The shirt cut into him; the collar tightened across his windpipe with a pressure that made his instincts say, Stop. You’re choking. But choking didn’t matter when there was no air left to breathe, so he bore down and wrenched against his bonds.
For a second nothing happened. Then the shirt tore, and he was free!
He tumbled away from the deadfall, spinning head over ass underwater, not sure which way was up.
Terror clawed at him alongside pain and the reflexive need to breathe. Then his head broke the surface, more by accident than anything. Cold air slapped his face as he sucked in huge gulps of air, keeping his head above water with spastic churns of his arms and one good leg, while the other hung useless, dragging in the current.
He wasn’t going to be able to tread for long. He had to get out of the water.
He blinked into the darkness, taking too long to focus, then even longer to comprehend the sight of the deadfall some twenty feet farther downstream, with Dewey grotesquely snagged and pulled partway out of the water, so his arms were draped over a couple of branches, his head cocked the way it did when he was about to fire off one of his killer put-downs.
Brandt’s heart lunged into his throat and even though he knew it was an illusion, he yelled, “Dewey! Hey, Dewey!”
There was no answer, of course. Dewey was dead. Which was what he was going to be if he didn’t get his ass out of the water.
He was just upstream of the boat landing now, and would pass within twenty or thirty feet of the dock. From his vantage, it looked like a mile.
You’ve got to do it, Woody’s voice said inside him. Brandt hesitated, looking downstream at the deadfall and the pale splash of Dewey’s face. Then he turned away and started struggling for the dock with weak strokes of his leaden arms and feeble kicks from his one working leg.
He almost didn’t make it.
The current nearly pulled him past the dock, but he closed the distance with a last violent, muscle-
tearing surge. His fingers banged into the cold, slimy wood of the dock pilings. He grabbed, missed, grabbed again, and this time got a good grip on the slippery wood.
He just hung on for a minute, breath burning in his lungs as he absorbed the feeling of being attached to something solid once more. Then, muscles screaming, he dragged himself up onto the dock.
Once he was on solid ground, he collapsed, went fetal, and just lay there, shirtless, banged up, and stunned.
What little he knew about first aid said he was fucked unless somebody drove down to the boat landing and found him, because there was no way in hell he was going to make it up to the road. But even as he thought that, he felt the strength of his heritage trickling back through him, warming him a few degrees and getting some of his systems back online.
With those inner reserves came a thrum of basic survival instincts that drummed through him with the beat of his heart, a throbbing refrain of, Get up. Get moving. Get help.
Rolling partway up with a groan of pain and effort, he took stock in the light of the single overhead bulb. It was solar powered and threw off dim, half-charged illumination. But that was enough for him to see that his right foot stuck out at an odd angle from his jeans, which were chewed back to his knee on the inside, leaving the limp, wet fabric plastered over his calf.
He didn’t want to look. But he had to. Steeling himself, he pulled back the fabric. And stared.
It wasn’t the deep, swollen slash in his leg that fixed his shocked attention, though. It was the sight of a strange marking a couple of inches above the injury: three curved triangles inside a round-
cornered rectangle. It was stark black and looked like an inch-by-inch-and-a-half tattoo he didn’t remember getting.
It was a glyph like the ones Wood wore on his right forearm.
A hypoxia-jumbled memory leaped out at him, that of the god’s voice saying, “Two will be taken as tradition holds, but one will come later. The last sacrifice will have both power and your love, because there is no sacrifice without pain. . . . Take the oath mark and carry it willingly until the triad balance is restored.”
Horror dawned. He still owed another sacrifice. And it would be someone he loved, someone who carried a connection to the magic.
Woody.
“No.” He didn’t scream it this time, didn’t rail against the gods or the cruel bargain they had demanded. Instead he went cold, deep down to his very core.
The answer crystallized in his brain, coming from that cold, rational place: The god had said for him to carry the oath mark willingly until the balance was restored . . . which implied that if he rejected it, the oath would be broken.
His entire universe suddenly contracted itself to the sight of the god-mark on his leg and the burning need to get rid of it. He didn’t know how the knife got in his hand, hadn’t even fully grasped that it’d been in his pocket, shoved there after he’d cut his way free from his seat belt what now seemed like a lifetime ago.
All he knew was that the blade was there. His bloodied leg was there. And he had to get that fucking mark off.
“Son of eagles, do not shame your ancestors.” The voice was familiar, yet not. It could have been a delusion; it could have come from the sky.
“You killed them,” Brandt grated.
“You made the oath.”
“Now I’m breaking it.” Clenching his jaw, he set the knife point to his flesh, nearly an inch beyond the border of the mark, like it was a cancer and he had to take enough to be sure he got all of it.
“Do not do this, or the gods and your ancestors will be lost to you until you willingly retake the oath.”
“Fuck that.” Brandt’s consciousness grayed around the edges, tunneling until all he could see was the stark black mark.
And he started to cut.
Without warning, the images kaleidoscoped inward, contracting to a point, and the royal shrine took shape around him once more; he sensed torchlight and incense first, then the pressure of Patience’s fingers twined through his. He blinked and swayed, then turned and sagged back against the altar, partly so he wouldn’t fall, partly so he would be looking at Patience, not her reflection, when he told her everything.
But then he met her eyes and saw shock. Grief. Maybe even revulsion. She knew. She must have followed him into the vision after all, though he hadn’t sensed her there.
He would’ve thought he couldn’t possibly get any colder inside. But he could. “Patience.” He reached out.
She backed away, expression stark. “Oh, gods.” A trembling hand lifted, pressed to her mouth.
The walls of the tiny room closed in on him; the world telescoped to her horrified expression. “I—” He broke off as he got it—he fucking got it. His legs gave out; his ass banged down on the altar. His mouth worked, but he couldn’t get out the words that would make it better, because there weren’t any.
Oh, holy hell. The thick incense burned his throat, his lungs. “Werigo made me forget.”