Soul Taken

5

Stefan’s house was nearly as big as Adam’s and mine, and for much the same reason—it might need to shelter a lot of people at any given time. Unlike ours, it sprawled out instead of up, and was set in a neighborhood of upscale houses built around half a century ago.

The outside lights were on, and several of the windows were dimly lit, as if reflecting lights deeper in the house. Only the basement windows were absolutely dark, but I knew they were painted black. Stefan told his neighbors that he had a movie theater downstairs.

Adam pulled his brand-spanking-new SUV into Stefan’s driveway. It looked exactly like the last two SUVs, which had suffered tragic deaths this year. Adam told me that in his worst year, suffered before he and I got together, he’d lost six vehicles—but they had been a lot cheaper. I asked him if they’d all been black, and he’d laughed. But he hadn’t denied it.

Adam parked next to Stefan’s Mystery Machine, not that anyone else would know what it was. The old VW bus’s paint job was shrouded in a protective cover.

“I thought you had gotten it ready for him to drive again,” Adam said.

“I did.” I tried to keep the worry out of my voice. “After the smoke dragon took him for a ride, he told me that he didn’t suit the bus just now.” But I took the cover as a good sign. Not now but someday, it said.

“The cover’s a good sign,” said Adam. “Stefan is planning on driving it again someday.”

Our mating bond did things like that sometimes, when Adam wasn’t keeping a close eye on it. I’d gotten used to having my thoughts come out of his mouth—or possibly his thoughts run through my head before he spoke. I didn’t like it. But when our bond had been suspended a few months ago, I’d learned that I preferred chafing under its inconveniences to silence.

I’d gotten used to sharing part of my inner self with Adam. It didn’t leave me in a blind panic anymore. Mostly.

“I was just thinking that,” I said.

He grimaced. “Sorry.”

He understood. I took a breath, leaned against him, and kissed the side of his jaw.

“It was a good thought,” I said. “I haven’t had a chance to really talk to him since the smoke dragon.”

Stefan had bowed out of the last few bad-movie nights. We held them at Warren’s and kept them down to eight or ten people—up from the days of our four-person maximum, but still more manageable than if the whole pack showed up. I should have approached Stefan after the first one he missed, but the vampire and I had a complicated relationship.

He was one of my oldest friends; I’d met him very soon after I’d moved here. He’d protected me from Marsilia for years before I’d known I needed protecting. He’d bound me to him at my request, to save me from another vampire. It had worked—and that was not the only time that bond had saved me.

But a vampire’s bond is not like the bonds of the pack or the mating bond I shared with Adam. A vampire’s bond is one between master and slave. Stefan had never used it that way, but he could. It scared me.

Adam ran a thumb across my cheek—the one without the scar because the scar could be sensitive. He didn’t say anything, because he knew all about Stefan and me, about my misgivings. I knew that he struggled with it sometimes himself. There was nothing useful to say, but his touch helped a lot.

We walked side by side in companionable silence to the front porch. I glanced up at the dimly lit windows and realized why there had been an itch on the back of my neck since we’d driven up. Stefan, like Adam, had been a soldier, albeit in a much different kind of army in a much different century. He would never have let his people present themselves as a target. Those windows should have been curtained.

Adam, who had gotten ahead of me while I looked at windows, lifted his hand to knock just as a strange scent drifted through the air. I took two quick steps and caught Adam’s arm before it landed on the door.

He stopped midmotion, raising an eyebrow at me.

Stefan’s house was more soundproof than most, but it was unlikely the occupants hadn’t heard us drive up—or seen our headlights. We weren’t going to take anyone by surprise.

Still, instead of speaking, I tapped my nose and mouthed, Fae. No sense advertising what we knew to anyone listening.

Adam inhaled through his nose and shook his head. He couldn’t smell it.

That told both of us I was probably smelling magic rather than body scent. Usually I could tell one from the other, but this scent was very faint, almost as if someone had taken some pains to hide it.

I have a quirky immunity to magic. It works best for vampire magic for sure, and for everything else it is hit-and-miss. Tad and I had spent an afternoon experimenting with it after we’d faced down some witches. He thought I’d been remiss not figuring out what kinds of magic worked on me. After he’d pointed it out, I’d had to agree.

It hadn’t been a productive afternoon. In the first place, Tad only worked fae magic. I didn’t want to involve the vampires, and the only witches I knew were now dead. It turned out that my immunity to magic, when dealing with fae magic, really did appear to be random. The same spell thrown at me the same way affected me sometimes but not always. We asked Zee to help, but he refused, saying, “Chaos is not predictable. To imagine anything else would be dangerous.”

But some immunity was better than none.

I glanced into the dimly lit windows and saw no one moving about inside. Those vulnerable windows, added to Stefan’s unanswered phone, fairly shouted that neither Stefan nor his people were in charge of the house. Someone inside that house used fae magic.

I wondered if this situation was tied up in Marsilia’s mysterious message and Wulfe’s apparent disappearance, or if it was some entirely new problem. A coincidence.

I don’t believe in coincidences much. I knew the thought was Adam’s, but I agreed.

I tried to send back a question: Do you think Marsilia sent us into a trap?

She would know that the first person I’d contact if I were looking for Wulfe would be Stefan.

“I’m beginning to think that all of our vampires are in trouble,” murmured Adam into my ear, so softly that a werewolf standing five feet away would not have heard him.

He stepped in front of me, pushing me behind him as he started to knock on the door again. Obviously, he intended to go in first.

In a physical fight, Adam was the tank and I . . . well, I was a predator, too. In our four-footed forms, Adam’s wolf was more than eight times my coyote in weight. I was a hair quicker, but his werewolf was considerably better armed.

In human form, which for me was the better shape for fighting, I had years of martial arts training backed by a recently hard-earned black belt. I carried a gun and a cutlass. But even there, Adam was a better fighter. He’d spent most of his life in battles—first as an army ranger and an LRRP (long-range reconnaissance patrol, essentially a scout) in Vietnam. After the war, he’d been Alpha of a werewolf pack and served in that role for almost half a century.

But in a fight where magic was a strong possibility, even an unpredictable immunity to magic made me less vulnerable. It made sense that I should go first.

I caught his arm. Continuing our probably useless attempt to be stealthy, I wiggled my fingers to indicate magic, tapped my chest twice, and then held up one finger by itself.

Adam’s lips tightened and a streak of white appeared on his cheek when he clenched his jaw. Given that reaction, it surprised me when he nodded. He made a downward gesture with the flat of his hand, indicating a space about knee height.

That made sense, too. I was a more difficult target in my coyote form, more unexpected and quicker than when I walked on two feet. I hadn’t managed to prove it to myself one way or the other, but I thought that my immunity might work better when I was wearing my coyote self, too.

I glanced over my shoulder at the road that ran by Stefan’s house. It was a fairly busy one, but at this time of the very early morning, when the darkness ruled, there was no one around. I stripped quickly out of my clothes and changed as I dropped my underwear on the ground. Unlike the werewolves, my shifting was both painless and virtually instantaneous.

I felt one claw catch in fabric that tore and hoped it was my underwear. I’d been wearing a new shirt my youngest sister had sent me for her birthday. I usually gave her something on my birthday, too. I don’t remember when it started or why, but it was a tradition now. This shirt was a T-shirt that said When the Zombie Apocalypse Comes, Remember That I Am Faster Than You in glow-in-the-dark lettering.

I shook myself to get rid of the last of the changing tingles and pressed my shoulder against Adam’s leg to tell him I was ready.

He fished my carry gun out of the pile of clothing, checked it, and tucked it into his waistband. He hesitated a moment, then simply drew my cutlass from its sheath, holding the blade against his body where it would not be seen by any passing motorist—though the road was still quiet.

I made a noise. The cross guard was silver.

“It’s not a cross guard,” murmured Adam almost inaudibly. “It’s a guard with a knuckle bow. Only the knuckle bow is silver. I’ll be careful.”

I paused. It wasn’t the correction. I knew the cutlass didn’t have a cross guard. A cross guard formed a cross shape with the blade. I’d made that mistake with Auriele once and been treated to a five-minute lecture that ensured I always called it a cross guard out of sheer perversity. We were getting along better these days, but now it was a habit.

I had not remembered, if anyone told me, that only the knuckle bow was actually silver. That was a good thing to know.

But I hadn’t called it a cross guard out loud. I couldn’t talk in my coyote form. He’d read my mind again.

It didn’t matter that I’d just tried to do that with him a few minutes ago. My breath hitched as if something were tightening around my throat. What if he could read my mind all the time?

“Not usually,” Adam told me softly, his attention still on the door and what lay beyond. Evidently our plans should be silent, but he didn’t think it made sense to worry about a stealthy approach. “But a few times tonight. You must be a little tired, or it might be the knock on the head. I do not lie to you, Mercy. We can talk later if you need to.”

He didn’t lie to me, that was true. Most werewolves quit bothering with lies because any other werewolf and quite a few of the other supernatural creatures can hear a lie. I could. Adam didn’t lie even about very painful things. The reminder that he would tell me what he knew allowed me to allow our bonds, pack and mating, to lie lightly upon me again. As soon as I quit struggling, I could breathe.

With me standing in front of him, Adam had to lean forward to knock on the door, three sharp knocks. When nothing happened, he rang the doorbell three times, too. Having given anyone inside a chance to welcome us, he landed a swift kick on the door, splintering the frame as if it were a movie prop.

The door swung open to an apparently empty house.

I could smell old blood, various cleaners, and personal scents that made up Stefan’s usual household smells. The fae scent that didn’t belong was present, but no stronger than it had been outside.

I padded cautiously over the cool flagstone of the entryway to crouch in the darker shadows beside the old upright piano that occupied the small space between the entryway and the living room. This allowed me to get an unobstructed view of the living room—which was apparently unoccupied. When nothing stirred, Adam stepped into the room, bringing my cutlass to guard position.

It had initially surprised me that he had chosen the blade over a gun, his or mine. But guns were loud and would attract neighbors. Whatever we were facing in Stefan’s home would not be made better by adding a bunch of human cannon fodder into the mix.

The cutlass in the hands of a werewolf who knew what he was doing would be quiet and nearly as deadly as a gun. Possibly, depending on what kind of fae we faced, more deadly. I hadn’t seen him fight with my blade, though I’d seen him fight with other swords and swordlike things. The cutlass was unlikely to give him any trouble.

I’d had time to think about the fae magic I’d been smelling. Fae had very distinctive odors, depending upon the magic they used. Some of them smelled earthy or like water. Others smelled of fire or woodlands. I used to think there were only earth, air, fire, and water, until I encountered more fae. Some of the Gray Lords smelled like hunting cats or lightning. Some of them just smelled like themselves.

This fae smelled . . . like nothing I’d ever scented before. Not so much a different scent, but less of a scent. It had to be magic if Adam couldn’t smell it. But it didn’t smell right even for that. I had no idea what we were facing.

Adam shut the front door behind us. Any close examination would reveal the damage to the latch, but people driving along the nearby road shouldn’t notice it—not the way they’d notice a door hanging open with light spilling out onto the porch steps.

I’d been inside Stefan’s house a couple of times before, enough to know the general layout. The entry and living room could have belonged to a 1920s craftsman, contrasting starkly with the soulless exterior that had been built to match the other houses in the area. The flagstone entry gave way to dark oak floors covered with scattered Persian rugs, Shaker-style couches, and chairs built with more dark wood and woven earth-tone fabrics.

The living room opened to a larger, more airy space that was the dining room and kitchen. The look here was modern and sleek, with lots of shiny chrome softened by earthy tiles. The two parts of the house should not have blended as well as they did, not without walls to soften the change. But the overall effect was, usually was, homey. But that wasn’t how Stefan’s home felt now.

The atmosphere reminded me of childhood expeditions to the haunted mansion at a traveling carnival, nerve-tingling but also sordid. I could not tell exactly what was causing it: the fae whose magic I could still sense, or the ghost who sat watching me from the big couch that took up the long wall of the living room.

I’d met Daniel before he became a ghost. Now the fledgling vampire sat on the middle section of the Shaker couch, absolutely motionless, as vampires often did. He sat near a big Tiffany floor lamp that was the source of the light reflected in the outside windows. That he did not cast a shadow in the light was the only real sign he was a ghost.

That’s not to say that he wasn’t creepy. His eyes were on me, white and pupilless, as they had been the only time I’d seen him alive. Or as alive as vampires got, anyway. He was, as he had been then, half-starved and frail, his hair only a stubble on the pale globe of his shaved scalp. Tears dripped slowly down his emotionless face.

Daniel was not a ghost I would have been comfortable living with—but Stefan didn’t know Daniel was still in his house. Or if Stefan did, it wasn’t because I’d told him about it.

I tried to ignore Daniel because too much attention from me strengthens ghosts. He was not what we were hunting here, and Stefan would not thank me for making his dead roommate more powerful.

Adam stopped in the center of the living room. He turned very slowly, taking his time peering into the shadowed hallway that led to the bedrooms, then at the open basement door. He didn’t see Daniel, but I hadn’t expected him to.

Adam moved without a sound, but not because he needed to. The splintering of the front door had been loud enough to alert anyone in the house who hadn’t heard our car drive up of our presence. It was an involuntary reflex he reverted to whenever there was danger about. I thought that he might have learned to do that before he’d ever become a werewolf, when he’d hunted and been hunted in Southeast Asia.

I felt like we were being hunted now. My impression that this was a trap had settled into an instinctive certainty. I just couldn’t tell if Adam and I were its intended prey—or if it had been set for Stefan.

I was going to feel really stupid if I was overreacting and Stefan and his people were at the seethe, or out on a team-building exercise. I made a mental note to ask Stefan if he did team-building exercises, then thought about what kind of team-building exercises a vampire might do and decided it might be better not to ask.

I told myself that the fact that Daniel was the only ghost I could see was good news—since I could not hear anyone in this house, which should have at least eight normal humans and a couple of fledgling vampires in it at this time of night. If they had been violently killed recently, there would be more than one ghost here. I put my nose to the floor and tried to pick up any hint of the thing we were hunting.

I made a full circle of the living room, a quick-time perimeter slink, with my nose on the floor, finishing back at Adam’s side. There were no sounds or scents to direct our hunt, so I paused to see where he wanted to go next.

I didn’t much want to move on to the bedrooms, where tighter spaces would make fighting anything nasty more difficult. As for the basement . . . spending some time in the basement of a black witch might have left me with just a bit of basement-itis, because I didn’t want to go through that dark doorway.

Adam took two steps forward so he could get a better look at the kitchen and dining area. I would have started heading into the kitchen, but Daniel’s whitewashed eyes caught mine. He wasn’t, had not been, one of the ghosts who interacted with the real world, so it caught me by surprise when he looked from me up to the vaulted ceiling.

I followed his gaze. I yipped a warning, but it was too late. Something pale the approximate size and shape of a VW Beetle dropped from the ceiling on top of Adam, flattening him on the floor with a boom that rattled the house.

I leaped upon its broad and smooth back, hoping to find a place I could get some teeth into, something that might get it off Adam. I’d expected to land on something soft, but the surface was as hard and cold as an ice-skating rink. My nails landed with a click, and I had to scrabble to stay on top of it as it moved under me because I could find no purchase.

The creature was near white with a greenish cast in the warm light of the floor lamp. It looked as much like a spider as it did like anything else I’d ever seen. Its body was divided into two rounded segments, one—the one I’d hopped onto—much larger than the other, and it had six long legs with two joints in each. If someone who had never seen a spider tried to make one based on a kindergartner’s description, it might have looked like this creature. Especially if the kindergartner was afraid of spiders—and couldn’t count to eight.

Fine “hairs” covered the hard shell of the body in patches, and they had more in common with cactus spines than with anything as friendly as actual hair. They dug into the tough bottoms of my feet like fiberglass fibers. The connection between body and head was hard, too, covered with plates like armor, and gave me no place to worry at with my teeth.

The legs were covered in longer slivery needles that lay down against the surface. I’d learned how to kill porcupines without getting a muzzle full of quills. If I bit at just the right angle, maybe I could avoid being stuck.

I had to try something because Adam was beneath it.

It shuddered, shivering like a maraca, complete with sound effects. I felt my feet slipping, so I flung myself back off the creature in the hope that once I was on the floor, I could get traction to pull off a leg strike.

The smaller round section, which turned out to be its head, spun as it tracked my motion. It was an uncanny movement—as if it were connected to the body like a trailer ball instead of bone or sinew. It reminded me of the way an owl’s head moves, but creepier. I got a brief glimpse of its open mouth—no teeth or tongue but dangling bits that wriggled—and it spat at me, a cupful of clear liquid that it obviously thought of as a weapon.

I accepted its judgment and sprang out of range as if the spit were acid. It landed on the wood and the edge of a Persian carpet and dissipated in a fog. I decided to continue to treat the spider spit as if it was dangerous.

In the back of my head, I kept track of how long Adam had been down beneath the creature. Seconds were hours in a fight, and I had counted three already.

Fortunately, Adam on the ground was the farthest thing from Adam helpless. While I was trying for a good angle of attack for one of the legs, Adam surged to his feet under the weight of his attacker and flung it into the piano with thunderous effect. Stefan’s piano had survived when someone heaved me into it a while back.

Either Adam threw harder or I didn’t weigh as much as the Volkswagen-sized monstrosity. The piano collapsed in a shower of splinters, ringing soundboard, and broken wires that lashed the creature hard enough to leave a few small cracks in its shell.

The spider-thing righted itself with a stomach-turning flutter of spindly legs. Then it skittered—if something that large could be said to skitter—back toward Adam.

Looking only a little the worse for wear, he waited for it with a calm face and my cutlass at the ready. It leaned back and balanced on four legs, striking at Adam with the two closest to him.

Adam avoided the first limb with a subtle twist of the weapon and a slight movement of his body. He caught the leg with a glancing blow as it swept past him. He didn’t hit it hard, but the blade sang out as if the leg were metal.

My cutlass wasn’t the thick-bladed version made famous in cartoons and bad pirate movies, though it was stout enough. Its blade was slightly curved, and short enough so that it could be used in close quarters—like on a pirate ship. Zack told me they’d picked it because the length suited my arm, and also because it was a prize for winning the pirate computer game the whole pack was obsessed with.

Adam’s first strike had been to test the way the blade felt against the leg, and he’d gotten some feel. The spider-thing’s second leg was only a hair’s breadth behind, and on that one Adam tried to take out the joint. Again, he didn’t hit it full force—as he would have with something that was ordinary flesh and blood. Instead, he caught it a glancing blow, the way he would have dealt with another, equally strong blade.

He thought that whatever formed the outer layer of the leg was as strong as or stronger than steel or he’d have hit it differently. Again, the blade sang out as it rebounded a bit off the leg.

There were going to be no easy victories here—and I was afraid that I was as useless as sunscreen in Seattle. I was fast enough, I thought, to avoid its attacks. But if that cutlass in Adam’s hands wasn’t doing much damage—neither could I.

I did take a good look at the creature’s underside in hopes of finding some weak point, but it was, as far as I could tell, made of the same stuff as the rest of it.

Adam took a third strike at the joint between leg and body. The creature could put its body anywhere from flat on the ground to about six feet in the air, and at that point the joint was level with Adam’s shoulder. It didn’t make that clanging sound, but I couldn’t see that it did any damage at all—visually, anyway. The spider-thing jerked back with a hissing noise of about the same volume as dropping water into hot grease. So he must have done something.

He’d struck the leg with a steel blade, and it had flinched. But it hadn’t reacted like most fae would have when hit with cold iron. The steel hadn’t left scorch marks or burned it. If the iron in the blade gave Adam any kind of advantage against this fae, it wasn’t much. There were fae who could tolerate iron and its more civilized child, steel—Zee was one of those.

I was in the middle of puzzling out the fae-thing’s weaknesses when I realized that I couldn’t smell the spider-thing at all—it wasn’t the source of the fae magic I could still scent.

The creature had so little scent, in fact, that I wondered if it was using magic to disguise that. I’d never heard of any of the fae doing that before, but it didn’t mean that they couldn’t. This six-legged spider-thingy just might be a case in point. With no scent to go by, there was no reason for me to be so certain that this creature was fae. But I was sure.

If it wasn’t the fae I’d scented, somewhere in the house was another fae creature working magic. I put that thought in the back of my mind because I wasn’t going to leave Adam fighting alone, even if I hadn’t been much help to this point.

As I watched Adam’s graceful, deadly dance, I had time to consider larger implications. It was fae. It attacked us, unprovoked, in the house of our ally.

If we’d encountered it in, say, a barn, as a not-random example, I wouldn’t have been that worried about it. Any single fae might attack us—but the fae community would take care of it if we weren’t able to. However, this was in Stefan’s house. Stefan, who was the bridge between the vampires and the werewolves. Could this creature’s presence in Stefan’s house be part of whatever Marsilia had tried to warn us about?

Was one of the Gray Lords holding our vampires prisoner? It might account for Marsilia’s oddly dramatic method of giving us a quest as well as her indirect communications.

One of the spider’s legs sliced down through the muscle of Adam’s calf, and I hissed in a breath as blood poured out. Adam didn’t react to it other than to pull power from the pack bonds to increase the speed of his healing. I decided to worry about whether or not we could kill Shelob (with apologies to Tolkien) before looking at the possibilities of even bigger disasters.

Adam grimaced briefly, and I smelled scorched flesh. His grip must have touched the knuckle bow. He backed farther into the living room, giving himself more space. Of course, that gave the spider-thing more room, too.

Instead of closing with Adam, the spider-creature rocked its body back even farther, like a rearing horse—except the bottom end of its body stayed on the ground. The sharp ends of the creature’s legs were leaving gouges on Stefan’s floor. It placed a leg on either side and raised the other four, twisting its odd head around until it could see Adam. The long hairs on the legs lifted away from the shafts of its legs, sparkling a little with warm golden light as they reflected the illumination from the amber glass of Stefan’s Tiffany lamp.

I flattened myself against the wall and moved very slowly around the edge of the room. If I could get behind it while Adam kept it busy, maybe I could do something.

I didn’t know what, as my fangs were apparently utterly useless against it, but something. I thought about the thin cracks the breaking strings of the piano had left in its back. Unfortunately, I couldn’t lift a piano and throw it.

I felt Adam’s awareness of me even though he didn’t look my way. He stepped forward to attack. I wasn’t sure if it was because it was the right thing to do or because he didn’t want that spider-thing noticing me when the wall I was skirting got too close to the creature.

The fight looked like a demonic fencing match, with the speed of both participants and the added weird grace of the thing’s long legs. The oddest element was that the body of the creature was largely stationary. Raised up as it was, I could see the underbelly more easily. I still could not see any spot that looked soft. The only difference was that it was even more heavily furred with the nasty slivery hairs. The precise strikes of its legs made me think that it had fought someone armed with a sword before.

As it had with me, it flung spit at Adam.

In the short period of time that I’d been examining the thing’s underbelly, Adam had acquired a long red strip along his cheek. I couldn’t tell if he’d been smacked by a leg or splattered with some of the spittle. His leg had quit bleeding, but he was favoring it ever so slightly.

Adam shifted his grip on the cutlass and punched with the knuckle guard instead of using the blade. He targeted one of the exoskeleton breaks from the creature’s impact with the piano, and his blow left a starburst pattern of hairline cracks about eight inches across. But I smelled burning flesh again.

He jumped away and I could see that the knuckle guard had buckled around his hand. He pried at the metal to free himself as the silver burned his skin wherever it touched. As soon as he’d pulled the knuckle guard away from his sword hand, he dodged under a flashing leg and hit the creature in the same spot, this time with the point of the blade.

There was a great cracking sound, like glass shattering. For an instant I thought he’d broken the thing’s shell, but then I realized the sound had come from the wrong direction.

Beside the damaged piano, on top of the broken plate-glass window he’d evidently jumped through, the king of the goblins stood. Why he chose to jump through the window instead of kicking open the damaged door, I couldn’t say.

He wore no shoes but was apparently unconcerned by the glittering shards of glass under his feet. He wore only a black loincloth; his body, like Adam’s, was refined to only muscle and sinew, though on him it looked stringy, almost as if his muscles worked differently than ours. His extra-jointed four-fingered hands flexed on the pair of short swords he carried as he stepped off the broken window, shaking his shoulders to shed stray bits of glass. If I’d done something like that wearing nothing but a loincloth, I’d have been dripping blood. His skin was tougher than mine.

He spared a yellow-green glance for me, his lips quirking upward. I don’t know if I amused him somehow or if it was just the anticipation of violence. Larry the goblin king was fond of violence.

Adam had kept the fae creature too busy to pay much heed to the sound of the window bursting—and the goblin made no more noise than Adam had as Larry’s first cautious steps turned into a sprint. He leapt atop the spider much as I had, though more to one side, deliberately unbalancing it. The creature fell forward and had to use one of the legs it was attacking Adam with to catch itself.

The tip of the leg had dug into the wood, putting the leg under tension. When the goblin knocked it down, the leg twisted further. Adam’s cutlass, sweeping upward to hit in a previously damaged joint, snapped the leg in half.

The shorn bit of leg flew at me, and I dodged right into the open doorway of the basement stairwell as the sound of the creature crashing into various furnishings echoed throughout the house.

My paws skidded on the smooth wood of the step, and my speed pushed me right over the edge. But my four-footed form is more agile than my human one, and I caught myself on the third step before I rolled all the way down. I hoped Stefan wouldn’t get too upset by the deep scratch I’d put in the beautiful figured wood of the step.

The spider-thing’s leg had followed me through the doorway and rolled over the edge of the top step behind me. As I gained my footing, it rolled through the empty space between the steps of the open stairway and fell to crash on some hard surface below. I couldn’t see the floor, because the basement was dark.

I dug my claws into the wood of the step again, with the intention of flinging myself back up into the fray wherever I might do some good. Then I realized what I was smelling and stopped.

The elusive fae scent I’d been tracking wafted up from the depths of the basement in thick waves of chill that raised the hairs all over my body with the expectant buzz of power. It felt as if, by coming through the doorway, I’d stepped past some barrier that had been restraining both the scent of the fae and the feel of its magic.

And as I paused, I realized that I could not see my feet. As if the basement were a pool of darkness and I was standing knee-deep in it.

This was more Larry’s territory than mine, and I tried to be sensible about admitting when something was over my head. I’d have gone and fetched him except for two things. The first was that the battle royal was still going on upstairs. The second was the feel of the magic.

After spending that time hidden in the witch Elizaveta’s basement, I’d gotten a sense for spell-casting magic. There’s a warp and weft to it, just like a good winter sweater. The magic filling Stefan’s basement was in the process of being gathered, spun, and woven into something big.

Spell casting of this complexity was the sort of thing that did not allow the caster to pay much attention to anything until the spell was done. If the fae lost focus, the spell would fail, probably in a spectacular way. But if I had to pick between a spell deliberately launched at us by an enemy and a chaotic magic bomb of some unknown effect, I would take the unknown any day.

Maybe that was because I wasn’t a spell caster.

To stop the spell, though, someone was going to have to trot down the stairs, into the blackness. That someone was going to have to be me.

Ears pricked, I started down the stairs at a rapid pace. I didn’t need eyesight much because stairways are regular in shape. I could have made less noise, but the feel of my nails digging in was reassuring. And I did not think that silence would save me.

Stefan’s basement staircase was an elegant affair, open underneath the railing and underneath the stairs. In horror movies, this kind of staircase always meant that someone could reach underneath a step and grab unwary feet. I was not sure there were more wary paws in the universe just now than mine.

As I descended into darkness, I concentrated on what my ears told me. But the battle above was loud, full of crashes, breaking glass, and an odd crunch or two. I thought I heard Adam grunt in pain. Below me was silence. If someone was breathing down there, they were doing it quietly.

About eight steps down, one of my raw feet—the punctures made by the hairs on Shelob’s back meant that it hurt to walk—came down upon a thin film of ice. I inhaled and the air felt as if it were fresh off a glacier. It could have been a side effect of whatever spell was being formed. Or it could be the start of a directed attack. If I was wrong about what the spell caster could do while wrangling all the magic, then I was in trouble. I’d spotlighted myself at the top of the stairs, and those same stairs made it clear what my path had to be.

Deciding I’d had enough of being a target, I jumped over the railing, dropped about a foot, and landed on something that felt like it might be a bookcase. My landing was awkward because I’d expected it to be a lot longer drop, and because there were ornaments and pots and other things under my feet. I knocked a fair bit of stuff onto the floor, which sounded as though it might be about a six-foot drop.

Stefan’s basement was very deep. I bet if I checked the original plans, this house didn’t come with a basement like this. I moved and something cylindrical that felt uncannily familiar rolled under my feet and followed the rest of the mess down to the floor. Maybe it was a cane or something else that felt like the walking stick. I was distracted from that by a high, whistling cry that hurt my ears, followed by a thundering crash from above, as if a body the size of a VW had fallen into something.

Beside me, at about the right place for the bottom of the stairway, I heard a sharp snapping sound that reminded me of the cracking of an ice floe on a Montana river in spring. The sound echoed throughout the house with an impact that hit my bones with a physical blow. Then the bookcase I stood on fell over, with me on top of it.

I scrambled over a mess of books and other things on the floor and bumped around until I found something to hide beneath and quit moving. My shelter might have been a low table or a high bench.

“Mercy?” Adam called out from above.

When I looked up toward where the doorway should be, I saw nothing. I’d known the light from above couldn’t illuminate the basement. I hadn’t realized that meant I couldn’t see the light from upstairs.

“Mercy?” Adam called a second time.

I didn’t want to answer him. My movement to my current location had been camouflaged by what I had to assume was the sound of the destruction of the stairway. If whatever called the darkness was also blinded by it, I didn’t want to make a sound and reveal my hiding place.

Too close to me, no more than ten feet away, something screamed, the sound starting in a register that I’d bet a normal human couldn’t hear—above the note a dog whistle makes—and then rattling down the octaves until my skin tried to crawl off my body.

Toward the end of the scream, I felt a very quiet click—and the basement was flooded with light. Adam and the goblin king, both battered and bleeding, stood where the top of the stairs should have been. I was right: I was in a large room, a library, roughly the size of the living room and kitchen above, but there was a hallway that led off to other rooms.

The stairs—or what I presumed to have been the stairs—looked like a pile of overgrown matchsticks that had been left under a sprinkler during a heavy frost. Or like the Fortress of Solitude from the old Superman movie with Christopher Reeve. All of that I took in peripherally, because first, I looked where the scream had come from.

A sturdy Stickley library chair had been pulled directly in front of the stair landing, which was still mostly intact, if white with frost. Crouched in it was a . . . well, a woman, I suppose. She was the same drowned-body color of the spider above, but her flesh looked too-soft rather than armor-hard, like the skin of a balloon that has been inflated too long.

She was thinner than a living human could have been, with pale gray hair that hung around her in long braids with small black beads woven into them. Her hands were abnormally long-fingered and black tipped—and she had six fingers on each hand.

Her eyes were solid black. I couldn’t tell what she was looking at—me, Adam and the goblin king, or Daniel, who was sitting on the ground directly between her and me. Maybe none of us or all.

In front of her, attached to the newel posts of the broken staircase as well as the wall behind her and the arms and legs of her chair, was a web woven in ice. Her lips twisted in an ugly smile as she reached out one finger to touch her web.

I could feel the magic form into something coherent as her finger neared the thread of her weaving. Out of time to plan or consider my actions, I simply bolted right through Daniel. I leaped into the middle of the web, and her finger touched me instead of it.

The snow covered the tops of my knees as the bitter cold slid down my lungs and tried to freeze my nostrils together. The tips of my ears and my fingers burned with the cold.

It was too bad I had somehow shed my coyote self. The fur would have done me a lot of good. As it was, my snow-covered feet and calves were significantly warmer than the rest of my naked body.

I stood in a vast empty field of snow. It was tilted just a little, like high mountain meadows sometimes are. On three sides, at a distance that was too far for me to see clearly, were great dark fir trees. I didn’t want to turn around to see the fourth direction.

I did, of course.

My bare toes touched the edge of a precipice over a deep hole as black as the snow I stood in was white.

“Be careful,” said Daniel, and I turned to see that he was standing beside me, leaning forward over the empty space.

He stretched out an arm toward the darkness, then turned to me and said, “Hic sunt dracones.”

Latin, I thought, not Italian. It took me a second and then I realized why the words were familiar.

I said it out loud. “Here there be dragons.”

He nodded. “Hic sunt leones.”

“Here there be . . . lions?” I said.

He nodded again. He spread his arms out, as if he were a great bird preparing for flight. His fingertips brushed my shoulder.

I took a slow step back. And then another.

“Hic sunt—” Arms still outstretched, as if he was planning on jumping, Daniel gave me a sad smile, then turned from me to face the chasm of darkness. In Stefan’s voice, he said, “—wolves.”

“Stefan?” I whispered, but my fear of the empty black was too much. I wanted to move toward him, but I took a third step away instead, forgetting that, in places like this, geography doesn’t follow the rules.

This time there was nothing beneath my feet, and the blackness reached out and touched me.

Hello, Coyote’s daughter, the void said.