Cold Fire (Spiritwalker 2)

“What manner of creature are you, that you can breed with a saber-toothed cat and a human woman, and no doubt other females besides?”

“I am the Master of the Wild Hunt. That is two.”

His words hit as a blow. I sank to my knees as the truth poured over me.

My sire was the Master of the Wild Hunt, before whose spears even cold mages were powerless.

Had Tara Bell known? Blessed Tanit! Of course she had known!

“Did you kill my parents?” I whispered.

“Yes. That is your third. Now, Tara Bell’s child, I will ask you three questions.”

“Even though it wasn’t Hallows’ Night, you found a way to kill them,” I cried. “It was your voice that said ‘Daughter,’ not my father’s. It was your arms that pulled me out of the Rhenus River while leaving them to drown. You killed them, and saved me.”

“Your destiny was chosen before you were born because I made you. Tara Bell promised to bring the child to me, but she disobeyed me. So I punished her.”

“I hate you.”

As if hate blazed, the chamber grew brighter. The shadows retreated to reveal a seething mass of creatures ringing the edge of what I now realized was a vast cavern whose walls were ice. Everywhere frozen within the transparent ice I saw hunters caught in motion: sleek hounds striped in gray and gold; hulking dire wolves; scowling hyenas; carrion crows; big spotted cats; men with dog faces and four paws instead of hands and feet; creatures half moth and half woman with soft gray wings and wicked sharp teeth; a cloud of wasps; slumbering snakes in coils and layers; furred spiders with faceted eyes; owls; and rank upon rank of bats with folded-up wings. Did they sleep, or were they suspended by the power of the ice?

“You can’t hate me because you do not know me nor do you know anything of me.” His voice’s timbre was limned with an indifference so supreme it was like asking the sun what it thought of you and receiving no answer. “You are a mortal creature bound and ruled by the tides and currents of the Deathlands. The tide that surges through you, you name as hate because you have no other way to describe it. But you need not remain bound and ruled by the tides that govern other creatures. How do you cross between the worlds?”

His question compelled my answer. “With my blood.”

“In the Deathlands, in what ways can you weave the threads that bind the worlds?”

“I can see in the dark. I can hear exceptionally well. I can conceal myself.”

“What is your name?”

I gritted my teeth in stubborn resistance, sinking to sit on my heels as I pressed my right hand to the locket. Its heartening pulse rose and fell like my father’s breathing when as a young child I had sat on his lap as he told me stories. I grasped my sword’s hilt and thought of my mother. With my elbow I brushed the hem of my jacket, feeling the stone I had picked up from the road. I remembered what Vai’s grandmother had told me: Names are power.

I pressed my lips together. Keep silence. Tell no one.

“Do not defy me. You do not have the strength. What is your name??”

Despite my struggle to keep them closed, my lips parted. For all my life I had been told to call myself Catherine Hassi Barahal. Yet the name his command called forth was the name Camjiata had given me, the name that linked me to the mother who bore me and the father who had chosen to raise me. “Catherine Bell Barahal.”

A black fleck like ash flickered in those blank bright eyes. “Now your name is mine, and you are mine. You are both my offspring and my servant, obedient to me because you are part of me, bone of my bone and blood of my blood. I will tell you this one thing, Catherine Bell Barahal. I admired your mother. Tara Bell was a female strong of will, with the strength of iron, and with the heart to accept fear but not succumb to it. You are like her. What I did not understand until later was that she harbored a reckless disobedience deep in her heart. But I now understand better how chains bind the vulnerable. In the end, she agreed to all I demanded because she was a slave to the threads that bound her to other creatures.”

I thought of my mother, tall and strong, a loyal Amazon in Camjiata’s army, sworn to celibacy. On an expedition to explore the Baltic Ice Sheet, under the light of the aurora borealis, she had debated with Daniel Hassi Barahal, using words as a form of flirtation, maybe even courtship.

To honor her, I stood. “No one knows what happened during that expedition, just that most of them died and a very few survived. I can only think of one way to interpret what you’ve just said. You trapped them somehow, on the ice, maybe even in the spirit world. She agreed to have sexual congress with you to save the lives of the others. She did it to save my father’s life, because she loved him.”

“That male did not father you.”

“He fathered me in every way that counts. You only sired me.” My voice rasped with unshed tears, thinking of what my mother had agreed to, and how she must have loved me anyway and risked her life and everything she knew to make a life for me. Had Daniel known? Or had she borne this secret alone, hoping the hunter might forget both her and the child? I would never know.

“That you are as you are is a gift that comes from me only. You must be what I made you to be. Forged like cold steel out of many layers, you are strong, resilient, and able to adapt in a moment’s reaction.”

“What do you want from me?”

He extended an arm. The crow hopped from its perch to tighten its claws over the bronzed muscles of his forearm. I thought the tips of those claws drew blood, but because of the way the crow’s shadow—the only shadow my light could not dispel— fell across his body, I could not be certain.

“I want you to spy for me, Daughter.”

I am not a young woman who craves attention or draws notice to herself through dramatic gestures or heedless bravado. But I admit it. I laughed.