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“All that lifesign bunched up this close?” Captain Patel, in charge of the Wolves, said, leaning on his cane. “Can’t risk it. If we have to run back the way we came, they’d slow us up.”
Gamecock put a hand on his pistol. A silencer rode in a little pocket attached to the holster.
A glance passed around the group. “No, nobody’s shooting anyone captured by Southern Command’s uniform,” Valentine said. “We can manage without the Wolves. Duvalier, would you mind helping scout the trail? I know you’ve been busy and on edge for four or five days, but we miss a stillwatch, we’re in for it.”
Valentine’s deference irritated her. Hadn’t she proven she was as tough as any? “As long as I can do it alone,” she said.
She was moving along the fire trail that ran just below a ridgeline. Even with thin moonlight, the view of the rolling forest was spectacular. The night was alive with birdsong. It comforted her—birds always either went too quiet or shrieked when disturbed, and most birds found Reapers as disturbing as humans did.
The only tracks she’d come across were from motorcycles, probably the group the Wolves had captured.
The linen-tearing sound of gunfire and the heavier chatter of machine guns startled her.
Two figures—no, three—struggled up the hill. She moved down to intercept.
It was Valentine, with a Wolf and one of the Bears. She knew the Wolf, a veteran corporal named Winters. The Bear had a long, narrow face with close-trimmed full beard and curly hair. He reminded her a bit of a poodle.
“Let’s move,” Valentine said, with his old rank-of-major authority.
David Valentine had a bad leg, ever since a Twisted Cross bullet blew through his thigh, clipping the bone. Duvalier always wondered if there were some remaining fragments hurting a nerve, or if something had been irreparably severed. In any case, he limped, but could still keep up a hard, mile-eating run when he chose. She fell in beside him, and the Bear ran behind, heading northeast. Wolf scouts could be seen intermittently through the thick trees.
“It’s a staggered fallback. The Bears counterattacked while the Wolves set up for firing. Then the Bears dropped back behind the Wolves—that’s when I grabbed Scour here.”
That’s how Duvalier learned the name of the Bear.
“You abandoned—”
“We can hit back. Maybe. This many Reapers has to mean Kurians nearby.”
“Twisted Cross, maybe,” Duvalier said.
“Another possibility.”
“Why northeast?” she puffed.
“Higher ground, better signal, closer to the highway leading back up to Bloomington and Indianapolis.”
The first warning of the harpy attack was a flutter from the treetops.
A pair of red flares wobbled up into the sky with a hiss from farther up the ridgeline, their parachutes opening roughly above them, probably fired by the harpy handlers. The signal would bring the creatures, who were most likely scattered all over the ridge, into the fight.
“Goddamn them!” Scour shouted. He followed the flare contrails up the hill, unslinging a combat shotgun.
“Stay together!” Valentine ordered, shouldering his short machine pistol and firing a blast at a harpy swinging down on them like a huge spider monkey dressed in a leathery cape. An ugly, pig-nosed, snaggletoothed face snarled at them. Valentine fired another burst and it fell over a thick tree limb like a big chamois hung up to drip dry.
Uselessly, Duvalier thought. A Bear will do what a Bear does, whether it’s shit in the woods or go after some guano-crusted Quislings.
Valentine’s muzzle sparked again and the gun made its brief mechanical buzz.
He knelt to reload, and a harpy dove at him from the night. She stepped quickly to his back, sword low and ready, then swung it up. The harpy banked awkwardly to avoid her, scrabbling with its feet at her face close enough for her to hear the air being cut by its claws, and even more awkwardly crashed, opened from shoulder to bandy hind leg.
“That tree!” she said, pointing with her blood-smeared sword down the slope. The tree was a stunted oak, widespread branches spread low, ideal for eight-year-old kids but impossible for a harpy to flap through.
As they ran Valentine’s gun spat again.
“You’re hit,” Valentine said. “It’s not bad.”
She didn’t feel it. There was a hot, sticky sensation up near her hairline.
