The elusive fae scent I’d been tracking wafted up from the depths of the basement in thick waves of chill that raised the hairs all over my body with the expectant buzz of power. It felt as if, by coming through the doorway, I’d stepped past some barrier that had been restraining both the scent of the fae and the feel of its magic.
And as I paused, I realized that I could not see my feet. As if the basement were a pool of darkness and I was standing knee-deep in it.
This was more Larry’s territory than mine, and I tried to be sensible about admitting when something was over my head. I’d have gone and fetched him except for two things. The first was that the battle royal was still going on upstairs. The second was the feel of the magic.
After spending that time hidden in the witch Elizaveta’s basement, I’d gotten a sense for spell-casting magic. There’s a warp and weft to it, just like a good winter sweater. The magic filling Stefan’s basement was in the process of being gathered, spun, and woven into something big.
Spell casting of this complexity was the sort of thing that did not allow the caster to pay much attention to anything until the spell was done. If the fae lost focus, the spell would fail, probably in a spectacular way. But if I had to pick between a spell deliberately launched at us by an enemy and a chaotic magic bomb of some unknown effect, I would take the unknown any day.
Maybe that was because I wasn’t a spell caster.
To stop the spell, though, someone was going to have to trot down the stairs, into the blackness. That someone was going to have to be me.
Ears pricked, I started down the stairs at a rapid pace. I didn’t need eyesight much because stairways are regular in shape. I could have made less noise, but the feel of my nails digging in was reassuring. And I did not think that silence would save me.
Stefan’s basement staircase was an elegant affair, open underneath the railing and underneath the stairs. In horror movies, this kind of staircase always meant that someone could reach underneath a step and grab unwary feet. I was not sure there were more wary paws in the universe just now than mine.
As I descended into darkness, I concentrated on what my ears told me. But the battle above was loud, full of crashes, breaking glass, and an odd crunch or two. I thought I heard Adam grunt in pain. Below me was silence. If someone was breathing down there, they were doing it quietly.
About eight steps down, one of my raw feet—the punctures made by the hairs on Shelob’s back meant that it hurt to walk—came down upon a thin film of ice. I inhaled and the air felt as if it were fresh off a glacier. It could have been a side effect of whatever spell was being formed. Or it could be the start of a directed attack. If I was wrong about what the spell caster could do while wrangling all the magic, then I was in trouble. I’d spotlighted myself at the top of the stairs, and those same stairs made it clear what my path had to be.
Deciding I’d had enough of being a target, I jumped over the railing, dropped about a foot, and landed on something that felt like it might be a bookcase. My landing was awkward because I’d expected it to be a lot longer drop, and because there were ornaments and pots and other things under my feet. I knocked a fair bit of stuff onto the floor, which sounded as though it might be about a six-foot drop.
Stefan’s basement was very deep. I bet if I checked the original plans, this house didn’t come with a basement like this. I moved and something cylindrical that felt uncannily familiar rolled under my feet and followed the rest of the mess down to the floor. Maybe it was a cane or something else that felt like the walking stick. I was distracted from that by a high, whistling cry that hurt my ears, followed by a thundering crash from above, as if a body the size of a VW had fallen into something.
Beside me, at about the right place for the bottom of the stairway, I heard a sharp snapping sound that reminded me of the cracking of an ice floe on a Montana river in spring. The sound echoed throughout the house with an impact that hit my bones with a physical blow. Then the bookcase I stood on fell over, with me on top of it.
I scrambled over a mess of books and other things on the floor and bumped around until I found something to hide beneath and quit moving. My shelter might have been a low table or a high bench.
“Mercy?” Adam called out from above.
When I looked up toward where the doorway should be, I saw nothing. I’d known the light from above couldn’t illuminate the basement. I hadn’t realized that meant I couldn’t see the light from upstairs.
“Mercy?” Adam called a second time.
I didn’t want to answer him. My movement to my current location had been camouflaged by what I had to assume was the sound of the destruction of the stairway. If whatever called the darkness was also blinded by it, I didn’t want to make a sound and reveal my hiding place.
Too close to me, no more than ten feet away, something screamed, the sound starting in a register that I’d bet a normal human couldn’t hear—above the note a dog whistle makes—and then rattling down the octaves until my skin tried to crawl off my body.
Toward the end of the scream, I felt a very quiet click—and the basement was flooded with light. Adam and the goblin king, both battered and bleeding, stood where the top of the stairs should have been. I was right: I was in a large room, a library, roughly the size of the living room and kitchen above, but there was a hallway that led off to other rooms.
The stairs—or what I presumed to have been the stairs—looked like a pile of overgrown matchsticks that had been left under a sprinkler during a heavy frost. Or like the Fortress of Solitude from the old Superman movie with Christopher Reeve. All of that I took in peripherally, because first, I looked where the scream had come from.
A sturdy Stickley library chair had been pulled directly in front of the stair landing, which was still mostly intact, if white with frost. Crouched in it was a... well, a woman, I suppose. She was the same drowned-body color of the spider above, but her flesh looked too-soft rather than armor-hard, like the skin of a balloon that has been inflated too long.
She was thinner than a living human could have been, with pale gray hair that hung around her in long braids with small black beads woven into them. Her hands were abnormally long-fingered and black tipped—and she had six fingers on each hand.
Her eyes were solid black. I couldn’t tell what she was looking at—me, Adam and the goblin king, or Daniel, who was sitting on the ground directly between her and me. Maybe none of us or all.
In front of her, attached to the newel posts of the broken staircase as well as the wall behind her and the arms and legs of her chair, was a web woven in ice. Her lips twisted in an ugly smile as she reached out one finger to touch her web.
I could feel the magic form into something coherent as her finger neared the thread of her weaving. Out of time to plan or consider my actions, I simply bolted right through Daniel. I leaped into the middle of the web, and her finger touched me instead of it.
—
The snow covered the tops of my knees as the bitter cold slid down my lungs and tried to freeze my nostrils together. The tips of my ears and my fingers burned with the cold.
It was too bad I had somehow shed my coyote self. The fur would have done me a lot of good. As it was, my snow-covered feet and calves were significantly warmer than the rest of my naked body.