Page 6

"Don't." I cut my eyes toward Barney and speared him with a look, my index finger aimed straight at his crooked nose.

The swamp thing moved.

It moved fast — faster than anything made of mud and swamp water had any business moving. Faster than I could track, and it went straight for me.

Kai got there first, throwing himself between us the way he always did, the way I'd spent four months trying to break him of. Without his Magic behind it, it wasn't enough. The thing caught him with something that looked more like a shove than a punch, and he went sideways into the mud with a grunt that I felt in my own chest.

I didn't scream.

I didn't reach for fire that wasn't there.

I fought.

Sidestep. The way Kai had drilled into me over and over, until my body did it before my brain caught up. Block. Forearm up, absorbing the strike instead of fighting it head-on. Elbow. Hard into whatever passed for its ribs. Knee. Up and in, using its own forward momentum against it the exact way Kai had taught me a hundred muddy mornings ago.

I drove it backward, off balance, and put it face-first into a cypress trunk with a sound like somebody dropping a bag of wet cement.

I stood there, chest heaving, absolutely stunned at myself.

"Holy shit."

"Move your feet, Love," Kai called from the ground, and I could actually hear the pride under the pain in his voice.

"I AM MOVING MY DAMN FEET!"

Except the swamp thing wasn't down. It peeled itself off the tree, and where its face had cracked against the bark, the mud simply... resettled. Reformed– Like I'd hit a puddle instead of a person.

Kai got a shot in a second later — no Magic, just muscle, a solid hit that should have dropped it — and it did the same thing. Absorbed the blow, put itself back together, and kept coming.

Even Barney, God love his socks-and-sandals soul, managed to catch it across the back of what might've been a knee with a fallen branch, hard enough that I heard the wood crack. It barely seemed to notice him.

The dogs surged forward, all teeth and fury, and I threw an arm out. "Stay back! I don't know what happens if it touches you!"

"I have teeth!" Chewy announced, as if that settled the matter.

"You weigh twelve pounds!"

"TWELVE POUNDS OF FURY!"

"He's eleven pounds soaking wet,” Arthur put in, unhelpfully.

"THIS IS NOT THE TIME, ARTHUR!"

And then, right in the middle of all of it, the thing simply... stopped.

It stood there, dripping, and looked at me, and its face changed.

For one split second, I saw myself staring back — my own eyes, my own stubborn jaw, mud-slicked and horrible but unmistakably mine. Then the face shifted again, and it was someone else. Older. Sharper cheekbones, a set to the mouth I somehow recognized without ever having seen it.

Then another face. And another. Woman after woman, cycling faster than I could track, all of them with something in the eyes that felt like it belonged to me even when the rest of the face didn't.

“Those are my memories,” Aideen whispered, and there was something in her voice I'd never heard before.

Fear.

"You wear her blood," the creature said, and its voice had layered itself, dozens of voices stacked one on top of another, all of them speaking at once.

"Whose?" My own voice came out smaller than I meant it to.