She decided there were about a dozen of the creatures around her. Close by, one was whining, or perhaps humming, beneath his breath. Two near the outer edge of the group appeared to be arguing, or muttering complaints. One moved with an uneven gait. She could hear one foot scraping with each step, as if he was dragging it.
It took a while to single out the sounds she thought indicated each individual, but she tallied it carefully and finally arrived at what she considered a fair guess.
Twelve to one and she was weaponless.
They were bound to become suspicious of her prolonged unconsciousness soon … unless they thought she was dead?
She decided to risk a peek through her eyelashes.
The first sight that greeted her eyes was a pair of hairy buttocks. A filthy thong divided the flaccid cheeks. The skin beneath the hair was somewhere between a pale blue and gray, but that might have been because the creature was so dirty.
There was enough light to see, but she had no idea of how near dawn it had been when the thing had grabbed her and nearly suffocated her, so no clue of how long she’d been unconscious or how far they might have traveled.
The sun peering through the trees glinted off of something metallic, catching her attention and she realized that the creature had a sword strapped to his side. Excitement pumped through her. She closed her eyes, mentally surveying the state of her body.
She’d been hanging over the thing’s shoulder long enough her entire body felt stiff and unresponsive. Sluggish circulation made it difficult to determine whether her hands were bound or not and she didn’t dare try to move them to find out, or look.
She decided she’d have to assume they’d bound her wrists, but her arms were hanging over her head. The thought had barely registered when a hand tangled in her hair and jerked her head up.
She didn’t have time to formulate a plan. The moment the fingers grasped her hair, she went for the sword. Snatching it from the scabbard with both hands, she swung it upward, gutting the creature that had grabbed her.
All hell broke loose then.
* * * *
Slowed by the need to look carefully to detect the faint signs, Reese had been tracking the progress of Amaryllis’ captors for nearly twenty minutes when an inhuman scream split the still morning air of the forest. It took him two seconds to triangulate the direction of the sound’s origin. He broke into a run then, his heart hammering with unaccustomed fear.
The ground had been steadily climbing since he’d left the stream behind, the soil becoming rockier and the vegetation thinning, making progress easier but detection of their passing more difficult. Until he’d heard the scream, he’d begun to worry that he would lose all traces of their trail and that anxiety nagged at him as he raced up the hill along with the fear that the forest and rocks had deceived him with the direction of the sound he’d heard. Within a few minutes, however, he began to hear the sounds of a battle; the clang of steel against steel; growls and grunts of exertion; howls of pain; the meaty sound of something hard connecting with flesh.
A flash of metal through the trees snagged his attention and he veered toward it. He could see nothing of Amaryllis when at last he caught sight of the excited natives on a wide outcropping of rock some fifteen feet above him, but he didn’t doubt for a moment that she was the object of their frenzied interest. Uttering a howl of rage, he bounded onto a large boulder beneath the ledge and then launched himself upward.
The rock beneath his feet split as he landed on the edge of the outcropping. He teetered for a moment and then caught his balance. A half dozen natives, attracted by the sound of Reese’s booted feet impacting with stone, whirled to face him, let out yells of surprise and excitement and charged him. Bending his knees, Reese launched himself over their heads, cleaving one of the creatures nearly in half as he flew over him.
He landed between the group that had charged him and the group that was still occupied with trying to disarm Amaryllis … or kill her. Two died before they even realized there was a threat behind them and, hacking to his left and right with his sword, Reese cleared a path through them and worked his way between Amaryllis and her attackers.
She threw him a look that was part relief, part apology.
“Stay behind me,” he growled, turning to face the savages.
“You can’t take them all,” Amaryllis said, gasping for breath.
“I won’t have to.”
She wasn’t certain what he meant by that. She didn’t see anyone else, but she was too tired to argue with him at the moment. She knew no more than fifteen or twenty minutes had passed since she’d engaged the natives in battle, but she’d already been worn out from her escape the night before from the patrol. Moreover, she was bleeding from a half a dozen cuts since it was impossible to fend off every strike without taking a hit occasionally and she felt vaguely dizzy.
She guarded his back, anyway, but discovered fairly quickly that Reese was backing both of them into a corner. “We’ll be boxed in!” she shouted warningly.
He ignored the warning, forcing her back until he was taking the full brunt of the attack and she no longer had enough room to maneuver to try to help. All she could do was try to stay out of his way and not hamper his efforts at defending them.
The natives might have been startled by Reese’s arrival. They might even have been intelligent enough to know fear when the raging blond giant landed in their midst, but their overwhelming superiority of numbers gave them courage and they showed no sign of flagging, or giving up. Within a few minutes, Reese was beginning to look as bad or worse than she did as they came at him by three’s and four’s and managed to break through his guard again and again, nicking his chest, his thighs, and his arms. The sword in Reese’s hand was moving so fast it was little more than a blur of motion. Each time he was attacked from a new direction, he managed to block and parry, but there were too many of them and they were crowding too close for Reese to do more than defend their position. Amaryllis had begun to fear that the two of them would be completely overwhelmed when she heard the hunter’s battle cry. Her heart leapt with relief.
Despite the heat of battle, the natives heard it, too. The moment those in the rear ceased to press forward to take the place of those who’d been injured or tired from wielding their swords against Reese, he launched an offense, cutting down three of the natives in quick succession.
Dante and Cain landed on the ledge behind the group like two great, wingless birds of war. Cain dodged two that launched themselves at him, leaping over them, landing in a dive and roll and scooping up a sword from the hand of one of the fallen along the way. When he came to his feet once more, a smile of grim pleasure curled his lips. Dante grabbed the first three that rushed him and tossed them over the ledge. Amaryllis heard one scream and then the meaty thuds as three bodies slammed into the rocks below in quick succession.
Within moments of their arrival, a half dozen warriors lay dead or dying and the ledge was so slick with blood that the battle became amacabrewaltz of death as the fighters slipped and skidded with each step they took. When the few remaining natives finally realized that their numbers had dwindled drastically and they no longer had even the advantage of superior odds, they made a belated attempt to escape.
Reese and Cain cut them down as they ran. Sheathing his sword, Dante crossed the ledge and knelt to examine Amaryllis’ injuries. “There are none that are serious,” she said quickly.
