From deep below came the shushing of fast-moving water, falling through boulders. Beast remembers cave, she thought at me. Door? Opening to cave?
The entrance? I thought back. Like a dark place in the face of the earth?
Tsalagi covered it, like Puma concolor covers kits to keep them safe? She sent me a vision of a tiny black space at the base of a small ravine. Water plunged down not far away. The woods smelled deep and green and alive in her memory, so it was before the hunger times. Or long after. Was good hunting. But door was too small for Beast to enter. Beast will take Jane there when Jane kills enemies and kit killers and bloodsucker vampires.
Holy crap. You know where my soul home is.
Beast did not leave scat at cave. Did not mark territory.
That’s not what holy cr—Never mind. Can you find it again?
Beast does not know if opening was cave of Jane’s memories. But sound of faraway falling water was like this. Smell of forest in winter was like this. Sun was over ridge from place of setting. Tall mountain was to place of sun rising.
Beast brought up the smell/sound/taste/look/directional sense of the memory. The all-in-one sensation made me vaguely nauseous.
Jane in We-sa form hunted with Edoda. There was much small prey there, rabbits, fun to chase. Beast looked up at the cloudy sky, found the sun in the west. Was not here. But Beast can find place of small door into blackness.
Soon, I thought at my other half.
Soon. Will hunt rabbits near cave where Edoda taught We-sa to hunt?
Yeah. I’d like that. Next time we go searching new stuff. Meantime, I have no idea where we are. Are we heading in the general direction of the lights you saw when you landed in the stream?
Beast snorted, insulted. Jane likes to play at being cat. Beast always knows where Beast is. Jane is human. Jane is always lost.
No argument. The sun’s setting soon. Let’s get on it.
* * *
* * *
The sun nestled on the tree line when I/we saw a sliver of bright magic. If we had been in my human form we might have missed it, but in Beast sight, the magic was a coruscating, scintillating prism of power. We had trotted many miles and ended up over a narrow, very deep crevice.
You sure about this? I asked my Beast, staring down into the rock-strewn, tree-clogged dark rent. It looked as if the earth had cracked open eons ago, and a mad, dark fae had taken over. Snow clung to the rock faces for the first twenty feet down; then it stopped, where the temps changed. There, the snow down the sides of the cliffs had melted, refreezing in a glistening crystalline shell. And below that, the stone faces had held the temps above freezing. Bracken grew from cracks in the rock face. Moss draped the stones, swathed the trunks of trees that clung to the smallest fracture, and carpeted every inch of exposed stone and earth as the rocks fell away into the earth. At the bottom was green, green, green, every shade of green life. Moist air, a mist like a thin fog, rose in the chasm, wet and warmer, to freeze on the glistening surfaces or hit the cold and drip back as rain. The chasm had its own microclimate, an amazing little place in the deeps, and I wanted to explore.
Beast can leap there and there and there. She looked from place to place as she thought at me. Then stop. Pick places to leap after.
Yeah. You can’t see the bottom, I reminded her. And you need to be back up before nightfall. Climbing this wall of rock after dark will be impossible. Dangerous. The “you fall, we die” kinda dangerous.
Beast does not fall. See magics at bottom.
Uh-huh. I hate when you do this.
Beast chuffed and leaped. The forest floor seemed to push back against our back paws. Air swept up under and around us. Beast’s tail whipped and snapped. Beast pushed off on a root that angled away from the wall, letting the three-inch-thick wood carry her weight long enough to change trajectory. A rock ledge, almost an inch wide, offered a second toe-pad hold. A narrow tree trunk, growing at an angle, was the third. But Beast didn’t stop. She caught all her weight on her front paws, twisted, and thrust off it. Down and down again. A controlled fall that had me fighting to keep from screaming.