That worried Ainsel more than anything else, and she didn’t know why. Something had changed, in the sky and the land below her feet.

“Fray? Curse?” said Nabi blankly. Then his expression cleared as Galbaric stood up, yanking Remy to his feet. The boy’s form had stabilized, but when he glanced toward Ainsel, she could still see a red gleam in his eyes. He didn’t resist when the Thunder King kept a hold on his arm, stalking alongside him without ever taking his gaze from her.

She felt a tickle of confusion in her gut at his look, a twist of desire to both flee him and heal him. But it vanished quickly under her growing sense that everything around her was going wrong, wrong, wrong.

The wind gusted and then died away.

Somebody was humming a song. Ainsel looked wildly between Nabi, Sarge, Jim, but they looked puzzled themselves. The music came from all around them, as if generated by the air itself: a lilting little song, like an innocent children’s tune that occasionally hit the wrong note. It didn’t sound like a child singing, though. The light tenor reminded Ainsel of somebody happy, and made her want to scream as it got closer, louder. The tune repeated, once, twice, and Galbaric and Remy had barely moved. How could they be so slow?

Dread crept along Ainsel’s skin. Jim said uneasily, “I think I’d rather go back to Bone Station—”

“Chief!” shouted Nabi. “Something coming!” He and Sarge both pulled levers on their guns as they looked around wildly. A shiver ran through Ainsel and she edged sideways, bothered almost as much by the less musical hum of the guns.

“La la la,” sang the directionless voice, and then finally the song had words, all layering together.

“Here. I. Am.” The song ended like a curtain would be pulled away, but nothing appeared.

“Where are you?” The voice spoke rather than sang. “I can feel you.” It was an intrigued voice, with fangs. “Somewhere.”

Ainsel’s fingers curled in mute paralysis, digging into Jim’s arm until he yelped and she released him instinctively.

“Here? Or here?”

With shocking suddenness, an invisible force swatted Sarge and Nabi away from Ainsel, flying yards away and landing hard. She gasped and reached for Jim but the invisible hand moved faster than her. By the time his cut-off cry of surprise had faded, he’d been flung even farther than the other two.

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“Jim!” cried Ainsel, but before she could dash toward him, the voice developed a direction.

“Hmm hmm hmm,” said the voice, from a different point for each beat. “I hear you, too.” A shape flickered at the corner of her vision, human-sized, gone each time she tried to track it.

“Down, lady,” bellowed Sarge, who had rolled to his knees. Ainsel obediently dropped to the ground. The gun sparked and then spat one of those awful streams of lightning in an arc over her head.

For a moment, a man-shaped darkness was caught in the blue river. Then the stream was a fountain shooting into the sky, sputtering out as a figure bent over the sprawled body of Sarge.

Red, with pale pink glinting through it. The rust-colored ground gleamed with wet. Sarge’s body bent in an impossible way and something spilled out of his middle.

Galbaric barked something in a harsh and alien language, syllables that would have torn a human throat rolling off his tongue. He sounded furious instead of afraid, and hope flared in Ainsel that maybe this could all be fixed. If she could get to Sarge—

The indistinct figure looked up, studying Galbaric before looking at Remy and then at Ainsel. When it looked back at Remy, it said something in an entirely different language. Remy only growled in response.

The figure turned back to Ainsel as it straightened up. “Ah. If that’s the dragon, then this must be—”

No. No. No.

Ainsel huddled in Galbaric’s coat, pulling it around her as if it could protect her from the incoming death. The teenage girl who went to sleep every night in Kishar and Andrea’s house; who struggled to be what she was expected to be; who prayed each night for dreamless rest; that girl could do nothing to escape the boogieman except hide under the covers.

But something else lived within Ainsel, too. Something that danced unshod, and ran, and screamed, who would not, could not give up. Something that knew meadowlands, something that made a barren world cough out demon dragonflies, something that had seen too much, and experienced how little passive paralysis accomplished.

No. No. No.

The ground trembled again. No. Not the ground. The world. The dark figure flowing toward her jittered back and forth and the sky jerked above her, until once again the shattered moon hung directly overhead. She could feel the echoes of the power that had shattered it, lingering after all this time. It was a painting on a distant wall, abstract and unattainable, until she felt a second power stir in the coat around her shoulders.

“And if I kill you, surely I deserve the prize you’ve stolen,” said the indistinct figure happily, reaching out for her even as it zig-zagged back and forth with the rest of the world.

Ainsel tumbled backwards, holding the coat closed around her as the power that shattered moons poured into her, filtered by the coat and transformed by her determination to escape. The girl who slept safely in Kishar and Andrea’s house would sleep there again. She could make it so.

Her head pounded as fragments of the moon fell from the sky, raining down as blood-and-silver dust. As her hair lifted around her, she tilted her face up, opening her mouth to drink in the light.

“Ainsel!” shouted Remy, and “No!” shouted Galbaric. But the hunter, Sarge’s killer, was far, far closer, reaching for her with a garish, dripping grin. She stomped a foot, and earth and sky shattered.