Ren snarled. The sound was low, utterly inhuman. It echoed in her chest, cut through the brown half-light. And for a moment—for the briefest moment—even the trees seemed to shiver.
Humans. In her mind, the word sounded like a curse. Careless, stupid—
The trees, once so silent, rustled.
Ren stiffened. Ignoring every instinct screaming inside her, she did not move. She blinked, as slow and luxurious as a cat. She felt her vision transform, sliding into familiar angles and shades, as she scanned the trees opposite. The colors had paled, their relative dimness sharpening every movement, every heartbeat in the trees. Everything was still. It was a good thing the humans were dead at her feet. They wouldn’t have taken it well: the black-rimmed eyes of a cat, slit pupils and all, shining in the face of a girl.
Ren turned around.
A strzygoń stood before her.
Her eyes may have been animal, but the rest of her was still human. And right down to the human bone, she trembled.
Run, whispered a tiny voice somewhere inside her. Now.
Though roughly the size of the human it had once been, the strzygoń looked nothing like the corpses in the clearing. It stood on all fours, joints locked. With the bulging eyes of a goat, oblong pupils in slate gray, it considered her. It put its head to the side, feathery brows jutting over those terrible eyes. It looked almost like an enormous moth, and again, Ren trembled.
Run.
But she was rooted to the spot.
The strzygoń began to pace. It retained all the right joints for a human, but its limbs bent in all the wrong ways.
Ren scraped up every last scrap of courage and forced her face into a grin.
“Still hungry?” She jerked her chin, beckoning it toward her. “Come on, then.”
She wasn’t sure if it could understand her. It issued a low hiss, feathers ruffling on the lower half of its face. Ren felt her smile falter.
Run, screamed her still-human heart. Run.
It took one nauseatingly uncoordinated step toward her. It twitched its head. Almost all the way around, like an owl.
“Oh, yuck,” she murmured.
The strzygoń leapt.
Ren fell back. She hissed. And she changed.
Her knees shot to her chest and her spine curled up. Her muscles expanded, snapping into place around her limbs. Power tore across her shoulders. Fur raced over her skin. Her world tilted into focus.
Ren leapt. She met the strzygoń midair. And not as a human.
As a lynx.
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 Ryś, sauntering out of the trees. “Really waited for the last second to change, didn’t you?”
Ryś 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. Ryś 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 Ryś.
“Three each,” said Czarn, divvying them up.
“Unfair,” Ren griped. “I already killed one. And I was bait.”
“If you’re scared,” Ryś 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,” Ryś 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, Ryś,” Ren interrupted. She avoided looking at the dead humans. “We need to bury them.”
Czarn and Ryś looked up at the same time.
“They can bury themselves,” snorted Ryś. “That’s what they get for coming in here.”
“I’m serious,” said Ren. “They could still turn into strzygi.”
Czarn and Ryś exchanged a glance. Recrossing his paws so his scar was hidden, Czarn said, “We don’t know that for sure.”
“That’s the point,” replied Ren. “We have no idea how they change. I don’t want them waking up tomorrow and then we have to kill them again.”