She was doing fine.
A snowflake dropped on the tip of her nose, and she cursed under her breath. Naturally, it would start snowing. Why not? It was bound to happen. Diana had just been waiting until they hit the higher elevations and encountered snows that not even late spring could completely remove from the peaks.
Squinting against the curtain of snowflakes, Diana realized that she couldn’t see any sign of Silvas. There wasn’t even the telltale flick of his tail, or the flutter of his hair in the wind. Her unease grew into a quaking panic, and something wrenched in her heart as if a void had sprung up inside her.
Silvas was gone.
As the first fingers of panic twisted within her gut, Diana’s first instinct was to shout for him, but she clamped her mouth shut against the impulse. She didn’t have a death wish. She didn’t want the strix to find her first and discover her alone and helpless on the side of the mountain. Fear crawled through her as she imagined the monstrous sorceress landing in front of her on the snow, her wings swooping as they beat the air. Long, clawed fingers stretching for her…
Shivering, she pulled her cloak tighter and distracted herself by inventing new curses to send after the lucomo. Diana continued to climb, fully aware that snow slicked the stones, making every step treacherous. Her pace slowed even more as the falling snow become thicker, a northern wind churning it, whipping it around her like an impassible wall, making the world an indistinct mass of white. The white rock had been bad enough, but now she was snow blind. The wash of falling snow had turned the entire world white without even a break of blue sky visible now.
She slowed, feeling the ground with each tentative step before putting her weight on the deepening snow. Her muscles quivered with each step. She could feel the dull ache building around her joints and the pressure that felt like it was squeezing her skull, but there was little she could do about it. Fear was like a living entity crawling through her, beneath her skin like shards of ice sinking into her blood.
The strix was out there was somewhere, possibly even hunting her now…
Diana needed to find some sort of shelter where she could wait out the storm. The longer she walked on blindly, the more she risked falling off the mountain—or being found by something straight from her nightmares.
Diana sighed, but couldn’t even see the faintest wisps of steam against the surrounding whiteout.
“Fucking ridiculous,” she muttered to herself through chattering teeth.
She stumbled, landing on her hands and knees in the snow, ice rushing into her protective gloves and soaking her knees and her calves where it seeped in around her armor. A hiss of shock escaped her, and she pushed herself back to her feet. Straightening, she squinted. She could have sworn that she saw something—
A shadow broke through the snow, striding toward her, down the slope of rock and snow, wings stretching out and moving against the wind. Icy blue eyes were all she could see clearly as their glow pierced the storm. It loomed over her even at a distance, its eyes focused on her with a predatory stillness.
Diana stumbled back, her feet sliding in the snow. Her heart hammered against her ribs as she pulled out the sword at her side. Her bow would be rendered nearly useless by the weather. The slide of metal was drowned out by the howl of the wind, which seemed to rise as the creature came nearer.
Terror clogged her throat, but she raised her sword and swung it with all her strength in a less than graceful arc, praying she would get lucky again. Fencing club never covered sword fighting in a damn snowstorm.
A hand shot out, snatching her wrist and stopping the forward momentum of her arm. The hand that gripped her wrist was masculine, sinewy with muscle. It squeezed, and the sharp pinch made her cry out as the hilt dropped from her hand. Her assailant pushed forward, forcing her arm against her chest as a behemoth among males leaned in close to her.
Large blue eyes, rounder than a human’s, stared down at her. They were set deep in a wide face with a beak-like nose and a long beard. She thought that Silvas was pale, with his pure alabaster coloring that made him almost radiant, like some sort of heraldic white stag. This man