“I wish you’d warned me. Those floppy ears are awfully cute.” Ashe tilted her head, as if the angle could somehow make the view better. She really hoped it didn’t have a cotton-puff tail. That would just make it harder to blow its head off, if push came to hop.
“Don’t underestimate it. We tried offering it a carrot,” Reynard whispered, his tone dry as grave dust. “It prefers something less crispy.”
With that phrase, he warped all her happy Easter memories. She used to love those marshmallow- filled bunnies wrapped in pink foil. She never would again. “Next time, I am so going to bite the head off first.”
Reynard gave her a puzzled look. “I wouldn’t do that. It has a deadly kick.”
Ashe closed her eyes, opened them again, forced her thoughts into neat rows. “Okay. We are bunny doom. How do you want to play this?”
The rabbit suddenly started and bounded down the stairs. The stealth portion of the evening was decidedly over.
Reynard bounded after it, vaulting over the guardrail and dropping to the stairs. A dangerous move, but it put him yards ahead of Ashe.
“Cut it off at the water up ahead!” he bellowed.
Ashe scrambled, leaped off the last few stairs, and sprinted over the lawn, angling to the right of the path. The garden was shaped like a doughnut, a spire of rock forming a lookout in the center. On the far side of the doughnut glittered a water garden. Ashe could hear a waterfall muttering like a distant conversation.
Her boots thumped on the grass, skidding as she leaped over a flower bed. Reynard had gone to the left, circling the other way. No blind corners here, but there were too many bushes for her liking. She made it past the lookout and headed for the pond, the colored lights in the flower beds splashing her legs green, then blue.
She sensed the hell bunny almost as she reached it. A thrill of energy down her skin told her she was far too close. A creature of the dark fey. A day late and a dollar short, everything she’d read about phoukas was coming back to her.
It reared up from the hydrangeas like a Beatrix Potter nightmare, front paws tucked against its fuzzy chest, nose working. A glob of flesh clung to one whisker, weighting it down.
Ashe stumbled back three steps, weapon already aimed at Vlad Cottontail. “Where’s that portal?”
“Nearly ready,” Reynard shouted back.
She felt a second thrust of energy from his direction, ants skittering over her flesh, biting, stabbing. The power rushed to her head like a slug of whiskey. Ashe gripped the Colt, using her own shredded magic to shove the high out of her brain.
An orange disk of light began to flare, hanging in space just above the lily pond. The portal spiraled from a bright pinpoint to the size of a hubcap in seconds. She prayed Reynard could get it open fast.
A charred smell filled the air, as if the wall between Earth and the Castle’s dimension were burning away. Ashe could see the portal growing behind the rabbit, outlining its floppy ears like a bright harvest moon. The beast was shifting its backside the way a cat does before a pounce.
“Hurry it up!” she yelled.
“Drive the beast this way!” Reynard answered.
“Haul ass, Cottontail,” she snarled, sighting down the gun.
The rabbit bared choppers and snarled right back.
Crap.
The demon rabbit seemed to sense the portal, because it hunkered in on itself, glancing from the gun to the ballooning orange glow. It looked angry and miserable. Ashe felt a moment of pity, and then thought of all the tender, juicy kiddies coming all too soon for the Easter egg hunt. Yum, yum.
“Okay, bud, do it the hard way.” Ashe shot the dirt at its feet.
It launched straight for her throat. Scary fast.
Shit! Ashe dropped to the ground, rolling out of its way and back to her knees in time to fire three shots at its head. They went wide. The rabbit flew over her, unable to stop its momentum. She heard Reynard shout, then a shot that wasn’t hers. She rolled for the flower bed. Two more shots bit the earth behind her.
Ashe panted, hot confusion sparking over her nerves like live voltage. Those shots weren’t from Reynard’s musket. His gun would fire only once, and it wouldn’t sound anything like a high-powered automatic rifle. Neither would anything the local security carried. What the hell?
She tucked her feet under her, coming out of her crouch an inch at a time. The bushes, so dense when she was hunting, now seemed woefully sparse. Her knees were steady, but she could feel a fine trembling in her muscles from the cocktail of adrenaline and hard running. The night was full of edges, sharp, clear, honed by danger.
A bullet sang by her ear, another spray of splintered bark. She did a face-plant in the dirt—pure reflex.
More shots came. The rabbit thundered by, claws barely missing the flesh of her arm. Ashe tracked it with her eyes, her cheek pressed into the soft, damp soil. The beast headed straight for the portal, leaping through the orange whorl. As it arched through the vortex, she saw the powder-puff tail on its vanishing backside.
She thought she heard someone shout on the other side of the orange glow—maybe Mac and his men playing zookeepers on the other side. Like a spiraling lens, the portal closed, the orange glow shrinking to nothing.
Then Reynard was in the dirt beside Ashe. The charcoal scent of the portal’s magic clung to him like cologne. He put a hand on her shoulder, a hot, firm touch. “Are you hurt?”
“Get down!” she barked, dragging him by the collar of his fancy coat.
The next shot missed his head by a whisker.
Chapter 2
She could smell his sweat, the dirt, and the tang of crushed plants. She’d landed in a herbaceous border, destroying the gardeners’ careful work. A mound of thyme was bleeding spice into the night air.
She could hear the clock tower of the main building chiming eleven. Time to be home watching the late news, not chasing monsters around a tourist trap. Wait—they’d bagged the monster. So why was someone still shooting at them?
Reynard gripped her arm. “Are you hurt?” he repeated.
“No.” She turned to look at him, careful not to raise her head too far. “How about you?”
“No.”
They lay still for a moment, breathing, listening to the dark spring night.
“Anyone trying to kill you these days?” she asked.
“Not outside the Castle.”
His eyes glittered. It might have been humor. She couldn’t quite tell. He was too closed, too different, like a map with no street names or landmarks. Just a lot of really nice geography.
Ashe swallowed hard, willing her jackhammer pulse to slow down. “Then the shooter must be after me.”
“A common occurrence?”
“Not since I moved to Fairview.” Shit. Shit. This was all supposed to be in the past. She had relocated, given up life on the road, scaled down the hunting to almost nothing—just the odd case. She’d let the word go out that she was retired. Sure, there’d always be some unhappy campers—friends and relatives of the supernatural monsters she’d exterminated—but even they’d grown quiet.
Quiet enough that Ashe had taken the risk of sending for her daughter.
Shit.
Ashe crawled backward, a slithering motion that brought her to the shadow of a thick bush. She rose into a crouch, molding her body to the shape of the greenery, hiding in the dense leaves. She guessed at the angle the bullets had traveled. That put the shooter high up the tall column of rock that formed the lookout in the center of the sunken garden. She knew there was a nearly vertical staircase that led up to the platform at the top, but it wasn’t lit at night. All she could see was the dark spire of stone blotting out the stars.
