That chorused howl again, closer now. Chilling and yet fevered.
Luis kept moving, focused on the path, taking each step deliberately, but with all possible speed. He knew, at least. He understood what little chance either of us stood against the madness of an avatar. Earth powers might allow us to fight, a little, but our chances of truly defeating one were slim, at best.
These were the nightmares of Mother Earth, thrown up in her troubled, ages-long sleep. And they shared her power, deep in their roots.
The air smelled suddenly rank and sweet around us, drowned in rotted syrup. I whirled, flashlight flaring pale against tree trunks, swallowed in dark gaps, then reflecting suddenly from a face. Filthy, bearded and matted with dirt and leaves. A young man’s face, and a bare, tanned, nude body whipped with scars and bruises and old dried blood.
His eyes were ancient and empty and yet full of something so intoxicating that I felt myself falling … falling … I tasted honey on my lips, felt the heat of liquor firing my veins. Felt the universe shattering around me into pieces, fierce hot pieces, and my skin was burning, even my hair, too hot, too hot…
I heard a thump as my pack slipped off my shoulders and fell to the trail, but it seemed so far away now. There was nothing in the world but the glow and fire and dark intoxication of the woodsman’s eyes. I ripped at my shirt, pulling it apart in a frenzy. Too hot. Burning. Had to get cool.
“Cass!” Hands grabbed me and spun me around, a confusing whirl, and my flashlight beam fell on another face, on rich dark skin and wide black eyes and strong, flame-marked arms. “Cass, stop! Stop it!”
I slashed at him with hooked fingers, and he flinched backward. I turned, flashlight stabbing darkness in nervous jerks.
The woodsman was gone. I staggered, screamed, and heard the ring of madness in my voice. The rising, disbelieving tone of loss, of need. I still felt the burning in my veins, my skin, and I ripped again at my clothes, shredding, snapping threads like spider webs.
Luis — that was his name, Luis — grabbed me from behind, twisted my arms behind me, and forced me down to my knees on the hard rock, then forward, on to my face. The pain made me whimper with pleasure, and a growl of hunger came out of my mouth. Violence. That would sooth the burning. If I could run, chase, rip, tear, consume…
Luis put his full weight on me to hold me face down on the path as I convulsed, trying to get up, to run, to hunt.
“No,” he panted, and I was overwhelmed with the smell of him, the rich male animal musk of his sweat, his body, his sex.
If not the hunt, then this. This.
“Oh Christ,” he murmured, and I felt him shudder in response. He was feeling what I felt now, too close for there to be emotional distance between us. The bond that fed his energy into me also echoed back, and he could not fail to know what I wanted. What I needed. “Cass, stay still. Stay still. Breathe. Come on, this isn’t you. This isn’t what a Djinn does.”
I wasn’t a Djinn. My body — my body—
It is only a body, the cold core of me whispered. And I am a Djinn. A Djinn. Not an animal, driven by meat and fury.
I shuddered and went limp under Luis’s weight, a submission that made the beast within me shriek and writhe inside. He didn’t move for a long moment, then whispered, “Cass?”
“Let me go,” I said. My throat felt raw with fury, as if I’d breathed in superheated air. “Off!”
He rolled away. I rolled the other way, breathing hard, and crouched with my back against the rough bark of a pine tree. I felt hot, still, and the fury pounding through my veins was maddening, trembling on the edge of uncontrollable. My shirt hung in rags around me, and the fluttering pieces annoyed me; I pulled it free and threw it away, snarling, and glared down at the thin sports bra that I still wore beneath it. I had ripped it in places, but it was mostly intact.
My denim shorts had survived my frenzy, though they were fraying at the hems in untidy strings. I struggled with an urge to strip them off, rip at them with teeth and nails, and closed my eyes to focus on slowing my hot, panting breaths.
The howls sounded again, a longing chorus that pulled at the desire inside me.
“Cassiel.” Luis’s voice. He’d ventured closer, but he was keeping a safe distance between us. “What happened?”
“The avatar,” I said. “I saw him.”
“Him?”
“The Bacchae are followers. They have no mind, only hungers. I saw the avatar. He thinks. We have to stop him if we want to stop them.”
But the Bacchae were his guard, his army of teeth and flesh and claws. There was no avoiding a confrontation with them, if we hunted him. Just as there was no avoiding the fact that I remained perilously close to becoming one of them. I had to push aside the memory of the avatar’s eyes, of the furiously empty hunger in them, of the sweet, hot intoxication of honey on my lips and in my blood. I had to. Or I would turn on Luis in an instant, and the first drop of blood I drew would trigger the final frenzy, reduce me to a naked, clawing, biting animal made of hunger and lust. I would not stop. I would take everything from him, down to the marrow of his bones, and then I would be lost.
“Can you handle this?” Luis asked me. He sounded tense, cautious, ready to move back at a single tremor from me. “Because I need to know. I can’t turn my back on you if you’re not in control.”
“I’m fine,” I lied. I had to make it true by sheer will; Luis couldn’t defend himself from other threats if he had to watch me as well. “We have to find the avatar now, if we want to survive the night.” Because the Bacchae would have caught Luis’s scent by now, that rich male musk that had drenched me in frenzy. They’d chase him down and rip, rape, consume. It was what the avatar had infused in them. Individually, they were normal human women, probably mild and gentle creatures. But here, in the wild, with the honey and wine in their veins, they were Furies.
I rose smoothly and loped off into the dark. Luis cursed and stumbled in pursuit. I did not need a flashlight, now; my eyes pulled in light in new ways, new colors, painting the world in flashes of red and gold and white. The eyes of the avatar, shared with his hunters.
I could feel him out in the darkness, moving through the forest. Wandering. Seeking … whatever fathomless thing avatars sought. It was nothing humans could understand, and the human body it was using at present would be destroyed in the process, either from hunger or thirst or sheer overdriven exhaustion. It would leap to another male body if it could, unless there was nothing to receive its spirit. Then it would sink back into the earth, back into sleep.
Luis. Luis would be here to receive it. I couldn’t permit that to happen.
In the next second, I realized that I couldn’t worry about that; I had to think of myself first. The avatar’s presence pulled me like a tide, drawing me closer, and I heard him now, padding through the forest, plunging through brush and thorns, leaving bare, bloody footprints on the ground and rocks. I smelled his rotted-honey stench.
I ran, loping like a lion giving chase, feeling the frenzy inside me mount and boil.
I burst out of the trees into a clearing. Overhead, the stars were white cold chips set in an onyx sky. A crescent moon had cleared the eastern horizon, bathing the small meadow in icy light.
The avatar stood in the center of it, staring up at the moon, arms raised. His back was to me, and I saw the claw marks scoring his back, his buttocks. The scratches and cuts. The trickling black blood.
Ecstasy was a deadly dangerous, shockingly beautiful thing.