S Stirling - The Council of Shadows

The remaining man swayed and went to one knee. His skin was sheened with sweat, and there was a raw, feral look in his eyes as he panted. That faded, and humanness came back to them.

"Harvey?" he croaked. "I'm not sure I can stay palpable, Harvey. He was too strong."

Then Farmer's voice, sharp with pain and throttled panic: "Guha's hurt! Bad!"

Ellen felt herself freeze; she was already motionless, but this was an inability to move. Then she took a deep, quiet breath and made herself relax. Less than a second later there was an impact behind her. Right behind her, where Adrian had put the final glyph.

Not physical. Nothing had struck her, but something had wanted to and started to make the world obey its will. And then been caught in a very bad place.

Scratch one night-walker.

Ellen started to giggle, then jammed it down with an effort of will of her own. Something was walking towards her. Trotting easily…

Beep! she thought as she adjusted the rifle, taking a turn of the sling around her upper arm to steady her aim. There's another one!

Then: Its a wolf. Big fucking wolf with big fucking teeth. I dont like dogs, and wolves are even worse. Wolves with a Shadowspawn inside are even worse than that.

She'd been savaged by a dog as a child…

A blur too swift to be really seen, and the beast became a man…more or less. Arrogantly fit, brown skinned, with a broad, hook-nosed, high-cheeked face and black hair falling to his wide shoulders. The eyes shone lambent yellow. They turned down at the ring of glyphs Adrian had drawn around her, and his lips moved in what was probably either a curse or Mhabrogast, if there was a difference.

Dale Shadowsblade, she thought. One of Adrienne's bully boys.

She'd met him while she was Adrienne's prisoner, and even by Shadowspawn standards he was nasty; also extremely powerful. His usual day job…sort of…was to carry out executions for the Council.

"I'm unarmed-" he began, smiling.

"Unarmed? Good!"

Crack. The rifle hammered back at her shoulder.

Just as it did, her hand slipped on the rock she was using as a rest; dust fountained up from the desert as the heavy silver bullet kicked into the dirt near Dale Shadowsblade's feet.

The Apache-Apache to the limited extent he was anything human at all-grinned at her, teeth very white in the darkness.

"Not in a chatty mood, eh? I like women with spunk. They fuck good, die well and taste even better."

Doggedly she broke the action open and thumbed in another shell. It was a little depressing that the Shadowspawn just stood and grinned at her at point-blank range. Then his eyes went to the rock face at her back and down to Adrian's motionless form as it lay breathing once every twenty seconds.

" Szau-ti glyph! That Adrian has a nasty mind," he said. "Put you in front of it like a tethered goat and see what he can catch while he's off being busy, and you're one tasty piece of meat. Dmitri the apeshit got whupped by Adrian and now he looks like he's got his ass caught in a crack back in there. He's going to be pissed, let me tell you."

Okay, so that's who got trapped behind me. Now if I can kill Dale here, it'll be a prefecta.

She aimed, took a breath, let half of it out, squeezed the trigger And as she did the man faded away. Crack, and the bullet split the night. Then he was there again.

"Pity the glyph worked, bitch. If it hadn't you'd be spending some quality time with my wolf right now, and then Dmitri's would be getting sloppy seconds. Before we drank you dry. Hey, they're man's best friend, right, so why not a gal's?"

Reload. Do not think about that. Ignore him. They try to play with your mind. Just fucking shoot him. Look on the bright side: before you met Adrian, you never got to shoot or knife abusive sexist assholes.

"But I guess I'll have to rescue him instead, no matter how much fun it would be to leave him there. Think about what you're missing!"

Suddenly he was rushing towards her. Crack, but the man was a wolf again. The bullet went over its head, and then it rose in a soaring leap over the semicircle of glyphs. Her head swiveled to follow it, and it vanished into the moonlit rock.

"Oh, man, I do not like this," she said, reaching for another shell. An effort made her fingers stop shaking.

"Adrian, what's going on?"

Adrian's body breathed once more, very slowly.

"Guha's hurt!"

Harvey went over to her. Peter let the knife drop and hobbled around the bed, vague recollections of Boy Scout first-aid courses in his mind. He stopped, shocked. The Texan's fingers were unlatching and easing away her body armor.

"Aw, shit," he said tiredly.

The dark woman was shaking slightly-shivering, Peter thought, but with an odd mechanical look to it. More like machinery than a human being. There were bubbles on her lips, swelling and popping, but they weren't spit. Even in the dim light of the single remaining bulb he could see that they were red-a very dark red, almost black. Her eyes were open too, and one had the pupil contracted to a pinhead. There was a smell about her, blood and something else.

"Aw, shit" Harvey said again. "He didn't just hit her. There's a bane with it, feel?"

Peter felt nothing… No, I feel terrified. Farmer ran his hands through the air over the injured woman, and his face scrunched up. It looked as if it were going to crack as it showed an emotion that it wasn't used to: sorrow.

"Right down into the cells," he said. "She's trapped in there. Everything's black-pathed. She's hurting really bad, and it won't stop until she dies, and her duration sense is stretched out so that seconds are days. The physical stuff would be all right but even her blood isn't clotting. All the healing functions are blocked. Harvey, do something!"

"Fucking what, Jack? I couldn't touch that any more than I could rip steel cuffs off barehanded!"

There was a stumbling sound behind Peter. The little hairs on his neck tried to stand up. That was just very tired footsteps, but…

Fascinating, he thought. My body knows when to be afraid.

But they were a night-walking Shadowspawns footsteps. Something very far down wanted to whimper and puke and piss itself and scream and plead.

The Empire of Shadow must have been really awful, for a very long time.

"Let me see," Adrian Breze said hoarsely.

The others moved back; Farmer hesitated, and Harvey Ledbetter laid a hand on his shoulder. Adrian crouched, then went to one knee.

"I've known her only a little," he said. "But she was very brave, to go after that thing."

"Yeah," Farmer said tightly; he'd picked up his knife and was looking at it and the injured woman, his face twitching with what he would probably have to do. "She is. Was."

Adrian sighed. His face went completely blank for an instant, and then he held his hands out in the same gesture that Farmer had used.

"Wait a minute, Adrian! You could just fucking dissipate if you overstrain, you're night-walking and you're not strong enough after that fight-" Harvey began.

"I will have to be strong enough, won't I?" he said remotely. Then: " Auii za!"

Both hands clenched closed. Guha's back arched, and then she was awake and screaming. And Adrian faded.

"I wish I hadn't seen that," Peter said, muttering to himself. Then he collapsed backwards on the bed. "I'm a physicist, I was trained to believe in an orderly universe where things make sense. I shouldn't see that sort of thing. I shouldn't be squeezed to paste by wereanacondas, I shouldn't-"

"Yeah, you're a physicist."

The light cut out. Harvey was standing over him, and staring, and Peter found that he was a little afraid of this man, as well.

"And you'd better be worth all this," he said flatly to the physicist. "You really had better be worth it. Especially if Adrian ain't waking up in his body right about now."