Chapter 192: A Woman and Four Dogs

The eyes moved.

They slid sideways between two trunks, low to the ground, and stopped again. Purple, split down the middle, catching the lantern light like wet glass.

Blair knew them before she saw anything else.

Jack took his hand off her mouth.

Silver showed in the dark, then a pale face, then the rest of him. Killian came around the edge of the clearing on feet that made no sound, keeping to the trees the whole way. He didn’t hurry. He didn’t snap a twig. When he sank down behind the fallen oak beside them, the janitor still hadn’t looked up from her puppies.

Killian looked at Jack. Then at the black wing wrapped around Blair. Then at Jack again.

"Feron."

"Your Highness."

"You brought the human."

"She brought herself."

Killian’s eyes touched her face for half a second and went to the bark of the oak tree. "Into this forest. At night."

"I’m right here," Blair whispered.

"I’m aware. Your shoes are on the wrong feet."

Blair looked down. They were.

The tree was not built for three. She was wedged between them, Jack’s wing still around her shoulders, Killian’s knee pressed against her hip. He was cooler than the frozen ground.

"And you?" Jack said. "Out for a walk?"

"I was given a reason to come." Killian’s eyes were on the janitor. "Who is she?"

"Someone who works under your name."

Killian went very still. His tongue flicked out, once, and back.

"Then she’s mine," he said.

"Tonight she’s ours. Stay on your side of the log."

"It’s my forest."

"It’s the academy’s forest."

"The academy is on Crown land."

"Then you won’t mind keeping your voice down in it."

Out in the clearing, the puppies stopped eating.

All four heads came up at once. Then they were gone into the brush, and the bag rolled over and spilled its crusts across the grass.

"Oh, don’t be silly," the janitor told the bushes. "It’s only me."

Behind Blair, in the trees, something went squish. Then click.

Every hair on her arms stood up. She knew that sound.

Another click came from the left. A third, farther back. Slow. Moving in a circle.

Jack’s wing lifted off her shoulders.

"Stay with him," he said.

"Feron—"

But Jack was already gone. One stroke of his wings, no sound, and the dark between the trunks swallowed him.

Killian took her arm.

He pulled her up off the frozen grass and back three steps, until her spine met the trunk of a tree, and he came with her. His coat fell open around them both. One hand went flat to the bark beside her face. The other slid behind her head, between her head and the tree.

"Don’t move," he breathed.

The smell reached her first: wet and sour, like something left too long at the bottom of a pond. Then the sound. Close. On the left side of the tree.

Blair’s whole body locked. She had seen what those claws did to Professor Feron’s chest. Her heart slammed against her ribs, and she couldn’t feel her hands.

She looked up at him.

He was already looking down at her.

Joy hit her.

It came from nowhere, warm and bright and enormous, and it flooded up through her chest until there was no room left for anything else. Her mouth curved. A giggle pushed at the back of her teeth while something with claws breathed on the other side of the tree, and she couldn’t stop it. She clamped her lips together. Her fingers knotted in the front of his shirt.

Killian shut his eyes.

The joy drained out of her as fast as it had come, and the terror came back all at once, worse for the second it had been gone. She was shaking against him, two fistfuls of his shirt in her hands, with no idea what had just happened.

He kept his eyes closed. His forehead was an inch from hers. His tongue flicked out against the air beside her cheek, tasting.

A long gray arm came around the trunk.

It stopped an arm’s length from her shoulder. The fingers were too long and ended in four bone-white claws. A head followed, slowly, tilting. There was skin where its eyes should have been, smooth and wet, stretched over nothing.

It breathed in. Toward her.

Killian didn’t breathe at all. His hand on the bark curled into a fist.

The jaw dropped open with a soft, wet pop.

Above them, wings cracked like a sheet snapped in the wind.

The creature flinched. It folded in on itself and was gone, clattering away through the brush. Farther off, the other clicks scattered and faded.

Then there was only the wind in the branches.

Killian stayed where he was. Under her fists, through his shirt, his heart was going hard and fast.

After a long time he opened his eyes and looked at the bark beside her head instead of at her.

Then he looked down at her hands.

"Let go," he said.

She let go of his shirt. He smoothed the front of it with his palm, frowning at the creases she’d left. Then he took his other hand out from behind her head and brushed the bark off his knuckles, one at a time.

Jack landed beside the oak and folded his wings. A few feathers stood out of place along one edge. Otherwise there wasn’t a mark on him.

"Gone," he said.

In the clearing, the janitor sighed and got to her feet. She gathered the spilled crusts back into the bag, rolled it closed and hooked it over the side of the cart. She lifted the lantern off the handle and held it up to the brush.

"Monday, dears," she called.

Nothing came out.

She turned the cart around. It came back down the track toward them, one wheel squeaking, the lantern swinging from her hand. Killian stepped into the shadow of the trunk and took Blair with him. The janitor passed close enough for Blair to see the tidy bun and the rubber gloves, and she was humming. Something light and cheerful, a little off-key.

She didn’t look into the trees once.

The squeak faded first. The humming lasted a little longer, and then that was gone too.

Jack stared down the track after her. So did Killian. Blair stared at the frozen grass where the puppies had been, at the ends of meat nobody had come back for.

That was it. A woman and four dogs.