through the regular senses, of course, but the things I smelled and tasted on the hunt weren’t stray molecules floating in the air, they were ideas. And ideas stuck around a good long while.
I smelled death, and anger, and jealousy as green and as stubborn as crabgrass. I had her scent, and it went out the window. Not worrying too much about being seen—I’d be gone long before anybody had the wherewithal to call the cops—I reached for the power of the Deepwild, and I jumped.
15
Trails & Blood
The strength I had to draw from the Deepwild to survive the four-storey drop in pursuit of Yelena’s trail was more than I’d tapped into in a while—I’d been trying to be more careful since my mother had literally taken over my body that one time—but you had to follow the scent from its source, and the source was four floors up so there we were.
I landed with a jolt and my head snapped forward with the taste of blood in my mouth. My quarry was dead, but in death she had found a way to tie herself to the living world with stolen blood and stolen life and now wearing a stolen skin. She had run in the shape of a wolf through what my rapidly fading humanity remembered were streets, along the wide black paths where the machines ran too quick, too quick, a thing should not be so quick. Past iron walls and wastelands, dead ground choked with dust and metal and metal dust.
A quieter place now, living in a human sense of living, though the free and the wild was still trapped behind barriers of stone, ripped from its home and carried far far far from its native soils. Trees with nowhere to sink their roots and everywhere the black paths where the machines ran (what did they want, that they went so quickly and so loud) I passed a place of wild tame green and still I could taste the blood and the death and the skin she stole and the shadows she stole it with. She would go back to the night. She would always go back to the night.
Uphill. I followed her uphill. Through narrow ways where nothing grew and trees were stone and all was red rock and shadows beneath the rock and glass looking back at me from the shadows. Trees stood forth from the rock, bare in the autumn and alone.
Uphill and ever uphill. A twist of steel across the wide black machine-path. Up again and further out and into paths lined with trees cut in angles like some strange green torture. The world grows greener and I follow the scent at last down paths still black and then at last a metal door lets me into the wood—cut up and carved out and built through and taken by the world-things that come from this strange imprisoned place. I follow the trail of the dead thing in the stolen skin away from the path and into high wood and old wood and the wood of long hunts and bloody nights. I follow her to a quiet place, still water and over the water arches of red stone, shadows beneath. The trail ends in water.
I prowl the edge of the still pond, seeking a scent and finding none. Here she came and here she disappeared. Perhaps she flew, but she wore the skin of a wolf, and wolves do not fly. I had to—there was a word, for when a thing was not known but could be known, was not understood but could be understood.
Think.
I still tasted blood, still felt the essence of my quarry in the air, but her name came back to me, and my purpose. I knew this place. Crouching down by the water I stared at my reflection and tried to remember that I was a person from this world, not an immortal creature of primal hunger from a space beyond.
After a moment, I remembered who I was and where I was. This was the viaduct pond on Hampstead Heath, I was sure of it. I’d been here a couple of times with Nim back in the day—the view over the city from Parliament Hill is so famous it’s protected by law. Yelena had come here too, and she had vanished. If my instincts were right, and while they usually weren’t most of the time, they usually were on questions like “just how fucked am I at the moment?”, there