The Devil's breath

sipped a beer and said quietly, “Tell your father. He’ll know what to do.”

She shook her head, wishing it could be otherwise, knowing she could not take the risk. Her father loved her, she was in no doubt of that, but his reaction could start a small war, and she did not want to be caught in the middle.

Someone had run into a Dartmoor foal and killed it. The high moor road was not only a scenic drive for tourists but also a rat-run for villagers getting across the moor to one of the major roads. Drivers didn’t usually stop when they killed an animal, be it a sheep or a Dartmoor pony, and this incident was no different. Special Police Constable Debbie Shilton closed the door of the village substation’s small office, having arranged for the hill farmer to remove the poor creature’s body. The death of the foal saddened her. There was a callousness in some people that she could not comprehend. Leaving any animal suffering after causing it an injury was not on so far as she was concerned, and she wished that if the culprits were ever caught, the law would prosecute and make an example of them. However, that seldom happened, even when troublemakers were caught red-handed. There were times when people’s behavior sickened her. Maybe she was not cut out to be even a part-time copper.

A car driven by a woman pulled up. There was a young boy with her. The boy looked anguished and the woman seemed scared.

“Please, officer, can you help us?” the woman said.

Shilton cast aside the momentary self-doubt; that was what she was here for, to help. Though she guessed, by the look of the young boy, that this was probably no more than a missing family pet. She smiled compassionately at Sayid.

16

!Koga had known fear in his young life. There was the time a lion challenged the hunters for the gemsbok they had brought down and he was suddenly faced with the snarling fury of a hungry lioness. He’d been so frightened that he screamed and shouted and threw stones at her, until she wilted under the hail of sharp rocks. That day had earned him respect from the other men. But it was not the fear of the lioness that had driven itself into his heart, it was the dying gemsbok. He had returned to the buck, the size of a small horse, and readied his knife. The hunter’s poison had taken a long time to work, but now its central nervous system was paralyzed and it lay helpless.!Koga knelt next to its head and thanked the gemsbok for allowing itself to fall victim to the skills of the hunters. He touched its soft muzzle with his hand. But he hesitated. The gemsbok’s brown eyes gazed at him in a moment of unspoken affinity.!Koga, transfixed, let the knife fall to the ground. The eyes held him until the last heartbeat. And then, as the life receded from those eyes,!Koga sensed the long and lonely journey that would one day be his own death. That was what frightened him. Not death, but the journey afterwards. And that same fear had touched his heart when Max had asked that he leave him alone for a while.

Max was in the pilot’s seat. The monster that was the Devil’s Breath lay somewhere ahead, and he had to find the route, but something other than the desperation of finding his father gripped Max. He didn’t know what was going to happen. Gently, his voice barely above a whisper, he told!Koga to pull down the camouflage netting and wait by the tall grass, a final rational thought to keep the plane hidden.!Koga could not imagine what his friend would see or where the shapeshifter of his mind would take him, but it was an unknown land and!Koga was convinced, like any hunter, that every wilderness harbored its own ferocious animals. Max’s eyes began to look like those of the dying animal that!Koga remembered so well. Afraid that his friend’s journey might capture his own soul and take him into the unknown, he moved away quietly.

Whatever happened when Max experienced this supernatural energy, he did not understand it. BaKoko, the shapeshifter, had released this ability within him, but Max thought, incongruously, that it was like learning to ride a motorbike. There was a power which was scary and exhilarating and, if not controlled properly, could kill. And there was no one to tell him how to control these immense feelings. When a shapeshifter gained sufficient experience and the energy was harnessed, the actual physical shape would change. The thought of being able to become another creature was far removed from his own sense of practicality-a load of tosh, was what he would have said-until he’d had that first experience. And now he was being drawn into that power again.

Max felt he was sitting inside his own body looking out. And when!Koga teased the camouflage net across the nose of the plane, being careful that the web did not snag the propeller, everything closed down for Max. No sound, no sight; all that remained was what now seemed to be the dim light at the mouth of a cave.!Koga settled the dead branches back across the netting, deepening shade settled on the plane and arrows of light pinioned Max in the darkness of the cockpit.

He waited in silence, trying to focus his mind into a place that lay as still and as remote as a pool of water. His head nodded forward, tiredness enfolding him, a sleeplike surrender easing him away.

A shuddering wrench made him gasp. Jolted, he felt as if he’d been snatched and thrown by a mighty hand. An ice-hot force seared up his spine. It was worse than he had feared. A huge rush of energy powered him through the sky, and then he hovered silently in the air. He was higher than a skyscraper, and part of him felt quivering terror, as if he hung over the edge of such a high building. His whole body shook. His cry of alarm shrieked across the sky; shadows moved on the ground and his eyes zoomed in to where a low circular mist hugged the ground. He looked over his shoulder, which was covered in overlapping layers of dense brown and gray feathers. A long way away-beyond the horizon, scrubland and low trees nestled alongside the scar that was the elephant track-was the tiny figure of his friend.

“!KOGA!” he yelled, but the cry that came from the back of his throat was not a sound he recognized. He gasped; he was unable to hover. He was a bird all right, but this time he was no hawk or eagle or whichever raptor form he had taken before; now he was a dove, swooping through the air and beginning to panic; a roller-coaster ride without anything to hang on to. But he saw the direction he had to take on the ground. Beyond the elephant grass, through the small forest and across the broken plain, small plateaus rose and dipped and animal paths gave a sense of direction for a few kilometers. Beyond the ravines and increasing tangles of scrubland lay a ragged-edged black hole, punched into the earth’s surface. The shape of its snarling face would not be visible from the ground; only a pilot or a bird would see how the land had been scrunched and twisted from a meteor’s impact, millions of years ago. The shattered remnants of rock formed eyebrow scars, and the slab of stone below, a broken nose. The gaping, broken-toothed chasm exhaled a sour mist that fed the vegetation. It was the entrance to hell and the place most feared by the Bushmen.

The place held his attention, but when he looked beyond the smashed earth he saw the distant glint of water. A river, like a fat Gaboon viper, settled lazily; reeds and sandbanks where creatures lay, unmoving. Crocodiles. Big ones. He was learning to see things now, his head twisting, giving himself different viewpoints, and the most obvious formation of rocks now made itself clear. Square blocks formed a structure, figures moved, dust rose from a moving vehicle. It was a fort. Skeleton Rock.

Max tried to turn; somehow he had to get back to!Koga, but flying was not easily mastered. He fluttered helplessly, as if caught in a storm, and his panic sent shock waves through the air. Another cry filled the desert sky; cruel and piercing, it instinctively terrified him. A dark shape circled high above him, the ragged edges of its wings dipping and controlling its flight. A memory flashed into his mind-baboons shrieking with fear at the shadow of a martial eagle. Now one had sighted him as its prey. Wings folded, it plummeted through the sky in perfect attack mode. Moments later, ripping talons would make short, vicious work of him. Max tried to escape; he could see the tiny figure of!Koga squatting in a tree’s shade, hundreds of meters below him.!KOGA! But of course the boy heard nothing. Ripping talons slashed, a feather’s breadth from Max’s face, but no sooner had the eagle missed its attack than it pulled off an incredible midair maneuver and struck again. Its heel talon stabbed backwards, cutting into feather and down.

Max was falling. The stomach-churning ride was now an out-of-control tumble. But how many times had he been told he was a natural sportsman? What Max could see, Max could do. Show him the position to take on a white-water kayak, demonstrate the body angle for a downhill off-piste ski run, and Max could hold that picture in his head, and his muscle memory repeated it. Eagles went bullet-shaped in their attack dive; so too could Max. Concentration forced his panic further back into his consciousness. He felt everything change. A subtle shift of