The Barbarian King

Chapter 44

The path curled and twisted, veering through the woods.

A wolf howl rose in the distance—a pure, beautiful note soaring to the clear skies. Another answered. The Keep sentries announcing our approach. A deep-voiced whoop followed, a warning and a declaration of ownership in one—a bouda must’ve been on duty tonight.

We burst out of the woods into a clearing. A massive structure towered before us, the solid, impenetrable mass of stone shaped into a semblance of a fortified castle or castlelike fort. It was the ultimate den, wrapped into a wall of gray stone, with towers, defenses, a vast underground, and a myriad of hidden passageways and escape routes. A testament to Curran’s paranoia. Even if the Keep were besieged, even if the siege was lost, the Pack would melt into the woods to reunite and fight another day.

We cleared the courtyard and kept running, through the door, through the narrow hallway, up a dozen of stair flights all the way to the top of the tower, to the floor just below Curran’s private quarters. The guard recognized us and stepped out of the way. Raphael was the male bouda alpha. He sat on the Council with Aunt B. Nobody would stop him.

We rushed into the spacious room Curran called his office. The Beast Lord was sitting behind his desk, looking at some papers. Simi sat on the couch with a tortured look on her face, holding a copy of the book of Pack law and making notes in a notebook.

They looked up in unison.

“Clan Jackal is in danger,” I said.

We sat in a conference room, both still in our fur, with the Beast Lord, Simi, Jim, and Colin and Geraldine Mather, the Jackal alphas. Colin, a muscular, beefy man with a wrestler’s build and pale hair, leaned on the table, his face flat and unreadable. His mate and wife sat next to him. Where Colin was fair, Geraldine was dark, her skin a deep brown, her hair black, her body honed to muscular efficiency by constant training.

“Her name is Brandy Kerry,” Geraldine said. “She is seven years old. Her parents are on a business trip to Charlotte. They left her here in the Keep in the boarding school in the south wing. She took a nap at five o’clock with the rest of the children in her class. The room is on the seventh floor. The windows are barred. Ruth, the teaching aide, sat by the door, reading a book. At the end of the hour, she came in to wake the children and found Brandy’s bed empty. Ruth searched the room. None of the other seven kids saw anything. Brandy just evaporated from her bed and nobody had noticed.”

“The rest of the staff searched the floor,” Colin continued. “Every room was checked, and to get to the staircase, she would’ve had to go past the school receptionist and a guard, and Connie swore she did not see a child leave. When it became evident that Brandy wasn’t anywhere on the school floor, we were alerted to the situation.”

Of all the clans, Jackals were the most paranoid when it came to their children. Where boudas spoiled their kids with too much freedom and cats encouraged offspring to go on solitary wanderings, the jackals always stressed family. In the wild, unlike wolves who formed packs or rats who swarmed, jackals mated for life and lived in pairs, raising their children on their own little slices of territory.

“I yelled at Ruth.” Geraldine clenched her hand into a fist. “I thought she walked off or fell asleep, and Brandy had snuck out.”

“We checked the bars on the window and did a complete sweep of the wing and the outside,” Colin said. “No sign of her.”

“He took that baby.” A snarl slipped into Geraldine’s voice. “He plucked her right out of her bed, that f*****g bastard. I will tear his guts out.”

“If you confront him, he’ll kill you and her,” Simi said.

Geraldine whirled to her.

“It’s not an insult,” Curran said. “She’s stating a fact. He has power over jackals.”

“So what do we do?” Geraldine raised her hands.

“We do nothing,” Curran said.

“But—”

“We do nothing,” he repeated. “We don’t know where he’s keeping the child, but he won’t hesitate to kill her. We will meet his demands. For now.”

“He wants Andrea and I to help him,” Raphael said. “We will do it.”

“We’ve discussed it,” I said. “As long as we play ball, no more children will be taken.”

Colin’s voice turned into a rough growl. “So you want us to sit on our hands, then?”

“No,” Simi said. “Find out everything you can on him. Go to the books, visit experts, get as much information as you can on him. Find out his weaknesses, if he has any. As soon as the moment presents itself, we will hit him with everything we have.”

“We’ve killed wannabe gods before,” Curran said. “Hell, we could probably kill him now. But I will not do it at the cost of a child’s life. We must be patient and smart. Bring your people into the Keep. The fewer isolated targets the better. Raise the alert. Nobody goes anywhere except in groups of three. Sleep in shifts, with the guards watching over the children.”I will reinforce the wards on the south wing again,” Simi said. “It won’t stop him, but it may make it harder for him.”

..

The alpha Jackals looked like they wanted to tear their hair out.

“Patience,” Curran said. “We can’t pull that chain, because there is a child attached to the other end of it. We’ll stalk him like a deer, with all the cunning and calculation we have. Jackals have a reputation as scavengers, but all of us know better. All of us here have seen Clan Jackal families bring down deer and moose. There is honor in taking prey much larger than yourself, especially if that prey is smart and difficult to trap.”

There was a reason why Curran was the Beast Lord.

“He may be a god,” Curran continued, “but he’s in our world now and he’s alone. Together we’re smarter, more cunning, and more vicious. Patience.”

-- .. --

The Jackals switched from agitation to a terrifying steely determination. “Patience,” Geraldine repeated, as if tasting it on her tongue to get the full meaning of the word.

Colin nodded. “AJ is a professor of cultural anthropology. He may know an expert.”

Five minutes later they had come up with six names and left.

“It won’t hold them for long,” Jim said, a few moments after the door closed behind them. “When the parents return, they will whip the clan into a frenzy.”

“Then we need to resolve it before the parents return.” Curran looked at Raphael and me. “What do you need?”

“A deer,” I said.

“I’m sorry?” Jim said.

“He said that Simi would know where the shield was and to tell her to bring another deer,” Raphael elaborated.

Curran looked at his mate. Something passed between them, some sort of wordless conversation only they understood.

“Hell no,” Curran said.

“They can’t summon it by themselves and you can’t get involved,” Simi said.

Curran’s eyes turned into molten gold. “Are you out of your mind? It took you, me, and five vampires and we barely got away. He has your scent now. Nobody goes to see him twice.”

“Nobody except me.” She gave him her psycho look.

The Beast Lord clenched his jaw.

Simi smiled at him.

The tension was so thick you could cut it into slices and serve it on toast. Of all control freaks, Curran was the worst and he existed convinced that Simi was made of fragile glass. I understood it. I completely understood. He was in exactly the same place I had been a couple of hours before: watching someone you love dive headfirst into danger and not being able to do a damn thing about it. It was difficult to watch and harder to live through.

“There are hard battles and there is suicide,” Curran said.

“Agreed. I have a plan,” Simi said.

Curran raised his hands, inviting the miraculous plan to come forth.

“The volhv serves Chernobog, who presides over the dead and fallen in battle. This is his area of expertise.”

“I’d like to be in on this discussion,” Raphael said.

“Me, too,” I added.

“The shield belongs to a draugr,” Curran said. “It’s an undead, unkillable giant.”

“How unkillable?” I asked.

“We couldn’t kill it,” Simi said.

“Both of you at the same time?” Raphael asked.

She nodded.

Great.

“We won’t be trying to kill him,” Simi said. “He’s confined by wards, but once we take his shield and carry it past the ward line, the protective spells may fail. We can’t let him rampage around, because he eats people. That’s where the volhv comes in. Meldrin will have to rebind the draugr.”

“Can he even do this?” Curran asked.

“Well, we’ll have to ask him,” Simi said.

There was more planning and discussing and talking, and at the end of it, I was so tired, I couldn’t see straight. The draugr was really bad news. I said that we needed extra firepower, the kind that would work during magic.

“Galahad warheads,” I told them. Strictly speaking it wasn’t a warhead, but rather an arrowhead that fit into a custom crossbow and carried a magic charge that would take down an elephant or a giant, for whom it was invented in Wales. In my time with the Order I had managed to order two cases of them from the UK. I even had the new bow to go with them.

Shortly after that, Barabas dragged Raphael off to talk about some sort of important thing that couldn’t wait. Simi led me to a room that had a bed, and I collapsed into it, fur and all. The Pack bed was so soft. Like floating on a cloud.

Fatigue weighed me down. I closed my eyes, feeling the ache humming through my legs. Shouldn’t have sat down…yawn…straight after running…yawn. Should’ve walked it off…first…

I stood in the water. It splashed past my ankles, dark blue-green and warm. Soft mud squished beneath my feet. I made fists with my toes and watched a bright green cloud of powdery silt rise from the river’s bottom, swirling around my legs. Patches of reeds grew, stretching into the river, bending lightly in the wind, as though they were whispering gossip to each other. In the distance, across the vast expanse of water, the sun was setting or rising, a small ball of yellow hovering at the edge of low dark hills, the silver-nacre sky around it painted with pink and yellow.

I looked over my shoulder. A yellow shore greeted me, touched with patches of bright green grass, and beyond it palms stretched upward.

We were definitely not in Kansas anymore.

A slender bird walked past me on long legs. It had a curved neck and a long beak and I realized it was a heron.

A presence brushed against me, saturated with magic. I turned. A jackal the size of a rhino waded into the river downstream from me and lapped the water, watching me with golden eyes.

Right. I was standing in the Nile, watching Anapa, and this was not an ordinary dream. There were rules to this dream. No promises, no striking of bargains, in fact, no talking. Nobody yet had managed to get into a shitty bargain with a god by keeping their mouth shut.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” The Jackal-Anapa raised his head and looked into the distance, at the sun. “Do you like the way it smells?”

It smelled verdant. It smelled like the moisture of the river mixing with the fragrance of dry grasses from the shore, and flowers, and fish, and rich mud. It smelled like the sort of place where life would flourish and hunting would be plentiful.