Night of the Highland Dragon (11 page)

It happened at sunset.

Sunset had never been Judith's favorite time of day. Even at its prettiest, the sight of the sinking sun still made her feel twitchy. It was too red, too angry, at once too much like blood and too much of a reminder that, whatever else the sun might be, it was also fire greater than even she or any of her family could control or withstand. Even with the sun so far away, she couldn't be entirely easy with that knowledge. It was doubly true now that she'd known enough of war and magic to be sure that the future would produce at least
one
damned fool who'd try to bring that power to earth.

Her mother, sorceress that she was, had told Judith once that sunset was one of the between times, neither quite one thing nor another. There was great power in those times and places, Riona had said. Doors to other worlds opened more easily. That hadn't helped Judith's discomfort.

Dawn was another one of those times, but she'd mostly seen dawn on early watches or after a night of revelry when weariness or drunkenness, or both, had distracted her. Now she simply slept through it—being the lady of the castle had its privileges—and at sunset she distracted herself with tasks or books.

The day after the fire, sunset found her on the road, walking back from the village where she'd been calling on the Connohs in their new lodgings. The store was going to take a while to rebuild and even longer to be habitable, rather than just a place to store and sell groceries. Meanwhile, the family was living with Young Hamish's married sister, and the accommodations didn't look
too
cramped. They'd resisted all of her hints about finding a place for them in the castle. After a while, Judith had admitted defeat.

This sunset was of the sullen red-and-gray winter variety. Brittle grass and browning heather brushed the sides of her skirt. Hard dirt crunched beneath her shoes. Cold wind knifed through her coat.

Eyes watched her.

The feeling came from nowhere, and she could see nobody around, only barren fields to each side and behind, and the castle and forest ahead of her. Yet she was completely certain of the scrutiny.

She knew words in Latin that let her see hidden things: spirits, auras, and lines of magical force. As their mother had done, Stephen called it “invoking the Wind that Parts the Veil.” Colin talked enthusiastically these days about energy and magnetism. Judith knew and cared only that it worked. She stopped in her tracks, a tall, dark woman standing alone in the midst of late-autumn desolation, and said the words aloud.

The world clouded. Grass, heather, trees, and houses all became misty and insubstantial. As far as Judith could observe, her own aura was as it always was: bright green, shot through with streaks of glimmering silver. She didn't spend long looking at that this time. Other things caught her attention.

Literally, “things” was the first word that came to mind. Little, six-armed rat-things—just looking at them hurt Judith's eyes. Six of them lurked around her in a rough semicircle, any one of them staying perhaps ten feet behind her. If she hadn't been looking, she might have missed them, even with magical sight. She hadn't—and her stomach clenched at the thought that these miniature horrors could have been following her for a good month now. If they had been, they'd kept more distance. Now they'd grown bold enough and perhaps strong enough to attract her attention.

The longer she looked, the more nauseated she grew. The rat-things had nasty-looking teeth and sharp claws at the end of each arm—now the wounds on Finlay's dead sheep made sense—but they weren't a physical danger. They were clearly spies or scavengers, not killers. They weren't harmless, though. By their very presence, they caused damage, not directly to people or things but to the fabric of the world nearby. There were no exact words for what they did, but rough synonyms came to Judith one after the other.

Fray
.

Tear.

Twist
.

Corrupt.

Rot.

She remembered Shaw Senior telling her that he'd checked his ladder before starting work. She remembered Agnes talking about Murray's horse suddenly going vicious—and she wondered just how the fire had started at the Connohs' store. Things went wrong with these creatures in the world, and although Shaw's injury had happened while she'd been in the castle and therefore in close proximity, the others had been farther and farther away. The effect was spreading.

She turned and started back toward the castle, moving at her same unhurried but purposeful speed while her mind whirled. Odds argued against the rat-things being natural, which meant they'd been summoned for a purpose. That purpose might include spying. Tactically, it might be best to let them keep watch and pretend she had no idea they existed—but she couldn't let them stay in the world, not with the damage they were doing.

How to get rid of them? Assuming their master wasn't already seeing through their eyes—Mother had said it was damnably hard to ride along with a demon, and that people who did usually couldn't even fake sanity for long—she didn't want to risk even one getting away to bear tales.

The wind picked up again. She barely felt it. The demons were tagging along behind her, maintaining a steady distance. Judith glanced back briefly to confirm this, then looked quickly forward again. Watching the creatures move was even worse than looking at them in the first place.

Could she take all six of them? In a fight, yes, almost definitely. But if one ran, she might not have the reflexes to catch it. Small things were fast and slippery. She'd learned that hunting rats on her first ship and had spent twenty years with a scar on one arm to remind her. She had the instincts of a soldier, not a predator.

Not in human shape, at least.

When a narrower path branched off from the main road to the castle, Judith took it and headed toward the forest. At this distance, she could make out individual trees rather than a single dark mass. The still-green bulk of pine and fir surrounded the leafless branches of the other trees. Protective, she thought, but perhaps she was just looking for protection.

She was also looking for concealment. The trees would function admirably in that regard. That much was not subjective.

Still walking without haste, Judith crossed the first line of trees and immediately went off the path, ducking between trunks and dodging undergrowth. She did look back once in a while, making sure that the rat-things were still following her, and she took an easier route than she might have otherwise. Although she hadn't been in the forest in a few weeks, she knew almost every inch of it from the ground and the air alike. She couldn't count on the rat-things being good at navigation.

They did keep up though, and without any apparent effort or distress on their part—although she didn't know what either would look like on such creatures. Whether natural or as abnormal as they were, their senses were good, as were their speed and mobility. Abstractly, Judith found that alarming, but for her purposes just then, it was the best thing she could have hoped for.

Gradually, the trees around her became larger and older, and the ground beneath them clearer. With the thick leaves overhead cutting off their sun, the plants in the undergrowth had died out. The soil they left was thick, dark, and moist. It had rained yesterday, too late for the Connohs' store but at least in time to help Judith.

This was the most ancient part of the forest. Her ancestors had gone to the nearer portions for wood throughout the generations, and villagers had even hunted in there when there was no danger of disturbing the MacAlasdairs in their other forms, but this part had never known a woodsman's ax, and she doubted if anyone on two legs had ever hunted there.

Judith spied her destination ahead: a huge clearing, dark with the shadows of the old trees that circled it, but clear for yards around. She knew the place from many seasons and many years. Her first real hunt had begun there—she and Stephen tagging along behind their father—and many others had followed.

Now she was alone. The prey was unworthy, inedible, and
wrong
. But it would be a hunt nonetheless.

She stepped into the clearing. A squirrel fled at her approach, scurrying for the safety of a pine tree and chittering alarm to any of its fellows who might be listening. Judith thought she heard an extra note of agitation in its call. No animals found her presence pleasant, even without the accompanying rat-things.

The creatures followed her as she'd hoped. First they lurked at the edge of the clearing. Then, as she moved farther in, they came. They seemed to maintain a fairly consistent distance. Whoever summoned them had probably given them specific orders, since they didn't look that bright.

Judith calculated. She wanted them as far out in the open as possible. They were maintaining formation. To get them all out from under the trees, they'd need to be roughly in the middle of the clearing, but no more.

The
farther
off
from
England, the nearer to France.

She'd been gun captain for a few years out in the Pacific. Now, as she had then, she sighted the spot she wanted. This time, she wouldn't be depending on half-grown boys with shot and powder. She walked, stood, took a breath—and transformed.

It was a full-body shiver. It was a moment when she saw double and felt stretched. From the outside, she knew, it took no more than a few seconds, but it always felt longer. Then she was the dragon.

The rat-things were even smaller now, and they hadn't moved. Either they were stunned by the transformation or they didn't have the wit to know they were in danger. Judith rumbled her satisfaction.

She inhaled and thought
control
at her gullet, where the force was already warming her chest. Judith and her brothers had inadvertently tested these trees in their youth, and they'd proved very sturdy, but there was no reason to take risks.

Now the rat-things were shifting, growing wary. It was time.

Judith swung her head and spat fire in an arc that ran from the last creature on the left to the one in the middle. It was a thin, whiplike stream of flame, which crackled out and caught the rat-things just in the center of their chests. The shrieking hum that emerged from them overwhelmed pride at her precision. It went all through her and made her back teeth hurt. The smell was putrid too. She reared her head back and snarled.

The other three rat-things bolted. Two headed back the way they'd came, while one broke sideways. Judith grabbed that one with her jaws, careful not to bite—there was
no
part of this thing that she wanted to eat—shook it sharply, and dropped it unmoving to the earth.

Meanwhile, the other two had hit the tree line. Quick little buggers; she had to give them that. Judith sprang up, let her wings give her momentum for a second or two, and then dove sharply. The ground shook as she hit it, throwing the rat-things onto their backs. She snaked out a foreleg and ripped through them with her claws. They felt liquid, as if they'd been rotting for a long time already, and they shrieked like their companions. If they hadn't been dead already, Judith thought darkly, she'd have killed them again for that.
Nothing
needed to make such a noise.

She wiped her claws on the soil. With any luck, the things' blood wouldn't do much harm, but she'd come out and purify the place later to be sure.

She turned back to the clearing and the burnt bodies there. None of them were moving. All were dissolving into the air, in fact, and to her relief, they didn't seem to be doing any more damage to the world with their deaths. A stray patch of pine needles
was
smoldering, though. She stomped on it with one clawed hind foot, grinding until the smoke went up; then she tossed dirt over everything.

This was her place. She would take care of it.

One advantage of finding trouble in isolated farming villages was that people actually went to bed. Sunset itself was a touch early, but even by that time most of Loch Arach's residents were getting dinner on the table, shutting the livestock in for the evening, or otherwise settled in their own homes. Nobody would suddenly go out to catch a show or attend a dance. A good many of the younger generation chafed at these conditions, but for William, they meant there were fewer people to ask inconvenient questions.

Waiting until full dark, sadly, would make Mrs. Simon or Claire wonder where he was, and William already knew they didn't keep such speculation to themselves. Late afternoon was the best compromise, he'd decided. If everything went as he planned, he'd be back well before dinner. If he did encounter one of the villagers, he'd just say he was out to look at the sunset. He was sure no local boy could have passed off such an explanation, but he was an outsider and strange.

Clarke's silver medallion would be harder to explain. That was why William kept it tucked inside his coat and didn't take it out until he found a secluded copse of trees halfway between the village proper and the castle. Then he knelt, placed it on the ground, and said the Enochian phrases that Baxter had passed on to him. A low humming, not unpleasant, filled his ears as the medallion attuned itself. He waited, almost holding his breath in the hope that nobody would stumble upon this, the most crucial and most obvious stage of his task.

Without interruption, the humming ended. William bent and picked up the now-quiescent silver disk. He saw a faint glow in the heart of the multicolored glass beads—maybe refracted sunlight, but then again, maybe not.

The rest of the disk's power had little room for debate. His vision snapped from one level of reality to another with the immediacy of putting on spectacles. Rocks and the outlines of houses looked far away and faded. Plants had a faint glow about them, stronger in the pines than the other trees and weakest in the dying grass.

Off near the main road, six leprous-gray trails ran in thin lines, back to the village and on toward the castle. Of everything in the new landscape, they stood out the brightest.

He headed out to join them, glimpsing flickers of russet light around his own body as he moved. The whole experience was rather fascinating so far. He wouldn't have minded lingering, if he hadn't had his duties to think of—and if he hadn't been looking at the gray trails. As he got closer, they seemed to squirm beneath his vision. He thought
infested
and then
dissolving
, and didn't know which one was right. He thought of the rat-things he'd seen near Finlay's and dropped his free hand to touch the butt of his pistol.

A short distance ahead, another trail joined them. This one was green, of a shade that looked like it had been vivid when it was new, and thicker. Like the gray lines, it went forward toward the castle.

William's chest tightened.

Either the green thing was Judith and the rat-things had attacked her or were stalking her in preparation, or;

The green thing was Judith, the rat-things were her allies, and she'd met them here for reward, assignment, or punishment, or;

The green thing was a third party altogether, and whether it was fighting or allied with the rat-things, both of them were headed toward the castle for some reason.

Every possibility involved Judith and danger. While he was laying the possibilities out in his mind, William was already following the trails, breaking into a light jog that he knew he could sustain for a while and keeping his gaze well ahead to make sure nothing would bring him up short. He almost stumbled anyhow when he saw the smaller path branch up ahead, and that all seven of the trails turned there.

Not the castle then, but the forest. In some ways, that was a relief; in others, anything but.

As he jogged onward, the trails got brighter, and William knew he was catching up to the things that had made them. They hadn't been in a great hurry. From what he'd seen of the rat-things, they were speedy little devils when they wanted to be. He was glad of their lethargy on this occasion. He was in decent shape, but not as young as he had been, and the trails got harder to see once he entered the forest. There, they competed for his attention with the auras coming off trees and the brighter sparks of birds and small animals. None of those left tracks the way that his quarry did, but immediately at hand, anything living and mobile could easily drown the traces out.

The ground was also horrible for running. That had been true when William was following an actual—though narrow and bumpy—path through the forest, but far too soon the tracks veered off through the woods themselves. He swore when he saw that—quietly, so as not to alert any of his targets that might be in hearing distance, but intensely profanely.

Nor did his sentiments change once he got started. Forests were all well and good in poetry, or as places for lovesick men and deposed kings in Shakespeare, but real forest floors held both roots and rocks, cunningly hidden under carpets of pine needles—slippery pine needles, at that. Real forests had plenty of undergrowth to catch at his coat and trousers, briars to whip across his arms like little bloody needles, and birds to screech practically in his ear when he was trying to duck under branches. He hit his head the first time that happened, with a
thud
that made him wonder why he'd bothered trying to be quiet in the first place.

He was still keeping up with the tracks as far as he could see. He knew it almost for certain when he heard the sounds up ahead of him. First were a
snap
and
fizz
like a struck match; then a shrill buzzing sound that rang in his ears and called to mind horrible hours in the dentist's chair. When a great beast snarled, drowning out the drill sound, it was almost a relief.

Almost.

The wind shifted toward him, and the scent it brought made him struggle not to gag. Smoke mixed with the sweetly rotten scent he remembered from the demon that had attacked him, flooding his nose and throat. His eyes watered. It would make sense for the rat-things to smell like the other demon, he thought. It would make no less sense for the larger creature to smell that way too, if it had come from the same place.

With sweat icy on his body, and tense from bones to skin in the instinctual response of a naked ape sensing a huge predator, William slowed down. He tucked the medallion under one arm, slipped his silver-loaded gun into the other hand, and moved quietly toward the noises. The trees gave him good cover. Most of them were far larger around than any man, even him, and their leaves let barely any light in. This part of the forest was very old.

The thought was not comforting. It brought to mind sailors' tales of krakens and sea serpents, the ancient beasts of the deep, giant bones buried in the American West, and Bible verses that he'd learned in childhood.
There
were
giants
in
the
earth
in
those
days.

As counterpoint to the verse, a great weight landed on the ground up ahead. The forest floor actually shook beneath William's feet. With his hands full of objects he didn't want to let go of, he caught himself on a tree with one shoulder, cursing again at the impact. He kept the profanity silent this time. He was too close for any untoward sound.

Ducking around another tree and behind a third brought him to the edge of a great clearing, where the last rays of twilight came to earth. He didn't need that light, not with the medallion, but even without it he would have seen enough to freeze him, openmouthed, in his tracks.

A dragon stood at the opposite end of the clearing.

Training and practice let him calculate and observe even while he quietly gibbered. Dragons were sleeker creatures than they'd appeared in the stories of his youth, apparently. The one in front of him had the four limbs that had distinguished the knight-gobbling sort from their counterparts of Chinese legend, and no whiskers. It was a rich, shimmering green, covered with scales the size of his hand, and a sharp-looking ridge ran down from the top of its head to the tip of its lashing tail.

That was quite a distance. By his shocked estimate, the dragon was at least twenty feet at the shoulder and probably triple that in length, and the furled wings on its back might have covered the clearing. For all of that size, there was a certain grace about the creature, the sort of disconcerting nimbleness he'd seen from tigers.

It slashed out with one foreleg as he watched, aiming for something in the tree line. The light shone briefly on claws like kukri knives. For an intense, horrifying moment, William wondered whether he should try to help the dragon's prey, for all of the three or four minutes his life might last doing so. Then he saw the bodies on the ground.

Three were horribly burned, which explained the smell. The fourth unmoving creature lay in the middle of the clearing. No human being could survive with its body at those broken angles, and apparently some demons couldn't either. All four of the bodies were rat-things. Their trails were fading, and so were their bodies, slowly dissolving into air and earth. William focused and saw two other trails leading to the tree line, toward the place where the dragon was fighting.

The dragon's claws made contact with a
splortch
like overripe fruit hitting a wall. William got a very brief glimpse of one of the rat-things, mouth open in angry pain, and then that damned buzzing noise, the demons' death cry, hit him again.

If he hadn't had any other reason to object to those creatures being present in his world, the sounds alone would have done it. He leaned against the tree and wished he had a hand with which to clutch his head.

He heard the dragon exhale and saw it retreat from the tree line, wiping its claws on the soil in a strangely dainty gesture that, on second thought, seemed practical. Who knew what kind of poison lurked in the rat-things' blood? And if he'd never thought of dragons as particularly forethoughtful, he'd also never thought much about dragons at all, once he'd left the nursery. D Branch didn't know everything, and it didn't tell its agents everything it did know.

The dragon turned. A long, curved horn came up from each side of its head, William saw. Its face was narrow and pointed, and its eyes were comparatively huge, as well as a striking shade of greenish-gold. As he watched, those eyes focused on a patch of ground near where the burnt rat-things were fading—a patch that was sending up a few faint plumes of smoke.

With a quick, sinuous motion, the dragon slammed one forefoot onto the smoldering earth and twisted it, grinding out stray sparks the way a man might crush a cigarette end. Then it flipped loose dirt on top of all the bodies, even as they faded. It was quick and precise about the whole business, much more agile than William had thought—and far more systematic. He watched with eyes that felt about the size of dinner plates.

If he survived, he'd deliver a report that would have Watkins buying him dinner at any club in London.

Cleanup concluded, the dragon stood in the center of the clearing. William waited for it to spread its wings and fly away—Amy Finlay's “giant eagles” were suddenly much clearer—but instead it coiled around itself, tucking its tail neatly under its chin. Perhaps it was the pose, but now it looked much smaller than sixty feet.

Then it shimmered like a mirage. There was a moment of color and light that William couldn't fully translate as the dragon shrank and shifted and became a bipedal figure, a shade less than six feet tall, in a skirt and shirtwaist. Black hair made a neat bun at the back of her neck. Claws became long-fingered hands. The eyes were smaller, but the color was the same.

Judith MacAlasdair stood in the middle of the clearing, looking around her with the distaste of a woman who'd just completed some unpleasant household chore.

Suddenly, she frowned. She turned. Those green-gold eyes focused directly on William.