Blood of the Earth by Faith Hunter Read Free Book Online Page A

With the other hand, he touched the crown of his head. When he drew back his palm, it was smeared with blood. His eyes went wide; he tilted up his head, eyes darting through the branches. But Paka had already leaped. Flying through the air, silent as the shadow of death in the valley of evil.
    Joshua saw. Movements jerky, he tried to raise his gun. Too late. Paka crashed into him and rode him to the earth, her claws embedded in his face, the long retractable claws holding his skull and jaw. Her back feet slammed into his middle, crushing out his breath in a strangled scream as they landed.
    “Paka! No!” Rick darted into the opening between the trees and waded through the small pond, his boots sinking in the clay and splashing me with icy water.
    Paka roared again, a hacking, growling scream that sent shivers through the forest and into my cold flesh. She turned greenish-gold eyes to me and hacked, asking me what I wanted to do. Rick came to a stop at the edge of the pool and looked from her to me, his eyes wide and uncertain, watching.
    On his shoulder something moved, the other life force I’d noted earlier. It chittered and bounced up and down to see in the gloaming dark. When I didn’t react, it leaped ahead and landed, racing from Rick, fast as a flying bird, bounding as if winged, toward Paka. More wrongness rocked through the earth, shocking the breath from me.
    “Pea! No!” Rick screamed. And I knew something horrible was about to happen. The thing drew in its body to leap. Steel glinted at its feet. Wrong, so very
wrong
.
    “No,” I whispered. In response to my thoughts, the groundseemed to close over its back feet. The critter whiplashed and rolled, its body stuck, as if on flypaper. It squealed, the sound catlike and mad. The small creature rippled and went still. Like the others, it looked at me. It wasn’t a rodent. Not a cat.
Something else.
Something with dark steel claws the size of good butcher knives, longer than it should be able to use, small as it was. Neon green, shaped like a small cat, claws out.
Steel claws.
An animal with
steel
claws longer than my hand.
It was so foreign that the forest would have rejected it and spit it out, sending the thing rolling, had I not clenched my mind around its feet. Yet, even through the ground, I couldn’t get a feel for what the creature was.
    Rick stared at his mate, his face and eyes fierce and angry and hurting. I had no idea what the expressions and emotions meant, but they were deep and intense, an agony of the soul. “Paka. No. Please, Pea. She was trying to save the woman, Nell.”
    The thing on the forest floor hissed, its claws flashing. I didn’t know what it was, but I had a feeling what it intended. “Why does it want to kill Paka?” I asked.
    Paka, sitting atop Joshua, growled low, the sound vibrating through the air and the earth. Her claws had pricked him, making him bleed, and I could sense that blood seeping into the ground, Joshua’s blood and Ephraim’s blood, strange and metallic. The earth was thirsty, so eager for sustenance that it made my mouth go desert dry and my stomach cramp with need. Eight years since I had fed it. Eight long years. Distantly I heard Joshua whimper.
    “That’s what its species does,” Rick said, his voice empty of everything but dread. “They live with us, like pets and friends, but they’re here for one reason, as a deterrent, to keep us from spreading the were-taint or killing humans. For a were-creature to kill a human or to bite and transmit the were-taint, the punishment is death. Always.”
    And Brother Ephraim hung on the tree limb, not far from us. Pea knew what had happened to him. Somehow. And for the weres, Pea was justice and vengeance and death. “And though Paka hurt Brother Ephraim saving me, there’s no hint of mercy?”
    “No. None,” Rick whispered, his eyes on his mate. Tortured. But oddly I didn’t see love as I understood it, or evenlove as the library books suggested it might