The sister was little more than a prostitute even though her bloodlines were the same. He could never be contented with a whore. Bringing her to bed, controlling her, owning her, would not be a challenge. It would be like taming a chicken to peck corn from his hands. Someone else could have her.
Dougal needed a falcon for a mate.
He slipped the leash. Shadow flowed and became his namesake, a moving blackness among the other pools of black under the ancient trees. The two of them crept along the valley, searching through the tangled underbrush of the ridges and the laurel thickets along the clear limestone stream in the depths, testing the air for scent and the ground for tracks. Dougal let the tension and danger of the hunt, of the primitive hostile forest, wash over him and take his spirit. Shadow lived for the hunt and the kill. So did his master. They became two bodies of one will. Then Dougal knelt and read a track, tracing the thin line of its edge in a single patch of carelessly printed moss.
This would have been the only trace of his prey, if he had been hunting by himself or with a normal cat. Shadow was not normal. Most cats hunt by sight and sound. They have good noses but rarely hunt by smell. Not Shadow. He would follow a scent through the brimstone fumes of hell.
"Yes," Dougal whispered, half in his mind. "Yes, my old friend. We have him. We have our poacher."
Dougal scratched the coarse fur between the ears, smoothing it into a slick pelt and then roughening it down to the roots and the fierce heat beneath. His hunters gave him the gift of friendship, of the intimacy that Fiona and the others denied him. Shadow, and the peregrine, and the others, they were Dougal's true lovers.
The Pierce woman would be another, far greater than the others. Liam had said she even worshipped trees. She would understand his passion for the savage beauties of the wildwood.
"Go. Kill."
Shadow bounded along the line of the track, clearing twenty feet at a leap, and vanished into the bushes. Dougal's finger traced the track again, a single boot-print in the moss.
Man, human, slave: the fugitive hadn't fled from Dougal's keep. The same beast-mastery that bound Shadow and the falcons also worked on humans. None of Dougal's slaves ever ran away. None of them ever turned on him, or disobeyed, once he'd finished training them.
That was Dougal's magic. That was his gift from the Blood. That would bind the woman to him, once she was brought from the land of humans to the Summer Country.
Thrashing burst out in the bushes ahead, followed by curses and a scream. Dougal pushed himself up from his crouch, straightening kinks in his spine and quietly wiping his hands. He could have moved as fast and deadly as the cat, but he didn't need to rush: Shadow could avoid any weapons a human slave might carry in the Summer Country. That was the other way the cat was more than a normal leopard. A brain sat behind those golden eyes.
Now Dougal smelled fear on the breeze, rank human sweat and blood tinged by thin sour urine. Twigs snapped and a scraping sound gave him a clear picture of fingernails clawing bark. Shadow coughed once, a snarling cat-curse followed by silence.
{Treed.}
The thought blossomed in Dougal's head. His smile grew broader. To flee a leopard into a tree . . . .
Dougal could feel a plan forming. Shadow measured distances and angles, tensing muscles as his thoughts bounced to a low, heavy branch and then a higher one, switching back and forth and spinning like furred lightning until the frightened human twisted around and lost his grip and fell or dropped his spear. Then the kill would follow, and the hot rush of sweet blood.
{Do it!}
The image broke. Dougal didn't mind. He didn't need to see the details as they happened. The sounds and his bond with the forest gave him what he needed: the scratch of claw on bark, the thrashing leaves as a hundred pounds of cat sprang from ground to limb to limb, the scream of terror, the clatter of a wooden shaft falling to the ground, the crunching thud of a body following it.
There.
Shadow crouched under the tree, paws claiming his kill. His golden eyes blazed with blood-lust. Beast-master and beast read each other's thoughts, respectful.
The human lay twisted, leg broken by the fall. Deep fang wounds tore the throat where Shadow had made his killing bite. Dougal didn't recognize him, but the Old One rarely paid much attention to slaves even in his own keep. They were fixtures, much like chairs or doors. He only noticed them when they didn't work.
Shadow inched away from the head of the corpse, keeping a possessive paw on the lower back. This meat belonged to him.
Dougal crouched, not looming over the cat and threatening his claim, and drew a short, heavy boning knife. Skill slid the point between two vertebrae and levered, snapping one bone loose from another. Sharp steel sliced through the tough cartilage, the tendons, muscles, arteries, and veins, until the head fell loose. The trophy was all he wanted from this kill. It would hang outside his keep, not important enough for a place of honor but a statement none the less.
Dougal glanced down at the headless corpse. He felt better about Liam, and the Pendragon, and Fiona, and Sean. The cat had settled down, both front paws pinning one leg to the ground as an anchor against the rip and pull of his jaws. Man-flesh vanished in chunks, to the sound of crunching bone and a deep, satisfied purr like an idling diesel.
Dougal shook his head. One thing Fiona didn't understand, one thing none of them understood. It wasn't the killing that mattered to Dougal. It was controlling the killer.
The falcon, the cat,
