Nothing human remained in her aspect except those glittering eyes. A snow leopard’s tail lashed from behind her.
Now,said her eyes.
Vikram sprang toward her, grabbing thevetalaas he jumped onto her back. Somewhere in the shadows of the Kishkinda kingdom, he thought he heard the barest trace of delighted laughter. Thevanarasloosed their arrows, but Gauri broke them in her teeth.
“Vetala!” he yelled. “We’ve kept our word. Now honor yours.”
Thevetalashuddered. “Honor? There should always be better motivation than honor. Try something more appealing. Like half-clothed women or a vat of goat blood.”
“Tell us where to go!”
“Pretty monster,” said thevetala,patting Gauri’s massive head. She hissed. “Bad cat.”
Thevetalalicked his hand and held it to the windless air. “Into the wall.”
“Are you insane?” asked Vikram.
“Yes?”
“Straight into a stone wall?”
An arrow sliced through the air. Gauri brought down a massive paw and snapped it in half. Vikram thought he heard a laugh rumble in her stomach.
“Get out of the way or die,” he said to thevanaras.
Gauri began to gallop, her body stretching for the stones just before them.
One.
Vikram’s gut wrenched. He didn’t want to die slammed by a wall of stone. He didn’t want to dieat all.
Two.
The air smelled sour. He could imagine the sound of Gauri’s beautiful antlers shattering.
Three.
Her fur glinted, light rippling over her body. Vikram held tight, bracing himself for a thud…
That never came.
10
A BOWL OF LUSH MEMORIES
GAURI
I didn’t know hurt. Or fear.
When my skin gave way to fur and my nails bent into claws, I knew what it meant to be stripped down to your barest self. It meant seeing the world for what it was. I took off my skin and released the thing that had always lurked, crept and slept within me: A beast. A monster. A myth. A girl. What was the difference?
My last thought before I turned was the wish I would’ve made. For freedom. True freedom. And even though I couldn’t speak it aloud, I could feel the weight of that wish filling me from the inside, pressing against my teeth. I felt that wish like a line of light, a boundary that my mind wouldn’t cross lest I lose myself forever.
We ran and I reveled. I could see and smell and taste. I licked starlight out of the air. Saw midnight cresting over a mountain. I thought I’d lost Vikram as we jumped through that wall, but then his scent caught me. He smelled of wanting and bottled-up dreams. And in some dimmed human part of me, heat flared.
Thevetalastroked my head. “Run toward the scent of death, pretty monster. The Grotto of the Undead will be the first boundary to Kubera’s kingdom.”
It was not a difficult scent to follow. The smells of death lit up the world already, but finding where the scent rang strongest was painstaking. I pawed the ground, turning up the earth and trying to find that smudgy scent of stale death—mushroom pale, a crease of shadow in a skein of light, flattened sounds that trembled in my ears like the blunted teeth of echoes.
