Page 30 of Horn of Winter

“Have you managed to track down a fire mage?” Sgott said.

“There’s no one close. We’ve a spellcaster on the way, but she’s still five minutes out. Not sure if Kaitlyn will last that long.”

“If we are dealing with a relic, then a spellcaster probably won’t help.” I suspected a fire witch might not, either, if only because few humans had the power to counteract godly energies.

“It’s still worth having them on hand in case your knives fail to have any impact.” He glanced at me. “How do you want to work this?”

“I get closer to the building and see if the knives react.”

“And if they don’t?” Sgott asked.

“I’ll stab one into the ice and see what happens, but given we have no idea what we’re currently dealing with, that might well cause more problems than not.”

“Well, if we don’t dosomethingsoon,” the woman on the phone to Kaitlyn said, “it’ll be too late. She’s no longer responding.”

“There are ambulances on the way,” Harry added.

Sgott nodded and returned his attention to me. “The show is yours.”

I dug my knives out, drew the blades, then handed him my purse and the sheaths. The softly gleaming ice covered the entire building; there were no features visible. No doors or windows. Harry and his companion might have tried breaking in through the latter earlier, but there was no evidence of their efforts or indeed the windows. It was as if the ice had thickened to protect itself. Or perhaps whoever was wielding the horn—if that was indeed what we were dealing with here—was close enough to see what was happening.

I jerked a look over my shoulder, quickly scanning the rooftops on the buildings opposite. There was no immediate sign of anyone, but that didn’t mean anything.

“Has a search been done of the area?” I asked. “Because if we’re dealing with a relic, the wielder might well be close.”

“Harry?” Sgott immediately said.

He shook his head. “We concentrated on evacuating the nearby buildings.”

Sgott nodded. “Then you and Bec get onto that, starting with the building opposite. But be wary—if we are dealing with someone using a relic, they might well turn it on you.”

“I’d like to say we’ll stay frosty,” Bec murmured, “but that would be a bad pun considering the situation.”

It was also a variation of a line in one of Sgott’s favorite old movies. I watched them leave, then flexed my fingers against the knife hilts and said, more to myself than Sgott, “Let’s get this show on the road.”

“Be careful.”

“That’s become my new motto when dealing with oddities and relics.”

Sgott snorted. “I believe that as much as I believed your mother every time she said it was a simple hunt and nothing could go wrong.”

And it didn’t. Not until the very last hunt, anyway.

Overhead, thunder rumbled and, a heartbeat later, lightning forked across the sky, a deep, dark, dangerous tree of power that echoed briefly in the two blades. Rivers of electric energy briefly ran across my vision—a rainbow network I could perhaps call on if the knives had little impact?

While I now knew to ground myself when I was channeling lightning through the blades, thereby lessening the risk of it boiling me alive, I wasn’t immortal. I’d come close to dying thefirst time I called down the lightning, and had only been saved by the song and power of an old forest the second time.

Did I really want to risk a third time?

Especially for someone like Kaitlyn?

All life was important, I knew that, but that kernel of deeper darkness whispered not all lives were the same.

I shoved it aside and forced my feet forward. The closer I got to the building, the colder it got. I stepped past the front of the police car onto the pavement, sliding a little on the ice before my boots caught traction. The wall of blue ice loomed above me, the lightning spearing the clouds above mirrored on its surface.

The knives weren’t reacting to the ice, although they seemed to be pulsing in time to the fury overhead.

“Anything?” Sgott asked.

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