“Then you’d best check with your superiors,” Dorian answered. “The instruction has already been given.”
Without another word, Dorian pushed past the guard and came straight at Wynn. He didn’t even pause, forcing her to back up into the room. When he entered, he went to the desk without even looking at her and set down the tray. The last thing Wynn saw was Nikolas’s desperate face as he stood outside in the passage, and then Dorian quickly left, closing the door.
Wynn sank onto her bed’s edge, with no way to get a message to Chane.
Chane sat leaning against the passage wall at the back of Nattie’s inn, hoping he had done right in sending Shade off with the young sage. Too much time had passed. Or perhaps it just felt so as he quivered and itched, wanting to scratch off his skin and imagining the burning sun just outside the inn’s back door. He hated this and longed for the oblivion of dormancy.
A wild, eager scratching outside the door was followed by a loud huff.
Chane quickly rolled to one knee, pulled his hood low, and shoved open the back door. Shade rushed inside and passed him, and he pulled the door shut. But as he turned about, he saw only her tail as she bolted up the stairs, huffing and panting in agitation.
Something had gone wrong.
Chane did not hesitate and followed Shade quickly, taking two steps at a time to where she sat panting and whining at their room’s door. He opened it, only to have her rush into the room. Quickly stepping inside, he latched the door and crouched before her.
“What is wrong?” he rasped. “What happened?”
Shade rumbled and then whined again, and Chane’s alarm grew. Without warning her, he slipped off the brass ring. She did not even snarl, but instead fixed her crystal blue eyes on his.
A memory rose in Chane’s awareness.
He saw the moment when he had looked down from Wynn’s window into the courtyard that first night back at the guild. He had seen Magiere, Leesil, and Chap step out of the keep’s main doors with Wynn and Shade. Then he saw a flash of them being “escorted” out. The jumbled flashes made him dizzy until the memory seemed to narrow in scope and focus only on parts of the images ... on Chap. This repeated and repeated until Chane jumped to his feet again.
“Chap?” he asked. “You saw Chap?”
Shade let out a sharp huff. She raced to the small, dingy window and rose, setting her forepaws on the sill. Chane joined her, though he flattened against the wall to one side when she pushed her nose around the canvas curtain’s edge to peer down outside. He had no idea what she was trying to tell him.
Shade pulled her head back and looked up at Chane, and the same dizzying flash of memories came to him again. He glanced at the curtained window in alarm.
“Chap ... is here?” he rasped.
She huffed once.
Chane quickly slid the brass ring on as Shade dropped and backed away from the window.
Chap scrambled after Shade’s trail through streets, cutways, and alleys, stopping only when he could to test for her scent. He caught sight of her twice, but each time she somehow outdistanced him. Every time he took to an open street to catch up, he heard someone shouting near or far behind him. When he trailed her all the way into a seedy district, some of what he saw seemed familiar.
He was somewhere else in the very district in which Magiere and Leesil still hid. Then Shade’s trail took another change.
Chap entered a long strip of worn buildings where the next cross street was too far off for Shade to have reached it so quickly. He backtracked, sniffing along the buildings’ side walls until he picked up her trail in an alley. He followed it, until it ended at the back door of a bleached gray, wooden inn with two stories and a high-peaked roof.
He dug his claws into the rear door’s gap.
No matter how hard he levered and pulled, it would not open. Shade could not have gotten in this way, and he doubled-checked that her trail did not continue farther along the alley. The stench of the alley’s center gutter made it hard to be certain, but he could find no scent of her beyond that one building. His daughter had to have gotten through that door.
Shame at what Chap had done to his daughter began to wane. Anger began mixing with his bafflement. If Wynn was locked in a room at the guild, with city guards at the portcullis, what in the world was Shade doing out here alone?
He looked up and down the alley, prepared to slip around the block for a peek at the building’s front. A stinging chill ran over him, making his fur stand on end. Instinctual fury followed, running through his flesh. His hackles rose and he snarled before he even realized why.
Choking in rage, Chap was almost overcome by the sudden, overwhelming presence of an undead.
It was somewhere nearby, and he turned a full circle to peer up and down the alley. Nothing moved in his sight, not even rats scurrying among the refuse and ash cans. He looked again to the locked rear door and up across the windows above it.
Chap swallowed down the need to cut loose a howl. It was inside the place where Shade had gone! Had she been hunting?
He charged and rammed the rear door. It bucked and crackled but did not give way. With his head ringing, he backed up for another run at it.
Then the sickening presence that heated him within suddenly vanished ... as if it had never been there at all.
Chap froze where he stood, trembling with lingering fury, almost unable to think.
The door swung out so hard it knocked over an old crate for collecting kitchen scraps. A corpulent, middle-aged woman in an age-faded apron waddled out, wielding an upturned broom like a club.
“What in the Trinity of Sentience is goin’ on out ...”
She faltered, her angry scowl vanishing as she spotted Chap.
“Wolf!” she screamed.
Chap came to his senses as a large, old man burst out behind the woman.
“It’s a wolf, wolf, wolf!” the woman screamed, ducking behind the old man. The sound of running feet and further shouts carried out the open door from behind the couple.
A snarl turned to a whine in Chap’s throat as he wheeled and raced off down the alley.
All because of Leesil and his stupid, worthless disguise.
Chapter 11
LEESIL HAD NEVER BEEN good at sitting and waiting. This situation was no exception. By the way Magiere paced the small room, she was little better. The clap-pause-clap of her boots was getting on his nerves.
She still limped, but he knew that would pass soon because of what she’d done to herself. That thought took away half his relief that she would be all right. To make things even more uncomfortable, Osha was up on the roof, Leanâlhâm was still off with Chap, and only Brot’an remained. He lay on the floor in a pretense of rest, but his eyes were open, staring into the rooftop’s rafters.
All was quiet but for the monotonous sound of Magiere’s boots.
Small talk seemed pointless, and Leesil didn’t want to speak of anything important. Not while Brot’an was present. A sudden silence jarred Leesil from sulking, and he realized Magiere had stopped pacing as she turned to Brot’an.
“How could you drag a defenseless girl into this skirmish with your own kind?” she demanded.
Brot’an had shown little reaction to anything since last night, but he sat up as if this time the question unnerved him. Much as Leesil wanted an answer to this, among other things, he’d grown as tired of the question as the lack of an answer.
“Her presence with us was her choice, not mine,” Brot’an said, sounding almost irritated.
This was more of an answer than they’d gotten before, Leesil noted. Not that it mattered, since it only raised more questions.