Blood Red (9781101637890) (25 page)

This time she slapped his shoulder. And not playfully, although it was not very hard either. “And that is enough of your nonsense, Master Dominik! Do you think I am going to respond to your flirtations as if I was any waitress in a café?”

He just laughed again. “Now, Master Rosa, flirtation comes as naturally to me as breathing! I could no more stifle one than stifle the other!”

Ah, now there's the truth at last,
she thought, and yet she was a little disappointed to hear it. She would have liked to have thought that he didn't flirt with
every
female he encountered.

“So, we are folklorists? Does that mean just you and Markos, or does it include me as well?” she asked. They had finally moved out of the city, and she slapped the reins on the horse's back to make him pick up his pace. The horse sighed gustily, but obeyed. The transition was fairly abrupt. One moment they were on a cobbled street surrounded by houses, the next, they were on a packed dirt road with hilly fields to either side. The hills were as often wooded as they were cleared; wooden fences marked the borders of fields, and it appeared that half of those were used for grazing, while half were cultivated. Her experienced eye picked out that while the cultivated fields were not suffering, they also were not as fertile as the ones in Germany. Probably the ground was harder here, with more stones. The grazing animals seemed to be predominantly sheep and goats, although cattle weren't rare. Nor were horses. But Transylvania was not only the land of the Romanians, it was the land of the Hungarian Magyars who prided themselves on their horsemanship.

“Well, that depends,” Dominik replied.

“Depends upon what?” She looked at him curiously, wondering what, exactly, was going to come out of his mouth. And whether or not she was going to be annoyed with him over it.

“On whether you think you'll be able to move and act more freely if you are ‘just' our sister, pretending to be a mere girl bored with us and our fascination with stupid old tales, or if it will be better for you to be the equal partner in this scholastic fishing expedition.” Dominik shrugged helplessly. “I haven't a good answer either way.”

“Why not both?” she suggested. “When we get to Casolt, I can see what happens when I play the scholar. If we happen across a village on the way there, I can see what happens when I'm the bored sister. We'll use whatever works best.”

“Well said, O Solomon,” Markos put in from inside the wagon. “Selimbar is on the way, and it is a good place to stop and eat and make some inquiries.”

“Well that was unproductive.” Rosa glanced back at Selimbar, and pulled a sour face. Not because of the village—but because the town of Sibiu was clearly visible in the distance, visible enough to make out the spires of that impressive church.

The difference from Sibiu could not possibly have been more obvious however. Out here, white, brick buildings were nowhere near as common as wooden ones, and tile roofs gave way to shingle and thatch. Many houses had a beehive-shaped oven near the kitchen door. And these looked like German villages.

That makes sense . . . with the houses so close together in the city, fire could easily leap from one to the other if they were wood—and thatch and shingle can catch fire quickly from a single spark. And in the city, it is easier and cheaper to buy bread than make it yourself.

“Well I certainly heard enough stories of wolves carrying people off in winter to fill ten books,” said Markos, who had taken Dominik's former spot beside Rosa in the driver's box by the simple expedient of getting there first. Dominik was sulking in the wagon itself. “Lots of stories of witches and ghosts, too. Oh, and did you know Vlad Dracul's bad son was the ruler back in Sibiu until he was stabbed to death?”

Or perhaps she was doing him a disservice. He might actually be writing their notes up in a more legible format . . .

In a moving wagon? Not likely.

“Well I got nothing except questions about my dowry and attempts to find out if my virtue was negotiable,” she replied, and made a rude noise. “More of the latter than the former, so pretending to be a modest and bored sister was no defense. I think the assumption was that you two were trying to market me.”

Markos made a choking sound; she pounded him on the back when it appeared he actually
was
choking. “I am . . . very sorry I was not aware of that,” he managed. “You should have said something! I would have—”

“Dear heavens, I wasn't going to tell either of you until we were well away!” she retorted. “I've killed
vampir,
I've killed shifters, I've turned trolls to dust. The day I can't deal with some idiot who thinks because I come from a city I have never seen a
real man
before, the sun will probably rise in the west! The only time I suspected the cad would not take no for an answer, I spitted a fly on the table between us with my dagger, then sweetly apologized. That shut him up.”

“Um,” Markos said, after a moment. “I expect it would shut me up, too.”

“What did you learn, besides tales of wolves?” she asked. The road wound its way along the valley between the hills. There were a lot more woods than fields, now. It was beginning to feel like home, actually.

“Mostly that wolves are bad enough hereabouts in the winter that a real shifter could probably kill at will and no one would notice,” Markos said, thoughtfully. “Summer is different, though. The wolves go back to the steppes; they come with the snow and leave when it is gone. So all those disappearances in summer are definitely not natural.”

The wagon jounced and swayed over ruts in the dirt road, despite Rosa's careful driving. This was very pretty country; it was a pity she couldn't take the time to appreciate it. She was too busy trying to keep the wagon on the best bits of the road. It seemed to be hay time here; many of the fields were either full of drying hay, or there were hay carts gathering the dried fodder up. It would not be stored in barns, however. All up and down the road, there were peculiar haystacks in various stages of formation, from the foundation of tree branches around a center pole, to the tripod of crude racks upon which the stack was formed, to the finished stack, tall and conical. They were carefully raked before they were considered finished, groomed so that rain would run right down the outside and not spoil the hay, then topped with a heavy wreath and perhaps some branches to keep the stack from blowing away. Rosa had never seen haystacks like this. It made her want to burrow into them like a child.

“The road will get better soon,” Markos promised. “Not as much traffic. These roads get churned up near a village in summertime.”

“I hope so; we are making wretched time,” she grumbled. “At this rate, it will take us two days to get to Casolt, and I had thought we would be there by nightfall. So tell me more, if there is anything.”

“Nothing, except ‘unnatural' things that are strictly related to the village. Local haunts, local curses, local witches. And that tells me that the predation hasn't gotten this far—that outside of Casolt is probably where it starts.” He tapped his finger on the side of his nose. “And since
I
know how much territory a shifter can cover, that gives me a good idea of the spread.”

“If it is a shifter,” she pointed out.

“If it is a shifter,” he admitted. “It's just within the realm of possible that it is a real wolf pack that remains here in summer, having discovered that humans are easy to hunt and tasty.”

She raised her eyes from the immediate mess that the road was, and saw, to her pleasure, that things did get a little smoother a little further ahead. “It could be something else entirely, too,” she replied absently. “Is there anything—well—local that
you
know about that it could be?”

“These mountains hold a lot of secrets, but everything I can think of is a variation on a
vampir
or a shifter,” Markos said, after a moment. “I can't imagine it could be a
balaur,
I should think someone would have noticed a dragon with more than one head.”

“I would think someone would have noticed a dragon with only
one
head,” Rosa said dryly, as the wagon finally got to a part of the road that was not as rutted, and she clucked to the horse. “And it would take an awfully powerful one to manifest physically enough to eat people.”

Markos was silent. “We keep coming to the same conclusion. A shifter,” he said, finally. “The only question is, what kind is he?”

“What have you got that is native—besides your family?” she asked. “The
vampir
I killed was a little different from the ones I hunted in Germany.”

“
Moroi,
maybe,” Markos mused. “I don't know, some of our
vampir
are also shape-shifters, like the
strigoi.
And, of course, there are completely human sorcerers that use blood magic to transform . . .”

“That could be why all the killing. He has to keep killing to renew and power the transformative spell.” She let go of the reins with one hand to rub her temple. “If so, he'll be the most powerful shifter I've ever seen. It will take all of us to track him and kill him.”

“If he's too much for us, I could call on the family, maybe,” Markos said.

“Then we'd take the chance that by the time they got here, he'd flee or go into hiding. The reason this is working for him is that he's in a remote area where wolves kill people all the time, and his chances of being discovered were almost nothing until you and Dominik showed up.” She frowned. “If he retreats into Russia, we'll never find him again.”

“And he'll know who was hunting him.” Markos went a little pale. “It wouldn't be that hard for him to pick us Nagys off one at a time. We don't have that much
magic.
”

“And by the time you'd gotten help, he could be gone again.” She nodded grimly. “The one advantage we have right now is that he doesn't know he's being hunted. We have to get him before he realizes that. My mentor told me about a
vampir
once that not only figured out he was being hunted, but by who and what, and over the course of a century completely destroyed a White Lodge and every family that ever had a member in it. On the whole, shifters aren't nearly that smart, and they tend to succumb to the beast the more they shift and the older they get, but if this one has been killing for the past forty years—he's not the usual sort of shifter.”

“And . . . maybe it
is
just wolves, robbers, and anarchists,” Markos added, after a long silence.

“There's one other possibility . . .” she said reluctantly. “The God of the Hunt taking sacrifices.”

That happened sometimes—mostly in England, Scotland and Wales. Even Ireland. Never in living memory in Germany or Austria, but—

But to her relief, Markos laughed. “We don't have any such thing,” he assured her. “You go back to the Dacians, and we have the god Heros, who never hunts humans, only beasts. The goddess Bendis was a huntress too, but she never hunted humans either.”

“Well that explains why the being I called up before was so willing to help me,” she replied.

Markos nodded. “He'd have been irked at the shifter in his woods, a thing that is unnatural, a hunter that kills without discrimination and wastes what he kills. Both he and Bendis aided human hunters. But of course, Heros had to play with you a little before he helped you, that's just how supernatural creatures are. Especially gods, though I have to say, our gods were never as fickle or contrary as the Greek and Roman ones. Simple people, we Dacians, and we had simple gods. Give them their sacrifice, and they were right on your side, and no trickery about it.” He paused a moment. “The Nagys—my family anyway—are almost pure Dacian.”

Rosa shook her head. “I'm no scholar, I have no idea what that means.”

“Well, when the Greeks ran into us, they called us the ‘people of the wolf,' and although most historians think that's because we had wolf battle standards, or wolf totems, or some wolf-inspired warrior society, my family knows better. We were of the Appuli tribe. We were never conquered by the Romans, for obvious reasons. Hard to exterminate a village that can turn into wolves and run away, harder still when we can load everything onto our horses and donkeys and drive them ahead of us.” He chuckled, and her eyes widened.

“That far back?” she exclaimed.

He nodded. “We became part of the ‘free Dacians' eventually, although the family always stayed a little apart. That's why we are different from most shifters. It's in our blood. It's a lot harder for the beast to get control—not impossible, but a lot harder. That's also why my people supposedly told Alexander the Great that we could not die, it was mistranslated. What we told him was that his people could not
kill
us, which in wolf form is certainly true.”