Rising Darkness (Game of Shadows #1)(30)

The alpha wolf fixed its intelligent, lupine gaze on her. Sister, we stay.

Overcome by their generosity, she said, My heart is full of gratitude.

Only much later did she realize how stylized her words had been, as if they belonged to another place and another time.

Chapter Ten

THE PAIR OF hawks that followed Mary rode thermals high above the rolling landscape. They had hurtled in pursuit of the car as she turned east, falling back only after fresh hunters swooped in to take over the chase. If an ornithologist had been asked whether the aerial predators were capable of such a sophisticated tactical interaction, he or she would have laughed the questioner out of the room.

The hawks weren’t finished with their task after they had been relieved by newcomers. Instead they winged west until they located a nondescript, battered blue Ford with a transplanted, meticulously maintained BMW engine.

Michael drove south on Interstate 94, which took him out of Wisconsin and along the outskirts of Chicago. As he wove through the crowded traffic, he rarely let the hybrid Ford’s speed fall under a hundred miles an hour, even if it meant that he sometimes had to plunge onto the shoulder to pass snarls of slower vehicles. The pace was suicidal in the greater Chicago area and required absolute concentration and prescient reflexes.

While he drove he maintained a cloak of secrecy around the car, projecting a kind of psychic null-space, a void where the mind’s eye preferred not to look. Troopers patrolling I-94 had radars flash with something inexplicable but their minds slipped away from the occurrence and they forgot it almost at once.

The man maintained minimal contact with his fellow hunters and companions, just enough to sense their presence without glancing away from the road, and to hear the simplest of messages. None had spoken after the first hawk had returned to make its presence known to him.

We have found her, it had said. Follow.

They came. They made contact.

It was enough. He followed.

All other questions and all other answers could be gleaned at a later time. If they lost her again, none of the questions or answers would matter, anyway.

As he drove, he thought back to another life and time, and another trip he had undertaken with almost the same desperation as this one. Another one of their group, Ariel, had been betrayed, captured by Burgundians and sold to the English.

She had begun that life as a peasant girl and fallen prey to the pitfalls their group faced as they grew to adulthood. Confused by her abilities and imperfect shards of returning memory, she became consumed by the voices she heard in her head. When Michael first made contact with her, she believed him to be a saint, and she laid claim to a holy vision. Even as a teen she had been a charismatic and formidable warrior, rousing the countryside to defeat their enemy both at Orleans and Patay.

Then their enemy’s spies spread their poison well. Abandoned by her king, she had been tried for witchcraft and heresy by French clerics who worked in service to the English.

Spring in France had been a messy business that year. The roads to Rouen were churned to thick mud from the downpour of several days of rain. He remembered the heavy strike of hooves as his horse thundered along the treacherous route, and the stomach-churning sound of bone snapping.

He had roared with frustration as his horse went down and threw him from the saddle. He had been forced to slit the suffering beast’s throat in the mud and the rain. And though he scoured every stable in search of another mount, and he had hurtled forward with every ounce of his considerable strength, he had arrived too late to prevent anything.

She should have been fine. He had told her to recant and keep quiet, to wait until he could break her out of prison, but their enemy had captured and tortured Uriel, her mate.

It had broken her. She had pleaded and demanded to be freed, had insisted the voices she heard in her head were real, and the frightened ecclesiastical court had burned her for it.

There had been no last-minute Hollywood appearance or rescue as the flames licked at the bottom of the woodpile. When he had arrived, there had been nothing left of her but the smear of ash and the memory of an outcry on the wind.

Thus was the sum of a noble life: loss and pain and defeat in a foreign place, and the strange, empty gift of sainthood almost five hundred years later, long past when she and her mate had been destroyed, and their real stories and original identities had been buried under the weight of human superstition and history.

Goddamn, he had forgotten how much he had loved that horse. He had raised it from a colt. It had given him everything it had, including its life.

Michael was forced to stop just past East Chicago to refill his depleted gas tank. The pause was agonizing.

Throughout the day as he traveled, the psychic realm rustled and whispered. Ethereal energies were more agitated than usual by the day’s disturbances. Dark beings as well as lighter ones crossed the landscape at the edge of his awareness. Once something fled past him, sobbing inconsolably.

Through all of it, he could feel the woman’s psychic presence radiating with uncontrollable force, a star blazing into a supernova before it died. Creatures attracted to such extremity moved with purpose and stealth toward her, hopeful for an easy kill.

Murder was a child’s picture drawn in bright crayon compared to the savagery he felt. In contrast to his current mood, his former state of rage had been pastel.

Night fell. His speed never lessened except once, briefly, to make the turn north. After an agony of waiting, his current feathered guide said, Turn here.