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I can’t hear anything except my own breath and my own pulse and the creak of trees in the wind.

I slow at a bend. The lodge is hidden behind the trees, but the gravel path is still beneath my boots. I can turn back whenever I like. A gust stirs the branches, scattering a crust of snow across the trail, and I hear movement uphill. Silas is coming. My whole body goes warm with anticipation.

I step sideways off the path to give him somewhere to find me, meaning to stay right beside the gravel. The snow looks shallow. Underneath it, the ground tilts sharply away, hidden by a thin white crust. My boot comes down on something slick and tilted.

It’s ice.

The earth falls away in front of me. A steep, glittering slope of frozen runoff drops toward a ravine I can hear but not see, the sound of fast water somewhere far below in the dark.

My boot loses traction.

Above me, through the trees, something enormous moves. Branches crack. A sound rolls through the forest that I feel in my teeth, deep and resonant and not remotely human.

My foot goes out from under me.

Chapter Eight

silas

Icount to thirty precisely, because she asked me to and because I am a man of my word.

It is the longest thirty seconds of my life. By twelve, my dragon is pacing the inside of my ribs. By thirteed, there is gold along my knuckles. By twenty, I can hear the front door bang open two floors below and her boots on the gravel, and her scent pours out into the cold like someone tipped over a jar of honey.

Chase.

Twenty-nine.

CHASE.

Thirty.

I take the stairs in four strides and the porch in one. Her trail is so bright I could follow it blind, ginger and honey and the sharp sweet edge of excitement, and my dragon is happier than he has been in a hundred and fifty years. She ran. She ran because she wanted me to come after her. Every instinct I possess is singing.

Then, halfway down the slope, her scent changes.

The excitement drains out of it. What replaces it is thin and cold and sour. Fear.

The game ends inside me so fast it leaves a vacuum.

The shift takes me before I can decide to. The suit goes first, a three-thousand-dollar charcoal wool reduced to ribbons in a single breath, and then I am bigger than the trees allow, crashing between trunks, snapping branches as thick as my human arm. Gold scales. Gold wings half-furled because there is no room to open them. My dragon has dropped chase entirely. He has one thought left.

Mate.

I break out of the trees at the top of the ice chute in time to see her boot go out from under her.

She slides. She doesn’t scream, she is too busy trying to grab something, but there is nothing to grab. The frozen runoff is smooth as glass and it ends twenty feet below in nothing but dark air and the sound of water.

I throw myself down the slope after her.

My claws punch through the ice and into the frozen earth beneath it. My wings snap open as brakes, as walls, spread wide on either side of her to catch the air. There is no time to fly. My tail whips around a fir trunk and locks there. And my foreleg comes down across her body six feet from the edge and stops her dead.

We hang there. Ice grinding under my claws. Fir creaking behind me. Below us, the ravine breathes cold air up through the dark.

Then, from somewhere under my foreleg, a small, breathless voice.

“Is this the getting caught part?”

I exhale smoke.