Her fangs found its throat before it even had a chance to fully register the transformation. It howled as she drove it into the ground. The strzygoń screamed and lashed out with broken nails. They scraped harmlessly off her thick fur. It kicked with its back legs, but Ren easily pinned them. Its re-formed limbs could not match the strength of her forelegs. She bit down. Hot blood splashed over her face.
The strzygoń slackened. It twitched twice and went still. Ren did not let go right away. Some monsters took more than one kill.
“Not bad, Malutka,” said Ry?, sauntering out of the trees. “Really waited for the last second to change, didn’t you?”
Ry? was the only one who dared used that pet name. Malutka, the little one. And only because he was older.
Ren dropped the strzygoń, still cautious enough to keep a paw on its lifeless corpse.
She grinned. “Keeps it interesting.”
“If you ask me,” came a second voice, “killing undead owl-people is a little too interesting.”
A slender black wolf had followed Ren’s brother out of the undergrowth. Where both the lynxes were low and muscular, the wolf was long-legged and elegant. He walked with the slightest suggestion of a limp.
Ren smiled back. Her heart was still pounding, but terror had begun to give way to a thrilling kind of light-headedness.
“Come on, they’re so easy to kill,” she said as scornfully as she could. “I wouldn’t mind a real challenge, you know?”
“A real challenge?” asked Czarn. “As in, let’s say, taking on a whole pack of these delights, and being wildly outnumbered?”
Ren grinned.
“It would be a pleasure, Czarn.”
“Excellent,” he said, nodding to the trees opposite.
Ren turned slowly.
The strzygoń hadn’t been alone. The rest of its pack paced at the edge of the clearing, hunters weighing their prey. Their limbs moved in unnatural directions. They all had variations on the same face: some with beaks, some without eyes. Some still looked almost human, except for the feathers trailing over their skin, the wicked spikes of their teeth, the insect eyes peering out of their faces.
Czarn shifted his weight to his good paw. Ry? flexed his claws, growling. Ren’s stomach knotted and unknotted.
“How many?” she asked.
The strzygi wove in and out of the trees, disappearing and reappearing.
“Nine,” counted Ry?.
“Three each,” said Czarn, divvying them up.
“Unfair,” Ren griped. “I already killed one. And I was bait.”
“If you’re scared,” Ry? said, chuckling as the strzygi began to move more purposefully, “then I can take four—”
“I’m not scared—”
“I hate to interrupt,” drawled Czarn, always the picture of elegance. “But—”
The strzygi charged.
The animals met the monsters mid-clearing.
The fight was short. And bloody. One of the beakier strzygi managed to take a chunk out of Czarn’s ear before the wolf’s powerful jaws closed around its throat and severed its head. When all the creatures were dead, the three of them went through the corpses and ripped off the rest of their heads. It was not clean work. By the time they were done, the trees were sprayed with blood, and Ren was drenched from nose to claw.
She wondered how long these strzygi had been a pack. Ren didn’t know exactly how it happened, but they often started as humans. She suspected they were the villagers who’d wandered into her forest, got lost, and—unfortunately—survived. The longer they stayed, bathed in the forest’s particular kind of evil, the more monstrous they became. A warm breeze riffled the clothes on the humans who had been killed. Next to the strzygi, they looked almost . . . peaceful.
Ren shuddered.
To think these had all once been humans. Had once looked a bit like her. . . .
Czarn wove through the corpses, tongue lolling over his wet chin. He was tired, and it made his limp more pronounced.
“I’m too old for this,” he panted, flopping down.
“You’re younger than me,” Ry? replied, rolling over and stretching into a lynx-shaped crescent. A shaft of sun braved the thick boughs and shone in, warming his belly. Czarn just smirked and crossed his long black paws. A patch of whitish-gray fur covered his injured foreleg.
“Czarn, Ry?,” Ren interrupted. She avoided looking at the dead humans. “We need to bury them.”
Czarn and Ry? looked up at the same time.
“They can bury themselves,” snorted Ry?. “That’s what they get for coming in here.”
“I’m serious,” said Ren. “They could still turn into strzygi.”
Czarn and Ry? exchanged a glance. Recrossing his paws so his scar was hidden, Czarn said, “We don’t know