The Lost Bloodline 1 - Chapter 4

Chapter 4

Finding the path left by the monsters wasn’t hard. They hadn’t exactly been trying to be subtle in their flight. Koda followed the road that the female hunter who had reported to Sienna came in on, then looked for signs of struggle.

The blood trail and drag marks made it easy to follow along, as well as the number of bodies having passed through the undergrowth.

 He stopped only once as he passed through a small orchard of blooming trees, using the well that was on the property to get the last of the blood from his face and rinse it out of his gauntlet.

Koda wasn’t sure if it was the material of the gauntlet, Thera’s blessing and magic, or just that he was washing it quickly, but none of the blood from the fight stained any part of his primal weapon. The claws still gleamed, the pale white of bone remained unmarred, and the leather and fur underneath bore no discoloration. 

It’s a magic gauntlet. Of course it’s going to be stain-resistant, Koda thought wryly when he realized that he’d let himself get distracted. Focus. You need to find the people taken and figure out if you can do anything to help them. Hopefully, Sienna and her group will follow soon. That way I don’t have to do this alone.

The gnawing worry sat heavy in his gut, but Koda did his best to push it away. He would do his best, just as he promised Thera. He tried not to dwell on the fact that today he had taken lives. Or the fact that he knew he would have to kill again.

Focusing on moving as silently as he could, Koda crept through the damaged brush.

The passage of the Crooked and their captives actually made following after them easier for him, since many of the small branches and twigs that he might have stepped on had already suffered that fate. Winding through the trees, Koda kept an ear out while he walked, his bladed gauntlet at the ready.

The forest, which normally felt so welcoming to him, felt stuffy and oppressive now. The air felt as though it refused to move, only stirring in his passage like he was walking through thick honey. No breeze stirred the branches of the trees overhead.

Shade that had welcomed him only an hour before in the mountains of Colorado now felt oppressive and threatening. Only the cool weight of his totemic gauntlet kept Koda moving, a gentle reminder of the promise he’d made.

After nearly half an hour of trotting along at a steady pace, the trees thinned, and Koda slowed down, crouching to ensure his silhouette did not stand out easily against the sky or the tree line. The thinning trees and what brush remained would help break up his outline, but the last thing he needed was to be spotted before he knew the threat he faced.

The tree line gave way to a ridge of rock. Stopping on the edge of the trees, he could detect the distant jabbering of words from the other side of the outcropping of gray stone, accompanied by the rattle of movement.

Peering around a tree, Koda listened closely for several long moments.

He could hear talking, though he couldn’t understand the words being spoken. The language sounded like someone had taken Russian and run it through several AI translation filters before having it spit out in English. Individual words felt familiar but sounded mangled and twisted, ensuring that none of them really made sense. Through all of that jabbering, he could hear the quiet sobbing of those he guessed were the captives, joined by the clatter of metal on metal or metal on wood.

Growling deep in his throat, Koda crept forward carefully to ensure he did not alert any sentries that might be around the camp he could hear.

Approaching the large, flat-topped stone, Koda discovered that the path the kidnappers had taken wound around both sides of the immense rock.

Edging to one side, the stone revealed that it was obscuring a small hollow in the earth. The little valley wasn’t deep—maybe twenty feet at its center and about two hundred across—but the low section was enough to easily hide the camp from casual view.

Though this does give me a decent vantage point to watch them from, Koda thought wryly as he peeked around the edge of the stone.

He’d played enough first-person shooters to know that one of the easiest things for someone on watch to spot was an irregularity against the sky. So Koda made sure to keep his head low to ensure that the blue sky did not outline him while he darted glances around the side of the stone.

What lay before him was simultaneously familiar and disturbing in the same ragged breath. 

The camp sprawled out in a jagged formation that roughly approximated regular rows. But somehow, none of the lines in the camp were parallel to each other. The only thing that was regular and reliable about the camp in front of him was the fact that nothing was orderly.

Tents constructed of the same dappled and stained canvas as the clothes the monsters wore sat in mottled, haphazard arrangements that tried to be rows. Roughly in the middle of the camp was a wide tent that had seven sides and was almost forty feet across by itself. The large tent sat slightly off-center, and none of its poles were straight or the same height.

A cloud of smoke hung over the entire camp from a trio of large fires that burned in shared spaces where a handful of tents were clumped together. Gross banners hung irregularly amongst the tents, displaying a pitchfork with bent tines crossed with a sword that vaguely resembled a kukri based on how bent its blade was, but the weapon had the look of a regular arming sword with edges on both sides.

Stumbling amongst the tent were more of the bent and twisted people. Many of them wore rags or the rough approximations of clothing, none of them in good repair.

A man with his left knee reversed and his right regular hobbled over and began talking in the garbled tongue with another man who had two arms, both growing from his right shoulder. Nearby, a woman with two mouths, one on her face and another in her neck, stirred a bubbling cauldron by one of the smoky fires while tossing in large hunks of meat with the bones still in them.

A cackling laugh drew Koda’s attention farther back into the camp. He saw another bent figure jabbing a broken stick at someone who was wearing actual clothes, though torn and tattered.

“Away from us, beast!” snarled the old man, his white beard swinging as he batted at the offending weapon with his wrinkled hands while a matted tail of the same color hung limp behind him. “Can’t you leave us alone?! Why torture us now? You’ll have plenty of time to do it later, freak!”

The prancing, crooked man jabbered again in that distorted tongue. Koda thought he caught something about ‘broken toys’ before another of the Crooked emerged from a nearby tent and cuffed the one with the stick. The second Crooked was larger, though his muscles flared in bizarre proportions, leaving his biceps thin but his forearms swollen. The swollen one barked at the stick-wielder and pointed at the old man.

Whining, the one with the stick dropped his toy and nodded before going back to herding the old man into what Koda now recognized as a corral. It was hard to see at this angle, but from the splashes of normal, unfaded colors that he saw, Koda guessed that was where the other villagers were being kept.

The pen was near the center of the camp, with only a single row of tents between it and the larger main tent. Two rows of tents encircled the other sides of the corral, though. That would make it harder for those inside it to escape, even if there weren’t guards walking around at random intervals.

Watching, Koda counted as many of the gnarled men and women in the camp that he could. He noted that there were usually three or four of the Crooked hanging around the pen of people at any given time, ensuring there was always a watcher present, though they did not pay particularly close attention.

While Sienna and he had taken down a dozen or more between them, those had been in smaller groups. There were easily thirty or more of the crude tents, and because of the way no one of the Crooked looked like the others, he had a feeling that the count of about fifty or sixty of them still in the camp was accurate.

As Koda watched, another handful of Crooked stumbled into camp from the far side, dragging a deer behind them that had three bent spears sticking out of it. One hunter was also dragging the gored body of another Crooked.

The deer was hauled to one of the cook-fires, while the dead Crooked ended up dragged into the central tent by its feet. For what purpose, Koda had no idea.

“This is going to be difficult,” Koda muttered under his breath, the clawed tips of his totemic gauntlet tapping against the stone in front of him. “How do I get the villagers away from them without alerting the entire camp? I might sneak in under cover of night, but that is no guarantee I can get them out. How can I even the odds?”

A scream split the air of the camp, and Koda had to fight the urge to leap to his feet. The scream originated from the large, seven-cornered tent where the Crooked had dragged their dead companion.

A second and then third scream split the air, the noise gurgling and distorted like a badly tuned amp. A pulse of energy echoed through the air a moment later, causing a stirring in the lingering smoke that hung in the valley from the fires. The pulse hit the stone walls of the little valley but did not escape it.

Unable to tear his eyes away, Koda watched in morbid fascination as the flap of the tent stirred a moment later, and the Crooked who had dragged his dead companion past a moment earlier shoved that same companion out ahead of him.

A companion that was now walking upright with blood still staining his thin chest from where the deer’s antlers had torn him open. A wound that was now a mass of scarred, sealed flesh.

“Disturbing, isn’t it?”

The voice in Koda’s ear made his heart jump. He whirled to find Sienna crouched only inches away from him, her spear held low and to one side.

Arrayed behind her were a dozen of the leather-clad hunters from the village with bows, spears, and clubs at the ready. He only could pick them out from the trees because they would move on occasion to dart a glance at him or past him at the camp, and the movement revealed them briefly.

Every single one of the hunters shared features with some kind of animal. He saw many with the ears and tails of wolves, foxes, cats, and one large man who had rounded ears that vaguely reminded him of a bear. Two bore feathers in the place of hair and had the piercing eyes of hawks.

“More than you can imagine,” Koda panted, keeping his voice low as he met the serious gaze of the redhead. Of all the others, she was the only one who had approached within twenty feet of him.

“I can imagine quite a bit. Crooked are the stuff of nightmares. Then again, you’ve seen them. You can see how easy it is for them to inhabit that particular sphere.” Sienna’s voice was low and tense as she spoke.

Koda watched her warily. She did have a habit of sticking that spear into his face at a moment’s notice, after all. The blue-green shimmer of her eyes, like a polished bit of jade, distracted him as they both studied each other.

“Pretty sure I saw one raised from the dead,” Koda said warily.

Sienna just nodded, her expression stony.

They stared at each other for another handful of seconds before Sienna tilted her head to one side, causing her pointed red-black ears to flop slightly. The gesture softened her harsh appearance and actually looked quite adorable, though he ruthlessly quashed that reaction for now. He had more important things to think about besides how cute the wolf woman in front of him was.

Or wondering if the fur on her ears and tail is as soft as it looks. Stop it, Koda! 

“Why are you here… Koda? I believe that was the name you gave us?” Sienna’s question came in a whisper, but there was the ring of iron determination in her voice.

Koda had a feeling that if she didn’t like his answer, that spear might end up in his face, again.

“I’m not going to abandon someone in need of help, and it didn’t look like you were going to be able to talk the others into helping in time,” Koda said after a moment of thought.

Sienna blinked once, a single, slow gesture with her eyes before she tilted her head the other way, causing her ears to flop again. A slight movement behind her caught his attention and drew Koda’s eyes to the mottled red-black mass of her tail, which wagged slowly.

“So you decided to hare off by yourself to try to lend a hand?” Sienna’s tone was neutral, but he thought he saw a twinkle of amused curiosity in her eyes.

“Better than sitting around and being yelled at,” Koda said with a shrug and got a nod in return.

“You will help us?” she asked again as if she didn’t believe him.

“I said before”—Koda fought to keep irritation out of his tone at her question— “I’m not going to abandon someone in need of help.”