There was a thin, elderly man sprawled face down in front of thehouse, a dead flashlight beneath his fingers. Green knelt and rolled him to his back.
The remnants of a minor nosebleed left a dull red line across his cheek. Still breathing. Warm to the touch.
Green sighed.
Gotta move him inside.
“Okay. This is going to hurt.”
The man was heavier than he looked, but Green hauled him into a fireman’s carry and took him into the house.
Inside, a woman was slumped in an upholstered chair, silver crochet hook gleaming on her lap. She snored softly. A shaggy Maine coon cat slept on a rug nearby. Phantom colors drifted from both sleepers.
The television chirped about a revolutionary juicer that would detoxify and make skin glow.
Green deposited the man on the couch, did a quick check for other survivors, and locked the door as he left.
They would not be happy when they awoke, but it was a miracle that they were alive at all. He didn’t know the lethal range of the glass fawn, and he did not like the idea that these people’s lives had become a data point in that deadly question. He couldn’t imagine what they would make of spore-log aftereffects, but at least they would outlive the pain and confusion. That was a victory.
He stood on the porch and looked out into the dark, swinging his jaw wide open to quiet the drumroll of his chattering teeth.
Catskill was out there somewhere.
Thinking of the wolf did something strange.
The landscape lightened. There was no more light, but the darkness had shifted from black to grayscale. It was like a moonlit night when the world was blanketed in snow. Something had turned up the dial on contrasts.
“Catskill? Did you do that?”
The wolf was busy elsewhere. He knew. He just knew. But yes, hispackmate had done that. Catskill was sharing a piece of himself with Green.
That’s new.
He tried to feel exactly what Catskill was doing, then recoiled.
He tasted mineral grit and felt the whip of roots lashing his face as he sped through the soil. The sting of it lingered on his raw nerves even after he pulled his thoughts away.
Right. Shit. Never mind.
Valentina was a small lump far out in the field.
He couldn’t leave her. He couldn’t carry her all the way back to Candle-Fly. He couldn’t just wait in the cold field until she woke up.
With a groan, he left the porch, cursing the high-voltage zap of pain that shot up his leg with each step.
He had just found a wheelbarrow in an old potting shed and was rounding the house with it when Valentina appeared.
“There you are,” she said. “Where is the horned wolf?”
She coughed and a shimmer of color swam in the air like a hunting eel.
Green grunted and dropped the barrow handles. Touching anything hurt.
“The wolf is gone. We…He…is not a threat to us.”
Valentina shook her head and spit on the ground.
“Save the story for later.Pizdets.If possible, it feels worse than I remember.”
