fast enough!
Lagula's bolt burned his neck, cut a shallow groove in it before burying itself inches deep in the tree. Radu laughed, a great bark of a laugh . . . until Rakhi's bolt bit deep into his left thigh, scraped bone and jammed there, midway between knee and buttock.
Radu had fired his last bolt. He had nothing to fight back with except his fierce Wamphyri strength. He would have fought, certainly, if his leech had let him. But survival was uppermost in the symbiont's 'mind'; its host's survival, and its own, of course.
The werewolf let himself fall to the forest's floor, went three-legged, limping through the undergrowth, but still with the sinuous, flowing motion of the Wamphyri. And this time he breathed his mist in earnest, knowing what he did, to obscure him as he fled. Not far from Ion Zirescu's dangling, ravaged body, he found the machete where it had fallen, and for a moment considered standing and fighting. But a greater wisdom (or a more sinister, insidious instinct?) forbade it. For the time being, survival was everything.
Once, near the edge of the clearing, Radu paused to look back, and saw the Ferenczys still blundering about in his mist, searching for him (but searching oh so carefully!) in the undergrowth on the fringe of the stand of trees. The fools, to have let him slip through their fingers like this! Didn't they know, didn't they realize, that he'd be back for them? Obviously not. Radu thought to remind them, and as the moon tumbled from view behind the treetops, he threw back his head and howled.
And from now on, whenever the Ferenczy brothers heard the howling of a wolf, they would automatically tremble and reach for the nearest weapons ...
In the western foothills, well away from the camp of the Zirescus, Radu cut the flights from the bolt that transfixed his thigh and drew it out head-first. At first there was pain, but as he gritted his teeth the pain faded to a dull throb, and in another moment all that remained was an insensitive numbness, as if his thigh were asleep.
There were medicinal leaves Radu knew of that would help in the healing, but he didn't bother with them. Something told him they weren't necessary. It was his leech, already at work on him with its vastly superior metamorphic processes.
Radu was a changeling creature now, but in the main his mind remained the mind of a man, and in his sleep he was visited by nightmares. He dreamed of the Thing that he'd become, and woke up cold and shivering, unwilling to accept the fact that he was no longer entirely human. His vampire, of course, worked on him to subdue all such fears and regrets. Dimly, he was aware of its influence: the small urging voice of some subconscious 'conscience' that nagged or advised him; no voice at al, but in fact chemical agents and catalysts in his blood and his brain, changing the way he thought. Eventually he succumbed to suggestion, stopped fearing and lost interest in it; finally he accepted that he was what he was - without considering that he was what his leech wanted him to be.
When the moon was down or on the wane, he was a man - a wolfish-looking man, by all means - but a man. When the moon was up and full, then it was hard to remain a man. But at all times he was Wamphyri, even though he still didn't understand or recognize his condition ...
He dwelled for some years between the foothills and the barrier mountains, sleeping in deep caves or crevices by day, and wandering gradually eastwards by night. And despite that his work wasn't finished in the camps of the Szgany Zirescu - by now the Szgany Ferenczy - and that it never would be while Rakhi and Lagula lived, still he put distance between. He knew that to return now would mean certain death; the entire tribe would be watching out for him, doubtless with orders to shoot on sight. And in any case he needed time to explore his amazing powers: his mentalism, metamorphism, and the source of his boundless, surging energy. As for the wound in his thigh: that had healed in a night and a day; there was scarcely a scar to show for it.
Adept at avoiding the encampments or settlements of men, he continued to do so; alas that they couldn't avoid him.
But the farther east Radu