“Why would who attack us?”

“Wolves.”

“What? No way. Wolves are mostly vegetarian. I learned that in school last year.”

“Then tell these to go find the salad bar,” said Aunt Kim, grimly.

Ned heard a crackle of twigs and leaves from the woods north of them, near the place where the path sloped down towards the city.

“Do you have anything? A pocket knife?” Aunt Kim asked.

He shook his head. The question chilled him.

“Find a stick then, fast, and get back towards the tower.” She flicked on her flashlight and played the beam on the ground between them and the trees.

Ned caught a glimpse of eyes shining.

He was very afraid then, unreal as it all seemed. As Kim ran her beam across the ground nearer to them Ned saw a broken branch and darted forward to claim it.

As he did, he heard his aunt, her voice hard, icy, speaking words in a language he didn’t know, followed by silence from the darkness.

“What?” he mumbled, hurrying back beside her, breathing hard.

“What did you just…?”

“I asked why they’ve come to trouble the living.”

“The living? You mean humans, right? Us?”

“I mean what I said. These are spirits, Ned, taking an animal shape. They have come early, they aren’t as strong as they will be in two nights.”

Two nights.

Right, Ned thought. He knew that part. Beltaine. Hinge of the year, when souls were abroad.

Or so his gran had told him, along with other tales of the old ways. His gran had been named Deirdre and had grown up in Wales, half Welsh, half Irish. The woman beside him now was her older daughter. Things he needed to deal with were coming really fast and he didn’t know what any of it meant.

There was a green-gold presence inside him again, though, when he looked. That was Kim. She wasn’t screening herself any more.

“Were you speaking Welsh?”

“Gaelic. Closer to what they’d have spoken back when. I hope.”

“You speak Gaelic?” A dumb question.

“Took me long enough to learn. My accent’s terrible, but they’ll understand me if I’m right.”

Back when. When was that? he wanted to ask. Sometimes when you had this many questions, Ned thought, you didn’t have a clue where to start.

Another sound, to his right this time, back up the path. They were a long way from the car barrier and her car, from the road, lights, from anyone.

“You didn’t answer me,” Kim said. “Ned, what have you been doing to draw these to you?”

“Nothing on purpose, believe me. I met someone in the cathedral. Who…he…it’s complicated.”

“I’m sure,” she said dryly. “It tends to be.”

She motioned, and they moved together, stepping over the low rail towards the curved tower wall, backs to it, facing outwards. For the moment her words in that other language seemed to have frozen the creatures out there.

She flashed her beam at a sound again, found another wolf. Four of them, five? They were both peering in that direction when Ned heard a scrabbling sound to his left, beyond his aunt.

Without stopping to think, an entirely instinctive movement, he stepped past her and swung the branch up and around, hard, like a baseball bat.

He cracked the wolf on the side of the head. It was heavier than the dog had been this afternoon. It didn’t spin or flip, but it went down. Ned cried out as his injured shoulder felt the impact.

His aunt swore again. Ned heard her snap something, almost snarling it herself, in the same tongue as before, and though he couldn’t understand a word he felt himself go cold with the ferocity of what she said.

Cold in fire, he thought. There was a word for that, the sort of stupid thing you got asked on English tests.

Kim repeated whatever she’d said, same cadences, more slowly. Ned almost felt a collective intake of breath in the night, as if the very darkness was reacting to her. He was down on a knee, holding his shoulder. The wolf lay near enough for him to see it. It wasn’t moving.

“Well done,” his aunt said to him quietly. “Are you hurt?”

“Shoulder, not from now. I had to fight a dog this afternoon.”

“What? Ned, what have you been doing?”

“I got mixed up in something. He said after that they were just playing games. With him, not me.”

She was still a moment. Then, “Who said that, Ned?”

“The man from the cathedral. He’s part of all this, I think.”

“Well, of course he is. That’s why you’re being tracked. Can you reach him?”

“What? Like a text message?”

She actually chuckled, briefly. She was cool, he decided, even if aunts weren’t supposed to be. “No, not that. Can you see him the way you saw me, looking inside?”

He hesitated. “I have done that. Seen him. Twice. He said he can screen himself.”

“I’m sure he can. I can’t see him. You try.”

Ned tried. He had the same foolish feeling as before, though not quite the same, if he thought about it. His aunt was here, and he could sense the glow of her, within.

Only that, however. Not the scarred man who’d told them in the cloister that he had no name. He shook his head. “I have no idea what I’m doing,” he said.

“Why should you?” she replied, gently. “That’s a reason I came, to tell you it’s all right not to know.”

“That’s why?”

She nodded. “And a few other things.”

The wolves hadn’t made a sound since she’d spoken, or since he’d cracked one of them with the branch.

“Have they gone?” he asked.

Kim turned and looked out. He had a sense she wasn’t really looking, or not with her eyes.

“They’re waiting,” she said. “I really wish I knew what this was about. How’s your shoulder?”

“Never play tuba again.”

She made an exasperated sound. “How terribly funny. You are just like your mother.”

“Mom joked like that?”

“At your age? Endlessly.”

It was news to him, that was for sure.

“What are they waiting for?” he asked.

“We’ll know soon enough. Keep trying to find your friend.”

“He isn’t my friend, believe me.”

A sound behind them. A voice in the same instant.

“He is not. You would do well to remember it.”

They whipped around together. To see something that never left Ned—even with all that was to come. What appears to us first on a threshold is often what lingers afterwards.

A very big, broad-shouldered man stood in front of the broken opening in the tower. He had long, bright hair, a heavy golden necklace, and golden armbands. He was clad in a tunic and a darker fur-lined vest, with leggings, and sandals tied up around his calf.

And he was antlered like a stag.

It wasn’t a horned helmet or anything like that, which was Ned’s first thought. He wasn’t wearing a helmet. The antlers grew straight out of his head.

It was in that moment that Ned Marriner finally accepted that he had entered into a world for which nothing in life had prepared him. There was no denial left in him; he felt fear coil and twist like a snake in his body.

“How did you get in there?” he stammered.

“He flew down. Most likely as an owl,” said his aunt, with what seemed to him an awesome calm. “Why not take your own form?” she added, almost casually, to the man-beast in front of them.

“Playing at shapes is a game. And this form is disrespectful. Even sacrilege.”

“Not wise the thought,” the antlered figure said. They were speaking French to each other, in an oddly formal way. “In my own guise I am too beautiful for you, woman. You would beg me to take you, right here, with the child watching.”

Ned bristled, clenching his fists, but his aunt only smiled.

“Unlikely,” she murmured. “I have seen beautiful men, and managed to keep my self-control.”

She paused, looking up at him, and then added, “I have also seen the god whose form you are copying, and his son, who commanded wolves far more deadly than these weak spirits.” Her voice changed again. “You have some small shape-shifting power. I see it. Do not expect me to quail. I knew men and women with so much more than that, there are no words for the telling. Do not ever doubt me. I am offering iron-bound truths by moonlight at the edge of an oak grove.”