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It is what I had already planned.
* * *
As we emerge from the tent, my eyes find Doug. I search his face and body for signs of injury, relieved when I find none.
“I am well,”he says.“Our allies are waiting.”
“We are going with them,” I say. “It is time.”
He nods, and before my eyes, the towering, brutal orc I know and love shifts into a great tusked beast with snow-white fur. He is not a wolf. He is the product of nightmares, with his savage jaws, the lower set bearing two immense tucks. His blue eyes,Doug’seyes, are wilder than usual.
Besides all this, he is huge. My head barely reaches half his height. His paws are the size of my head, and each toe is tipped by claws like daggers.
He snorts when I lay a gentle hand upon his foreleg.
I have only caught half glimpses before. Today I see him.
“You are beautiful,” I say in wonder “I have dreamed of seeing your beast form one day. May the Goddess guide your fury.”
His great snout lifting to the sky, he issues a savage roar.
ChapterNine
Jasmine
The camp disintegrates into bedlam. Word of our plans must have spread. Some bondservants take up arms and side with the orcs. Others join with us.
We run, fleeing from the camp into the forest.
We are pursued.
Camped as we were in the lower foothills of a mountain, the ground soon becomes steep, and we must scramble up the incline. Winter carries Melody, while her warrior, Jacob, runs alongside them. Doug, the shifters who colluded with Jacob, and any other bondservants who seek to flee run with us.
I see Bron off to our right battling with another orc, and I wonder if they were once friends or whether they even know each other at all.
The lines become blurred, both in the battle and in determining who is friend and foe. The noise fills my ears: the clash of weapons, the screams, the shouts, the sound of my own blood rushing in my ears as I scramble and pitch and try to keep moving.
I want to ask Doug what happened while he was away. Only I see no evidence of any shifters beyond the few who have been working with Jacob, nor other allies. It feels very much like we are too few, and there are too many in pursuit. I have neither training nor skills at battling, but I have a will to survive, one that tells me to run as fast and as hard as I can, to keep going even though my muscles and lungs burn with the strain.
There are so many fleeing, yet the orcs who follow are faster and stronger.
I see people fall, and it breaks me inside. Is Penny among those who run? I do not have time to wonder long when all my efforts must go into surviving and taking another step, scrambling a little further up the incline and keeping alert to danger.
Doug’s paws drum on the ground as he charges back and forth, dispensing with any who get too close. His white coat is smothered in blood. He is fearsome, he is brutal, and yet it is not long before I sense his growing exhaustion, the slowing of his footfall, not only him but in Bron as orcs and human bondservants who fight for the Blighten swarm us.
As is inevitable, an enemy gets through. As Doug fights an orc, a human bondservant is on me. A scream tears from my lips as I am knocked to the ground, his club raised and coming for me. Another club whistles through the air, knocking the man clean off his feet.
Bron.
The man who sought to assault me now lies broken on the forest floor.
“Winter and Jacob?”
“They were heading east, last I saw. We need to keep running, lass,” Bron calls.
Beyond him, I see a dozen orcs charge up the slope. I run, glancing back in time to see Doug rush them. They scatter as he side-swipes one, skewering the orc on his mighty tusk.
They won’t be deterred for long.
