Gonji: A Hungering of Wolves by T. C. Rypel

nothing, caring not to gaze into one another’s ice-crusted faces.
    Gonji found that Orozco was alive, and his heart was briefly lightened. At least four of Perigor’s troop also chugged along at their ponderous gait through the haunch-deep crusted snow.
    But their relief in living allies was fleeting. Doubling back along the bloody, corpse-strewn trail only focused them as targets, toys for the amusement of supernatural assailants.
    Night swept down from the sky in an impossible swirling gray fog. Black shapes moved within it, stark shadows with menacing substance, watching, waiting. At last working their demon-spawned evil.
    Flying shapes, bulky and vermin-furred, began to strafe the survivors from above. At first they merely antagonized with their piercing titters as they soared overhead. Then they would single out a horseman who had strayed from the rest and arc down to buffet him with their wings and formless limbs. Finally one man reined in his steed, halted its endless plodding, signaling his own doom. Once stopped, a horse could no longer find strength and courage enough to resume its plunging at the relentless tundra.
    The fogbound horrors swarmed him. His voice cried out in French, hurling oaths as he swung a weapon overhead with pathetically useless strokes. Horse and rider crashed sideways into the snow bank, which seemed to open and engulf him. There was no helping him. His fellows angled their complaining mounts toward him, cursing, threatening in cracked and strained voices. The warrior, mired to the shoulders in reddening snow, was seized and borne off by the flying demons, his wretched struggles a distant, smoky-gray silhouette.
    It was his screaming that went down hardest.
    “My wife! O Jesus God Almighty! My wife — don’t tell her it was like this… ”
    “Oh, Christ—”
    It was Buey whose furious kicking at his lathered steed at last brought him near to the place where the creatures had brought the screaming man to ground, to work their evil on his tormented body and soul before bearing him off. The Ox called out a challenge, and a hulking gray shape that had lingered behind rose straight up into the air and curled through the curtain of mist above Buey, to swoop and engage him.
    Gonji kicked his steed and twisted at the reins, with great effort finally steering the recalcitrant destrier in Buey’s direction. Snow swirled up into his eyes, obscuring his vision. He strained to see Buey and the strafing monster.
    Hearing the Spaniard’s curse, Gonji searched for a weapon, blinking as if out of a dream, to see the naked blade of the Sagami sheathed in his broad belt. Cold comfort—The bared edge of his heat-tempered soul sang free. The samurai winced to see the blood that caked his garb, his horse’s flanks. He saw a fleeting glimpse of the strange broken nettles hooked into his greatcoat in spots. Remembered briefly engaging an enemy with clawed hands backed with thorny, curved barbs, then…
    He saw Buey’s sidewise lurch in the saddle. And the broken shaft of a halberd suddenly snapping upward in the huge soldier’s grasp. The shriek of alarm—the dark spill into the snow between them—the skewed flight of the monster as it plunged straight for Gonji in its pain-maddened flight—
    Gonji’s katana rasped free in a two-handed clench. He saw the eyeless visage of something like a mole. A shrew. Bulbous bat-ears. Gaping jaws full of pointed teeth that were stained dark.
    He slashed hard, twice, eyes clenching shut. He felt the thudding weight that knocked him off his horse. Heard the muffled wail as he fell through the snow-crust, a coppery smell in his nostrils—
    A grisly, snowbound grave began filling up around him.
    Gonji heard a pounding impact in the snow not far off as he fought to the surface of the small avalanche that churned over him. Gasping, he instinctively raised the Sagami to high guard, then cast about for orientation.
    The hideous beast lay thrashing in the snow behind