Kenar’s eyes lit with vicious fury. He signaled the pack forward and shouted, “By Right of Threat—kill them!”
Dayn nailed the closest beta in the haunch, aiming to wound but not disable. As the male went down howling and snapping at the bolt, Dayn grabbed Reda’s hand. “Come on!”
They made it only a short way before the ranks closed again. Reda had his back, fending off the creatures with sweeps of her unstrung bow as he sent two more bolts into the crowd. And over his shoulder, he said, “I’m sorry, Reda.”
But apologies didn’t fix anything, did they? Never had.
Grief and guilt rose up within him like old friends as he pulled his short sword. “I’m going to try to make a hole. Be ready to run and hang on to that map.” Because she would be running without him. There was no way Kenar would let him live now.
“Dayn.” Reda’s voice was choked, but that was all. And he didn’t blame her for not knowing what else to say.
Roaring, he swung the weapon in a glittering arc and surged forward with her right behind him. He made it through the first rank, knocked aside a big beta in the second, and—
Without warning, an arrow seared so close that he felt the vibration on his skin as it passed him and carved a nasty furrow across the next animal’s back.
“’Ware the woods!” Kenar yelled as another arrow sang past and glanced off the shoulder of an older wolfyn in the outer rank.
Not stopping to question the rescue, Dayn grabbed Reda’s hand and hauled her toward the gap that had just been punched in the line. “Come on!”
They flew across a section of open road, then across to where a huge rock face rose up thirty or so feet to a sloping plateau. With the wolfsbene flowing through his veins and the entire Scratch-Eye pack lunging after him, Dayn made it up the sheer stone face in two big bounds, dragging Reda with him.
They crested the top and charged along the downslope, which put them on a narrow ridgeline with dense scrub on either side, forcing the pursuing wolfyn to run parallel to them, howling and barking in challenge, anger and threat. But Dayn’s heart pounded and his muscles burned, propelling him faster than any human, faster even than most of the wolfyn. And Reda matched him stride for stride.
They soon outdistanced the bulk of the pack, until only a few of the fastest wolfyn were keeping pace where the ridge swept lower to flat ground and the scrub thinned along a narrow plateau that ended in the canyon: a wide chasm that was spanned right at this point by a narrow rope bridge.
As they charged down the steep incline and their pursuers closed on either side, Dayn said, “Stay behind me, but keep up. If we can make it across that bridge, we can pull the pins from the other side.” There were other ways across, but they involved a half day’s detour. She made a noise that might have been assent, might have been a whimper, but there was no time to stop and discuss options.
And there weren’t any other options.
Dayn’s pulse throbbed, thudding in his head and beneath his skin, and power seared in his veins, urging him on. When they broke from the last of the trees to the flat plateau that led to the bridge, there were only two wolfyn still following. Those two, though, closed in fast. Then, as if choreographed, they split and attacked, one from each side.
As they leaped, Dayn shouted, “Down!”
He and Reda hit the dirt and the wolfyn actually collided in midair. The larger one drove the smaller back and down; they landed hard a few feet away and scuffled.
Dayn dragged Reda up, ready to run again, then stopped dead as he saw that the two wolfyn weren’t struggling to get up and continue the chase. They were fighting.
And one of them was Keely.
The battle was short but vicious; within seconds, she rose to her feet, leaving the other lying stunned and still. Then she shimmered and changed, becoming her familiar self. Except that she suddenly looked entirely unfamiliar—still tall, gorgeous and stacked, but…he didn’t know what the “but” was, actually. It was there, though.
She looked at Reda. “You’re his guide?”
“So he tells me.” The women shared a look that excluded him, left him baffled.
“You knew?” he demanded of Keely. “How?” Then, because there was only one possible answer, he said, “Candida told you.”
“She wanted someone else to know, in case anything happened to her. When the witch’s servant came, I pretended I didn’t know, and tried to think of a way to get a message to you, warn you of what was going on, but I couldn’t.”
The guilt was a raw ache inside him. “I’m sorry. I would have told you everything, but…Kenar.”
“Kenar,” she agreed. And there was something in her voice that hadn’t been there before. Anger, maybe, or defiance. He wondered whether that was new or if, like her collusion with Candida, there were layers to her that he hadn’t seen.
“Thanks for helping us get away,” he said, knowing that must have been her. His eyes went to the still form of the unconscious wolfyn. “Will you get in trouble?”
“I’ll blame it on you.” She glanced back along the ridgeline, where growing howls warned that the rest of the pack was regathering. “You should get across the bridge and pull the pins.”
“That’s the plan.”
“Which way are you headed?”
“Northwest,” he said without hesitation, giving her his full trust, though far too late. “To Meriden Arch.”
She nodded. “I’ll tell them you went south, then. We’ll head for the log crossing down by Candle Pass.”
That would put the pack a solid half day behind them. “I’ll owe you one. Hell, I owe you, period.” He paused. “Keels, I’m sorry about the mindspeaking. I just…I had to feed.”
She shrugged, and her voice held only wolfyn practicality when she said, “I was pretty freaked out when Candida first told me, but she helped me get over it. And in the long run, it was a fair trade—I used you for sex, you used me for blood. That’s what people like us do—use each other.”
It was a hell of an indictment. And he couldn’t deny it.
He swallowed hard, very aware that Reda had drawn away from him; her arms were wrapped around her body as if she was freezing and she stared out over the chasm as if she couldn’t look at him. He wanted to pull her aside and tell her that wasn’t how it had been between him and Keely. Except that it was exactly like that—she had nailed it. They had used each other, and each been content with the deal. Now, though, with the wolfsbene running in his veins and Reda in the picture, the arrangement echoed cold and bloodless.
He didn’t have the luxury of time to pull her aside, though, or even try to reason through the sudden change inside him. They needed to move now, talk later.
To Keely, he said, “Be careful, okay? And be happy.”
“Go.” Her amber eyes went from him to Reda and back. “And hey…you be happy, too, okay?”
He didn’t know how to answer that, so he just nodded. “Thanks for everything. Business deal or not, you helped make the past twenty years bearable.” He didn’t kiss her goodbye, just as he had rarely kissed her hello. Theirs had never been that sort of a relationship. Instead, he nudged Reda toward where a low line of trees hid the edge of the canyon. “Come on. Keely will buy us as much time as she can, but we need to get across the bridge and drop it from the other side before the pack gets here.”
She didn’t say a word as they jogged toward the trees, but he didn’t know for certain if that was because she was shell-shocked by the wolfyn attack, upset over the Keely thing, or something else. Or all of the above.
But he did know for certain that his arrangement with Keely had nothing to do with his feelings for Reda. One had been business and practicality, while the other was entirely impractical and ill-advised. Yet even knowing that, he couldn’t keep his eyes off Reda. Part of it was the wolfsbene, yes. But most of it was her.