Blood Red (9781101637890) by Mercedes Lackey Read Free Book Online

but he had nothing.” Hans bent his white-blond head over the waist area of the body. He immediately saw what Rosa had found about the body that was interesting. “Huh. Belt?” He indicated a paler stripe of fur that went all the way around the “waist” area of the body.
    â€œBelt,” she confirmed. The presence of a wolfskin belt meant that
this
werewolf had been a magician of some kind, and had deliberately chosen to transform himself in order to kill. Oh, it was possible to transform for other reasons, but every magician she had encountered that had done so had used forbidden blood magic. And had been a murderer in both two- and four-legged form.
    There were two kinds of werewolves that Rosa knew of; those that transformed themselves by magic, like this one and the one that had attacked and murdered Grossmutter Helga, and those who had been born with the ability to transform. She had
heard
that, allegedly, there was a third kind, transformed by the bite of another werewolf, whose transformative power was out of his conscious control. She had personally never seen one.
    She had also personally never seen a benign werewolf, although her mentor insisted they existed. Then again, she only ever saw the ones she was forced to hunt down and kill, so perhaps her view of the beasts was skewed, and her skepticism that such a thing existed misplaced.
    Or perhaps her mentor was wrong, and eventually the beast within overcame every werewolf.
    There was more rustling in the undergrowth, and they both looked up to see one of their two hosts come pushing his way onto the path. By this point, the sun was up, mist had gathered down in the bowl of the valley below them, and the morning sunlight just gilded the tops of the trees. Matei looked relieved to see them both—then his eyes widened as they fell on the body of the werewolf.
    In full light, it looked nothing at all like the half-beast that had terrorized Rosa and murdered Grossmutter Helga. It looked like an extremely large wolf, and nothing about it was out of the ordinary, until you got to the head.
Then
it was clear this was no common wolf. The head was much bigger than that of a proper wolf—or rather the skull was, which gave it a slightly misshapen look. The silver shot that Rosa had used, created specifically to kill werewolves, had torn its chest apart. Silver was the only metal that prevented the shape-shifters from healing. In fact, they couldn’t abide having any of it on their bodies at any time, not even the ones who did their transformations by means of magic.
    Which made the glint of metal under the fur around the beast’s neck that much more out of the ordinary. As Matei drew closer, Rosa poked at the fur where she thought she had seen something shine with the tip of her dagger. Just as he reached them, the dagger caught on and dislodged a copper chain, with a pendant dangling from it. Somehow not one of the pieces of shot had cut the chain or damaged the little oval pendant. She seized the chain at the ornament, and yanked sharply, breaking it.
    â€œWell, well, look here.” She held out her prize to the others. The pendant was a medal—a saint’s medal, that of St. Hubert, who was also the patron saint of the Bruderschaft . . .
    Or more to the point, it was a medal showing St. Hubert’s
stag,
the vision that allegedly turned the Saint to a life of piety. This was the same medal that the Bruderschaft wore.
    With two differences.
    The medal was copper, not silver.
    And the crucifix between the stag’s horns was inverted.
    Her companions’ eyes bulged as she held it up to the light, examining it critically. There was nothing on the back, which was interesting.
    â€œIs it—” Hans ventured.
    She was getting no sickening feeling of evil, nor any tingling of residual magic, and Earth Masters were particularly sensitive to such things. She shook her head. “Nothing. Just ordinary