Wolfbreed (24 page)

Rutger turned around. “No. I thought—”

“Please refrain from thinking for a few minutes.” Karl grabbed the woman’s wrists and dragged her back toward a nearby stand of trees.

“The road—” Rutger pointed. “It’s in the other direction.”

“What did I say about thinking, Rutger? Stay there and shut up.” Karl reached one of the trees, where a thick branch had broken off just within arm’s reach. He lifted the woman and looped her wrists about the branch so she hung there, the balls of her feet barely touching the ground.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m teaching this bitch a lesson.” Karl drew out his dagger. Rutger watched the blade shine in another flash of lightning and had no idea what he should do.

hankfully, the runt Rutger shut up when Karl took out his dagger.

He spat again. His lip still burned where she had struck him. The pain only served to intensify his anger—anger at the rain sliding down the back of his neck, anger at being pulled from his proper duty to search barns for some pagan nightmare, and
most of all, anger at the bitch hanging on the tree in front of him.

“You’ve caused me much grief, monster,” he whispered.

Her eyes fluttered, and he slapped her.

“I want you awake for this.” He spoke German, not caring if she understood him or not.

Her green eyes snapped open, staring at him.

“Good.” He touched the blade of his dagger against her cheek. “Feel that? It’s silver. The blade’s shit for much else, other than cutting you.”

“No,” she sobbed in Prûsan.

He laughed. “A little scar to remember me by?” He drew the blade down her face. She pulled away, a fine thread of blood on her cheek, little more than a scratch.

“N-no hurt.”

He kept talking, not caring that his German words were lost in her Prûsan ears. “Different, isn’t it, with that collar? No monster coming to save you, little girl.” He jerked the blade down, catching the collar of her surcoat and tearing down. Her muddy clothes hung in open rags now. A few more flicks of the wrist, and he had her exposed from neck to knees.

“My, aren’t we an attractive monster?”

He held the dagger up under her jawline, above the silver torc around her neck. With the other hand, he loosened his belt. He whispered into her ear. “It’s sad. The Landkomtur is going to have to kill you anyway.”

illy struggled against the man pressing her to the tree. She shook her head, eyes shut, tears mixing with the rain as the man forced her legs apart with his knee.

“No,” she said.

Like her first master, this man didn’t listen.

“No!” she shouted.

The man brutally thrust himself forward, slamming her back into the tree. Her head jerked back with a gasp and a cry, and her entire body went limp as Lilly curled up inside herself.

Help me
, she cried into the darkness inside her.

A cold, angry voice answered.

arl lowered the dagger as he felt damp warmth spreading down his naked thighs. He reached down, and his hand came away covered in blood, the bright red turning pink in the rainfall.

“I’ll be damned.” Karl laughed. “The monster is a virgin.”

From far away, Karl heard a voice call out, “Sir!”

“Shut up, Rutger!”

The monster in front of him stirred, muttering something.

“Fool …”

“What did you say?”

Karl started bringing the dagger back up to her neck, but before he could, he felt her naked legs wrap around him above his waist and pull him forward so violently that he lost his grip on the weapon. His face was a finger’s width away from hers. He could feel her breath on his cheek as he felt her thighs squeezing his lower ribs. It was hard to breathe and he tried to push himself away from her.

The green eyes didn’t cry, didn’t show terror. All Karl saw was a horrible emptiness as she smiled. Her head snapped forward, and he felt her lips on his.

Then he felt her teeth.

utger had stared at the rape with sickening fascination. Unable to turn away, he watched his knight brutalize the woman as he kept telling himself that this was a murderess, a monster. But that didn’t change the terror in her face. The expression he saw there was so deep, so wrenching, that he knew the instant it changed.

Karl was laughing at something in his hands, and the woman’s eyes opened. What he saw there made Rutger gasp, “Sir!”

“Shut up, Rutger!”

The woman stared at Karl with a cold disregard, the way Karl might look at a dog. The way a wolf might look at a pile of dung.

He drew his sword as she brought her legs up around him, and he was running for her as Karl fell back, clutching his face with blood-drenched hands.

Sprawled on the ground, Karl shouted something that sounded like, “Kill her!”

The neck
, Rutger thought.
Even without a silver blade, separate the head from the body and it will die
.

Rutger swung, but she pulled herself up, impossibly quick, over his stroke. He gasped as his blade embedded itself in the tree with an arm-numbing impact.

He looked up. The woman crouched on the limb above him, snarling, face covered in gore. She pulled her arms apart, snapping the cords that bound them. He tried to pull his sword free, but it was stuck fast.

She leapt down onto his unprotected head.