Lord of the Wolfyn - By Jessica Andersen Page 0,14

a good thing.

Who was he? What in God’s name was going on? She wanted to ask him but couldn’t get out the words. She was locked in place. Frozen. Once and always a coward under fire. Was this, then, what her subconscious wanted her to see?

Maybe. But she’d seen it and the dream wasn’t ending.

“You can get up now.” He said it without looking at her, but she thought she saw the twitch of a smile. “There’s a bag in the pantry. How about you load up some provisions while I take care of the other stuff?”

As he turned away, she slowly levered herself to her feet, suddenly wishing that a herd of pink elephants would walk past the broken window, so she could point at them and say, Ha, I told you so. It’s a dream. Hallucination. Whatever. What mattered was that this wasn’t really happening. It was all in her mind.

Except there weren’t any pink elephants. Which left her with a stinky dead giant with two too many heads, and a really hot guy who thought they were going somewhere.

MacEvoy, when I get through with you, you’d wish you just mailed me the damn book for free, she thought. And then, because she couldn’t think of a good reason not to, she went to pack some food.

The bag proved to be a single-strap rucksack, and the provisions at hand were heavy on the hard rolls, dried protein—she didn’t ask, didn’t want to know—and trail mix. She loaded up whatever she sort of recognized, trying to focus on the similarities rather than cataloging the differences. Her brain, though, kept a running tally that twisted the knots in her stomach increasingly tight.

And all the while, she was entirely aware of Dayn as he pulled on a sweater followed by his heavy leather coat, loaded a rucksack with his crossbow and bolts and strapped on a narrow leather belt that held an unusually short sword on one side, pouches on the other. As she finished up her packing, he slung a sloshing crescent-shaped leather pouch over his shoulder, glanced over at her and nodded.

He didn’t seem to expect a reply, though, because his attention moved on to the overturned couch and smashed end table, the broken window and the scattered other things that defined a life: a journal bound in what looked like nylon but wasn’t, a bunch of interesting rocks in a jar, a huge antler with a picture of a beautiful stallion carved into it, only half-finished. And while he looked at the room, she was looking at him. Decked out in a strange mix of modern clothing and archaic equipment, he should have looked as if he was late for Halloween. Instead, he appeared utterly comfortable in his own skin and—as evidenced by the giant’s corpse—deadly capable. She couldn’t take her eyes off him.

He turned abruptly toward the door. “Let’s go.”

She held her ground. “Go where?” They were the first two words she had managed to utter since the attack. Her mind might be racing but her body was still mostly vapor locked. That was the way it worked when she went into curl-up-and-die mode.

He tipped his head toward the dead creature. “That was an ettin, which isn’t native to this realm. It had to have come from the kingdoms, which means the vortex has probably opened back up. And that means we need to go. Now.”

Vortex? Realms? How could he stand there wearing a crossbow and sword and talk about things that belonged in science fiction? It didn’t make any sense.

Of course not, her rational self said. It’s a dream, or a hallucination or something. But since counting to three didn’t work, maybe this vortex will.

So she nodded and followed him out of the cabin, her boots crunching on broken glass and then echoing on the short steps leading down.

“This way,” he said, urging her along a wide path. His breath fogged the air. “If we can get back through the stones—Shit.” His face fell. “It’s not glowing.”

“Which means?”

“The vortex is already gone.” He glanced at her. “You know how to call one, right?”

“I…” She thought of the whirling wind in her kitchen, the spell her mother taught her. “Yeah.”

“Then let’s go. If we hurry we can be gone before the pack gets there.” But he hadn’t gone more than a few paces before a wolf’s high, eerie howl rose into the clear night air, coming from very nearby. First one, then another and another joined in,