Frost shouted his name.
The Kirata bounded at him and instinct took over. Oliver took one step backward, throwing up his hands, fists closing on the tiger-man’s wrists, fingers digging into fur and flesh. The Hunter’s momentum drove him down and Oliver went with it, the damp stink of its breath a miasma in his face. He shot one boot up into its midsection and then used every bit of his strength to propel the Kirata over his head, toward the fireplace.
The tiger-man’s head struck the stone hearth and for a moment— as he twisted round and scrambled to his feet— Oliver was sure he had messed up his one chance at survival. In the instant that he’d gotten a grip on the Hunter, he’d been aware of the fire as his target, as his one hope. But the trajectory had been off. The Kirata’s head had struck the hearth a foot to the left of the fireplace.
Close was enough, however. It collapsed to the ground, back turned toward the blaze, and its fur caught. The Kirata’s eyes went wide and it roared in agony as the fire raced over the surface of its body, fur burning quickly, blackening to char. Aflame, the tiger-man staggered toward Oliver, but then its panicked gaze darted toward the window and the snow outside and it stumbled in that direction. As it passed a love seat, the fabric of the furniture caught fire. The Kirata reached out to steady itself and clutched a heavy floral drape, which went up in flames even faster than the Hunter’s fur. It fell to the ground, twitching and mewling. Dying.
The cottage began to burn.
“Frost!” Oliver shouted, thinking the winter man would bring ice to extinguish the blaze.
But when he turned he saw that more Kirata were coming in. Blue Jay, Frost, and Kitsune were fighting them. The trickster was a man again, or something nearly like a man, for he danced with such speed that he was once more a blur, a fan of blue wings battering one of the Hunters.
Oliver needed to help them— or at least to defend himself— and he remembered the sword above the fireplace. The sword of Euphrasia’s king. He ran to the hearth and reached up, snatching blade and scabbard down from their mountings.
Thunder shook the floor and rattled the walls. Oliver looked over to see that Gong Gong had continued to grow. The Black Dragon of Storms was enormous now, at least a dozen feet long and curled in upon himself. He had one taloned hand upon a Kirata, pinning the creature to the floor, and lightning struck from his eyes, incinerating the Hunter. At the same moment, a second tiger-man leaped upon his back, claws raking the dragon’s hide.
“Enough!” Gong Gong cried. “We need space! Air!”
The massive serpentine beast raced at the door, the Kirata trying to hold on, claws tearing dragon flesh. Gong Gong did not stop at the door but barged through it, shattering wood. As he passed through he swung his torso to the left and scraped the Kirata off his back. The Hunter fell to the floor, broken and bleeding but still alive, still ferocious. Snow blew in and swirled around its head.
The Black Dragon of Storms disappeared out into the storm. Oliver was about to attack the fallen Kirata, to follow Gong Gong outside, when a figure appeared, framed in the silhouette of the broken door. A massive broad-shouldered being with the head and wings of a bird, wielding a sword no man could have lifted.
The Falconer.
A shudder of fear went through Oliver. The Kirata terrified him, but this was different. The sight of the Falconer filled him with primal dread, born of the simple fact that the Hunter had nearly slain Frost once before. It had snowed that night as well.
“Frossst!” the Falconer cried.
Oliver thought that the winter man feared the Falconer. He had seen it in Frost’s eyes. But he had also been wounded then, and it had been before the conspiracy had begun to be revealed and before Yuki-Onna’s murder. When Frost heard his name he turned from the Kirata he and Blue Jay had been facing, and he saw who it was that had called to him.
There was no fear in the winter man’s eyes this time. Only hatred.
Frost raced for the door.
The Falconer let out a piercing bird’s cry and stepped back outside, making room for the battle that was about to begin.
Oliver raised the king’s sword in his right hand, clutched the scabbard in his left, and ran to help Blue Jay and Kitsune against the Kirata that remained in the house, even as the fire spread.
“This place is burning down!” he shouted. “We’ve got to get outside!”
Kitsune responded not at all. She was the fox now, quicker than the Kirata, slashing at their most vulnerable places, throats and groins and the tendons in their legs.
Blue Jay smiled at Oliver with his mad, dancing eyes. “Working on it.”
* * *
The winter man could feel the storm. Not the way he could when he had created it. No, this was nature, the churning weather of an entire world, the brutality of the skies. As Jack Frost, the harbinger of winter’s first snow, he could trigger a storm, could even create one, but nothing lasting. Nothing of the weight of the storm that brewed above Canna Island. He could not drive away a blizzard, but he could ride it, could command its power in limited fashion.
The Falconer had caught him by surprise the last time.
Not today.
Outside in the snow, along the path between the empty church and the abandoned market, Kirata surrounded the house, nearly a dozen of them in addition to those that had already made their way inside. A black shadow moved through the storm, sweeping from the sky, and talons dropped down to tear one of the tiger-men in two, head, shoulders, and arms separated from the lower torso, blood spraying the snow, steaming a crimson stain into the white. Gong Gong was in the midst of the storm and he was home. Lightning lashed down from above, melting snow and blackening the ground beneath. One of the Kirata raced into the cover of the market’s porch.
The tigers would wait. Frost had other prey in mind. He glanced around, searching the sky, and when he saw a shadow moving through the snow he thought at first it was Gong Gong again. But this was smaller than the dragon, and he knew it was his Hunter, his would-be killer.
The Falconer’s sword erupted with fire, a beacon in the snow-obscured sky. One of the Kirata growled and raced toward Frost even as the Falconer swept down toward him, crying in that ear-shredding bird voice. The Kirata lunged, claws slashing the air.
Frost slipped into the storm, his body falling away to nothing, to snow, whipping along on the wind. But now he focused, and he felt the storm all around him, and he did what he was created to do . . . he commanded the storm. Images of Yuki-Onna filled his mind, times they had danced in just this way, merging themselves together in the heart of a blizzard.
Hatred burned in his frozen heart.
The Falconer was riding the wind. Frost stole it away from him, used it against him. With the snow and ice and wind that was all a part of him, he clutched the Falconer in his grip, the grip of the storm, and spun him around. His icy wind stole the Hunter’s breath, suffocating him. Hail stabbed the Falconer’s eyes and the storm beat at him so that his wings would not hold him aloft. He could not wait to pierce the Hunter’s thick hide with his fingers and freeze the very blood in his veins.
But first there would be pain.
Frost was all around him, encompassing him, and as the Falconer struggled, the winter man summoned all of the power of the storm and pushed the Hunter toward the ground.
The Falconer shrieked as he struck the frozen earth, impact only slightly lessened by the accumulated snow. Where he lay, his flaming sword made the snow hiss and pop and little rivulets of ice water streamed away from it.
The Falconer began to rise.
With the innate ease that was his, Frost collected himself, drawing together the moisture in the air to sculpt his body once again out of ice and snow. As the Falconer stood, he staggered slightly, and one of his wings looked bent, perhaps broken.
The winter man smiled. “You are stealthy, Hunter. You wounded me before. But that triumph has made you arrogant. You will not catch me off my guard again. Not when I can remember that ensorcelled blade cutting in to the essence of me.”
The Falconer only screamed in that shrill voice and spread his wings, but he did not take flight. He stalked across the snow, raising that burning blade. A pair of Kirata came up behind the Falconer, fanning out to either side, all three of them stalking Frost.
Lightning seared the ground, blew apart the rock wall that lined the path to Koenig’s cottage, and one of the Kirata fell dead. The other searched the sky warily and backed away. The Falconer cried again, sword aloft and crackling with falling snowflakes, then ran at Frost.
The winter man fell to his knees, thrust his fingers into the snow, and raised his hate-filled gaze to stare at his enemy. He shuddered with exertion, with the flow of winter and nature that coursed through him, and then he
pushed
. Icicle spikes thrust upward from the ground, razor-tipped and hard as rock, impaling the Falconer through the right leg, the left side, the chest, and both wings.
With one final cry, the Falconer went limp, sword falling into the snow, its flame winking out, ice freezing over it. Blood began to stream down the icy stalagmites that had pierced his flesh, lifting him off the ground. But he still twitched; his beak still opened and closed, attempting to wail out his pain. His eyes were still alight with malevolence.
Frost glanced round once to see that there were no Kirata nearby. The house was burning entirely now and his companions were emerging, in the midst of battle with the tiger-men. For the moment it was just the winter man and the Falconer.
“I was careful not to do very much damage to your vital organs,” Frost said, tilting his head to study the twitches of the dying Hunter. “It will take you hours to expire this way. With your constitution, even blood loss will not kill you for some time. And it will be agony. Now that I’ve pierced your flesh, I can save you that agony, just freeze your blood and kill you instantly. But you must tell me who it is that sent you. Who has set the Hunters after the Borderkind?”
All that issued from the Falconer’s beak was a weak cry.
The winter man elongated the ice daggers that were the fingers of his left hand and he tore at one of the Hunter’s wings. The fury in the Falconer’s eyes was soul-deep, but it was meaningless. He was beaten. Dying.
“I know you can speak if you wish to. Speak now. A name. And I will take the ice away.”
The hatred in the Hunter’s eyes only deepened, its chest rising and falling in hitching gasps, fresh blood streaming down the ice spikes with each breath. But there was more than hate in the Falconer’s eyes. They glistened with agony.
“Ty’Lis,” it hissed.
Frost frowned so deeply that the ice of his face cracked. “The Atlantean? Impossible.”
The Falconer uttered another sound that was almost laughter.
With a sneer, the winter man touched the bloody point of one of the ice spikes, his influence traveling down into the snow below, and another stalagmite thrust upward from the ground, the thinnest and sharpest of all. An enormous needle of ice, it punched through the Falconer’s abdomen and pushed all the way up through his heart, at last emerging with a crack of bone through the back of his head.
Ice formed over the Falconer’s eyes and even the blood the Hunter had already shed froze solid.
The laughter ended.
But Frost still heard its echo.
* * *
Oliver coughed, eyes watering, his skin tight across his face from the searing heat of the burning cottage. He followed Kitsune out the ruined door, Blue Jay close behind, leaving the corpse of David Koenig to burn. The screams of a dying Kirata came from the conflagration that had been the old professor’s living room, but two others were following Blue Jay’s exodus, and still more were gathered outside the cottage as they emerged.
The fox darted ahead and leaped at the nearest of the tigers, but Kitsune had also breathed in that smoke and she was slowed by it. The Kirata caught her and threw her to the ground. Oliver held his breath an instant until he saw her roll and spring to her feet, and then Kitsune was not just rising, she was changing. In an eyeblink the fox grew into a woman, her fur becoming a copper-red cloak blowing in the snowstorm, billowing behind her. Her jade eyes flashed and she curled her fingers into claws as she leaped at the Kirata’s back, digging furrows in its fur, drawing blood.
Snow whipped into Oliver’s eyes but he saw the tiger-man raise a massive hand to snatch at Kitsune, to tear her off its back.
Both hands on the grip, Oliver swung the king’s blade and it struck flesh like a hatchet into wood, cleaving muscle and bone. The Kirata roared and staggered away, tripping over its own severed arm, blood fountaining from the stump. The hot blood sprayed through the falling snow.
Kitsune dropped to the ground, fur spattered with blood Oliver hoped was not hers.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
Her head hung, hidden beneath her hood, and her body shook as she caught her breath. When she glanced up at him, the ferocity in her eyes chilled him.
