The Thing About Weres

branches that grew steadily thinner and weaker the higher I went.

All of it accomplished under the watchful eye of the Mystwalker of Threall.

She of the fireballs and bad temper.

I tapped my cudgel against my thigh, thinking how much I’d like to use it on Mad-one while she busied herself by daintily rearranging the folds of her scorched skirt. After I’d counted all my toes and fingers, I slid a glance toward her in time to see her quickly avert her eyes.

This is ridiculous. I’m playing “who’s the bigger bitch” with Mad-one while Lexi is throwing himself at the door of his prison. “So, am I right in thinking that you don’t have any particular problem with me killing the Black Mage?”

Her answer was a slow, chilling smile.

I jammed the piece of oak down the back of my pants so that my hands were free. “Well, watch and learn, Mad-one. I’m going knock the Black Mage’s twisted heart straight into the abyss of hell.”

When, out of nowhere, I heard a voice. “This is ill-advised.”

Who was that? I whipped around, searching for a face, a shadow, anything to explain that cool observation that seemed to come from either inside my head or right behind me. Let it be someone behind me. But there was no one. Just the wind, the moss, the myst. An errant breeze goosefleshed my skin as I turned back to Mad-one. Her head was tilted; her eyes narrowed in consideration.

“What did you say?” I asked Mad-one hopefully.

The Mystwalker lifted a single blond brow, very delicately. “I did not speak.”

The wintry voice inside my head spoke again. “I shall not aid your travel to that one’s embrace. The Old Mage calls us, can you not hear his summons? We were born to serve him, not the foul one.”

Oh crap.

Up to now the few times my Fae had opted to comment on Hedi-land, she’d been basically all “Fee-fi-fo- fum. I’m going to fuck with this dumb-dumb.” Sly quips. The Dorothy Parker of ride-alongs. And usually, she strung together two or three words at most.

Six tops.

Never had she spoken using a distinct sentence structure, with verbs and stuff. Never like a fully formed person inside my freaking head. Well, that wasn’t quite true … there was that time the three of us had killed Dawn.

No. Not that again.

Not up here, when I was Were-less. When it was just mortal-me pitted against Fae-me.

“Do not talk to me,” I said. “You’re not becoming top dog in Hedi Incorporated, got it? Just because we’re in Threall where you’re feeling all…”

“Forsooth, she is witless, this one,” the Mystwalker murmured.

My voice trailed away. I stared at Mad-one, wondering, was this how crazy had begun for her? She’d started out reasonably normal and then the voices started? Two or three Threall visits later, and she was the resident whackjob having long heart-to-hearts with herself?

Scary. Get out of Threall before you turn into an inmate.

Without another word, I launched myself out of the foxhole, and sprinted across the field with the speed of an infantryman under sniper fire.

I’m coming for you, you black-hearted bastard.

Puddles sprayed as I dashed toward the dastardly and all was going swimmingly until twelve feet from the walnut when I hit an invisible and viscous pocket of something … terrible.

His ward was thick and oily.

Horrible. It swamped me with a near-overpowering urge to backtrack bowing and whimpering from that wall of the dreadful and the bad. Even breathing became a Herculean task because there was no air in that bubble. Just horrible, stinking pressure. It squeezed down on me … Fae Stars, I was the bruised raspberry suspended in a bowl of setting gelatine.

“Go back,” said my Fae.

I couldn’t do it. Retreat required a one-hundred-eighty-degree turn. Too much effort.

“Fool, push through it,” she cried.

The command congealed before it ever reached my toes. How could I move my foot? It was a cinder block affixed to a concrete pad bolted to a unyielding slab of bedrock.

“We’re going to perish!” She flooded me with bitter frustration.

No we won’t. Not if I lift our foot. It isn’t a cinder block. It’s a foot. Toes and heel. A callus on the back of your heel. Always missing a shoe or two. I can do it. All I have to do is take another step. I don’t need air.

Lungs screaming for air, I took a shambling step.

Followed by another.

“We’re seeing dots,” she hissed.

Stop whining. I’m concentrating.

One last push. Come on. You can do it. Use the momentum of your weight. Stick out your goddess-cursed chin and fall forward.

Sometimes I amaze myself with my brilliance. I thrust out my jaw and willed myself to become the Leaning Tower of Hedi. A sense of reluctant parting—choking hands being forced to open—and then I was out of its sickening grip. Release. Oh, wonderful release. I fell onto my hands and knees, and stayed like that, gratefully sucking in air, the pinata stick digging into the upward swell of my ass.

I’m going to have to go back the same way I came.

My mouth filled with bile as I twisted around. There was nothing to mark the place where the invisible wall began or where it ended beyond a long track of moss pleated up during my zombie walk. Even as I watched, a stream of blue myst slid right through the ward, did a lazy circuit around me—go ahead, rub it in—then merrily flitted away.

“Kill him,” said my Fae. “The ward will die with his soul.”

“Works for me.” It took a brief second to puzzle out the toeholds and stretches required, then I placed a foot neatly on the big bulbous growth sprouting on the trunk and sprang upward. My hand caught the edge of the knothole a foot higher. One big heave, a bit of awkward scrambling, and I was crouched in the fork of the black walnut tree.

Stupidly, I grinned—oh evil murderess me—at how easy it was. Success was just a quick scramble up through the foliage. And then, as I was reaching for my pinata stick …

Oh sweet heavens.

The Black Mage’s dark soul poured into me, as if someone had pulled the stopper on a bottle of something vile. I didn’t see pictures, I didn’t receive thoughts. Just the essence of him, and that was both fascinating and repugnant because his soul was really low on the gray tones—he was hate without heat; ambition without limit; sex without pleasure; night without light.

Dark-hearted. Yes, that fit.

And constantly hungry, too.

My sluggish progress through the ward must have sounded an alarm for him, because I didn’t receive any images that would have given me a clue as to what he was seeing or doing in Merenwyn. Instead, he plunged me into a pitch-black cave that no amount of rapid blinking could bring bright light into.

Swirling head. Dizzy. Disoriented.

Goddess, he’s blinded me.

My sense of direction disappeared. Was the end of the world off to my right elbow or my left? Had I been spun around in my confusion? I can’t see. That abyss. That long, long plunge—to fall and never stop falling.

Don’t move. Not until your head clears. Heart thudding in my chest, I hunched over my heels, trying not to twitch or even breathe, frightened that he’d soon find me, one toe in his thought stream and then … oh what would happen then? My knee began to shake against the trunk of his tree, tap, tap, tap, like a woodpecker on a tall pine.

“I see you now,” he said softly.