Winter's Tale

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I wanted to slam the door to my apartment behind myself. I didn’t. I’d never really been the sort to indulge myself like that. I knew it would just make things harder for me in the long run. Dealing with complaining neighbors, with the landlord, maybe even fixing the door if I slammed it hard or often enough. It wasn’t worth it.

 

But it would have felt so good in the moment. It had been a bad day in a bad week in a bad month, and if I was going to be honest, it had been a pretty damn bad life. I couldn’t remember how many times people had told me I only had to do one more thing and it would get better, and none of it had worked. My parents finally moved out of the slums, and the few friends I had in school were gone. Moved on to high school, and the ostracization got even worse. Finally find a social niche, and it’s the kind of niche where admitting you belong there is a death sentence for the rest of your social life. Graduate and go to college, and develop a major anxiety disorder before dropping out when the money cuts off.

 

Get a job and support myself, and I had this bullshit to deal with, day in, day out. Every day the same tedious, pointless crap, the same meaningless posturing and drama queens, the same petty squabbles over who was supposed to do what.

 

No wonder I was frustrated. A year and a half of this shitty job, and things hadn’t gotten any better, and I no longer believed that they were going to.

 

I turned on my computer and then went to take a shower while it started up. It wouldn’t take that long, but I really wanted to wash up and change out of my work clothes. I reeked like grease, and the last thing I needed right now was to be reminded of the restaurant.

 

After my shower I put on an old, greying bathrobe and went looking for dinner. I was a good cook, but after spending the day working in the kitchen the last thing I wanted to do was make food, so, as usual after work, I just grabbed something out of the fridge. Usually it was leftovers, but I hadn’t been able to work up the energy to cook for myself in days, which made that hard. I ended up throwing a premade sandwich from the grocery store into the microwave. They tasted like crap, but after a day at work, everything would taste like crap.

 

While the food was heating, I went back to my computer and launched an Internet browser, mediated through a VPN for slightly more security. Once that was in progress, I went back to the kitchen. I flipped the sandwich to ensure even heating, and then grabbed a bottle of beer out of the fridge before returning to the computer. You weren’t supposed to serve beer cold, but I was just enough of a philistine to prefer it that way, and with the kind of beer I could afford, it really didn’t matter.

 

At the computer, I pulled up my usual assortment of sites. a couple of social networks, a couple of news sites, some comics and entertainment sites. And then there was the one I was actually here for, a simple login page. The background of the site was a simple CG picture of a mountain glen with some rocks and a stream, visually attractive without being terribly memorable. Aside from a notice that much of the content of the site wasn’t available to guest users, there wasn’t anything to really suggest what the purpose of the site was.

 

It wasn’t that we were secretive, exactly. It was more that the people who actually wanted to be there already knew what we were there for, and people who stumbled on it by accident didn’t want to know. Besides, people didn’t really spend much time on the login screen. All the good stuff was restricted.

 

I typed in my username and password, then hit enter. It went to a loading screen, then brought up a screen that displayed:

Welcome, xXDarkWolf18Xx. You will be automatically returned to the previous page in 5 seconds.

 

Once it brought up the welcome screen, I went back to the kitchen to grab my food. I’d only waited to confirm that I hadn’t slipped up on the password. I was usually fairly good about that, but it was thirty characters; the occasional miskeying was inevitable.

 

I wasn’t entirely sure why I bothered with that kind of password anymore, really. No one was likely to try to hack my account here, after all. I supposed it was a sort of nostalgic throwback to when I’d actually had to take care that no one knew I was logging into these sites. They weren’t illegal, technically, but they weren’t the sort of thing I’d wanted my family to know about.

 

Which would have felt more excessive, if they hadn’t literally disowned me when they found out about it. I’d sent them a couple of Christmas cards, but gave up after a few years when they were returned unopened. Enrico was the only one who was even still on speaking terms with me, and even then, there was always a certain disconnect. Any topic which even hinted at my interests or proclivities was ruthlessly avoided. When I brought them up by accident, the result was a chilly silence that could last for days.

 

Frowning at that thought, I got my food and drink and returned to the computer. I’d planned to browse while I ate, trying to move past the aggravations of the day, but I paused when I saw a notification window on the screen.

You have a new private message.

From: leporine4life

Subject: Made up your mind yet?

 

I opened the message, and found that it was blank. No real surprise there; the message was all in the header for this.

 

I sighed, and typed a quick response. xXDarkWolf18Xx: Not sure yet. I still can’t believe you’re serious about this.

 

I was almost halfway done with the sandwich before I got another message. leporine4life: u know i am. u saw the video. y u r not convinced i have no idea

 

xXDarkWolf18Xx: Videos can be altered. Or faked completely. I hit the send button and then took another drink.

 

This time the reply came almost immediately. leporine4life: id have known. that is literally my job. literally. whats your problem?

 

xXDarkWolf18Xx: It’s just…werewolves? Seriously? This can’t be real. Where did you even get this video?

 

leporine4life: *shrug* some nut sent it to the paper and told us to publish it. editor wont touch it but i saw it and saved a copy. course i did right? lol

 

xXDarkWolf18Xx: And you’re sure the video is genuine?

 

leporine4life: absolutely. and get this, i think i tracked down the person who made it. took some work but its my job anyways so whatev. girl in colorado sent it in n from her note i think she maybe knows the werewolf. you live around there right?

 

My heart sank a little, and I took another bite before writing my reply, giving myself a second to make sure that it wasn’t too obviously disappointed. xXDarkWolf18Xx: Not really. California isn’t that close.

 

leporine4life: in the US at least. you could visit there and see whats up. or move. we both know you don’t have a lot to stay for.

 

xXDarkWolf18Xx: I don’t have the money to move right now. And before you ask, no, I can’t take out a loan even if I wanted to, which I don’t. My credit is shit. Why don’t you go?

 

leporine4life: i cant even get in the country. its easier for u than me. …look, i should maybe not be mentioning this, but i think i know someone who can help with the money. paybacks a bitch (no offense) but he doesnt give a shit bout your credit score or whatever. you want me to shoot him an email for you?

 

xXDarkWolf18Xx: …maybe. Why do you care so much about this anyway? And don’t say it’s for the paper. We both know a Dutch newspaper isn’t printing a story about this, and even if they were there are easier ways you could do it.

 

leporine4life: u caught me. this is personal, not business. any chance werewolves are real i have to check u know? lol of course you do. look where we are there are like 100 threads about that in the forum right now. ppl here would give their right arm for this n u know it.

 

xXDarkWolf18Xx: So why not go yourself? You could get a visa if you really wanted one.

 

leporine4life: roflmfao what? me? you know im not the canine here you dweeb. this has u written all over it. don try and deny it iv seen your faves on this site u perv.

 

xXDarkWolf18Xx: You’re one to talk. You think I didn’t watch the video you uploaded last month? Never mind canines, some of the rabbit pictures you get off to make me throw up a little.

 

leporine4life: to each her own my friend. look, iv gotta go to bed. work in four hours. you want me to send my guy an email n send you what iv got about the girl that sent that vid?

 

xXDarkWolf18Xx: …Yes please. Don’t know whether I’ll follow up on it but I should at least look into it, I guess.

 

leporine4life: cool. good luck with work.

 

xXDarkWolf18Xx: Lost cause with that, I’m afraid. Almost stabbed the new waitress with a carving knife today. She grabbed a plate before I put sauce on it and then had a hissy fit when the customer flipped out on her! Who does that?

 

leporine4life: lol send pics if you do. gnight.

---

 

It still creeped me out that leporine’s mysterious loan shark had arranged the meeting in my own damned restaurant. I supposed it was possible that it was a coincidence, but not even I believed it. There were so many restaurants in Los Angeles that you’d have a hard time picking the right one if you meant to. And it wasn’t like it was a particularly good venue; the place was just another mediocre Mexican place that was more cheap than good.

 

It was a pain in the ass for me, too, in that anyone who recognized me would be a disaster. I’d ended up putting on heavy makeup, sunglasses, and a hat; hopefully that would keep the other employees at bay. I’d briefly considered wearing a fursuit, more as a joke than anything, but in the end decided it wasn’t worth the risk. The restaurant wasn’t in the really bad part of LA, but there were still some things you didn’t do. Fursuiting on the street, especially after dark, was definitely one of them.

 

I didn’t have a party name, but it was very easy to find the man I was here to meet. Pasty pale and dressed in a black suit that must have cost more than I made in a month, he stood out from the mostly poor, mostly Latino clientele of that joint like a shark in a tank of goldfish.

 

I sat down across from him, and he smiled warmly. “Ah, Miss Rossi,” he said. “How good of you to join me. I have taken the liberty of ordering food for you; I trust you will not object. I will, naturally, cover the price.”

 

Less than five seconds later, the same waitress I’d been complaining about to leporine set a plate on the table. Steak fajitas with rice and refried beans, glass of soda.

 

I stared for a couple of seconds before stuttering out a thank you to the waitress, who sneered and walked away without replying. Not only was this one of the very few meals that I could still stand to eat here, it was a particularly annoying one to serve. The fajitas were served in a hot skillet that could and routinely did leave burns on the waitresses’ arms.

 

Somehow, I didn’t think that was a coincidence.

 

“Now,” the man in the suit said, “I believe you had something you required financial assistance with, is that correct?” He was staring at me with an intensity that I would have called lecherous in anyone else, but there was no hint of lust in his grey eyes. This reminded me more of the way that a cat watched a mouse, which was somehow even more uncomfortable.

 

I didn’t miss that he had no food in front of him. The only dish on his side of the table was a glass of water, untouched, which had been sitting there long enough for the ice to melt.

 

“Maybe,” I said cautiously, not touching the food. “Is that something that you could help me with?”

 

“Certainly I might consider it,” he said. “But let us consider this more carefully, Miss Rossi. Now, it is true that I could extend you a loan, and perhaps that would suffice for your immediate goals. But in order to move to another state, you would require more than simply a sum of wealth. You will need transportation, as you have none of your own at this time, as well as lodgings and employment in your new home.”

 

“How do you know all this?” I asked suspiciously.

 

He smiled. “I know many things,” he said. “And before you ask, no, your rabbity friend did not betray your trust. I have my own resources, which I believe you will find to be quite considerable.”

 

“Okay,” I said. “And you’re talking about this…why?”

 

“Because I can offer you considerably more than simple money. I am prepared to give you one hundred thousand dollars in cash, transportation to your destination, a one-year prepaid lease on an apartment, and an employment position comparable to that you currently have.”

 

“And this would cost me…what?”

 

“Why, Miss Rossi, it would cost you nothing. All I ask is that in the future, you perform a favor for me in turn, and ask no questions about it. Three times, and your debt will be paid in full.”

 

“Okay,” I said slowly, “this is getting a bit more of a Godfather vibe than I’m happy about.”

 

He smiled, and this time there was a hint of sharpness to that smile, an edge to match the one in his eyes. “Oh, that is where you are mistaken, Miss Rossi,” he said. “An organized crime syndicate could, perhaps, have offered you what I have mentioned thus far. However, they most likely could not promise what I will now. Accept my bargain, Miss Rossi, and you will achieve your true goal. The road may be hard, and it may be long, but one day it will lead you to the end you seek.”

 

“Right,” I said. “And…what mysterious goal is this? Because last I checked I just wanted out of this shithole of a town.”

 

“You wish to leave humanity behind,” he said calmly. “And I can make that happen. Three favors, Miss Rossi, in exchange for your heart’s desire. A bargain, is it not?”

 

I took a deep breath. “Okay,” I said. “This is…we’re leaving Godfather territory behind now. This is starting to sound like I’m talking to the devil.”

 

“A better analogy than your previous one. But I am not your devil. Now, Miss Rossi, do you agree to my terms?”

 

I took a deep breath and then nodded. “Yeah,” I said. “What now?”

 

He smiled and handed me a thin paper envelope. “There is your bus ticket,” he said. “Good day.” He collected his cane, a fancy wooden one with a grip in the shape of a wolf’s head, and walked out the door.

 

The second he was out of the building, I rushed to the window, looking for him.

 

He was already gone.

---

 

I looked at the piece of paper, then frowned and looked again. It still read the same way. Call your brother tonight at 9 P.M. Ask him to join you in Colorado Springs.

 

That simple. I didn’t understand. But it had been in the envelope with my bus ticket when I made the last transfer, and it definitely hadn’t been there before. So I supposed this must be the first of my three favors. I hadn’t been expecting to pay it back so soon, but I couldn’t say I was sorry about it.

 

I didn’t expect it to do much good, either. Enrico and I were still on speaking terms, but I didn’t see him leaving everything behind to follow me halfway across the country. I could ask, though; the note hadn’t specified that I had to be successful.

 

I waited with my phone in hand that night in my new studio apartment, and pushed the call button exactly as the clock hit 9. I had no intention of letting him tell me it didn’t count because I was off by a minute.

 

It took almost thirty seconds for Enrico to pick up, long enough that I didn’t think he was going to. When he did, he sounded tired. “Hey,” he said. “What’s up?”

 

“I don’t know. Is something wrong?”

 

He sighed. “Not really, but the police force just laid me off. Or something. They didn’t give me a whole lot in the way of reasons, but I don’t have a job anymore.”

 

“That’s weird,” I said. “But interesting timing. Is there anything keeping you in LA now that they fired you?”

 

“Not really, now that dad’s dead,” he said cautiously. “Why?”

 

“I was wondering if you wanted to join me in Colorado,” I said. “I just moved out here today. One of my online friends hooked me up with a job. Sorry, I meant to tell you sooner, but it was a really short-notice kind of thing, and it’s been crazy hectic for the last few days.”

 

“Oh,” he said, a little awkwardly. Online friend had long been our code for people I met on websites and at conventions that he’d rather not know about, and any mention of them could get that instantaneous awkward pause in the conversation. “Um…okay. You have somewhere to stay?”

 

“Yeah, that was all set up in advance. It’s not big enough for both of us, but you could stay here while you get a place of your own.”

 

“Oh,” he said again. “Huh. You know, I might just take you up on this. It’d be nice to get out of Cali for a while.”

---

 

I stood in the parking lot and glanced back at the slip of paper I was holding. It had appeared on my keyboard the previous evening, and though it didn’t have a name on it, I knew damned well where it came from, literally.

 

At first the favor had seemed easy. Go to a certain address and talk to the guy there. No commitment about what to do once I got there. Harmless.

 

Except there was nobody here. The guy in the suit was nowhere to be seen, and I didn’t see anyone else interesting, either.

 

And then I suddenly spotted a guy cutting across the parking lot. He was carrying a cardboard sign and whistling, badly.

 

It seemed ridiculous, but I didn’t see anyone else, so I walked up to him. Up close, he looked a little more interesting. I’d seen the grey hair at a distance, but his face looked younger than mine, and his eyes were a shade of almost-gold that didn’t look quite human.

 

“Hi,” I said. “I’m Anna.”

 

He glanced at my face and then looked away awkwardly. “Hi,” he said. “My name is Winter.”

---

 

I stood by the side of the grave and watched as they lowered the coffin inside. Well, I thought bitterly, there goes the last of the family. Guess that’s done with, anyway.

 

I wanted to believe it wasn’t my fault. The two scraps of paper in my pocket, both worn by years and covered in creases but still legible, said otherwise. I might not have meant to, but I’d been the one to bring Enrico and Winter together, I’d been the one to give my brother the idea that there were werewolves in this world, and in the end those two facts had undeniably been what led to him dying.

 

That’s what you get for making a deal with the devil, I told myself. Did you think it would be a good thing?

 

I wanted to cry, found that the tears didn’t come.

---

 

leporine4life: hey. seems like i never see you on here anymore. you get busy or something?

 

xXDarkWolf18Xx: Sort of. Busy with the new promotion. Also my brother died recently. Just finished sorting out the estate and everything.

 

leporine4life: oh damn im sorry. put my foot in it there lol. you want me to go away now?

 

xXDarkWolf18Xx: No, it’s good. Something to take my mind off it, right?

 

leporine4life: now that i can do. so how’s that werewolf lead working for you? damn im sorry to have sent u on that. didnt realize it was a hoax.

 

xXDarkWolf18Xx: I don’t know…there’s a lot of videos coming out now. Could be for real. That’d be something, right?

 

leporine4life: piss on that iv seen those vids. edited to hell or total frauds, every one of them. and they wont let anyone look at the actual film? i smell a hoax. betcha money it blows over in a few months and everyone that fell for it feels real silly.

 

xXDarkWolf18Xx: Maybe. I don’t know…some of it looks very convincing. But I’m not the expert here.

 

leporine4life: damn straight. im telling u its fishy as hell. no way this is all legit.

 

leporine4life: shit i have to go. kids are gettin out of school soon and im supposed to pick them up. g2gbye.

---

 

It was a long drive to Wyoming. I had more than enough time to think about things. I had enough time to move past second and third thoughts into the mid teens.

 

But I kept driving. It was scary, to finally take the plunge, but it was better than living the rest of my life knowing that I’d had the chance and I hadn’t taken it.

 

I reached the edge of town and pulled over, getting out. Edward had told me that the pack would find me, and I trusted him on that. I’d seen some of what they were capable of.

 

I took my last dose of poison before I got out of the car. I’d taken the time to research what went into that concoction, and I knew what it was doing to me. They said it made it easier to make the change from human to werewolf. They didn’t advertise that it did so by killing you a little at a time. They were natural poisons, raw plants rather than pills, but the effect was the same. With how much had been in that last dose, I’d just killed the person I was.

 

The only question was whether I’d come out as something else, or I was just plain dead.

 

I supposed I’d find out soon enough.

 

I stood by the side of the road and waited. Within minutes I started to feel dizzy, and had to lean against the car to stay standing. My balance was bad enough already, since I lost the toes.

 

About the same time, I heard the howling start. The wolves appeared minutes later, great creatures that dwarfed any dog, watching me with bright, intelligent eyes. One of them stepped forward and locked gazes with me, and I knew I was looking at Edward.

 

I nodded, once, and then lost the last bit of control in my legs and slipped to the ground.

 

The wolf moved in and bit me, tearing and savaging. It was painful, but the poisons I’d taken numbed it, made it feel distant.

 

Then the moonlight poured into me, and filled what the wolf had emptied, and for the first time ever I felt whole.

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Before I could move to chase the fleeing prey, I became aware of a change in the atmosphere, a shifting of the air.

 

A handful of men and women were stepping out of the crowd. They were dressed in simple robes, one and all, but there was a power and a confidence to them that defied anyone to think them insignificant.

 

There were nine in total, forming a broad arc between us and the rest of the prey. Most of them looked tired, favored injuries, but they weren’t running, and their attention was focused on me.

 

A werewolf’s ears were sharp enough to hear as one spoke to another. “Fool got himself killed,” the blue robe said.

 

Black shook his head, though he kept his eyes on us. “Not quite yet,” he said. “Though it was a rash choice. To call the Wild Hunt with so weak a will…he will be lucky to survive.”

 

The darker blue snorted. “The Hunt might not kill him,” he said. “But the stupid is terminal. Trust me on that.”

 

“Enough,” white said, with a tone of command that silenced the others instantly. “Walker, begin evacuating. Arbiter, Keeper, establish defenses. The rest of us will keep them off you.”

 

Their conversation had been interesting at first, but I was losing interest. So I threw myself forward, and the Wild Hunt came with me, moving as a single unit. They were half a mile away or more. We could reach them in a matter of moments.

 

The white robe was almost within the storm when he sighed and raised his hand. With that warning I wrapped the Wild Hunt around myself more thickly, the storm thickening to something closer to a sheet of ice, the defensive magics of the Sidhe sliding over my skin like chilled silk. Secure behind my defenses, I grinned and kept moving.

 

The storm took something of the force out of the blast, and the warding spells took more, draining its energy away.

 

What was left was enough to pick me up and send me sailing backwards through the air faster than I could run. Bones broke and flesh tore from the acceleration.

 

The storm cushioned my fall when I finally came to earth again, softening the blow. I still broke further, and bounced, skipping and skidding along for another fifty feet before hitting a dead tree and knocking it down.

 

I lay there for a moment, panting. It was hard to breathe with my ribcage crushed, and every movement sent a shock of sensation through me as it pulled against broken ribs, broken spine, shattered pelvis.

 

Ice sealed the gaps in my flesh and pulled them shut, and as I pushed myself to my feet the storm tugged and pulled at me, tugging bones back to where they should be. It felt good, little spikes of cold pleasure going through me with every movement. The bones would take a few minutes to heal, but in the meantime ice would serve to fill the gaps, adjusting to my movements as necessary.

 

Only the Hunt could see me through the storm—it was so thick now that I had no doubt of that—but I took a moment to cover my skin in frost anyway, mimicking the fur that had been torn away. I couldn’t have said why, except that it amused me.

 

I saw that the prey were escaping, marching through holes between the worlds, and snarled in cheated wrath. Standing again, I threw myself at them again, faster than before. Every step, every breath, sent more sensations rushing through me, and I laughed to feel them, my own blood dripping onto my fur and freezing there.

 

The rest of the Wild Hunt had reached the humans in robes, but were faring no better against them. In a sense, I could see that this was very nearly the worst-case scenario for us. We excelled at culling the weak, the slow, the young. Against a single strong target we could surround them, keep up the pressure and capitalize on any mistake, the way we had against the necromancer.

 

Here, the prey were much too powerful to be taken down with the casual brutality with which we had killed the dead. But they were too numerous and too quick to be overwhelmed as the necromancer had been. They hit back just as hard as he had, though. A direct hit from the white’s force magic sent us flying half a mile or more, and even with the storm to guide and protect us, not all of the Hunters rose again after being struck with such power. The violet’s lightning sliced through the storm with startling precision. She was as blind as I and lacked the Hunt to compensate, but she did not miss her targets. Even the Sidhe could not dodge aside swiftly enough to escape.

 

The last of the other prey in sight stepped out of this world, and the last hole sealed shut behind him. The nine people in their colored robes fell back and formed a tighter group. I could smell the barriers around them, defensive spells that would keep us at bay. There was layer on layer of barrier there, and I knew just from the smell that there was no way we were going to be breaking through.

 

And then we were all forcefully reminded that there were more people there than just the Wild Hunt and the prey. When we’d first entered the field of the dead, a small group of alien beings had come with us, too strange and abstract to join the Hunt, but also so far removed from anything we knew that it was impossible to categorize them as prey.

 

They had entered the darkness beside us, and they had stayed beside us as the necromancer fell, and they were still beside us now. Except now one of them reached out and did something. It was impossible to say quite what; the thing’s magic was as alien and abstract as the thing itself. It felt somehow sideways to reality, a line drawn perpendicular to everything I understood.

 

I might not know what it was, or what it had done, but I knew what the results were. Their protections, the defenses they had raised to keep us safely at bay, were gone, wiped away without a trace. It was odd; they hadn’t been dispelled or overpowered. I would have understood that. This was more like they had been entirely erased, simply wiped out of existence.

 

I leapt forward, grinning widely. They lashed out with their power, but they had been caught by surprise by the disappearance of their defenses, and they were slow to react. Before they could do anything to stop me I had pounced on the woman in the green robe, bearing her to the ground with my weight. I bit her neck and she screamed, pulled and bit deeper and the screaming stopped.

 

The pale woman in the blue robe stopped trying to burn me and gasped a few words. A moment later, as I released my prey and turned for the next, she let out a powerful surge of magic, scented with disinfectant and wide-open spaces, a long breeze flowing over the plains.

 

All of the prey vanished, leaving the green behind. She was dying, if not dead already. I looked around and saw them standing on a hill a quarter of a mile away. The blue fell to one knee, gasping, needing to lean on a piece of wood to stay even that close to upright.

 

I started in that direction, grinning, then paused. Something was holding me back, though I hadn’t noticed until I tried to move.

 

I looked back and saw that the yellow had her hand clasped tightly around my hind leg. She spoke a few words in a language I couldn’t place. Chinese, perhaps, or something from the same vicinity. Even had I known the language I couldn’t have understood her. Her voice was halting, choked with blood.

 

I smiled indulgently and watched her die.

 

And then a hammer of magic slammed me to the ground, knocking me out in an instant.

---

 

Things got confusing after that.

 

There was darkness, and pain. I felt cold, and then very hot, and then cold again. Odd colors burned against the blackness. I heard singing, quavery singing in a language I didn’t know, and then the singing turned into screaming and a massive technicolor macaroni penguin swallowed me. I rolled over, and that really hurt, and someone told me to be quiet, which was funny because I hadn’t said anything. I tried to tell them so, but all that came out was a growly sort of whimper, and that hurt too.

 

At some point, I realized that a lot of what I was feeling and seeing was probably a hallucination. The penguin was a bit of a giveaway, really. The hell of it, though, was that knowing it wasn’t real didn’t do me any good at all in terms of knowing what was. I opened my eyes and saw storm clouds swirling over my face, a beam of vivid green light tying itself in knots, a giant wearing velvet and carrying a massive axe with a head made out of ice. What, if any, of it was real? I couldn’t say, couldn’t even guess.

 

Unconsciousness would have been nice. But I didn’t have that luxury. I couldn’t tell what was real, couldn’t process or think about what was going on at all, couldn’t move beyond the occasional twitch, but I was conscious.

 

I closed my eyes again and lay there shuddering while the world spun around me.

---

 

The next clear impression I got was someone talking in my ear. It was a quiet female voice, which I recognized as Selene after a few seconds.

 

“Change,” she said. “The doctor’s here, but she needs you to change. Come on, jarl, change for me.”

 

I had no idea what she was talking about, not really. But Selene was one of my most trustworthy followers, and if she told me to change, there was a reason for it. So I reached inside, to where skin met fur, and twisted.

 

It’s hard for a werewolf to scream during the change. Your body’s all twisted around, things don’t connect right and it isn’t doing what you tell it to.

 

I screamed. There were times it was loud and piercing, times when all I could manage was an agonized whimper, but I screamed. It wasn’t just the pain, though there was plenty of that, enough to make most changes look like a pleasant trip to the spa. Worse than that was the feeling of intrusion, the sense that there were things inside me that did not belong there and weren’t responding the way they should to my magic. It felt like it took me an hour to tear myself apart, and five to put myself back together.

 

The whole time, Selene was murmuring gentle encouragements into my ear. It was weird, and I’d be lying if I said it didn’t scare me a little to have a demon sitting there encouraging me, but it did give me something to focus on other than the pain.

 

Finally, after what felt like a small eternity, it was over. I collapsed back against what felt like a stack of pillows. I was lying in a bed on the upper floor of the mansion, back in Colorado, in one of the housecarl’s rooms. I recognized it, even if I hadn’t spent much time there.

 

The sheets were damp, and shredded where I’d torn them during the change. It smelled like blood, sweat, and urine in there, and I knew I was to blame for all three. I was naked, of course.

 

Another time, I might have felt awkward about this combination of circumstances. At the moment, I was mostly too busy feeling exhausted and in pain. Mostly.

 

“Good,” Selene said, standing from her chair by the head of the bed. “I’ll go get her. You just lie still.”

 

I was too tired to argue, so I just lay slumped against the pillows as she left. She came back in about a minute later, with two people following her. The first was the same doctor I’d taken Snowflake to, her pristine white lab coat flapping around her legs as she walked.

 

The second was Aiko, who looked about as tired as I felt. “Hey,” she said, moving over and sitting by my side, grabbing my hand and holding it tightly. “Sorry I couldn’t be here earlier. The doc said I shouldn’t be in the room with you.”

 

The doctor snorted. “I should bloody well say so,” she said. “I mean bloody hell I really don’t think you people have even the foggiest idea how much danger you were in here. Do you have even an idea and I mean even the tiniest idea of how much damage he’d have done if he woke up in the wrong way? Jesus, the way you amateurs fuck about with that which you don’t understand scares me some times. Now lie still.”

 

This last was directed at me, and made more ominous by the fact that she had a scalpel out in one hand and a mouth mirror in the other. “What are you doing?” I asked, edging away a little.

 

“I’m taking a looksee at what we’re dealing with here, what d’you think I’m doing, really, this isn’t that complicated, people. Now lie still, and yes, this is going to hurt, what kind of pansy are you anyway?”

 

It did hurt, but it wasn’t actually as bad as I’d been expecting. She mostly just used the scalpel to hold open cuts that were already there while she probed around inside with the mirror. Only once did she actually cut deeply into flesh, and even then it was so sharp that I didn’t feel much pain.

 

“All right,” she said, taking a step back from the bed and wiping the tools off on the sheets before dropping them into a pocket. “Now I first want to make it very clear that this is a special case and I can honestly say that I’ve never seen someone with their bones turning into ice before so you get no guarantees on any goddamn word out of my mouth right now. That said, it looks like it’s healing okay and the ice is apparently fused with your flesh in a way that will eventually recover, so aside from being a total freak of nature you don’t have a think to worry about.”

 

“Gee,” I said dryly. “How comforting. My bones are turning into ice?”

 

“Turned,” she corrected me. “In a few places mostly around the ribs and joints. And honestly you should be grateful, because if they hadn’t you’d probably be dead and definitely be paralyzed, since it looks like you snapped your spine like a fucking toothpick. How the hell did this happen anyway?”

 

I coughed, wincing as I did so. “I kind of joined the Wild Hunt for a while,” I said weakly. “Um. As the leader.”

 

She stared at me, and something about the expression emphasized the odd, almost reddish tone of her black irises.

 

It wasn’t until then that I realized I could see again. It was a bit blurry, especially for things more than about ten feet away, but I could see. That was pretty freaking nice.

 

“That,” she said, “is possibly the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”

 

“It wasn’t my fault,” I protested. “Loki roped me into it!”

 

She continued to stare. “You are not improving things,” she said solemnly before turning to Selene. “He’ll be wanting a few days of bed rest that we both know he isn’t going to get but I kinda had to say it anyway,” she said. “And maybe keep him out of the heat for a while, ’cause how the fuck do I know what happens to him if that ice melts? I mean it should be melting already and it isn’t so maybe it doesn’t matter but I, personally, wouldn’t be taking chances with that if they were my bones. I checked up on the dog, too, and apparently being in the Wild Hunt of all fucking things to do with a brain injury was actually good for her. Passed out right now, but condition’s stable and actually better than it was.”

 

“Thanks,” Selene said.

 

The doctor snorted. “You thank me with payment,” she said bluntly. “Send it to my Cairo address. Okay, good luck and whatnot, buh-bye now, please don’t call me again for at least a week, you people need help from another kind of doctor if you know what I mean, have a nice day!”

 

She swept out of the room with another swish of her lab coat, leaving the space feeling much emptier. Which was odd, considering that she was the smallest one in there by a considerable margin.

 

“So,” I said. “Killed the necromancer in Russia, along with a whole lot of other people. Most of them were dead already, though, so that’s okay. Might have killed some people that I wasn’t supposed to kill; my memory’s a little fuzzy. How’d it go here?”

 

“Nothing like as exciting as your evening,” Selene said dryly. “Though we do have some news.”

 

Before she could say anything else, the door opened again. This time I wasn’t the only one to cringe away from the people that entered.

 

There were two of them, one male and one female, and both of them carried power around them like a mantle, thick and rich. The intense, musky scent of fox was heavy in the air, almost choking even to me, and I liked the way foxes smell. He was dressed in a sharp black suit, while she was wearing a grey kimono with a simple floral pattern in black.

 

And, in case there were any doubt of what they were, bright red fox tails protruded from the rear of their clothing. He had seven, tipped with white and waving cheerfully. She had nine, lacking the paler tip and very, very still.

 

I gulped hard. Seven tails was bad enough. Nine was…well, it made an impression.

 

He waved to me, but she dismissed me as completely as if I weren’t even there, all her attention on Aiko. “What is the meaning of this?” she asked, her voice so calm and level that you just knew there was something else underneath.

 

Aiko looked at her mother and swallowed. “Um,” she said. “Hi?”

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The darkness instantly started pulling at me. It was the strangest feeling, somewhere between being tickled and having my fur pulled. I got the strong impression that it would probably have felt a great deal less pleasant without the combined influence of the full moon and the Wild Hunt running through me. Someone could probably have skinned me alive right then and I’d have been giggling and getting off the whole time.

 

I knew that it was a bad thing, though, so I reached out to the Wild Hunt, trying to find something that would protect us from the danger.

 

There was nothing that quite fit. I’d always had a bit of a knack for blood magic, nothing like this kind of scale, but enough that I understood the principles at work here. I could use that to work against it. The Sidhe weren’t alive in quite the same way humans approached the concept, and that alien nature gave them a certain protection, a certain resistance to the magic. The vampires were very alive, absolutely brimming with life, but they’d been designed to take that energy in, not to give it back out. It was hard to take what they didn’t want to give. Two of the mages who’d joined the Hunt had talents that could do something to block this draining effect, although neither was quite suited to the task.

 

A lot of kinds of defense, none of which was really sufficient. Taken all together and spread out through the medium of the Wild Hunt, they could do something to protect people.

 

I gathered up the protections, and through the Hunt I could feel as the others did so as well, instinctively reaching for the right powers to shield them from this threat.

 

The pulling sensation slowed, though it didn’t stop. We weren’t in danger of dying immediately, I thought, but this environment was still hostile. We could only spend so long here before people started dropping.

 

I grinned. That was good. A hunt with no challenge and no threat was a boring hunt. Having a time limit added some spice to the chase.

 

It was impossible to see here, and I fell back on other senses. I could feel everything that fell within my winter storm, and with that storm blanketing miles now, sight was unnecessary, more a distraction than a help. I could hear every movement, I could smell every breath of air, and there were stranger senses as well, things that I couldn’t possibly have known how to process without the Hunt. The vampires could feel the life around them with an intimacy that defied description, and the Sidhe could sense the currents of magic with a precision that put my senses to shame.

 

There were more of the dead here, packed in shoulder-to-shoulder, tight as lemmings on parade. They marched forward in a tight crowd, almost like a siafu swarm, but without any of the discipline or coordination the ants would display.

 

We hit them and kept going, even as I was wrapping what protection from the blood magic I could around myself. They fell, and were trampled by the ranks behind them before the other Hunters could even reach them.

 

The hard part now was just finding a way to advance. They were crowded together so tightly that there wasn’t room for me to fit between their legs, and killing them again didn’t do much good. They fell to the ground, the next rank moved forward, and then in just a handful of seconds they were standing again, the necromantic energy getting them back on their feet almost before they hit the ground.

 

I growled and renewed my assault, lashing out, faster and harder. My jaws and paws were coated in ice now, sharp as razors, tearing large chunks of flesh out of their bodies with every movement but it didn’t matter and they kept coming. They were slipping on the ice upon the ground and when they fell the ice clutched at them, piercing them; when they stood pieces were left behind and they stood anyway, hideous and grotesque. The wind flowed over their bodies, simultaneously giving me another way to feel them and tearing at them, a windstorm blasting them with tiny slivers of ice like a sandblaster.

 

The Sidhe lashed out with their weapons, impossibly graceful, dancing through the darkness with utter confidence and terrible beauty. Their steeds broke the dead, sending them flying through the air as they were kicked. When those fae blades met dead flesh they passed through like it was air, flicking casually through them and dropping them to the ground in pieces.

 

Hounds and wolves bit and tore, crushing bones and pulling the prey down, mobbing them on the ground, and they were pulled to pieces that still, horribly, moved. The enemy kicked them, striking at them with fists and stones and ancient weapons, but nothing could penetrate the storm around them.

 

The mages had turned to broad attacks now, crushing whole crowds of the dead with their powers. A column of fire twenty feet across roared down out of the sky, leaving little more than ash, and the ground steamed for a few moments before the storm swept in and blanketed it in ice again. A blast of force swept through the crowd like a bulldozer moving as fast as I could run, pushing the mangled corpses along before it and leaving an open trail behind it, until the press of the dead filled the space again.

 

And still, in spite of all of this, they pressed in tight around us on all sides. It was nothing like a fight, not really. In a fight there was something you could do to win, and no matter what we did here, they just kept coming. There were too many of them, and it was too hard to put them down beyond the necromancer’s ability to pick them back up again.

 

It was, in many ways, more like dealing with a flood. There was a constant press, threatening to overwhelm us if it was ignored for even a moment. You could create a temporary reprieve, essentially bailing out some of the water, but it only took moments for it to return.

 

On some level, I recognized all that.

 

The rest of me was entirely focused around the joy of the fight. I kept pressing forward, tearing the dead apart and tossing them aside, pulling them down and stepping over them without pause, ignoring their feeble attempts to hurt me.

 

I had not forgotten my aim here. This was a hunt, not a battle. These pitiful creatures were not my quarry, not truly. They were a distraction, an obstacle, a pleasant diversion on the way to my true goal.

 

The spear had narrowed now, our formation tightening to present less area to the exterior. I was still at the cutting tip, with Snowflake on one side, Kyra on the other, Anna directly behind. I could feel the husky exulting in the battle, the thrill, the joyous madness of the hunt. The werewolves were only slightly more reserved, if at all. The moon was singing in their veins the same as mine, the Hunt was driving them on, and any hint of fear or hesitation was buried beyond recognition.

 

We kept moving forward, slowly but surely, and I knew that the center of this vast aura of death was moving towards us as well, every step bringing us closer to the grand culmination of this hunt. I shuddered with pleasure at the mere thought, throwing back my head and letting out a howl of thanks to the unseen moon. The Wild Hunt took up the call, a chorus of howls and yips that rang out in the night. The Sidhe called out in voices high and sweet as silver bells, a sharp ululating battle cry that seemed to shiver in the air. The jötnar roared their approval, screaming threats and praises to their gods.

 

And everywhere, running over and under and through the sound, was the call of the Wild Hunt, thunderclaps and howling winds, an avalanche pouring down the mountainside, wolves racing along the snow and the prey screaming beneath the sharp teeth.

 

Even the dead seemed to draw back at the sound.

 

With a wide, mad grin I lowered my head and bit down again. This corpse was fresher, its blood only slightly tainted with the flavor of decay, and its sweet taste was a balm in my throat. It spurred me on to greater and greater heights as we moved forward.

---

 

Time was a meaningless concept in the embrace of the Hunt. I understood that, on a level that went beyond rational thought. The Wild Hunt was timeless. This Hunt was at once my hunt and all hunts, the very concept of hunting distilled down to its purest essence. This was nature, red in tooth and claw, an idea as old as time and one that would never really die.

 

Could I hunt forever, wrapped in the endless storm and mad joy of the Wild Hunt? I thought I could. It was a frightening prospect, in a way, but there was also a sick temptation to it. It was the feeling you got when you stood at the edge of the building and thought, I could jump. It was seeing a stranger in the night and thinking, for just a heartbeat, of blood and sex and laughter in the dark without thought for morning.

 

This is how werewolves go mad, I thought again, but this time there was no fear. On the contrary, there was that same sick edge of hunger.

 

I could jump, and I would fall forever.

 

I shook my head, trying to drive that thought out. It wasn’t hard. Here, now, not to think was the easiest thing in the world. Another of the dead was in front of me and my teeth closed around its leg, pulled it down within my reach, and then I bit into its torso and ripped it almost in half.

 

And then, suddenly, the night was clear. I could feel my storm around me, and there were no more of the dead in front of me. I looked, and though there was no light to see, I did not need to see to see now.

 

And then I grinned and howled again, shuddering with joy. At last, we had reached our true prey.

 

At a glance, I wouldn’t have known him for a man. He was taller, close to ten feet tall, as though he’d been stretched. His movements left a trail in the air, a lingering darkness that went beyond the mere absence of light. He couldn’t see, but there was no hesitation in his movements, not even a momentary doubt.

 

More than anything else, though, what struck me about him, what told me just how far behind he’d left any pretense of humanity, was his scent. He reeked of death and decay, stank of maggots and worms, rotting meat and corruption. He breathed out and I would have flinched, but for the influence of the Wild Hunt that made the stench of rot and decay on my prey’s breath as sweet as blood and honey.

 

Another night, in another mind, I would have hesitated to attack someone like that. He was powerful enough to make an army of Watchers hesitate, and that meant he operated in an entirely different world than I did.

 

But here, tonight, with the moon singing in my blood and the Wild Hunt wrapping me in an arctic storm, there was no thought for that. He was my prey, and that was all that mattered.

 

Running forward, I leapt at him, jaws open. He swatted me out of the air with one arm, moving with a speed that left me breathless, but my teeth closed on his hand as he did, and the force of his own blow tore the flesh. I flew away with a mouthful of black blood and foul-smelling meat, and I gulped it down hungrily, and it tasted delightful, an explosion of flavor on my tongue that left me breathless.

 

His body repaired itself almost instantly, and he was whole as the rest of the Wild Hunt followed me in, circling around him. He kept walking forward at the same pace, uncaring for the forces that had enclosed him.

 

Hounds and wolves leapt at him, and he knocked them aside without breaking stride. The storm protected from the worst of it and they didn’t die, but neither had they accomplished anything much. The Sidhe were shooting at him now, long arrows that gleamed brightly in the darkness though there was no light to reflect. Most of them glanced off his skin, and those that struck did little. He kept walking, disregarding them though they stood out from his flesh on both sides.

 

Jötnar charged him, screaming and roaring almost incoherently, chopping at him with axes and swords, and again, they simply didn’t have an effect. He dodged the worst of the blows, his skin was tough enough to mitigate many of the others, and when he was cut the wound sealed itself within instants. It was like cutting water.

 

Then he reached out and grabbed one of them. The giant was as large as he was, but still the necromancer lifted him off the ground easily, as though he weighed nothing at all. He broke the jotun over his knee and tossed him aside, the storm already fading from around him when he hit the ground.

 

The other jötnar faded back warily. There was no fear—there couldn’t be fear, in the midst of the Wild Hunt—but there was a reasonable caution, an awareness of tactics.

 

I picked myself up and rushed forward again, and this time I did not try to kill him. I bit down on his ankle instead, tugging it backward with all my strength just as he lifted his other foot. The ground was slick with ice and the wind was pushing him and my teeth were deep enough in him to crunch bones, and in that moment he was still strong enough, he was still strong enough to stay standing.

 

Until Snowflake threw herself at his face, moving at a speed that put even the other hounds to shame, her white fur fading into the white storm, nothing visible of her but iron teeth glinting in the moonlight that wasn’t there.

 

Finally he overbalanced and fell, and I slid out of the way just in time for him to land on a spike of ice rather than me. The ice shattered, but sharp edges dug into his skin, helping to hold him down.

 

The pack fell on him while he was down, biting and tearing and keeping him from rising. I was beside the vampire who chose the form of a great wolf now, with one of the great wolves of the jötnar on my other side. The giant on his back swung a bearded axe in a long arc that slammed home between the necromancer’s shoulder blades and cut deep.

 

Still, nothing we were doing was obviously harming him. The wounds sealed themselves, the flesh we took was replaced, and afterwards all was as it had been before.

 

But I knew that we were depleting his life, I knew that this was accomplishing something. He only had so much stolen life hoarded up, and if we could wear him down, he was as mortal as anything else.

 

But that was little consolation when he reached out and grasped one of the wolves, and tore its life out in an instant. Our protections had done something against the aura of necromantic power, but against the directed power of the necromancer himself, they were nothing.

 

He dropped the wolf lifeless to the ground and a moment later it stood and began attacking its fellows, the cloud of the Wild Hunt gone from it. The necromancer reached out again, and only the swift intervention of the most human-looking vampire kept it from claiming another of the hounds.

 

Once again, many of the Hunters had to pull back. Every life he claimed made him stronger, undoing the work we’d done, and thus to surround him with the living was to threaten ourselves. The hounds, the wolves, the mages, all of them pulled back again, leaving him room to stand. I remained, tearing and biting and pulling at him, and the vampires were there, and so were some few of the jötnar.

 

Too few, I thought. He was standing again, and though I was pulling at his leg, he was braced against it now and he was stronger than I was. Even with the Wild Hunt lending me the power of giants and werewolves, even with the ice beneath his feet and the storm winds howling around us, he was stronger.

 

Three of the mages were talking to each other, or at least their lips were moving; the meaning was carried by the Hunt, not by the air. I could catch that meaning even if I couldn’t catch the words, and thus I knew to brace myself as they coordinated with each other and blasted at the necromancer with force and lightning. His muscles jerked and the force sent him reeling and now I could pull his leg out from under him and he fell again.

 

The lightning ran through his body and into mine, and I shuddered ecstatically at the feeling of the electricity surging through me to the ground. I knew that it was hurting me, that my fur was smoldering and my muscles were twitching and my pounding heart had skipped a beat in its course, but it just felt so good that I couldn’t help myself.

 

He was down again, and I was tearing at his flesh and the creatures beside me were biting and cutting at him while the rest of the Wild Hunt kept the dead at bay, and still, still nothing was visibly harming him.

 

And then I saw another figure, wreathed in the ice storm without quite being of it. It was dead, but it didn’t belong to the necromancer. Its bones were sheathed in ice, and over that there was a layer of dark fog that kept the storm of the Hunt at bay. Pale blue lights blazed in the skeleton’s empty eye sockets, bright and pure as tiny suns in the darkness.

 

I looked at the skeleton, and suddenly I had an idea. I had a wonderful, terrible idea.

 

I thought I could feel Legion smiling as the demon moved off into the darkness. It didn’t matter. I knew what to do.

 

Tyrfing came readily to my call, appearing by my side. The storm caressed it gently, and it was an easy thing for the wind and the ice and the darkness to undo the catch and slide the cursed blade gently out of its sheath.

 

The storm stood still, for just a moment, and the necromancer turned to stare, stopping momentarily in his attempts to stand.

 

The air lifted the blade and I took the hilt in my mouth. Ice formed around it, twisting it around and holding it tightly in place. More ice coated the cutting edge, glittering gently in the glow of the lightning which cracked the night again, slamming the necromancer back to the ground.

 

I lunged forward and bit down again, and this time it wasn’t teeth that hit the necromancer’s flesh, it was Tyrfing.

 

The sword sliced off a chunk of flesh, and this time it didn’t grow back.

 

The necromancer screamed and swung one fist at me, but one of the jötnar seized his arm and held it in place, pinning it to the frozen ground. Another jotun grabbed his other arm and held it down, and a swarm of wolves piled onto his legs, so that he couldn’t move at all.

 

I moved into position and bit down. Tyrfing plunged through the center of his head without slowing at all, and the tip bit into my own lower jaw.

 

I shuddered in pleasure at that, letting out a low, incoherent moan.

 

The necromancer jerked against the hunters holding him down, and then went still.

 

And then the darkness began to fade, letting the moonlight shine down on the scene.

 

All around us, the dead fell to the ground again, clumsy and lifeless.

 

A crowd of mages and other fighters stood around the edge of the area which had been drained in life. They watched in shock as I pulled the sword back out of the necromancer’s body and threw my head back, howling once again as the moonlight flooded down onto me. Blood dripped red and black from my jaws as I howled, and the Wild Hunt howled with me.

 

Then I looked out at the crowd again, grinning a broad, bloody grin. Some part of me could recognize that they weren’t my enemy. Some of them were even friends of a sort.

 

But I could smell the hot blood of my prey, bright and red and full of life, and after so much dead meat and corrupted blood, it would be a great pleasure to hunt another sort of prey.

 

We howled again, jötnar prayers and Sidhe war cries and above all else the high, sweet howls of wolves delighting in the moon and the hunt and the victory.

 

The smarter of the prey began to run.

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I started to curse Loki, but stopped myself. Getting a reaction out of me would just encourage him. Besides, he was already gone.

 

And I had bigger issues to worry about. The wintry storm of the Hunt, of my Hunt, was gathering rapidly about me, wreathing my hands and feet, climbing up to surround me completely. It would only be a minute or two before I was entirely shrouded in the freezing fog, and I somehow knew that once that happened, the Wild Hunt would begin in earnest.

 

Then I felt something else, and my eyes widened. It was the full moon, and I’d been feeling the urge to change into fur for quite a while, but I’d been able to keep it under control. It helped that I’d been in and out of the Otherside so much. Then I’d changed to run across Romania. Running was the next best thing to hunting, and it had done a lot to satisfy the wolf in me.

 

But now that primal, basic urge was intensifying, the need to change swelling in time with the fog that wrapped itself around me. My hands started to change, twisting into paws, drawing a scream from me as the changing shape came into conflict with the gauntlets I was wearing.

 

I tried to choke it back down, and I managed it, but the urge was still getting stronger, and for all my discipline, I didn’t think I could keep the change away once the Hunt was here for real. It just wasn’t possible.

 

I started stripping the armor off with hasty, near-panicked movements, throwing it on the ground carelessly. I thought about keeping my foci, adjusting them to my new skin the way I sometimes did for a fight, but there was no time. By the time my armor was off, I was panting, my fingers fumbling and clumsy. The fog was starting to spread across my chest now, over my face.

 

With shaking hands I pulled off my clothing, dropping it on the ground in a heap. The jewelry went next, leaving me naked in the moonlight, hidden only by the storm of the Wild Hunt gathered around me.

 

Naked in Russia on an autumn night, and I wasn’t freezing. I wasn’t even uncomfortable. On the contrary, it felt right, felt natural. This was good.

 

I stopped resisting and the change hit me like a ton of bricks, smashing me to the ground. I was already starting to twist by the time I hit the ground, limbs warping and shifting, my skin splitting and reforming as the flesh underneath moved around. Joints popped in and out of socket as the bones snapped and then knit themselves back together.

 

Unusually, there was no pain. Normally the change was agony from start to finish, and while the influence of the full moon eased the pain, there was still pain. This time, there was still sensation, but it was altered, transmuted by the storm and moonlight and the thundering rush of blood in my ears into something entirely less straightforward. I knew what I was feeling was supposed to be painful, but the actual sensation wasn’t there. On the contrary, all I could feel was pleasure, mad, overwhelming, almost orgasmic pleasure, wiping everything else away.

 

I stood, and I was shaking a little, panting, hyperaware of everything around me. The breeze hit me with the scents of blood and death and I shuddered, barely able to stand, my attention narrowing down to nothing more than that scent and my own intense, overwhelming hunger.

 

Changing under the full moon was always like a drug, but it was a drug that I knew. This was entirely different, the Wild Hunt’s influence pushing it far beyond what I’d been prepared for. It was like giving someone crack when they were expecting coffee. I couldn’t even think.

 

This is what it feels like to go moon-crazy, I thought distantly. This is how werewolves go mad.

 

And then, when I was just beginning to come to grips with the feelings, the mantle of the Wild Hunt finished wrapping itself around me, and added another layer to the madness.

 

I’d been in the Hunt before, but being the center of it, being the seed crystal that the Hunt grew from, was an entirely different experience. As it finished engulfing me, I felt it snap into place and reach out, trying to make connections with other Hunters.

 

I couldn’t say why, but somehow I was convinced this was an important moment, a definitional moment. This was my first time as the leader of the Wild Hunt in truth, and in some ways it was when the Wild Hunt decided what that meant. Who it brought to me, who it felt belonged in my Hunt, would in large part decide what that Hunt became.

 

And there was nothing I could do to influence it. At this point, there was nothing for me to do but sit and watch.

 

The first person it found was Anna, sitting nearby and watching me curiously. The fog started at her feet and climbed rapidly up her body, first in thin streamers, then coming in heavier, until her fur was completely hidden. I could feel it as she was brought into the Hunt, could feel her excitement and anticipation not quite covering a thin edge of fear. She’d been a part of the Hunt in the past, and while I could feel that she was looking forward to feeling that way again, looking forward to it enough to be a little disturbing, there was also an element of dread. The loss of personal identity, the loss of individual choice, was a frightening prospect even to someone who was otherwise entirely on board with the concept.

 

After that, it began reaching farther afield. I could feel the Hunt reaching out in directions that didn’t quite make sense, and after a few moments holes opened in the world, somewhere between Otherside portals and tunnels leading sideways from the world.

 

A wolf on two legs stepped out of the first one, accompanied by half a dozen faerie hounds. He watched me with an odd, knowing smile as the storm began to wrap itself around him. The next produced four Sidhe on large black horses, wearing dark, delicate-looking armor. Their eyes gleamed with fey light, and their half-smiles were sharp enough to slit a throat. More hounds accompanied them, huge lean animals with blazing eyes. A third, after a few moments, dropped Kyra and Snowflake beside me. Neither one should have been capable of getting there, but the influence of the Wild Hunt changed all that. If Snowflake’s brain wasn’t in shape to direct her movements, the Hunt could do it for her; if Kyra’s leg couldn’t bear her weight, the storm could carry her along.

 

The next three openings all dropped jötnar onto the hill. Some I recognized as my housecarls, but many were strangers to me. A handful rode horses, and one trio were seated upon unimaginably huge wolves, but most walked. More wolves followed them, easily the size of werewolves if nowhere close to as large as the creatures the other jötnar rode.

 

The freezing cloud closed around all of them, and I felt the accumulated powers of the Wild Hunt flowing into me. I was stronger, faster, more graceful. There were enough werewolves in the mix that I could smell everything for miles around, enough Hunters that I could feel and see everything in the vicinity.

 

I debated saying something, decided against it. I could have gotten around my current body easily—if nothing else, the other Hunters would probably understand exactly what I meant even if all I did was snarl a little—but there was nothing to say, nothing that needed said.

 

I started down the hill towards the fighting, moving at top speed. I was running flat out, and it made our run across Romania look slow. I started at around forty or fifty miles an hour, and sped up from there, until we must have been doing something like seventy through the trees. It should have been suicide, even if I could have managed it, but just now it didn’t matter. I had the grace of the Sidhe, ensuring that every footstep was perfectly placed. Even more, the storm of the Wild Hunt extended close to ten feet from my skin now, painting the world in a thick coat of frost and ice. I could feel everything that fell within that space, and the ice provided exactly the footing I needed from one step to the next.

 

I was running through a forest without a trail, going at a pace that would have normally been frightening to maintain on an open highway, and it was easy. The rest of the Hunt was following me, but not a one of them could pass me, not even the Sidhe horses.

 

At such a ridiculous pace, it took only a few moments to reach the beginning of the fighting. Twisted creatures stood in front of me, things that used to be people, but had left that behind long ago. Death had claimed them, but even in death they couldn’t rest.

 

Something about that made me angry. Not that it mattered—I would have killed them again just for the joy of it, just to taste the blood and feel the moon singing in my ears. But it was good. This was a good hunt.

 

They fell within my storm and they died. It was as simple as that. They couldn’t see, blinded by fog and frost, but my vision was as clear as it had ever been. They couldn’t move, slipping and stumbling on the ice, but to my feet it was as smooth and certain as an open field.

 

The rest of the Wild Hunt came behind me, spreading out now into a broad arc, and we swung around, encircling the group of creatures. Trapped, blind, and surrounded, it was only moments before the group was torn to pieces.

 

Moving on, just as fast. I ran through the midst of the Hunt to reclaim my rightful position at the front, panting and laughing. Bloody drool, tainted with decay and ugly magics, dripped onto my fur, and I didn’t give a damn. I couldn’t stop laughing.

 

Further, faster. I could hear the sound of fighting now, screaming and gunfire, explosions, the sharp crack of thunder.

 

The main body of the enemy is in front of us now, hundreds of thousands of walking corpses, monsters with no conception of fear, or pain, or self-preservation. If what Prophet said was true, there might have been millions, everyone who died in the bloodiest battle in history, along with who knew how many people killed between there and here.

 

I grinned wider at the thought, mad and hungry. Millions of them was good. It meant I wouldn’t run out of prey any time soon.

 

I hit them and, again, they died as they came near me. There were far more of them now, and I was surrounded almost instantly, but it didn’t really matter. They couldn’t touch me. They were slipping and stumbling now, falling before I could even pull them down, and it disappointed me but I didn’t allow that to prevent me from biting them while they were down. There was no purpose to targeting vital areas here, but a hard bite to the neck could remove the head, and that was enough to end them.

 

The other werewolves, the hounds, the wolves, they were all beside me now, running into the crowd and bringing the enemy down. Behind us came the Sidhe and the jötnar, moving through the storm and the snow with the same smooth assurance I felt. They killed many of the fallen dead without even trying, as the hooves of horses crushed skulls and spines, left their victims broken on the ground. Axes and swords and long sharp knives flickered in the moonlight and more of them fell.

 

One of the mages miscalculated, deliberately or otherwise, and a bolt of lightning fell from the sky onto me. I smelled it coming and reached out through the Wild Hunt on instinct, reaching for the defenses to shield myself. They came in the form of wards spun by the Sidhe to protect themselves from mortal magic. Any one of the wards might not have held against the blast, but all of them together were more than adequate. The lightning ran over me into the ground like water off a fish’s scales.

 

In the moment of distraction several of the dead struck at me, lashing out with hands, with stones, with ancient rusted guns rendered into makeshift clubs. None of them meant a thing to me. The storm protected me, slowing them, taking much of the force away. The ice on my fur did the rest of the work, absorbing the blow, as good as armor and a hundred times lighter, moving with me.

 

I didn’t fall down, didn’t so much as hesitate, and all of the prey that struck at me died again within moments. We continued moving, dancing through the ranks of the enemy, cutting a broad swath through them, and they couldn’t touch us.

 

There were more werewolves beside me, I realized at some point, and they were slipping on the ice, they were slow and clumsy and blind. Not a part of my Hunt, though the Wild Hunt was aware of them. I could feel it reaching out to taste them, could feel the tendrils of the storm gliding over their fur. Without even thinking I stretched out into their minds, feeling the touch from both sides, the gentle, almost insubstantial chill. I shivered in pleasure at the sensation, though that might also have been from the spine I was crushing between my teeth at the time.

 

It was my choice whether they might hunt beside me, I knew. I was hesitant to share this glorious joy with anyone more than was already here, but there was prey enough for all of us and more here tonight, and so I brought them in, the icy winter storm wrapping around them entirely.

 

There were more after that, mages of various sorts. Some few I accepted, but most were too alien, too far removed from what it meant to be a Hunter. They were prey, not predator. Most I left alone, there being more than enough prey here to be discriminating in my hunting, but some refused to listen, and these the Wild Hunt fell upon with abandon. I enjoyed the dry, decayed flavor of the dead prey, but the taste of life and fresh blood was beyond compare, a thrill unlike any other.

 

And there were others as well. Some were things that had no names, so strange that even the Wild Hunt couldn’t begin to grasp their nature. That group walked beside us without joining the Hunt, without needing to join, and where they went strange and terrible things happened to the dead prey, things so horrid and incomprehensible that it hurt to look at them. A group of kitsune joined the Hunt, and a handful of raiju that had been nearby, their lightning lighting the storm from within.

 

Last of all were a trio of vampires, one that looked like a massive wolf, one that was wrapped in shadow and seemed almost incorporeal, and a third that was human in appearance but killed the dead again with no more than a touch, or even a glance. There was a reluctance in me to accept the vampires, but I could not think of why, and there was no doubt that they were predators and not prey. They joined the storm, and a new element entered the Wild Hunt, a hunger and a profound awareness of the creatures around us.

 

We kept moving, kept killing, and now we sprawled across the land, a spearhead almost a mile across with me at the very tip. I continued running forward, laughing all the way, and the storm around me laughed with me in a voice of wind and ice and death. Nothing could stand against me, or stand before me and hope to live.

 

And then there were no more of the dead to kill. Instead, there was a wall of darkness in front of me, the leading edge of the aura of death around the necromancer. From what I’d heard nothing and no one could survive that magic; it would tear the life right out of you just to touch it.

 

I laughed and ran inside.

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I felt almost bad watching the medics working on Winter. I was largely responsible for him being there, after all.

 

The feeling was easily dismissed. This was hardly the worst thing I was responsible for. I had done terrible things. That went without saying; I’d been a Watcher for twenty years. Doing terrible things was a part of the job description. It was very nearly the whole of it, in fact.

 

In comparison, this was relatively mild. He was still alive. He would likely make a full recovery. And we had been doing good work here. Killing people who deserved it, which was better than what I often did.

 

I wondered idly, as I watched, whether the link between Zhang and the slave trade had been real. It was plausible, if nothing else. He’d had fingers in enough other unsavory pies to make this one a logical next step. That scene might very well have been genuine.

 

At about that time, the medics began loading Winter and his dog onto stretchers, apparently satisfied with their work, at least enough to move them to a better location before continuing. The kitsune and the giants went with them, leaving only Watchers and our hirelings on site. Good. That made things simpler.

 

“How’d it go?” Monica asked, stepping up beside me. In a few minutes her work would start, but for the moment she was still enjoying her customary pregame cup of tea. I’d never asked her what she laced the tea with, although I could feel that there was more in that cup than water and tea leaves. I’d learned not to ask questions I didn’t want to know the answers to.

 

I shrugged. “It went. Did what needed doing. The contractors did most of the real work.”

 

She smiled a little, showing teeth a little too crooked to call attractive. “You usually get contractors to do the work,” she said. “Isn’t that why I’m here?”

 

“I don’t know,” I said. “Are you planning on actually doing your work?”

 

She shrugged carelessly. “Give me another ten minutes or so,” she said. “I’ll work when I’m good and ready.”

 

From anyone else, that kind of attitude would have gotten her into trouble with the Watchers. Maybe even gotten her killed, depending on who she was talking to. The Watchers didn’t like much independence in their contractors. It might give them ideas.

 

Monica knew she could get away with it, though. She wasn’t the best in the world when it came to penetrating magical defenses, and she didn’t claim to be. She was the best who would even consider working for us, and far better than any of the Watchers. For all her attitude, for all the annoyance and expense of hiring her, when there was a really important target, there was no question who I would call.

 

“Think I’ve heard of this guy,” Monica said after another sip of her tea. “The one you brought in to deal with Zhang. Bit of a psychopath, isn’t he?”

 

I remembered a shadowy basement full of children, a sword, blood. “A bit,” I said uncomfortably. Hard to deny the accusation when I’d seen his face, heard his voice while he executed that man. Hard to deny that I’d have done something similar if he hadn’t beaten me to the punch, and what did that make me?

 

“How’d you get him to work with you here?”

 

I shrugged. “We manipulated him,” I said simply. “Mostly truth, but we made sure he saw the right truth to make him want to help.”

 

“Mostly truth,” she said, looking at me with an odd half-smile playing about her lips. “So which parts were lies?”

 

Unwillingly, I found myself thinking once more about that room full of children. Surely that had been real, I thought. That scene of misery couldn’t have been fabricated. Those children must have been slaves, even if Zhang hadn’t been responsible.

 

It would have been more comforting if I weren’t so intimately aware of how easily it could have been arranged. Those kids could have been enslaved, brutalized, had their whole lives torn away, just to provide Winter with a bit of motivation at a critical time. I had done similar things in the past—nothing involving children, that would involve crossing lines that I wasn’t willing to touch, but I’d arranged other scenes. I’d been the one to provide that critical push for other people in the past.

 

But Monica was waiting for an answer, so I shrugged. “I don’t know,” I said. “They never tell us that. It’s easier to sell a lie if you don’t know you’re lying.”

 

“I don’t think I could work for anyone who would limit my information like that,” she said frankly. “Not telling me everything about what I’m doing…I couldn’t tolerate that.”

 

“I couldn’t work for anyone who didn’t,” I replied.

 

“Oh?”

 

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s…we do bad things. Some of the worst. That’s why we keep our secrets so compartmentalized. Every Watcher does horrible, terrible things. It’s a necessary part of this line of work. But I have a hard enough time coping with what I’ve done. If I had to know about every bad thing the Watchers as a whole do, I think it’d drive me insane.”

 

She smirked and drank more tea. “I have a hard time picturing you doing anything that bad,” she said. “What was it? What crimes, what sins weigh so heavy on your conscience?”

 

I thought about blood and death. Civilian casualties in the dozens. Handing a prisoner off to the men in stained lab coats and watching them close the door of the soundproof room. Vivisecting a particularly lifelike construct that turned out to just be someone’s pet. A long hallway lined with cells, the residents of which were too dangerous to let out, too valuable to kill. Leaving friends to die, because the mission was more important.

 

So many bad things, and yet I kept doing them. Because I knew, I knew, that the alternative was even worse.

 

“You don’t want to know,” I said quietly. “You really don’t want to know.”

 

She shrugged and drank the last of her tea. “Maybe not,” she said, tossing the cup aside carelessly. “Whatever. Let’s go loot this place.”

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As it turned out, I was wrong.

 

The reality could be a lot worse than vague fears.

 

It had taken almost an hour for the person we were waiting for to arrive. I wanted to call them a man, but I wasn’t entirely sure the term applied; they looked like an anorexic teenager who was way too fond of body modification. Not just a little bit, either; their face was warped out of shape until it was as close to a cat as a human, one of their ears was completely gone and the other had a hole in it I could fit two fingers through, and one cheek had gaping holes in it, letting me see their jaw moving up and down as they chewed bubblegum. They wore their trench coat open, the better to show the mass of scars, piercings, and subdermal implants covering their torso.

 

Calling someone human who so enthusiastically left humanity behind seemed almost rude. To pin them down to one gender or another was an assumption I couldn’t confidently make.

 

“Hey,” they said, walking up to us. “Guessing you two are the pickup I’m supposed to get to the front?”

 

“That’s us,” I confirmed.

 

“Cool,” they said. “Gotta fag? I haven’t had anything to smoke all day.”

 

“Sorry,” I said. “No.”

 

They grunted and turned to Aiko. “What about you? Anything?”

 

She shook her head. “I don’t smoke,” she said.

 

They frowned, the expression made darkly comic by the way I could see their muscles moving inside their face. “That’s not an answer,” they chided. ”Don’t like it when people dodge around questions.”

 

“Sorry,” she said, sounding somewhat exasperated. “Didn’t realize it was such a touchy subject for you. I don’t have anything to offer you.”

 

They grunted again. “Damn. Ran out yesterday, and the pills they’re handing out just don’t cut it. Come here, then. Let’s get this over with.”

 

They moved us into a domain I’d never seen before, a vast dim space that stank of smoke and gasoline fumes, filled with the noise of constantly grinding machines half-seen in the darkness. It was so loud that it was hard to think, impossible to talk, the noise a physical pressure against me. The acrid stench of the place was offensive, nearly toxic; I started coughing with the first breath I took, and didn’t stop. Worse than all the rest, though, was the inexplicable certainty that this place was alive, that the domain itself was aware and, if not precisely malicious, certainly alien, hostile simply by being so very far removed from anything we had ever been designed for.

 

Our escort seemed quite at home there. I tried not to think too hard about that.

 

And then we stepped out of that mechanical hell, onto the highway south of Saint Petersburg.

 

On the whole, I thought I might have preferred the Otherside.

---

 

My first impression was one of madness. It was the middle of the night, and while the moon was full, the cloud cover got in the way, made it darker than it might have been. It smelled like smoke, a mix of woodsmoke and nastier things, scorched rubber and burning hair. The noise of battle was quieter than the Otherside had been, but still distracting, confusing and disorienting.

 

The instant we appeared, we were attacked. The creatures attacking us were humanoid, sort of, but they looked even less human than our escort. Their limbs were too long, twisted in odd directions and tipped with claws, their skin an ashen grey that looked unnatural even in the darkness. They had glowing red eyes, literally.

 

Two of them jumped me, one swinging a crowbar, another just clawing at me. Another one tackled Aiko to the ground and started trying to bite her. The last of the group rammed what looked like a sharpened golf club into our escort’s chest. It was placed for a lung shot, and given that they were wearing their coat open, there was nothing stopping it from punching into their flesh.

 

They looked down at it and sighed. “Bastard,” they said. “You’re supposed to still be a quarter mile back.”

 

Then they reached up and pulled the piece of metal out of their torso. No blood emerged from the hole it left behind. A fluid did dribble out, but it was thick and black, more like oil than blood, and there was no real pressure behind it.

 

They slammed the golf club into the pavement we were standing on, accompanying it with a burst of magic, scented with car exhaust and gasoline, burning rubber and hot asphalt, and just a hint, a touch, of motor oil. The typical human scent of disinfectant was all but lost in that.

 

And the asphalt reacted to the magic, moving to their will. It lashed out at our attackers, moving with a speed and fluidity that startled, and pulled them to the ground, even pulling the one off Aiko without actually touching her. Once they were lying on the road they were pulled down into the pavement and crushed.

 

“Not in the forest anymore,” the mage muttered. “Bloody stupid bastard. This is my kind of place.”

 

I looked at them with new respect. “That,” I said, “is one of the stranger pieces of magic I’ve seen.”

 

They grinned, a lopsided sort of grin that showed teeth only through the hole in their face. “You should spend more time with urban druids,” they said. “You might learn some things. Now come on, our command post is this way.”

 

They led us up a nearby hill to where another tent had been set up, along with some floodlights. People were spaced regularly around the perimeter of the lighted area, maybe eighty percent of them carrying assault rifles, the last twenty armed with more exotic weaponry.

 

They didn’t challenge us. I wasn’t sure whether we were expected, or it was our escort that got us by the defensive line. Or maybe it was just that, for maybe the first time I’d ever seen, everyone was on the same side here.

 

A small table was set up within the tent, a large map spread across it. The map was marked with a mixture of colored pins and tape; I wasn’t sure what any of it meant. The only person in the tent was a man in a plain white robe, carrying a long wooden staff.

 

“Prophet,” I said, eyeing him. I’d only met him once before, and it hadn’t left the best impression. When people vote for your execution, it tends to have that effect.

 

“Jarl,” he replied. “A moment. Metro, do you have anything to report?”

 

“Not really,” our escort said. “Things are getting pretty close, though. My input point was overrun.”

 

“I know,” he said. “They’re traveling faster on the road than we anticipated. Try to slow them down if you can.”

 

They nodded to him and walked away, spitting their gum out on the ground and pulling another stick out of their pocket.

 

“Not terribly useful at the moment,” Prophet said, watching them go with cool grey eyes. “But she’ll be key to our defenses if the fighting reaches Saint Petersburg.”

 

“Is her name seriously Metro?” I asked. “Because that seems like a ridiculous name.”

 

Prophet smiled thinly. “I would think it would be easy to recognize that Metro would not keep the name she was born with.” He then looked back to the map on the table. “Watcher has great confidence in your ability to contribute in this battle,” he said. “I do not. I will not bother giving you instructions, as it is a waste of my time and you will not listen anyway.”

 

“Great,” I said dryly. “You mind at least telling me what we’re fighting?”

 

He pointed behind me without looking up. I turned around to look where he was pointing, and then gulped.

 

The funny thing was that I’d already seen it. I just hadn’t quite grasped what it meant.

 

The cloud was hard to see in the dark; there wasn’t much light to begin with, so the area where there was none was harder to distinguish. But once he’d pointed it out to me, I realized what I was looking at.

 

The effect was maybe a mile across and half that in height, a broad dome shape through which light simply didn’t pass. Anna couldn’t see the ground on the other side, or the skyline. Even the moon was blocked, invisible when the supernatural darkness got between her and it. The leading edge of the effect was still over a mile away, but it was moving steadily towards our position.

 

I frowned, and shifted my consciousness out, into my surroundings. I skipped over a handful of wolves, a dormant brown bear, and what felt like some kind of seal before settling on an owl. I asked her to swoop in and take a look, and found a surprising amount of resistance. I might not know what was going on, but she had an idea, and she wanted nothing to do with it.

 

Eventually I managed to convince her, although she wouldn’t go close to it, let alone into the area of darkness. It didn’t matter. I was still able to get a decent look at things.

 

The edge of the darkness was the site of maybe the most intense fighting I’d ever seen. Most of the combatants were the same warped humanoids Metro had taken out, although there were quite a few things that had four legs but were otherwise similar in appearance. There were a lot of them, more than I could really grasp. I could only see a small section of the fight, and I still estimated that there were probably more than a hundred thousand of them there.

 

Fighting them was a force that would have been terrifying under almost any other circumstances, but which was simply overshadowed by the sheer numbers being brought to bear against them. I could see werewolves, whole packs of werewolves fighting as a unit to hold down a section of the line. In another spot, the three vampires I’d brought in from Romania were crushing the twisted creatures like they were made of cardboard, sometimes felling a dozen of them with a single blow. It didn’t seem to matter. There was always another dozen ready to go.

 

Further back, away from the close-quarters combat, were all manner of ranged attacker. There were mages, of course, using every kind of power imaginable and quite a few that I couldn’t identify at all. In another location what looked like an entire battalion of soldiers were shooting into the thick of things without apparent concern for friend and foe. This wasn’t small arms fire, or sniper rifles; far from it. They were spraying indiscriminately with assault rifles, and when the guns ran empty, they reloaded and kept shooting. I saw at least one truck-mounted machine gun.

 

After a moment, though, I realized there was something odd about the fight. No one went into that area of unnatural darkness. The most blood-mad werewolf, chasing his prey beneath the light of a full moon, turned away when it ran under the cover of that darkness. When it moved forward and buried one of the few close-range mages, his comrades abandoned him without a second thought, fleeing at full speed.

 

That was about all I could get before the owl got absolutely fed up with me and went back to her nest, a safe distance from the warzone.

 

I frowned and tried to move to something within the area of the darkness.

 

Nothing. Not just nothing I could use. I literally couldn’t feel anything, not so much as a rodent in the whole of the area.

 

I returned to my body and opened my eyes, then frowned and shifted part of my attention back to Anna’s senses. Blindness was really getting old.

 

Prophet was still looking at the map. I was pretty sure he was doing something important, but I needed more information, so I decided to interrupt him.

 

“Where are the monsters coming from?” I asked.

 

He didn’t look up. “The first thing he did after the gods lifted their restrictions was go to the mass graves from the Battle of Stalingrad. He’s added some more since, but we think most of them are still from there.”

 

“Wait,” I said. “He raised the dead? We’re talking about a literal necromancer?”

 

“Not precisely,” Prophet said. “Raising the dead is impossible. We call them necromancers, but that isn’t entirely accurate. Mages such as this have power over life, not death. There just happens to be enough lingering life in corpses to provide them with something to work with.”

 

I opened my mouth, then paused as I realized something. There had been no animals in the area of darkness. What if that was because there was nothing alive in that area, except Viktor?

 

“Blood magic,” I said. “He’s using blood magic. Taking the life from everything near him and using it to power his magic.”

 

Prophet looked up at me like I’d done something interesting for the first time. “Correct,” he said. “Right down to the bacteria. That’s why this is so problematic. He’s got enough stolen life to recover from anything we can do to him. His creatures aren’t much threat, but he can bring them back as fast as we can put them down. Everyone he takes makes him that much stronger. Now, if you don’t mind I do have work to do here, so if you can’t be useful, at least be silent.”

 

I thought for about ten seconds, trying to find something I could do. I wasn’t coming up with much. He was almost invincible, insanely powerful, and surrounded by a cloud of death that would probably wipe me out within a couple of seconds. I only had a couple of weapons that could plausibly even hit him, and none of those was likely to do any good when everything they’d thrown at him thus far had failed.

 

I reached a decision, and then hesitated a few seconds more, trying to talk myself out of it.

 

Fuck it. This wasn’t a time for small guns.

 

“Loki,” I said. “Loki, Loki, Loki. I have a question for you.”

 

“Yes?” he said to me. I’d turned around the instant after I spoke, so naturally this time he showed up in front of me.

 

I turned back to face him, scowling. “You know what’s happening here,” I stated.

 

“Of course,” he said. “It’s quite interesting. I really thought this was over when the military carpet bombed him. Evidently he was further along in his ascension at the time than I realized. An odd miscalculation on my part. I wonder whether he’s drawing power from another source as well, something to supplement the lives he steals?”

 

“Whatever,” I said. “Priorities. How do I stop him?”

 

“Is that your question?” he asked, pacing around me. Aiko was watching warily, standing at a safe distance. Anna didn’t seem to realize the danger, and stood right next to me.

 

“You said I didn’t have to worry about exact phrasing,” I reminded him. “So yeah. Tell me what I need to do to deal with this.”

 

“The obvious answer is that you need to kill him,” Loki said, circling a little closer now. “But that would be unsporting. The next answer is that you need to kill him quickly enough that he can’t heal. That’s slightly more informative, but doesn’t really provide a useful how-to guide. While I could tell you what the most efficient ways to solve the problem are, I know for a fact that you won’t pursue any of them, which makes the suggestion somewhat disingenuous. So instead, I think I’ll say this.”

 

He then stepped forward, quick as lightning, his hand reaching out to my arm. He reached through my armor and the clothing beneath it like they weren’t even there, and opened a long, shallow cut in my arm with nothing more than the touch of his finger.

 

When he pulled his hand out again, it was dripping with my blood. “My name is Winter Wolf-Born, jarl of the Peak,” he said. His voice was a perfect mimicry of my own, right down to the sound of wolves and wind hidden beneath the surface, replacing the mad laughter that usually lurked under his voice. “By this offering of my blood, I call on the Wild Hunt to ride beside me. I call myself the Lord of the Hunt this night, and let my life be forfeit if I am not so great a hunter as this.”

 

I opened my mouth to ask what that was supposed to mean, then felt an odd, familiar sort of tickling sensation. I looked down and saw pale fog forming around my armor, bringing with it a dusting of frost.

 

“You asked how to stop him,” Loki whispered in my ear, leaning close as a lover beside me. “My answer? Think hungry thoughts.”

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Having never been to Russia before, I was a little disappointed by how little difference there was between it and Colorado. Brick’s portal dumped us out onto an open plain near a river, with a conifer forest to the other side. The environment was actually quite a lot like the subalpine forests outside of town.

 

There was a small cluster of tents by the river, and it was towards these that Brick headed, not checking to see whether we were following him. I did, because there wasn’t really much point in doing otherwise at this point, and everyone else followed me.

 

Aiko was there, of course—I hadn’t even tried to suggest that she might stay behind—and Anna had come along to provide me with vision. Kyi had to stay behind to manage things, but I’d brought several of the other housecarls, especially those who weren’t that well suited to city fighting. They were more useful here, I thought.

 

No mages, though. If the Conclave’s entire force couldn’t deal with this, the handful I could convince to come with me weren’t likely to manage it.

 

Anna could smell smoke well before we reached the small camp, thick with the smell of the pines and spruces it had come from. Moving closer, I could see the small details that hinted at how serious the situation was. The tents were the highest-quality models money could buy, but all were soiled, and many were torn, or set up improperly. People were eating, but they were eating what looked like old MREs, the sort of food that could keep you alive for a while, but didn’t have much else to recommend it. Most of them were injured, and almost all were downing pills as they ate. The few who weren’t eating were either tending to injuries or unconscious in the tents.

 

Everywhere, there was an air of urgency. There was no conversation, and everyone was moving quickly, like they couldn’t afford to waste even a second.

 

Brick walked through the midst of it all without even looking. The rest of us attracted a few curious looks from various people, but they went back to what they were doing after only a couple of seconds. These people were just too exhausted to work up much interest.

 

We made our way to a slightly larger open tent near the river, almost a pavilion. There were people running back and forth from this tent, holding scraps of paper or carrying bags. These people, too, looked worn and broken down.

 

Watcher was sitting at a small table within the tent, her cane leaning against her chair. As each person came in, she took the paper they handed to her or listened to spoken messages, considered each for no more than five seconds, then replied.

 

Brick made his way to her through the press without any evidence of concern for the people he displaced. I followed in his wake, feeling a little overwhelmed. I had seen some fairly large conflicts in the past, but nothing this long-term. Normally, by the time I was anywhere near to as worn out as these people were, the fight had been over for a while.

 

“Wolf,” Watcher said, not looking up from the paper in her hand. I wasn’t sure how she could read it, considering that her eyes were very much blind and she used magic to compensate, but apparently she could. “This is all you brought?”

 

“I had to leave people behind to keep my territory secure,” I said defensively. “And besides, I don’t know what you’re fighting out here. How am I supposed to know who’s useful?”

 

She grunted. “Everyone’s useful right now,” she said darkly. “But I take your point. Your associates are physical fighters, I take it?”

 

“Primarily, although one of them is a shapechanger and another has some magical ability. We’ve got quite a few weapons, too—guns, explosives, stored spells, that sort of thing.”

 

“Right,” she said. “We’ll want them on the front lines then.” She scrawled a quick note on a piece of paper and handed it to the runner who she’d been dealing with when we walked up. “Take that to Raven,” she ordered him. “Then go to Jäger and ask him where he wants a squad of skilled and equipped physical combatants.”

 

The runner nodded and sprinted off, stumbling a little before he hit his stride. I was guessing he was also functioning only due to massive amounts of chemical assistance. Take away his stimulants, and he’d probably be down for the count.

 

“I notice you aren’t fighting,” I said. “Why? You’re one of the strongest mages in the world, right?”

 

Watcher smiled grimly. “We’re trading off,” she said. “I fought yesterday and the day before. Today is my rest day before I go in again. Right now Guard and Prophet are keeping him busy. Keeper, Arbiter, and Maker are trying to establish a wall to keep him from getting any closer to Saint Petersburg. We haven’t been able to lock him down yet, but hopefully we can keep him going the path of least resistance, and he won’t make it to the city. If he does, we might not be able to bring him down at all.”

 

“Okay,” I said. “Overlooking the fact that it apparently takes five members of the Conclave just to keep him contained…who is this guy? Why’s he such a problem?”

 

She reached under the table and pulled out a paperback book. It looked like it had been manufactured in a hurry, with smeared ink on the cover and the binding applied at a wonky angle. “Viktor Samsonov,” she said, handing the book to me. “Here’s the dossier. Don’t waste time reading it right now.”

 

“All right,” I said, taking it. “What should I be doing instead?”

 

“We need people to pick up less mobile assets and bring them here,” she said. “You and anyone with you who can open a portal should report to Celina Cateye. Brick can show you where to go.” Watcher waved another messenger up, and we walked away.

 

“She’s pretty energetic for someone who’s been working for three days straight,” Aiko commented.

 

Brick snorted. “She’s on modafinil and amphetamine,” he said. “And magic. We don’t have enough witches who can mitigate sleep deprivation for them to work on everyone, but she’s important enough to get the treatment. Now hurry up.”

 

Celina turned out to be a short, heavily tanned woman standing near the edge of the camp. She was pacing restlessly back and forth, and she was wearing a heavy winter coat, although I hadn’t noticed any particular chill in the air.

 

“Celina,” Brick said. “Got another two for you. They both do Otherside portals.”

 

She stopped pacing and turned to face us, staring intently with sunken blue eyes. “You,” she said, pointing at me. Her finger shook slightly. “Where can you go?”

 

“Colorado,” I said. “Wyoming, Oregon, and North Dakota. London. Romania. Singapore. Should I list the Otherside locations?”

 

“No,” she said. “Still working on agreements with them. Good. American, but good. You?”

 

“Colorado,” Aiko said. “Milan. Leipzig. Bremen. Seville. Tokyo. Cape Town.”

 

“Very good,” Celina said. “And the rest of these people? What do they want, Brick?”

 

“They’re going to one of the fortifications the Jäger clan is defending,” he said. “Don’t know which one.”

 

“Someone will be making a trip in that direction within an hour,” she said. “They wait here until then. Now. Where in Colorado? Denver?” This last was clearly directed at me.

 

“Colorado Springs,” I replied.

 

She thought for a moment, then nodded. “Close enough. Go there, go to Denver. Your pickup will meet you at the coffeehouse on…Colfax?” She dug a scrap of paper out of her pocket, glanced at it, and nodded. “Colfax. Downtown. Go there, get them, and bring them here. Then you talk to me and I will tell you where to go next.” She then turned to Aiko. “Go to Tokyo,” she said. “Akihabara. Your pickup will meet you at the AKB48 theater.”

 

“I know where it is,” Aiko replied.

 

“Good,” she said. “Now go.”

---

 

I had a surprisingly easy time getting to where I was supposed to be. The highway between Colorado Springs and Denver was usually congested and miserable, but at the moment it was more or less deserted. In Aiko’s Lamborghini, I managed to do triple digits most of the way. It was probably unsafe, but at this point, who really cared?

 

Finding the rendezvous points was a little harder, since I wasn’t familiar with the city and it had the same problems as Colorado Springs, or worse. The roads were bad, and many of the major ones weren’t even functional. But I managed it after only a little struggling, and pulled into the parking lot.

 

I didn’t like leaving the car there, but it wasn’t the biggest issue right now. And besides, it wasn’t likely that someone would steal it. Not after I powered up the defenses.

 

I stepped inside the building, Anna sticking close to my side.

 

It wasn’t hard to find the group I was looking for. They were damn near the only people in the building. There were maybe fifteen to twenty of them gathered around a couple of tables they’d pushed together in the corner. Most of them were holding cups of coffee that they weren’t drinking, and staring at each other distrustfully.

 

“I’m here to pick you up,” I said, walking up to them. “For the fight in Russia?”

 

One of them, a big guy with dark skin and muscles on his muscles, glowered at me. “What is that werewolf doing in my territory?” he asked, rising halfway to his feet.

 

“You’re the Alpha of this town?” I asked, more out of curiosity than anything. I’d spent a lot of years practically next door to him, and I’d talked to more than a few of his wolves in the past, but I didn’t remember having actually met him.

 

“That’s right,” he said. “Now answer my question.”

 

“Guess you’ll get that show of solidarity after all,” I muttered, smiling a little. Then, louder, “We’re just here to do the pickup. Not moving in on your turf. Now, do you really want to start problems about it? Because I think we’ve both got bigger problems right now.”

 

“He’s right, Thomas,” another man said. This one was shorter and a lot thinner, although still in decent shape. He was also most definitely not a werewolf; there were a lot of magical signatures around that table to sift through, but if there was one scent I could pick out of a crowd, it was werewolf, and he didn’t have that. “I’m Steve, by the way. Blake clan, mental specialist.”

 

“Don’t really care, honestly,” I admitted. “Although…if you’re that good, why are you still here?”

 

“I’m not much of a fighter, frankly,” he said. “Not one of the first people you’d call for something like this. And I don’t know anywhere in Russia well enough to open a portal there.”

 

“Fair enough. Now come on, we don’t have time to waste.”

 

The portal from downtown Denver to the forest of Faerie was a pretty major difference in terms of the conceptual and atmospheric difference between the two. That made it harder to bridge the gap, and it took me almost ten minutes to get the portal up, even with the focus I’d designed to help with that sort of magic. A couple of people tried to rush me, but Steve and another two mages shushed them.

The amount of distance being covered would also make the experience of crossing it particularly unpleasant, but that didn’t really matter to me. I got a little bit of vomit on my boots from one of the other werewolves, but I’d stepped in worse things. It also meant that I was almost done with the next portal when people started waking up, which was a nice perk.

 

Back in Russia, I walked up to Celina with the people from Denver following me. “Got these guys,” I said to her. “Don’t know what to do with them from here.”

 

“I’ll handle it,” she told me. “Werewolves, over there!” she shouted after that, loud enough to make me and most of the werewolves wince a little. “Everyone else, that way! Ask for Watcher, do what she tells you, don’t cause trouble!”

 

People started breaking up into groups and moving where she’d pointed. No one questioned what they’d been told, not even the Alpha. Celina Cateye had a considerable amount of presence, when she chose to exert it.

 

“All right,” she said to me, more quietly. “Next up, Romania. There’re two groups, one in Bucharest and one in a village outside Sibiu.”

I nodded. “Okay,” I said. “I can do that. What are the details?”

---

 

The second trip was harder than the first. The only place I knew to put a portal in Romania was right outside our castle, which was in the northwestern portion of the country. I shifted into fur, and Anna and I just ran southeast towards Sibiu. It wasn’t a run I’d made often, since normally if we wanted to go to the city we just took a portal somewhere, but I knew the way.

 

We made decent time. Not spectacular, but decent; it was relatively rough terrain, forested and fairly steep, and even werewolves could only go so fast. It didn’t help that this was my first time trying to run at full speed as a wolf while looking through someone else’s eyes. It took us a bit to coordinate that, and there were a few accidents on the learning curve, including one particularly exciting tumble off a sizable cliff.

 

But we managed, and it only took us two hours and change to get there. The village we were looking for was small, barely a thousand people, not far from Sibiu. I didn’t get a chance to see much more than that, because this time the people we were there to pick up found us before we’d even made it into town.

 

There were three of them, two male and one female. All three were very obviously vampires; the blood-and-spice scent of their magic was clear, as was the absolute stillness they had when they weren’t moving.

 

They didn’t say a word, just walked up and nodded to us. When we started running again, they ran beside us with no evidence of difficulty or complaint. One of the males actually turned into a wolf, a massive beast with jet black fur and glowing red eyes; the other two stayed human in shape, but they still kept our pace easily. I got the impression they could have outdistanced us if they wanted to.

 

We could have stolen a car and driven, but I didn’t think it would really be any faster. We’d have to stop for me to change, since driving in fur was awkward in the extreme and there was no way I was getting in a car driven by a vampire right now. Then the highway took a rather circuitous route, and we’d have to deal with any problems that the road had right now, which might be serious. Simpler to just run it.

 

So that’s what we did. Following the road would have been easier, but it went well out of the way, and we were all capable of handling harsh terrain, so we went straight cross-country. That took another three hours or so.

 

When we got to about the right neighborhood of Bucharest, the humanoid male vampire looked at me. “We can go in and get them,” he offered. “You stay here and start the portal.”

 

The three of them walked further into the city without waiting for a response, the wolfish one melting back into a humanoid form. Although, now that I looked at him in that context, there was something about him that was less human than the other two. He moved with a sort of predatory grace that was subtly but noticeably inhuman.

 

Once they were gone, I started by shifting back to human, and then opened the next portal. It was a bit of a struggle—I was already pretty tired from the running—but by the time the vampires returned with my pickup from this location, I was ready to go.

 

Back in Russia, the vampires moved off toward the command tent without waiting for instruction from me or Celina, pulling the rest of the group with them by sheer charisma.

 

“Where next?” I asked Celina, leaning on the table a little. I was more fatigued than I’d realized, and, now that I thought about it, hungrier. Almost starving, really.

 

She shook her head. “There is no more time for this,” she said. “The necromancer has broken through the defenses. You are needed to help hold him back from Saint Petersburg. Go and talk to Watcher. Your transport will arrive soon.”

 

“Okay,” I said, turning and walking back towards Watcher’s tent. I wasn’t in the best of shape for a world-class fight right now, but I couldn’t deny a certain excitement at the thought. I’d been hearing about how bad this situation was for a while now; actually seeing it couldn’t be worse than the vague, formless fear I had felt.

 

“Wait,” she said.

 

I paused and looked over my shoulder. “Yes?”

 

“In Italy,” she said, “I would say in bocca al lupo now, to wish you luck. It means ‘in the mouth of the wolf.’ Now, to wish for the death of wolves now is not a good thing to say. But I think there is another meaning that is not so bad to ask for.”

 

“I often like to have my enemies in my mouth,” I said dryly. “If that’s what you mean.”

 

“Yes,” she said, nodding. “In bocca al lupo, then. And may God have mercy on us all.”

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The hospital room was almost entirely silent. The occupants were both asleep, not producing a sound beyond quiet breathing and the slow, steady thumping of two heartbeats. I could hear hurried footsteps and hushed voices in the halls, but nobody ventured too close to this room. Not while I was visiting. Occasionally a nurse would come in for the regular checks on them, doing it quickly while watching me carefully out of the corners of their eyes. I thought they would have avoided even that, if they weren’t afraid of incurring my anger.

 

I sat in the corner of the room and stared at nothing. Almost two weeks since I’d been blinded, and still my vision hadn’t recovered properly. I could open my eyes without collapsing now, and I could even make out shape and motion a little, but that was about it.

 

Recovery was slow. For me and everything else in this city.

 

The people in front of me were no exceptions. Kyra’s leg was in traction, broken so badly that it would likely be a month or more before she could put weight on it. For the moment it was held in place with an arrangement of straps and pins that wouldn’t have looked out of place in the Marquis de Sade’s bedroom. The assortment of fractures and dislocations in her leg was so painful that she was on a sufentanil drip that might have killed a human, and she still hurt every time she woke up.

 

Snowflake was better off, in some ways, but even worse in others. She wasn’t in serious pain. Physically, she was largely recovered. But she had the kind of brain damage that was effectively crippling. Her memory was spotty; some days she was as clear as ever, and others she couldn’t remember a conversation she’d had five minutes earlier. Her coordination was shot so badly that walking was a serious struggle. Sometimes when we talked she had to struggle for over a minute to figure out what she was trying to say. Given how we communicated, this wasn’t just her forgetting a word, though that would have been frightening enough. No, this was more that she couldn’t organize or sort her thoughts, and she struggled to remember the basic concepts she was trying to convey.

 

Still, she was recovering. Like Kyra, she was more resilient than any mortal had a right to be. It probably helped that I’d gotten a demigod with a talent for healing to start her off. Before that, she hadn’t been making much progress. Things had improved considerably afterward.

 

It would just take time. Time for bones to heal. Time for brains to recover. Time for trust to be rebuilt.

 

Time was a resource in short supply, these days. For every minute I had, there were five minutes’ worth of work to do. There was always a task clamoring for my attention. I hadn’t slept in three days.

 

It almost bothered me how much that didn’t seem to matter. I was tired, but it wasn’t the sort of bone-deep fatigue I used to feel after going without sleep for that long. It was almost more cerebral than visceral. The constant stress wore on me, making me irritable and snappish. But I didn’t get weak or clumsy. I didn’t fumble. I didn’t have to work to keep my eyes open. Physically, I was almost less tired than when I’d been sleeping regularly.

 

It was disturbing, another step away from being a mostly normal person into being…whatever it was I was turning into. Another step away from humanity, for sure. But having the extra time was so useful right now that it was hard not to be grateful even though I was scared out of my mind whenever I took the time to think of it.

 

But still, even with how pressed I was with every minute, I spent an hour in that room with Kyra and Snowflake, listening to them breathe and not even coming close to dozing.

 

I closed the door quietly behind myself, so as not to wake them, and walked out of the hospital. Times being what they were, there were armed guards watching the exterior doors, standing at many of the key locations within the hospital, and occasionally patrolling the halls. They were hard, grim men and women, the sort of people that could put a bullet in a toddler and walk away whistling.

 

I ought to know. I was the one that hired them. Pellegrini had turned out to be more willing to contribute to keeping order than I’d expected, and he’d loaned me some of his troubleshooters at cut rates. Add in some freelancers that I knew, and it wasn’t all that difficult to come up with a security force to protect the hospital.

 

I liked to think that I’d have done it even if I didn’t know people who were staying there.

---

 

I’d had to expand my operation somewhat, setting up other locations, just to house my newly expanded army of minions. But the center of my organization was still very much the throne room in the old pack house, and it was there that I went after I left the hospital.

 

I imagined that the location of the building was something of an open secret at this point. Technically I was still a highly wanted man, and the police were probably supposed to consider apprehending me their highest priority. But they also knew that I was doing more to stabilize the situation right now than anyone else in this city. I was guessing that they were telling anyone that asked that I was just a bloody hard target to find, and politely ignoring the fact that I had a massive organization running right under their noses and they knew exactly where to go to find me.

 

It was a situation I’d seen a few times before. Usually I’d been the one to violate the unofficial truce and attack the bad guy in spite of all the reasons not to.

 

The comparison was not exactly a comfortable one.

 

Inside the building, the throne room was full of activity. There were a dozen or so guards standing around, a roughly even mix of jötnar and ghouls. The rest of the people were mostly humans in my employ, some of whom knew who they were working for, some of whom didn’t. There were accountants in there, lawyers, mages, mercenaries, and all kinds of other useful people. I didn’t even know who all was working for me at this point. A lot of them had been recruited in the past few weeks, while I was way too busy to keep track of them all.

 

At this point, I was paying more in wages every week than I’d been worth for most of my life. But there was also an incredible amount of money pouring in, from all kinds of sources. It wasn’t just the magical community paying me protection money at this point. Legitimate businesses were paying me out of gratitude for having anyone to call for help, and Frishberg was funneling some cash from the police’s budget into mine, as well. I had the investments that Tindr made and managed on my behalf, including multiple companies.

 

And then there were the less legitimate sources of income, as well. When I brought Luna into my fold, I also brought her entire black market network. She dealt in arms, drugs, and secrets, and I made a cut on every transaction. Not only was I giving my tacit approval by taking the money, I was lending the support of my influence and talents to make the deals happen. Pellegrini’s local operations now paid me tribute for the privilege of operating in my territory, and even a small portion of the money they made was significant. Then there were payments for assassinations, payments coming from the Watchers, from the Pack, bribes from people hoping to buy my favor…money was coming in from everywhere.

 

It had gotten to such a scope that not even Tindr could manage it all on his own. For the time being he’d hired an entire accounting firm to help manage it.

 

Walking through the throne room, I was only seeing a small fraction of the people working for me. Mostly, there were representatives here. The heavyset man in the nice suit, for example, was just one of the accountants, here to drop off numbers with Tindr. The woman with a tattoo of a snake on her cheek was a gangster, dropping off the weekly payment for her business.

 

I passed through the bustle, and where I walked, the activity stopped. People turned to watch me pass. Many of those who were actually in my employ saluted me, in one way or another. The others mostly just watched.

 

I sat in the throne, and was almost immediately surrounded by my inner circle. Aiko was there, of course, and then there was Anna, who had flat-out refused to go back to Wyoming with Ryan and Daniell. I couldn’t be too upset by that, since she was basically the oldest friend I had at this point. Plus her presence was the only thing that let me see the room clearly.

 

Other than those two, most of the people were there for a reason. Kyi was my field commander, in charge of the jötnar, and also in charge of information gathering and scouting. Selene was the more general second-in-command, who coordinated all of my enterprises and kept me up to date on them. Tindr handled the financial aspects. Of the more recent additions, Luna was more up to date on local gossip and attitudes than maybe anyone else in the city. Jibril was there to represent the ghouls, and Shadow was there to represent the mages.

 

There was enough sheer firepower in that group to eradicate a small city, and it was only a fraction of the total forces available to me. It was a little scary, actually.

 

“Okay,” I said, sitting down in the throne and looking out over the room, through my own eyes and Anna’s. The activity continued, money and files changing hands. “Situation?”

 

“Financially, we’re sitting well,” Tindr said. “I’ve got access to about all of the accounts again, and your investments are doing well. I actually made a fair profit short selling stocks right before a company went under.”

 

“Spare me the details,” I said dryly. “I won’t understand them anyway. What’s the bottom line?”

 

He cleared his throat and said, “At the moment, we’re actually in the black. Net profit for this week is two thousand. I can’t predict where things will be soon, though. Things are too unstable.”

 

“Okay,” I said. “How much is in the accounts?”

 

“In your personal accounts, slightly over ten million,” he said. “In the operational account, three million. In investments, stocks, and real estates, an additional nineteen million.”

 

“Sounds good. Next?”

 

“No attacks today,” Selene said. “We’re getting reports of a group of vampires moving into the area, though. Apparently they’re looking to take over the territory now that Katrin is done. Kikuchi said that there’s a group of oni that might want a piece of the pie, but he thought he could handle them. We got a message from the pack in Denver congratulating you and asking for a public show of solidarity. There’s a message from a group of apsaras asking permission to visit the city.”

 

“Send a group to talk to the vampires,” I said. “No promises yet, just feeling them out. Send Kikuchi a message offering my formal support if he wants it; make sure it doesn’t suggest that he can’t handle it on his own. Tentatively agree to the pack’s request, depending on what they have in mind for the display. Tell the apsaras I need to know what they want, and they would have to agree to some ground rules. Next?”

 

Selene cleared her throat. “You have a visitor, jarl.”

 

“Who and when?” I snapped. “And why didn’t you already mention it?”

 

“She’s talking about me,” Brick said dryly.

 

I blinked and looked around. I hadn’t noticed him, even though he’d walked straight up to the throne I was sitting in.

 

Or, more accurately, I hadn’t recognized him. It was always a little tricky trying to translate from another body’s senses, and Brick looked different enough that I might not have known it was him if I were using my own eyes.

 

More specifically, he looked like shit. His face was burned, badly, almost half of it covered in blisters and blackened skin. His grey robes were also burned and torn, though I knew they were as strong as most armor. His left arm was in a sling made out of what looked like burlap, and he walked with a limp, leaning heavily on his staff.

 

“Brick,” I said. “What the hell happened to you?”

 

He grinned weakly. “You remember the situation in Russia I told you about, right?”

 

“Yeah,” I said. “The all-hands-on-deck thing, right? Did that lighten up enough that you could come back?”

 

“Not exactly. You remember I told you we might need to call everyone that might help if things got much worse?”

 

“Yes,” I said slowly. I thought I knew where this was going, and I was not liking it.

 

“Well, it’s worse.” He started to rub his eyes, leaning the staff against his chest, then remembered the burns and lowered his hand again. “We need help. We need all the help we can get.”

 

“Oh,” I said. “You want me to come, then?”

 

“Yeah,” he said. “You and anyone you can bring. I mean anyone. We’re taking all comers at this point.” He then paused. “What time is it, local?”

 

“Just before noon,” I said. “Why?”

 

“Shit,” he muttered, dropping the staff again and reaching into his cloak. He pulled out four unlabeled pill bottles. “You got something to drink?”

 

“Somebody get me some water!” I shouted, not watching to see who ran for it. Someone would. I was more interested in what Brick was doing. “What are those?” I asked him quietly.

 

“Broad-spectrum antibiotic,” he said, pulling one pill out of the first bottle. “Painkiller. Modafinil. Amphetamine.”

 

I blinked. “They’re handing out amphetamine?”

 

He smiled grimly. “They’re handing out anything that might keep people in the fight a little longer,” he said. “And I mean anything.”

 

“It’s that bad?”

 

“Let me put it this way,” he said. “You remember that one-to-twenty scale I told you about? We’re sitting at a fifteen right now. If it goes one step higher, we start dropping strategic nukes on this thing.”

 

I took a second to process that. “Okay,” I said. “Let me get some people together.”

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In a certain world, there was a vast lake, and on the shores of this lake there was a great forest, and rising from this forest there was a towering mountain, and on the slopes of this mountain there was a mighty castle, and in the depths of this castle there was a long hall, and at the end of this hall there was a heavy door of purest silver. The door was locked three times.

 

The first lock took the form of an iron lock, as large as a grown man’s head and carved all over with ancient runes and dead languages, promising a dire fate to anyone who so much as dared to touch it. There was no keyhole anywhere on it, though it opened with a key.

 

The second lock took the form of a pair of guards standing ever vigilant outside the door. They could not be seen behind the crystalline shell of their armor, not their faces nor their hands nor any part of them, but they were tall Sidhe warriors, proud and ancient in their service to their wicked queen.

 

Or, at least, that was the form the second lock should have taken. Not even Sidhe could serve forever without break or pause, and many, many guards had rotated through this position over the past weeks and months. Some were all that they should be, but many others failed to live up to the duties of their position. It was difficult to get them to grasp the sheer magnitude of the threat they contained. It was difficult for most of them to conceive of a mere mortal who could pose a threat to them alone, let alone to this castle and everything in it, up to and including the queen herself.

 

It was difficult for the queen to conceive of such a thing, which was why this room contained its occupant. Had she grasped the peril she was in, the sheer magnitude of the threat she courted, she would never have dared to risk arousing his genuine anger.

 

But she had dared, and none had questioned, and thus we found ourselves here.

 

How much different, I wondered, how changed might the entire world might be, had but a single person presented a single choice chosen only slightly differently? Such a delicate web we weave, that a gentle tug to a single strand might bring the whole of the grand construction to the ground in a tangled heap.

 

But that was a matter of imagination. And I did not deal in imaginations. I dealt in realities, in truths, and the truth of this was that the choice had not been made differently. The queen of wicked faeries had made her choice, and placed her bets, and it fell to the rest of us to live with the consequences.

 

I had time to muse on this, and on a great many other things, as I walked down that long hall. The sound of my footsteps was my only company, echoing from the stone walls with each step, a furtive tap-tap-tap here meeting up with a more assertive click, there, until it sounded as though a whole company were walking beside me.

 

But I stood alone. Forever and always, I stood alone.

 

“Gentlemen,” I said, drawing to a stop outside the door. “Here for the usual.”

 

The guard standing to the left of the door nodded, once, and the two uncrossed their halberds from before the door. I was expected. A formality, this exchange, bereft of meaning and import.

 

It seemed so very hollow. More so than usual. My current assignment was wearing on me, in more ways than one.

 

“Has the prisoner woken or moved?” I asked, reaching for the key in my pocket.

 

“Nah,” said the guard to the right of the door, deviating from the script. “She is a sweet one, though, isn’t she? Doesn’t do anything but lie there, but we could still have some fun with her, I think.”

 

The air in that hall, buried under so many thousands of tons of earth, was deathly silent and perfectly still. It would be incorrect, therefore, to say that the hall went still at his words. It would be misleading to say that the fall of a feather to the floor below could have been heard in the silence after his words.

 

These things, however, would not be wrong.

 

Sound entered the hall again as I walked up to the offending guard, the sound of my footsteps quiet, a counterpoint that did not so much disrupt the silence as emphasize it, the way a candle could illuminate a cave while serving only to reinforce how very, very dark it was.

 

My current shape was smaller than his, by a wide margin, and there was nothing about it which at a glance would have given an impression of disproportionate strength hidden by the size of my frame.

 

But I had no difficulty in grasping the guard by the throat in one hand and lifting him off the ground, until my hand was above my head. The strength of my true form, showing through the glamour I wore. I held him there and pinned him against the wall, not saying anything. Not yet.

 

The other guard shifted his grip on the halberd, as though considering attacking me.

 

I looked at him. Not saying anything, not threatening or rebuking. My expression was blank and placid, with no hint of a growl or a grimace, a smile or a snarl. Simply meeting his eyes, and allowing him to see the choices before him, the ramifications which followed from each of the paths he might walk.

 

He made his choice, and the subtle tension, the hint of violence, faded away as though it never were. He set his halberd against the ground again and looked pointedly away, down the hall.

 

I turned my attention back to the other guard, the one who had misspoken. He was beginning to choke now, beginning to strangle. He clutched at my hand with both of his, his halberd dropped forgotten to the floor, but both of his hands together could not peel a single one of my fingers away from his throat.

 

“The prisoner is to be treated with all appropriate respect,” I said quietly. “Do you understand?”

 

“Can’t…breathe,” he wheezed.

 

I brought my other hand up and slapped him. Gently, by my standards, which meant it was only hard enough to rattle his skull within its helmet rather than crush it.

 

“If I want to know the status of your breathing, I will ask,” I said. “Do you understand?”

 

He nodded frantically, and I released him, letting him drop to the ground. He collapsed when he hit.

 

“The prisoner will be treated with respect,” I said. It was a statement of fact, not loud nor brash, but with the quiet certitude of someone with no doubts. “You will behave as though you were gentlemen. There will be no inappropriate contact. There will be no cruelties nor indignities. There will be no indulgences of your baser instincts. There will be no fun. Do you understand?”

 

Again, he nodded.

 

“Good. Because if you do not comply with these instructions, there will be consequences. Soon or late I will hear of it, and I will hold you personally responsible, without care for who is guilty. I will hunt you, and I will find you, and I will not be inclined towards mercy or reason. I swear this by my own given name. I will hound you, such that you spend weeks in fear, without rest or peace. Where you would find shelter, I will take it from you, that you may know only isolation. Where you would find succor, I will take it from you, that you may know only despair. I swear this by oak and mistletoe and blackest iron. I will make you beg for the mercy of death, and I will deny that mercy. I swear this by the honor and the name of my Queen.”

 

He was staring at me in shocked horror now, and even the other guard, who was still very carefully not watching, couldn’t entirely keep from showing his reaction to what I’d said. With reason; that was a very serious oath, something that was not said lightly or without reason. When people heard, and I had no doubt that they would hear, some would say that I had gotten soft, to invoke such an oath on behalf of a prisoner.

 

The rest would remember what happened the last time I was called on to fulfill a similar oath, and they would not question my resolve.

 

I left him there on the ground, and unlocked the door.

 

The room inside was, it seemed, too simple to merit such defenses. There was no hoard of treasure, no ancient weapon or caged nightmare. It was not even a particularly large room. On the contrary, it was quite simple and plain, a small chamber cut into the mountain and finished with silver. The walls and floor and ceiling were all coated with silver, a prince’s ransom of silver, and everywhere there were more of the runes and sigils, warning trespassers of the dire fates they courted by entering without authorization.

 

In one corner of the room was a bed, and on that bed was the reason I was there.

 

As usual, before so much as looking at the occupant, I examined the devices around the bed. Some—the intravenous line with its attached mixture of glucose and amino acids, the various monitors that hummed quietly around the bed—had been stolen from mortal hospitals. Other devices served to monitor and regulate other functions, things that mortal science was incapable of handling.

 

The devices were functioning as they ought to. I knew they were; a mistake here would not be tolerated. Knowing how seriously the queen took this work, none of the technicians would dare to risk failure.

 

But I also had no desire to risk it, and so I took the time to check on each of the devices. The intravenous line was clear, and the bag of nutrients would not need replaced for another hour at least. There were other bags, with blood to replace what had been taken for diagnostics and experimentation, with antibiotic drugs to help ward off diseases of the flesh, but these were not as critical.

 

An examination of the monitors suggested nothing amiss. The prisoner had not regained consciousness at any point, as the guard had said. She had had no contact with the world beyond these walls, excepting the regular visits of the nurses, physicians, and witches that kept her alive and in good condition.

 

I relaxed slightly, and sat down in the comfortable chair next to the bed. For the first time since entering, I looked at the prisoner herself.

 

She was slight of build, with classically Japanese features. Not unlike my own appearance, although there were slight differences. Efforts had been made, but there were limits to what could be done, even when both modern human technologies and ancient fae magics were in play. After such a long period of unconsciousness, consequences were to be expected. A certain amount of emaciation, of atrophy, was inevitable.

 

She was naked, making such comparisons easier, and making it so that there was no hiding the changes she had undergone. I looked her over with a knowledgeable and critical eye, marking and taking note of each of those changes.

 

Progressive loss of body fat from the breasts, buttocks, and abdomen. Progressive loss of muscle mass from all major muscles, most obviously the arms and legs, but also apparent in the torso, the abdomen, even the neck. Loss of muscle tone. Loss of skin tone. Mild but progressive hair loss.

 

It was, I thought, good that my memory was nearly flawless, so that I did not need frequent confirmations or reminders. If I were to use her current appearance as the basis for my own, I would fool no one at all.

 

I hesitated before reaching out to touch her, steeling myself and gathering my resolve. There were few things I feared, and in truth this was not one of them, but there was still a certain hesitation. Not out of fear, I thought, so much as guilt.

 

The prisoner looked unconscious, and in some ways she was. But that was a simplistic way to view it, an excessively binary one. For our purposes she could not be truly awake or aware, and thus the potion she had been dosed with removed consciousness and volition. But at the same time, I needed access to the knowledge locked within her brain, and thus genuine unconsciousness was not sufficient.

 

The state she was in, then, was something of an intermediate step. Not awake or aware, not cognizant of her surroundings, not capable of taking voluntary action. But conscious all the same, locked in her own mind in a manner very similar to a perpetual dream.

 

Or, as the case might be, a nightmare. Thus the twinge of guilt, the momentary reminder from the tiny spark of a conscience which remained within me that what I was doing was wrong.

 

I knew better than most how wrong it was. I had been dosed with the same potion, to establish myself in my current role. It had been a brief matter, just long enough to establish myself as her, drugged and hidden while an impostor took her place.

 

The subject of the deception had found the first impostor almost immediately, as predicted. But who would think to look at the person thus rescued with suspicion? Who would think to question whether the impostor they found had been only a distraction, a cover for another, greater impostor?

 

Such was the way of the Sidhe. One deception covered for another, and if you only thought to look, the truth was plain to see. But so few ever looked at what was closest to them.

 

Still, though, I remembered how this potion had felt. Not just the helplessness, but the consciousness, the awareness of my own condition. Left to its own devices, outside of my control, my mind had naturally gravitated to darker memories, all the things I had done which I had cause to regret.

 

From what I had seen of the prisoner’s mind, I knew that she had nothing so horrific weighing down conscience as what I had done. She had no memories of torment to match what I had endured.

 

All the same, her mind was not a place where I would wish to be trapped. Not at all.

 

And there, I supposed, was the true reason why I had been willing to stake my honor in her defense. I knew that what was being done here was wrong. I prevented the guards from raping her to soothe my guilty conscience for the far greater rape which I had been party to. They would have taken only her body, a terrible crime, to be sure, but one which would pass. I had taken her mind, and her life, and made them my own.

 

There were reasons I seldom indulged in introspection.

 

Finally, I worked up my nerve, and rested my hand on her forehead.

 

The room disappeared, replaced by the mad dreamscapes that spun and danced behind the prisoner’s closed eyelids.

---

 

Some time later, I opened my eyes again, and took my hand away. I had gotten what I came for, learned what I needed.

 

I had made mistakes. Too open on some topics, too concealing of others. Too many questions dodged. Too supportive when I ought to have been critical.

 

On the whole, I had been too quiet, too reserved. An inevitability, and a mistake that I very commonly made. It was generally safer to err on the side of quiet rather than noise. No disguise could be entirely perfect, and thus it was safer to avoid notice, to avoid drawing attention to myself. Not even my skills could stand up to scrutiny indefinitely.

 

In this case, though, it was a weakness. The prisoner was not quiet or reserved by nature; acting as though she were had the potential to attract precisely the notice that I wished to avoid. To this point, it had been overlooked or attributed to stress. Going forward, I could not afford to rely on those excuses. The danger of being caught out was too great.

 

I stood and left, locking the door behind myself, and went to another room, several floors higher in the castle.

 

This room was not guarded, although I knew that it was being watched. All rooms in this castle were watched. It was a fact of life among the Sidhe. Here, I stood as invisible attendants undressed me, bathed me, applied various poultices, wiped them away, bathed me again, draped me in a plain grey robe, and tucked me neatly into bed.

 

I was tired. Even with the protections I had been given, even with the poultices that had been applied, the presence of so much iron wearied me. A substitute had been made for the prisoner’s armor and weapons, but other sources of iron could not so readily be dealt with.

 

Thus, this room. Here, thanks to the power of the queen, the passage of time was dilated with respect to the mortal world. I could take days or weeks to recover from the iron exposure here, and return with the confident knowledge that only hours had passed.

 

I let myself relax into sleep.

---

 

Waking, I dressed myself. I could have had one of the invisible servitors do it, but I preferred to take care of it myself. It was a ritual, a chance to remind myself of my role.

 

My appearance still resembled hers, but there was more to it than that. It was a state of mind. I had to keep in mind who and what I was imitating, had to make the role an integral part of my thoughts. Now, I was not playing a role; I was a role.

 

Garbed appropriately, I returned, opening a portal to Transylvania. My true destination was far away, but my cover for my return to Faerie had been spending time in Transylvania, and thus I had to at least visit before my return. Otherwise I was too likely to be asked questions that I couldn’t answer.

 

Another portal, to a location within the city of Colorado Springs. The portal location was at a distance from anywhere I was likely to meet someone of import, giving me time to recover from the effects of the transition. The prisoner had no such reaction to them, which was one of the greatest weaknesses in my disguise. I had no ability to mimic that.

 

Returning to his house, I found that Winter was out accomplishing another task. A short reprieve, then, and an incomplete one, but still a reprieve. I sat and waited, observing the activity of those he surrounded himself with. It was an interesting observation, although not a terribly useful one.

 

Finally he returned, and I went to greet him.

 

“Holy shit,” I said as he walked up. “Did you seriously buy a limousine?” I already knew where the vehicle came from, but questions were by definition not lies. Deceptive in their implications, perhaps, but no one could say that they weren’t true.

 

“I’m not sure yet,” he replied, stepping inside the building. “How was your morning?”

 

I shrugged. “I’ve had worse. Yours?” Again, there was no real, definite meaning to what I’d said. I’d had worse, yes, but what did that mean? I’d had worse mornings? I’d had worse experiences than that morning? I’d heard worse questions than the one he just asked? Without clarification, any of those interpretations was possible.

 

We continued inside, and the conversation continued in the same vein, joke and implication without obvious meaning, until his attention turned elsewhere and I could stop engaging in the discussion.

 

Aiko. It was a good name, although not my name, for all that I was pretending to it just now.

 

It was my custom to take a new name for each target I mimicked. This time, I had settled on Notsune, before the job even started.

 

My queen had commented on how odd a name that was. She’d asked why I had chosen it.

 

“Well,” I replied, with my typical dry humor, “I’m certainly not a kitsune.”

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Aiko and I sat and looked out over the city as the setting sun painted the city in amber and vermillion. Or, rather, Aiko sat and looked out over the city. I was sitting, but my vision was focused elsewhere, scattered through the eyes of a hundred ravens, hawks, gulls, and pigeons, giving me a literally birds’-eye view of the streets.

 

The scars were visible. Unmistakable, when the city was viewed on this scale, when the whole of the picture could be seen. There were gaps in the structure of the city, where buildings had been destroyed. There were gaps in the flow of the city, where the traffic was detouring around streets that were blocked or worse.

 

But there was traffic to stop. There was structure to interrupt.

 

It wasn’t nothing.

 

“My city,” I said, returning my consciousness to my own body and walking forward to stand by Aiko at the edge of the roof, my hands folded behind my back. It was a striking image, one that I could appreciate even if I couldn’t see it.

 

Theoretically this building was closed. About as close as Colorado Springs got to a real skyscraper, it was corporate offices all the way up. At the moment it was shut down, since nobody was going to the office just now anyway.

 

But I’d been in a melodramatic mood, and my name had been enough to open the door.

 

There weren’t many doors that were closed to me around here anymore. It was funny, in a way. Every door was open, and yet my choice of path was narrower than ever.

 

“Your city,” Aiko echoed. “How does it feel?”

 

“Odd,” I admitted. “This is…it isn’t something I wanted.” Then I frowned. “It’s funny, actually. I can say that, but…I did it, didn’t I? If I really don’t want this kind of power, why do I keep seeking it out?”

 

“Sometimes what we do has very little to do with what we want,” Aiko said. She sounded a little said, and a little thoughtful, almost meditative.

 

“I guess so,” I said. “It’s just…is it worth it? So many people dead. Snowflake still hasn’t woken up, and Kyra might never walk right again. All this, for what? Who gets to wear the biggest hat?” I shook my head. “I don’t understand.”

 

She turned to face me and leaned in for a hug. For once I wasn’t wearing armor, so it was more satisfying than most of our hugs had been recently.

 

Apparently she felt similarly, because she held me tight for almost a minute. It was more actual contact than we’d had since I’d started my campaign for control over Colorado Springs.

 

“I don’t know if it will all be worth it,” she said, letting me go. “I hope so, but I don’t know. Ask me after this is over.”

 

“Yeah,” I said. “I hope so too.”

 

We stood there and looked over the city as the shadows lengthened and the brilliant hues of evening faded into the muted greys and blues of a night without streetlights.

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