Her eyes were solid black. I couldn’t tell what she was looking at—me, Adam and the goblin king, or Daniel, who was sitting on the ground directly between her and me. Maybe none of us or all.
In front of her, attached to the newel posts of the broken staircase as well as the wall behind her and the arms and legs of her chair, was a web woven in ice. Her lips twisted in an ugly smile as she reached out one finger to touch her web.
I could feel the magic form into something coherent as her finger neared the thread of her weaving. Out of time to plan or consider my actions, I simply bolted right through Daniel. I leaped into the middle of the web, and her finger touched me instead of it.
* * *
—
The snow covered the tops of my knees as the bitter cold slid down my lungs and tried to freeze my nostrils together. The tips of my ears and my fingers burned with the cold.
It was too bad I had somehow shed my coyote self. The fur would have done me a lot of good. As it was, my snow-covered feet and calves were significantly warmer than the rest of my naked body.
I stood in a vast empty field of snow. It was tilted just a little, like high mountain meadows sometimes are. On three sides, at a distance that was too far for me to see clearly, were great dark fir trees. I didn’t want to turn around to see the fourth direction.
I did, of course.
My bare toes touched the edge of a precipice over a deep hole as black as the snow I stood in was white.
“Be careful,” said Daniel, and I turned to see that he was standing beside me, leaning forward over the empty space.
He stretched out an arm toward the darkness, then turned to me and said, “Hic sunt dracones.”
Latin, I thought, not Italian. It took me a second and then I realized why the words were familiar.
I said it out loud. “Here there be dragons.”
He nodded. “Hic sunt leones.”
“Here there be . . . lions?” I said.
He nodded again. He spread his arms out, as if he were a great bird preparing for flight. His fingertips brushed my shoulder.
I took a slow step back. And then another.
“Hic sunt—” Arms still outstretched, as if he was planning on jumping, Daniel gave me a sad smile, then turned from me to face the chasm of darkness. In Stefan’s voice, he said, “—wolves.”
“Stefan?” I whispered, but my fear of the empty black was too much. I wanted to move toward him, but I took a third step away instead, forgetting that, in places like this, geography doesn’t follow the rules.
This time there was nothing beneath my feet, and the blackness reached out and touched me.
Hello, Coyote’s daughter, the void said.
6
“Breathe, damn you,” growled my mate.
I sucked in a breath, because Adam told me to. But the rest of me was still falling, consumed by the darkness. It took another moment for me to understand that I was lying on the tile floor of Stefan’s basement library with the fading taste of empty blackness in my mouth.
I tried to stand up. But when I had stood on that icy snowbank, I’d been in human form, so that’s the body I expected to be in. My four feet all seemed at sixes and sevens, and I scrambled in something approaching panic until Adam helped me up.
I stood shaking, my breath rising in a mist around me, though the earlier frost that had covered the basement was just dampness and a few small puddles now.
Adam was sitting beside me, next to a broken chair. He brushed a hand over his forehead and closed his eyes, his other hand firmly threaded through the hair on the ruff of my neck. I could see the pulse pound in his neck as he breathed out. I wanted to tease him about swearing at me, to distract us both from the last few panicky moments, but I was wearing my coyote self, so I whined at him instead. His fingers tightened on me.
His breath didn’t make a fog. Mine quit after my third breath expelled the last of the air I’d inhaled wherever I’d been. If I’d been anywhere at all.
I glanced at the ruined library for clues to how much time had passed. Daniel was still seated where he’d been, staring off into space. I wondered if he was flying through the darkness with his arms open wide—or if I’d just been knocked unconscious and dreamed the whole thing.
Light footsteps and a sense of motion called my attention to Larry padding out of a dark hallway, a bronze short sword in each hand. The left one dripped a thick black liquid that was the wrong color for blood, though that’s what it smelled like to me.
Larry looked first at me and then at Adam. The blades of his swords caught fire for a moment. When the flames died, the bronze looked freshly burnished and a fine ash drifted to the floor.