Mangled Read online

  He rolled his white eyes at me. “He moves around a lot. He said he’d be around here tonight.” He gestured at me. “You remember how you tracked the dogman when you were hunting with Brutus? Well, go find him, girl.” He made a little sound at me and slapped his thigh, like he was calling a dog.

  I glared. “Your long-lost relative is the freaking dogman?” Figures. What Tommy thought a creature like that could do for me, I had no idea.

  But once he had planted the idea and I sent my senses out, searching for powerful non-humans, I felt him there. “A little farther.”

  We made our way over several strangely symmetrical hills, that sensation that Death had been here growing stronger with each step we took.

  And then there he was. The dogman. The creature had been sighted in Michigan since the 1800’s. I always thought it was just our local werewolf myth. But apparently there was more to the story. The creature was sitting on a fallen log, his shaggy, man-ish shape covered in patchy, reddish-brown hair that looked black in the night. He stood as we approached.

  The dogman’s face was caught between dog muzzle and human, kind of an elongated human face or a flattened canine one, with sharp teeth that protruded from the muzzle here and there as if they didn’t quite fit into his mouth. Glowing orange eyes studied me, filled with a sharp intelligence that I had not expected.

  Brutus and the hunters had forced me to track and kill creatures like this. I could still hear their terrified cries in my sleep.

  But as the dogman unfolded to stand well over six feet in a ripple of something that almost felt like hunter magic, I knew that this creature possessed a steely core that would never let it cower or beg.

  “Hey,” I said with an inane wave. “What’s up?”

  Tommy coughed and inserted himself between me and the dogman. “This,” he said with a look in my direction, “is Tess. The one I told you about.”

  I raised an eyebrow. Tommy showed respect to absolutely no one. But he was begging me with his eyes to please behave. Interesting.

  “So,” I said, glancing at the towering canine guy again. “The idiot here says you can help me stop wigging out and running amok in the woods bathing in blood?”

  Tommy sighed.

  I ignored him. The dogman’s eyes flicked to my ghoul then back to me. Then its muzzle stretched obscenely. It took me a moment to realize the thing was smiling.

  Great. Even the crazy dog-monster was laughing at me.

  The dogman paced closer to me and I stood my ground, crossing my arms over my chest. Sure, he was big and freaky. But I could take him. Even if he did radiate that weird magic. He circled around me, sniffing, eyes studying every inch of me. Shit, was this thing checking me out? I glared at Tommy. My idiot ghoul was wasting my time. My hunger burned like I’d swallowed hot coals.

  The beast made a weird grumbling-whining sound that I can only describe as a dog trying to speak without human vocal cords. It was as wrong as it sounds. It reached out a hand…paw? The fingers were like stretched out digits from a dog’s paw. The undersides had thick, rough pads that dragged across my cheek, along with the sensation of dull claws. I hissed, baring my teeth.

  I hated it when people touched me.

  The creature tilted its head, but didn’t seem to realize it was in danger of losing an arm. I hadn’t ever eaten any of the strange creatures that came to my woods for sanctuary from the humans, but I was suddenly tempted.

  It garbled again and patted at one of my antlers. I stepped back and dropped my hands, claws out and throat rumbling.

  Tommy shook his head. “She doesn’t like to be touched.” Then he turned to me. “Tess, he’s just feeling your energy. I think he has to get a sense of your magic. I don’t have magic, but I’ve watched enough witches work to know they have to feel what they are working with sometimes.”

  I tilted my head at Tommy. Fucking Tommy and his fucking secrets. “Witches, Tommy?”

  He shrugged. Then he looked at the dogman as if for permission. The creature nodded its head.

  “Our guy here…he used to be a witch. But something happened.” Tommy averted his eyes and I knew there was more to the story than he was sharing. “He ended up like this…but he has magic in him still. So, I thought maybe he could help with a spell or a charm or something….”

  I stared up at the intelligent orange eyes that watched me so patiently. “Wow,” I said slowly. “You…you’ve been like this for a really long time, haven’t you?”

  He nodded.

  “That fucking blows.”

  Another nod, and that terrifying grin.

  “Do you think you can help me?”

  A pause. A shrug. Then another nod.

  Well, that wasn’t entirely comforting. What the crap would happen if he tried to help and failed? I mean…he apparently hadn’t been able to fix himself, after all.

  But then again, what did I really have to lose? I knew, deep down in the black pit that was my soul, that if I didn’t find some way to stop what was happening to me, I was going to end up turning into a real monster. The kind that nightmares were made of.

  The dogman made a weird gesture with one hand into the palm of his other. Tommy seemed to understand. He reached into the inner pocket of his leather jacket and pulled out a little notebook and a thick Sharpie marker. I stared as the dogman took it in his clumsy paw-hands and went over to sit on the log. Bracing the notepad on his furry knee, he scribbled on the paper with painful slowness.

  When he handed it back, Tommy squinted at it for a moment, then nodded. Thank God for night vision. “He wants us to come back in a few days. And…” he shot a sideways glance at me, “bring Ahanu.”

  I tilted my head and drew in a deep breath through my nostrils, trying to calm myself at the mention of the ghostly defector. I glanced back at the dogman. “We’ll just pretend for a minute that it’s perfectly normal for you to even know about him. I haven’t seen the traitor in weeks. He wasn’t my guardian spirit. He was hers.” I growled. “He belongs to the hunters now.”

  Tommy shifted from foot to foot and I turned my glare on him. Again, with the fucking secrets? Really?

  “What are you looking so guilty for now?” I demanded.

  Tommy shrugged and ran a hand through his hair. “I see him sometimes. Once in a while. I can get him to come.”

  I curled my claws inward, slicing open my own palms as I opened and closed my fists. “No. Absolutely fucking not, Tommy. He’s probably just keeping an eye on us so he can report back to the hunters!”

  The dogman stood up again, looking down at me with those orange eyes. He garbled out one of those terrible sounds, as if he wanted to chime in. Then he huffed impatiently and took the notebook back from Tommy. After some intense scribbling, he held the paper up before my face.

  Bring the bird

  Then he turned and loped away into the night.

  Tommy shifted from foot to foot as if impatient to get moving himself. I narrowed my eyes at him. We were going to have words, my idiot ghoul and I. Talking to Ahanu. Magic relatives. Fucking witches.

  But I had bigger problems. Because the sun would be up before we got back home if we didn’t get a move on it. And the hunger was still clawing at me. I needed something bigger to eat than a squirrel. There were a couple pounds of liver in my fridge at home. I was going to need it if I was going to have a heart-to-heart with my ghoul.

  Because anytime I talked about her, my control slipped even more. Rage and heartache did nothing to calm the beast inside me.

  “Let’s go, Moron,” I said, turning back the way we’d come.

  Chapter 4

  Cloud squatted in the night-dark forest and licked the black, magic-infused blood from her fingertips. She shuddered as her own power was renewed. Loathing rippled over her along with the sensation. She had hunted the shadow creatures for more than a century. She had hardened herself to it. She knew the things were dangerous, tricksters. Even so, she tried to keep to the more ferocious among them,
like the one she had just taken down, all claws and teeth that fed on human flesh.

  But sometimes she wondered, even now, if she was missing something. Were they all evil? Were even the deadliest of them driven by something more than mindless violence?

  It was all the wendigo’s fault. Of course they were monsters. How could she think otherwise? But she had seen the heart that beat inside her pet, and now she couldn’t unsee it.

  If only Tess had chosen her. All she had to do that day was take Cloud’s hand. But she hadn’t. Instead she had backed away, eyes full of rage and pain, shielding the monsters who had taken Kwan from the earth.

  Cloud wiped her hands off on the dead leaves that scattered the forest floor and stood. Tess had made her choice. Her human heart had been completely tainted by the darkness. The hunter ignored the constant ache in her chest. Pain was nothing new to Hanging Cloud.

  The monsters had been stealing loved ones from her for nearly two-hundred years now. Why should one more loss upset her? She knew how to recover. By hunting.

  She hated the taste of the dark blood that still lingered on her tongue. But this was the price of her immortality. The dues she paid in order to be able to continue hunting. To keep unsuspecting humans from death and destruction. If that made her a bit of a monster herself…well, she’d long ago come to terms with that.

  There was a flutter of wings in the night, and Tess’s raven landed on a nearby tree branch. There was no mistaking the bird for a normal raven. Its body was outlined in a spirit glow and there was a sensation of otherworldly magic about it. Why it was here, she had no idea. The bird was the wendigo’s pet. Cloud had always thought the spirits wise and infallible.

  Apparently, she was wrong. This one had chosen the monsters.

  She touched the new tomahawk at her belt, knowing it was probably useless against the bird. She shivered at the thought that there was something else going on here. Something out of her realm of understanding.

  Tess had insisted that Kwan had tried to hunt the god of death. Surely the woman was insane, her mind clouded by the wendigo madness.

  The bird made a haunting sort of grating cluck and tilted its head, yellow eyes staring intently at Cloud.

  “What?” She demanded. “What the hell do you want from me?” She felt betrayed somehow. The Great Spirit had sent guardians, spirits of the ancestors, to watch over a human who had turned her back on her humanity and chosen to become a monster. And yet Cloud, as always, was alone.

  The bird fluttered its wings and cawed again. Then it hopped to another branch a bit farther away, looked at her, looked away, cawed.

  She snorted. “I am not following you.”

  But her heart was suddenly speeding up, thundering in her chest. Why was Tess’s spirit guardian trying to get her to follow it? Was it a trap? Or…did Tess want to speak to her? Maybe she had come to her senses and realized she shouldn’t be protecting the monsters.

  Cloud scoffed at her own weakness.

  But she followed the bird, slipping through the forest using her magic to glide through shadows and conceal her presence.

  As they neared the national forest near Tess’s cabin, she sensed darkness. A powerful creature aura. It called to her in a way her other prey never had, and she trembled with the desire to feast on the creature’s blood. Tess had always made her want this way. Made her more aware of her monstrous desires than anyone else.

  She stopped in the shadows under the branches of a towering pine tree. A dozen paces away sat the monster. Her monster. Guilt ripped through Cloud’s carefully maintained barriers. If she had been faster that night, she might have prevented the wendigo attack that turned Tess into a monster. If she hadn’t been so stupid and weak, she would have killed the girl the moment she realized she was tainted. But Cloud had kept her. Such selfishness never ended well.

  And now, as she looked out at the scene before her, she knew Tess could never be saved. It was far, far too late for that. She gripped the handle of her tomahawk as she watched the creature before her—beautiful, chilling and heartbreaking. Tess was completely feral. Her wild brown curls streamed about her curvy body, tangled with bits of leaf and twigs. Her antlers had grown, and they arched away from her crown like those of a magnificent stag. Black claws and wicked, needle-sharp fangs sliced through flesh and muscle, cracked through bone as she devoured the deer she had killed.

  The wendigo girl’s aura was strange and riveting, a bright outline closer to her body, surrounded by a smoky, pulsing black. She growled and made wild noises as she ate. As Cloud watched, trying to dredge up the courage to unsheathe her weapon and end this terrible existence, the creature began to shake.

  At first, she assumed the girl’s body was simply vibrating with the force of her tearing into the deer carcass. But then she slowly sat back on her heels and Cloud realized Tess was sobbing. She let out a high, keening sound like a wounded animal, then fell silent again, her breath coming in puffs of air as she cried.

  Cloud watched Tess lift her shaking hands and examine them as if she was seeing them for the first time.

  Cloud’s heart wept. The woman had been through so much pain, and now she was watching herself turn into a mindless beast. Cloud had to end this, put her out of her misery. Perhaps that was what the bird had been trying to tell her.

  She stepped out of the shadows, stilling as Tess whipped her head around, eyes locking on Cloud.

  “What--” Her blue eyes burned with a fiery glow, like the hottest flames. They were confused at first, but then slowly seemed to clear. “Cloud?”

  The desperate hope in that voice almost broke her. As if Tess expected Cloud to save her.

  Cloud shook her head. “I am so sorry, Tess.” Her voice broke, cracked, as she choked back tears. She had never wanted it to end this way. And now…now she once again had to be the one to put the person she loved down like a rabid animal. Her hand shook, as she gripped her tomahawk, but she forced her emotions away and steadied herself. “I’m going to make it all stop.”

  Tess had pushed herself to her feet, and Cloud watched as her words hit the beautiful monster like a physical blow. She bent forward slightly as if she had taken a hit to her middle. “You’re…here to kill me?”

  “It was my keeping you alive that has caused all of this,” she whispered. “I need to right the wrong I’ve done to you.”

  Tess stared at her for a heartbeat. Then she threw her head back and howled with dark, bitter laughter. Maybe she wasn’t as far gone as Cloud had thought. That sounded like a typical Tess reaction to a death threat. She nearly smiled at the thought, even though her heart was breaking.

  Tess’s glowing blue eyes met Cloud’s. “The only wrong you’ve done me is to fucking abandon me, Cloud. But even that wasn’t your fault, was it?” She flexed her claws and licked her lips and Cloud could see the hunger in her despite her recent kill. “No,” she said softly, voice husky with unshed tears. “That was my fucking fault for thinking you actually cared about me. My fault for forgetting for just a second how goddamned much it hurts when you let yourself love someone.”

  Cloud shook her head, even as Tess’s words stabbed through her like daggers. “You never loved me, Tess. You just needed a warm body to gnaw on and someone to keep your animalistic urges in check.” She felt her mouth twist into a bitter half-smile. “But it doesn’t matter. Even if I loved you more than life itself, I couldn’t let you go on like this.” Her eyes prickled with unshed tears. Some part of her hoped Tess would hear what she was saying.

  Not that it would matter.

  Tess shook her head, setting that glorious mane of chaotic hair swaying about her. Her jeans were torn. And her white tank-top was stained with dirt and blood. She had never looked more beautiful. Cloud gritted her teeth. She stepped forward, motions fluid as she drew her tomahawk. Tess crouched low, growling.

  The raven winged between them, croaking out a warning just before the ghoul bounded out of the woods and came to a halt at Tess’s side. �
�Cloud?” He growled. “What the fuck?” He darted murderous white eyes at the raven. “I trusted you, Ahanu!”

  Tess only laughed. “That’s what happens when you trust, idiot Tommy,” she whispered. “People die.”

  She tilted her head at Cloud, and for a moment her face was too lucid, full of longing and vulnerability that Cloud knew Tess never let anyone see. Then her expression closed off. “Run, Cloud,” she whispered.

  And the hunter cursed herself for being so clumsy. So stupid. Her attention had been so focused on Tess and her overpowering aura that she had not sensed the others approaching.

  Glowing eyes peered out of the forest in every direction. She felt a press of creature energy as Tess’s people surrounded her. Hissing, snarling and strange barks of anger rose up around her. Cloud pulled her magic up and stepped into shadow. She felt a cold presence that sent tingles down her spine, but somehow, she side-stepped it, using the shadows to transport into a space between, stepping out miles away.

  She stood in the chilly night, listening. She was alone.

  Had she imagined it? Or had she heard Tess’s voice as she disappeared? She could have sworn she heard the wendigo order the others to let Cloud go.

  She sheathed her weapon in her belt and, confident that she was alone now, sank to her knees, shaking. Her body was wracked with sobs as the tears came. The night she had been gifted with her shadow hunter powers came back to her in vivid detail. The way her heart had cracked. The feel of her tomahawk slicing through flesh that had once been human, destroying the person who had once held her and sang to her of love.

  She knew the cost of duty. The pain of responsibility when someone you thought you knew became an enemy.

  But what if she had been wrong all those years ago? And what if she was wrong now? Was she just shying away from the burden? From the pain of carrying around one more memory to torture her all her long existence?

  Or was Tess still able to be redeemed?