Wild Ones' Blood

One

The Call woke Fenny in the early hours of darkness, an inexorable tug pulling her north. She’d been expecting it for days - a restless feeling keeping her up at night, an itchy sensation in the back of her mind, like a storm was coming - so her bags were already packed. All she had to do was shove the bedding in a final duffel and pull up a glamour over her features, and she was ready to go. She headed for the door without a backwards glance.

She dropped the keys in the apartment’s mail slot, shoved the duffel bags in the trunk of her car, and started driving north, staring blindly at the grey road in front of her. The Call served as her compass, growing into an unpleasant tightness in her chest when she strayed from her path; the empty nighttime roads made the driving go smoothly and quietly, if not easily.

Lights of small towns flickered past her, and the night dragged on. She chewed on caffeinated mints and cursed softly into the silent air of the car, and drove on, northward and, it seemed, a little east.

An hour before dawn, a figure far ahead on the side of the road caught her eye; long before she could make out features, she could feel the particular shimmer of one of her kin. As she grew closer, she could tell that he was barely bothering to hide his features behind a glamour. The feel of him grew stronger, making her knuckles itch, and she let off the gas slowly, bringing the car to a stop a few feet ahead of him.

He was walking down the edge of the highway in an obviously foul mood, backpack slung over his shoulder, feet bare on the autumn pavement, dark hair falling around his face. Curiosity piqued, she concentrated, reaching out her other-senses, and felt the same Call pulling him as her.

She pushed the passenger door open, finally meriting his attention. “Get in,” she suggested. He sniffed the air, then nodded, and slid into the passenger’s seat.

She twisted in her seat to face him, and he did the same; she held out her right hand to him, and they clasped forearms, leaning in to sniff closely at each other. He smelled of fire and blood and the hunt, and, beneath that, of a sameness, a sense of kinship. She pulled back and smiled, dropping her glamour.

He tilted his head and studied her, looking her up and down appraisingly, then dropped what passed for a glamour for him, and she gave him the same once-over.

Too tall, too golden-skinned, too inhuman, and yet he’d pass as human more quickly, un-Veiled, than she would, if he wore a hat. The horns were a give-away, of course, twisting back along his skull, but they marked him to their kin as much as they did to the humans – much as her teeth and ears did her.

“I’m Fenn,” she said, as much a challenge as it was an introduction. Some of their kin… but he smiled, amused at her challenge and showing no recognition of the name.

“Nathanial.” Something like a truce settled on the cabin, and Fenny settled back into her seat.

“Headed north?” she asked dryly. He pointed just slightly to the east of the road’s path in answer, and she started driving.

His scent, his presence, filled the car, tugged at her attention and senses, seeming to overlay everything with the sense of deep forest and something older, wilder, than the steel-and-plastic world she lived in. Her fangs brushed her lower lip, and she ruthlessly forced the hunger down. With the Call pulling at her, she could not afford to be thinking of hunting. She needed to be focused on the unknown task ahead or, at least, numb. Hunger, right now, was nothing but a weakness to be exploited.

The sun was high in the sky, and the tugging in her gut getting stronger, the scent in the car harder and harder to ignore, when she found the turn-off from the main road; her stomach cramped tightly at the same moment that Nathanial pointed wordlessly down the nearly-invisible gravel road. She made a sharp turn, nearly pulling the car off the road, and muttered softly at the pothole-filled farm path.

The path, bordered on one side by hedgerow and the other by cornfield, meandered its way back nearly a mile, the cramping growing stronger by the minute, until it terminated in a small, scrubby brush-pile masquerading as a woods. Fenny parked the car, grabbed the smallest & heaviest of the duffel bags, and headed into the brush, still following the tug in her gut, but moving behind Nathanial.

The brush beat at them, but he muttered something softly and the way became smooth and gentle, the roots sliding out from under their feet and the thorny bushes avoiding them. A couple dozen feet into the soi-disant woods, however, he stopped dead, blocking the path ahead from her.

He was a good six inches taller than her, and broader in the shoulders, the thorns pushed in behind her and to both sides, and the cramping of the Call made her irritable and impatient; she twisted space to put her in front of him.

And stopped dead for a half a heartbeat. Her mind froze in horror, her stomach tried to heave up bile, but her instincts moved her out of Nathanial’s way, off to one side, dropped her to her haunches while she pulled the most silent & deadly of her weapons from her bag.

When it became clear that the fight was not here, her fight reflex allowed her to relax, and her mind began to dole out the scene for her in small doses. The Old Man stood in the clearing – the cramping was gone; confirmation (as if she needed it) that he’d been the one who Called – in his customary hooded robe. Behind him stood three crosses, each ten foot high – as tall as the Old Man, at least.

Here, Fenny had to struggle with deeper instincts again, forcing her body to remain still, to remain human. The low snarl coming from Nathanial didn’t help, urging her to hunt, to fight, to kill. She took several slow breaths and studied the crosses.

A body had been nailed to each one and flayed, bodies which clearly had been kin – even skinless, hanging bloody and naked, they bore the marks of their difference. The Old Man shifted to one side then, and she could see that the body on the middle cross was smaller, almost child-sized.

The hands and feet had not been flayed, nailed as they were to the rough wood of the cross, and the feet of that small body bore designs Fenny herself had tattooed onto her youngest sister not five years ago.

She sat down. It was the only way to keep from diving off in a brainless, feral desire to attack something, punish something. Beside her, the snarling had gotten louder. She found her lips curling away from her teeth in response.

“You made it, I see.” There was nothing in the Old Man’s voice to suggest he even knew the bodies were behind him, much less cared. “And I’m sure you can see why I called you here.”

“There’s such a thing as a telephone.” It could have been her voice or Nathanial’s, it was so far from human. It took the look the Old Man shot her to be sure it had been her who spoke.

“A telephone call suggests that I’m asking you to attend. I do not ask, children; I demand your presence.” As always, his cold arrogance set her teeth on edge, and, as always, she schooled her face to equally arrogant blandness and said nothing. “Now. They have declared war, and we will bring war to them.”

“Nedetakaei?” Nathanial snarled the obscenity as a question, and the Old Man nodded.

“I believe so. No-one else could have taken Harjo.” He gestured negligently at the biggest of the bodies. “But they have obscured the trail very well. You’ll have to use other means to track them.”

“They will die.” Fenny’s lips curled in a satisfied smile at the cold tone of Nathanial’s voice. Yes. They would die in pain.

“They will die,” the Old Man agreed. “But you will have to find them first.” Fenny sniffed the air lightly, and gagged. They had covered their trail with burnt hawthorn smoke and chemical air fresheners; the Old Man was right. He bit his forefinger, drawing blood, and flicked it across their faces, first Nathanial’s, and then Fenny’s. “Blood calls to blood, my children. Another one of ours lives somewhere nearby. She has the gift of Sight, and she will know where to go next.”

He paused, then looked directly at Nathanial. “Where you will have to follow the Nedetakai, you will need an anchor. What works for me should work for you as well. Take her with you.”

His glance slide to Fenny then. “Be gentle,” he adjured her, and it had the strength of a geas; “she is your sister, too.”

Turning his attention to encompass both of them, he gestured his left hand in a small benediction. “This will take the both of you, and more. Work together on this, my children.” He faded from view, and was gone.

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