Chapter Twenty-SixHeat
The pack of six shambling wargs crossed Mal’s protective symbol without hesitation and stalked into the boundaries of the camp with all the confidence of the born hunters they were. Which was impressive, seeing as they were merely the undead, rotting corpses of hunters, the stench rolling off them worse than Leo the Head after a day spent basking in the sun.
The ward must only work on actual spirits, then.
The wargs’ presence was a message much louder and clearer than the shadow’s: Mal was too far behind on the path to the treasure, and the Shadow Queen’s patience was wearing thin.
He was grateful that the creatures’ matted chunks of fur, their deep, exposed rib cages and stumpy tails, their gnashing yellowed teeth and flea-bitten pointed ears, didn’t remind him of any dog he had ever known or loved. They were bigger than wolves, and smarter. Meaner.
It meant he wouldn’t feel a shred of remorse about chopping off their heads and returning them to their graves.
Mal, Griff, and Alys all managed to get to their feet before the wargs advanced enough to show the broken-off stumps oftheir fangs, huge paws missing the occasional claw, the threads of sinew just holding a leg or neck together. Despite their advanced decay, their luminous eyes showed plenty of understanding and intention as they slowly shrank the ring they had made around the three humans, whose weapons didn’t seem to trouble them in the slightest.
“Look, we’re on our way. We’re leaving right the fuck now to get this treasure, if you’ll just let us through,” Mal said through clenched teeth to the biggest of the wargs, a beast whose black pelt was flecked with white like fallen snow. “Won’t stop till we’ve rowed across the lake and back with every last bit of shiny.”
He didn’t care that Griff might wonder why the hell he was trying to bargain with reanimated wargs. Getting them out of this was more important than worrying about what questions he might have to face later. He needed to make sure therewasa later, and he wasn’t sure they could hack their way through six of these beasts before the wargs devoured them.
Snarling, tails swishing, they continued their slow advance, apparently unimpressed with Mal’s assurances.
Rather than reaching for the spirit blade, which was decidedly less useful against solid flesh in its current shattered state, he drew two knives. Now unable to scratch the relentless itch in his side, he could only hope his stitches would hold when these things pounced.
The wargs crept forward as one, slowly, taking their time in tightening the noose.
He hated that he couldn’t see them all at once. He took a step back, trying to get a better look at what was happening around him, and was met with the solid warmth of Griff’s and Alys’s backs against his. For a moment, he could fully breathe.
Then the wargs sprang at them, Griff swinging his maul at the biggest of the bunch while a smaller, faster beast took both Mal’s knives into its rib cage and still managed to pin him near his bedroll. Yet Mal grinned up at it through streaming eyesdespite the claws cutting into his shoulders, because fighting dirty was his favorite.
“Your dreadful lady is gonna be pissed that you didn’t just let us get on with it,” Mal growled as he spat in the warg’s eyes and pulled one of his knives free of the desiccated flesh.
As he tangled with the beast, other snarls and yelps and panted breaths filled the camp, but he didn’t feel the need to take his eyes from his own fight for once.
Because between every heft of his lover’s maul, every leap Griff made away from snapping jaws, and every kick of his boots into a brittle body, Griff called out to him, “Close one!” or “Hit it that time!” or “On your left!”
Mal was almost enjoying fighting like this, he realized as he sawed into the lean warg’s neck with savage pleasure. Or at least, it was easier. Having two partners who could hold their own. Whom he could count on.
He hummed a little as he wiped thick ropes of the unmoving warg’s drool from his cheek with his tattooed arm, but his expression changed as soon as he saw what Griff was doing with the biggest warg he still hadn’t managed to put down.
He was feeding it, that beautiful idiot. Tossing whatever scraps he could reach from the pack slung over his good shoulder—strips of jerky, an extra boot, a leftover, crusty old cinnamon bun—as if he might charm the beast with his undeniably good cooking while he slowly edged toward Alys, who needed more help than Mal did right now.
One of the other wargs had already been reduced to a headless corpse, a pile of mottled gray fur gently stirring in the night wind, but there were still three on Alys near the fire, and she didn’t seem to know where to aim her blade. Being drunk surely wasn’t helping.
Mal clocked the distance, the breeze, and threw his knife, which flashed in the embers before burying itself into the thick ruff of fur on the neck of one of the three. The struck beast whirledaround to confront him, snarling, just as Griff cried out in a way that wasn’t meant to convey anything more than pain.
The big warg had gotten tired of the snacks and now had its jaws clamped around Griff’s injured leg. His maul was several yards away, out of reach, as if he’d dropped it when the creature knocked him down. There was a gaping flap of skin in its underbelly, but of course that wasn’t enough to stop it cold.
By the fire, Alys screamed too, and Mal didn’t know where to look now that there was a pissed-off warg growling in his face and Griff was going to lose that fucking leg if he didn’t do something to help.
He wasn’t enjoying anything about this fight anymore.
With both his friends’ shouts ringing in his ears, louder than the sounds of the undead, Mal only had a second to decide.
He made a gesture in the air to Alys as he lunged onto the broad back of the beast trying to make a meal of Griff, ignoring the pull of his stitches.
The warg with the knife in its back bounded after him, its teeth closing on his pant leg and shredding it as Mal crawled up the larger beast’s body and settled between its hunched shoulders like he meant to ride it. “Okay down there?” he shouted to Griff over the creature’s incensed cries as the foreman used his other leg to kick it in the face.
Griff actually managed a pained smile. “Now that you’re here, I will be.”
Mal was no stranger to dirty work, but gouging out the eyes of the giant warg until it stopped trying to chew off Griff’s leg was one of the filthiest endeavors he had ever attempted. As Griff freed himself and started crawling over to grab his maul, Mal tore through the big warg’s fur and rotting flesh with his bare hands, hoping to sever its brain stem as violently as possible. Extra punishment for trying to stain the ground with any more of Griff’s blood.
