upward. Form sparkled for an instant too brief for even her senses to fathom, turned into something like a mist with eyes, and then the eight-foot wings of Aquila chrysaetos simurgh whipped at the air.
She reached down to her baggage and took out a small shape in her teeth. They closed on it, and the wolf's powerful neck muscles tossed it a dozen feet upward.
Talons closed on the metal oblong, and the extinct golden eagle of Pleistocene Crete soared upwards.
The wolf leapt down and loped to the west.
The Humvee was old but well maintained. Adrian drove it into the shadow of a tall boulder and parked. The engine ticked slightly as cooling metal contracted; even in the tail end of summer the Arizona desert could be chilly at night. Ellen swung out of her seat and looked around at the moon-silvered landscape and breathed the cool sage-scented air with its hints of caliche and dust.
Adrian's mouth tightened as he glanced around likewise. She had her night-sight goggles pushed up on her forehead, but he could pierce the darkness on his own. The lights of a very small town or medium-size hamlet glittered in the middle distance. Somehow they emphasized the loneliness of the spot the way the passing of a train did, a peculiarly American desolation-it made you think of dust blowing over the cracked concrete of a gas station and people looking out a window over their fifth cup of midnight coffee.
I really am an artsy, Ellen thought. Here I am about to fight for my life and I'm making comparisons to Hopper paintings.
'This is an abortion of a mission,' Adrian said. 'There is at least one night-walker out there, perhaps more. I can scent them.'
Oh, thanks, honey, Ellen thought-and then hoped that Adrian wasn't listening.
He was usually scrupulous about her mental privacy, at least as far as words went: sensing her emotions was something he just couldn't help.
Its a compliment in a way, she thought. He's really treating me as a comrade-in-arms. I guess this is that soldiers bitching you hear about. Goes with the gallows humor, I expect. And I may not have thought seriously about enlisting in high school – the university money wasn't quite tempting enough – but I've been well and truly drafted.
It all made taking a permanent holiday in that flying penthouse look pretty attractive. Her instincts were telling her things about why the night was dangerous, and she knew the source of those genetic promptings better now.
Things were out there, things far more dangerous than any tiger or lion. They'd hunted her human ancestors like rabbits while the glaciers came and went and came again. She'd had personal experience with them, and only the training inside Adrian's mind was letting her control her fear. It was there, lurking in her mind as the predators did in the night.
'Let us get ready, then,' he said.
She helped him get their gear out. Part of it included a high-impact oblong of composites. She knelt and unlatched it. A sniper rifle lay within, and she let her hands occupy themselves snapping it together. It was beautifully crafted and scrolled with silver inlays that would look like ornament to a casual gaze. But it was also a single-shot weapon that broke open like a shotgun, a thing of stone-ax simplicity; the fewer moving parts, the less for the probability-twisting Power to grasp.
While she completed the mechanical task she was conscious of Adrian moving in the background: the scrape of colored chalks against the rock behind them, the purling whine of Mhabrogast. She turned, the rifle cradled in her arms like a cold lover of walnut and blued steel. The final glyph was sketched on the sandstone surface. It glittered faintly in the moonlight.
'I meant to ask about that. If the Power can't affect silver, how come you can use it for a glyph?'
'That is a glyph of negation, of constraint,' he said. 'You want it to be unchangeable. This sort of thing involves feedback loops; you can alter the probability cascades keyed to the glyphs on the fly if you're good enough.'
She made a questioning sound-she couldn't really understand the Power intuitively or use it herself, but she could learn the theory-and he shrugged.
'Nobody has ever been able to prove whether Mhabrogast objectively helps one to use the Power or whether it's just a focusing device. Latin certainly isn't more than that, and it's useful as a lead-in.'
'You mean the lingua demonica may be psychosomatic? Or some sort of symbolic placebo?'
'Or the operating code of the universe.' He snorted laughter. 'We can't even prove that modern Mhabrogast is actually what the Empire of Shadow spoke. The Order of the Black Dawn's adepts used the Power to reconstruct it from a few fragments, back in the nineteenth century. But we know it works.'
'Or maybe it works because you know it does…My head hurts when I think about that…What does that one do? The silver one.'
Adrian smiled grimly. 'If someone comes walking through the stone and into contact with it in their aetheric form…let us say the consequences will be unfortunate. For them. Think of it as running into a cross between invisible barbed wire and the web of a very large spider.'
'Except there's no spider.'
He smiled, a remarkably unpleasant expression if you were on the receiving end of the dislike.
'Oh, so there is one. That so relieves my mind, honey. Having to think about someone fading through solid walls right behind me and then biting me on the ass is sort of paranoia-inducing. Now I feel safe because there's a giant murderous spider lurking in the rock.'
'More the potential for something that would be perceived as a giant, murderous spider. In a way the victim creates it themselves.'
'That so reassures me. Not.' She took a deep breath and gave him a light kiss on the lips. 'Go get 'em, tiger.'
'And I have you to make sure I have a body to come back to.'
He lay down on the unrolled foam mat inside the semicircle of glyphs, crossing his arms on his chest.
'Amss-aui-ock!'
Adrian was there, lying on the mat in his fatigues, with a webbed belt bearing tools and devices and pouches. And he was there, naked under the moon. Another not-quite shift and he was gone. What stood there instead still took her breath away a little: Smilodon populator.
Sabertooth tiger. A cat but not really a tiger, built as much like a bear as a feline, a tawny bulk with huge shoulders coming up to her chin and a broad back sloping down to the hindquarters. The face was a cat from a nightmare, with fangs like curved ivory daggers more than a foot long, serrated like steak knives on their edges. The lambent yellow Shadowspawn eyes didn't help either. Something deep down screamed, Run, at the sight.
The great feline weighed as much as a horse-she'd ridden on its back, not least when they escaped from the bloody shambles at Rancho Sangre, after Hajime's death. Now it brushed against her, rocking her back a little, then nuzzled affectionately at her body with its stumpy tail twitching, and nuzzled again in a way that would have been fresh from someone…something…she wasn't married to.
She leaned the rifle against the rock and used both hands to scratch at its ruff and behind the palm-size ears; there was a rumbling deep in the chest, and it licked her with a great rough washcloth of a tongue. Then it turned and leapt into the darkness, eerily silent for all its mass. Ellen crouched back against the stone, cradling the rifle in her arms.
'There're definitely some kinky elements in this relationship,' she murmured to herself. 'And I don't mean just the good ol' vanilla B and D. But kinky in a good way.'
Then she fell silent. That was another part of the training, and one she'd enjoyed after a while; she'd never realized how much she missed by being noisy all the time, not least the noise she made herself inside her head. In a way the listening was like sinking into a painting, opening yourself completely while excluding everything else. Thought went away, until she was floating somehow, but intensely aware of everything. Letting it pass through without dwelling on it, her attention suspended until something tripped it.
After a while-later she thought it might have been an hoursomething did.
Pain ran along Adrian's nerves like a wave of white fire as he shifted. He fought briefly for control as he took the Smilodon's form, man-thought crowded into the dim, focused brain of the great carnivore. It was easier this time; he'd been using the sabertooth's form for more than two years now, since investigators unknowingly in his employ had succeeded in reconstructing the beast's genome. You could lose yourself in the beast, if it was
