Samantha Henderson - Dawnbringer

There was a quiver as two handfuls of bees fell away. From the blunt-featured face, two eyes blinked open and looked at the horizon. They blinked again and looked down at the Boy. Round eyes with golden yellow irises and a black, black center looked down at him, reflecting two tiny images of the reddened sun. No other part of the statue moved.

The Boy opened his mouth to scream, but only a harsh whistling sound came out. He felt as if a blow of Skreetchu’s baton had struck his ribs, knocking away his air. He wanted to scramble away, but he felt as if his limbs had frozen in place.

The Boy had nightmares like this-nightmares of goblins and worse chasing him, close enough so he could see their leering faces and yellowed teeth, and him unable to move, or moving unnaturally slowly, knowing in a few seconds he’d be seized and devoured. Drenched in sweat, he’d wake, sitting bolt upright on the thin pallet he was allotted in the stables.

But this was no dream, and he wouldn’t wake. A bee-covered arm reached up before he could move, and a strong hand grasped him about the throat. He grabbed at the arm, feeling a few bees crushed beneath his fingers and the dull shock as his hand was stung. This time he managed to scream, a shrilling cry that rang in his ears. He tried to yell again, but no sound came.

As if reacting to his scream, the bees sprang away from the figure, swirling up and away like a thick mist. The Boy’s neck was still clasped in a firm grip as the statue’s head turned to watch the bees as they spread out so one could see them as individuals instead of a solid mass. They merged into a solid black column, then dissipated again, vanishing over the edge of the hollow.

I’ll never catch the queen now, thought the Boy, despite his terror. The figure turned back to look at him, and the Boy would have screamed again had the pressure on his throat not increased, choking off his cry. He felt a warm trickle against the inside of his leg as he lost control of his bladder.

Yellow eyes in a fierce face stared into his own. The figure’s head was furred, with deep black stripes across the burned orange and stark white of its cheek, chin, and muzzle. Stiff, wirelike whiskers jutted beneath the flattened, flaring nose of a predator, and the feline-split upper lip quivered in a snarl, exposing thick ivory fangs. Tufts of tawny fur framed its ears, the backs of which had jagged black stripes while the inside of each was snow-white. The ears swiveled slightly to catch every sound: the distant buzzing of the bees, the occasional chatter of a bird, his own subvocal whimpering.

It was a tiger’s head, square on a thick neck and muscular body that was a man’s, save that it, too, was covered in short tawny, black-striped fur. The tiger-man pulled the Boy up by the neck until his toes barely touched the ground. The creature growled in his face. The Boy’s breath was cut off, and black dots danced before his eyes. He could feel the tips of sharp claws biting into his skin.

He thought he’d been afraid of Skreetchu, with his species’s cruelty and his baton always at the ready for an errant slave. But he’d willingly go to the kenku now and confess to losing the swarm and to a passel of other sins if only he could get free of this monstrous creature.

Just as the pressure on his neck grew intolerable, the tiger-headed creature snarled and tossed him aside. The Boy fell heavily against an inscribed slab of rock that tilted, broken, half-buried in sand. He struggled to regain his breath and wrapped his arms around his battered ribs, knowing that if the creature decided to kill him there was no defense.

He squinted up at the creature, which stood rooted in place, ignoring the Boy. The tiger-headed thing was staring at its own hands, turning them back and forth. They were strange hands, unnatural-somewhere between a human hand and a paw, elongated with claw-tipped fingers mobile enough to hold small objects, but powerful enough to wrap around the hilt of a weapon. The hand-paw was covered with fur, striped tawny and black on the back and white on the palm. As the creature turned its hand over, however, it became apparent that something was wrong: the palm faced back, and the large, clawed thumb was reversed. It was as if some clever trickster had severed the tiger-man’s hands, flipped them over, and skillfully stitched nerve, bone, sinew, and skin back into place, backward.

The Boy closed his eyes, and a small groan escaped him. He’d lived too near the Beastlands for far too long not to know what stood there; a rakshasa-a demon with the body of a humanoid and the head of a jungle cat, and most telling, those awful backward paws.

Lusk looked at his hands in baffled rage and horror.

He looked at the small human who had witnessed his rebirth, whom he had seized upon in his anger and tossed aside. A boy, he saw, grown too tall for his shabby clothing and a face too thin for his eyes. He was thirteen, perhaps; no older than sixteen, surely. The child struggled to his feet, breathing unsteadily and cradling his side as if it pained him.

Lusk’s nose twitched. His sense of smell was acute, like the predatory cat whose shape his incarnation had taken. He smelled sun-baked grass and rock, and a strangely strong, sweet musky smell.

Honey …

He remembered the bees. They were gone now, but he remembered-the blackness of the void, all his senses muffled, the only sound his own voice inside his conciousness, shrilling in terror. Then, a stab of light came through the void, tearing away his blindness, painful and unrelenting. He floated, helpless, inside that merciless light, until he felt ground under his feet and warm sun on the body that was emerging, molded like clay from the very air where nothing was before. Then came countless tiny vibrating bodies, humming insistently and covering his new, raw skin from head to foot, hurting him with their thousands of tiny clawed feet but sheltering him from that excruciating light, that too-warm sun. They cooled him with their wings until he could stand in the world without experiencing the agony of the new, raw flesh the gods had given him.

The bees had flown away and the child stood there. Lusk smelled sweat and the stables and urine, and also a trace of the dried-sugar musk of the bees. The skin of the boy’s throat was bruising where Lusk had seized him before, and there were small drops of blood where his claws had pierced. Lusk wondered if he should kill him.

He took two strides and stood in front of the boy. It would be very easy to break his neck. Or …

Lusk’s belly growled with the hunger of his new body. He could find a use for the child, skinny as he was.

The boy’s eyes widened, huge in his thin face, as the rakshasa approached him. Lusk knew the child was aware there was no use running. The boy straightened his back and faced him, looking up into Lusk’s tiger face, and steeled himself to die.

Lusk remembered a time long ago in his previous life as deva-Lusk, early in that incarnation. He remembered a farmhouse, and a family who welcomed him, however far he wandered. He remembered finding the burned-out farmhouse, and the bodies, and his soul torn away from his body.

He remembered the children of that family. He found all the bodies save one. The eldest, a girl, was about the age of this boy, and something of his height.

Lusk spoke, carefully shaping the words in the unfamiliar contours of his new mouth, lips, and tongue. Although catlike, his new mouth was sufficiently humanoid so he could speak.

“What is your name?” he said gruffly.

The human boy blinked rapidly. “I don’t-” he began, then faltered. He looked at the ground, at Lusk’s great clawed feet. “They always call me Boy.”

“Look at me,” growled Lusk.

The Boy drew in a breath, held it, and looked up into Lusk’s inhuman, golden eyes. Lusk looked back. The child’s eyes were muddy brown at the edge of the iris, lightening to hazel surrounding the pupil. It reminded him of something, a lake, with round, polished brown-green agates in handfuls on the shore.