The women stumbled together, slipping in the snow that shifted beneath their boots, as they scrambled quickly toward the line of protective wardings, the holly bushes and cairns that marked the edge of the settlement. An inhuman scream made both flinch, made them both turn. Neve crashed to her knees in the snow with a cry of pain.
“Keep going!” Phelan roared, staff and body wreathed in evergreen light. “Don’t wait for us!”
A single blast of a hunting horn sounded. Neve’s heart took off at twice its normal speed.
I know that sound.
Seamus lowered the horn as Leinth hauled Neve upright again. Both women were trembling as they dashed pell-mell through the snow.
“He just called them,” Neve panted as they ducked through the row of holly bushes and nearly tripped over one of Marin’s cairns.
“I know,” Leinth said. “This escalated quickly and badly.”
Something else screamed behind them, sounding far more like a man than a beast. Both women turned again.
A blur of motion drew their gazes—something small and gray throwing itself at the ward-lines. It rebounded as if it hit an invisible wall, coruscating light shooting up from the space above the cairn. Neve swore.
“What was that?” Leinth gasped.
“What they’re fighting,” Neve said, swallowing the bile that had suddenly risen in her throat. “Come on. Come on!” Her heart thundered against her breast as she yanked Leinth onward this time. “They’ll come, come on!”
“What if they can’t?”
Hooves thundered somewhere nearby. Neve shuddered. “Then the Hunt will avenge them in the worst ways. We have to get the others. They’ve defeated these creatures before and they’ll be able to do it again!”
At least, I dearly hope they can.
Swallowing her doubts, she twisted free of Leinth and ignored her own agony as she scrambled through the snow toward help she prayed she’d be able to easily find.
