Night of the Highland Dragon (20 page)

“Not that Campbell could make out. Of course, I doubt he was listening very closely.”

Outside, Loch Arach dwindled behind them. William saw a flash of light as the rising sun glinted off the lake, and then the village was gone. Gray rock and dark trees shot up on either side of the carriage. The land had shut them in. It was an absurd thought, but William couldn't banish it as quickly as he would have liked. He rubbed at the back of his neck.

“Kenneth's a fair hand with the horses,” Judith said, sounding like she spoke offhandedly. “I could swear he practices on the sly. I don't travel nearly often enough for his liking—though, of course, we all keep the road in good condition. There's none in this part of the country that'd take that charge less than seriously.”

“Your faith in human nature is slightly reassuring.”

Judith shrugged. “All parts of human nature. The railway didn't get here very long ago, and the roads were most people's way out. They'd do what was needful—and the man who didn't would hear of it.”

On the other side of the carriage, Ross shifted and muttered. Like Campbell before him, William couldn't have said what the words were, if they were words at all.

“I had a driver once,” William said, “who greatly resented me for wanting to keep all four carriage wheels on the road. Not a young man, oddly enough—I think he was in his eighties at the time.”

“Less to lose?”

“That could be,” William said and laughed, but his own words, even his feeling of amusement, took second place in his concentration.

He couldn't have said why. Instinct was an itch in the palms of his hands, the urge to shift forward in his seat, a restless twitch of one booted foot. He checked on Ross again. The man's eyes were closed now. He wasn't trying to sit up. His wrists and ankles were still bound.

William made himself count to ten.

The carriage went around a turn, sliding Judith toward him. Her weight against his side and the smell of her hair and skin were calming, no matter that the contact was brief. He fought back the urge to reach for her. After a second, she made herself move back to where she'd been, putting a few inches between them that seemed like a much longer distance.

He cleared his throat. He could have said a hundred things, asked her a thousand, if Ross hadn't been in the carriage. Now he couldn't think of anything. With that blank face in front of him, William's mind went just as blank, save only for the sense of unease that kept plaguing him.

Slowly, he slipped his pistol out of its holster and placed it on his knee. There he could hold it, keeping his finger well away from the trigger—wouldn't do for Ross to die before D Branch could ask their questions—and yet feeling better for the metal beneath his palm.

“The cuffs are good,” said Judith mildly. “I checked myself.”

“I don't doubt it,” said William, and indeed it hadn't occurred to him to question the manacles. “What did you give him?”

“Morphine, I wouldn't doubt. It was McKendry who did that. I admit I didn't take much interest in his comfort.”

“How long ago?”

Ross opened his eyes. They still didn't quite focus. His tongue slid out of his mouth, tapped at his upper lip, and then retreated. He kept watching the other side of the carriage.

“Midnight, roughly?” Judith hesitated and looked back and forth between Ross and William. “There are the two of us here. And we did make sure he'd nothing else on him.”

“I know. I just—”

Ross smiled.

Stopping mid-sentence, William heard Judith's sudden, sharp inhalation and knew she was thinking along the same lines he was. Nobody in the carriage could have thought any differently.

That was
not
the smile of a drug-addled man. It was too deliberate and too knowing. There was still a haze about Ross, a sense that he wasn't quite himself, but his eyes weren't vacant anymore. They narrowed as he looked at William, and his smile widened.

Ross opened his mouth and said a word.

William didn't know it. He couldn't have spelled it. He wasn't even sure he could have pronounced it. Ross's mouth looked like it bent in the effort, all odd angles and distorted muscles. William only knew that the word began with
M
and that hearing it made the backs of his eyes hurt.

Beside him, Judith snarled like no human woman ever would have. William glimpsed her face and saw, in the seconds before she caught herself, her canines extend and her eyes start to glow.

No spell William had ever heard of took only a single word. He knew that, just as he'd known earlier that Ross was bound and drugged, and yet fear tightened his stomach and his chest.

“What was that?” Judith bit off each word, leaning toward Ross. “You
will
tell us—”

“You'll find out,” he said quietly. “I expect it'll be harder on you this way. I wish you'd been sensible.”

He smiled again.

And then he stopped. His mouth fell open like that of a man who'd been hit unexpectedly, and his eyes went huge with fear and more than fear—shock, William thought, and betrayal. “No,” Ross mouthed. “But—no.”

Judith cried out in pain and revulsion. When William turned to look, she had one hand pressed against her temple. She closed her eyes, then obviously forced them open. “What in God's name
are
you
—”

Then Ross started screaming. As William hastily rapped on the ceiling of the carriage, hoping that stopping was the right idea and knowing only that he wanted Judith away from whatever was hurting her, Ross thrashed in his bonds like a fish on a hook. He had the same mindless look in his eyes as a wounded animal, and in that split second William pitied him. Whatever he'd done, whatever he'd given himself to, he'd gotten a reward that William wouldn't have wished on any man.

Pity didn't last very long—between one blink of the eye and another. After that, there was nothing
to
pity.

Ross unfolded in blood.

A sound from all around them took up his shrieking. It mingled with the screams of the panicking horses, the shouts of the driver, the rough sounds of dirt under speeding carriage wheels, and the wet noises of a human body…

William couldn't say what that body was doing, and he didn't want to. After a lifetime as investigator, soldier, and sometimes assassin for D Branch, he'd never seen anything like what happened to Ross MacDougal. He hoped he would die before he ever saw it again. He looked to Judith and saw the same horrified disbelief on her face. Two hundred years and this was foreign to her too.

His hands went cold. He grabbed his gun.

The shrieking sound was high-pitched now, a saw blade from the air around them. That air itself was deforming. The other side of the coach wasn't there; instead, there was a room, and in front of it, a human head pressing against some reddish barrier like cheesecloth that distorted and blurred all features. Other shapes lurked behind it. Most of them were much less human. Maybe they'd been human once.

The room expanded to either side, going beyond the blood-soaked carriage. The world twisted.

Outside, the coachman gave one cry of mortal terror, a panicked cry to God. Then the carriage was tilting, going over on its side—and space was twisting with it.

He was falling.

They were falling.

They were all falling: off the road, perhaps, or perhaps through a different place entirely. One thing stopped connecting to another.

The man behind the barrier was coming through, almost as entirely teeth and flaring mad eyes as the demons around him. He reached out one hand, and a knife was in it, black fire flaring along the blade.

Judith was snarling. He saw light—he didn't know from where—glint off green scales on a human-shaped arm.

How much time did it take to transform?

William aimed, as well as he could with the way that the world kept skipping around him, drew a breath, and fired as rapidly as he could:
one, two, three, four, five, six
. They punched little holes through the not-quite-air and made subdued popping sounds.

A drop of Ross's blood fell from the ceiling and hit William squarely in the middle of his hand, flowered red, and ran in all directions in rivulets.

One bullet grazed the intruder's cheek. Two hit the things directly behind him, which roared in pain and outrage. The other three bullets sprayed a route down the man's shoulder and along his chest. As the air became air again, William could still see the bullets' flight and the trails they left behind.

He could see the knife too, when it left the man's hand. He knew the man was aiming for his heart.

Space still warped between them. The knife didn't fly entirely true. William almost dodged completely. But not quite.

Damn
, he thought as he felt the blade sink in just below his ribs, burrowing forward with a mind of its own.
This
is
going
to
be
a
problem.

Then, darkness.

Judith screamed. In dragon form, it came out as a roar, which scared Ross's ally and his pack of demons into brief stillness: a useful effect, but not her intention. She had no intention, hadn't since she'd lunged toward William and the stranger, too late and too slow to stop the knife. She just screamed.

The carriage smashed into the ground at the base of the hill. It landed in two halves, several feet apart from each other, all the edges severed with surgical neatness. The back, where Judith had burst the walls during her transformation, was a splintered contrast; so was the tangle of blood and leather and bone at the front, where the horses and Kenneth, poor lad, had been. Between the two were five demons—more-than-man-sized gray horrors with single eyes, four arms each, and too many teeth. William lay in front of them, almost at Judith's feet.

She thought she saw his chest move. She couldn't wait to find out.

The magician was slumping back toward his allies, blood pouring from his torso. His wounds might have been fatal. She didn't wait to find that out either.

Burn, God damn you all.

She didn't bother with control this time. Flame sprayed from her mouth in a swelling cloud, enveloping the demons and the coach behind them. The wood caught; so did the flesh of humans and horses, and Judith snarled at the scent of it. The magician didn't make a sound when he died, just charred and fell.

The demons stood unharmed in the middle of the flames and then rushed forward.

Judith sprang to meet them, landing at William's side. The first swipe of her clawed foreleg knocked two of them back against the smoldering wreckage of the coach, and one, as she'd hoped it might, landed with a spike of broken wood through the back of its head, struggling faintly and then moving no more. The other was getting to its feet, but it would take a few moments.

She whirled to meet the rest, just as one sank its claws into the side of her neck. The wound wasn't likely to be serious—she had
far
more between her veins and the air than a human or a beast would have—but Judith snarled at the pain and felt blood begin to flow. She shook herself, but the demon hung on, and then the other two were on her.

They weren't humans, she thought, in an insight as painful as the wound to her neck. They didn't fight the same way—and they didn't need weapons. Judith's experience wouldn't serve her as well in this battle. It might even be a drawback. Aside from the rat-things, much smaller than these and vulnerable to fire, she'd never been in a real fight as a dragon—and she knew she wouldn't survive for long in human form.

But she had fought while wounded before. That much was familiar. She knew how to ignore the pain, set aside the weakness, and push onward—and never before had she had quite so much reason.

Judith roared again and bent to face her enemies.

One was easy enough to dispose of. A quick dart of her head and its neck was between her jaws. The taste was foul, and its blood actually seemed to burn her tongue, but she had no time to care. Quickly, savagely, Judith bit down and snarled again, this time triumphantly, at the resulting crunch.

That left three alive.

At her neck, the demon ripped and tore, and Judith felt her skin and flesh giving way before its onslaught. She clawed it away with one leg, closing her talons around its body. The larger demons' flesh was as liquidly insubstantial as their smaller counterparts' had been. The demon squeezed through her grip, falling bruised but alive to the ground.

Blood was flowing down her neck now. That happened. She'd live.

At least she hoped so.

This was no quick battle like the one in Aberdeen had been. The demons were too large and too hard to kill—the one she'd thrown against the carriage was already rushing toward her again—and she had no ally with a gun. She didn't have any ally at all.

When her claws sheared off one of their arms and it started growing another, she knew she was in trouble. Another slash opened up its stomach—a fatal wound for a mortal—but nothing came out. The demon fell back a few steps but kept moving, and one of its friends took its chance to wrap around Judith's flank and fasten itself—claws
and
teeth, the bastard—on her side, right under her ribs. It didn't make its predecessor's mistake either, but raked through her scales and then leaped away as she struck.

She had to destroy the heads then.
Because
this
would
have
been
too
damn
easy
otherwise.

But now she knew.

Judith threw herself into the fight once more, striking out with claws and teeth, tail and head and even wings, knocking the demons back with the force of her buffeting. It was messy and far harder than she was used to. Judith's muscles were burning, aching with long use and becoming more and more feeble as she bled from her neck and her side. The struggle was desperate. It was uncertain.

It was exhilarating.

Wounded, worried, tired, Judith was still a dragon, and in dragon shape. All of her old joy in the hunt and battle, her love for testing her strength and quickness against long odds, ran through her veins: rain on earth she'd kept parched for too long. When she threw one of the demons to the ground and crushed its head with her hind foot, she lashed her head back and roared once more, and this time there was laughter in it. The human part of her would have regretted that, but it wasn't in control.

She was a MacAlasdair, the daughter of Andrew and a thousand other ancestors more savage and less human, and this was still her land—her people—her lover. Any that tried to take them, mortal or otherwise, would answer to her.

The last demon fell before her, and she was, for an instinctual and completely inhuman moment, sad to see it go. Was that all? Would nothing else stand forth against her? She showed her teeth to the brightening sky: a challenge to the world.

She didn't even see the demon before it hit her. It must have been hiding, perhaps behind the body of one of its fellows, but Judith never knew. She saw the movement in time to jerk her head left, saving her eye by an inch or less. Pain and weight hit her face at the same moment. The demon ripped its way downward, shredding skin and flesh as it went, and Judith clawed at her own face in half-blind agony.

Her first swipe at the thing missed. So did her second, and she knew it was nearing the base of her neck, where the veins and arteries clustered thick and a deep enough wound might kill even her. The demon was on too firmly, too close. She snarled, futile, and lashed her neck from side to side, but it hung on and dug deeper.

All at once it fell away.

She felt its weight drop first, then saw the creature squirming on the ground. Judith pounced—but it was already going still. Its head was missing.

Judith swung her head to the side, peering at the spot where she knew William had fallen.

He lay on his stomach now. One hand grasped his pistol—he had a second—and he'd braced his arm on his other elbow. William's face was almost bloodless, his eyes huge and bright blue.

“Always one you don't see,” he said hoarsely.

Almost before she had time to think about it, Judith was human again and stumbling toward him on legs that barely worked. She knew so little about human physicking. She had to turn him over. She didn't want to move him. She had to.

She was as gentle as she could be, but her hands felt as unwieldy as if she'd still been trying to use claws.

The knife hilt stuck out of his torso, just below his ribs. A malign list immediately marched through Judith's head: liver, guts, stomach, spleen. Kidneys were toward the back. Blood vessels were everywhere. The blood oozing up around the knife hilt proved that. William's jacket was dark, so she couldn't see how much he'd bled already, but his face was white, with an almost bluish undertone. She'd seen that look before.

Ripping up her petticoats, Judith swore under her breath, long and low, in three different languages.

“An educated woman,” said William.

She pressed the wadded cloth against the wound. Never pull the knife out. She'd learned that somewhere. It might have been a hundred years in the past or the day before. “Stop talking. Don't move.”

William smiled. “Anything for you, love.”

It was not a joke. Judith gasped as if for air, thinking at once that she'd gladly take another demon's claws to her face if it meant hearing those words again, or seeing that smile—and that no bargain she made would guarantee either. “Stay,” she said, and she heard her voice crack. “Just stay.”

But his eyes had closed.

In the stillness of the morning, her lone sob almost echoed.

With a shaking breath, she got herself back under control. There was still a chance.

William still breathed: shallowly, not healthily, but steadily. That was a start. It wasn't enough for Judith to thank Anyone or to feel any significant sense of relief, however. Breathing at the moment was no guarantee. Judith knew that too well to even try fooling herself.

The hilt of the knife was very small. Against William, a man with a powerful frame and a good bit of muscle on it, one might not have even seen the glint of metal.

She could cheerfully have rent Ross into his component parts once again, or done the same to the other sorcerer. She would have done so in an instant if it would have helped.

It never did.

Judith looked between the rocky valley where they had landed and William's body, still save for the faint movement of his chest. How long would it take her to get out? To get help?

Too long.

She knew that without any calculation at all.

At least, when she didn't have a plan, she didn't need much time to change it.

The transformation strained every atom of her body, every fiber of her will. Shape-changing had never been so hard before. When it was over, she was shaking with the effort, and she fought back her urgency to make herself sit for a moment, telling herself that haste wasn't the only thing that mattered.

As gently as she was able, wincing with every rough movement, Judith picked up William in her fore claws. It was not ideal. She kept his body as straight as she could, but she had claws, and even humans weren't supposed to move the wounded—not without stretchers. She didn't have a stretcher. She didn't have many things she would have wanted, and she was conscious of every single lack, just as she saw every rise and fall of William's chest.

Concentration was as good as prayer. A gunner's mate had told Judith that, with the sea wide around them and gunpowder gritty beneath her fingernails, and she hoped he'd been right. She didn't have time for both.

Judith closed her eyes, breathed in, and became aware of her body. She knew the ground where she stood and adjusted her balance; she tested her muscles, feeling the stiffness coming on and the weakness that she couldn't quite push aside as blood flowed from her own wounds; she felt William's not-inconsiderable weight and how it swung her center forward.

Her wings opened with a crack like a gunshot.

She waited. Tested the wind. Crouched. Then, with the smoothest and most conscious leap she'd ever taken, she sprang into the air and away from the ruin below.

* * *

Nobody was on the street when she landed, and the sky was still dark, with only a glimmer of sun showing at the horizon. Farmers would likely be up with cattle or sheep. One of them might have seen her. Judith didn't care.

Lights did go on in McKendry's windows. Setting William down on the lawn, Judith saw them at the edges of both her vision and her awareness. They were probably worried about earthquakes inside—or would be until one of them went to a window. Then they'd have other worries altogether.

She stepped away from William, closed her eyes, and shifted.

“Lady Mac
Alasdair
?” The voice was male and young. Sure enough, when Judith opened her eyes, she saw the door open and Hamilton staring at her with his mouth open.

He had seen
something
. Whether he'd looked out the window before coming down or had opened the door mid-transformation, he looked at Judith now with the knowledge that she wasn't quite human.

Of course, the blood running down from her face probably didn't help—not to mention the long gashes on her outer thigh, the general state of her clothes, or the fact that her arms were bloody to the elbows. Damn. She'd forgotten how she would look as a human.

“You—what—he—my God, what happened?” Hamilton finally managed a sentence.

“More than I wanted,” she answered tersely. “Help me bring William inside. Then get the doctor. It's what
will
happen that matters now.”