The Chosen

Except no one seemed to want to man up.

Fine, fuck it, Tohr thought. “Qhuinn’s conscious, bleeding, and locked inside the Tomb. The key”—Tohr shook his head at the gate—“is on our side of the lock. Qhuinn, is Xcor in there with you or not?”

Even though that trail of blood out through the forest provided answer enough.

Qhuinn dropped his head and rubbed at his dark hair, his palm making slow circles in what was already matted. “He escaped.”

Okaaaaaaaaaaaaaay, you want to talk about f-bombs? It was like each and every one of the Brotherhood had had a piano dropped on his fricking foot and was using the word “fuck” as an analgesic.

A sense of urgency made Tohr unplug from all that. Turning away, he took out his cell phone, initiated the flashlight, and swept the beam around. Tracking those messy prints in the loose sand and dirt was easy and he followed them back out to the mouth of the cave. Xcor had been shuffling, rather than walking, his ambulation compromised clearly both by the month he’d spent on his back as well as by whatever had gone down when he and Qhuinn had done their rounds.

As Tohr reemerged in the thick of the forest, he crouched down, and swung the little light in a circle. Behind him, a huge argument was rolling out between Wrath and the Brotherhood, those deep voices echoing around courtesy of the rock walls, but he let them have at it. Walking forward, he shut the beam off and put his cell phone back into his ass pocket. He hadn’t taken a coat or anything with him as he’d left the mansion, but the twenty-five-degree night didn’t bother him.

He was too busy making like a bloodhound, sniffing the air.

Xcor had gone to the west.

Tohr fell into a jog, but he couldn’t go too fast. With the wind coming and going in different directions, it was hard to keep the trail.

And then it just ended.

Circling around, Tohr back-tracked so he could reconnect with the blood path … and then yup, lost it once more.

“Oh, you fucking bastard,” he hissed into the night.

How in the fuck that weak, wounded piece of shit had managed to dematerialize, Tohr was never going to comprehend. But you couldn’t disagree with the facts: The only possible explanation for the trail getting cut off so abruptly was that the bastard had somehow found the strength and will to ghost out.

If Tohr hadn’t hated the motherfucker with such a passion … he’d have almost respected the sonofabitch.

As Xcor resumed his corporeal form, it was naked in a heap on some snow-covered brush, deep within a forest that was no longer of pine, but of maple and oak. Gasping, he forced his eyes to get to work, and when the landscape abruptly appeared clear and in focus, he knew he’d made it off the Brotherhood’s property. The mhis, that protective blurring of the landscape that marked their territory, was gone, and his sense of direction was returned unto him.

Not that he had any clue of his whereabouts.

Over the course of his escape, he had managed to dematerialize three times. Once from about fifty yards outside of the cave; the second, some distance away from that, mayhap a mile down the mountain; and then to here, to this flat portion of parkland, which suggested he was well away from the mountain where he had been held.

Rolling onto his back, he pumped his lungs and prayed for strength.

The immediate threat to his life having passed, an insurmountable weakness came upon him, as deadly as any other kind of foe. And then there was the cold that further compounded the energy deficit, slowing his already poor reflexes as well as his heart rate. But none of that was his biggest concern.

Turning his head, he looked to the east.

The horizon was going to start warming from dawn’s imminent arrival within the hour. Even in his state, he could feel the shimmers of warning across his naked skin.

Forcing his head off the ground, he searched for shelter, a cave, perhaps, or a collection of boulders … an overturned, rotting trunk that offered a hollow place in which he could hide himself. All he saw were trees, standing arm in arm, their bare boughs forming a canopy that was not going to provide nearly enough protection from the dawn.

He was going to be up in flames as soon as the sun rose fully.

At least then he would be warm, however. And at least then, it would all be over.

Certainly, whatever horrors immolation held for him, they were nothing in comparison to what tortures the Brotherhood would have no doubt put him through—tortures that would have been for naught, assuming information on his Band of Bastards was what they would be after.

For one, his soldiers would have followed protocol and decamped to another locale following his disappearance. After all, death or capture were the only two explanations for any absence of his, and there was no logical rationale to gamble on which one it might be.

For the second, he wouldn’t have given up his fighters even if he were in the process of being disemboweled.

The Bloodletter hadn’t been able to break him. No one else would.

But again, all of that was moot, the now.

Curling onto his side, he drew his legs up to his chest, wrapped his arms around himself, and shivered. The leaves under him were no soft bed, their frozen, curled edges cutting into his skin. And as wind crisscrossed the landscape, a tormentor in search of victims, it seemed to pay particular attention to him, pushing forest debris into his nooks and crannies, stealing ever more of his dwindling body heat.

Closing his eyes, he found a part of the past coming back to him …

It was December of his ninth year, and he was in front of the ramshackle, thatch-roofed cottage in which he and his nursemaid stayed. Indeed, as soon as night fell each evening, he was cast out here and chained in place by the neck, tolerated upon the interior once more only when the sun was threatening in the east and the humans would be out. For most of the lonely, cold hours, especially during this, the winter season, he huddled against the outer wall of his home, moving on his tether only to stay in the lee of the wind.

His stomach was empty, and going to stay that way. No one of the race in their tiny village would e’er approach him to offer him food in his starvation, and his nursemaid certainly would not feed him until she had to—and then it would be scraps after dawn of the meals she ate herself.

Putting his dirty fingers to his mouth, he felt the distortion that ran between his upper lip and the base of his nose. The defect had always been thus, and because of it, his mahmen had sent him out of the birthing room, casting him into the hands of his nursemaid. With no one else to care for him, he tried to do right by the female, tried to make her happy, but nothing he did e’er pleased her—and she seemed to relish telling him, o’er and o’er again, how his birth mahmen had banished him from her sight, how he had been a curse unto an otherwise high-bred female of worth.

His best course was to get out of the nursemaid’s way, out of her sight, out of her home. And yet she would not let him run away. He had tried that sometime back and gotten as far as the rim of fields that surrounded their hamlet. As soon as his absence had registered, however, she had come for him and beaten him so badly that he had cowered and cried in the midst of her blows, begging her for forgiveness, for what, he did not know.

That was how he came to be chained.

The metal links ran from the rough collar around his throat to the iron horse hitch at the corner of the cottage. No more wandering for him, and no more shifting position unless he had to relieve himself or keep sheltered. The coarse leather about his neck had worn raw spots in his skin, and as it was never removed, there was no healing of the sores to be had. But he had long learned to endure.

His life, such that he was aware of it, was about enduring.

Bending his knees up to his meager chest, he linked his arms around the bones of his legs and shivered. His vestments were limited to one of his nursemaid’s threadbare wool capes and a set of male’s pants that were so large that he could secure them under his armpits with a rope. His feet were bare, but if he kept them under the cloak, they did not freeze.

As the wind gusted through bare trees, the sound it made was like the howl of a wolf, and his eyes widened as he searched the shifting darkness, in the event that what he heard was indeed of lupine nature. He was terrified of wolves. If one, or a pack, came after him, he would be eaten, he was quite sure, as his chain meant he could not seek escape into or up any of the trees, nor could he reach the door to the cottage.