Liz continued checking all their gear, wiping it here and there too. When she was satisfied, she pulled one of her battery stones out of the stone pack and placed the amulet necklace on it to recharge. Scrubbing her hands into the soil, she closed her eyes and blew out a breath. He knew she was reaching down for rocks below the surface, reaching deep. She frowned, which meant she wasn’t finding undisturbed stone, a bad thing for a stone witch looking for untapped power.

  Her words quiet, she said, “We know several things about it and its power. It’s not moon called, because we’re close to the new moon, which makes it harder for were-creatures to achieve animal form. It isn’t any single animal we’ve seen before, but rather an amalgam of at least three: wolf, bear, and human, or possibly also something like chimpanzee. Its shoulders were built for swinging from trees. It’s carnivorous. It has fangs but also grinding teeth.” Casually she added, “I got a good look inside its mouth as it fell on top of my ward.”

  Eli knew that meant they would likely have been dead or seriously wounded had her hedge of thorns ward not gone up in time.

  She continued, “Its saliva and blood are caustic. It’s not cleaning itself. Its claws were caked with filth, and so was its hair. It’s been in this form for a while. It’s sick. It can control wind, so the primate part of it—” She stopped. “Her? There were four visible teats but it was wearing pants, so external genitalia was hidden.” She shrugged, but she was frowning as she watched her cell.

  Eli glanced at Chewy, who repositioned for a full range of cover fire. He moved behind her to watch the video.

  Eli had no idea why the gender of the creature should matter. Unless… He studied the creature as it fell. Again. Mouth open, raging. The teats were stretched across its chest, but they didn’t lie flat, like on Chewy’s chest.

  It was feeding… “Pups,” he said. “Probably weaning. Old enough to not need mother’s milk, but young enough to still need to be fed.” He cursed inside. “Pants, so the primate part was likely human. Chimps don’t wear pants.

  Liz nodded. “Its human part is potentially an air witch. That downdraft was full of power. And I can’t reach significant stone here until I hit the outcropping at the base of the mountain, which is very strange. I’m getting scree and rounded pebbles and larger rock, but nothing tied to bedrock. Sand mixed with clay. It feels like a huge embankment, like sand piled up from a river.”

  “There’s dirt like that in the Carolina foothills,” Eli said, “probably the result of the massive floods at the end of the ice age.”

  “This ain’t no hill, Hoss.”

  “No,” Eli said. “This is the top of a low mountain ridge. Which means the river that created it had to be huge.”

  Chewy indicated downhill. Way downhill. “There’s a small river down there. If my internal compass is right, it’s part of the Broad River Basin. But it’s a tiny thing. No way it reached up here.”

  “Maybe the entire Broad River basin once came through here for a while,” Liz said. “Then changed course, leaving only one small tributary. Doesn’t matter why. I’m going to be nearly powerless up here.”

  “Our weapons didn’t seem to hurt it much, Hoss.”

  Eli finally located the drone. The wind had smashed it into scrap. He took in the rolling crest of the hill, down the way they had come, along off to both sides, and then over territory they hadn’t covered yet—the direction the Dwayyo had vanished in. There were no screams, yowls, howls, or other sounds of fighting, so he figured Brute had not engaged the enemy. Or had been ambushed and was dead.

  As if he had conjured the werewolf, Brute appeared, the grindy again on his back. The wolf was unbloodied and there were no burrs in his fur, so where had he gone?

  “Brute,” Liz said. “The female Dwayyo. Does it have young?”

  The wolf gave a slow nod, his eyes on her.

  “Damn, damn, double damn,” his girl said. “How many? And are they mobile and able to hunt and fight?”

  Brute

  Finally someone was asking the right questions. His eyes on the witch, Brute shook his head yes and then no. An ‘I don’t know,’ answer. He hadn’t managed to see the pups but he’d smelled them on her.

  “Is the Dwayyo’s nest or home close?”

  Nod.

  “Are there any big rocks near the nest, like boulders buried in the dirt?”

  Brute chuffed and nodded. He whirled and considered the faint scents on the breeze, nose in the air. Then he adjusted his angle and stuck his tail out straight, pointing his nose in the exact direction. Like a damn pointer dog.

  “You are brilliant,” Liz murmured.

  His ears flicked. Compliments went a long ways to assuaging his ego, but he’d be glad when his penance and his jobs in this form were over.

  “Brute,” Eli said. “Can you get me up close and personal without us being scented or seen?”

  Brute shook his head no. That thing knew they were close, and it was now in full on mama-beast-protective mode. Even as he thought that, the wind changed, blowing uphill, hard and fast. Overhead, limbs cracked. Leaves shot up at them in a whirlwind.

  The direction of the wind would hide its scent as it approached.

  Brute showed his teeth and growled, the sound long and low. Turning his nose into the scents, trying to determine patterns and location.

  He thought about the angel and the power that Hayyel had made available for him to draw upon. He sank into that hard, cold, distant place the angel had shown him. Darkness and light. The place of the void before and after time. He could get lost there, forever, if he wasn’t careful. But he needed to see what had happened ten minutes ago.

  The grindylow chittered with what sounded like irritation as his angel-magic rose. It grabbed his ears and handfuls of hair with its paws. It mewled and yodeled softly.

  Time and space twisted. Brute stepped forward and yet back in time, five seconds. A lifetime. The channel of time and space was a tunnel, like a curl of a wave open in front of him. He gathered himself and the moment before the wave would have collapsed, he raced through.

  He dove the last few feet (Years? Seconds? Miles?) and landed in the woods, a hundred feet in front of the small house the Dwayyo called home. He was crouched in the trees, hidden behind branches that still carried the browned leaves of autumn. He wasn’t in a spot he had reconnoitered before, the angle more toward the east and about twenty feet higher, so he could see down into the clearing.

  The Dwayyo was standing in front of the shack in a rough circle, composed of trees. The creature lifted its arms into the air and sang a wyrd. It was a complex set of notes that seemed to have no equivalent to music as he understood it, but was more like the soft yowling of wild dogs combined with the hooting of monkeys. Around it—around her—wind swirled and gathered. Magic danced across the clearing, hovering over the pit filled with bodies. The air working gathered power, picking up leaves and twigs, dust and small rocks, becoming visible as the things around it were incorporated into the whirlwind.

  The female might be going insane with rabies, and whatever other sick scent he could smell, but at this point she could still think.

  Two small creatures toddled out of the house. They were spotted and furred things with claws and fangs. They were walking wobbly. Just young, or something else? That mad deer prion disease they had considered?

  Killing a creature’s young, even sick young, went against his orders from the angel. Killing the mother would mean the pups were dead too, as they were too young to hunt on their own. One cub fell over and twitched. The smell of sickness reached him, carried on the scent of the pups. The disease carried by the Dwayyo had been transferred to the pups.

  With a final note, the Dwayyo shoved with her front paws and the whirlwind raced toward the not-too-distant crest where the witch and the humans waited.

  Fast as the wind, the Dwayyo followed, loping on four legs, fangs and claws fully exposed. Attacking. The moment the creature disappeared, Brute raced for the shack. Leaped over the two pups, now lying in filth. Landed inside. To focus on the small space.

  Son of a bitch, he thought.

  Liz

  The wind rushed uphill.

  Brute vanished in a spill of magic she could feel but not see.

  Eli pushed her down and took up a protected spot behind a tree. Chewy lumbered to a bigger tree a good thirty feet away.

  The wind increased in speed and abruptly cut off.

  Liz opened a seeing working.

  She rolled to her feet. She shouted. “Whirlwind!”

  Eli moved. He grabbed all the gear in one hand, her arm in the other, and shoved them against the tree he had been leaning against. In seconds, he wrapped a heavy flex around the tree, gear, and both of them.

  Three seconds. It had been inhumanly fast. Nearly Jane Yellowrock fast. And it proved how changed he was, how different he was, since his assorted healings with vampire blood. He wrapped his arms around her, still tying them to the tree.

  “Chewy get over here!” she shouted.

  Chewy hollered with what sounded like glee and strapped himself to his own tree.

  The trees all around began to whip.

  “Chewy!” she screamed.

  “He ain’t coming,” Eli said, his voice battle hard.

  The wind began to roar, a freight train in a forest. Tornado.

  Though her face was pressed against bark, she pulled her amulet necklace around and pinched a special, one of a kind, hedge of thorns amulet between a finger and thumb. Hoping to provide them some protection.

  Thirty feet away, Chewy was tied to the tree and was crouched down like a boulder in camo-overalls. Laughing like a maniac.

  “What do you see?” Eli demanded.

  “Air magic. Lots of it. Probably a prepared offensive working, so all the Dwayyo had to do was speak or sing or whistle and…”

  The wind roared. It was unbelievably loud. Air pressure changed. Her ears popped. She tucked her face and closed her eyes. Eli was at her back, one arm and one leg wrapped round her and as much of the tree as he could reach. The other leg fixed against the ground and his free hand held a shotgun, braced against his shoulder.

  The noise rose. Her ears popped again.

  The whirlwind churned through the trees. Twisting them. Splintering them. Ripping them off at head height. Poised at the top of the hill, it danced back and forth. And then slammed at them.

  Liz closed her eyes and pinched the amulet that held the untested working. Shaping the chained power with her will, she spread it gently, to include the bottom twelve feet of tree, all of them and the gear, and yet leaving Eli’s gun barrel exposed and separate. She had no idea if it would work.

  It was a new working, what she was calling a shaped hedge, and it would be the coolest thing since sliced bread—if it worked, and if she lived and got to tell anyone about it. It was a version of a protective ward devised by her family, one she had been working on alone, without Cia because her sister was too busy to help with workings these days. And—

  The wind howled and roared. Branches, whole trees, birds, and a squirrel slammed against the tree and the shaped hedge. The tree they were tied to juddered and shook. Eli’s body shuddered, hard as a rock at her back.

  Everything larger than air molecules stuck to the outside of the working.

  Clung there. The debris cut off the wind, like a clogged filter on a vacuum cleaner.

  She opened her eyes, but could see nothing except for the dead animals and the trees and leaves plastered there. One dead bird had been stripped of feathers and crushed into her working by a tree. But before it died, its throat had been sliced open. The storm had been called with a sacrifice. A blood magic ritual. Beyond the physical, her seeing working showed her incredible energies, a maelstrom of directed force.

  The tornado didn’t move on. It stayed on the crest of the hill. And it lasted. And lasted. More trees fell. The earth vibrated beneath her feet with the force of the destruction.

  After what felt like an hour, but was likely only minutes, the violence and power of the air magic fell to a trickle. Her seeing working showed the magic leaching away into nothing. Eli started to pull away but she gripped his am. Things began to fall from the sky. Branches. Animals. Trees.

  The ground bounced beneath their feet as an entire tree landed nearby. The air felt strange. Waiting. Sharp as thorns. As if more was to come.

  “Chewy?” Eli yelled, right into her ear, which was still deaf from the wind. “Chewy!”

  “Aoowww. Stop yelling,” Liz said, elbowing him in the gut. “Son of a witch, that hurt.”

  “Chewy’s not answering. Drop the damn ward.”

  “When I let the working go, all this stuff is going to hit us. Hard.”

  He cursed, a single hard word of fury. He restrung the harness to support a tree that was leaning on the shaped hedge. “Can you see Chewy?”

  “No, but—”

  Something roared as loud as the wind had been.

  Gunfire sounded. Three shots. Three shots. Then the boom of a shotgun.

  Chewy, shouting. It sounded like “Die, you fucker!”

  Another shotgun blast shivered the weird air and the tree leaning against her working slid to the side and fell to the ground with a huge thump.

  Eli released the harness holding them together. Yanked Liz to the side. “Drop the ward.”

  She did.

  Large branches and small trees and dead animals slid, fell, dropped, and smashed to the ground. Liz wasn’t hurt. Eli raced away. Fingers nimble, she prepared to cast three workings, finding the necessary amulets.

  She stepped around the tree.

  Chewy was on the ground. Arms straight up and braced. The Dwayyo was above him. Its much longer arms were clawing his face and neck. Eli was racing toward the two. His body between her working and them. Stupid man. As he sprinted, Eli fired in multiple three round bursts, which the Dwayyo didn’t even seem to notice. He slowed. Then three blasts of the shotgun.

  Eli advanced. Firing. Firing. Five shots in total. Adding rounds, or slugs, or whatever they were called to the shotgun and firing some more.

  For some reason, the creature staggered back at the sixth round.

  Liz stepped to the side and the moment the creature fell away, she cast the obfuscation working on Chewy.

  The creature roared again.

  Eli fired. Fired. Fired. It fell back. Bleeding. Nine shots fired.

  Liz was utterly deaf.

  The Dwayyo was on its knees. A bloody hulking mess. But still alive.

  She pulled a stone from the quick release on her amulet necklace and tossed it at the Dwayyo. It hit and activated. The working instantly stopped blood from clotting inside the Dwayyo.

  When someone had a clotting problem, the working was a life saver. A similar working had been used on Liz herself after her sister dropped a boulder onto her chest and she developed a clot in her lung. It was intended for healing. But it didn’t have to heal. It could also kill. When the working touched an injured creature, it was a curse working, intended to kill.

  The Dwayyo wailed in pain. Its blood was red, a slightly darker, browner red than human, and thicker than human blood.

  Eli fired once more and began to reload. The Dwayyo tried to get to its feet.

  The darkness, usually quiescent inside her, woke. Not a demon. Not possession, but the grime and filth that had tainted her soul when she and Cia accidently called up a demon spawn when they were young and invincible.

  With that darkness awake, it was easy to toss in a reverse pain-free amulet. The Dwayyo grunted with agony. Both workings, used as she just had, were illegal as hell, a ruling set up by the witch council of the US, but what those biddies didn’t know couldn’t get her in trouble.

  Eli fired.

  The Dwayyo screeched and raced into the woods. Limping. A trail of blood flowed behind it.

  Knees bent, Eli chased after, still firing, reloading. Firing. Faster than strictly human.

  She released the obfuscation working and knelt at Chewy’s side. There was blood everywhere, and he had rolled to his side, coughing up gouts of blood and gore. She removed a fresh clotting amulet from her necklace, activated it, and placed it into a long gash in Chewy’s throat. Activated three healing amulets and placed them on his face, throat, and upper chest.

  So far as she could tell the creature hadn’t gored him, pierced him, cut out his eyes, or sliced his carotid or jugular. The scores were deep, but not immediately deadly. She darted back to Eli’s pack and dumped it out on the ground before she saw the first aid kit tied to the exterior. She unhooked the carabiner and sprinted back to Chewy. She found sterile pads, rolls of gauze, alcohol wipes, and that brown stuff, Betadine. She began cleaning him up, stanching the blood flow with gauze pads and wrapping him with the rolls of gauze and then with pink sticky wrap. Not tight on his neck. He had to breathe. Pads went to his face, and she secured some with tape, others with more sticky wrap. Head wounds bled a lot. She knew that. But this looked like a real lot. Blood was pooling beneath him on the dirt as she tried to stanch it.

  She was muttering as she worked. “More. Thicker padding. Too much blood. Breathe, damn it. Agh! Cough in my face again and I’ll let you die right here. More pads. Soaking through. Have to risk another clotting amulet. You die and I’ll kill you. Out of sterile pads. Hang on, I have some clean underwear.” Liz sped to the tree where she and Eli had hidden beneath her ward and upended her own pack. In a moment she was back with cotton undies and two padded mitts for a fire pit. They went around Chewy’s neck too.

  He coughed some more, not in her face, which she appreciated, and then he gasped, “Is my beard hurt?”

  “What? You’re bleeding to death and you’re worried about your beard?”

  “I think it tore out my beard. I love my beard. I’m a beard guy.”

  “You’re showing some bleeding skin on your cheeks and your chin. Okay, a lot of hairless places. It took some deeper flesh too.”