Page 1 of On A Rift's Edge
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Lyall paused at the top of the ridge, panting with the exertion of having run up a good portion of Mt. Hood. Damn, but that had been fun.
He was far stronger in his true hellhound form than in his human alterform or that damn Scottish terrier shape he had been forced into during his years of service to Arimanius, the ratkind mafia boss. Making it up to the tree line had taken effort, though, and after months of self-recrimination and second-guessing, it felt wonderful to focus on the physical. For hours there had been only the burn of muscles surging under his pale fur and the cool relief in his lungs as he sucked in the pine-scented mountain air.
What didn’t feel wonderful was what awaited him in the gaping crater that was all that remained of the former top of Oregon’s highest peak. Mt. Hood had been a sleeping giant before the Sundering, when portions of the Riftworld had splintered away from the rest of its universe. Each fragment had ended up scattered over part of the Earth, isolated chunks of an alternate dimension that functioned under the physical laws of the Riftworld. Traveling out of those areas meant being subject to the bizarre conditions of a different universe and a different planet.
A planet that fucking sucked, in Lyall’s admittedly biased opinion.
Many Riftworld species couldn’t survive if they ventured past a rift. Others could if they modified their forms. Lyall’s species had always been known for the ability to alter themselves, although his own particular talent for holding a fully human or Earth canine shape was exceptional even by hellhound standards.
The only thing that talent had got him was a ten-year sentence as Arimanius’s indentured servant and exile from his clan as punishment for getting trapped that way.
He stared out at what he used to call home, his panting breaths slowing. Below the ridge stretched thousands of trees felled in minutes by a massive eruption, arrayed like toothpicks around an enormous caldera. It was now a vast earth rift—humans called them hellmouths. Humans liked to associate any glowing rocks and fire with a place of eternal torment and endless agony.
Which pretty much described their entire fucking world. They should be called Earthmouths since the damn humans had turned a decently habitable planet into a dysfunctional mess.
And they had the gall to call the Sundering their Monster Apocalypse.
Lyall had never cared much for humans. That made his present situation even worse. Because there was one human he cared about a lot, and he couldn’t have him. Ever.
He tried to tamp down thoughts of Katsuo Nakamura, the young human who had been caught up in the mess that had been Lyall’s final job for Arimanius. Six months ago, Lyall and the mafia boss’s son, Remi, had traveled to Moon Star Ranch in Arizona. Next to an air rift, the ranch’s main attraction for human guests was the opportunity to catch a glimpse of the giant flying snakes Earth people called drakones and hellhounds like Lyall called mortal enemies.
The job had seemed straightforward. Remi would seduce the ranch veterinarian to get information about the drakones, and Lyall would back him up as a bodyguard. That plan had blown up in spectacular fashion, and the veterinarian’s smoking-hot assistant, Kat, had been caught in the crossfire.
Lyall had saved Kat, along with other random humans who hadn’t deserved his help. Then he had left.
Because Lyall was the worst thing that could ever happen to Kat.
Pushing thoughts of the attractive human out of his mind, Lyall made his way down the slope, the welcome smell of brimstone and rich earth filling his senses. Unlike the air rift in Arizona, this boundary between Earth and his clan’s fragment of the Riftworld wasn’t a soaring wall of light. It was a winding path through bubbling lava and vents releasing spurts of vapor and gas that bled into the fragment of the alternate universe beyond. As he trotted along, subtle changes occurred. A lump of dark rock opened into a five-petaled flower that glowed with internal fire as it stretched its voracious mouth in Lyall’s direction. A growl and snap of his huge jaws made the carnivorous plant shrink back into its rocky shell.
Once he crossed the boundary, Lyall changed into his hominid alterform, his living leather armor expanding to cover his more vulnerable body. Reaching the main building of his pack’s territory took Lyall about half an hour. Even accounting for two legs instead of four, he could have traversed the distance in half the time.
He was in no hurry to make it to this reunion. His two mothers were…trying at the best of times.
And this wasn’t the best of times. Lyall had broken free of the shameful servitude his arrogance and overconfidence had led him into, but now he was trapped in another mess.
His pack had not tried to replicate its vast underground clan den after their world changed forever twenty-five Earth years ago. It would have been impractical, and since only a fraction of their number had been caught up in the Sundering, there was no need for the vast expanse of tunnels, meeting halls, and training centers that Lyall had grown up in.
Instead, his clan had opted for accommodations in the caldera of the Mount Hood volcano, using living stone to create a main house, where his mothers lived and ruled, along with the necessities of a large fighting arena, volcanic-warmed hot springs to soak in after training bouts, and a collection of other buildings that had borrowed materials and design from the humans in the world around them.
There were more touches of that influence than there had been when Lyall left, and he gave a snort of amusement as he surveyed a wooden structure with panes of clear glass and a tasty aroma wafting out of it. His pack had become so accustomed to living near the humans of Portland that they had built a coffee shop.
There were only a few clan members on the pathway to the lodge, and they all gave Lyall a wide berth.
The doors to the structure were open, revealing a wide entryway. The building was constructed from the slow-growing organism known as living stone that his people used for most construction. On either side of the entrance, the darker volcanic black was offset by embedded weapons of gold on the right side and silver tools on the left. His mothers, Cesmak and Gremory, were co-rulers of the pack as well as spouses, although Lyall had rarely known them to agree on anything.
Except his bad life choices, of course.
Everyone not involved with critical clan business would be resting at this hour, a late afternoon downtime roughly corresponding to the Earth custom of the siesta. Lyall could have shown up earlier for the midday feast—he was hungry enough for the traditional foods of his pack that dealing with hundreds of his relatives would almost be worth it—but instead he planned on getting the confrontation with his mothers over as quickly as possible.
Two clan elders stood near the outer door to his mothers’ private quarters. They gave Lyall a disapproving glare, but showed no sign of surprise that he was back after a decade in exile. It was a good sign that his arrival had been announced, officially or by not keeping it a secret. If the plan was to punish him by putting him to death, his mothers would have been more discreet.
Probably.
“The alphas are awaiting you in the onsen.” The older female spoke, using Earth terms for both the pack leaders and the sacred hot springs reserved for them to receive petitioners and hear complaints. She and the male beside her were in their human alterforms—or the closest they could get to a hominid shape—and human vocal cords weren’t terribly useful when it came to speaking Lyall’s native language. It seemed time had softened his clan’s reluctance to identify too closely with the dominant species of this planet, although he doubted Cesmak, in particular, had grown any fonder of humans.
Lyall agreed with them on that point, with Kat being the obvious and glaring exception he was trying not to think about. He also didn’t care for other riftpeople, like drakones, or especially the ratkind, except for Remi. In fact, he didn’t get along well even with most of his clan.
