Game of Cages

sees it.

Steve stood and gaped as I came around the back of the truck and saw the sapphire dog.

CHAPTER EIGHT

It was walking away from us, and I didn’t think it looked like a dog at all. It didn’t have fur, and its skin was a brilliant electric blue. Its body swayed as it moved, as though it was part cougar and part python. Its four legs extended and retracted in a disturbing, boneless motion, like a set of tentacles or springs. It didn’t have wings, but it did have two rows of dark spots running down its back. A second glance showed that they weren’t spots at all but actually faceted blue crystals embedded in its flesh. Its long, slender, whiplike tail snapped and wavered the way a stream of water might move as it flowed over a pane of dirty glass.

Then it reached a patch of grass about a dozen feet away from us, turned, and sat on its haunches. Suddenly, it looked very much like a dog. Its broad, oversized head tapered at the front to a snout that had no opening. There were more blue crystals on its forehead and around its impossibly narrow neck. Its ears were long and floppy, almost long enough to be rabbit ears. And its eyes …

Its eyes were huge, as large as a cartoon animal’s. Its pupils were shaped like eight-pointed stars, and there were five of them in each eye, all shining gold and arranged in a circle.

It stared at us with an unfathomable expression while its pupils slowly rotated. The effect was hypnotic.

The sapphire dog was beautiful. That’s a simple word I’ve used to describe anything from a new car to a moment of karmic payback, but it could never capture the impact the sapphire dog had on me. Framed in bare trees and mud, the otherworldly beauty of it hit me like a punch in the gut. It didn’t look solid. It didn’t look real. I thought I might be having a vision.

“Lord, thank you for this day,” Steve said. He was a few paces to my right. It took an effort to look away from the animal, but Steve was just as stunned as I was. He stepped toward it, and so did I. I didn’t want him to be closer to it than I was. I didn’t want to share.

The sapphire dog looked at Steve, and I felt a twinge of jealousy—I wanted it to look at me. I wanted to punch the old man in the back of his head and knock him cold, so the sapphire dog would want me and only me.

There was a familiar pressure against a spot below my right collarbone. It meant something, but I couldn’t quite remember what it was.

The tip of the sapphire dog’s snout began to recede, the way a person might suck at their cheeks to make them hollow. The snout changed color—first to a dark purple, then to shit brown. A nasty, puckered opening appeared— round, wrinkled, and toothless like a shit-hole.

We were in danger. I remembered that the twinge under my collarbone was a warning that I was under attack. There was a tiny feeling of unease deep inside me, but thoughts of the sapphire dog had crowded it out.

This wasn’t right. I knew it wasn’t right, and if I didn’t wake up, I was going to be dead.

It lifted its snout toward Steve. I bolted toward him and knocked him into the mud just as the sapphire dog’s long, bone-white tongue snaked out at him.

The tongue passed over us, swiping through the air near my shoulder. I felt Steve hit the ground hard, the air whuffing out of him.

A second wave of love-struck longing washed over me, but this time I recognized the twinge under my right collarbone. My iron gate, one of the protective sigils on my chest, was trying to block a magical attack.

These weren’t my feelings. I had to focus on that. The animal—no, the predator— across from me was trying to control how I felt.

It turned its attention on me. I rolled to my knees in the freezing mud and cocked my arm to throw the ghost knife. Its eyes widened.

I threw the spell.

The sapphire dog seemed to move in three directions at once. It slid to the left and right at the same moment, and shot straight up from the ground. It was almost as if it was a still image that had split apart.

The three afterimages vanished. The ghost knife passed through empty air.

I jumped to my feet, stepped between Steve and the ghost knife, and called it back. Hopefully, he wouldn’t see.

The sapphire dog was gone. Although it had split into separate still images before it vanished, there were footprints in the mud heading to the left and right for a few feet. Damn. At least it wasn’t cloning itself.

I scanned the area around the house. The predator was nowhere in sight. I ran around to the other side of the truck, but it wasn’t there, either.

I laid my face against the cold metal cab. I felt empty. I had a raw, hollow space inside where my adoration for the sapphire dog had been. I knew those feelings weren’t mine. I knew they’d been forced on me, but I still felt their absence as a terrible ache. And I knew that, because of them, I’d missed my chance to kill a predator.

Steve was still on his back in the mud. He stared up at the overcast sky and muttered to himself.

A few seconds ago, I’d been about to put his lights out, and I’d been partly protected by the iron gate Annalise had given me. How much worse had it been for him?

I heard a crash from inside the house. The front door was still standing open, but I couldn’t see Penny. Damn. Of course she couldn’t just wait quietly to be taken to prison.

I kicked the bottom of Steve’s shoe. “Get up,” I said, my voice more harsh than I’d intended. “You have to call those ambulance assholes for the kid in the truck. You have to take your cousin to jail, too.”

I jogged toward the house. The predator might have hidden inside. I didn’t think it was likely, but I had to check. It’s what I was there to do, after all.

Penny was not in the living room, but the axe still lay where she’d dropped it. I stepped carefully inside. I couldn’t see anyone, but I did hear the far-off rasping of metal on metal.

I walked toward the sounds. The throw rug in the middle of the floor and the dingy brown sofa were coated