Page 113 of The Mirror of Beasts

Lord Death let out a laugh, bringing his face down in line with hers. “My dear, I have no plans to kill you. Not yet, at least.”

He brought the blade down to her forearm, slicing it with a single stroke. Olwen gasped with the pain of it. Fresh blood burst across the seneschal’s senses, and inside him, the hound growled.

“Now,” Lord Death said, collecting the blood in the palm of his gloved hand. “Let’s see what secrets are hiding in your memories, shall we?”

Between worlds, there was nothing but darkness.

It was unending, absolute. My first journey had been too chaotic to notice anything other than the sensation of being compressed and hurtled forward at a speed that left me breathless. Now, my mind was alive to what it was seeing—a despairing abyss, a void where no life existed. A place beyond the sight of gods.

Then the mist came, a hazy border.

Then the light.

The snow.

I burst out of the doorway, momentum carrying me even as I tried to dig my heels in to stop. But beneath the snow was a layer of hard ice, and even the spikes on my boots couldn’t gain any kind of purchase. I was powerless to do anything other than fall.

The whipping winds snarled with disorienting rushes of snow. I staggered up, bracing my feet to fight back against the force of them. Snow—ice crystals—battered my face as I searched for the others in the maelstrom of white around me.

“Cait!” I shouted. “Neve! Can anyone hear me?”

Fear spiked through my chest. The portal had vanished. I couldn’t even tell which direction I’d come from.

This doesn’t make any sense, I thought. The others should be here. We’d come to the same place—I’d traveled through right after them.

“Neve!” I tried again. My face was stiff and aching from the cold. “Cait! Neve!”

The shouts were nothing compared to the howl of the blizzard. It seemed to laugh, sputtering ice and snow in my face until it became difficult to breathe. A growing panic simmered beneath my skin.

“Is anyone there?” I called, the words breaking at their edges. “Hello? Anyone!”

I turned in a slow circle, trying to shake the growing sensation that I was drowning in blisteringly cold light.

Alone … my mind whispered. Always alone.

“Anyone!” I pleaded. If something had happened to them—

A shadow appeared just ahead of me, emerging from the cloak of white like a drop of ink seeping through parchment. My heart leapt at the sight.

“Over here!” I shouted, waving my arms. Thank the gods, or fates, or whoever for sparing me this one single ordeal.

The shape came closer, and closer. Slowly, as if to figure out who I was too.

And then its eyes, a hideous, glowing yellow, found mine through the storm. As it came toward me, it wasn’t walking on two legs, but four.

My arms fell back to my sides, limp.

“Oh … shit,” I choked out, already backing up.

At my movement, it yowled. The pitch was like glass shards in my ears, and if it hadn’t been for that pure, primal drive to survive, I would have doubled over and tried to cover them. Instead, terror turned into an iron band around my chest as my mind flipped through its vast archive of beasts and horrors.

The creature was the size of a horse—terrifying, even at a distance. Its tawny fur was encrusted with snow. Massive claws tore through the ice beneath it with ease. Dark spikes covered the tip of its tail like a mace.

Cath Palug, my mind helpfully supplied. A monstrous wildcat that had become the scourge of the Isle of Anglesey, claiming the lives of at least a hundred and eighty warriors before King Arthur, or one of his knights, slayed it.

Apparently not.

Maybe if the others had been with me, if there’d been someone other than my sorry self to protect, I might have stood my ground and faced the coming fight with courage. But I was alone, and there was a monster, and even though I knew—I knew—predators reveled in the chase, every instinct in me was screaming Run.

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