Category Archives: Uncategorized

Previous Chapter                                                                                    Next Chapter

 

When you summoned something, there was always a certain amount of uncertainty regarding how it was going to appear. With formalized rituals, you could usually make some reasonably confident predictions. When you were just inviting something and hoping it came, it was harder to predict quite what would happen. Sometimes it was huge and dramatic. Sometimes it was closer to Loki’s favorite approach, and they just showed up without any flashy effects at all.

 

Aiko appeared in a wave of darkness. For an instant everything went dark, like a curtain had been drawn over every spark of light in a three-block radius. I could still sense things, still function, but vision–normal vision, the sort that was based on the perception of light–was utterly impossible.

 

The darkness lasted for a solid three heartbeats, and then faded, leaving Aiko standing right next to me, close enough that I could feel her breath and she could feel the lack of mine.

 

She looked like herself, still. But maybe that was me, because the housecarls were staring like they’d seen a ghost. Or, I supposed, a Faerie Queen. Probably I’d had a similar expression the first time I saw Scáthach.

 

“What’s up?” she said, grinning.

 

I pointed at the monster and said, “Kill it.” Not my most articulate moment, but it got the point across.

 

She looked at it, and for an instant, I saw a flicker of fear cross her face. She knew what this thing was. She hadn’t seen the other one the way I had, but she’d seen enough to know just what kind of danger it posed.

 

Then she went back the cavalier grin she’d shown up with. “You’re really good at getting in trouble,” she said. “You know that, right? All right, let’s do this.”

 

Then I saw Aiko use her newfound power for the first time.

 

I loved her. In spite of everything that had happened to both of us, I still loved her.

 

But even I thought it was freaking terrifying.

 

The one and only time I’d seen Scáthach fight, she’d gone for a very straightforward, physical assault. That might have been because she’d been fighting Skrýmir at the time, but I thought it probably had more to do with who she was. From what Aiko had said, and what I’d felt myself, taking on a role within a Faerie Court entailed a sort of mutual adjustment. The role bent you into shape to fit into it, but it also bent itself to fit around you.

 

For Scáthach, being the Maiden of the Midnight Court had meant being swift and aggressive, embodying the predatory hunger and aggression of the Unseelie fae. But Aiko had always been more inclined to misdirection and trickery, and it was in that that the power of the role found its expression in her.

 

She flicked a finger, I smelled a burst of magic scented with fox and spice and darkness, and things started getting crazy.

 

It started with ropes and patches of darkness materializing all around the thing from the void, tangling it up. It devoured them in instants, but as many as it eradicated, there was always another waiting. There were sparks of scarlet light scattered through the darkness, casting an eerie crimson light through the area that was just bright enough to see. Not that I really needed the light, since this darkness, born of Midnight power and sculpted by the person that had given me mine, stood out even more sharply to my senses than natural darkness did.

 

At almost the same instant another burst of power went the other direction, flooding into the people who were standing and watching in shock. As one, in total unison, they stood and started walking away. There was something stiff and mechanical about it, something artificial. It looked like they were puppets, somehow. All things considered, that might have literally been the case. Only Snowflake and the housecarls were unaffected. They were still standing and staring at the unfolding scene.

 

One of those tendrils of manifest nothingness stretched out towards Aiko, shredding the barriers of darkness and power between them. Without thinking, before I had time to think, I was bolting towards it, moving to intercept it before it could reach her.

 

Probably a dumb move, given that she was more than fast enough to get out of the way before it could get near her. But I’d always been sort of dumb in some ways.

 

As I got close, I did another dumb thing without thinking, on reflex. I called Tyrfing to my grasp and brought it over in a sweeping cut at the tendril. I wasn’t really sure why, beyond the fact that a quick cut with Tyrfing had gotten to be my default response to attackers. I knew that this wasn’t really something that could be cut, after all. It was a hole in the world, the concept of void given shape and form. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that a sword wasn’t going to do much against something like that.

 

Which, in turn, made it even stranger when the thing recoiled from the blade, the tendril snapping back in to its core. It looked slightly ragged, too, the clean edges of the absolute nothingness wavering slightly.

 

Tyrfing looked as smooth and bright as ever after passing through the abomination. It gleamed bright and hungry in the crimson light, looking like it was drenched in blood though blood had never left a mark on that sword.

 

I stood there staring in shock, trying to process what had just happened. As such, I was just standing there as two more tendrils snapped out from the abomination and hit me in the chest.

 

I hadn’t thought that I was really capable of feeling pain anymore.

 

I was probably right. This wasn’t pain, as such. It was just an overwhelming feeling of wrongness, something vile, spectacularly wrong. It was an alien feeling, something I couldn’t quite grasp or process.

 

My body collapsed in an instant, ripped to pieces. I was left in an incorporeal state, lacking the means to directly influence what was happening.

 

“Keep it still,” Aiko said, her voice echoing strangely. I almost heard it more mentally than physically, the meaning of the words reverberating through the bond between us.

 

Keep it still. Great. Because that was totally a thing I could do. Really.

 

It seemed like she had a plan, though, and that was a lot more than I could say. So I figured I had to at least try.

 

There was snow around, but I didn’t have time to form a decent body. Hell, I probably didn’t want to. This thing was terrifyingly fast to retaliate, and I did not want to let it hit me again. I was mostly invulnerable, but considering just what I was dealing with, I didn’t think it was a good time to put that mostly to the test. That meant that staying in one body for more than a few instants was a bad idea. I couldn’t trade hits with something from the void; that left hit-and-run as the only viable option available to me.

 

So rather than the snow and ice, I reached for darkness, slipping into the cords and sheets of Midnight power Aiko was throwing around.

 

I found them to be a surprisingly good host. Or not surprisingly, maybe. I still didn’t have the best grasp on how this champion gig worked, but it seemed clear that the Midnight Court’s name wasn’t just an affectation. It sort of made sense that tying myself so closely to the Court would leave me with a connection to the dark magic it used as well.

 

Only a few seconds after I collapsed, a vaguely humanoid form stretched out of the darkness behind the abomination, nothing fully real about it except for the shining blade in its hand. I swept Tyrfing through another of its tendrils, then ceased concentrating and let my body dissipate into a few wisps of shadow. The sword fell to the snow an instant before it ripped that patch of darkness apart, a few seconds too late to catch me.

 

The next minute or so was a tense, fast-moving stalemate. I jumped from one shadow to the next, occasionally even sculpting a loose body out of snow, always slashing at its tendrils with Tyrfing. Every time I hit one it recoiled in what seemed to be pain, reabsorbing that tendril into its core, although since it was constantly absorbing and extruding tendrils anyway the effect was rather minimal. I could do a bit to slow it down, but I wasn’t really affecting it in a meaningful way. Cutting the core might have done more, but even if I’d been willing to get that close to it, there was nothing there to manifest out of.

 

Meanwhile, Aiko was throwing out a constant stream of darkness, replacing the shadows as fast as the abomination could remove them. She took a moment to throw up a wall of darkness just past the housecarls, as well, keeping any well-intentioned morons from rushing in and getting themselves killed. Occasionally she tried something else, flinging blasts of magic at it. I understood about half of them–force, lightning, dark fires–while the other half were more abstract, fae magics. Or, hell, maybe kitsune magics; it wasn’t like I’d understood what Kuzunoha did all that much better. Regardless, nothing she did seemed to be having an effect on it, beyond the minimal slowing effect that the solid darkness had. Again, she could inconvenience the thing, maybe, but that was all.

 

For its part, the abomination seemed to be focused on me. For a while it tried to hit me before I could cease manifesting, but after a few tries it seemed to figure out that it couldn’t react quickly enough to reach me before I abandoned a body and moved on. Instead, it started lashing out wildly in all directions, cutting through large swaths of the darkness and hoping to catch me by chance.

 

It worked a few times. I took some more hits, shattering bodies before I could do anything with them. More than that, though, they seemed to be having a cumulative effect. It was getting harder to manifest a body for myself, and slower. I was getting clumsy. The last two times I’d missed when I went to cut at it.

 

I wasn’t sure how much of that was the damage from the abomination adding up, and how much was just me getting tired. I hadn’t felt fatigue in the physical sense for a long time, now–hell, even before I’d lost my real body, I hadn’t had much of a fatigue response. But I could still get tired, mentally, and there were still limits to how hard I could push myself.

 

I hadn’t done this before, hadn’t tried to weave together anywhere near this many bodies in such a short time. As it turned out, there were limits to that as well. I didn’t think I could manage very many more without a long rest.

 

This wasn’t working.

 

I tried to think of something, anything else that I could do in this situation, and took a tendril to the face for my distraction. I shattered again, and this time that feeling of wrongness lingered for several seconds. It was something like an intense nausea and a splitting headache, except that it was a purely mental thing, like someone dragging their nails over the chalkboard inside my head. I transitioned to another patch of shadow, and even that took a couple seconds of concerted effort.

 

I couldn’t keep this up much longer.

 

I gritted my teeth–well, metaphorically, but teeth were engrained enough in my self-image that I still had them even when I existed only as a concept waiting to find expression–and prepared myself for another attempt.

 

Then I suddenly heard something. “Winter!” Aiko shouted, her voice coming to me in a strangely warbling, almost unreal way. If I hadn’t had the mental and emotional echo from my connection to the Midnight Court I might not have understood at all. “Get out of there!”

 

It took me a second to grasp what she meant, and then a couple more to actually do it, shifting my focus to a patch of snow in the shadow of a building. Or half a building, at least. It seemed like the upper half had largely been obliterated by a stroke from the abomination.

 

As I was lying there, trying to work up enough energy to build a physical shell to inhabit, I finally saw what Aiko had been planning.

 

All that time while the abomination was swinging at me, it had been leaving those trails of nothing behind itself. They didn’t seem to be permanent, but they lingered.

 

What neither of us had realized was that Aiko hadn’t been throwing that darkness around at random. On the contrary, they’d been very precisely placed. And as it kept trying to hit me, it had been unwittingly following the path of that darkness.

 

It had, in essence, been duped into drawing an enormous and elaborate geometric diagram around itself, one which still hung in the air as a three-dimensional image in the form of those trails of nothingness.

 

Now, Aiko threw her hands out, and once again I smelled a burst of incredibly powerful magic. Ropes of darkness spiraled along those trails, outlining and somehow feeding off of them in a way that I couldn’t quite grasp.

 

She twisted that magic, leveraging it, and the entire space inside the diagram–including the entirety of the abomination–shifted, turning into utter blackness filled with sparks and streamers of light in every color I could imagine, and some I couldn’t.

 

It took me a second to realize what I was looking at, and when I did I wanted to laugh.

 

It was the void. Or rather, the void as Coyote had shown it to me, with enough buffers that mortal eyes could look upon it without the mind behind them being rendered into confetti. We weren’t meant to look at something that fundamental.

 

Things stayed that way for the space of a long breath. Then Aiko clapped her hands together, and with another surge of power, the hole she’d opened in reality sealed itself shut again. The void, and the eternal chaos that danced within it, were gone.

 

So was the abomination, leaving nothing behind but the slowly fading streaks of nothingness that it had carved into the world.

 

We’d done it. Unbelievably, we’d actually managed to drive the thing off.

 

I almost wanted to laugh as I slowly, painfully began assembling another body from ice and snow and darkness.

Previous Chapter                                                                                    Next Chapter

Previous Chapter                                                                                    Next Chapter

 

The instant that thing appeared, the nature of the fight changed. Dramatically.

 

Before that point, it was pretty much a joke, and one that was played most of the way out. The advantage had been tipped so far in my favor that there really wasn’t any kind of contest.

 

After it showed up, that had pretty much completely reversed itself. It was still a fight between two wildly different weight classes. But I wasn’t on the winning side.

 

I’d seen one of these things before, once. It was bad enough that Loki—Loki—had felt the need to bring help to deal with it. I’d gotten a lot stronger, but I was still several orders of magnitude short of Loki’s scale. If he needed backup, I was not remotely capable of winning this fight. Or even surviving it.

 

I kept running, but changed direction, cutting across at an angle towards the others rather than running straight forward.

 

I’d already noted that I could run pretty freaking fast in this body. I was a lot stronger and a lot lighter than a normal human, and between the two I could set a pace much faster than anything I’d been able to manage as a human. Add in an edge of raw terror, and I could really book it.

 

None of them had even started to stand before I reached them. It was that fast.

 

I grabbed Snowflake and tossed her away from the thing, then kept moving, bowling the housecarls over with sheer momentum. I fell down, and it took me a second to extricate myself from the pile.

 

When I did, I was glad that I’d prioritized things how I had. The tendrils extending from it had already reached the cafe, writhing slowly in ways that almost—but not quite—formed regular patterns. They left streaks of that same not-darkness in the air behind them, places where things started to seem less than fully real.

 

It was moving faster than I remembered. The last one had moved slowly enough that I could outrun it, and that had been when I was a lot slower than this. Compared to this one, that thing had been moving in slow motion. If I hadn’t reacted as quickly as I had, somebody would already have taken one of those tendrils to the face.

 

I could still remember what being touched by one of those things felt like. The scars had gone away with the rest of my body. But my left hand still twitched a little at the thought. That had been a really, really bad day.

 

If I got very lucky, I wasn’t about to have a worse one.

 

“Loki,” I said as I pushed myself up. “Loki, Loki…come on, of all the times to not be listening, you picked this?”

 

“No,” Loki said, appearing out of nowhere right next to me. He didn’t offer me a hand up, unsurprisingly. “I’m watching.”

 

I noticed that things had stopped. Everything had stopped, with the sole exception of the void-beast, which was still moving, albeit slowly.

 

How did that even make sense? It had been moving quickly before, but not that quickly. Why was it still moving when Loki had warped time around us?

 

“You want to deal with that thing, then?” I asked.

 

“No,” he said, watching it with a cheerful, lopsided smile. “Not particularly.”

 

I paused. “I thought keeping these things out of the world was kind of important to you guys?”

 

“Oh, it is,” Loki assured me. “I won’t actually let it get out. For the moment, though, I’m more interested to see what you do about it. This one is considerably weaker than the last you saw. Even in the worst case it’ll only destroy a part of the continent. It’s an acceptable risk.”

 

I blinked. “Wait, what?”

 

“You heard me,” he said cheerfully. “Do try to keep up.”

 

“What the hell am I supposed to do to that thing?” I demanded.

 

“Oh, I’m sure you’ll figure something out,” he said cheerfully. “It’s not like you have to fight it. Just make it go away.”

 

“Make it go away,” I repeated. “And…how am I supposed to do that?”

 

“You’ll figure something out,” he said again. “Just remember, the worst case scenario is all of your friends dying horribly, your city being annihilated, and everything you’ve spent your life building being laid to waste.” He grinned. “Oh, and you might want to get ready. You’ve got about…ten seconds before time goes back to normal for you.”

 

I wanted to scream at him, or plead, or do any number of other things.

 

But I believed him when he said that I only had about ten seconds before things got crazy again. And I could afford to waste any of that time on feeling sorry for myself.

 

I wasn’t entirely sure what I should, or even really could, do in this situation. But the first step, at least, was fairly obvious to me, and I figured I could sort out the rest after that.

 

So while I was waiting for those ten seconds to expire, I took a couple steps further away from the void-thing and drew a quick circle in the snow. It was harder than it should have been, probably because they weren’t in the same reference frame I was for the passage of time. From their perspective, I was trying to move them at an incredible speed.

 

But after a second, I managed to make it work, and stood in the middle of a circle in the snow. I bit one of my fingertips, drawing something that was…well, not blood. Ice-cold water and liquid darkness and something a little more indefinable just under the surface. It was as close as I was likely to come to having blood again.

 

I touched that thick, heavy fluid to the circle, throwing power into it as I did. It was sloppy, manifesting physically as a burst of cold, a faint wash of darkness in the air. But it got the job done, and I was in too much of a rush to care about efficiency.

 

I stood up again as the world wavered and then started to move again. People were just starting to scream and run. It felt like it had been a painfully long time since the thing showed up, but objectively it had only been a few seconds.

 

It started to move faster as time skipped a beat and then resumed its normal flow. One tendril swept through a car, not even slowing, and then carved a hole in the ground before retracting.

 

“Aiko,” I muttered, tapping that well of Midnight power in me and pulling. “Aiko, Aiko. Come on, I could really use a hand here.”

 

I pulled a little harder, and felt something rip. Darkness flooded into me, like a hemorrhage in reverse, and I gasped.

 

The world went black.

Previous Chapter                                                                                    Next Chapter

Previous Chapter                                                                                    Next Chapter

 

I didn’t fully appreciate the extent to which my sensory perceptions ha changed until I walked through the city streets.

 

Until that point, I’d been able to more or less fool myself into thinking that things hadn’t changed that much. Operating in limited, familiar environments, it almost seemed like old times.

 

Out in the city, that wasn’t so much the case. There was too much to see, and I could see too much of it.

 

I knew, without even having to think, where every animal within a mile of me was. I could feel their minds pressing against me, a constant, quiet hum of activity. It only took a passing thought for me to let that murmur rise to a resounding chorus, flooding into my mind. Most of that input didn’t make it to my conscious thoughts, just stayed in the background.

 

Those minds were part of what was currently sustaining my existence. Based on what Fenris had said, anyway, but it made sense. I’d always had a strong connection to animals, and especially predators. I’d been able to exist as a purely mental entity by, essentially, timesharing space in their minds that they weren’t using. In doing so I’d been transitioning from a purely mortal being to something else, though I hadn’t recognized it at the time. I’d been taking the first steps on the road that led me, eventually, here. Now that I’d taken another step on that path, the relationship had grown more complex, but that connection was still one of the things maintaining me in my current state.

 

All of that, though, was more or less an extension of something that I’d had most of my life to get used to. That was relatively easy to deal with.

 

The rest was less so. The way I could feel a chill in the air, a scrap of snow or ice, a sense so basic I couldn’t fit it into words. I wasn’t translating it into vision, or scent, or anything else, at this point. It was a sense all its own. I could feel it, and it only took a little more thought and effort to act on it, manipulating it.

 

Darkness was similar—the same, in fact, since shadows tended to bring a certain cooling effect. Beyond that, though, there was a looseness to it. Standing in the darkness felt, in an odd metaphysical sort of way, like standing on the surface of gelatin. There was a surface that I was pressing against, but it was only a minimal resistance. With a slight push, I could break through it. Through it, I could feel a connection to every other shadow anywhere close to me, like a vibration in a spider’s web.

 

With all of that to draw on, my experience of the city was nothing like what I’d been accustomed to before. Strangely, though—or not so strangely, considering—it didn’t feel odd. It felt normal, natural. I had to keep reminding myself that it wasn’t, that the people with me didn’t have that appreciation of their surroundings.

 

Snowflake, at least, understood. She could feel an echo of what I did. It was a distant echo, but it was enough for her to grasp the most basic level of what I was getting. She had some of the information I did, and she knew why I was so distractible. The rest—the housecarls with me, and the people I was here to meet—didn’t even have that.

 

I had to remind myself that this was temporary. Eventually it would all be natural for me again. Eventually I wouldn’t have to focus on this, any more than I’d had to concentrate to use my eyes when I’d had eyes.

 

For now, I just had to muddle through as best as I could.

 

I’d brought thugs, although I didn’t really need them. At this point, they were little more than a statement. Anything that they could present a meaningful threat to was so far below me that it wasn’t even a challenge.

 

If power were graded on a scale of one to ten, I thought I’d gone up a solid two or three points recently, between Fenris and Aiko. I hadn’t had the chance to really test my new powers yet, but between what I did understand of them and what I’d seen of Carraig, I was pretty sure I’d suddenly transitioned to an entirely different world of power.

 

I was guessing that I was about to have the opportunity to find out.

 

Snowflake was at my heel as I walked up to the cafe. I had Kjaran and Vigdis there, as well as Herjolfr. I hadn’t interacted with the skald much. I still didn’t particularly like having him in my employ at all. But on this occasion, I thought I could make an exception.

 

Pellegrini had brought his own thugs. Naturally. The man called Andrews was with him, quietly dangerous as usual. I could smell him, his magic, vivid and sharp. He felt like a coiled spring with a sharpened edge. The girl, who smelled more fae than ever, was a bit more of a mystery. She smelled cold and hungry, but there was a depth to her, a subtlety. She nodded in my direction, very slightly, as I approached.

 

The third party was largely an unknown party to me. They’d shown up in the short time while I’d been “dead.” Or not so short. Two weeks was a tiny scrap of time on the cosmic scale, but two weeks at the right time was an eternity.

 

My people had been able to dig up some information about them. They were human, as far as could be determined. But they were surprisingly well-equipped, and well-informed, which between them suggested well-connected. They had resources. And they had a very serious hate on for everything that wasn’t human.

 

I was pretty sure that they were the same group that had been attacking werewolves around the country. I was also pretty sure that their presence in my city, and the suspiciously good timing with which they’d appeared, were not coincidences.

 

Taken as a whole, I was reasonably confident that they had a tie back to Jason. It made sense. He’d been the one arming the last group of these lunatics I’d seen, the one that had attacked Conn’s little meeting. He’d been in a position to know exactly when I was removed from play, since he was the one that did it. Between those, it figured that he was responsible for sending these people here to make trouble.

 

I intended to find out. I owed Jason, and I didn’t have any intention of forgiving that debt. He had, after all, killed me. The fact that it ended up not being quite as permanent as he’d intended didn’t change that.

 

There were five of them. Four were clearly members of the group; I could smell magic around them, but not on them, in them. They were using someone else’s toys, but of themselves they were no more magical than anyone on the street. They looked like hardened killers, and I was guessing it was because they were.

 

The last one, the odd one out, was different. He smelled like he had magic. Not a lot, but some. Still human, although I’d come to think of that as a less binary descriptor than I once had. It was hard to really characterize a mage as fully human, even if they’d started out that way.

 

I thought about making a dramatic entrance, since there were so, so many ways I could have done so. At this point, I had options when it came to dramatic entrances. But they would all have given things away, so in the end, I just opened the gate of the patio and walked in.

 

Snowflake came with me. The housecarls waited outside the fence, both as a statement of power and for their own safety.

 

This meeting wasn’t going to go peacefully. I was guessing we all knew that, although it was anybody’s guess who’d throw the first punch.

 

I walked up to the table and sat in the one open chair. That put my back to the street, which would have been a source of discomfort. Now, it didn’t really matter. With so many ways to monitor what was happening, which way I was facing was more or less immaterial.

 

“Hi,” I said, breathing for the first time in almost an hour. I hadn’t bothered, earlier. It still required attention for me to breathe, and the people I was with weren’t going to be upset if I didn’t.

 

“Hello,” Pellegrini said. “I trust you’re feeling better?”

 

I smiled casually. “I’ve felt worse,” I said, not really answering his question. I was still capable of lying, but more than ever, I felt like it was probably a bad idea. It might reflect poorly on Aiko if her thug was breaking her rules, after all.

 

Pellegrini caught the distinction. I could see it in his eyes, hear it in his breathing. The girl caught it. Andrews might have caught it, or might not; he wasn’t interested, wasn’t invested enough in this conversation for it to be clear.

 

None of the human supremacists caught it. I was confident of that.

 

“Good to hear,” Pellegrini said, another phrase that was quite a bit more meaningful than the words suggested. A veiled threat, a congratulation on my promotion, a statement of solidarity…it incorporated elements of all of those.

 

The other faction at this table might as well not have known the language, there was such a large proportion of the conversation flying over their head. I’d have felt sorry for them if I didn’t feel so contemptuous of them.

 

“You’re Winter Wolf?” one of them said. The apparent leader, he was the only one of their group sitting down. Effectively, the rest were there as decoration, as objects more than people. It was a fairly common sort of approach among the supernatural. I wasn’t sure whether it was similarly common among gangsters, or Pellegrini was just a quick study. Oddly enough, for all that I’d spoken and worked with him repeatedly, this was the first time I could remember having attended a meeting he was hosting.

 

The man was expecting an answer, though, and my inability to keep my train of thought on the rails was already showing. So I smiled, and nodded. “I’ve been called that,” I said. Again, not really an answer.

 

I wasn’t really sure what the answer was to that question, anymore.

 

The man nodded. “Do it,” he said.

 

The odd man out, the mage among their group, gestured slightly. Brilliant red light flared around me, complex geometric designs drawn in a circle around my chair. It wasn’t just me, either; there was real light there.

 

I felt a minor, distant surge of annoyance at that. It was sloppy work. Energy spent on lightshows was energy wasted, when it came to magic.

 

“Fascinating,” I said, not standing up. Pellegrini and his people didn’t stand, either, didn’t react at all. “You realize that we’re meeting under truce to discuss the fact that you’ve broken numerous rules within this city? With a neutral arbiter here to adjudicate the resolution of this dispute?”

 

“It was going to come to a fight anyway,” he said, pushing his chair back to make very sure that he was out of my reach. “We just cut to the chase.”

 

I nodded. “I appreciate that,” I said. “It’s less frustrating for me, that way.” I glanced at the designs around me, sniffed the air. “This is solid work, by the way.”

 

There was no response from the mage. Andrews, however, smiled slightly. He knew where I was going with this.

 

“Surprisingly powerful warding circle you’ve got here,” I said casually, still not standing. “Looks familiar, though. Did you copy it right out of the Lesser Key of Solomon?”

 

“It’s a viable design,” their mage said defensively.

 

I nodded. “Sure, sure,” I said. “The geometric structure is solid. Overbuilt, if anything. Lots of redundancy built into it. Of course, that also means it takes a lot more power to energize it. How did you manage that, anyway? You’re not strong enough to power it yourself. You aren’t good enough to be tapping a major source of power without killing yourself. It’s too coherent to be a group effort; those tend to come out more as patchworks. It doesn’t smell like fae, or a god, so you aren’t getting subsidized by one of them. So that only really leaves blood magic.” I smiled. “Did you kill someone to power this thing?”

 

“Wolves,” the mage said. His voice was surprisingly deep and resonant. “Sympathetic magic, like to bind like.”

 

“Fascinating,” I said. “See, that was your third mistake.”

 

Their leader tensed, started to rise, then visibly forced himself to relax again. “Third?” he asked.

 

I nodded, still smiling. It was a hungry sort of smile. “Third,” I repeated. “First was trusting the guy that set you up to do this. That was a mistake.”

 

They reacted. It was small, it was subtle, but I was watching. They reacted to my mention of a backer. I was, it seemed, not entirely wrong, although there was still a possibility that I’d put the pieces of the puzzle together wrong.

 

“Second,” I continued, “was hiring an amateur to do your trap. You get what you pay for, guys.”

 

The mage bristled. “Who are you calling an amateur?” he asked, flexing his fingers like claws. They glowed with a gentle violet light as he did so. Again, a sloppy, incompetent waste of power. My respect for these guys fell even further when I saw that.

 

“You,” I said simply. “But I’m getting to that. See, mistake number three? You killed animals for power. Before that, this was just business. Now, I’ve got something against you, personally. That’s really not a position you want to be in.”

 

Their leader gestured slightly. Almost imperceptibly, but he had to move his hand through a shadow, and I could feel the movement.

 

Two blocks away, the sniper saw that gesture. He moved, a similarly slight amount. But there was a raven on the roof with him, and it saw him, and so did I.

 

I could have dodged.

 

Instead, I sat dead still as he put a bullet through my chest.

 

It was a very solid shot, straight through where my heart would have been if I were as human as I currently looked. I was guessing they fully expected a fountain of blood and for me to collapse out of my chair and die with a confused, silly expression.

 

Instead, they got a fountain of snow and a disappointed expression.

 

I let out a long, slow sigh. The nice thing about not having to breathe, when it came to sighing, was that you could drag it out. It sounded more like the wind through bare branches than any human noise.

 

“The circle you could, perhaps, have made a case for,” Andrew said, not even flinching. “But that was a clear violation of the truce.”

 

“Yes,” I agreed. “I would appreciate if you allowed me to take care of it, rather than doing so yourself. As I said, this is personal.”

 

Pellegrini smiled. “Well,” he said briskly. “As a host, it seems the least I can do. Any chance of peaceful negotiations seems to have been rather thoroughly terminated, so my role here is done.” He stood up and started walking away without another word. Andrews followed silently after him. The girl, on the other hand, shot me a darkness-tinged wink before she left.

 

“I paid a phenomenal amount to get him out here, you know,” I said. “But it was worth it. The illusion of neutrality can be such a useful thing, at times.”

 

“You should be dead,” their leader said.

 

“Oh, probably,” I agreed. “But I was going to finish what I was saying. You shouldn’t have hired an amateur. See, the circle from the Lesser Key has two flaws in this situation. One is that the power usage is extreme. The other? This circle, it’s not designed to keep things in. It’s designed to keep things out.”

 

I threw my hands out in front of me as I said that, calling up power as I did. Unlike almost every other time I’d done so, I wasn’t drawing power from my surroundings, or from myself. I was tapping into something considerably darker and more powerful than either of those things.

 

I wanted to make an object lesson out of this.

 

The power of the Midnight Court leapt to my call like an eager pet, thrilled to be called. I took it and channeled it out.

 

I wasn’t drawing much power from that well. I wasn’t even drawing, so much as letting off the pressure that had built up. All things considered, it seemed safer to start small. For much the same reason, I wasn’t trying to exercise much in the way of control over it. I was content to largely let it do its own thing.

 

The power manifested as a column of darkness as thick as my chest, flowing out from my hands. It looked thicker and darker than it had any right to, not yielding to the light the way darkness was supposed to.

 

I could smell the magic, the power in it, rich and ancient. I imagined the mage could feel it, as well. I imagined he was rather unhappy as a result. When somebody you thought you had caged starts throwing around that kind of power, it’s never a good thing.

 

Left to its own devices, the power of the Midnight Court was a destructive thing. It was a force of death, of endings. If the Daylight Court was growth and birth and vibrant life, I was currently tapping the other side of that force, something that was by its very nature associated with darkness and death and devouring hunger.

 

When that power hit the circle, there was no question of stopping it. It annihilated the warding circle in an instant. The defensive structures, not having been designed to hold up against a powerful assault from this side, shattered. The darkness continued, coiling in the air like a serpent. It crashed into the table and didn’t even pause, splintering it and throwing it aside. The flood of darkness just kept coming, slamming into their leader and driving him back into the rest.

 

I sat and watched, feeling the power flowing through me. It wasn’t hard. I didn’t even have to think. It felt less like doing something, and more like relaxing my grip on something. The power wanted out, wanted to be used. All I had to do was…let it out.

 

After a few seconds, I closed my hands, and closed that connection in my mind with them. I felt a hollowness in its absence, a sense of lacking.

 

I should have been scared by that. I wasn’t. It wasn’t a surprise. I’d known what I was letting myself in for when I made the deal.

 

I stood up slowly, as they tried to do the same. They were having a harder time of it than I was. It was snowy, and an almost thoughtless effort on my part had been enough to turn it into ice. As though that weren’t making things hard enough for them, the couple that had been directly hit by the darkness seemed to be struggling. It had sapped something from them, left them weak and fumbling.

 

Again, that made sense. The hunger in me wanted to take from them to satisfy itself; it fit that that would have an influence on how I manifested the power of the Court. It might not be my power, but it was being channeled through me, and from what I knew of how such things worked, it was inevitable that the channel would have an influence on what form the power took.

 

There would be rules to the whole champion of darkness gig. It was unfortunate that I didn’t know what those rules were. Hopefully Aiko would be able to tell me, once she’d figured out her own role a little better. Either that, or I’d have to figure it out by trial and error.

 

I stepped forward, a massive hole still gaping in my chest, and called Tyrfing as I walked.

 

Two of them were down and dying before they could even stand up. A third got to her feet, but Snowflake pulled her back down and started chewing on her face before she could do any more than that.

 

I almost felt bad. Not…guilty, exactly. But it felt too easy. For a long time, a fight like this would have been a very serious one for me. Now that I was capable of winning it easily, it felt like cheating.

 

I didn’t let that stop me, of course. But still.

 

The last two didn’t even try to fight. I couldn’t blame them. They’d just played their trump card, and it got them nowhere at all. Then I killed more than half of them in a couple of seconds. And I still had three housecarls just standing around looking bored. Their sniper wasn’t sniping, which I knew to be because he’d been forcibly rendered unconscious by Kris shortly after he took his first shot, but they had no way of knowing that.

 

In their position, I’d have run too.

 

By a mixture of chance and intent, the two left alive were the most important ones. Their leader, and their mage. The leader jumped to the top of the priority list by virtue of being the first to get to his feet and bolt.

 

I let him get around fifty feet away while I walked casually after him. Then I stepped into a shadow, and pushed against that surface I’d felt earlier.

 

It gave way at my touch, and I slipped into another world. It was dark, the total darkness of a moonless night with no stars, but I could see. More than sight, I could feel my surroundings, including feeling another weak point ahead that I could return through.

 

A step and a thought were enough to move me to the one I wanted. Naturally; this was my domain, my private little world, granted to me in my capacity as a champion of the Midnight Court. My desires were a literal, physical force here.

 

I stepped out of another patch of shadow less than a second after stepping into the first one, and the runner almost ran headlong into me before realizing I was there. Before he could turn around, I stepped forward and grabbed him by the throat.

 

Choking someone unconscious is a risky business. It’s easy to go too far. Even if they survive, it can be very easy to do permanent damage.

 

Luckily for me, I just didn’t care about that kind of thing right now.

 

The mage looked at me, fifty feet away and choking his boss unconscious. He looked at Snowflake, who was just finishing the woman she’d brought down and looked like she’d be happy to go for another. He looked at the housecarls.

 

Then he looked down at the dying man by his feet.

 

I got an ugly feeling. Something bad was about to happen, I could feel it. It wasn’t a premonition so much as…recognizing what was in front of me.

 

The mage dropped to the ground. He was holding a knife, although I hadn’t seen him draw it. I was running, trying to get closer. I’d have ducked into a shadow if I thought about it, but I was already too far away.

 

He drew the knife across the dying man’s throat. Blood spilled out, the bright red an oddly intense contrast against the snow.

 

I could smell the magic. This mage wasn’t all that powerful, but life was a hell of an equalizer when it came to that, and he’d just taken a lot. It was a fairly intense scent.

 

I couldn’t tell what he did with that magic. Not really. It was too strange, too alien for me to fully grasp.

 

But I could see the result.

 

A hole opened in the world. It was something like an Otherside portal, but more. It was unnatural, unreal, or quite possibly too real for me to process. Looking at it made my head hurt, and I didn’t even really have a head anymore.

 

Something came through.

 

I couldn’t really define it any better than that. It looked dark, although I could tell that it wasn’t, not really. I’d have felt darkness, have understood it and had a degree of control over it. This was more just…an absence, a piece of the world that had been removed. I couldn’t see anything, not because it was dark, but because there was nothing to see.

 

Tendrils extended from the main body, as the hole it came through slowly sealed itself with a sound like tearing metal. Where those tendrils passed, they left trails of the same utter, total blackness behind them.

 

Had I still had blood, it would have run cold. Had I been breathing, I’d have stopped.

 

He’d called something up from the empty spaces between worlds. Somehow, some way, he’d managed that. And he didn’t have the slightest bit of control over it.

 

Suddenly, I wanted to be somewhere very far away.

Previous Chapter                                                                                    Next Chapter

Previous Chapter                                                                                    Next Chapter

 

Why not smile while the bodies hit the floor?

 

Grinning, laughing, walking through the battle. Because I know what none of them know, and that is that life and death alike are at their finest when there’s a razor’s edge between them.

 

One, two, three, another step sideways. Someone looks scared and I focus on him, grinning. He doesn’t belong here. He’s out of his element, and everyone knows it. He should be gone. With a swipe of the axe, he is.

 

The people around me recoil. It doesn’t matter which side they’re on. They recoil. They fear me. They don’t understand. They look at the violence and don’t see the beauty. They listen to the battle and don’t hear the song.

 

I tense my muscles and leap, every part of my body working in tandem, everything functioning as a part of a coherent whole. I surge up into the air, grinning as the air flows over my skin, cooling me.

 

I hang in the air for a moment, at the peak of my leap, like a drop of water glittering in the sunlight in the instant before it starts to fall. The fight spreads out below me and around me, glorious in its chaos.

 

I pass from one skin into another in that moment, as easily a breathing. Some people characterize what I do as magic, as casting a spell. I don’t see it that way. For me, body is a state of mind. Stepping from one into another is more a change of perspective than anything.

 

I slide from one into another, with a slick layer of blood to ease the passage, and a heartbeat after I left the ground I’m soaring over it. From the eyes of an eagle, that old lover of war, I look down on the world I’ve just left behind.

 

I see my axe lying abandoned on the ground below me. Some things don’t carry over with a change in perspective. Some things don’t fit into a new worldview.

 

That’s fine. I don’t need it, anyway. Weapons are tools. A wise person never lets herself grow fully dependent on a tool. They are useful. They are not necessary.

 

I drift up on the breeze, soaring, floating weightless. I look down on the world from a hundred feet high.

 

From up here, it all looks so small.

 

Again I hang motionless as time seems to stop for that one endless moment of transition, that liminal moment that I live in, that I live for.

 

And then I twist and fold my wings, and I plummet. At first I drop as fast as a falling stone, then faster, and faster, the world passing in a blur around me.

 

Instants before I hit the ground I snap my wings out, catching and cupping the air, letting it buoy me up once again. I skim by just above the surface of the ground, friend and foe passing me by at a dizzying speed.

 

One of them is in front of me. Another male, more experienced than the last. He doesn’t flinch as I fly towards him with the speed of my long dive behind me, just raises his blade to bat me out of the air.

 

But there’s no fire in him, no spark. There’s a fine, crucial distinction between a good fighter and a great fighter, and he’s on the wrong side of it. This is just a job, for him. It isn’t an art. It isn’t a lifestyle.

 

As I approach him, I fold my wings down again and drop until I’m just above the ground. Another quick shift in perspective, in focus, and I’m on the ground, my legs a blur as I sprint forward with the speed of a diving eagle at my back.

 

He tries to react, sidestepping and cutting at my spine. But he isn’t good enough, not quite. Not fast enough, to move or to react. Before he can do more than twitch, I pounce, and rather than the bird he had anticipated, a wolf hits him in the chest.

 

I overbear him and pull him down, with speed more than muscle, and we tumble, hitting the ground together a moment later. I writhe against him, my breath hot in his face as I twist and contort and close my jaws around his throat.

 

This is the perspective of the wolf. Teeth to bite and rip and tear. Legs to run the long, slow race of hours. Nose that one cannot hide from. This is what it means to be wolf.

 

He smells of fear and grimaces in panic as he realizes what I already know: that I am at home here, and he is merely visiting, and that makes all the difference.

 

My jaws snap closed and jerk away, tearing at his flesh. Instants later I taste the hot, salty rush of crimson across my tongue. I see a thousand emotions in his eyes as he, too, experiences that frozen liminal moment. In his case, the very last.

 

I stand and walk stiff-legged away as the body begins to cool. Lying in the snow, it won’t take long.

 

There is a pause in the flow of the battle, a half-beat break in the rhythm, and I know that something is changed, that a new variable has entered the fight.

 

I see it, a moment later, through a break in the bodies. It’s another man, clearly on the other side. It’s not hard to see why the fight paused as he took the field. He towers over the rest of the combatants, even the giants. He’s enormous, larger than a man has any right to be. Ogre blood in him, I’m guessing.

 

More than the size and obvious strength, though, I’m struck by his bearing, his attitude, his presence. The heavy spiked armor he wears doesn’t cover his face, and I see his expression. It’s a joyous grin, one that revels in the chaos, one that glories in life and death all around. It’s the same grin I still wear, though my crimson-stained teeth are sharper and wider than his.

 

I’ve never seen this man before, never spoken a word to him. And yet I feel that I know him better than anyone else I’ve seen today.

 

I run toward him and no one bars my path. Perhaps it’s luck, or perhaps I have a similar aura of battle-frenzy around myself that similarly frightens those who lack such passion, or perhaps they simply have the wit not to stand between us. In any case, the result is much the same. Deed follows thought, and it’s only seconds before I stand in front of him, only ten feet separating us. The battle continues to rage, but leaves a gap around us, an eye in the storm. It lends a sense of privacy to the proceedings, as strange as that might seem.

 

I blink and step back into my natural form, the icy giant, tall and gaunt and terrible. Even so, I’m small in comparison. I am naked, have been naked since this battle started—clothing and armor are, for me, just more accoutrements of another world, a perspective that has no place here and now. I am unarmed, having left my axe behind. He is neither of these things, and much larger than I, as well.

 

And yet still, his grin sharpens as he sees me. He can recognize a kindred spirit when he sees one.

 

The duel opens slowly, the beginning moves of the dance. We circle one another, in the open space everyone else has so thoughtfully left us. Each of us is considering the other, taking stock. How do they move, how do they stand, how do they carry themselves? There are a thousand variables to be weighed and measured, most of which can’t be named or quantified.

 

Taken as a whole, it creates an impression, more than anything. Again, it isn’t something that can be quantified, or even really qualified. It isn’t something that can be put into words or numbers. It’s more a base-level awareness of the person I’m facing off against. It’s more instinct than rational thought.

 

It’s instinct that tells me when he’s going to move.

 

It’s instinct that tells me, without my so much as having to think, just when and how to dodge to let his axe crash to the ground behind me, carving a hole in it rather than in me.

 

It’s instinct that tells me when and how to leap to catch him in the back, off balance, and drag him to the ground.

 

But it’s experience that lets me wrap my arm around his neck in exactly the right way to cut off his breathing and limit his movement.

 

He struggles, but there’s very little he can do. He tries to pull me off, but I’m behind him, and between the armor and the sheer muscle mass of his shoulders, his freedom of movement is limited, his leverage nonexistent in this position. He tries to stand, but my knee presses into the side of his, forcing him to collapse again or let me destroy the joint. He tries to roll over and crush me under his weight, but I go with the motion and throw my own strength behind it as well, ending up back on top of him.

 

I squeeze tighter, leaning down beside him where he can’t move my weight as easily. Again, it’s a matter of experience, of understanding how to arrange matters such that leverage and balance favor me more than strength favors him.

 

Not that strength is favoring him much, at this point. He hasn’t been able to breathe for over a minute. Here, his bulk is a detriment rather than an advantage. It takes a great deal of air to sustain that much mass, particularly when struggling violently. Denied that air, he’s already beginning to grow weak.

 

He tries to push himself to his hands and knees again, scrabbling at the ground with his hands. I slam my weight down on him, forcing him back to the ground, shoving his face down into the snow with my free hand. I grind my hips against his armor, pinning him down.

 

There’s a moment, after he passes out, when I could let him go. I could let him live.

 

I choose not to.

 

I hold on. If anything, I squeeze tighter, clenching down almost convulsively. I hear things break in his neck. He’s too massive, his neck too heavily muscled, for me to have broken it and saved myself the effort of this slow strangulation. But as he loses consciousness, he can’t resist. I still don’t break the spine, but the trachea, some blood vessels, they rupture as I bear down on them.

 

He dies.

 

I throw my head back and howl sheer exultation to the sky as the battle continues to rage around me.

Previous Chapter                                                                                    Next Chapter

Previous Chapter                                                                                    Next Chapter

 

The throne room had undergone some major renovations since the last time I saw it. Not surprising, I supposed. This room was the center of Aiko’s power, at this point. It made sense that it was the first place to reflect the new ownership.

 

The basic structure was the same. It was a vast, open room. Cavernous, really. But cosmetically, it was very different. Rather than total darkness, it was defined by the interplay of light and shadow. Mostly it was kept dark, but there were patches that were brightly lit. The light shifted and danced slowly, unpredictably. As was often the case, it didn’t so much illuminate the darkness as emphasize by contrast just how deep it ran.

 

The floor had also changed. Instead of flat, featureless black stone, it was black with swirls of crimson running through it. The color was arranged in ways that almost, but never quite, formed repeating patterns. There were patches of ice on the ground, as well, and snowdrifts scattered irregularly around the room. The lights reflected off the snow, adding another layer to the slow, constant dance of light and shadow.

 

The throne had shifted as well. Scáthach had sat on a chair carved from a single piece of gem-quality amethyst. This was similar, but it was a blood-red stone rather than violet. Ruby, or something like it. And while it still had an assortment of runes and hieroglyphs carved into the stone, pride of place was clearly held by a stylized image of a diving falcon on the back of the chair. After a moment I recognized it as the coat of arms Loki had assigned her, way back when. At the time, I hadn’t understood why she would need a coat of arms.

 

How long had this been planned, I wondered? Since the day I met her? Since before that? Just how much of what had happened to us had been planned from the start?

 

The room was crowded with every sort of fae that I could imagine, from Sidhe nobles to hags and trolls. Every last one of them got well out of our way as we walked in, leaving a ten-foot aisle to the throne absolutely empty. We walked up to it in total silence.

 

Aiko sat—or, more accurately, lounged—in the throne. I stood next to it, with Snowflake by my feet, and tried to look threatening and ominous. It was probably undercut a bit by the fact that I was dressed in casual clothing rather than armor.

 

Although I wasn’t planning on that staying the case for long. There were reasons I didn’t feel the need to wear armor.

 

“Okay,” Aiko said. Her voice carried through the room like she was using a high-quality PA system. “I’m taking charge here. Now, I’m sure there’s going to be some urge for a lot of you to cause trouble for me while I’m getting used to the role. I’m telling you right now that that is a bad idea. You annoy me and I’m perfectly fine with killing you. This is the only warning I plan to give you, so I suggest you take it seriously.”

 

“Do you really intend to kill everyone that goes against your whim?” one of the Sidhe nobles said. All of the Sidhe were beautiful, of course, but his beauty was less attractive than most, and more condescending, a silent statement that he was better than everyone and everything around him. He sounded oily, and he smelled like a snake.

 

“I figure I’ll have the thug do it,” she said, nudging me in the ribs with her foot. I suddenly noticed that she was barefoot. Of course she was. Cold wasn’t a problem for her anymore. We had that in common. Which was a good thing, really. Otherwise she’d be liable to get frostbite just being near me.

 

The Sidhe responded in what was, really, a very predictable way. He threw a blast of dark fire at me, something that didn’t so much cast light as eat it, and left an acidic scent in the air behind it.

 

I didn’t even try to dodge, and the blast hit me in the face. My head exploded into a cloud of steam, and the rest of my body collapsed to the ground.

 

There was no pain. That was the most interesting thing about it. There was no pain response associated with what happened.

 

There was just a sudden, wrenching shift in perspective. My view of the world twisted, instantly and dramatically.

 

The most immediately noticeable thing was a sort of loss of location. I wasn’t associated with a specific point in space. Or, rather, I was, but the relationship was suddenly a great deal looser. A single step could carry me across the room, since I wasn’t really moving in any physical way. Movement was just how I conceptualized a transition, a shift in focus and attention.

 

The second thing that changed was the pattern of light and darkness. It went from a constantly shifting maze to a pattern that was static, locked in place. It also had nothing to do with illumination. Again, it was just how my mind was interpreting something completely unrelated to visual input.

 

Instead, it indicated the presence of something in line with my nature. Here, the “light” indicated the presence of ice and snow, of cold. The snowbanks and ice slicks in the room burned with a cold light to my sight, casting a dimmer glow over their immediate surroundings. The stretches of stone between them, meanwhile, were dark and empty.

 

I took a moment to orient myself and decide what to do next. It didn’t take long. Like a fool, the Sidhe noble who’d blasted me was standing right next to a snowbank, with his back turned towards it.

 

I took a step towards that snowbank, blurring across the empty stone floor between me and it. I couldn’t have stood there if I wanted to; there was nothing to host me, nothing for my mind to inhabit.

 

Once there, I stepped into the snow, and then through it. The world twisted again, snapping back into a view more in line with what I had grown accustomed to in life, as a loose body formed itself out of snow. I called Tyrfing as I reached out with one arm, forming a rough pseudopod out of snow.

 

The cursed sword still came when I called. If I’d had any doubt that I was really me, that would have settled it. I might have changed in ways that I could never have seen coming or comprehended before they happened, but it still recognized me. It was still bonded to me. ‘Til death did we part, if death was even a concept that could be applied to me anymore.

 

My “body” wasn’t much—just a torso and a pair of arms extending out of the snow, with no clear features. It took time to form a decent replica of the body I’d had.

 

But for all its crudity, it did have one undeniable perk. It was strong. Something of the unnatural strength I’d had, as a werewolf and a jotun and who knew what else, carried over. There was something else there, too, a trace of darkness that was a new element in my composition, a shadow just a bit deeper than the mere absence of light.

 

I shaped myself out of the snow, and before anyone could so much as shout a warning, I hit the Sidhe nobleman with Tyrfing and the kind of force that could punch holes in concrete. He hit the ground in two pieces, both flickering with pale fire from the touch of the iron.

 

A second or two later, my body collapsed back into snow, casting me back into that disembodied state. It had been too hastily constructed, too unfinished to hold me for more than a moment or two. Tyrfing clattered to the floor beside the dying Sidhe, the blade gleaming against the floor. No one moved towards it.

 

I could see the sudden wave of shock go through the fae as they realized what had just happened. More than a few people cast sidelong glances at the snow and ice and edged away from it, suddenly realizing that it was more than just a choice of decor.

 

“I can’t change what you are,” Aiko said into the echoing silence. “I can’t alter your natures. I’m not even going to try. But I can impose some limits. I am your Queen, and you will acknowledge that.” The words sounded odd, vague and warped, like I was hearing them underwater. Probably because I wasn’t really hearing them. There was enough here for me to work with that I could understand them to some extent, but it wasn’t the same thing at all.

 

I found it interesting, in a way, the extent to which her role had already influenced her. Aiko had never been that much of a commanding presence, really. But now there was a regality to her bearing, an almost palpable authority. She’d just told this entire room full of Sidhe to sit down and shut up, and not a single voice was raised against her.

 

And granted probably part of that was because of the clear possibility that I’d cut them in half if they tried. But then again, this was the Midnight Court. Violence was a part of their nature. That wasn’t really good or evil, as such. It was just…what they were.

 

“I will meet with many of you in the coming weeks,” Aiko continued. “I expect I will be making some changes around here. In the meantime, you may go and consider what has been said here.”

 

Every single one of them knelt for a moment, then stood and began filing out. There must have been more fae magic at work, because despite the size of the crowd and the fact that there was only one exit, it only took a few moments for the room to be empty.

 

No one went near the corpse, or the sword, or even looked at them too closely.

 

I stepped into another snowbank, then just waited as they left. I couldn’t see anything much in that state. I was too coherent, too closely tied to a specific body, to use the weird sensory model that I’d picked up when I ceased to be a fully living being. But the senses I was more used to, and which I instinctively mimicked while in a body, were largely blocked by the snow.

 

It wasn’t exactly a moment of vulnerability. I was still, for all practical intents and purposes, invulnerable. Even if someone destroyed everything that could host me—every bit of snow and ice, every predator, everything that I could manifest through to act on the world—even then, I wouldn’t really be hurt. Not in a meaningful way. Inconvenienced, perhaps. But not hurt, not killed. From what Fenris had said, there were very few things that could kill me at this point.

 

But that in-between state was definitely a moment of weakness. It was a moment when my ability to perceive and influence the world was sharply limited.

 

I dimly heard footsteps coming closer, then stopping. “Well,” Aiko said, outside my snowbank. I wasn’t sure how she’d known which one I was in, beyond the obvious. “That was fun.”

 

I waited a moment longer for my body to finish forming, then clawed my way out of the snow. It moved aside at a touch, or a thought. It was mine to command.

 

This body wasn’t as good as the one that had been destroyed. It was still a little crude, lacking the fine details. Even if I put on an illusory mask of flesh and blood over it, I was guessing it would be noticeably imperfect. It wouldn’t look real. But it was functional, and it was formed enough that I could sustain it more or less indefinitely.

 

“I would have thought you’d hate it,” I commented, sitting down and leaning back into the snow. The image amused me—snow leaning into snow. Even if I was as much formed of ice and darkness as actual snow. “Too political.”

 

“The Midnight Court has a fun sort of politics,” she said. “And they mostly have to deal with my whims, instead of the other way around. That makes it easier.”

 

“You can’t lie, can you?” I asked.

 

“Not as such,” she said. “No. That was part of the deal I made.”

 

I nodded. It made sense. Even if she hadn’t been born fae, she’d effectively chosen to become such when she took the job. It fit that she would have taken on some of their weaknesses as well.

 

“That’s going to be hard,” I commented. “Especially for you.”

 

She grinned broadly. “Just means I have to get twistier,” she said.

 

I nodded with a creak of breaking ice. “Yeah,” I said. “What now?”

 

“I’m going to have to have those meetings,” she said. “There’s a lot to do right now. I’m not doing this job the same way Scáthach did.”

 

“Do you think you’ll have the choice?” I asked.

 

“I think so,” she said. “The role is…it isn’t a cookie cutter. It isn’t about forcing people into exactly the right mold. It’s more a matter of…expressing the right concepts. How I go about expressing those concepts is up to me.”

 

“Two plus two is four,” I said. “But so is three plus one.”

 

“Or two times two,” she said. “Yeah. That’s a good analogy. I actually have more flexibility than I would have expected.”

 

“That’s good,” I said. “Do you want me here to put the fear of me into them?”

 

She hesitated, then shook her head. “No,” she said. “Thanks, but no. I have to show them that I can stand up for myself.”

 

“Okay,” I said. “I’ve got my own things to take care of. Meeting with my minions and reestablishing control in Colorado Springs. I’ll meet you back here?”

 

“Yeah,” she said. “Do that. You can get back on your own?”

 

“I haven’t forgotten how to open portals,” I said dryly. “I can get back around on my own.” I stood with another creak of breaking ice and shifting snow. “Come on, Snowflake,” I said. “Let’s let her do Court things. I think you’re going to enjoy this trip.”

 

Will we get to kill things? she asked, standing up from where she’d been lazing next to the throne. She hadn’t even gotten up at any point, or involved herself in the proceedings in any way. Smart dog.

 

“If past experience of what happens when I leave that city to its own devices is any guide?” I said. “Yeah. Probably we will.”

 

Cool, she said. I can’t wait.

---

 

We’d debated, at first, telling my minions what had happened. Or something of it. Most of them weren’t remotely equipped to understand the full reality of it, but the gist could have been explained.

 

In the end, though, we’d decided it was a bad idea. I had enough henchpersons that I couldn’t remotely guarantee that all of them were loyal. Even of the ones that were loyal, there was no guarantee that they were smart. Hell, given that they were working for me, there was practically the opposite. So any information shared with them was potentially information leaked to an enemy.

 

In the end, we’d decided to just carry on like nothing had happened. Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated, and such. Some of them, of course, would know better. And my inner circle would have to be informed, at least partially. But for most of them, this was need-to-know information, and they didn’t need to know.

 

Most of them didn’t even know I wasn’t dead and gone. I’d sent messages to Kyi and Selene, including statements that they shouldn’t inform anyone else. I thought the reactions to my reappearance would be telling.

 

I’d told some other people, as well. Friends, mostly. I’d made sure that Kyra, Anna, and Edward all knew. I’d sent a message to Alexis. There were a couple of other werewolves I’d known when I was younger who were still around, and some people from Pryce’s.

 

I’d seriously thought about letting them continue thinking I was dead. It would probably have been kinder to them, all things considered. But in the end, I just couldn’t bring myself to do so. I’d already lost…so much of my old life. Things I’d given up, and things that had been taken from me. I couldn’t bring myself to cut those ties as well.

 

By the time I got back to the city, it was dusk. The sunset was beautiful, and I stopped to watch it before going in. It seemed like it had been ages since I’d just stood and watched the sunset.

 

It was interesting how much comfort the little things could provide, when the big things were ugly.

 

Once it was dark, I walked up to the door and opened it without knocking. The wards let me through without complaint. I’d been keyed into them when they were built, and I was still me enough for them to recognize. Snowflake came in, as well, walking just to my right.

 

I’d taken the time to finish sculpting my body into a passable imitation of the original, and I was maintaining the mask over it. Clothing hadn’t been an issue; my suite at the Isle of Shadows had a full closet, including duplicates of everything from the castle in Romania. Those duplicates were absolutely perfect, right down to the magic I’d woven into the fabric.

 

I walked into the throne room, and by prior arrangement, everyone of real importance in my organization was there waiting for me. I wasn’t sure how Selene had managed to get everyone there at once, at just the right time, without any of them noticing anything odd about it. She was really very good at what she did.

 

The response when I walked in was instant and pronounced.

 

Jibril looked momentarily, intensely annoyed. Then the ghoul smiled wryly and nodded to me. The gesture reminded me of a fencer’s acknowledgment of a touch, not so much a greeting as recognition of a point scored.

 

Vigdis whooped and threw her arms up, grinning like a madwoman. It was nice that someone was glad to see me again, at least. Even if it was just because she was a psychopath and I let her kill people on a fairly regular basis.

 

Between those two extremes, the responses were mostly defined by their surprise, or lack thereof. Most of them seemed shocked. A few—Kjaran and Luna, in particular—very much didn’t.

 

But by and large, they seemed glad to see me. They seemed glad to have me back.

 

I wasn’t sure why that was as much of a surprise as it was.

 

“Hi,” I said, walking up to my throne of black iron. I thought, with a sort of wry amusement, that our days of complaining about the thing were probably gone. I didn’t have the physical responses to make it really uncomfortable, and if Aiko was really fae now, odds were good she couldn’t stand the iron. “Did you miss me?”

 

There was a momentary pause, then the room filled with laughter. It was a relieved sort of laughter, the sound you make when it turns out that everything’s going to be okay after all. I found myself grinning as I settled down into the throne. As much as I hated the thing, as much as I’d never wanted this job, there was something…comforting about coming back to it. There was a feeling of continuity about it, a feeling that as much as everything had changed, some things were still the same.

 

Selene was standing next to me with a sandwich and a cup of tea—cold tea, of course; I could imagine the effect of drinking hot tea, and it wasn’t likely to be a fun one. Kyi was going over scouting reports and talking with the housecarls about patrol schedules and countermeasures. Tindr was walking up with a notebook full of numbers.

 

It felt like coming home. I’d never have expected it, but somewhere along the way, this had turned into home.

 

My city. In spite of everything, this was still my city.

Previous Chapter                                                                                    Next Chapter

Previous Chapter                                                                                    Next Chapter

 

“Right,” Aiko said, as I stepped in behind her and closed the door, setting Snowflake down on the floor. “Family.” She sounded understandably uncomfortable at the thought.

 

“There are things to be established,” Mab said in a flat, empty voice. “Now that you are assuming the responsibilities of your office.”

 

“Cool,” Aiko said in a casual voice which fooled nobody. “What do I have to do?”

 

“The question is not what you do,” Mab said. “The question is what you are.”

 

“Okay,” Aiko said. “Um, quick question. Since we’re all technically on the same side here, is there any chance you could stop the cryptic bullshit?”

 

I almost thought I saw Grandmother Midnight’s cowl twitch, as though she were smiling underneath. Beyond that, they might as well have been statues for all the response she got out of them.

 

“Of course,” Aiko muttered. “Who was I kidding? All right, then. What am I supposed to be?”

 

“You are the Maiden of Night,” Mab said. “Reflect that fact.”

 

“Okay. So that means…violent, psychopathic, and scheming, but not quite mature enough about it to be a grown-up?”

 

This time there was no question that the cowl twitched. I heard the barest whisper of laughter, bone-dry and cold, but recognizably laughter all the same.

 

“That is one interpretation of the role,” Mab said. “It is not wholly wrong.”

 

“You realize I do those things anyway, right?”

 

“That is why the offer was extended,” Mab said. “The less the office is required to mold you, the simpler the process is.”

 

I was reasonably confident I should have shivered at that. I probably would have, if I still had a physical fear response. It was sure as hell an ominous thing to hear.

 

“So just be myself,” Aiko said. “Are there things I have to do in particular? I don’t really know how hands-on this gig is. Am I supposed to be here every Tuesday to boss people around or something?”

 

“You will know when there are specific obligations to be met.”

 

“Be myself unless otherwise noted, and I’ll know when otherwise noted applies. Got it. So…if it’s this individualistic, why did we even need to have this meeting?”

 

“There are formalities to be observed,” Mab said in that same voice, empty of all emotion. “Such as the appointment of a champion to act on your behalf when appropriate.”

 

“Where’s yours?” Aiko asked flippantly.

 

“I do not bring pets to important meetings,” Mab said. I wasn’t sure whether that was a dig at Aiko or not; it could have been, but it could also just be a statement of fact. Mab was really, really hard to get a read on.

 

“Fair enough,” Aiko said. “Well, I think I’m going with this guy.” She elbowed me in the ribs, a little harder than necessary. She was more nervous than she was letting on. Or possibly she’d just forgotten that I wasn’t wearing armor. There wasn’t a lot of point in armor for me, these days.

 

That got a response, the first really notable response I’d seen from the elder Queens in this meeting. There was a pause, one that dragged on for a few seconds. I couldn’t see Grandmother Midnight’s face, and Mab’s was still a blank, beautiful mask. But I got the impression of surprise, all the same.

 

“You realize that a champion is meant to be a living mortal,” Mab said.

 

“Are you saying I’m dead?” I asked. More to see how she’d respond than anything, really. I knew better than to expect a straight answer from Mab.

 

“I say that there comes a point at which life and death cease to be meaningful concepts. You passed that point some time ago. And there are other issues which make this choice problematic, as well.”

 

“No.”

 

It was amazing how much of a response that one word got. It was just one word, spoken in a barely audible rasp. But everyone, even Mab, shut their mouths and turned to look at Grandmother Midnight. All at once.

 

“Let them do it,” the crone rasped.

 

“Pardon me, ma’am,” I said. “But if this is a problem, it might be better not to.”

 

“Such caution,” she replied. “Not at all like last time. Arrangements have been made for this, however.”

 

I paused, and while I couldn’t really shiver, I did have a definite feeling of unease. That statement had…a lot of implications, none of which I liked. I couldn’t help but be reminded that the last time I was here, Grandmother Midnight had offered me the chance to be her champion.

 

“This won’t end well, will it?” I asked quietly.

 

I’d heard it a few times now, but the sound of Grandmother Midnight laughing was still creepy as hell. It rasped and twisted and caught in her throat, working its way out only with difficulty. It sounded like it stained the world darker just by its presence. I could feel, now, that this impression wasn’t entirely wrong.

 

I understood that a little better, now. I understood what Mab meant when she said the important thing was for Aiko to be. One of the things I’d come to realize was that power was a little like mass. At high enough concentrations, it started to bend the world around it just by existing.

 

By the time the laughter stopped, Snowflake was shivering a little, and had our surroundings been a little bit less dangerous I was guessing she’d have been growling. For that matter, I might have been growling too.

 

“It won’t end well,” Grandmother Midnight said at last. “Nothing ever does.”

 

I tried to smile. The result was probably more creepy than anything. I’d always been better at psycho-killer than comforting, when it came to smiles. I doubted that had changed.

 

“True enough,” I said. “Well, I’m willing to try it. I doubt it can be much worse of an idea than everything else we’ve done.”

 

Aiko snorted. “Setting the bar low, there. Was there anything else that needs dealt with first?”

 

“Not presently,” Mab said. “Go. There will be more to be done when that is complete.”

 

With no more formality than that, the meeting was over. I knew the meeting was over, because both Mab and Grandmother Midnight were gone. I didn’t see either of them move, didn’t feel a bit of magic.

 

Then I realized that Aiko had moved, too. She was standing instead of sitting, and on the other side of the room.

 

“Um,” I said. “What just happened?”

 

“A conversation,” Aiko said sourly. “Which Mab decided you didn’t need to be a participant in. So she removed you from it.”

 

I paused. “Removed? What does that mean?”

 

“She put the two of you into stasis,” she said. “For…an hour or so, I think. They left a few minutes ago.”

 

I frowned. “Oh,” I said. “That’s…unsettling. What was the conversation about?”

 

Aiko shrugged. “Can’t really explain. Some of it I don’t really have the words for, and some of it I’m not allowed to talk about.”

 

That was a bit odd. Aiko wasn’t normally the sort of person to care too much about what she was and was not allowed to do.

 

I didn’t say anything about it, though. I was guessing she was already chafing under the restrictions of the role she’d chosen to adopt, and for me to remind her of that fact wouldn’t make it any better.

 

“You want to get this over with?” I asked.

 

“Yeah,” she said. “I know what we need to do.”

 

“I’m not going to enjoy this, am I?” I asked.

 

She shrugged. “It could be worse. It’s us, at least. And it won’t be any more fun if we wait, so let’s do this.” She opened the door and started for the stairs. I picked Snowflake up and followed her.

 

The top of the stairs wasn’t the same as it had been when we went down. The vast, empty hall was replaced with an expansive suite. It was also at the top of one of the castle’s towers, as I found out when I glanced out the window at a five-hundred-foot drop.

 

It felt familiar, and that wasn’t a coincidence. It took me a couple seconds to realize it, but it was very clearly an expanded replica of our bedroom from the castle in Transylvania.

 

Aiko didn’t seem surprised by the change, which made sense. Hell, she was probably the reason for it. This was her domain, after all. It stood to reason that she would be able to mold it to her will the way I’d seen really powerful people manipulate the Otherside in the past.

 

It was going to take a bit of getting used to thinking of Aiko as someone who could use that kind of power, instead of someone who had it used on her.

 

“Okay,” she said, scratching Snowflake’s ears. “You can’t stay for the next part.”

 

Can’t? Snowflake asked. Or don’t want to?

 

“Both,” Aiko said firmly. “You want to take a nap, or get some food, or something?”

 

Nap, she said. Wake me when you’re done with the freaky faerie rituals. She then walked back out the door and lay down at the top of the stairs.

---

 

Afterward, I never really remembered what happened after that. Not in any clear or coherent way.

 

The process involved sex, and blood, and darkness. The blood was Aiko’s, presumably, since it wasn’t like I had any left. But I took some damage, as well. I remember having to scrape my body together a few times, though, and I was still missing some chunks by the end.

 

Somewhere along the way, I got a glimpse of just what I was joining myself to, what I was letting inside. I got a tiny glimpse of what the Midnight Court was for.

 

I couldn’t fathom that purpose. Not really. My mind was not meant for that kind of thing, wasn’t made to process that. It was too alien to anything that I understood the world to be.

 

I didn’t scream at that revelation. I hadn’t been breathing for a while, at that point, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to start just for that. I couldn’t spare the attention to even if I wanted to. I got very little physical feedback from this body, and I was guessing it was just as well, because what did get through was enough to leave me half-stunned.

 

The next several hours stretched out into a small eternity, floating in utter darkness and bitter cold, filled with power and primeval hunger.

---

 

Later—much later, at least from my perspective—I was lying on my back on the stone floor. Mostly on my back, at least; my torso was sort of twisted on its side, and my neck was bent at an angle considerably sharper than it should have been able to get to. I wasn’t really dependent on things like nerves and muscles to control my body, and keeping it to vaguely human limits was more a matter of habit than anything.

 

Not that it would have looked anything like human, anyway. I’d stopped maintaining a mask of flesh over it somewhere along the way, and I hadn’t yet bothered to put it back on. As a result, my body still looked more like a vaguely humanoid ice sculpture than any kind of person.

 

The influence of the power I’d just taken into myself was obvious, if you know how to look. The strands of darkness tying the ice and snow together were a little bit darker, a little more real. The shadow I cast, too, was just a little larger and darker than it should have been. There was a depth there, as though when I looked into that shadow I was seeing something more than just a patch of darkened stone.

 

I could feel a similar depth inside me. I couldn’t really put words to it—I wasn’t entirely sure words existed for this sort of feeling. The closest I could come to really grasping it was to picture a sort of well in my soul, except instead of water, it led down into darkness. The power wasn’t in me, not really, not beyond a minimal amount to establish that connection. But I could tap a hell of a lot of it, through that connection.

 

That wasn’t something I could do without consequences. I didn’t fully grasp the nature of that well, and I couldn’t begin to fully comprehend the nature of the power it was tapping into. But it didn’t take a genius to guess that it wasn’t something to do casually. Power never came without a consequence, and when the source of that power was the Midnight Court, it wasn’t hard to guess that the consequence wouldn’t be a pretty one.

 

But if we went down, Aiko and I would go down together. If the whole thing weren’t so spectacularly messed up, it would have almost been romantic and sweet.

 

“So what now?” I asked, twisting my head further to the side to look at Aiko on the floor next to me. There was a quiet crack of breaking ice as I pushed the “bones” in my neck past the breaking point. It only took a moment’s thought to fuse it back together in the current position. That was definitely a bright side of being associated with ice rather than, say, stone.

 

“Lie here and contemplate our many and vast mistakes,” Aiko said sleepily. “Wake the dog. Then I have to go introduce myself to my new minions. You should probably be there for that. You’ll have to start making an impression on them at some point.”

 

“What kind of impression are you thinking?” I asked.

 

“They aren’t the sort of people to be impressed by nice guys,” she said. “So I figure you can just be yourself.”

 

I snorted. “Should be fun,” I said. “When is that?”

 

She shrugged, a fluid, almost boneless gesture. “Whenever I want,” she said. “Basically. Time is pretty flexible here anyway. Like, as far as anyone else is concerned, we’ve only been in here for about fifteen minutes.”

 

I blinked. A thin film of snow acted to lubricate the eyelid of darkness as it slid over an eyeball carved as a rough sphere of ice. It was funny how much my instinctive understanding of how a body worked carried over to this. If I’d had to actually build a functioning replica of a human body out of frozen water and darkness, I’d have had no chance at all. But if I just gave a sort of general instruction and let my subconscious take care of the details, I got a sort of functional result.

 

“You can do that?” I asked.

 

She shrugged again. “Here? Yeah, sorta. It’s not a precise sort of thing, but I can make it faster or slower.”

 

“That part’s nice,” I said.

 

Aiko grinned and nodded. “It really is,” she said. “I mean, I get that Faustian bargains are bad and everything, but damn, the perks are nice.”

 

“Otherwise nobody would take the deal,” I said. “All right. Putting this off any longer isn’t going to make it hurt any less. Let’s just get this over with.”

 

She sighed and pushed herself to her feet. “Let’s,” she said. “I’m really not looking forward to this. Who’d have guessed we’d end up here, huh? Me actually being in charge of people?”

 

“I don’t think anybody saw this coming,” I lied.

Previous Chapter                                                                                    Next Chapter

Previous Chapter                                                                                    Next Chapter

 

I’d been to the Isle of Shadows before. But this was still a very novel experience.

 

For one thing, I wasn’t the same person I’d been back then. I’d changed, on a lot of levels. I didn’t see the world the same way anymore, literally or figuratively. And not just because the only other time I’d come here I’d been in a psychotic rage and unable to think clearly. Or at all, really.

 

For another, the context was completely different. The last time I’d been here, I’d come to unseat the Queen with violence and destruction. This time was…well, pretty much the exact opposite of that.

 

I still hadn’t fully wrapped my head around that. Or any of this, really. It was a lot to get used to, and I hadn’t even finished adapting to how my own mental functions had changed. That was a pretty vital first step when it came to adjusting to other massive upsets.

 

This visit started about the same way as the last one. Aiko did the portals, of course. She’d always been better with that sort of magic than I was, and the role she’d adopted had done a lot to widen that gap. Messing around with the structure of the Otherside was a major part of what a Faerie Queen did. That was what the title meant.

 

Aiko was good. She was one of the best I’d ever seen. She could open a portal in a couple of seconds while carrying on a conversation, and she made it look easy. They were so smooth that even Snowflake barely even stumbled.

 

That, in itself, did a lot to drive things home. I’d taken portals that smooth in the past, but only very rarely, and they were always the result of a major power taking an interest. Someone like Ryujin, or a Twilight Prince. That was the league Aiko was playing in, now. In one step she’d gone from being a fairly minor member of a fairly minor faction to a notable factor on the world stage.

 

The three of us stepped out of the last portal into Faerie. We were standing on the path leading up to the castle, back in the island. Like the last time I’d been there, it was thronging with creatures from the Midnight Court. Unlike the last time, though, they weren’t trying to kill me.

 

Instead, the instant Aiko appeared, they knelt and bowed their heads in her direction.

 

All of them. At once.

 

“Is this normal?” I asked in a whisper. Not that it would probably matter, given who we were dealing with. It seemed like a safe bet that a lot of the fae could hear my heartbeat, let alone a whisper. Except that I didn’t have a heartbeat anymore. You need a heart for that.

 

“No idea,” she replied, even more quietly. “This is the first time I’ve been here since I…you know…did it.”

 

“Wonderful,” I muttered. “Well, don’t let them see you flinch.” I offered her my arm, and she rested her fingers lightly on my elbow as we started up the path.

 

Not one of the fae said a word. There wasn’t a sound as we walked up the hill. They weren’t even breathing. I’d have known if they were. They stayed there, kneeling on the ground, until we were out of sight.

 

There were a lot of them, too. Enough that I gave up counting after a few hundred, and we weren’t all that far up the path. And they didn’t stop until we’d made it all the way up to the castle bridge.

 

I was a little hesitant to step out onto that bridge. The last time I’d done so, it bucked under my feet and threw me back to the shore, which would be rather embarrassing.

 

Aiko showed no such hesitation, and the stone didn’t so much as twitch. It did twitch when I stepped on it, and kept quivering under my feet the whole way across, but it didn’t go any further than that.

 

Across the moat, we were in the courtyard. It looked much the same, but my awareness of it had changed dramatically. I was still cognizant that it was a barren, utterly lifeless field of stone. But that was a side note, much less important than the less obvious things I could feel about the space. I could sense the currents of power running through it, torrents of energy rushing by just beneath my feet and on every side. They smelled dark, and subtle, but beyond that I couldn’t say much about them. There was too much there for me to process, even now.

 

Even more than that, though, I was acutely aware of the meaning of the space. I had an impression of what the courtyard, and the castle which encompassed it, were intended for, the context in which they existed. I could feel the creeping fear that was inherent in it, the deception and power. It smelled dark and quiet, like secrets and sadness, regret without remorse. It tingled on my skin, to the extent that I had skin.

 

And as a final note, there was a constant awareness of…well, me. I had a sort of perpetual connection to the ideas that were most important to my makeup. I could feel cold, not in the sense of being cold, but in the sense of instinctively knowing where to find cold in my vicinity. I could feel the presence of predatory minds outside the walls, the hunger there.

 

Between processing all that and the constant effort involved in things like walking, I didn’t have all that much attention left for actually looking at things.

 

The castle around the courtyard all looked about the same to me—which was, itself, probably the result of some kind of fae shenanigans, since the side we’d just come from seemed like it should have been less heavily built. Aiko, though, seemed to know exactly where she was going as she walked up to one of the tall, narrow spires and opened the door.

 

Then again, she would. Being on what was, now, her home ground, I was guessing she was getting an incredible amount of information as a sort of constant feed. I could almost feel the connection between her and the island, subtle but very much present once I knew to look for it.

 

Inside, the building was far larger than it should have been, a vast, echoing hall rather than a narrow spire. Par for the course, with the Sidhe. It was, of course, empty, the black stone lacking any sort of decoration or indicator of purpose.

 

Aiko ignored all of that and went straight to a staircase in the corner. It was an impossible staircase, thin slabs of black marble stacked in a tight spiral with no other form of support. In a rational world, it couldn’t have supported its own weight, and the staircase would have collapsed into a pile of broken stone. As it was, it was a perfectly serviceable spiral staircase.

 

It led both up and down from where we were. Naturally, we did not start climbing.

 

It was a long way down. A very, very long way, descending through a shaft no wider than the staircase itself. It was tight enough to trigger my claustrophobia, although it didn’t manifest the way it once had. There wasn’t fear, or even unease—no emotional reaction at all, in fact. There was just an abstract, cerebral sort of awareness of it. I knew that I was uncomfortable, that my current surroundings were upsetting me. I knew that I should be a little nervous, or even actively afraid. But the actual fear reaction just…wasn’t there.

 

I didn’t get tired, either. That had been one of the strangest things for me to get used to. Not having flesh meant that simple things like walking and breathing, which had once been so rote as to be entirely thoughtless, were instead difficult and demanding. But it also meant that I wasn’t susceptible to the weaknesses of the flesh. I could still get tired mentally, but I simply didn’t have a physical fatigue response.

 

Aiko, similarly, didn’t get tired as we descended the stairs. Her movements were casually, effortlessly perfect. She didn’t stumble, didn’t slow down, didn’t have to pause.

 

Snowflake, though, was still mortal, still flesh and blood. And she was not pleased about this. You don’t know how good you have it, she grouched to me when we were about two hundred steps in.

 

I could carry you, I offered. I had to pause for a second to do so; stairs were enough of a challenge, when it felt like I was operating a marionette rather than actually walking myself. In a sense, I supposed that perception wasn’t inaccurate. Not that it mattered too much, since the stairs were narrow enough that we had to go in single file, and I was at the back of the line.

 

That’s a good point, she said. Why aren’t you carrying me?

 

Rather than answer her, I sped up slightly and pulled her up off the ground, cradling her in my arms. It wasn’t hard. I wasn’t quite as strong using this puppet-body of ice and darkness as I had been back when I was housed in my own flesh and bone, but it also didn’t weigh nearly as much. I could make it move very, very fast when I wanted to.

 

The next twenty minutes passed in a steady, uneventful routine. The only real concern was boredom, which was alleviated considerably when Snowflake started telling impressively filthy jokes to break up the monotony. Aiko got in on it too; being largely unable to hear Snowflake was no longer a problem she had. One of the perks of the job, presumably.

 

I tried to remember to laugh—or, as was more appropriate for a lot of the jokes, groan. Neither one was an automatic response for me, anymore. They were things I had to think about, and even when I remembered, they didn’t sound right. It was like telling jokes to the Terminator. There was always that momentary pause, while I tried to remember what I was supposed to sound like, and even when I did respond, it sounded artificial.

 

I didn’t even try for a reaction more elaborate than that, and definitely not for actually contributing jokes myself. I was having a hard enough time managing things as it was. I figured being a bit less fun than I might have been was preferable to taking a tumble down the endless staircase.

 

We’d gone down a similar staircase last time. But that one had ended at a similarly vast hallway, and this time it was just a door.

 

It didn’t look like much. The stone of the door was glossier than that we’d seen elsewhere in this castle, something like an enormous slab of obsidian. But beyond that, there was nothing particularly remarkable about this door.

 

I had an intense feeling of foreboding looking at it, though. This one wasn’t the result of weird magical senses, though. It was just because I knew what was on the other side, and I’d have needed to be utterly, irrevocably mad to not be frightened at the prospect.

 

“Are you ready?” I asked quietly.

 

“Oh, hell no,” Aiko replied. “Not even a little bit.”

 

“Me neither,” I said. “You going to do it anyway? Because I did not get the impression that this was optional.”

 

“If it were optional, we wouldn’t be here,” she said. She took a deep breath, then shook her head briskly. “Okay. Let’s get it over with.”

 

I nodded and stepped forward to open the door for her. She stepped through first, trying her best to look authoritative and arrogant. She didn’t do a very good job of it. It wasn’t a look that came naturally to her. Aiko was good at cocky, but the formality and gravitas she was going for here just weren’t her.

 

The room inside the door was small. That was the first thing I noticed about it. It was small, and simple, almost cozy. There was a wooden table, not big enough to seat more than a dozen friendly people, and three chairs. A couple of empty bookshelves. That was it.

 

Two of the chairs were already occupied. I recognized one of the occupants, though there wasn’t a whole lot there to recognize. Her black cloak didn’t show anything of what might be underneath, not even a tiny bit of skin. I didn’t know her name, and I wouldn’t dare to use the names I could guess she’d used in the past. I called her Grandmother Midnight, because that was what she was—the eldest queen of the Midnight Court, the matriarch of the wicked fairies.

 

I had not, to the best of my knowledge, encountered the other being in that room before. She was beautiful, of course, in the overwhelming, inhuman, almost painful way that the high Sidhe usually were. She looked a whole lot like Scáthach had, in fact, at least at first glance. She had the same alabaster-white skin, the same raven-black hair. Only the eyes were different, a few shades darker—the green of a forest in summer, rather than spring.

 

Aside from her physical appearance, though, the difference was obvious. Her bearing had none of the playful mockery that Scáthach had exhibited, none of her thinly veiled sadism. The only thing that showed through her mask was a sort of detached, businesslike interest.

 

In other ways, the difference was even more dramatic. She smelled powerful, in a way that Scáthach never had. She’d been a powerhouse, of course, but this was something entirely different, in the sense that a military-grade assault rifle was different than a popgun. There was really no comparison.

 

This, presumably, was Mab, the middle queen of the Midnight Court and the one who most often acted as the Court’s political head. She was a force of nature, the sort of being that most people thought of only as a bogeyman, although she still wasn’t a match for Grandmother Midnight.

 

Between the two of them, though, this was very possibly the single most dangerous meeting I’d ever attended. That was a high bar, too.

 

They ignored me and Snowflake entirely as we walked in. No, ignoring wasn’t the word. It was more like they were aware of our presence, and dismissed it utterly as unworthy of their attention.

 

No, they only had eyes for Aiko as she walked in and took the third seat, with me and Snowflake standing behind her.

 

“Welcome to the family,” Grandmother Midnight said, with a chuckle that sent shivers down my spine.

Previous Chapter                                                                                    Next Chapter

Previous Chapter                                                                                    Next Chapter

 

Block high, step in and half-turn, cut low, dodge, block low, dodge, step in and find a sword against my neck.

 

Feint high, sidestep and cut left, cut left, dodge, cut right, sidestep, half-turn and cut high, and the sword taps against my side.

 

Cut high and the sword is already poking at my belly, as Kikuchi takes an unusually aggressive opening.

 

He beat me. He always beat me.

 

“Good work,” he says, once we’re done.

 

“Yeah,” I say, forcing a fake smile onto my face. “It was great.”

 

As I walk away, I cut viciously at a tree. A branch hits the ground a few seconds later as I walk away with a calm smile.

---

 

The next day, Kikuchi tells me there’s something I have to do, someone I have to fight. Not just me; a large group of us are going to take care of this. Kikuchi, me, and at least a dozen tengu, leaving in a few minutes.

 

He doesn’t tell me why we’re fighting, and I don’t ask.

 

It doesn’t take long to get ready. Not for me. Grab weapons, grab armor, and I’m ready to go. I always keep them close, anyway. A knife, a sword, a gun. The armor is just a set of reinforced motorcyclist’s leathers. It’s comfortable enough to sleep in, and I sometimes do.

 

I meet them a quarter of an hour in a clearing in the woods. There are a dozen tengu, none of whom I recognize. They aren’t important members of the court here. On a chessboard, they would be pawns.

 

And then there’s Kikuchi himself.

 

We make our way off the mountain, a phrase which has a much more complex meaning to a tengu than the literal meaning of the words would suggest. Mountains tend to act as confluences, gathering points for the currents of power that run through the mortal world. Tengu could use that power to support a coterminous domain on the Otherside, and to step from one to the other without even trying. From their perspective, there was no distinction between the mountain and the domain Kikuchi ruled.

 

Leaving the mountain, then, entailed both exiting the domain and getting far enough from the summit to be outside of the area of convergence. This fight is in the mortal world, then, in the city.

 

Probably we should ask the jarl for permission before starting a fight, there. It’s his territory, and not ours. Probably Kikuchi did ask, since his devotion to proper form is even greater than his ego. Probably.

 

I don’t ask whether he did or not.

 

Most likely he did, though, because there are cars waiting at the base of the mountain. The jarl is the sort of person who could easily arrange that sort of mortal convenience; Kikuchi is not.

 

After a short drive across the city, we reach the battlefield. It’s smaller than most, not much more than a shack. I know as soon as we get close what the enemy is, today. The stench of ghoul is distinctive.

 

We stop a short distance away and get out. The tengu begin stretching and warming up. Kikuchi gives me a look, and I know what he wants without a word said.

 

I step out of the car and into my other skin. As a fox, I’m even smaller than most kitsune, and that’s a high bar. Foxes as a whole aren’t known for their great size, but fennecs are the smallest variety by a fair margin.

 

It’s unusual for a kitsune to turn into a fennec rather than a red fox. Not as rare as a swift fox or Cape fox, but still quite unusual. In my youth, it had been a sensitive topic, to the point that even mentioning it could easily provoke me to violence. Since then, I had come to recognize that being small could easily be a weapon as well as a weakness.

 

The extreme difference in size make it easy for me to simply walk out of my clothing. I don’t expect any difficulty in sneaking up on the target. It’s dark, and I’m small, and I know what I’m doing.

 

I don’t move into the building. But even keeping a reasonable distance, I can gather a great deal of information. I can see signs of the ghouls, I can smell them, I can hear them. My hearing is very, very good.

 

At a guess, there are at least thirty of the ghouls in there, packed in like rats. Probably more. Odds re good they outnumber us by three to one. It isn’t remotely a fair fight.

 

I almost feel sorry for them.

 

I can’t find any hint that there was anything else in there. There’s no sign of defenses, no suggestion of a hidden exit. None of the things that Kikuchi had sent me to look for. I head back. I’m starting to get excited, now. I’m looking forward to this. Ghouls are a fairly basic opponent, fairly straightforward. But they’re strong, and tough, and not something to disregard completely.

 

I change back and start pulling my equipment back on. “Nothing special,” I say. “There are about thirty of them in there, I think. Doesn’t seem like they’ve done much to get ready for an attack.”

 

“Good,” Kikuchi says. “Let us proceed.”

 

Kikuchi leads as we close in. He couldn’t do otherwise; tengu culture does not allow one to lead from the rear.

 

However, I am the one directly behind him. I earned that position.

 

He opens the door neatly, rather than kick it in. It figures that he would do so. It also figures that they didn’t lock the door. Some ghouls are quite smart, but this particular group obviously didn’t put much thought into security.

 

Once inside, there are a few ways that things might go. The ghouls choose the worst of them when they rush Kikuchi as a mob.

 

He cuts down the first several in instants and continues walking straight forward at the same pace. I strike off to the left.

 

Step in, cut low, dodge, dodge, thrust high and a ghoul falls, its spine severed. Sidestep, cut low, cut high, dodge, half-turn and cut high, and another falls, missing several limbs. Feint high, feint low, cut high, and a third is decapitated.

 

They’re respectable opponents. They’re lethal.

 

But I’m stronger, faster, smarter, better than they are.

 

The fifth ghoul manages to duck under the sword, and connects with a swipe of its claw. It does no harm, but I’m still snarling as I step in and gut it.

 

Too slow, I think. Too slow, too weak, too clumsy.

 

I’m better. Just never quite good enough.

Previous Chapter                                                                                    Next Chapter

Previous Chapter                                                                                    Next Chapter

 

Walking was hard. I hadn’t fully learned how to control this body yet. Fenris had told me that it would feel natural in time, but until then I was more or less stuck with it.

 

Fenris had told me a lot of things. I hadn’t understood most of them. I lacked the context to make sense of them, and explaining things was hardly his strong suit.

 

I saw the group gathered up ahead. I didn’t approach. Not yet. There were too many unknowns. It had, apparently, been a while. A week for me to regain consciousness, according to Fenris. Another week to begin to grasp what I was, and how to function now that I was…different. He had done what he could to mitigate the time lost, but there were limits.

 

A lot could happen in two weeks.

 

I watched, though. It was fun, in a macabre way. And there were plenty of eyes for me to look through.

 

Not so long ago at all, I would have had a hard time doing so without them being aware of my presence. I tried to use a light touch, but actually going unnoticed? That would have been difficult, probably impossible with some of them.

 

I’d learned some new tricks since then. This one was simple, although not easy to describe. It was a matter of potential. All I had to do was be something that could be present, rather than something that actually was. It was very hard to detect something that only existed in theory. Doing it that way also made the sensory information I got back fuzzier, but with so many sources to draw on, the resulting gestalt image was still clear.

 

I doubted I could have learned that particular trick, before I was forcibly separated from my body. It wasn’t a concept that human minds were suited to grasping. Having now given up any vestiges of humanity that might have remained to me, I found it a surprisingly easy thing to learn.

 

I’d learned a lot, in the past week. It had, on the whole, not been worth it.

 

I stood there for an hour or so while the funeral wrapped up. No one bothered me. Probably no one even noticed me. There wasn’t a whole lot to notice, really. I wasn’t moving, not even a little bit. I had to keep reminding myself to breathe.

 

Fenris had assured me that it would get to be natural at some point. Eventually I would no longer need to make an active attempt to breathe. Like a lot of the other things I’d always taken for granted, it would eventually become second nature again. Until then, there wasn’t much I could do but keep dealing with the annoyance.

 

As the group started splitting up, I walked away. It was slow, but I’d given myself time. I was out of sight around the corner before they were anywhere close to me.

 

I wasn’t sure which direction Aiko and Snowflake were going to go. So I gave them a nudge. It was nothing big. Just a very gentle, very delicate tugging on Snowflake’s mind, a slight preference to walk in one direction rather than another. At the same time, I swept the snow into a slightly different position, one that pointed in my direction.

 

I was kind of amazed at how easy that was. I remembered when physically manipulating snow and ice had been difficult, even exhausting. Now it was…simple. It was barely harder to do it than to think about it. The hard part was just getting it exactly right, since I had only a vague sense of what I was doing. I had a vague impression of where the snow was, but I couldn’t actually see it. While it had gotten easy to do, I still couldn’t multitask well enough to do it and also process input from animals for my vision.

 

They started walking in my direction, though, splitting off from the rest. I wasn’t entirely sure how much of that was luck and how much was my intervention. It didn’t really matter.

 

It took a few minutes for them to reach me. They were moving fairly slowly. I wasn’t surprised by that. It would have been odd for them to move quickly, in that context.

 

I’d spent a fair amount of time, over the past week, thinking about how to handle this conversation. I hadn’t come up with much. There were some things you couldn’t say well. I could have tried some kind of clever way of getting at it, but that had never really worked out for me. So in the end, I’d settled on the direct approach.

 

Aiko didn’t look surprised when I stepped out in front of her. Snowflake didn’t either, although she did at least look upset.

 

“Hi,” I said.

 

“You have three seconds to explain before I kill you,” Aiko said. Her voice was calm and cheerful, and she had a quiet half-smile playing about her lips. She didn’t sound like she was joking.

 

“I’m only mostly dead,” I said hastily.

 

“That’s funny,” she said. She had that same half-smile, the same joking tone, but there was something underneath that wasn’t funny at all. I had seldom, if ever, gotten that much of a feeling of intensity from Aiko. “Because they shipped your body back to us in pieces. I just finished putting it in the ground, in fact.”

 

“I know,” I said. “I was watching.”

 

“Well, you would be, wouldn’t you?” she said. “So maybe, if you’re so magnificently well-informed, you can explain to me how it is that you’re still up and walking when your body is really most sincerely dead.”

 

Rather than answer, I held up my hand, and stopped concentrating on it.

 

The illusion of flesh faded, revealing what was underneath. The basic structure was ice, with here and there a bit of bone. The “meat” was packed snow, and it was all held together with shadows.

 

She stared for a second, then said, “Oh.” That mocking little grin was gone.

 

“Fenris saved me, at the very end,” I said quietly. “But his options for doing so were…limited. He couldn’t get me out as what I was. So he took my…essence, or soul, or whatever word you want to use for it.”

 

“Your heart,” she said. “It was missing.”

 

I nodded. “The heart isn’t important, really. But it’s a symbol.” I resumed concentrating, and my hand took on the appearance of a hand. Skin, with flesh and blood and bone underneath. It was an imperfect mask, at best. Apparently that was another thing I’d get better at, as time went on. “He held me together long enough for me to learn how to do it myself. Apparently I can’t go back to my original body, so I put this together instead.”

 

“And why did you not contact me about any of this?”

 

I snorted. “Maybe because I was ripped apart down to my soul, and it turns out that coming back from that is actually pretty hard? It wasn’t until yesterday I even figured out how to walk.”

 

“It’s really you,” she said quietly.

 

“Yeah. It really is.”

 

Aiko was silent for about half a second after that. Then she tackled me to the ground, squeezing as tightly as she could. Snowflake pounced a second later, licking my face and wagging her tail and generally seeming much more doglike than usual in her excitement. She hadn’t said a word so far, but now that she was opening her mind to me I could feel her relief, so raw and intense it was almost painful.

 

It was a bit of a challenge to hold myself together. Snow wasn’t naturally good at holding up under pressure, and it was hard to force things against their nature. It wasn’t a huge problem; this body was a convenience, more than a necessity, and if it were broken I could easily make another. But I figured that hugging me until I crumbled would probably not a great first experience after hearing that I wasn’t quite dead after all.

 

They didn’t let me up for a solid minute. When they finally did, I sat up, surreptitiously fluffing the snow back out and freezing the cracked ice together again. Once I tugged the casual clothes I’d stolen back into place, I looked as good as new.

 

“I was expecting it to be harder to convince you,” I commented. “I mean, I was ready to spend an hour exchanging passwords and doing proof of identity stuff.”

 

Aiko shook her head. “I’d have known if you were lying.”

 

I paused. “How?”

 

“Um,” she said uncomfortably. “That’s a long story.”

 

“I’ve got some time,” I said dryly.

 

“Well, here’s the thing,” she said. “When I thought those fuckers had killed you, I wasn’t about to let them get away with it. But if they’d taken you down that easily, I needed a hell of a lot more power to beat them.”

 

“Makes sense,” I said. I’d have been getting a sinking feeling in my guts, if I had any. I’d always known that Aiko might do something reckless if something bad happened to me. I just hadn’t expected to be around to deal with the consequences afterward.

 

“I didn’t have all that many options for how to get it,” she said. “But…you remember what Scáthach said? About how I had the potential to take her role?”

 

“I thought we arranged for her to die in a way that that couldn’t happen.”

 

“Turns out she wasn’t actually dead,” Aiko said. “She just really wished she was. Anyway, I figured that would be enough power to make a decent try at it. So I looked into it, and…well…the position was still open.”

 

“So let me get this straight,” I said slowly. “I’m a partially disembodied entity that might be transforming into some sort of deity of cold and predation. And you’re the Maiden of the Midnight Court, the youngest Queen of the Unseelie Sidhe.”

 

“That sounds about right,” she said.

 

I sighed. “We are so utterly fucked,” I said.

 

She shrugged. “We’re alive,” she said. “So I figure we’re doing all right.”

 

“True enough,” I said. “Well, are you about done here? It sounds like I’ve got a lot of catching up to do.”

 

You have no idea, Snowflake said, butting her head against my thigh. Let’s go home.

Previous Chapter                                                                                    Next Chapter

Previous Chapter                                                                                    Next Chapter

 

The next time I woke up, I was actually awake. I knew I was awake, because I felt too shitty for it to be a dream. My leg was throbbing; I’d almost forgotten that I’d been shot.

 

My subconscious had a point about that, if nothing else. I’d gotten complacent. I’d assumed that just because I’d beaten some big people, I no longer had to worry about the small ones. You’d think that I, of all people, would know better than to discount the threat things like guns could pose.

 

Beyond that, I couldn’t really say much about my surroundings. It was dark, and I was tied down to something hard and flat. I could hear what sounded like a heating or ventilation system in the background, and my leg was tied with some sort of tourniquet.

 

That meant two things. First, it meant that they didn’t want me dead yet. Second, it meant that they didn’t care too much about how long I stayed that way. Tourniquets weren’t something you used on people you cared about, not unless the alternative was imminent death. It probably wasn’t a huge danger for me, but for a human it could be a literal death sentence if they didn’t get lucky.

 

There was no one in the room, and I couldn’t smell anything beyond a faint scent of must and disuse.

 

I debated waiting to see what happened next for about a second and a half. Then I remembered the dream I’d just had. Or vision, or whatever the hell I was supposed to call that. I wasn’t even sure.

 

Waiting wasn’t a good idea. If I waited, it might be too late before I even knew what was happening. A good card was no better than a bad one if I never played it.

 

“Loki,” I said. Luckily they hadn’t bothered gagging me. I could have gotten his attention without talking, of course, but this was simpler. “Loki, Loki. Come on, I know you’re listening.”

 

For once, I had some warning that he was about to show up. It turned out that Loki’s eyes didn’t just look like wildfires, they actually cast light. It wasn’t enough to stand out most of the time, but in a completely dark room, it was pretty noticeable.

 

“Obviously I’m listening,” he said, somewhere behind me. “You didn’t think I wouldn’t notice this, did you?”

 

“Nope,” I said. “So what’s the deal? What do I have to pay to get out of this?”

 

He considered me in silence for a few seconds, then said, “No.”

 

I paused. “No?”

 

“No,” he said again. “I’m not really interested in helping you this time. See, I think you’ve been getting too reliant on my help. So this time, you don’t get it.”

 

“You still owe me some answers,” I said.

 

“I do,” he agreed. “But do you really want to use them on this after I’ve made my opinion on the matter clear? I recommend you think carefully before you answer that question.”

 

I gritted my teeth. “All right, then,” I said, trying and failing to keep my voice calm. “Disregarding deals entirely, is there anything you just want to tell me?”

 

The room was silent for a moment. “You can’t go back,” Loki said at last. “Your choice, then, is whether you take the next step forward or this marks the end of your path. Either way, rest assured that I’ll be watching.”

 

And then the fires went away, and the room was dark again.

---

 

After Loki left, I spent a while testing my bonds myself, in various ways.

 

I didn’t make much progress. I was tied down quite thoroughly; I couldn’t move anything other than my head, and even then my range of motion was sharply limited. I wasn’t entirely sure what I was secured with, but judging by feel it was a combination of rope and manacles. I could conceivably have just torn myself free by main force, but in my current position it wasn’t going to happen. I was pretty strong, but I still needed leverage and positioning.

 

I considered trying to do something with Tyrfing, but I didn’t have the mobility to pull it off. I could get the sword, I was fairly confident of that, but for all its power, Tyrfing did still require someone to move it. I couldn’t even twitch my wrist enough for that.

 

Magic wasn’t going to get me much further. There was no silver disrupting my power, which was a nice change. Considering Jason’s specialty, though, it wasn’t a huge surprise that I couldn’t manage much anyway. Trying to gather power was like trying to empty a bathtub with a funnel, and the harder I tried, the harder it got. Getting enough together to do something dramatic, like unlock the manacles or tear the ropes, was out of the question.

 

I could, however, manage enough for a more natural application. After a minute or two of trying, I slipped out of my body and went looking for another host.

 

It was harder than it should have been, and not just because of whatever Jason had done. The nearest animal was, as far as I could tell, several hundred feet away at the least. That was unusual, in my experience. Most of the time there was something closer than that, even if it wasn’t something I could really use. A few rodents, a stray cat, some pigeons, something.

 

When I did make contact, I got another shock. The animals around here were not the sort that you typically found in the city. Far from it. There were a couple of foxes and coyotes, which wasn’t that unusual. But there were also a few wolves and a freaking grizzly bear, which were unusual and then some.

 

Sifting through their senses, I got a sort of gestalt impression of the area. It was a wilderness, which wasn’t that much of a surprise after the selection of animals I’d felt. The hills were forested and rocky, and there was a cold stream not too far away.

 

After a few seconds, I realized that I was underground. That explained why there were no animals closer to me, at least. It made sense, too. Jason was obviously pretty well prepared for all this, and keeping me away from animals was one of the first steps someone would logically take to keep me imprisoned somewhere.

 

It did present a bit of a problem for me, though. I didn’t have enough time to figure out a solution—if there was a solution—before I heard the door open.

 

A second later a fluorescent light turned on, and I saw Jason and Reese step into the room. Or, rather, closet. It was barely bigger than the table I was tied down on.

 

More surprisingly, I also saw that there was a steel circle set into the floor around me. An enormously intricate design was laid down outside of that, a mix of geometric designs and runes in a wide variety of metals.

 

It was, I realized, a ritual circle, the basic structure of a major piece of magic. Probably part of the purpose was just to support whatever Jason had done to shut me down, but it would also serve as the setup for whatever the hell else he had planned.

 

I got a sinking feeling when I realized that. Somehow, I’d been planning on having an opportunity while they moved me to wherever they had it all set up. In hindsight, that had been a silly expectation. That would introduce another possible point of failure for no apparent reason. It wouldn’t have been a very smart plan, and so far Jason seemed to be pretty damned good about avoiding stupid mistakes.

 

He was holding a silver knife engraved with more designs, one that stank of magic to a ridiculous degree. The second I saw how he was carrying it, I knew there wasn’t going to be a final monologue and a last-minute rescue. Here in about thirty seconds he was going to walk over and kill me, as quickly and efficiently as possible. That was his style.

 

I panicked, trying to think of any way out of this. Nothing came to mind. I couldn’t win this fight, not in any world I could imagine. Even if I’d been able to move, I wouldn’t have put money on myself here. I still hadn’t seen what Reese was capable of, beyond throwing up a portal with impressive speed. I hadn’t, however, overlooked the fact that Jason had chosen him to bring with, while the fire mage was left to be torn to shreds covering their escape. Based on that alone, I was guessing that Reese was nobody to take lightly.

 

Fighting was out. Running was out; again, even if I could have moved, it wouldn’t have been likely. Not with them between me and the only way out. I’d established extremely thoroughly that talking wasn’t going to get me anywhere with these lunatics. The only help that could plausibly get here in time was Loki, and I didn’t see him going back on his decision.

 

I had nothing.

 

Then, very suddenly, the world froze. Things stood still. Jason was standing with one foot in the air, utterly still, not even breathing. Outside, I could feel that each and every one of the animals I was in contact with was frozen as well, even their minds paused in the moment between thoughts.

 

An instant later, someone was standing next to me. Or, rather, something. He looked generally human in shape, a tall and terribly thin man. But his human mask wasn’t very firmly in place. Things shifted under his skin, and his eyes were terrifying, pits of golden flame so deep it felt like I could fall forever in them. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw something else entirely, a massive beast of darkness and hunger and impotent rage.

 

“I can help you,” Fenris said. His voice was shaking; the strain of holding us outside the normal flow of time was obviously telling on him, after just a couple of seconds. “I can…I can save you. But you have to trust me. Do you trust me, Winter?”

 

That was a big question. There weren’t many bigger. In spite of the circumstances, I took a second to decide.

 

In the end, though, there was really only one way I could answer. Most people would have said that it was a sign of utter madness, and they might have a point, but I genuinely did trust the Fenris Wolf. He might be a monster, a being of hunger and destruction, but to the best of my knowledge he’d never done me wrong.

 

And besides. I knew the game was crooked, but it was the only game in town.

 

“Yeah,” I said. “I trust you.”

 

Fenris nodded, and stepped up beside me. Time started up again as he lashed out, claws of darkness gathering around his fingers. I heard Jason screaming in cheated fury.

 

Those claws had to be unimaginably sharp. That was all I could think, oddly enough. They had to incredibly sharp. I never even felt the pain as they broke my skin. Just…cold.

 

A second later, Fenris ripped my beating heart right out of my chest, right in front of my eyes.

Previous Chapter                                                                                    Next Chapter