TEN
THE WEREWOLVES, EVEN in human form, clearly had far sharper senses than I. My first clue vampires were about to attack was when my companions suddenly reined to a halt, leaped from their horses, threw off their robes, and turned into wolves.
This, of course, left me in the unfortunate position of being the sole rider left mounted on a horse surrounded by wolves. I gripped the reins tighter (and sneezed, for good measure), but to my delight, the horse remained unfazed. She just lowered her head to nibble grass from the verge of the path we’d been following between dark, unkempt fields.
I was so happy with the mare’s calmness that I leaned forward to pat her neck . . . and something whooshed through the space I’d been occupying a moment before. In the same instant, something else slammed into my side and knocked me from the horse.
I hit the ground hard enough to knock out my breath—one of my least favorite experiences in the world, although I suppose, on a scale that includes being attacked by flying vampires while surrounded by werewolves, it perhaps doesn’t rank very high—and rolled, trying desperately to draw breath, only to find a giant black wolf staring down at me, eyes glowing red: Jakob. He took one look at me, as if to be sure I wasn’t dead. I wasn’t, and at least I was managing at last to draw a little air around the edges of the sharp lump in the middle of my chest, so he twisted away.
I couldn’t see much of what was going on. Wolves snapped and howled and leaped into the air at giant black bat-shapes. The battle only lasted a few moments, then the vampires broke off, circling up into the sky and flying back north, the way we’d come.
Several of the wolves shifted back to naked humans. Jakob came over to me, pulling his robe on as he approached. By now I could breathe almost normally, although the lessening of pain in my chest just meant I could feel the bruises on my side where I had hit the ground. I touched my ribs gingerly. Not cracked I hoped but, ow. Hadn’t broken an arm or a leg, either. All in all, a pretty good fall from a horse, if there was such a thing.
“We were fortunate,” Jakob said. He held out his hand and I let him pull me upright. I only groaned a little. “Embry, in lupine form, has been running ahead, then turning to watch behind us. He glimpsed them in the air and gave warning. Carelessness on their part, flying high enough to silhouette against the stars.”
“What did they want?” I said. I rolled my shoulders and winced.
“You have to ask? You, of course. And I was a fool to change the moment the alarm came. I had forgotten you are only a human. I should have stayed in human form long enough to pull you down. They almost had you.”
“Any casualties?” I asked, feeling subdued. Once again, people—okay, werewolves and vampires, but still people—were fighting because of me.
“Nothing that did not heal when we left wolf form. Some of them took worse.” He made a face, turned his head, hawked, spat, swiped his sleeve across his lips, and turned toward me again. “And vampires taste terrible.”
I blinked. “Not something I ever thought about.” Some impulse made me ask, “How do they think you taste?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve never let one I’ve fought live long enough to ask it.”
I wanted to ask him how this had all come about, how the Pact had fallen and the vampires and werewolves, once allies, had become enemies, with the humans caught between them—but the middle of the night, after a vampire attack, didn’t seem the best time. I filed the question away for later.
The horses, those remarkably placid Shaped horses, had only moved a short distance down the road. We retrieved them, mounted, and continued our journey. The pack didn’t talk: no chatter about the attack, or anything else. Just grim, straight-ahead riding.
I found myself slumping in my saddle, only the occasional sneezing fit perking me up. Jakob, riding behind me, trotted his horse up to my side. “Not much longer,” he said. “There is a redoubt ahead that we maintain for ranging packs. We will rest there for a few hours.”
“Sounds . . .” I sneezed, wiped my nose with the back of my sleeve—nobody seemed to have heard of Kleenex on this world and I hadn’t been given a handkerchief—and finished, “wonderful.”
“Wonderful” perhaps overstated it, but the “redoubt”—really a cave, its mouth sealed with stone blocks, the only openings in it a narrow wooden door bound with steel bands and two narrow slits perfect (I presumed) for shooting arrows through—was surprisingly comfortable inside. By the time we reached it, dawn was breaking, though the sun would take a while yet to climb above the eastern slope of the valley, in which the redoubt was set. The wolves who had been scouting around the horses had all turned into naked humans who were glad to be given cloaks on our arrival.
Inside, there were a dozen cots, blankets, food (of the dried-this-and-that variety; somewhat to my surprise, considering this was a werewolf redoubt, the this-and-that included fruit and nuts, but I suppose in human form they were no more inclined to eat fresh streaming entrails than I was), fresh water from a spring in the back wall that tumbled noisily into a small pool, and a couple of what I would have called picnic tables, though they probably had a more medieval-ish name I wasn’t aware of.
Or maybe not: maybe the Shaper just decided to include picnic tables in her world for some reason, or the world decided on its own that they were appropriate and borrowed them from the First World, as apparently the Shaped worlds were wont to do. The precise rules surrounding such things had yet to be explained to me. I wondered if I had learned them in Ygrair’s school, and then forgotten them. Maybe it was just as likely that nobody knew all the rules—maybe not even the mysterious Ygrair. Heck, maybe the rules were different for every world. Apparently, physical laws were, since here, humans could actually turn into werewolves and vampires.
I ate, though I couldn’t exactly tell you what, and drank water, and then fell into the nearest cot and was asleep in an instant.
Perhaps three hours after they departed, the vampires returned to the castle. Karl had pulled the comfortable chair onto the balcony and had dozed off in it, but he woke to the susurration of wings and peered down into the courtyard to see the bat-things turn into humans. There was much angry discussion, though he could make out none of the words, and then everyone repaired back into the castle, leaving the courtyard empty in the moonlight.
After a few more minutes, Karl left the chair where it was and went to the bed, lying on it fully clothed, in case something happened during the night.
In the end, all that happened was that he slept.
When he woke in the morning, the food and water had been replenished. Someone had come into the room without waking him.
Furious with himself, he sat at the table and ate and watched the door.
Surely, someone would come to him today.
I awoke to dim daylight, finding its way into the cave through the slit windows. I sat up and looked around. The pack still slumbered around me—all except Jakob, who, in his robe, sat on the ground by the door, back to the wall. I went to him. “Good . . .” I stopped. I didn’t have a clue what time it was. “Afternoon?” I guessed.
“Almost,” he said.
I felt grungy and stinky and generally unappealing, after all the running and swimming and riding on (and falling off of) horses the night before, but there seemed little hope of a bath anytime soon, and clearly, in this world, a shower was definitely out. There was another matter that could not wait, however. I cleared my throat. “Um, where do I . . . ?”
He nodded toward the back of the cave. “Behind that curtain.”
“Thanks.” Behind said curtain, I found a hole in the ground and a remarkable smell. I emerged feeling relieved in more ways than one. Around me, the rest of the pack still snored. I took a moment to count them: ten, in all, counting Jakob. Of Maigrat and Eric, there was no sign, but they would make the pack an even dozen. Which made me unlucky thirteen.
I found some cheese and dried fruit for my breakfast/lunch and then returned to Jakob. “What happens today?” I asked, sitting beside him.
“We rest until nightfall. We do not travel in daylight if we can help it.”
“Why not?”
He looked at me like I was an idiot. “Because we cannot take our superior forms by daylight. In the sun, we are as weak as you humans.”
“And you don’t like that.” I took a bite of cheese.
“It is like having a part of myself amputated.”
I thought about that. “And the vampires?”
“They are the same.”
“They don’t burst into flame or crumble into dust?” Father Thomas had said they didn’t, but I wanted a second opinion.
I got the “are-you-an-idiot?” look again. “Of course not. Why would they?”
I couldn’t exactly say, “Because they do in my world.” Because, of course, they didn’t in my world, because they didn’t exist in my world, other than in books and movies, which I thought meant—though I guess I couldn’t be a hundred percent sure—that they didn’t exist in the First World, either. So I said nothing, instead sipping water and thinking.
“If the vampires are only ordinary humans by day,” I asked after a moment, “then why not travel by day? They can’t possibly catch you if they can’t fly.”
“We do not travel by day,” Jakob growled.
“Afraid of humans?”
He said nothing. I thought of Eric’s crossbow bolt slamming into Elena’s side, suddenly wishing I hadn’t asked.
Eric was himself a teenaged werewolf now. I asked Jakob where he and Maigrat might be.
“We have other, smaller shelters. Maigrat knows them all. No doubt they are in one of those.”
Unless the vampires got them, I thought uneasily. I hoped that wasn’t the case. I felt responsible for Eric. If we hadn’t appeared, the pack wouldn’t have been ordered to capture us, and Elena wouldn’t have been shot by Eric, and the werewolves . . .
That way lay madness. Might as well think the Shaped worlds would all be better places if I’d never existed when, clearly, they wouldn’t. I changed the subject. “Tell me about Queen Stephanie.” Tell me if she’s the Shaper, I wanted to say, but I didn’t figure that would get me very far.
“What do you want to know?” Jakob said.
“Why does she want me?”
“You will have to ask her that.”
Well, that wasn’t helpful. “How old is she?”
“I have never asked.”
“Older than me?”
“In appearance, yes, although I do not know how old you are.”
“Twenty-seven,” I supplied.
He raised an eyebrow at that. “You look younger.”
“So I’ve been told.” But not in my own world. I remembered what Karl had told me, that in my own world, those around me would have seen me as the age I was supposed to be, but I would not, in fact, have been aging. However that worked. Certainly, the barely-out-of-high-school guy putting up the sign above my pottery studio the day all this began had seen me as too old to be of interest. But in the last world, and this one, I apparently looked younger than I thought I was. It was all very confusing. “How old are you?”
“Forty-one,” he said.
“And you’ve always been a werewolf?”
I got the “you’re-an-idiot” look again. Three times in one conversation! A new record. Even Karl hadn’t matched it. “What else would I have been?”
“A human,” I said. “Like Eric was, until yesterday.”
“There are very few changed humans. Within the kingdom, it is seen as a great honor.”
“I don’t think he thought so.”
“Of course he didn’t,” Jakob said impatiently. “But it is one, all the same. He is part of the pack. He slew Elena. He will regret that all his life. That is his punishment. But he has taken her place in the pack. In that way, he makes right, as much as he can, the wrong he did.”
“Vampires can change humans, too. Do they also see it as an honor?”
“I do not know.”
“Do they do it more often than you do?”
“I do not know.”
“Vampires are undead. So they have to kill someone to change them, don’t they?”
“I do not know.”
That was just as annoying coming from him as it had been from Karl. Then I remembered something else. “Wait. You said, ‘Within the kingdom, it is seen as a great honor.’ Why add that caveat?”
Jakob literally growled, a little of his inner wolf seeping into his outer human. “We have heard that the rogues will change anyone, no matter how brutish or violent. They may, in fact, seek out those qualities.”
“Rogues?” That was the first I’d heard of “rogues.” For a minute, I felt like I was getting somewhere.
But Jakob’s lips tightened. “I should say nothing more. I do not know what Queen Stephanie intends for you, or what she wants you to know.”
You’re not getting off that easy, I thought. “The fields we’ve passed through are untended. There are abandoned farms and villages everywhere. Is that the work of the rogues?”
“I will not . . .”
“Oh, come on,” I said. “I can put two and two together. You’ve told me your people don’t attack humans. But these ‘rogues’ don’t follow that decree, do they?”
After a long pause, he sighed and gave in. “No. They have attacked many farms and small villages, murdering those who dwell there. It began shortly after the Pact failed. In response, the largest villages fortified, and farmers and people from smaller villages fled to them for security, leaving much of the land vacant.”
“Father Thomas told me there are also villages that are simply emptied of people, but there’s no sign of a struggle—no bodies, no blood,” I said. “Is that, too, the work of these rogues?”
Jakob shook his head. “We don’t think so. But we have no other explanation for them.” His suddenly gave me a sharp, penetrating look. “But none of this is our doing. Queen Stephanie does not allow the werewolves of the kingdom to attack humans. We believe Queen Patricia has set the same restriction on the vampires of her realm. It is the rogues who have been killing humans, attacking any they catch in the night. It is because of the rogues that humans see all werewolves and vampires as the enemy—as they always did, in the world beyond this valley, before the Great Cataclysm, before the Pact. And so . . .” His voice trailed off.
“Elena,” I said. I remembered the thump of the crossbow bolt into the flank of the wolf above me, the bolt protruding from the bloody side of the naked girl lying in the dirt when I’d been pulled out of the tree. I swallowed.
“Elena,” he said. He shook his head. “The world has become a darker place.”
“But how did the Pact break down? Was it the vampires?”
“Yes,” he said emphatically. “We do not know why, but Queen Patricia personally led a surprise attack against one of our packs. I saw her myself. Queen Stephanie saw her.
“There was no warning. Among the vampires who attacked were some I counted as friends. None of them spoke. They simply attacked. Queen Patricia herself killed several werewolves.” His voice thickened to a near-growl. “One of those was the queen’s husband.”
Husband? That startled me. Did that mean Queen Stephanie wasn’t the Shaper? She wouldn’t marry someone she’d Shaped, would she?
Then I remembered, as if from a long time ago (a fact which made me feel guilty), my own boyfriend, Brent. Hadn’t I intended the same thing? The fact I didn’t remember Shaping him didn’t change the fact I had.
“And there’s been no attempt to make peace?” I said.
“Did you not hear what I said?” he said, and for the first time, I heard a hint of Maigrat’s default snarl in his voice. “With whom would we treat? Queen Patricia herself led the attack. Queen Patricia herself murdered werewolves. Queen Patricia herself killed Queen Stephanie’s husband. There can be no peace.”
He got to his feet. “I must tend to the horses,” he said, and left me there.
I drank the rest of my water in silence.
The afternoon passed. The werewolves did not confine themselves to the cave. They went out. There were wrestling matches. Nude ones. I retreated to the cave as they began. The werewolves seemed to have no nudity taboo at all, but I was just a small-town girl, and I’d already seen enough naked people to last me quite a while. Although, to be sure, all the werewolves seemed extremely fit and some of the men had impressive . . .
Stop that.
I thought about Karl instead. (Fully clothed, I hasten to add.) The vampires had him. Father Thomas thought they would either kill him or make him one of them. I hoped he was wrong. It was still entirely possible that Queen Patricia of the vampires was the Shaper. If that were the case, she and Karl might even now be planning my rescue.
And then my eyes widened. Crap. What if that “attack” last night was the rescue and failed?
That would definitely mean Queen Stephanie wasn’t the Shaper. But if she wasn’t, what did she want with me? Was I just some kind of exotic takeout?
No, she has to be the Shaper. How else would she have known about our arrival and sent a message to the pack to capture us?
But if she’s the Shaper, what does that mean for Karl? And why did the vampires attack—and make a grab for me specifically?
The words in my head went ’round and ’round, like the wheels of the bus in the children’s song, but whereas the bus eventually got somewhere, my head got nowhere but achy.
Night fell at last. Five of us changed into giant red-eyed wolves, five of us mounted half of the horses (and led the rest), one of us started sneezing, and we set off by the light of the eternally full moon. I couldn’t help glancing up at it, over and over again, searching for the silhouette of a giant bat, but the only thing that obscured it, about three hours into our travels, were clouds.
Shortly after that, it began to rain.
On the minus side, I was cold, wet, and miserable. On the plus side, I quit sneezing. On balance, I rather thought I’d come out ahead.
At least Karl’s in a nice warm castle, I thought. He’s better off than I am . . .
. . . well, you know, if he’s still alive.
He is. He must be.
Suddenly, I sneezed again. It had nothing to do with my allergy. It had everything to do with the aforementioned “cold, wet, and miserable.”
Drat, I thought.