waiting to be sprung.
The howl sounded again. Liz shivered but didn’t open her eyes.
“Hoss. It’s coming back. How much ammo you got?”
“It’s downhill,” Eli said. “Coming back around. Get in a protective circle,” he ordered Chewy.
“That’s what your girl wanted. And there’s one set up round me if I decide I need it. But I can’t fire from behind a ward and I ain’t going out as dead weight.”
As they talked Eli had been scanning the area, the broken trees, two that had fallen across each other, with one at an angle, the trunk tilted, and a spot that might make a shooter’s hide, about twelve feet off the ground. He bet the Dwayyo could jump that high, but the trunk nexus was the highest ground now that the trees were all down. Except for the debris, this was now a treeless clearing. Eli tossed a bag to Chewy. It contained all but three rounds of his bismuth and zinc ammo.
“Keep that thing busy. Stay alive. We can get you out on a medic helo.”
“I ain’t drinking no vamp blood. I’m too pretty as it is.”
But he looked too pale, and Eli knew the signs of shock, but had no way to treat it until the creature was dead. It was too late for him to open the blood-soaked padding and apply his own clotting sponge gel. Anything he did now would make things worse. “Hospital, my friend. Stay alive.”
