DREAM QUEST

Chapter 9: What Walks in the Dark

The master stepped into the moonlight, and Daren's first thought — the thought that arrived before fear, before strategy, before anything resembling a rational response to what he was looking at — was that it was too big.

Not big the way the pack wolves were big, not the size of a large dog or even a bear, the kind of size that registered as animal and therefore, on some primal level, classifiable. This was different. This was the size of something that had never needed to fit through a doorway, never needed to move carefully through the world to avoid breaking it. It stood on two legs — that was the detail that lodged in Daren's chest like a splinter, because four legs would have been easier to process, four legs meant *animal*, meant something that operated on hunger and instinct and could be understood in those terms. Two legs meant something else. Two legs meant *choice*.

It was easily eight feet at its full height, broad across the shoulders in a way that made the trees behind it look narrow, fur the deep rust-brown of dried blood covering everything except the face — and the face was the worst part, the part Daren's mind kept sliding off of and returning to with horrified compulsion, because the face was almost human. Not human enough to pass, not in the dark, not at this distance, but human enough that you could see what it had once been and understand that whatever stood before him now had been made, not born. Something had happened to this creature, some old and catastrophic transformation, and whatever had been lost in that transformation had clearly not been missed.

The burning amber eyes found Daren across the dark ground between them and stayed there, unblinking, with the particular quality of attention that very dangerous things give to things they have decided to study before they destroy.

The pack held perfectly still around it.

Daren held perfectly still across from it.

For a long moment, nothing in the world moved at all.

Then the master smiled — and the smile was the most human thing about it, which made it the worst thing about it — and said, in a voice like boulders grinding together at the bottom of a river:

"So. You're the one."

Daren's grip tightened on the dagger. The half-awoken blade hummed faintly against his palm, that silver luminescence still tracing its snake-curve edge, and he was aware, with a clarity that fear had sharpened rather than blunted, that he was alone. Vasha and Lyset were somewhere behind him in the chaos of the pack fight, occupied, unreachable in any timeframe that was going to matter to him in the next sixty seconds.

"I don't know what you expected," the master continued, and took one step forward, just one, slow and deliberate, the ground seeming to compress slightly under its weight. "When you killed Greth. Did you think that would go unanswered? Did you think you had done something permanent?" Another step. The amber eyes hadn't moved from Daren's face. "Greth was a nuisance. Reckless. I had been meaning to deal with him myself, eventually." A sound that might have been a laugh, low and without humor. "You saved me the trouble. And now here you stand, with your little glowing knife, looking at me like you're trying to decide if you're brave or stupid."

"Both," Daren said. His voice came out steadier than he had any right to expect. "Probably both."

The master stopped walking.

For just a moment — a single, strange beat of silence — something moved in those amber eyes that wasn't hunger and wasn't fury. Something that looked almost like reassessment. Like it had expected fear and gotten something it hadn't prepared a response for.

Then it moved.

It crossed the distance between them in a single lunge that Daren's eyes almost couldn't track — not the straightforward charge of the pack wolves but something faster, lower, a diagonal approach that came in from the left and forced Daren to commit his dodge before he'd fully read the angle. He threw himself right, felt the rush of displaced air as one massive clawed hand swept through the space his torso had occupied half a second earlier, hit the ground in a roll that was more desperation than technique, and came back up with the dagger raised and his heart somewhere in the vicinity of his throat.

The master had already corrected. Already turning, no wasted motion, tracking Daren's new position with those unblinking eyes.

"Faster than the guards," it observed, sounding genuinely interested. "They freeze. You moved." It rolled one massive shoulder, the joint cracking like a small explosion. "Let's see if you keep moving."