Mom’s notes on this Waypoint hadn’t mentioned that the water was cold. And I don’t mean cold like your roommate used most of the hot water. I mean cold like I suddenly had to wonder if I was going to trip over a seal or a penguin or a narwhal or something.
The cold hit me like a sledgehammer, and it was suddenly all I could do just to keep from shrieking in surprise and discomfort—and, some part of my brain marveled, I was the freaking Winter Knight.
Though my limbs screamed their desire to contract around my chest and my heart, I fought them and made them paddle. One stroke. Two. Three. Four. Fi—Ow. My nose hit a shelf of rock. I found my will and exhaled, speaking the word Aparturum through a cloud of blobby bubbles that rolled up over my cheeks and eyelashes. I tore open the next Way a little desperately—and water rushed out through it as if thrilled to escape.
I crashed into the Yucatán jungle on a tide of ectoplasmic slime, and the line we’d strung dragged everyone else through in a rush. Poor Sanya, the last in line, was pulled from his feet, hauled hard through the icy water as if he’d been flushed down a Jotun’s toilet, and then crashed down amidst the slimed forest. Peru to Mexico in three and a half seconds.
I fumbled back to the Way to close it and stopped the tide of ectoplasm from coming through, but not before the vegetation for ten feet in every direction had been smashed flat by the flood of slime, and every jungle creature for fifty or sixty yards started raising holy hell on the what-the-fuck-was-that party line. Murphy had her gun out, and Molly had a wand in each hand, gripped with white knuckles.
Martin let out a sudden, coughing bellow that sounded like it must have torn something in his chest—and it was loud, too. And the jungle around us abruptly went silent.
I blinked and looked at Martin. So did everyone else.
“Jaguar,” he said in a calm, quiet voice. “They’re extinct here, but the animals don’t know that.”
“Oooh,” said my godmother, a touch of a child’s glee in her voice. “I like that.”
It took us a minute to get everyone sorted out. Mouse looked like a scrawny shadow of himself with his fur all plastered down. He was sneezing uncontrollably, having apparently gotten a bunch of water up his nose during the swim. Ectoplasm splattered out with every sneeze. Thomas was in similar straits, having been hauled through much as Sanya was, but he managed to look a great deal more annoyed than Mouse.
I turned to Lea. “Godmother. I hope you have some way to get us to the temple a little more swiftly.”
“Absolutely,” Lea purred, calm and regal despite the fact that her hair and her slime-soaked silken dress were now plastered to her body. “And I’ve always wanted to do it, too.” She let out a mocking laugh and waved her hand, and my belly cramped up as if every stomach bug I’d ever had met up in a bar and decided to come get me all at once.
It. Hurt.
I knew I’d fallen, and was vaguely aware that I was lying on my side on the ground. I was there for, I don’t know, maybe a minute or so before the pain began to fade. I gasped several times, shook my head, and then slowly pushed myself up onto all fours. Then I fixed the Leanansidhe with a glare and said, “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
Or tried to say that. What came out was something more like, “Grrrrrrbrrrr awwf arrrr grrrrr.”
My faerie godmother looked at me and began laughing. Genuine, delighted belly laughter. She clapped her hands and bounced up and down, spinning in a circle, and laughed even more.
I realized then what had happened.
She had turned us—all of us, except for Mouse—into great, gaunt, long-legged hounds.
“Wonderful!” Lea said, pirouetting upon one toe, laughing. “Come, children!” And she leapt off into the jungle, nimble and swift as a doe.
A bunch of us dogs stood around for a moment, just sort of staring at one another.
And Mouse said, in what sounded to me like perfectly understandable English, “That bitch.”
We all stared at him.
Mouse huffed out a breath, shook his beslimed coat, and said, “Follow me.” Then he took off after the Leanansidhe, and, driven by reflex-level instinct, the rest of us raced to catch up.
I’d been shapeshifted one other time—by the dark magic of a cursed belt, and one that I suspected had been deliberately designed to provide an addictive high with its use. It had taken me a long time to shake off the memory of that experience, the absolute clarity of my senses, the feeling of ready power in my whole body, of absolute certainty in every movement.
Now I had it back—and this time, without the reality-blurring euphoria. I was intensely aware of the scents around me, of a hundred thousand new smells that begged to be explored, of the rush of sheer physical pleasure in racing across the ground after a friend. I could hear the breath and the bodies of the others around me, running through the night, bounding over stones and fallen trees, slashing through bits of brush and heavy ground cover.
We could hear small prey animals scattering before us and to either side, and I knew, not just suspected but knew, that I was faster, by far, than any of the merely mortal animals, even the young buck deer who went soaring away from us, leaping a good twenty feet over a waterway. I felt an overwhelming urge to turn in pursuit—but the lead runner in the pack was already on another trail, and I wasn’t sure I could have turned aside if I had tried to do so.
And the best part? We probably made less noise, as a whole, than any one of us would have made moving in a clumsy mortal body.
We didn’t cover five miles in half the time, an hour instead of two.
It took us—maybe, at the most—ten minutes.
When we stopped, we could all hear the drums. Steady, throbbing drums, keeping a quick, monotonous, trance-inducing beat. The sky to the northwest was bright with the light of reflected fires, and the air seethed with the scents of humans and not-quite humans and creatures that made me growl and want to bite something. Occasionally, a vampire’s cry would run its shrill claws down my spine.
Lea stood upon a fallen log ahead of us, staring ahead. Mouse walked up to her.
“Gggrrrr rawf arrrgggrrrrarrrr,” I said.
Mouse gave me an impatient glance, and somehow—I don’t know if it was something in his body language or what—I became aware that he was telling me to sit down and shut up or he’d come over and make me.
I sat down. Something in me really didn’t like that idea, but when I looked around, I saw that everyone else had done it too, and that made me feel better.
Mouse said, again in what sounded like perfectly clear English, “Funny. Now restore them.”
Lea turned to look at the big dog and said, “Do you dare to give me commands, hound?”
“Not your hound,” Mouse said. I didn’t know how he was doing it. His mouth wasn’t moving or anything. “Restore them before I rip your ass off. Literally rip it off.”
The Leanansidhe tilted her head back and let out a low laugh. “You are far from your sources of power here, my dear demon.”
“I live with a wizard. I cheat.” He took a step toward her and his lips peeled up from his fangs in unmistakable hostility. “You want to restore them? Or do I kill you and get them back that way?”
Lea narrowed her eyes. Then she said, “You’re bluffing.”
One of the big dog’s huge, clawed paws dug at the ground, as if bracing him for a leap, and his growl seemed to . . . I looked down and checked. It didn’t seem to shake the ground. The ground was actually shaking for several feet in every direction of the dog. Motes of blue light began to fall from his jaws, thickly enough that it looked quite a bit like he was foaming at the mouth. “Try me.”
The Leanansidhe shook her head slowly. Then she said, “How did Dresden ever win you?”