LITMIR.BIZ

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death had put a crack in the dam, and the strange, cosmic coincidence of her seeing the woodcutting in MacEvoy’s shop had washed out its base of support, meaning that now the entire construct was poised to come crashing down on her. Oddly, considering how much she used to pride herself on control and self-discipline, she didn’t really mind. Since the shooting she had felt like she was running in place, or maybe hunkered down inside herself, waiting for something. And this was it.

      Or was it? What if this was all just happening in her head? What then?

      The rational, logical part of her said to call the shrink and have herself checked in somewhere. Instead, reaching out with a hand that suddenly didn’t shake at all, she touched the page, resting her fingers on the woodcutter’s chest.

      It didn’t take any effort now to remember the magic words her maman had taught her. The two of them used to sit on a mossy bank down by the duck pond, cross-legged, knees touching. “Concentrate,” her maman would say, over and over again, though somehow it never seemed like a lecture, never like work. “Close your eyes, visualize the doorway and say the spell, and when you open your eyes again you’ll find yourself where you were meant to be.”

      The words weren’t magic, of course, wouldn’t conjure some strange passageway to a magical realm. But they were exactly what her mind needed in order to wash away the dam once and for all.

      So she thought, What the hell? And she said the words.

      Crack! Lightning split the air around her and incredibly, impossibly, wind whipped past her, around her, though she was standing inside her apartment. Panic lashed through her and she froze, paralyzed by the fear. Her heart hammered in her ears, but that inner pulsation was the only movement she could manage.

      She tried to call for help but couldn’t, tried to tear her eyes from the book but couldn’t do that, either. She was snapping, losing it. She screamed but made no sound, fought but didn’t move. The woodcutter’s eyes grew larger and larger in her vision, until she saw nothing but the inky black, heard nothing but the wind, and felt …

      Nothing.

       Kingdom realm

      Moragh snapped out of her trance as the divination was interrupted by magic of another kind—a blood-linked power the likes of which she hadn’t sensed in many years.

      “The prince!” she hissed, excitement firing in her veins as she recognized the signal’s source. Finally—finally—after all this time she could feel the spell that had snatched her prey from her. More, she could follow it. Even after the first flare of power leveled off, the connection remained inside her, throbbing like a heartbeat. One that said, This way. I can lead you to him.

      The spell had reactivated. Thank the dark lords.

      Her lips curved in a smile that the ornate, gilt-edged divination mirror showed as feral, with a hint of fang gleaming from behind the lips of a coolly gorgeous brunette in her forties. She had survived the Blood Sorcerer’s wrath over her failure to kill Prince Dayn the first time, and had eventually won her way back into his graces. But she hadn’t ever escaped the failure. And now … “Redemption,” she said, the word echoing off the cool stone walls of the castle’s upper reaches.

      Over near the hearth, her servant, Nasri, looked up from his mopping. The old, crooked-fingered gnome—who now had only seven of those crooked fingers, having recently been caught filching a meat pie he’d had plenty of coin to buy—was cleaning last night’s bloodstains up off the stonework. The water in his bucket was dark, the gray mop gory. “Mistress?”

      “Send word to the bestiary. I want the largest two ettins ready to hunt in an hour.” The three-headed giants were pure rage wrapped up with hunger, killing machines that need only be pointed toward their target. “And have the beast master reinforce their collars and control spells. I’ll be handling them myself, with you along to help tend them.”

      He cringed and whined low in his throat. “Wouldn’t you rather—”

      “Go,” she snapped with enough force to have him squealing and bolting out the door. When he was gone, she smiled again into the warped mirror. “By my life and blood, I’ll get him this time.”

      She had missed before. She wouldn’t miss again.

       Chapter 2

       Wolfyn realm

      As the blood moon edged over the dark tree line, a perfect blue-white circle visible through the windowed wall of the big bedroom, Dayn did up the last button of his plaid shirt and shrugged into his fleece-lined bomber jacket.

      “You could stay, you know. Be here when I get back.” He glanced over. A cut-glass lamp shone from the bedside table—a Tiffany knockoff that had been imported from the human realm and converted to run off the quasi-magical energy that powered the wolfyn’s gadgets. The pale glow lit the room’s earthy brown walls and finely carved furniture, both of which were subtly worked with the Scratch-Eye pack’s sigil: four parallel bloodred slashes crossing an amber wolf’s eye. The bed was piled with luxurious crimson-dyed furs, but the room’s true centerpiece was Keely. The pack’s alpha bitch lay stretched, sinuous and satisfied, her scent musky with arousal and the magic of the blood moon. Graced with the toned body of a huntress and the ruddy hair of a bitch in her prime, she was unmated and independent, just like him.

      Except that she was nothing like him. Not really.

      They met and mated this one night each year, when sex sparked the strongest of changes and the wolfyn stayed largely in wolf form for the next three days, running together, renewing their magic and making or breaking new alliances. She didn’t dare mate with a male of her kind during the blood moon lest he claim the Right of Challenge for the pack leadership, which had gone to her brother, Kenar, rather than down through her as was traditional. So, as the Scratch-Eye pack’s “guest”—that was the name given to the few accidental realm travelers who by some quirk of the vortex magic couldn’t return home through the standing stones—Dayn had become Keely’s choice. She had laid it out with the blunt practicality of a wolfyn: sex once a year, nothing more or less. Which worked just fine for him for a number of reasons.

      Their relationship might have begun as a transaction, but over time it had mellowed to friendship. Or what did the humans call it? Friends with benefits. But, friends or not, he didn’t tell her that he was almost certain this had been the last time. He didn’t dare. Instead, he said, “Thanks but no thanks on the staying over. And you wouldn’t have asked if you didn’t know that would be my answer.”

      “You understand me too well. So … same time next year?”

      “Of course,” he said, and then added, as he always did, “unless you’re mated by then.”

      Her eyes flashed. “Kenar is a good alpha.”

      That was debatable, but Dayn wasn’t going to get Keely or any of the other pack members to admit that their alpha was more interested in himself than the pack or its traditions. Or that it had been wrong for him to twist those traditions around in order to run off the male Keely’s father had brought in from an outside pack to be her mate and his successor. Granted, the male—Roloff—shouldn’t have left. But that didn’t make Kenar right.

      Since there was no point in picking the fight, though—“been there, done that” was a particularly apt human saying in this case—he blew her a kiss. “Until next year, then.” Which was a lie, but a necessary one. In the entire wolfyn realm, only the pack’s wisewolfyn, Candida, knew who and what he truly was, and that it was almost time for him to go home.

      “Of course,” Keely agreed. “That is, unless you find a mate between now and then.”

      He had his hand on the door, but looked back, surprised. “Me? No. Not in the cards.”

      “The Stone-Turn pack’s new guest is pretty.”

      “I’m not interested in taking

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