Charmed I'm Sure Read Online Free Page B

you can.” I took off toward the logging trail, using the pike as an over-sized walking stick. “It’s up to you.”
    Eric followed, but he wasn’t in good shape. He’d already run himself to the edge of his limits while suffering from blood loss, and he was an emotional and physical wreck. It still didn’t take very long for him to start gasping questions.
    â€œWhere are we going?”
    â€œTo the river,” I said. “She can follow our scent trail, and she sees in infrared. We have to conceal our smell and lower our body temperature. Also, her voice is hypnotic. If she starts talking and you find yourself getting hazy, scream your head off. Fire that gun. Plug your ears. Do whatever you have to do to drown her voice out.”
    â€œWhat about you?”
    â€œI’ll manage,” I said tersely.
    â€œIs she…is she a demon?” he asked, and his voice quivered.
    â€œI don’t know,” I said. Wila, or vila, or wili, or veela, are the source of a lot of stories. They’re a kind of cross between a wood nymph and a succubus. I don’t know if they stay young by taking life energy from the act of sex or adoration, or if they’re immortal and just like to screw, but they usually keep a lover around, and they go through a lot of them. Nymph is where the word nympho came from.
    In the old stories, wila rode on the backs of reindeer and hunted rejected lovers with bows and arrows. Apparently they’d upgraded to Harleys and automatic weapons. Either way, seeking out and destroying lovers they hadn’t made a psychic connection with was apparently still a tradition or instinct that drove them.
    We made it to the riverbank in a ragged, disorganized fashion and Eric collapsed. I quickly stripped down to my boxers and smeared cold river mud over my body. Then I dragged Eric out to a fallen tree whose trunk extended some twenty feet into the river. I settled him onto a rough nest of branches and left him there some nine inches above the surface of the water, the Thompson on his chest.
    These were the best conditions I was going to get. Elemental alliances are important among such creatures, and the magic of the wila is aligned to the earth. There are stories of wila changing into falcons and eagles and swans and snakes and horses and wolves, but I have never heard any story where a wila changed into an animal that could breathe underwater.
    I was gambling my life on that distinction.
    I had taken away the wila’s distance weapon, and if I was right, as long as I was standing in the water she would have to come at me openly no matter what form she took. My bow slung over my bare shoulder again, a quiver with four arrows still fastened to its stock, I refastened the belt that held my holstered pistol and sheathed knife, then picked up the stake and pike.
    I was too loaded down. I would have preferred to leave the bow and pistol on shore, but then the wila could have tracked them by scent and used them against me.
    There was a cleft rock jutting out of the water at a level somewhere between my navel and nipples, and I went out to it and shoved the hawthorn stake into the rock’s crack. Moving a few yards inward until the water was slightly below my knees, I placed the hawthorn pike on the surface of the river and stepped on it, submerging it. I then withdrew the knife from its sheath.
    I don’t know how long I waited there. Not long. Her voice, when it came from the shadows of the trees on the riverbank, was still beautiful.
    â€œWhat are you?”
    â€œWould you believe room service?” I asked. My voice was oddly relaxed, almost gentle now that one or both of us would be dead soon.
    â€œThere are no rooms here,” she said tartly. “And you didn’t bring me anything. In fact, you took something that belonged to me and tried to kill me.”
    â€œI didn’t say I was very good at it,” I pointed out.
    â€œWhat are you