by D. D. Chance
The explosion was deafening. All the mirrors and windows in the room burst inward, and the room filled with bodies—pushing, straining, shoving, an entire tsunami of creatures charging through the flying debris. Bulls on human legs, eight-foot lizards scrabbling forward on freewheeling claws, cats the size of smart cars with their jaws stretched wide in unholy roars, screeching birds with claw-tipped wings and plumage in every color of the rainbow. The entire mass of them swept into the room with a mighty cry, sending everything into chaos.
The Hallowells reacted immediately, as did the guards, but Grim turned to me, shouting something I couldn’t hear. A second later, it didn’t matter. Claws buried themselves into my shoulders, wrenching me around, and a bird three times my size that looked like a phoenix, minus the flames, thankfully, wrapped its wings around me and yanked me back through one of the shattered windows.
4
Arms and legs flailing, I grabbed the first thing in my path and held on tight, whipping around and wrenching free of the bird’s claws as I bent a sapling nearly double, then yanked it out of the ground.
It was enough, though. The bird, screeching with fury, soared off, and I hit the ground with a thud, rolling to the side to avoid more of the swooping, dive-bombing creatures. I’d landed in some sort of forest at the edge of an open field, and I scrambled farther into the shadows for only about three seconds before I realized my problems weren’t over. The roar of pounding footsteps made me pivot in sudden fear, and all I saw were giant horned heads, angled down, shoving me back toward the open field. There were so many of them, and I had no knife, no weapons, no magic—nothing to fight with but my own pitiful hands. No way that would work against all these monsters. I sprinted for the open field, my head careening wildly left and right as I braced for another bird attack.
I threw up my arms reflexively as something else flashed above me, a giant shadow leaping out of nowhere, barely clearing me. It struck the ground a moment later with a tooth-rattling thud, and I reared back in primal fright. It was the largest wild cat I’d ever seen—not a tiger, not exactly a lion—but some sort of whiteish leopard, with pale gray spots against its white fur, massive shoulders, and a long, sinewy body. It whipped around toward me and opened its jaws wide, and I thought for a second it was going to rip me in half. Because that’s what monsters did.
Instead, it roared in fury, the force of its cry carrying a magical pulse strong enough to blow me backward into the grass—and push back the oncoming horde of monsters as well.
I struggled to get upright again, when the great cat refocused on me, hunkering one shoulder down toward the ground. I recognized in an instant what it wanted. I didn’t stop to consider how insane it was for me to climb on top of an enormous predator with razor-sharp teeth the size of bowling pins, I only knew it was my best chance at living another five minutes. I clambered up and held on as the creature pivoted, burying my hands deep into the thick, heavy fur that made up the ruff of its neck.
It took off and I screeched, flopping around like a rag doll for a few seconds, until I finally got my knees to either side of the cat’s spine and pressed them tight against its back. It thundered into the forest. Almost as soon as it had breached the line of trees, other running creatures joined it, all of them as white as moonlight, streaking through the forest as a pack.
The cries of our pursuers both on foot and overhead gradually faded away, but the running leopards never stopped, racing deeper and deeper into the forest, whose trees grew together so closely that eventually, it was like plowing through the darkness despite the fact that I knew there was bright sunlight overhead. I nearly passed out a couple of different times, my terror keeping me coherent enough to maintain my grip on the massive furred shoulders of my ride.
When the leopard finally stopped, my ears were ringing so loudly, I couldn’t hear anything but the pounding of feet. I slid to the ground, landing in a heap, vaguely aware of the animals circling but only dimly able to hear their growls.
The ground was soft and dry beneath me, and gradually, through my daze, I heard a different sound. Falling water. I crawled forward on my hands and knees, every limb still shaking, and peered through a break in the brushy leaves.
It was a waterfall, dropping into a fast-flowing stream that flowed past me, extending deeper into the forest. I was parched, and in a heartbeat, water became the only thing I wanted, the only thing that could help me. It didn’t matter if it was filled with monsters, it was something my limbic brain could focus on that made sense. Nobody tried to stop me as I scrabbled down the sharp incline toward the stream, leaves giving way to thick grass as the sky opened up above me and I edged out from the canopy of trees.
The sun’s warmth heartened me further, and I knelt by the water’s edge, reaching for the crystal clear liquid. I half expected it to disappear before I could dip my fingers into it, and I almost cried out with relief to find that the water was cold and wet and everything that water should be. I scooped it into my hands and lifted it toward my face.
“You could die if you drink that.”
The water splashed down into the stream again, and I half pivoted, not surprised or even shaken to see Grim. The giant cat had to have been him. It really was the only possibility, and I held on to one shred of sanity for another precious moment.
“Was that illusion magic?” I asked, impressed with how steady I sounded. “The whole, um…snow leopard thing?”
He glanced my way. His nostrils flared the barest amount, the breeze lifting his white-blond hair off his face. Yeah, no. Totally not illusion magic. Somehow, some way, Grim had transformed bodily into a giant cat who’d carried me through the forest with a bunch of other leopards, and then turned back into a guy.
Um…right.
I felt like I might pass out again, my grasp on reality getting looser by the second.
For his part, Grim didn’t dignify the question with a response. Instead, he refocused on the stream. “They’ll come back. We need to keep moving.”
I also shifted my gaze out over the water. I needed to understand what was happening here, wherever here was. But I also needed to understand all the various ways in which I could die.
“So, the water will kill me? That’s a thing?”
He shrugged. “It killed the first generation of hunters the Hallowells sent through. Humans who made their way into our realm by mistake prior to that generally survived, but not the hunters, not at first. The belief was that the realm generated some sort of protective magic intent upon eradicating threats. The Hallowells adapted. You, however, probably aren’t part of that adaptive strain.”
“I’m also no threat,” I pointed out, because I felt like it needed to be said. I also didn’t miss the fact that he’d referred to the realm as “our” realm. Our, as in his. As in he was from here. The monster realm.
“Then drink the water,” Grim said, interrupting me. “If you’re not a threat, drink the water. We’ll see if it agrees with you.”
I gritted my teeth. To be fair, he hadn’t said the water would kill me, he said it could. Two very different things. “Okay,” I allowed. “I drink the water, and you tell me what the fuck is going on. Deal?”
Grim’s lips curled into something that almost passed as a smile. “You drink the water, and you live to see the sunrise, I’ll tell you anything you need to know.”
“Anything I ask,” I corrected, and he shrugged, though when he met my eyes, something hot and sharp flared between us. Anger, sure. But not anger at the level I wanted it to be. Instead, I saw a need in Grim’s expression that practically leapt toward me, a hunger as he searched my face, as if he needed to imprint this moment in his mind so he could capture it forever, in case he never had the chance to experience it again in real life. It lasted barely a second and was gone, but I swallowed, once more wobbly on my feet with no one to reach out and steady me except for a guy who’d just turned into a giant snow leopard. Yeah, no.
Grim finally nodded. “Anything yo
u ask.”
Without giving myself time to work through the details, I leaned forward and scooped the water into my hands again. I lifted it up and drank greedily, as convinced as any thirsty person that no water had ever tasted better. I sat back and wiped my mouth with my hand. Nothing happened.
“Is death instantaneous? Or does it have to work itself up to it?” I asked. But Grim angled his head sharply, his attention fixing on something deeper in the forest.
“They’re coming.”
“They who? And who are you working for anyway? Because it’s really going to break my heart if it’s the Hallowells, I’m not gonna lie.”
Something in my tone must have struck Grim the wrong way, because he scowled back at me, his mouth tightening.
“Tomorrow,” he snapped, and then he was up and away again, moving with his trademark catlike grace. I shivered even as those words came to mind. Was Grim actually a huge shape-shifting cat? Some kind of monster in the true sense of the word? I sat back on my heels and stared at the water again, struggling with the idea of it, but not struggling anywhere near as hard as I should.
He was a monster, dammit. And I was an idiot for not seeing it sooner.
He’d always seemed different from the others, quieter, darker. He’d always been able to find me no matter where I’d carried myself off to. The guys had ascribed that ability to his excellent tracking skills, but I was monster bait, for freaking sake. Grim had been the first to point that out to me.
And if he was a monster, then it only stood to reason that he would be able to track monster bait no matter where I was.
The thought made me shiver, and not entirely in a bad way, which was, for the record, kind of twisted. Grim was a monster, but not any old monster. A shifter, a were. In all my years of facing monsters, I’d never encountered a werewolf or a shifter of any type, to my knowledge. There had been animals, sure, larger than life and deadly. I’d just never thought they could change into humans, since they’d never done so around me. Like succubi, I’d written off shifters as something out of fairy tales and romance novels.
Only here was Grim, an enormous, snowy-white leopard with thick, glistening white fur and light gray spots, ferocious in size and strength. Were his eyes the same pale gold color when he was in his cat form? Could he talk in his cat form? I’d known instinctively what he’d wanted me to do when he’d practically given me a boost up onto his back, and I’d been scared out of my mind on top of it. But had he somehow actually communicated the direction to ride him?
Even those words made my cheeks flush. Grim was a monster. What did that actually mean when it came to the guys? He had joined them in the collective and…what, they’d never noticed? How was that even possible?
How was that—
“Nina.” Grim spoke sharply. I turned to see him, tall, built, and quite assuredly human-looking, all broad chest, powerful arms, and heavy legs in his thick gray tunic and pants. He gestured toward me, and for the first time, I noticed that his long white-blond hair fell nearly to his waist, lashed into a tight braid. Had it always been that long?
“We’re going again. And we need to be fast.”
“Ok, I guess I’ll…um, you know, do whatever you need me to,” I finished lamely, flapping my had at him. I needed to come up with another term other than ride, stat.
Something flickered across his face, and he shifted toward the water, waving sharply.
“Look away,” he ordered, and I swiveled my head obligingly, though honestly, that was the last thing I wanted to do. A rush of cool wind blew across the ground toward me, whistling out over the water. I shivered, remembering all the times that cool breeze had emerged out of nowhere on the grounds of Wellington’s campus. It couldn’t have been Grim switching into his monster form all the time, right? It had to have just been a sign of Grim. Who he really was, who I’d never been able to see him as.
Had he ever intended to show me?
He had to have, I decided. All this was part of a plan, surely…or at least part of a contingency plan.
A second later, a hot feral breath whispered across my neck, causing me to, unaccountably, freeze. In the corner of my eye, I saw the feline nose of an enormous white snow leopard edge forward, as if the neighborhood stray had ambled up beside me to see what I was looking at. But this was no stray. Power rolled off Grim’s thick body. Magic, strength, and anger too.
Anger at what? Me? I wanted to say something flip and full of attitude, but I could barely swallow my own rising hysteria—no, not hysteria. Excitement. Anticipation. The giant cat’s nostrils flared beside me, and I flushed again. Maybe Grim couldn’t read my thoughts, but there was no doubting how attuned he was to me.
He spoke in my mind then, his words thick and somewhat garbled, but unmistakably Grim.
“Keep your head down, and stay as flat against me as you can. We will be going through tight terrain.”
He turned toward me then, and I stood awkwardly, shoulder to shoulder with him, while his body stretched a good seven feet in length beside me, his long white tail twitching impatiently with a lush, white-gold puff at its tip. I swallowed and reached up with clammy hands—faltering as a wave of nervous tremors swept through me. I wiped my palms on my yoga pants, which were starting to get a little shredded, then grabbed a thick handful of fur at Grim’s neck, wincing as I tightened my grip.
Unexpectedly, a soft chuckle rolled through my mind. “It doesn’t hurt,” he rumbled.
“It hurts me,” I muttered, and I clumsily hoisted myself up onto his back.
We set off.
5
The trek through the forest seemed to take hours. I held on for all I was worth for as long as I could, then was scraped off unceremoniously by a low-hanging branch. I lay dazed on the forest floor as Grim circled back, then blinked up at his regally judgmental snow leopard face for a half second before he opened his mouth and grabbed my collar to shake me.
I batted him away and hauled myself upright again, still dizzy with confusion and the foreignness of everything, then managed to scramble back on his shoulders. The race began all over again. At one point, I must have passed out, because when I awoke next, I found I had been strapped to Grim’s body with a long, thick vine. Had he switched back into human form and done that himself? Or had one of the others assisted? Were they all shifters as well?
These questions rattled around my brain as my body bounced with each bone-jarring leap Grim took, but I wasn’t getting any answers. If Grim could hear me, he wasn’t weighing in. I slept again, nightmares racketing through me, every chase scenario I’d ever experienced galloping along in my mind. One of those dreams felt almost like a memory, a dash through woods I recognized, the patch of forest beyond my own backyard in Asheville. My fists far too small, my legs too gangly as I ran with awkward inefficiency over fallen leaves and fresh-grown sprouting grass.
Behind me, something howled, and I jerked awake.
Grim had come to a stop, and we were surrounded by people, men and women alike, with the same pale blond hair that he had, the same golden eyes. One of them, a tall commanding female in a sleeveless gray tunic, gray leather pants, and dark boots, with her blonde hair cropped short and spiky around her ears, stepped forward and loosened the strap that held me to Grim’s shoulders. She caught me as I rolled off his back. I tried to stand, and couldn’t.
“Sorry,” I muttered automatically, feeling like I’d already failed these strangers in some way.
A rush of cold air jolted me, then Grim was at my side, taking me from the woman to hold me upright until the blood flowed back to my feet. That didn’t help much, and I listed to the side with another mumbled apology.
“She drank,” Grim said, and a murmur of surprise flowed through the group.
“You mean you let her drink,” the woman said sternly. I blinked up at her, but I couldn’t hold my focus. There was one of her, then three, then back to one. “If she dies, none of this was worth it.”
Grim shrugged
, the movement rippling through me. “If she dies, none of this matters anyway.”
This logic apparently satisfied everyone but me, but I couldn’t put two words together coherently, let alone demand an explanation. I sagged against Grim, unable to resist the thrill of awareness that rolled through me at the intimate contact. Grim said nothing, and the woman stepped back.
“Then you carry her,” she snapped. “We could have tested her in a far more civilized way.”
I could barely restrain the chuckle that bubbled up inside me. I didn’t know who this woman was, but I liked her. And if she was a giant majestic snow cat as well, then that was pretty much the coolest thing ever.
Those thoughts scattered a second later as Grim hoisted me in his arms, the momentary surge of pleasure at the intimate contact stirring up all my butterflies—only to squash them a second later as he threw me over his shoulder in a fireman’s hold, my head smacking against his back. I thought momentarily about being sick, but the queasiness passed, and he started moving again.
We made good time, despite everyone being on foot, weaving our way through trees so close together that they wouldn’t have allowed the passage of such large cats. The blood rushed to my head, making me dizzy, but also seeming to settle my stomach, leaving me to wonder which side effect of traveling with Grim was worse. I’d pretty much decided I preferred nausea over vertigo when Grim stopped again and swung me around, having the grace not to drop me outright as he reset my feet on the ground.
I blinked woozily, expecting to see some sort of rude encampment, maybe a fire, little more. These people were cats, right? It wasn’t as if they needed homes to sleep in at night.
To my surprise, however, a thick stone wall greeted me. It had an archway cut into it that was lined with a gleaming metal—definitely not iron.
“Silver?” I asked, and though Grim said nothing, the woman who had chastised him before shifted toward me.