23

IT’S NOT A SLAUGHTERHOUSE, IT’S A SLAUGHTERHOME

The forest reserve was hundreds of miles by hundreds of miles, and it was dusk when we found two more clan members in that bizarre half state between men and wolves. They were impaled on a barricade of slim wooden pikes that smelled faintly of the bakaak’s paralyzing poison and wolfsbane. The pit they had fallen into wasn’t your typical steep drop; it had opened up into an increasingly sharp decline with loose gravel leading toward long stakes slanted at an angle, their ends sharpened and scorched by fire. The hairy half-human bodies looked like discarded puppets, their limbs held up and splayed at unnatural angles.

Off in the distance, perhaps a half mile away, the screaming that had led us here continued. It was one voice, which meant the rest of the claw was dead. More, the voice wasn’t able to form words and it wasn’t muffled. Someone’s tongue had been removed so that his garbled shrieks would draw us in without being able to give us any specific warnings.

It was working.

If we had all been knights, the prisoner could have timed screams in Morse code. If we had all been knights, we could have done something complicated and counterintuitive and set up skirmishers. If we had all been knights, I could have told the rest of them to ignore the screams of their brother and wait while I proceeded cautiously and carefully alone, and I would have known that I would be obeyed.

But we weren’t knights, so we went forward the way we’d discussed en route, in a firing-team wedge, four teams in a roughly diamond-shaped formation. One team of two was front and center and slightly ahead of the others. Two teams of two were on the left and right flanks respectively, slightly behind. The reserve force was farthest back to reinforce or take advantage of any openings as necessary. All of us had combat training of some kind, and we moved together instinctively, kept track of each other with our enhanced senses and maybe a little bit of something else, some bond that verged on telepathic if it didn’t outright spill over into that territory.

The bakaak had indeed been busy for days, perhaps weeks or months, before ever attacking the first guard. The air was full of a confusing screen of disgusting smells, rotting entrails hanging from tree limbs like Christmas ornaments, fetid river mud smeared on trunks, the lingering trace of burned animal oils and dead carcasses that had been dragged over the ground multiple times in different directions. I suppose it was possible to use our sense of smell to get our bearings, but it was impossible to do it quickly, and we needed to move quickly.

I bounded in six-foot running leaps that put me near narrow trees, close enough that I could grab on if I went down a pit but not directly beside the trunks. I was holding my Kevlar vest on my left hand like a shield instead of wearing it, my hand looped through the armholes. Mayte was trailing me.

I didn’t have a weapon in my right hand yet. I wanted that hand free to grab at anything that lashed out or dropped down.

Maybe thirty feet to my right, I could see another dead clan member who had triggered two traps in a combination I’d never seen before. Some kind of twitch snare had yanked him upside down and off his feet, which wouldn’t have held him long, but apparently the sliding rope of the twitch snare had then released the kind of pig-spear trap that is meant to kill boars or bears. A large pike had pinned him upside down to a nearby tree, and the smell of wolfsbane was in the air.

I was having a hard time putting my emotions aside, and I think it’s because they weren’t all my emotions. These were my family, something was saying, or many somethings. It felt like there were a lot of feelings combined into one huge pressure that was swelling against my conscious mind like water against a dam. This was my territory! This was my home!

On the far left, Uni-brow went down into a pit. Several hides had been sewn together, then set across a hole and covered with loose dirt and pebbles and twigs and small clumps of dung to confuse his sense of smell. He went down and tried to grab on to the ground around him, but there was no ground, just shifting hide pulled down by his own weight. Uni-brow’s efforts ceased when he was impaled on sharp stakes coated with paralyzing venom.

But that wasn’t the end of it.

Slowed, stiffening, Uni-brow was helpless as the rest of the trap fell into place. The edges of the hide were anchored by bladders full of distilled alcohol. When Uni-brow’s weight pulled the hides abruptly down, the bladders were pulled in after him, bursting and soaking him in flammable liquid. A burning arrow, the source of the smoke smell, ignited the entire area. Uni-brow’s claw mate tried to stop and grab the edges of the hide then, tilting his head back as he strained upward, and an arrow went through his nasal passages and into his brain.

I didn’t even know their names.

What I did know was that the bakaak was firing from an elevated point somewhere west of my location. I was heading toward an embankment of sheer stone, perhaps forty feet high with no end in sight, and I could picture the rest of the battle—if you could call it that—unfolding in my mind’s eye. The sloping incline that we would find somewhere far to our right, no doubt larded with pitfalls and deadfalls and snares and barricades designed to slow us down while the bakaak waited to pick off the brave fool who would inevitably try to sneak up on its vantage point by climbing the rock face stealthily.

Perhaps the bakaak would retreat to its next fallback position then, some narrow underground passage where we could only approach it one at a time, or a chasm with some makeshift bridge that it could disable behind it, or some patch of woods that it could set ablaze to cover its retreat until it was ready to attack again.

I looked around for some way to alter the equation, scanning the tree line with a vague idea of finding a tall tree that might just get close enough to the top of the cliff face for a werewolf to jump across, and that’s when I saw it—a narrow dead tree some sixty feet in height that was almost ready to collapse, perceptibly leaning and made of wood that was bare of bark and dried out and gray.

I sprinted past the tree and then skidded to a halt. It was possible. It might have even been possible if I was only human. I ran straight back at the tree and saw Mayte coming to a halt behind me, stopping to stare at me openmouthed. At the last moment, I pivoted and pointed my foot and turned my hip and aimed my butt cheek at the nexus point I wanted to hit, the juncture next to a hollow hole in the trunk, and I let my momentum drive all of my body weight into a sidekick that shattered that rotted surface. Chunks of brittle wood went flying with a sharp crack like a rifle going off, and I rebounded backward some little ways but managed to stay on my feet and charged the tree again.

I hammered another kick into the tree, and then another, pivoting rapidly, left foot, right foot, wood spewing from the opening I’d made as if the tree were spitting out crumbs, and then its top-heavy frame began to lean forward even more with the sound of a hundred envelopes being ripped open at once. The weight bearing down on the thinned base snapped it and the entire tree toppled forward. Its new base thundered into the ground and the top fell against the cliff at a diagonal angle, almost reaching the apex.

I leaped on to the sloping tree trunk and began to run up its length. It was a steep angle but climbable. A slight hiss, and I moved the Kevlar vest I was holding like a shield upward. An arrow thumped into it. The arrow stung my forearm, hot and sharp, but it didn’t penetrate the bulletproof material.

I kept running into a section where the branches were negotiable next to the trunk but extended out into smaller and thicker networks, providing me cover even while they slowed me down. Another arrow cracked into a branch right in front of me.

To my right, a fairly thick branch jutted upward, and I saw a chance and took it, running up the branch and leaping for a ledge on the embankment and making it, moving around a small outcrop of rock on the cliff face while another arrow shattered on stone behind me. There was a rock jutting a few feet before and above me, and I didn’t try to grab it; I leaped upward as far as I could and used it as a foot brace and then jumped again and then I was rolling over the top of the embankment.

I just had time to unsheathe my knife and gain my feet when another hiss made me turn my head just fast enough to make an arrow tear out my left earlobe instead of anchoring in the side of my neck. Then the bakaak burst through the undergrowth and we were in closing distance.

God, I missed my katana.

It really was faster than me, just like legends said, and I’m not used to fighting things that are faster than me. Stronger than me, yes, often, but not faster. I couldn’t see much of it; it was shorter than I was and covered in pelts and a greasy layer of animal fats and charcoal that had been melted into paste. Only its eyes were plainly visible, two smoldering red dots in shadow.

We halted then, circling each other while it told me its name and who it had been in its previous life, speaking of its motivations and hatreds and dreams. The bakaak just happened to speak contemporary English, and it bragged of its plans for the werewolf clan and taunted me with my inability to prevent them.

Okay, all of that was a lie. The bakaak didn’t say a damn thing, it just tore my left eye out with the end of the bow, using its length like a staff. It was so fast that I couldn’t stop it, though the knife that I tried to block it with did belatedly slash the bowstring a microsecond later. This actually saved my life, because I was staggering back and the bakaak was already beginning a move that would have strung another arrow and fired it through my face at point-blank range. It wasted a second realizing that the bowstring was cut, and I grazed the side of its knee with a short kick instead of breaking it squarely like I’d hoped.

Damn, the thing was fast!

The bakaak dropped the arrow in its right hand so that it could reach for its war club, but the bow in its left swung and caught my foot on my now-blinded side, pulling me off balance. I fell next to its foot and my knife pounded all the way through the bakaak’s soft felt boot and anchored into the hard soil beneath it.

Flit through the forest like some darkest nightmare now, you bastard.

The bakaak freed the war club from its side before I cleared my gun, and it smacked the weapon out of my hand with a whistling swing that broke several of my fingers, and then wolves were bearing the bakaak backward and down, one, two, three of them.

They must have followed me up the tree ladder I’d made. As fast and skilled as it was, the bakaak didn’t last long after that.

Mayte came and pulled me away from the carnage, hooking her hands under my arms. That was fine, but then Mayte started to suck on my wounded ear, spitting blood out intermittently. I tried to tell Mayte to quit it, but the words came out garbled because the left side of my face was dead, which might have been a blessing because that eye was missing and it probably would have hurt like a bitch otherwise. She tried to say something back, but her lips and tongue had gone numb. We both started to laugh, strange-sounding hoots that were maybe a little hysterical.

Mayte collapsed down beside me, and we lay there on the ground with our heads close together and listened to the sound of tearing flesh in the background.