the mother slept, you held me on your heart, and I knew you. You are the father given me, a gift from the gods.”
She came back, let out a breath. Smiled at him. “Daddy.”
And like Duncan, so like Duncan, he just lowered his forehead to hers.
* * *
With Simon, Lana stood in the cold with the first snowflakes drifting while Fallon called Taibhse to her arm.
“Are you sure about this? We could come with you.”
“It has to be the three of us. Well, six.” She laid a hand on Laoch’s neck while Faol Ban sat at her feet.
“Maybe you could have Mom and Hannah over for a while,” Tonia suggested. “I think Mom’s having some sad because of where we’re going.”
“Of course.” Thinking of her friend, Lana pushed at the hair spilling loose over her shoulders. “I should’ve thought of it. Are you going to be warm enough? It’s bound to be colder there, and probably damp.”
“We’re fine.” Fallon already wore the knit cap and scarf at her mother’s insistence. “It’s really a scouting mission.”
“With a black dragon in the mix,” Simon added.
“If we’re lucky. We’ll be back as soon as we can. Don’t worry more than you can help it. Ready?”
She caught the look her father sent Duncan, nearly laughed before they flashed.
And there the dark held deep, the wind sliced like angry blades, cutting through the trees that bowed and creaked, throwing up the snow lying thick on the fields so it flew in ragged curtains.
There, things breathed in the night, in the dark, that watched. That waited.
There the circle stood, its center black and slick as oil.
“My gods,” Tonia uttered. “Feel that? It’s like a black heart beating.”
“I want to say we can close it, we could try, but…” With the wind blowing, streaming through his hair, Duncan stared into that heart and shook his head.
“We’d fail. I don’t know why it can’t be done now, and over. I just know we’d fail if we tried now.” Fallon glanced toward the woods. “And if we fail we wouldn’t be able to try again.”
“It lives here. There are some animal tracks.” After tugging her own cap down on her head, Tonia gestured. “But not nearly as many as you’d expect. And not one sign of a human.”
The crows came to circle and scream. On Fallon’s arm, Taibhse, his great eyes golden flames, stirred restlessly. “Not yet,” she told him. “Their day will come, but not yet.”
“It’s in there.”
Tonia looked toward the woods where Duncan stared. “Then let’s go say hello.”
“Yeah.” Fallon circled a hand, conjured a bright ball that illuminated the snow, tossed the dark woods into relief. “Let’s see how it likes a little light. Stay together,” she said as they trudged through knee-deep snow. “Separating us would be a win.”
“It’s not going to win.” Duncan drew his sword when they reached the edge between light and dark.
With the next step, the air dropped from blustery cold to biting and bitter. Ice coated the trees in lizard scales that cracked and re-formed with a sound like gunshots through the deadening silence.
“No tracks.” The thickness, the fog unrolling over the snow, turned Tonia’s voice into a muffled murmur.
“No life,” Fallon responded. She pressed her hand to the trunk of a tree, found no beat. She gestured to Duncan. When he pierced the trunk with his sword, a black liquid bubbled out of the wound.
The air stank with sulfur.
“It’s taken these woods.” Calmly, he cleaned his sword with snow. “Whatever’s unlucky enough to wander in here doesn’t wander out again.”
Fallon guided the light left, right. “We’ll pick a direction and—”
The wolf picked for them, moved left. She urged the owl to Laoch’s saddle so she could have her sword in hand. So they followed the white wolf through a world of dead trees that shivered in their scaled coats of ice, through brambles crawling with thorns hidden under mounds of snow and creeping fog, through silence that echoed with the hollow breath of the dark.
“There’s something.” Neck prickling, Fallon gestured to the dark stain on the snow, a scatter of entrails. “Frozen solid, but they can’t have been here very long. There’s no snow over them, no snow over the blood.”
“And where’s the rest of it?” Duncan wondered. “It’s not enough, more like another animal dragged a few bits here. And the bits are too big for a rabbit or fox. More like—”
“Human. A girl.” Fallon fumbled out a hand for Duncan’s as Tonia’s came to her shoulder. And