Razors and Revenge #2
Shiloh blinked, her skin clammy, razors scraping, scraping, scraping inside her. They could see she was having control issues. Shiloh said, “The werewolf bitch. I saw her. She made the wolves attack me.”
“She spoke?” The queen leaned forward.
Some insane werewolf bitches lost language.
“No. Whistled. Pointed. Atticus came to help. Five turned on him at once.” She stopped, the queen’s stare holding her.
“I killed a wolf and got to my feet. Atticus was…” She fought vamping out.
Fought the burrowing pain. Even Koun’s scent didn’t calm her now. “True-dead.”
“I’m sorry,” Jane said again. “I know you two were close.”
Sharing jokes. Sharing donors. Sharing everything and moving to being more. Heading to being lovers. “I don’t remember anything else.”
The wolf-woman’s eyes had held nothing but rage and psychosis. The razors and bloodlust in Shiloh were part of that.
Jane said. “You killed two more werewolves. According to the tracks, three badly injured wolves and the werewolf-human bitch left the site together. You secured three wolf heads, carried as much of Atticus as you could find, and crawled into a cave. You were comatose and feverish when the rescue party found you.” Jane glanced at Koun.
“You did a number on him before he could subdue you. He was impressed.”
“I’m sorry,” Shiloh said.
Koun gave that almost smile again.
The queen continued. “Werewolf prions shouldn’t be able to survive in a vampire, but you’re a young vamp, and a witch. A witch-vamp-werewolf is a…singularity.”
Singularity, hell. She was dangerous. A ravening beast lived inside her. “I should still be chained in a scion room.”
Jane chuckled, though amusement never reached her eyes. Her tea sloshed over the Count. She put the mug down and wiped her fingers.
Shiloh wondered if the woman ever smiled like a human. Happy.
Eli wiped the outside of the Count mug and poured the queen more tea.
“Another night in a cell,” Jane said, “and your aunts would skin me and pin my pelt on the door. My Beast is too pretty to die.”
Shiloh laughed, but it was high-pitched, off-kilter. She finished the coffee and poured another. A servant entered, replaced the empty carafe, and withdrew. Before she realized she was speaking, Shiloh said, “I’m going after the males and the bitch-queen.”
Jane’s eyebrows rose. She lifted the Count mug. “Would you care to restate that?”
“With your permission, I’m going after the males and the werewolf bitch-queen.”
“Thanks for the clarification. And no. We forbid it.” The royal we. A pronouncement.
This had just become an official tea, not that Shiloh cared.
“They did this to me,” she snarled, her lips curling.
Her fangs tried to snap down. She clenched her teeth and, for one hard second, fought the need to vamp out and attack, the razors scraping, the insanity making the room spin.
She wanted action, violence. She said, “I want the bitch’s head on a pike. ”
“While we approve of vengeance, no.” The queen propped her elbows on her chair arms, her tea mug fully hiding her mouth.
“Because they bit my scion—you—and killed Atticus, the males you killed each had a fifty K bounty. You earned one hundred fifty thousand dollars. You’re injured, so you’re done.
Three other scions want the bounty on the remaining wolves. ”
“They’ll need me to track and identify the wolves.”
“Why?”
“We’ve been through a full moon since I was attacked.
What if the bitch made more? I’ve smelled the three who attacked us.
” Shiloh drew on the scent of Koun and repositioned, mirroring the queen’s posture.
Forcing calm. Negotiating. Hiding the raging wolf slavering inside her.
“The werewolf bitch directed the attack. That makes her—what’s the word? Responsible, but more?”
The queen said, “Culpable.” Without looking away, she asked, “Koun, your evaluation?”
The queen’s executioner turned icy eyes to Shiloh.
Ancient Celtic tattoos swirled blue above his collar.
“She smells, looks, and acts sane, my lady. Shiloh has skills most undead do not. When her aunts evaluated her magic this past week, they found it to be rusty but functional. She can make amulets preloaded with witch workings. Though she knows wyrd workings by heart, she has never attempted them. She passed Eli’s remedial paramilitary course and is capable of working with a team. ”
More slowly, his voice sliding like silk across skin, he said, “She killed three werewolves single-handedly. She gave me a black eye. She has untried physical gifts that indicate she is faster and stronger than she allows us to see.”
A black eye? Shiloh’s eyes darted to his face.
Amused, Koun said, “I approve.”
Jane frowned, but lifted her head and spoke into the room. “Alex, record.”
From invisible speakers, Alex, head of electronic security, said, “Recording, my lady.”
“We proclaim. Shiloh may go with the hunters,” she enunciated, “to identify the males. But the team will take a trank gun, sedate the bitch, and bring her in, alive, for testing, because she should not be insane after the Change.” The Dark Queen considered, and added, “We have previously approved a death sentence upon any werewolf who bites a human or one of mine. That proclamation stands.”
Shiloh considered the exact words of the pronouncement. She wanted all the werewolves dead. If she had to be bitten again to kill the bitch, that could happen. “Thank you, Your Highness.”
The queen made a pfft sound and said, “End recording.”
“Done, my lady,” Alex said.
Shiloh drank her coffee. It’s over.
“While we’re chatting so nicely,” Jane said, “tell me how the werewolf prions have altered you.”
Shiloh nearly choked on her coffee.
“I’ve watched vids of you sparring. You’re faster, more precise, and holding back to keep us uninformed.”
“Beats the hell outta me. I’m a singularity, remember?”
“Language, girl.”
“Sorry, my lady.”
The queen snorted. “You are dismissed.”
Shiloh narrowed her eyes at the royal dismissal, stood, and left the room.
Her repaired armor was too tight on her shoulders, too loose in her waist, and short in the inseam. The undead can’t grow. Unless starved of human blood, which makes them skinny, their body shape, when changed, is theirs for eternity (or until they’re beheaded).
Forever the same. Except her. She’d added two inches since she was attacked.
Armor was expensive, hand-tailored layers of anti-spell Kevlar and Dyneema, to protect against explosive weapons and close-in fighting: bullets, blades, darts, talons, and magic.
Because of the damage hers had sustained in the werewolf attack, and her growth spurt, she needed new armor.
Instead, she had poorly repaired, blood-stinking armor.
Crappy armor or not, she needed to try out her new abilities, which meant getting in front of the team.
She looked overhead at the waning moon and climbed into a tree.
“I’m checking ahead.” Without waiting for a reply from the others, Shiloh turned on normal fanghead speed and leaped over a storm-downed oak.
The trunk was ten feet high. The vamps followed.
She cleared a twelve-foot white water creek, landing on the other side.
She jumped, gripping a branch fifteen feet up.
Feet pushing off the trunk, swinging, she landed in the next tree, five feet higher, like a gymnast on steroids.
The vamps made the creek but failed to follow her into the tree limbs. Interesting.
Through the winter-dead treetops, she sprinted and swung.
Eluding them, she dashed full speed. Seconds into her mad sprint, the nagging razors dissipated.
It was so unexpected, she laughed, the sound echoing, brittle and crazy.
The air resisted her, a steady crackling and a loud pop-whoosh as it shoved aside and filled in behind.
She scaled a cliff face like a spider, flipped at the top, and descended, weight on her palms and the tops of her boot toes, re-flipped herself, and climbed to stand above her personal rock climbing wall.
She was hungry, needed to feed, but adrenaline and speed and a lack of pain created euphoria. She raced on.
She was using vamp vision, her pupils so wide her irises were nearly invisible, the night world bright. Her fangs were secured on their little hinges in the top of her mouth. In control.
This was what she was. Faster, stronger, more predatory and dangerous than the oldest vamps. Unbalanced? Crazy? Yeah. So? Witch, fanghead, with were-prions. If it wasn’t for the razors—currently soothed—it would be cool.
A scent trace stopped her cold in a dead tree, fifteen feet up. From a thicket of rhododendrons beneath her rose the sickly sweet stink of rotting blood, faint, after the recent ice storm. Werewolf. Vamp. Some of the old blood was hers.
The reek of blood marked the place where she and Atticus had fought the wolves until running out of ammo, too bloodied and exhausted to escape. The memory rose through her again.
The wolves had encircled the thicket, limping, wounded by silver-lead rounds. There was no way they could change back until the silver had been surgically removed from their bodies. But she and Atticus had made no kill shots. Werewolves, even crazy, even bleeding and full of silver, were fast.
Her breath came rapid and shallow as the sensations, the remembered fear, engulfed her, a hallucinogenic nightmare. Image upon image, wound after wound.
Atticus, ripped to death by werewolves. He had died, badly.
Shiloh pushed the memories away, reached inside a pocket of her armor, and wrapped her fingers around the calm of stones amulet, a cut agate. Its striations were psychedelic, haphazard, but the magic within soothed her crazies. The pain of Atticus’ death eased. The lacerating madness faded.
It worked. She hadn’t been sure it would.