The Thing About Weres

Simeon.

All delivered so fast, it made my stomach want to hurl.

And feelings, too. Fae Stars. So much emotion. An intense explosion of surprise, anger, and hatred. Then fear—oh, a whole bunch of that—followed by a sickening wave of weak despair. Hissing with shock, I scrambled off her then scuttled up the mud-slick incline for the surface. There I froze, half in, half out of Mad-one’s foxhole.

The top of a nearby stump was hearth to a clump of smoking moss.

What had happened to Threall?

War? It sure looked like it. The formerly lush and semitranquil landscape was a ruin of rutted bomb craters and scattered tree branches—all of it fanning outward from the healthier of the two black walnuts that held court at the edge of Threall’s world. Anger grew inside my belly as my gaze roamed. Whatever had occurred during my absence, the souls of Threall had endured at least two casualties beyond the loss of the former Mystwalker of Threall. Signs were everywhere: a long sheaf of moss swung from the root ball of a fallen beech; the crushed remains of a flattened hawthorn. An empty soul ball, with its skin torn and its contents spilled, reproached me as it flapped against a spar of elm thrust into the damp earth.

It’s just a hawthorn. And an old tree.

And yet, sorrow brushed me with dry fingers.

Souls had been killed.

Two of mine.

There it was again—the same feeling that had assailed me the first time I’d visited Threall. An inexplicable feeling that this world was mine, and everything in it—the souls, this mossy terrain, these trees—was my Goddess-given duty to protect.

It scared me.

Focus, I told myself. Will yourself back to Creemore.

Except focusing was suddenly incredibly difficult to do. I was positively flooded with an inexplicable feeling of possessiveness. If I left, who was going to protect those souls?

I flicked a resentful glance to my left, to the beech under whose leafy canopy Mad-one usually lolled about with her mandolin. The Mystwalker’s favorite tree had taken a least one direct hit, judging by the hole in its foliage, and the wattle fence built to protect it had been torn asunder. Her overturned silk chaise sported a burn spot in the shape of a bull’s-eye on its back.

She never even saw it coming.

My gaze swept the area, searching for a shadow that didn’t belong, then moved to the line of hawthorns. Soul lights glowered inside their thorny embrace, but nothing or nobody popped out with a gotcha “Boo!”

Still, someone had to be responsible for all this destruction.

I twisted around to inspect the other end of the pasture, where two hulking black walnuts served as sentries to the end of Threall’s world. The trees were of equal height, but other than that, they were as dissimilar as they could be; the most obvious difference being the smug and rude health of the one on the left versus the one- wheeze-away-from-adios-my-friends of the walnut tree supporting the Old Mage’s essence.

Because that pathetic, leaf-denuded relic was host to the old man.

I knew that as clearly as I knew Trowbridge was meant for me. Last time I’d been in Threall, I’d found myself clinging like a limpet to one of the dying tree’s wind-chapped boughs, and I’d heard him. Inside my head.

Without a word of a lie, I’d heard him. Speaking directly to me. Sounding old and wise. That day, I’d thought him a mixture of Gandalf and the Wizard of Oz. Kindly. Paternal. Now, I knew better. I’d spent too many slumbers watching Mad-one’s last hour in Merenwyn to be fooled by the bonhomie in his voice.

Bottom line, kindly men don’t make good mages.

And yet …

Over the last six months, Threall’s soft wind had further ravaged the Old Mage’s black walnut, stripping off its bark, beating its topmost branches into bleached, frayed splinters, and the remaining signs of life had been reduced to a few whippet-thin branches that boasted a few handfuls of leaves. His sagging soul ball drooped from its tether; its rich hues had faded from their glowing brilliance into a watercolor blur of dead golds and toothless reds.

I should have been unmoved at the sight. An arrogant man was finally meeting his inevitable end. But I wasn’t. Sorrow, that’s what flooded me at the sight of that languishing soul. An ancient sorrow—not a fresh pain —deep inside me, down in my gut where my Fae usually lived.

A great man is dying, I thought.

Even I recognized the awesome weird buried in that comment.

Look away. The sight of his tree is muddling your mind and stirring something buried inside you.

It took a force of will to tear my gaze away, but I did it, and that creeping instinct to genuflect to the dying black walnut disappeared the moment my attention turned to all that empty blue between the two black walnuts.

Fear—it’s the ultimate mind-wipe.

You couldn’t look down that sky-blue end of the clearing without thinking about falling. Not a “whoops!” pratfall, but a long, screaming, arm-flailing, endless plummet. Here’s the thing about Threall. It isn’t round like the earth. It’s flat. Past those hulking brutes, where Threall’s landscape should have continued to undulate in endless vista of rolling hills, winding trails, and ancient trees, there was nothing but a vast blue sky.

Well, that, and the portal to Merenwyn.

There it was, fifty feet from the crumbling edge of the world, a white plume that rushed straight up toward Merenwyn, which could be defined as paradise or hell, depending on what blood flowed through your veins.

I’d seen Mad-one blow a soul across that void.

And I’d seen the portal eat it.

With one gulp.

This is a war zone, and I’m without a weapon.

I gave the terrain within arm’s reach a quick visual sweep in search of a suitable bat. There were plenty of choices out there, where the tree lay shattered, presumably the result of some unseen assailant who could still be lurking, but there wasn’t anything handy, just waiting for me to casually pick up. Only clods of earth, brittle leaves, shreds of torn souls, and damp moss.

Nothing within reach.

I lifted my right hand, prepared to summon my Fae magic, then remembered that I’d left her by the fairy pond in Creemore. Well played, Karma. I really could have used my talent at that moment.

I wanted to go home, and to do that I needed to close my eyes and concentrate, but … there was a bad guy out there, somewhere. He or she could be watching me right now. Waiting to pounce, or to blow me helplessly into the wild blue yonder just past those trees.

I can’t close my eyes, not without a weapon.

My gaze flicked to the body slumped at the bottom of the foxhole. The Mystwalker of Threall was the picture of a battlefield corpse, lying in a semifetal position, one arm protectively curled over her middle, the other stretched out as if she’d made an aborted effort to climb out of her grave before she’d drawn her last breath. Her lids were at half-mast; her eyes milky. Evidently—as witnessed by the death grip she had on a sturdy oak branch —her sunny personality had persisted right up to the last. The back of her hand was swollen, and red; the knuckles fat with yellow blisters; her fingertips familiarly sooty.

Mad-one had suffered from payback pain, just like me.

She doesn’t need that bat anymore, I thought, staring at the cudgel.

But was she really dead?