Being a true shifter isn’t the blessing it may seem. But through pain and darkness Perdita seeks to find her own life despite the ambition of others…
Mandrake rested his chin on my head and made the mind link. ‘I can understand why our fae finds this lot disturbing.’
‘Me too. Although they are behaving far better than they ever have before.’
‘Yeah, well. Your man Knut owes me a life debt. And I’m thinking he is the big guy in the group.’
‘He is.’ I favoured Mandrake with a narrow-eyed stare. ‘Where did you learn to instigate the link?’
‘Mothwing thought we might need it.’
I couldn’t argue with that so I just sat back and watched, entranced as always by exactly how much beef and beer seven orcs could get outside of. It was impressive if a trifle messy. It took them the best part of an hour to finish off the beef and a goodly portion of the beer.
Mandrake flicked an eyebrow my way and I nodded.
“Knut,” he said casually, “what was up with those kids at the hot springs?”
Knut was picking his teeth with a needle pointed dagger and he grunted. However, something in my mate’s voice must have penetrated the beer fog, because he put the dagger away and stood scratching at one armpit as he thought.
“I dunno. They were pretty up themselves until we rolled in. Then they mostly shut up.”
One of the other Angels belched quite loudly. “The tall one with the mouth never buttoned it.”
“Until you smacked him around the head.”
“The second time. The first time he just kept right on talking.”
“Asswipe,” a third muscular orc joined in the conversation. “The piece of shit I had hold of was riding high on something. I near to twisted his dick off before he stopped wriggling.”
“Wonder what he was on,” Knut grunted.
“I dunno, but he had some glass vials in his pocket. I stomped on most of ‘em. Ground ‘em to paste under my boot.”
“Where’d he get the shit?”
“His dad’s some sort of science human out of the research station. Snotty bumhole. Didn’t like being told that if his kid got caught trying it on with underage females again he’d be in trouble.”
The orc, who I just then realised was female, grinned at some memory and her neighbour elbowed her hard.
“What’d’ya say to him?”
Her grin grew wider. “I might’ve said that I’d castrate the brat myself and make him eat his own balls.”
Knut belched sonorously. “Seems proportionate to me.”
He ambled off into the trees and I had to push down the impetus to question the female further. It was unlikely she knew any more than she had said, and anyway asking her without her pack leader being present would have been the cue for a fight.
The drunkest of the orcs lay on his back and started to sing. Well, I say sing, what I mean is bellow loudly at the sky.
“Shut up Gobshite.”
“You gonna make me?”
The singer struggled to his feet, but whatever he had been going to say or do was immediately superseded by the call of nature.
“Orcs shit in the woods,” he announced before shambling off into the undergrowth.
I marked his entry place carefully as the chances of him getting lost were high, and if that happened me and Mandrake would have to lead the retrieval party.
While we waited for Knut to return I replayed the conversation in my head. I’d just got to ‘most of them’ when the pack leader stumbled back into the clearing. He’d obviously been thinking too.
“Stomped on most of them?”
“Yes Pack Leader. I kept two.”
“Why’d you do that, my mate?” He sounded puzzled and right on the edge of being angry.
She showed him her fangs. “One for our chemists to look at and one for The Agency.”
It was amazing, and mightily pleasing, to see such a big orc reduced to the status of a naughty schoolboy. He ducked his head and looked at his own huge feet.
“I’m sorry, mother of my cubs, it’s you have the brains.”
She chuckled. “You stick to cracking heads, and leave the thinking to me. Now. If we had some music.”
I sprinted into the biggest of the store caves and came out with the music box my master had stolen from some humans. I keep it charged in his memory so I could turn the dial to ‘heavy rock’ and fill the clearing with wailing guitars and a thumping beat. The orcs started to dance, stamping their feet and swinging their shoulders in perfect time with the beat.
I leaned into Mandrake. “They can keep this up for hours.”
“Somehow that isn’t a surprise.” He watched for a while. “Some of them are females aren’t they?”
I looked carefully. “Two or maybe three.”
“Three?”
As Mandrake studied the whirling stomping figures a ululating wail split the night air. He dropped into a fighting crouch.
“What the frag?”
“Orcs shit in the woods. And quite often get lost.”
The dancers came to a ragged and reluctant halt. Knut scratched his exceedingly hairy chest.
“Anybody know where that fragging moron Gobshite went?”
The orcs all shook their heads, and Knut tugged ferociously at his own beard in irritation.
I whistled sharply to get the big guy’s attention. “I know where your lost packmate went into the undergrowth, and what direction he took.”
“That’s a start, but it’s still gonna frag up the party.”
Mandrake laughed. “I’ll go find him.”
One of the females glared at Mandrake. “What you gonna do we can’t, human?”
Knut’s mate smacked her firmly around the head. “Mouth shut and eyes open,” she snapped.
Mandrake stepped out of the firelight onto the freezing cold grass of the upland meadow and the chilly moonlight. He made the change and the disrespectful orc swallowed audibly.
“You better hope,” Knut rumbled, “that there isn’t a vengeful dragon.”
Mandrake turned his whirling multicoloured gaze on the group of orcs for a heartbeat, before giving his full attention to the business of taking off in a fairly limited space. Three wingbeats took him to treetop height and he began the search.
It didn’t take him long to locate the lost orc and he hovered above it, whistling to attract attention, but the distressed drunkard just carried on crashing about in circles and making his horrible ululating noises. Mandrake swooped and scraped the top of the orc’s head with his talons, but even that failed to break through the twin fogs of alcohol and panic.
I saw the precise moment that my mate’s patience ran out, so the blue flame that lit the woodland in front of Gobshite came as no surprise. The rest of the orcs were a bit more surprised, with Knut going so far as to throw back his head and roar.
“We’re in for some sport now,” he said.
His mate’s grin was a feral thing, and I made a mental note not to get on the wrong side of her.
“Sport?” it was the voice of the orc who had disrespected Mandrake, only now it quivered with barely concealed fear.
“Oh yes. You are about to watch a dragon herd his prey. Only this time he won’t eat what he herds. Or at least I hope he won’t.”
Knut looked at me and I hastened to reassure him. “No. He won’t eat your orc. Orc flesh gives him wind.”
The pack stared at me for a second before the idea that I was joking landed. When it did they laughed far more than such a small jest merited, with Knut hisself capping my joke with a very rude suggestion about hot dragon wind.
Working Title Blogspot 
Leave a comment