Do we turn around? We should probably turn around. Or maybe go get Sofia and see if the magic daylight thing works on foot-thick permafrost.
Shit, I was going to drown.
Yelena had come through here, which meant there must have been a way up. Except she didn’t need to breathe, which was quite a serious advantage given our present situation. Trying to keep my cool far harder than I had ever tried to keep anything, I inched along the underside of the ice feeling for any point of weakness. I was going numb in the extremities which somehow didn’t seem to be doing anything for the pain in my arm, which was only getting worse.
Although I always figured I’d die young, I thought I’d at least go out fighting something or fucking something. Not trapped in the cold and the dark and running out of breath way faster than was helpful. I doubted even my mother could get me out of this one, the ice was too thick to break through and it wasn’t like I’d be able to get a grip on it no matter how strong I was.
Tara appeared beside me, the dowager beside her. We shared quick looks of mutual how-fucked-are-we-ness, but then she and her grandmother exchanged a few sharp glances and opaque gestures, and they moved quickly away from me, spreading out at sixty degrees from each other to cover the ice more efficiently. Hoping I’d read their strategy right, I set out in the direction neither of them had covered.
It didn’t help. I just found more ice and more water and no air or hope of escape.
Then a naked elderly woman tugged at my leg, and I turned. The dowager swam quickly away from me—for somebody of her advanced years she had impressive lung capacity, but then I guess werewolves aged well. We swam to Tara, who was already hauling herself up through a narrow hole in the ice—I say hole, it was more a crack, barely big enough for a relatively svelte person to wriggle through with significant effort. That was fine for Tara, and the dowager was basically a skeleton covered in skin and gristle, but I wasn’t quite so physically suited to slipping through narrow fissures as they were, and while I managed to get my head above water, the rest was tough. I abandoned my jacket as a bad job and with two werewolves yanking me from above combined with the—for the moment at least— convenient tendency of ice to slip, melt, and give way under pressure I managed to emerge at last, panting and freezing and soaking and fantastically pissed about the whole broken arm thing, onto the surface of a frozen lake deep in the Cold and Dark.
“Whose stupid idea was this?” I asked nobody in particular, lying on my back on the ice and staring up into frigid, alien stars.
To her credit, Tara didn’t take the obvious bait and remind me that it had been mine. “I’d rather not talk long,” she said. “I’ll be much warmer as a wolf. We should be able to track the pack from here. You follow.” Then she shifted, along with her grandmother, and I was shivering in an unnatural winter beside two great wolves, one gold and the other silver. The pair of them set off at once and I did my best to follow. They were fairly good at keeping to a deal-withable pace, especially since tracking by scent across this much snow and ice couldn’t have been easy. Still they seemed to have a good idea of where they were going—family called out to you, it seemed—and it wasn’t long before we found the woods clearing and saw a glittering black-and-white castle in a valley between two hills.
That looked worryingly heart-of-the-realm-like. I’d hoped that the King of Shadows, the Queen of Winter had left his-her wolves in Yelena’s custody, meaning if we were lucky we’d be able to kill two birds with one stone. Instead it looked like he-she was keeping them close. I suppose there had been no good options here—either we faced a faery lord, an evil vampire lady who was obsessed with my ex, or an evil vampire dude who was obsessed with destroying me in the most personal way possible, or some combination of the three. That was, like, a textbook lose-lose-lose.
We hunkered down on the edge of the woods and did whatever the more mystical version of casing the joint was. The palace had