Page 87 of Cursed Shadows 4

My eyes fix on the emeralds. Can hardly make out the silhouette that shadows in the mist. But with each focused second that passes, my heart thumps just a bit harder, just a bit faster—

And the shape of the beast comes into view.

My throat bobs.

A beast of white fur, a translucence to it that shows enough of the pink skin beneath, a beast that stands as tall as I would if I had the strength, the courage to rise.

A faerie hound has found me.

Standing between the boulders, camouflaged in the frost, the beast watches me.

Then, slowly, its upper lip—foamed with drool—curls over its teeth. Saliva drips from the needle-like teeth, bunched together like a shark’s fangs, rows and rows of a menacing, metal danger.

It faces me with a silent snarl that needs no sound, because that gleaming green gaze is enough of a threat.

My hands fist on my thighs. Fingernails scrape over the waterproof leathers of my high boots.

I don’t move.

I watch the creature that watches me right back.

Fully mature, perhaps a decade old, and female I suspect. They are always that bit more feral than the males, and I think it might be something to do with the need to protect their pups.

Perhaps her pups are nearby.

Perhaps I am in her fucking territory.

The thought shudders me. Not just my spine, my arms, my shoulders, but my insides, too.

My mind flutters in all its panic to the ice-python.

I’m no mind reader, but I’m almost certain that the snake was sizing me up for a meal before it decided I might be too big to consume or might be too much of a battle.

I appeased it.

I made it an offer—the rodent.

A trade.

A life for a life, a show of respect from me to the beast.

But it was more than that, it was that I made the meal easy for the beast. I caught the rodent, I killed it, then I simply handed it over.

The snake would have had a fight in killing me—and its own life would have been at risk, too. Could be that it was a touch grateful, and that was why it warned me of the dokkalf who aimed his arrow at me in the depths of my sleep. Could be that it was simply repaying a debt.

Whatever it is, it gives me the idea to offer the same to the faerie hound—because, truthfully, I have no other route to take.

A fight with a beast like this, I will lose it. Fast.

Those serrated metal teeth will shred me to bloody ribbons. It will be a far uglier death than any litalf will spare me.

And my body won’t survive it.

There will be no corpse of mine to be flung back through the portal and land in Comlar.

I will be in shredded pieces—and that is if the faerie hound doesn’t eat me.

So I play my only hand. The only out that I might have.

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