Shadow Runners Page 8

  She stubbed her foot on a rock on the floor in her rush, lost her balance, and sprawled out. The fall was more frightening than painful despite the fact that she’d scraped her hands and arms and bruised her knees. Grunting, she climbed painfully to her feet.

  Behind her, she thought she heard a cascade of tumbling rocks. It was enough to drive her to more speed despite her injuries. Long before she stumbled out into a wider cavern, however, she’d begun to think that she’d been completely wrong when she’d decided that the cavern was the same one where she’d stayed before. As dark as it was by that time, she knew immediately that she’d right after all. She recognized the steaming pool where she’d bathed.

  Relieved, she paused to catch her breath and listen for pursuit. She was dismayed when she caught sounds that seemed to indicate just that when she’d hoped she might make it all the way through the caverns before they discovered she’d fled. Nearly blind in the darkness, she ran anyway, holding her hands out in front of her to keep from barreling into anything.

  She was rushing so fast that she stepped from the cavern and into space before she realized she’d reached the opening. It wasn’t far above the clearing, fortunately, but it was far enough to send her tumbling and to gather up a host of new bruises. Ignoring the pain, she scanned the sky for direction and raced toward the border as fast as she could go.

  There was no fence of any sort to mark the line. The delineation was only notable by the thinning of the forest. Shadowmere was a wild tangle of nature. The lands beyond showed the encroachment of man and, although it was certainly not cleared lands, there were stumps from trees that had been cut down for firewood or building.

  Sonja didn’t slow appreciably once she’d crossed into what she knew to be King Vladislav’s lands. She didn’t think for one moment that Jarek would hesitate to cross the boundary as he had before. She needed to find the king’s men if she was to have any hope of completely eluding him.

  Her heart leapt with a mixture of fear and hope when she saw a shadowy figure emerge from the trees a little ahead of her. “Help!” she cried breathlessly as soon as she was as certain as she could be that it wasn’t Jarek or any of his pack brothers. “I need help!”

  Chapter Nine

  Sonja was nearly upon the man before it struck her that he didn’t appear to be wearing the King’s colors. In point of fact, he didn’t appear to be wearing anything at all! She skidded to a halt, but almost as if he’d expected it, he surged toward her and caught her.

  “From whom? Or what, little maiden?” the man asked in a deep, gravelly voice that sent shivers through Sonja.

  “Uh … I’m lost!” Sonja gasped, still breathless from running, trying to extricate herself from the man’s embrace.

  The man dipped his head to hair, breathing deeply. “Indeed you are,” he murmured. “You have strayed into the Shadow Lands and that isn’t the sort of place for a tempting little morsel like you.”

  Sonja shoved away from him, the length of her arms, at least, and gaped at him, trying to read his shadowy expression. “This isn’t the Shadow Lands!”

  He grunted. “Close enough.”

  She didn’t have time to argue with him! “Let me go!”

  “Why would I want to do that?” he asked, amusement threading his voice. “In point of fact, I don’t.”

  “But you will release her!”

  Sonja shook all over when Jarek’s voice boomed at them from the darkness, whipping her head around to try to see how close he was.

  The man holding her stiffened. “I don’t take orders from you, Jarek.”

  “She’s mine,” Jarek snarled.

  The man didn’t reply for a moment. Instead, he lowered his head and burrowed his nose against her neck. “I think not,” he murmured in satisfaction when he lifted his head. “Her scent tells me she’s unclaimed—or was. I believe I will claim her myself.”

  “She bears my mark on her neck,” Jarek growled.

  “True,” the stranger agreed. “It shows intent, but there is a vast difference between the intent to claim and an accomplished fact. She ran to me. If she was yours, she would not have.”

  “You’re challenging my right, Loki?”

  “I believe I am,” Loki growled, easing his hold on Sonja at last and nudging her behind him.

  “Uh oh!” Sonja gasped shakily when she saw Jarek step from the shadows into the light cast by the heavens. Thorne and Rafe appeared little more than an arm’s length beside him. A moment later Byron and Arman emerged from the shadows to either side of the first three.

  Loki shrugged. “A pack challenge?”

  “She belongs to us,” Thorne and Rafe growled at almost the same moment.

  “So be it!” Loki said, motioning with his head.

  When he did, five men stepped from the shadows to confront Jarek’s pack.

  They were outnumbered, Sonja thought, feeling a touch of relief. Only by one man, true, but still ….

  It didn’t seem to make any difference to any of the men—beast men. In little more than the blink of an eye the men she’d known vanished and great, hairy, frightening two-legged beasts stood where they had stood. Too paralyzed to move for several moments, Sonja found that even her eyes seemed glued in place until, with a knee weakening roar, the two groups clashed and she discovered that she was surrounded by nearly a dozen monsters.

  The sound alone was enough to send her heart into a wild gallop. Adrenaline rushed through her in a burning tide that unlocked muscles and joints and commanded movement completely independently of her mind, which was still in a state of shocked horror. Uttering frantic squawks of terror, she raced around and around mindlessly for several moments and finally shot through the forest when she found an opening.

  It was the brush she tripped over that finally penetrated mad terror that gripped her mind. Even as she slammed full force into the ground a tiny warning sounded in her mind—she was headed the wrong way! Scrambling up, she whipped her head around and finally took off at a tangent to the battle she could still hear very clearly even though she couldn’t discern much more than movement with her eyes.

  Her legs were completely beyond her command. They outran her body for a while, slamming her into the ground when she pitched out of balance and then failed to keep up so that she rooted the ground face first. Each time she sprawled out, however, she leapt up again almost before she’d rolled to a halt and churned up the dirt again.

  At some point, it finally dawned on her that she’d been headed to meet up with the king’s men. “Help! Help! Somebody! Anybody! Beasts! Beasts!”

  She shouted until she was hoarse, deafening herself to the sounds of battle.

  She’d begun to think her heart would fail her when she slammed into something hard and bounded backwards. Two arms grabbed her, halting her trajectory toward the ground so effectively that her head rocked forcefully backward and then forward on her neck. As if a curtain had gone down, she blacked out.

  The nervous wicker of horses and the jingle of harness filtered into Sonja’s consciousness even as she felt herself lifted up and plunked rather unceremoniously onto the hard saddle on the beast’s back. She wavered, still barely half-conscious, but made a grab for the horse’s mane as the man who’d been carrying her hoisted himself onto the saddle behind her.

  “I can manage,” she said in a strained voice.

  The man didn’t respond. She doubted he heard her above the frightful noise of the beasts charging toward them, terrifying man and horse alike until they whirled and danced beneath their riders, trying to rear so that the soldiers’ attention was divided between trying to gain control of the horses and trying to figure out which direction to flee. One man managed to gain control of his horse and kicked it into motion. The moment the horse shot off, the other horses charged after it.

  Sonja, mounted on the second horse from the lead, was left to hang on the best she could, but she wasn’t certain if the man behind her was simply too terrified to know or care
whether she was conscious or if he realized she was capable of holding on. For the space of a handful of heartbeats, Sonja actually believed they would escape, but the horses hadn’t even managed to launch themselves into all out flight, despite their terror, when man beasts leapt from the darkness, toppling the riders in the rear from their mounts. The horses screamed, the men screamed, and the horses that had managed to evade an attack, began to soar like the wind as they strained to escape. Two more bounds forward and two more horses and riders went down.

  A man beast soared from the shadows and slammed into the rider directly in front of them, carrying him from the saddle into darkness. A second landed on the rump of the horse carrying Sonja. The horse stumbled. The man beast and the soldier toppled from the horse’s back, leaving Sonja in sole possession. By the time the horse had managed to regain his footing, Sonja was hanging half way off herself, but she managed to launch herself upward and regain her seat, more by determination than skill.

  She groped blindly for the reins but gave up after a brief search, focusing instead on hanging on to the fear crazed horse. Thoughts flashed through her mind, doubts and fears, a search for what had happened when her memory was spotty at best.

  There seemed little doubt, however, that she’d found the king’s men, or they had found her—and then the beast men had found them.

  She shuddered, heartily glad the shadows had prevented her from seeing them clearly enough to be any more terrified than she was.

  She knew who they were—Jarek and his pack and Loki and his—but she hadn’t begun to imagine what they looked like in beast form! She’d seen them as wolves—Jarek’s pack, anyway. She’d thought that was the beast form! It was hard to reconcile the monsters she’d seen fighting with the men she’d lain with, made love to!

  She blocked that thought from her mind.

  They were the same, weren’t they?

  She wasn’t so sure. She’d never felt truly threatened by Jarek and the others—except when they’d been in wolf form—but even that paled ….

  Did they have awareness? Did they know that it was her they were chasing? Or had their minds changed with the forms? Were they truly monsters?

  She didn’t know, but she had no intention of finding out if she could help it!

  When the horse beneath her finally began to tire and slow, Sonja discovered that she was all that was left of the party she’d joined.

  Led the beasts to!

  She shook the thought, trying to convince herself that the beast men hadn’t slain the soldiers who’d helped her.

  Surely they wouldn’t have? Not on the king’s land?

  But did they know or care that they had violated the border?

  This was a fine mess she’d gotten herself in to!

  Pushing it from her mind, she struggled to calm herself and the horse. Finally, the horse slowed enough from its breakneck pace that she managed to grasp the reins. Feeling a little less frightened once she had them in hand, a little more in control, she slowed the horse a little more and listened intently for sounds of pursuit. She heard nothing, but she couldn’t decide if that meant the horse had actually managed to outrun them or not.

  She certainly had no desire to stop! She did need to have some idea of where they were, however, and she began to search her surroundings for anything that looked even vaguely familiar. After a time, the horse made its way to a road. She reined him in when he did, glancing along the road in both directions as far as she could see and then lifted her head to study the night sky and the position of the moon.

  It was no great surprise to discover the damned horse had fled instinctively toward ‘home’, but it was extremely annoying! After a few moment’s thought, she nudged the horse forward and wrestled the beast until she managed to convince him that she had no desire to return to the castle. It would’ve been hard to say who was most exhausted—her or the horse—but there was no resting where they were! She wasn’t convinced that Jarek and the others had abandoned pursuit. Beyond that, the king wouldn’t be at all pleased to see her so soon and without having completed the task she had been hired for.

  * * * *

  Jarek was so furious he didn’t stop until he reached his own turf. In point of fact, he had no idea where he was going until the familiar scent of his surroundings finally filtered through the anger boiling in him. He slowed then, looked around and discovered his pack brothers were trailing him and then headed for the cottage where they lived.

  It was no castle, but it was a sprawling well designed structure that was comfortable if not luxurious, an achievement he had always taken a good deal of pride in since he had designed and built much of it. He had always considered it the crowning jewel of his holdings but it flickered through his mind to wonder what Sonja would think of it.

  Not that she was likely to see it, now, he thought furiously.

  Shaking the thought, he stomped across the wide porch that fronted it and went inside. He’d already begun to mount the stairs to the master bedroom on the second floor when the others followed him inside, halting in the entrance hall to stare up at him.

  “Where are you going?” Thorne demanded angrily.

  “To bed,” Jarek growled, continuing his climb after a brief pause.

  The response caught him off guard. He gaped at Jarek as if he’d never heard the word. “To bed?”

  “But … Sonja is gone!” Rafe exclaimed angrily.

  “And there is no telling what sort of trouble she might run in to,” Thorne added.

  “She is very likely hurt!” Byron exclaimed. “She was not even conscious when that bastard threw her up on the horse and charged away with her.”

  “We are not going after her?” Arman asked, clearly bewildered.

  Jarek paused at the railing along the upper landing, leaning on it to glare down at them. “Are you all deaf? She called to them! She went directly to them. It’s as clear as day that they were waiting for her. And she was damned well conscious enough to ride! She was alone on the horse when I took out the soldier!”

  “Did you expect her to fling herself from the horse?” Thorne demanded angrily. “It was maddened with the smell of blood! What else was she to do but cling to the horse the best she could?”

  Jarek uttered a disgusted huff of breath. “I am nigh ready to drop from exhaustion,” he bellowed. “I have lost a great deal blood from the battle with Loki and I am far from convinced that she is not exactly where she planned to be!”

  He stalked into his room then and slammed the door behind him with a satisfying force that ended the discussion and nearly cracked the hinges. Stalking to his bath, he stepped into the large tub and jerked on the lever that released the rainwater from the barrel on the roof. The water was cold, naturally, but he was in no mood to build a fire beneath the heating vessel and wait for it to warm. Grabbing a cake of soap, he scrubbed the dried blood and dirt from himself, rinsed, and stepped out to dry off.

  Despite his assertion that he had no intention of doing anything but resting, the moment he’d fallen into his wide, comfortable bed, his mind, dulled with exhaustion before, came alive.

  As furious as he was, he supposed it was irrational to blame Sonja for the debacle at the border—at least insofar as it pertained to Loki and his pack. She could not have known that she was racing straight into the arms of a rival pack or that Loki would seize the opportunity and try to claim her the moment he had the chance to get a good look at her.

  She was a beautiful, desirable woman and although he knew very well that she was not above using that gift of nature to her advantage whenever possible, she could hardly be blamed for the effect it had on men. Beyond that, he had the distinct impression that it had caused her as much grief in her life as it had helped her. Men had taught her that it could be used against them by trying to take advantage of her because of it.

  He could be completely wrong about her, but he didn’t believe he was. He was as certain as he’d ever been about anything that she’d inadvert
ently revealed a grain of truth about herself while she’d been weaving her latest tale. Whether orphaned or discarded, she’d been fending for herself a very long time in a hard, cruel world. That told him some very important truths about her. She was clever. She was resourceful, and she was strong, because she would never have survived if she had not been.

  She was a dangerous woman. The world had made her a predator to avoid becoming prey.

  The question was, had her life quashed everything from her but the cold determination to survive and prosper? Or was it still leavened by the goodness and innocence she’d once had?

  Maybe the real question was, did he care?

  He decided he did. He had no qualms about her being a predator. He was himself and, truthfully, she would not have made a very good mate for him if she had actually been as sweet and gentle as she appeared. He wanted strength in his mate to pass to his off-spring. He needed a mate that would be a strong nurturer—who could teach strength beyond the womb—but love was important, as well. If she had no capacity for it she had no business mothering his off-spring.

  The thoughts were hardly new to him. He had been wrestling with them from the moment he’d set eyes on her, battling his instincts to ignore everything beyond the blood pounding in his veins to have her—come hell or damnation. He had been focused near obsessively on her purpose—not because he considered her a threat, but because he needed to know if the beautiful face and flesh he lusted for hid a monster.

  He supposed he was justly served for his unaccustomed indecisiveness. If he had had his wits about him, he would have allowed his instincts to guide him and claimed her.