Hellforged

but her tone was steel-edged. “There’s no time. Pryce can release the Morfran. He’s not going to wait until we’re ready before he makes his next move.”

She tapped the ground once with the stick and walked to the tile. Oh, God, please no. Not that pain again. My throat constricted, and Hellforged went crazy. I wasn’t centered. I couldn’t get centered, not when I couldn’t even breathe.

“Mab, wait. I can’t do it!”

“Of course you can. What’s more, you must.” But she paused. “Relax, child. Last night’s attack was Pryce’s first test. I don’t believe the Morfran will attack you again. But whatever happens, I won’t let it hurt you. You must learn this, Victory. Take a moment to collect yourself. Bear in mind, though, you won’t have that luxury in battle.”

Still panicking, I tried to relax, to turn inward, to notice my heartbeat and breathing. Easy. Take it easy. I pushed away all thoughts of pain and fear; muscle by muscle, I unclenched. Hellforged calmed, grew still. The cramping in my fingers showed how hard I’d been squeezing the grip.

Three gonglike chimes rang out as Mab struck the slate once … again … again. My stomach lurched. As the dark mist emerged from the stone, I began to make slow, wide circles with my left hand. The mist rose up and floated in my direction, tendrils reaching for me like tentacles. Focus, Vicky. The mist stopped a few feet away, and the tendrils changed direction, reaching upward, toward the athame. They thinned as the mist was drawn into Hellforged’s orbit.

There was no buzzing, no headache. The dark mist swirled in wide arcs above me, following the motion of my arm.

I was doing it. A sensation of bitter cold passed into the athame as the Morfran locked onto my movement. The coldness traveled into my hand and crept up my arm; as it did, I made smaller circles and pulled my hand closer to my body. The Morfran followed. In another minute, the cold had reached my shoulder. My arm felt like it was encased in ice.

A jolt hit the obsidian blade and shot up my arm like a freezing-cold spark. Now. I switched Hellforged to my right hand; it jumped in the transfer but didn’t get away. I pointed at the slate, pushing the Morfran with my mind.

And forgot the incantation.

I stood on the grass, pointing at the target, my mind a complete blank.

The Morfran energy flowed up the blade, moving into my right arm. My fingers turned frostbite black. My wrist, my forearm, my elbow seized up from the icy energy.

Mab clasped her right hand around mine. She drew back both our arms, then flung the Morfran at the slate, yelling the words of power.

“Parhau! Ireos! Mantrigo!”

The cold shot from my arm. The Morfran hurtled into the slate target. It hit so hard, I thought the slate would shatter, but the tile stayed in one piece.

My arm ached and stung as though I’d mainlined a hypodermic of snake venom. I rubbed it, trying to chafe normal feeling back into my skin. I flexed my fingers, watching as they gradually grew pink, then red. I’d learned something about the Morfran—if it didn’t gouge you to pieces and digest you from the inside out, it froze you to death. I had an image of my frozen-solid body cracking into Vicky-flavored ice cubes for the Morfran to snack on.

Mab waited, holding the athame. I looked in surprise at my empty hand.

“Guess I screwed that one up.” Need someone to state the obvious? Call me.

“Practice the incantation again. I’ll do it with you.”

We said the words, over and over. If we’d been in a school-room, I’d have been writing them five hundred times on the blackboard.

After the fiftieth repetition or so, Mab dropped out, motioning for me to continue. The words began to burn themselves into my brain. I could see them, written in a thin, fiery script. I could taste them. Parhau had a chalky, mineral-like flavor. Ireos was salty, Mantrigo sharp and bitter. After a few hundred repetitions, there was no way I could ever forget those words again.

Until I did. We practiced for another hour, and each time Mab came to my rescue. Hellforged would jump from my hand. Or, fearful of that cold, painful spark shooting up my arm, I’d switch hands too soon. Or else the words tripped me up—I’d leave one out or say them in the wrong order. Maybe I just wasn’t fluent in the language of Hell.

AFTER PRACTICE, I DRANK SOME NO-DREAMING TEA AND FELL back into bed. Sleeping was less like sinking into blackness than it was like wandering through a featureless gray fog. I woke up in the afternoon, feeling like I hadn’t slept at all and wondering if the tea was already losing its potency. Mab was right—time was slipping away from us.

I got up, dressed, and went downstairs. On the kitchen table was a note saying that Jenkins had driven Mab and Rose into Rhydgoch for some shopping. The village’s only retail establishments were a tiny grocer and a shop that sold tobacco, candy, and newspapers, so I wasn’t missing much. Still, I would’ve liked to pop into the Cross and Crow to make some phone calls. Telling Mab about Kane and Daniel made me want to hear their voices. I needed to update Daniel on what I’d learned about the Morfran. And I wanted to find out if the local packs had finally left Kane alone at his full-moon retreat.

Jenkins usually went into town for a couple of after-dinner pints at the pub, so I’d hitch a ride with him tonight. My black eyes were gone, and I was more or less presentable. In the meantime, I’d do what Mab’s note suggested: spend some time with The Book of Utter Darkness. Lucky me.

I opened the book to where I thought I’d left off last time, where I’d gotten a brief flash of meaning about the three tests. Almost immediately, the question I’d seen then appeared in my mind: And shall thrice- tested Victory be conquered?

No, I thought. She shall not. Not by Pryce, not by his stupid tests, and not by some bogus prophecy. Next question.

For several minutes, though, that question was all that the book offered. Then, like a blurry movie slowly coming into focus, two more sentences emerged. First, the carrion-eater consumes living flesh. Second, a battle in the world between the worlds.

I stared at the page until a headache clamped my temples, but that was all the book would give me. I closed the cover and sat back to think about what it might mean.

First, the carrion-eater consumes living flesh. Okay, in test number one the Morfran snacked on something other than its usual din-din—that would be me. But what did the next sentence mean? Second, a battle in the world between the worlds. I knew of only two worlds: the demon plane and the human plane, what Pryce called Uffern and the Ordinary. What was between them? My dreamscape? Difethwr used that as a bridge between the realms. But the Hellion said Uffern had expanded, claiming my dreamscape within its territory. The prophecy didn’t make sense.

Not that I expected crystal clarity, but still.

“Don’t try to figure it out,” Mab said when I asked her about it later. “If you grasp at a meaning, you’re likely to latch onto the wrong one. Just hold the sentence lightly in your mind, and be ready for anything.”

Great. So the book would drop me clues, but if I tried to understand them, I’d be wrong. And Pryce’s next attack could jump out at me any time, any place. Helpful, really helpful. I might as well choose random words from the dictionary and string them together into “prophecies.”

“Now, look at this,” Mab said, like she was addressing an overexcited toddler. “See what I’ve brought you from the village.”

She handed me a white tissue paper-wrapped rectangle. Inside was a plaque, about six inches wide by eight inches high. Hand painted, with flowers and a curlicued border and the words HOME SWEET HOME, it looked like something that would hang in a grandmother’s gingham-curtained kitchen, right next to the cross-stitch sampler of a girl in an oversized bonnet watering sunflowers.

“Um … thanks?”

“Look closely. What do you notice?”