Biteclan's Daughter (Lands Forlorn Saga Book 1) Read online

  Biteclan’s Daughter

  By

  Devin McRee

  I

  Her elders often said when one of these creatures is staring directly at you, then you are in the last minute of your life. Kira Naughton slid the shredded tatters of her parka off her shoulders and pounded her fists together, staring right back.

  On the brow of a slight ridge sloping above her, the tomwolf let out hot breath into the cold forest air and paced at a right angle to his line of sight. He never averted his gaze. The parka slid over her father’s tawny brown pelt in the snow between her feet, and he whimpered so faintly that no steam even wafted up from his muzzle. He was going to die, right before her.

  She needed to find the cell phone that had been knocked aside in the mossy rocks and summon medical attention. She needed to carry him away. But right now she couldn’t even afford to look down at him. The creature was waiting for just such a moment of distraction.

  Losing the parka had left Kira standing chilled under several mature oaks, even in a pair of her thermal running tights and the training pullover that she and other varsity team members wore to practice in the early track season. Her hair was mostly tucked under a form-fitting skullcap, and beneath it the tips of her ears began to lengthen.

  She was hardly dressed for this — the late afternoon air had warmed enough to melt much of the snow, but the breeze still cut into her skin. A layer of fur grew already up her back to fend it off, and under her full cheeks a set of burgeoning fangs began weighing down her jaw. The change lengthened her face and unnaturally aged her young features.

  “You,” she rasped in a gravel voice. She wouldn’t be able to speak much longer. “You aren’t leaving. Not without finishing this.”

  There was no question that it was a tomwolf. The size and the aquamarine eyes were unmistakable. Besides, the natural eastern timber wolves inhabiting these woods never confronted her father nor the rest of her pack. Not even to feed. And there were always the residual anthropomorphic features that no timber wolf breed ever displayed: the knees, knuckles, five toes, a pair of deltoid shoulder muscles and discernible triceps above the forelimbs, and the moderately enlarged cranium. Passable for a wild animal at a distance, maybe – but up close it was clearly something else.

  And it had stopped short at her threat, facing directly toward her and lowering its tail and ears. Even in the rage of a hunt, they could understand. At this range, it had to see the gold color imbuing her own irises as well. She was not some random human bystander jogging into the wrong place, and this kill was not yet over.

  Warm blood pooled around her feet, soaking through her training shoes and melting the snow. She winced slightly and shed them, her bare feet already assuming a triangular shape and coated in a silver-colored pelt. The change was taking very little effort, especially for daytime; but then Kira was already close to her moon-cycle and surging with adrenaline.

  Her father’s paws were lengthening again into fingers, his fur thinning and giving way to skin. She tried to ignore this and stay in the fight. Still, the brief shift in her stance was the moment the tomwolf sought.

  Her friend Lavon’s open carcass was almost directly between them, sprawled over a thick oak stump, his neck impossibly bent and his open rib cage turning the dead bark an even deeper crimson.

  His mate lay dead somewhere around here as well. Not Ronda, though; this was the new bitten girl, whose name Kira hadn’t yet learned. The attacker bore down, charging for the stump as if to kill Lavon all over again, its large black pelt like a solid shadow crushing thistles of ground cover that poked through the snow.

  The ground immediately behind the stump sank into a slight depression, and it disappeared there for an instant before launching into view as if he were a new creature, reborn from Lavon’s remains. There was no thinking. Kira ran headlong, clearing the snow and prancing up the length of a fallen tree limb and ricocheting off another nearby tree trunk, to meet it in the air.

  No one is ever supposed to fight a tomwolf without the pack. The elders had pounded that rule into the heads of every damp-furred cub, including her, along with basics like cycles and tracking techniques, and deciphering howls. Well, she had confronted him along with the pack — it had just made short work of everyone else, and now there was nowhere to retreat. And who could expect her to leave her father alone out here?

  His long and curved fangs – yes, his, it was definitely a male – now found the same spot in her shoulder blade where the parka had ripped open, cutting into her first wound from above her. She yelped, this time making a fully lupine growl, and tucked into a roll while digging into his back with both hands. It was a move Vance had taught her, and it flipped the creature onto his back and sent him sliding tail first through the snow. He regained his feet quickly, shaking off tufts of white powder and looking stunned.

  Her hand had caught the trunk of another oak and dug in with newly-sprouted claws, allowing her feet to grip it and turn herself around. In this posture she looked more like a monkey than another wolf, but he lowered his head nearly to the ground, flicking his ears.

  That’s right, she thought. I’ve seen your moves already. You still haven’t seen mine. But his green-blue eyes abruptly disappeared into the snowdrift at his feet, and he threw a cloud of powder into her face with his muzzle.

  A torrent of white needles assailed her vision, followed by another onslaught of pure black as he pounced. Kira flailed, striking the ground with his fangs lodged near the base of her neck.

  He tossed her back and forth like a chew toy, and she stifled a whimper as the pain racked her back. Her body kept smashing against the same fallen branch she had strode over just a moment before, until she could find a footing and push back against him. Growling again, she threw one fist forward like an uppercut, all the energy radiating from her core straight through her claws.

  He reeled once more, with a roar that became a gargle, and this time Kira realized she had found blood. Vance would be proud of her, even if for now he was no more than a flickering thought that her rage chased away. Bounding onto the branch again, she pounded her knuckles into the tomwolf again and again, until her hands fully transmogrified into paws and her legs bent back and the muzzle erupted fully formed from her jaws. Now she was on all fours, seething and raising her withers.

  He roared once more, as her clothes ripped away and she lengthened herself into one long, leaping scream.

  ***

  “I’m sorry, did you say that name was Norton or Naught–?”

  “Naughton! Scott Naughton. And Kira. Father and daughter.” Sharon struggled mightily to keep her composure with the charge nurse. “Both were admitted here, about an hour ago. I’m the emergency contact. They said to come to this desk, in the trauma…”

  “Sharon, honey. There.” Ronda tapped her shoulder and pointed up the hallway to their right. “Here she comes.”

  “Kira! Oh Lord, let me look at you.” Sharon left her friend and almost broke into a run toward the nursing assistant pushing a wheelchair in their direction. “I’m here, baby, I’m here. Are you all right?”

  Kira thanked and waved the man behind her chair away and then struggled to her feet, clutching her hospital gown. He bent down to grab the I.V. stand and pull it clear of the chair so she could take it and roll it alongside herself. The twins, Cory and Charlie, who had flanked their mother, now approached their sister while Ronda remained at the nurse’s station. Kira gripped the pole with one hand as if it could steady her, while she raised the other to offer a feeble hug.

  “Where is he?” Her words came slowly, dampened by what Sharon
assumed were acute painkillers. “Th-they separated us as soon as we got here.”

  “Mr. Naughton is still in surgery, through those doors,” the nurse volunteered to Ronda, the family friend positioned closest to her across the counter. “There’s a full team with him now. I believe someone will be coming out shortly to speak with the family.”

  “I told them it was an animal at-tap. At…attack,” Kira said. “In the foothills. He lost a lot of blood. The state police and parks service are up there now. S-searching.”

  “Lavon?” Ronda stepped forward apprehensively, and Kira seemed to notice her for the first time. “I’ve been trying to call him. My ex. He was — he was with them?”

  Kira bit her lip and nodded. The effort to find words was making her heave, so much that the assistant went racing to retrieve the wheelchair. Ronda covered her mouth with one hand and gasped, her eyes going wide. Sharon steadied Kira while she wept openly.

  “No. Oh sweet Jesus!” Ronda tried to come out from behind her hand and speak herself, but quickly retreated back behind it. “That man. Oh, no, no.”

  “Come here, baby.” Sharon clasped hands behind Kira’s back in a full embrace, and her daughter buried her head in her shoulder. The teen’s normally auburn hair was fully black and knotted, still damp from melted snow, and she looked half her size in the ill-fitting gown. After a moment her mother ventured a whisper. “It was that thing, wasn’t it? The tomwolf?”

  Kira nodded, waving the chair away again and waiting to be clear of earshot from the assistant. “It’s dead. We got it this time.”

  “Dead how? You?” Sharon asked.

  The charge nurse was ushering them to some waiting room chairs outside the operating room doors, and Sharon directed Cory to help keep the I.V. stand close so the attendant wouldn’t return. She waited until they were clear of the staff to speak again.

  “What happens if the police do find it up there?”

  “It’ll look like a regular wolf. Probably the pack will too.” Kira grew more lucid as she spoke. She seemed to need the effort or the distraction of explanations. “Fully one shape, or the other, after death. If any of them reverted, then we may have to identify them. But there shouldn’t be many questions… .”

  “Miss? Ms. Naughton?” Another woman in scrubs none of them had yet seen clutched a data tablet next to the operating room doors. “I’m Nurse Davies. I have a patient update.”

  “You wait here.” Sharon stepped away and the twins took up seats on both sides of Kira. Ronda sat on the other side of Charlie, staring absently down the hallway. The nurse spoke in tones too low for anyone to overhear while Sharon wrung her hands and nodded.

  “Um, can we get you something?” Cory offered. “There’s a vending machine at the other end of the wing.”

  “I don’t think I’m supposed to.” Kira coughed and looked vapid again. “Not yet. If you see Vance, tell him he really pulled me out of a wringer today.”

  “Vance? Vance Rutledge? The football running back?” Cory and Charlie glanced at each other. “I don’t think Mom’s even taking us to school tomorrow.”

  “Right. I can text him, I guess.” She looked around, then leaned heavily onto one arm of the chair. “Later.”

  “Will Dad be all right? They won’t tell us anything except that they found you holding him by the road leading to one of the trailheads. He wasn’t conscious.”

  “I don’t know. It ... it broke something in him.” Her eyes welled, and Cory looked around for a tissue. “I heard this awful sound.”

  “Move for me, honey.” Sharon nudged Cory to move one seat down and returned to Kira’s side. “They don’t know much yet. Apparently there’s some internal organ damage and several ruptured arteries. He’s in danger of anaphylaxis, but they have some immune suppressant drugs that are helping with that part. Once they’re sure they’ve stopped all the bleeding, they said it should get easier. They hope to tell us more in an hour. Boys, why don’t you go with Ronda and get something to eat?”

  Ronda gathered her purse and took to this new distraction, leading the boys down the corridor.

  Kira looked up toward the window behind them and realized it had been dark for some time. Sharon leaned over the seat to give her daughter another embrace, and fidgeted with her car keys.

  “I don’t know what I’m going to do, Kira.” She sighed quietly. “God, I can’t lose him.”

  “I can’t either, Mom. I feel like I failed him. All of them.”

  “What, you? You can’t think that way. You’re the only reason he’s still with us now.” Sharon fetched them both a pair of tissues. “I don’t totally understand this world, you know, that you and your dad have become a part of. But I know that even by their standards you’re pretty exceptional. One of a kind. Did you actually kill this thing by yourself? Is that even possible?”

  For a moment Kira’s expression was distant and cold, making her look much older. Whatever it was, it passed. “What’s that thing on your key ring, Mom? I’ve never seen it before.”

  “Oh, this?” Sharon smiled. “It’s a tiny cast of Han Solo, frozen in carbonite. Your dad bought it for me when we were dating. I hadn’t used this for a while, until after I lost the newer key ring. When I was even younger than your brothers I had like a giant crush on young Harrison Ford. Even cried in the movie theater when the bad guys lowered him into the freezing chamber and Leia never got to hear him say he loved her too.”

  “Right. That was…what, The Empire Strikes Back?”

  “Very good!” Sharon considered it a core parenting duty to induct all her children in the Star Wars pantheon when they were in grade school. None of them really shared her zeal for it. “I had told your grandfather right after the movie that I wasn’t OK with the fact they had done that.

  “And now I know that you should never pass up the chance to tell someone how you feel. Especially when you might not get a sequel for three more years and no one knows for all that time if you’re even going to survive! Oh, I was a flat wreck.”

  “Huh. You know that was adorable for your dad, right?”

  “It was adorable for your dad. Years later, I mean. He and I were swapping stories about our first heartbreak, and that’s the story I told him. I was still getting animated about it, as a grown woman. He ribbed me about that for days. By the next month, though, I’d forgotten all about it. Until my birthday came. We were still undergrads, so I knew he couldn’t do anything elaborate for a present. But he took the time to find this for me at a collectibles store and left it in my desk. Even got it engraved.”

  Sharon handed it to her. Kira flipped it over and read the backside:

  Somebody who loves you.

  – SN

  “It’s what Leia says to him, when she gets into Jabba’s palace and thaws him out. Kind of had a double meaning, in this case.” Sharon recovered the keychain from her daughter and returned it to her purse. “I knew then he wasn’t getting away from me.”

  Kira smiled and leaned on her mother’s shoulder. It was rare for Sharon to feel as if her oldest could draw any strength from her, and she relished the moment. But Kira suddenly began sniffing the air, and raised her head again in that inscrutable way of hers. Eyes distant, fingers and toes digging into the nearest surfaces, feeling for vibrations. Like one of them.

  “What? What is it honey?”

  “Hold on. Follow me.” Kira grabbed the stand and lifted herself by it, wheeling past the nurse’s station toward the intersection of two corridors. There she peeked around the corner. Sharon followed and craned her neck to look.

  Maybe thirty feet away, a nondescript orderly in his twenties was scanning an ID badge at the entrance of a medicine closet. He ducked inside and emerged again seconds later with a bundle of bed linens and towels draped over one arm. He secured the door and headed in their direction.

  Kira hobbled back toward the attending nurse. Sharon stood perplexed, eyeing the length of both corridors,
waiting to spot something else. Lights flickering off, machines going haywire, large hulking animals padding down the halls with fierce brimstone eyes. Anything a bit less mundane.

  “Excuse me.” Kira winced as she leaned over the counter, and Sharon realized she hadn’t yet asked the extent of her injuries. “There’s a gentleman heading this way. Could you take a look at him when he comes around this corner and let me know if he works here?”

  The nurse craned her neck to look. “Never seen him before. He could be a replacement for tonight, but I hadn’t heard anything about a —”

  “Hi there!” Kira planted her feet wide apart in the corridor as he neared, trying to look stronger than she was at the moment. “Boy, I could use some extra sheets in my bed just now. Got a few to spare?”

  The orderly stopped cold for a moment, weighing his response. Sharon took a cue and sidled up alongside Kira, and even the nurse stood and stepped around her counter.

  “Can I help you?” The nurse looked him over. “It’s not time to change bedding for at least two hours. Maybe you were headed to oncology. Can I see your …?”

  Sheets and towels littered the floor. The man was off at a full run while the charge nurse scrambled for her phone. Kira hobbled along, trying to pursue, but in her condition even Sharon could keep pace with her. She did, until they were well past the debris of spilled linens. Sharon spotted a pair of photos that had been discarded on the floor. Grainy images, both of Scott, entering and exiting his vehicle outside one of the shops in the downtown district.

  “What on earth --?” By the time she had picked them up, Sharon heard a large crash and glanced up again toward the end of the corridor. A pair of large glass doors led outside, and one of the panes had shattered, falling in spider-webbed fragments to the pavement immediately outside. Kira stopped short, barefoot and apparently leery of stepping too close. Sharon raced up alongside her.