Iron and Magic (The Iron Covenant #1)(40)

A piercing scream rolled through the orchard from the right. Hugh jumped off Bucky.

“Help! He’s got the dogs!” A man screamed. “Help!”

A wolf howl rose from the woods, floating above the trees.

Hugh tossed the rope to the girl and lifted her onto Bucky’s back. “Get to the castle,” he ordered. “Tell any Dog you see to send Sharif and Karen to me.”

The girl nodded.

“Don’t throw her,” Hugh warned.

Bucky snorted and took off toward the castle.





The body of the dog sprawled under a bush. Blood stained the brown and white fur. Next to the dog, Sharif crouched, leaning close to the ground, staring unblinking at the crushed bushes and red-stained leaves. Karen, the other shapeshifter, dropped to all fours on the other side and took a long whiff.

Shapeshifters had their issues, but Hugh never agreed with Roland’s disdain for them. He understood Roland’s position well enough and recited it with passion when the occasion called for it, but when it came down to it, shapeshifters made damn good soldiers and that’s all he cared about.

He braced for the uncomfortable flash of guilt that usually flared when he thought Roland was wrong. It never came. Instead the void scraped his bones with its teeth. Right.

“He got some bites in,” Karen said softly, her voice tinted with sadness. “Good boy.”

Sharif bared his teeth.

The dire wolf was big and old. One of the shepherds had snapped a polaroid of him two nights before when the beast prowled the tree line, studying the cows in the pasture. From the paw prints and the pictures, the old male stood more than three feet at the shoulder and had to weigh damn near two hundred pounds, if not more.

Wild wolves didn’t follow the strict alpha-beta pecking order people assigned to them. That structure was mostly present in big shapeshifter packs, because hierarchy was a primate invention. Instead wild wolves lived in family groups, a parent couple and their young, who followed their parents until they grew up enough to start their own packs. But this beast was solitary. Something happened to his pack or they ran him out, and now he was a lone wolf with nothing to lose. A night ago, he tried to take a cow. The dogs and guns chased him off. Then the magic hit.

The old wolf was a smart bastard, smart enough to figure out that when the magic was up, guns didn’t bark. Still, he stayed away from the pasture and went for the easier target instead, a ten-year-old girl picking pears from the ground in the orchard while her parents were on ladders harvesting the fruit.

A dog’s job was to put itself between the threat and the human. The two dogs with the harvesters did their job.

Hugh and the shapeshifters had found the first dead hound at the edge of the woods. The second was here. Now it was up to human Dogs to settle the score.

“Heartbeat,” Sharif whispered.

Hugh reached out with his magic. The dog was a mess, torn and bitten, but a faint, barely-there heartbeat shivered in his chest. Hugh concentrated. This would be complicated.

He knitted the organs together, repairing the tissue, sealing the blood vessels, mending the flesh like it was fabric, muscles, fascia, and skin. The two Dogs by his side waited quietly.

Finally, he finished. The dog raised his head, turned in the brush, and crawled toward them. Sharif scooped the hundred and twenty-pound hound up like he was a puppy. The dog licked his face.

“Blood loss,” Hugh said. “He won’t be walking for a bit.”

“I’ll carry him,” Sharif said. His eyes shone, catching the light.

“We’re only a mile in. Take him back and catch up,” Hugh told him.

The werewolf turned smoothly and ran into the woods, silent like a shadow, the huge dog resting in his arms.

Karen took the lead and they followed the scent trail deeper into the woods.

If he never saw another rhododendron bush until his next life, it would be too soon, Hugh decided. The damn brush choked the spaces between trees and getting through it wasn’t exactly a cakewalk.

They pushed their way through the latest patch. The endless rhododendron finally thinned out. Old woods stretched before them, the massive oaks and hemlocks rising like the thick columns of some ancient temple, cushioned in greenery.

A shadow flittered between the trees, trailing a smear of foul magic. An undead.

The day was looking up. Hugh grinned and pulled his sword out.

The undead dashed right and stopped.

Another smear appeared on the left. Two. If it was Nez’s standard rapid reconnaissance party, there would be a third, each piloted by a separate navigator.

Karen waited next to him, her anticipation almost a physical thing hovering in front of her.

“Happy hunting,” Hugh said.

She unbuckled her belt with the knife sheath on it, unzipped her boots, and gave a sharp tug to her shirt. It came open. She dropped it on the forest floor. Her pants followed. A brief flash of a nude human, then her body tore. New bones sprang up out of flesh, muscle spiraled up them, sheathing the new skeleton, skin clothed it, and dense gray fur burst from the new hair follicles. The female werewolf opened her monstrous jaws, her face neither wolf nor human, swiped her knife from her clothes, and sprinted into the woods to the left.

Hugh went in the opposite direction, toward the foul magic staining the leaves. The smear hovered still for a moment, then moved north. Run, run, little vampire.