She stared at me as if I were a ghost come to haunt her. “You’re alive. I didn’t know it was you, I just saw something chasing me and I thought. . .”
“No thanks to your sorry hide.” I threw the words at her. “I know you were scared, but we could have taken them together. Now they know we’re here. I couldn’t stop them all!”
She slowed her horse and Marcel jogged up beside me. “Is she available?”
I waved a hand at him. “She’s pregnant.”
“Oh, perfect,” he cooed. I spun in the saddle to look at him.
“What? How can that be perfect?”
He grinned, and I knew it would be in his mind as perfect satyr logic. “Well, I can’t knock her up, and I know she likes to flounce a bounce. How could that not be?”
Yeah, satyr logic.
Kiara frowned. “Who is that?”
“The satyr I pulled out from the gorcs.”
Marcel waved at her, winked, and blew her a kiss. She blushed and looked away, and I remembered all too clearly the curl of magic Marcel had at his disposal. Sex magic was a real thing and if you weren’t aware of it, you’d end up flouncing a satyr before you thought better of it. I sighed and smacked the top of his head. “Leave her alone, Marcel.”
“Okay, but only for you, pussy cat,” he said.
I whipped around and glared at him until he squirmed. “I mean, Zam.”
I nodded. That was better. “We’re making a pit stop.”
“No.” Kiara shook her head. “We’re not.”
I stared at her a moment and then laughed. Because she was out of her mind if she thought she was in charge.
“What’s so funny?” She glared at me. “You ran into danger without any thought of me or my baby. Just like Steve always says you do to him.”
I rolled my eyes. I couldn’t help it. “Please, Steve is an idiot.”
“WAIT!” Marcel roared the word as he skipped and hopped so that he was in front of us, trotting backward. “Do not tell me this girl is the one that your ex flounced around with?”
His eyes were wide with a mixture of shock and hope.
Kiara huffed. “It wasn’t like that.”
He held up his hands. “Right, I’m sure Steve loves you the best.”
If I hadn’t been sitting in the saddle, I would have fallen to the ground laughing. As it was, I bent over the saddle horn and struggled to breathe for a good solid minute. “Oh, my gods! Marcel, you are my fucking favorite satyr of all time.”
“Well, no doubt, you did save me,” he said.
Kiara was not amused.
I was in my fucking glory.
“That was good, right?” Marcel danced around us. “I mean, it took only a little putting of the puzzle pieces together, but damn. Too funny.”
He gave a hop and a kick with both feet, flicking his tail as he did.
I grinned. “Yeah, that was good work.”
The wind swirled around us, bringing the smell of rain right before a roll of thunder cut through the air.
I hunched my back. I was no different from most other felines. I did not like getting wet if I could avoid it.
“Marcel, how far to your friend’s home?”
He cocked his head. “If we’re going full speed, maybe half a day’s ride?”
I bobbed my head. “Then we go now, as fast as we can.”
Outrunning a thunderstorm was one thing, but there were still gorcs behind us. I wasn’t going to assume we’d lost them. In fact, we were going to ride like they were hot on our asses. I couldn’t throw the feeling that they would come after us.
They know your name. Of course, they are coming after you.
“My horse is tired,” Kiara whined.
“Then shift and run on your own feet,” I said without another look. “We need speed and you need to give it up.”
“I’m pregnant. I don’t want to shift again. It hurt.”
She was clinging to an old wives’ tale that shifting too much while pregnant could harm the child.
But I couldn’t force her to do it.
What if something did happen to the baby that had nothing to do with the shifting? She’d blame me. I’d blame me. I hunched my back further. “Fine. We go as fast as you and your horse can go.”
As fast as they could go turned out to be a quick walk. Fuuuuuk. I wanted to tip my head back and howl like a wolf shifter.
I finally got off and walked beside Balder. I might as well give him a break where I could. And the blood flow would help when the cold came—
The rain slammed into us without any warning. There was no gentle patter that led up to it, just an opening of the heavens that left us soaked in a matter of seconds.
Marcel was as bedraggled as I was, and I could see him shivering, his upper body naked except for the dusting of fur that protected him. I went to Kiara’s pack; she yelled as I yanked her blanket out and handed it to Marcel. He bobbed his head and wrapped the blanket over his shoulders.
“That’s mine!”
“Well, then, you should have thought about that before you condemned us to all get soaked, you selfish twit!” I snarled back at her. She cowered from my anger and I didn’t feel a stitch of sorrow for it.
We stopped after a few hours to eat and feed the horses to keep their energy up. The rain hadn’t eased off a single drop. If anything, as the day began to wane, the rain came down harder, pushing across us in sheets and waves. The only thing keeping us from full-on hypothermia was the fact that we were all walking, moving, and keeping the blood flowing.
As we stood in a tight circle to eat, a rumble slid through the ground and up the soles of my feet. I blinked away the raindrops hanging from my eyelashes and looked back the way we’d come.
A dark mass of bodies rumbled our way, their large flat feet slamming into the ground, which was the only warning we were getting. The gorcs had found their friends. A hell of a lot of them.
“Mount up, time to run.” I spun toward Balder and pulled myself onto his back, the weight of my sodden clothes hampering my movements.
“What is it?” Kiara asked.
“Gorcs, lots of them.” I put my heels to Balder and he took off, Kiara and her mount right behind us. Marcel dropped the blanket and kept up surprisingly well.
This was very bad. I couldn’t fight off that many gorcs on my own, not even if I pulled the flail. That seething mass had to hold at least eighty, maybe more of the Jinn’s creations.
Eighty.
I’d not seen a horde like that in years, not since my father had still been alive.
“Water, find water. They don’t like it and aren’t strong swimmers,” Marcel yelled through the weather at me.
Normally I would have laughed in his face. This was, after all, a desert, but with the rain coming down like this, water was a distinct possibility.
My mind raced as I tried to piece together the terrain in front of us. This close to the Stockyards, I knew it better than others, but I was turned around with the weather. A bolt of lightning lit up the sky as we galloped across the terrain that was turning from hard-packed footing to sloppy mud bath.
“Kiara, where is Hangman’s Gorge?”
She shot a look at me. “Are you insane? It will be flooded and running too fast!”
“The horses can swim it. I’m sure.” I was sure of no such thing. But I knew if we didn’t survive the gorcs, there would be no one to go after Bryce, no one to tell Lila that she was important and still a part of my family. Kiara wouldn’t survive, nor her child.
“Where is it?” I repeated louder with a growl to the words.
Her jaw tightened, and she tipped her head for me to follow. I tucked Balder in tightly to her horse’s rump, and as we ran, I tied them together.
Kiara’s eyes widened. “We can’t. We’ll all die!”
“You want to get eaten by a gorc? That’s a sure thing. This is a chance to make it.”
I wasn’t sure she heard me over the pounding rain and the boom of thunder that was coming faster and harder, but she gave a single shake of her head. Yeah, I didn’t think so either.
“What about me?” Marcel yelled.