Driving Force (28 page)

“What is your name?” she asked, thinking it might be better to establish a certain rapport with her jailers.

“Harath.”

“Mine is—”

“We do not care what yours is. You are the human who killed Eliara with a distance weapon.”

Well, that took care of that bright idea. They did not want to know her name or to see her as a person. Kihain had, but even he had still handed her over to Arrhan.

Harath was looking her over narrowly. “But now you have no distance weapon to help you.”

The Glock 26 was back at the ranch. So much for any kind of defense. Though only a machine gun might have helped against the number of Shifters Arrhan probably had.

“What is that in your pocket? A knife?”

It wasn’t a knife. She wouldn’t have thought of carrying a knife or known how to use one properly if she had. But she supposed that the humans in his world did carry them.

“As if a knife would be any use against your claws,” Sierra said and he snickered in agreement.

“True. Nevertheless, I do not wish to be remiss in my duty. Give it to me.”

She sighed wearily, took it out of her pocket and handed it to him. He frowned at it.

“What is this?”

“A hair slicker.”

“A what?” He turned it over in his hands, a flattish three-by-two-inch paddle with a handle on one end and a stiff plastic cover over the prongs on the head.

“To smooth the hair.”

He glanced at the shining fall of her long black hair. Then he shrugged.

“Females,” he said scornfully and tossed it back to her.

She caught it and shoved it into her jeans. “We’re the same in any dimension. What now?”

He moved to a tree on the edge of the clearing and sat down with his back against its trunk. “We wait.”

“For Arrhan?”

“Yes. Amuse yourself,” he said, settling himself comfortably. “Do as you like. Go where you like.”

“Within the clearing.”

He smirked. “Of course.”

She moved around the clearing, testing the boundaries of the spell. They were seamless, that burning prickle coming wherever she put a hand. Harath observed her sardonically, his yellow gaze never moving from her. Sometimes he stayed in human form. Other times it was a lion lying on its belly that watched her. It was creepy.

She finally circled the whole clearing, then sat down on a rock some distance away from him. He curled his lip at her.

“As you see, you cannot escape.”

Very much for stating the obvious, this one. Sierra lifted one shoulder in false indifference.

“How do you do that with the clothes?” Unlike the Shifters of this dimension, his clothes and jewelry vanished when he shifted to lion, then came back again when he returned to human form. Only a gold stud in one of his ears remained the same in both shapes.

He touched the stud. “This is bespelled.”

“I thought spells didn’t work here.”

“The spell was cast in the other world. It is the ones that are cast here that warp or lose power.” He scowled at her. “Kihain should not have told you of that.”

“He probably thought it wouldn’t matter since we have no such thing as mages here and he wanted us to trust him.”

“And you did trust him.” He sniggered. “We knew that you would. He is soft. He believes in the Way.”

“You don’t.”

“No. That is Kihain’s weakness, not ours. He believes in such foolishness as honor.”

“Isn’t that what keeps you loyal to Arrhan?”

“Honor?” He shook with contemptuous laughter. “Arrhan is strong. He will win, both here and in our world. It is self-interest that binds us to him. You are fools, both Kihain and you, with your prating of honor. And it seems the Shifters of your world also persist in that delusion. That is why we chose to send Kihain when the first attempt to seize you failed. He has not yet grown past the childish belief in honor and he is as transparent as water. We knew you would all believe him. You let him live before. The Lowe pride even nursed him. You were predisposed to trust him.”

He was enjoying himself, getting a kick out of rubbing in how stupid they had all been, how superior and more clever his people were in comparison. Let him believe that, she thought, encourage him to boast. She might learn something.

“Weren’t you afraid that he might come over to our side because of that?”

“See what a liability honor is? He gave his word that he would bring you to us. Even if he wished to betray us, he could not. His vaunted ‘honor’ bound him.” He gave her a mocking, triumphant glance. “He is a fool and you all are also fools and therefore Arrhan, who is not a fool, will always win.”

Poor Kihain! Caught between a rock and a hard place. He knew that those to whom he had given his word were undeserving of his loyalty, knew they did not believe in that Way of his. But he wanted his home in his own world, wanted to be part of a pride, yearned to belong. If Arrhan’s schemes succeeded, he would have all that. He too was motivated by self-interest, even though he might not have admitted it to himself. He had persuaded himself that since he had given his word he must keep it, that just this once honor required a dishonorable action.

She had trusted him and he had betrayed her trust.

Yet she couldn’t help feeling sorry for him, even though he had turned her over to possible torture and death. If he had not been cast out of his pride, he would have gone on peacefully following his Way and would never have found himself torn between two contradictory imperatives. She liked Kihain even now and she could understand being pulled in two directions at once. This would trouble the conscience she knew he had and she hoped it would continue to trouble him, because if that ceased he would become someone like Harath, conscienceless and a true outcast.

Harath rose suddenly to his feet. A white lioness had entered the clearing. She rose up onto her hind legs and turned into a woman in her early thirties, not beautiful but striking, with a mane of white hair and a proud, intelligent face.

“Iseya,” said Harath and bowed.

So this was the mage. Sierra got uneasily to her own feet, but Iseya just cast her an indifferent glance and turned away.

Other forms were filtering out of the forest. Sierra backed away toward a tree at the edge of the clearing and leaned against its trunk, hoping to remain unnoticed. There were several Shifters in the clearing now, both in human and in animal shape. It was like a delirious fever dream, watching those human and lion shapes weaving restlessly about each other across the green turf.

A bulky body brushed past her and she recoiled with a gasp. The lion looked up at her, amused. It was unsettling to see human intelligence and scorn in a beast’s face. Both Ian and Gregor had shifted briefly into their animal forms, but that had been for such short periods of time that she hadn’t had the chance to really get used to it.

The clearing was filling up. Sierra watched as many of them shifted to their human forms and gathered into groups or disposed themselves on the grass to talk. They all wore the black leather pants and open vests that seemed to be hunting uniform for them. They all had those gold studs in their ears and several were wearing gold bands and ornaments.

Harath was still close to her. He too had risen and had drifted over to where he could continue to keep an eye on her.

“Are these all of you?” she asked, her voice low. Even so, Shifter hearing brought heads turning her way and yellow eyes flicking around to stare unnervingly at her.

“There are as many more again, but they are on duty or hunting.” Harath gave her his sneering grin. “Did you hope we were a lesser number than the Lowe pride? Abandon hope.”

“Where are the females?” Most of the Shifters in the clearing were males. She could see hardly any females.

Harath gave her a surly look. “We have not many.”

The nomads and outcasts from which Arrhan had drawn his troops would all have been males. She guessed that any outcast females in the other world could easily find mates among the nomads and form the nuclei of new prides of their own. They would not have needed to follow Arrhan. The rare female that she could see must have joined his band because of ties to some member of it.

“We will have many more,” said Harath smugly. “First here and then in our world. We will take them.”

By force. Pride by pride.

“But you will not be there to see,” he said and laughed.

A giant of a man was crossing the clearing now. He was massive, bigger than Kurt, even bigger than Nick Korda, astonishing as that was. He had black hair and he wore the ubiquitous black leathers, but in his case they were hung all over with an excess of jeweled gold armlets, wristlets and chains. Way over the top, thought Sierra scornfully. But he had the presence to carry it off.

“Is that Arrhan?” she asked under her breath and Harath grinned nastily.

“Yes. Impressed?”

Unwillingly, she was. Someone had thrown furs over a boulder to make a seat for him, and when he cast himself down upon it, Sierra was involuntarily reminded of a king upon his throne. It was his attitude, the arrogance of that haughty face that didn’t seem to see any of them except as lesser beings. “Royal” was too small a word. “Imperial” was closer.

Unrestrained pride and insufferable hauteur. The pride for which Lucifer had been cast out of heaven. An enormous egotism that demanded as a right the homage, the obedience, even the worship of all those who surrounded him. This man would not accept being denied anything, would not be content until everything he saw lay under his rule. No wonder being cast out and rejected had driven him to fury.

Iseya moved quietly to stand behind his right shoulder. One of the Shifter males came and bent to say something in his ear, a report of some kind, because he listened to it intently, then nodded, snapped some order and waved the man away.

Then he looked around to where she and Harath were standing. Sierra swallowed hard under the cold malignancy of those yellow eyes, which didn’t seem to see her as a person, only as a thing, some beetle to be stepped on.

“Bring her,” he said.

Harath seized her upper arm in a painful grip and jerked her forward. She came without resistance. That would be useless and it would be humiliating to be dragged across and flung at Arrhan’s feet. She staggered as Harath propelled her in front of Arrhan, but managed to keep her balance. Scared stiff but determined not to show it, Sierra locked her knees under her and glared at Arrhan defiantly.

“And this creature, puny even among humans, slew Eliara, one of my finest warriors,” said Arrhan, looking her over with disgust.

“With a distance weapon,” Harath reminded him. “There is no defense against such.”

“Humans have no shame.”

“
Humans
have no shame?” snapped Sierra. “What
was
shameful was that she attacked Ian while he was fighting you and wasn’t expecting it! Two against one isn’t fair!”

Arrhan slapped her.

She should have expected it, but she hadn’t. She should have known that any resistance at all would be a challenge to this man and therefore immediately punished. The blow was casual, almost negligent. But Sierra was knocked sideways and would have fallen if some Shifter hadn’t caught her and tossed her back in front of Arrhan to the snickers of the onlookers.

She kept her feet with an effort. The side of her face where he had hit her throbbed with pain. For a moment she thought he had broken her jaw, but when she cautiously moved it she found with relief that he hadn’t.

“But I guess you needed her help,” she flung at him recklessly. “Otherwise, a leopard would have kicked your ass!”

The crowd fell abruptly still in shock. Then Arrhan’s fist smashed her ten feet across the grass. She landed badly, all her weight upon one arm, and heard a snap. Blinding agony shot through her forearm. This time something
had
broken.

She should stay down, she thought, giddy with the pain. That would be the smart thing to do. But looking around, she saw that he was enjoying her pain. He was enjoying being able to make her suffer, relishing her helplessness against his vastly superior strength.

For all his overweening pride and physical size, Arrhan was
small
, just another sadistic bully. At first sight, she had thought him some sort of Luciferian figure, cast out of heaven. But Lucifer had been the first among the angels for a reason. Lucifer had been great. Arrhan was not.

Evil is petty, she realized. Ian, Kurt, Nick, all the Shifters she knew in Wade County, were each of them larger in soul than Arrhan was, for all his pretensions.

She wasn’t going to let him beat her down. She clambered painfully back onto her feet and faced him defiantly, cradling her broken forearm against her stomach.

“You live because I have a use for you,” he said contemptuously. “However, all you need to be useful is to be alive. Be careful how you address me or I will have your tongue ripped out.”

She gritted her teeth, caught at some strange point between fury and terror where she wouldn’t have cared right now if he did. But to give in to that would be stupid, so she controlled herself with a slow, shuddering breath and asked in a carefully neutral voice, “What use can a human be to Shifters?”