As night fell, the prehistoric landscape came alive with sound: howling and shrieking, screaming, calling and barking.
“I’ve suddenly realized why all of these animals died out,” Scathach said. She was sitting cross-legged in the mouth of a cave with a pile of rocks beside her. “They probably died of exhaustion. None of them could get any sleep.”
“I could get some sleep-if only you’d let me,” Joan grumbled. The tiny Frenchwoman was in the cave behind the Shadow, lying on a bed of straw and covered with grass and branches they’d cut from trees and plaited together. Pulling the leafy blanket up to her chin, she closed her eyes. “I’m sleeping now,” she announced, and almost immediately, her breathing settled into an easy rhythm.
Scathach reached over and fixed one of the branches on her friend’s shoulders. In the pitch-darkness, she picked an enormous black beetle off a leaf and laid it on the ground outside the cave mouth. It slipped into the night, where it was immediately pounced upon by what looked like a small fox. Scathach shook her head: in this place and time, everything was either predator or prey.
Catching the hint of a musty odor, the Shadow picked up a rock and tossed it out into the night. Something yelped and scuttled off through the long grasses. “The Dire Wolves are back,” she said quietly. Behind her, Joan started to snore very gently.
Scathach smiled. It gave her extraordinary pleasure to know that Joan had fallen asleep confident that she would be safe. Scatty guessed that this must be like the absolute trust a child had in a parent. Then her smile faded: she’d never had that trust in her own parents. The two figures had been almost strangers, aloof and distant, and although she had called them Mother and Father, these were empty titles; there had been no emotion behind the words. She’d been close to her grandmother and her uncle, but she’d always been closest to her sister.
Aoife of the Shadows: now, there was a name she’d avoided thinking about for years.
Something moved in the grass and she tossed another rock, sending the unseen creature crashing into the undergrowth.
Scathach rarely thought about her parents now. They were both alive-she would have been told if they were not-in a distant Shadowrealm that was supposedly patterned after the lost world of Danu Talis. She’d not been there in centuries. Not for the first time, it struck her that, unlikely as it seemed, Nicholas and Perenelle Flamel had become the parents she’d never really had.
She frowned, trying to remember the first time she had encountered the Flamels. She was almost sure it was Paris in the middle of the fourteenth century, shortly after they had bought the Book of Abraham the Mage. She knew for certain that she had met up with them in Spain when they were trying to translate the Codex, and she had definitely been in Paris for Perenelle’s funeral in 1402. Over the centuries she had crossed paths with them again and again. She had saved their lives-and they had saved hers on more than one occasion-and almost accidentally they had become her family. When she needed advice, she went to Perenelle, and when she needed money, she asked Nicholas.
Across the decades, there had been some others too who had become part of her new family-Joan was like a sister to her-but the problem with having humani friends was that they aged and died, and in the last few centuries she’d been careful not to cultivate them. The last time she’d had a circle of close friends was when she’d been in a Goth-punk band in Germany with three of her vampire clan. They’d had some wild times. Sleeping during the day, singing and partying all night, then hunting the savage water sprites Nix and Nixe in the twilight hours before dawn. Now that she taught martial arts in San Francisco, she had plenty of students, and on the last Friday of every month she met up with some of them for karaoke night in the local sushi bar, but that was just to keep up a normal appearance, and they were more acquaintances than actual friends.
And she wasn’t lonely. Not really…
But these last few days had reminded her just how much she enjoyed the company of humani. She was thrilled to have been able to use her skills properly, rather than just in the dojo. She had millennia of martial arts training; she should be using it to protect her friends and keep them safe. It made her feel wanted and needed. The adventure in Paris had made her realize that it was time to take a more active role in the world again. She had promised herself that when all of this was over, she would do what she had always done for the humani: protect those who needed protection and punish those who deserved it.
Right now, however, she didn’t think she was going to be able to keep that promise.
The Shadow had been in difficult situations before-trapped in Shadowrealms, facing fearsome odds, battling monsters, once even standing alone against an entire army-and yet she had never doubted that she would survive and make her way home. A Shadowrealm had both an entrance and an exit-all she had to do was to find that exit. Foes could be fought or tricked, defeated or won over.
But this was different.
There were enemies aplenty in this Pleistocene world-and none of them could be tricked or won over. Much of the flora was poisonous or inedible, and all of the fauna was hungry.
And there were just too many of them.
After their encounter with the saber-toothed tigers, Scathach and Joan had seen lions, huge bears and endless herds of bison. Vast deafening flocks of condors flapped across the skies. As night had fallen, they had spotted the first of the wolves, tall, long-legged creatures keeping pace with them in the high grass.
“Wolves?” Joan asked
“Dire Wolves,” Scathach corrected, “The ancestor of the modern wolf, and just as deadly. And for every one you see, there are at least a dozen that you don’t.”
“I can see four.”
“Well, then there’s a big pack out there watching us.”
For the first time in her very long life, Scathach was beginning to consider that she might be in trouble. Real trouble. This was a situation in which not even her speed and special skills were useful. She tossed another rock into the darkness, heard it strike flesh and threw another in the direction she guessed the creature would run. A wolf barked in fright. “She shoots, she scores!” she whispered.
They had been in this landscape for only a few hours and already they were attracting the attention of the big predators. Scathach had no doubt she could fight them off, and Joan was almost her equal in battle, but sooner or later one of them would be injured. And while they were both immortal, they were not invulnerable-if the injury was devastating enough, they would die. The slash of a tiger’s claw, a bite, even a scratch would quickly become infected. Her metabolism would help her heal… if she fed. The problem was, in this landscape, there was no one to feed off-except Joan… and she would never do that.
Scathach’s vampire clan were not blood drinkers; they had other needs. And while she rarely-very rarely-needed to feed, sooner or later the hunger would come upon her. Joan too would need food; she was vegetarian, but who knew what was safe to eat in this time and place?
The Shadow took a deep breath, drawing in the clean night air, and leaned back on outstretched arms to survey the landscape. Close by, a lion roared and something smaller squealed in alarm.
She had lived longer than she’d ever imagined, seeing civilizations rise and fall and rise again. She had lived through the best and worst of humani history. In the course of her long life, she had made mistakes, and while it was not in her nature to apologize for what she had done, there were things she would have done differently. Her biggest regret was that she had trained Cuchulain; she had taken a boy and turned him into a warrior, and that had ultimately killed him. Maybe she should have found an Elder master to make him immortal beforehand. Funny, she hadn’t thought of Cuchulain in centuries; he was so inextricably entwined with memories of her sister, and those were painful memories.
If she’d had her life to live again, she would never- ever- have fought with her twin. When her parents and brother ignored her, Aoife had always been there for her; Aoife had always loved her unconditionally.
Drawing her knees up to her chest, Scathach wrapped her arms around her shins and rested her chin on her kneecaps. It had been a long time since she had thought about her sister. She wondered if Aoife was still on the earth. She thought so. Occasionally, she would hear rumors about a red-haired pale-skinned warrior, or she’d come across stories that confused her with Aoife, mingling and mixing their legends until sometimes even she could not tell them apart.
Gazing across the landscape, Scatty realized that there was a very good chance she could die here. Whenever she thought about dying, she imagined it would be in a dramatic battle, something huge and glorious that would ensure that her name would be remembered for generations. She didn’t like the idea of dying in this lonely place, hunted down by prehistoric megafauna. A sudden thought made her sit up straight. She’d once been told that she would die in an exotic location. Well, it didn’t get much more exotic than the Pleistocene era, did it?
Scathach tilted her face to the heavens. The sky was cloudless, the stars so bright and clear that they actually shed a little light on the ground. She started to look for the constellations. They had shifted in the heavens during the centuries she had lived on earth, but if she could find the polestar she should be able to find…
The huge gray wolf leapt out of the darkness, savage jaws gaping, saliva matting its fur.
Scatty dropped to her back and her legs shot out, catching the beast in the chest, lifting it high in the air and sending it sailing off into the night. There was a single yelp of surprise before it crashed into the grasses and then a snarl as it scrambled to its feet and trotted away.
The Shadow remained on her back, staring at the night sky.
There was something wrong with the stars.
Rising slowly to her feet, she stepped outside the cave mouth to look across the arc of the heavens. An enormous swath of light that almost resembled the Milky Way washed across the sky, but there was something wrong with its overall shape. It should have been an arch-but this looked too straight. And no matter in which direction she looked, she could not find the polestar.
“Where…,” she breathed.
And then the moon rose huge and yellow in the east and climbed steadily into the heavens, shedding milk-white light across the landscape. The sky was so clear that individual craters were visible on the surface.
A heartbeat later, the second moon rose.
Then a third.
And a fourth.