Page 2 of To Run with the Wild Hunt

I wavered, everything starting to swim around me as my blood ran down my savaged legs. "I'm not a deer or a dog," I said, somehow keeping my voice steady in the face of certain death. "I'd rather stand here and bleed to death."

That made the man laugh, throwing his head back and belling out a sound as dangerous as the howl of his hounds, his antlers framing the sky. The animals lifted their noses and joined him, their voices soaring up into the air.

I couldn't help it. The terror, the light-headedness, and the surreal nightmare of it all collapsed in on me. I started laughing, too, bright and hysterical, laughing the laugh of the condemned until the night fell over my eyes and everything went as still and silent as death.

Prey

Nuada Silverhand

It had been a long time since I'd been intrigued enough by a human to bring them underhill.

After these long years, mortals were all so predictable. You could smell it on the wind, the predators sorting themselves from the prey in the bright song of adrenaline and the sour delight of terror. They liked to think of themselves as greater than the beasts, but when my horns scraped the sky they were no different from the hounds and the deer that fled before them.

Except for this woman. She'd chosen iron and defiance, burning my hounds and laughing as her blood stained the earth.

The novelty caught my interest, and I caught her body as she dropped. Power rippled out from me as I did, recognizing her as part of me the moment I touched her. The wounds torn into her body by my hounds closed, woad tattoos in the shapes of their jaws marking her limbs as my strength scrolled across her body.

I went stiff, my eyes widening as the hounds whined, circling around my steed. My horse shifted, restive beneath me from the tension in my legs.

I'd had my power stripped from me once, claimed at the source and ripped from my bones and blood. But she hadn't taken anything from me. She was sharing my power with me, as if it was hers. As if she was mine.

Black night.

She was my soulmate.

A creature who could share eternity with me, find balance with me. The eternal Hunter, yoked to a human.

Snarling a curse, I hauled her up with one arm, throwing her across my saddle in front of me like a slain deer, even as her body slipped away from the cervine curse of the Hunt, returning to its human form as my power ran through her.

"Master?" one of the hounds ventured, licking his lips in a conciliatory gesture.

I raised my lip, my hand tightening on the reins. The woman's body was warm against my thighs, her breathing stabilizing and color coming back into her skin as my deathless power healed her, and my whole soul yearned towards that warmth.

"Silence," I snapped at the black hound. I didn't allow them to indulge their intelligent natures when we ran the mortal world, not even one who’d once been a prince. Tonight was no different, and especially not with my fucking soulmate slung across my saddle.

A sound made them all whip their heads towards the open fields again, ears coming forward and ruffs lifting. I wheeled my horse, catching sight of a white shape in the moonlight, framed by the bone of the mask I wore. Antlers of the kind only the ancient Irish elk had once borne blotted out the stars, pale runes standing out against the brown of antler-bone.

Sarcaryn.

The howl tore from the throats of the hounds as I roared out my fury, spurring my black steed into a gallop. With an elk's belling cry, the stag-god of sex and beauty reared, his pale hooves cutting across the sky before he wheeled and leapt into a bounding run. I held my spear in an easy grip, leaning forward as the hounds raced forward, outpacing my horse in a deadly black skein.

"Fuck you," I snarled as he kept the pace, fleeing from the Hunt without a single ell of distance closing between us. I knew we couldn't catch him, for Sarcaryn ran ever before Death himself, but rage drove me. I'd lived the eons without anyone beside me but my hounds and horse, King of nothing and no one. But Sarcaryn's eternal war with the great Wolf Faerqen had spread among the rest of the Deathless, and now he'd brought it to me.

When the prey runs from the hunters, he leads the hunt. Foxhounds follow the scent of the fox and sighthounds follow the movement of the deer that flee from their white fangs, predators bound to the patterns of those they seek to master. Sarcaryn was no different, nor was I. His fleet hooves carried us from Ireland into Faery and back again, running us out.

The red tongues of my hounds lolled and lather turned the black coat of my horse white. The power of our ancient patterns ruled us, my focus as keenly on the shape of the great Stag as that of my hounds, every thud of my pulse dedicated to the desire to put the silver of my spear into the red heart of the beast fleeing before me. It didn't matter that his death wouldn't endure. He was mine to hunt, mine to kill, mine to gut for my hounds and to sling across my saddle—

Across my saddle, where weight and heat already rested.

The warmth of a woman, radiating against my thighs.

I reined up abruptly, the break in the pattern snapping my endless need to hunt, to hunt, to hunt. With a piercing whistle, I called my hounds back, the lash of my command enough to make them stumble. Even that scarce heartbeat of time was enough for Sarcaryn to vanish, crossing between worlds and leaving us standing on mortal soil.

"Walk," I said, when the hounds started dropping to the ground. One whined at me; I struck her with the butt of my spear. "Walk!" She snapped at the wood and silver, but staggered back to her feet and started walking. I goaded the rest to their feet with the same cruelty, refusing to leave them there to die on mortal soil with the rising of the sun.

Sarcaryn had run us past the endurance of mortal beasts, burning through the faery power that let the Wild Hunt roam the mortal world with the same ferocity we did the faery world. He might have cost me my hounds and horse, save that the fucking mortal woman he'd inflicted on me had… existed.

"Motherless whore," I growled as I forced my exhausted horse to move forward, feeling for the seams in the Veil that would let us cross underhill. Sarcaryn and I weren't exactly enemies; he was older and stranger than I, a god from the dawn of the world instead of one of the Tuath Dé, and I doubted he deigned to regard someone like me as a true enemy. But we certainly were in opposition, and I'd had the upper hand for millennia, ever since I'd slain his mortal son to claim the antlers I now bore.

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