Fair Game

momentarily at the foot of the stairs: Lizzie had quit making noise. When he started forward again, his initial rush had slowed, and he moved cautiously, aiming for the open doorway because the subbasement was obviously empty.
    Only it wasn’t.
    Charles paused, still six or eight steps from the bottom of the stairs. There was a scattering of fine gold sparks, like a constellation in miniature. “Pay attention,” the witch had said.
    He might not have, might not have noticed them if they hadn’t moved. But once he did, they did a pretty good job of telling Charles a little something about the fae they were stalking.
    The horned lord, if that was what it was, was big. The ceiling of the subbasement was nine, maybe ten feet high, and the little sparks started right at the top and took up a fair chunk of the corner of the room it stood in. He didn’t get any details, but he knew it was there.
    Charles wished he’d thought to ask Beauclaire what the horned lord looked like in its original shape. Even knowing whether it stood on two legs or four would have been useful. As it was, he was hoping for two—a four-legged creature that was big enough to brush the ceiling would be nearly elephant-sized.
    Anna had stopped when he did, her stillness alert and watchful. Charles turned his head and nipped her shoulder lightly. When she looked at him he directed her toward Beauclaire, who was already halfway across the room.
    The fae should have backup—and Anna didn’t have a whole lot of experience in combat. Fighting something that she couldn’t see wasn’t the best way for her to gain more.
    She gave him a puzzled look and then trotted off after the fae, while Charles continued more slowly down the last few stairs behind her.Isaac, aware that something was going on, stopped at the bottom and waited for Anna, then Charles, to go past him.
    Charles bided his time, watching the hidden fae, trying to use the sparks to infer what it was doing. When Anna and Beauclaire passed it, it moved. Charles gathered himself, but the hidden creature stopped before it got close to Anna—the top part of it moving with a dizzy swirl of sparks.
    He imagined that it had finally noticed the pair of werewolves, he and Isaac, focused on where it stood, though it should be invisible and had turned its head to watch them.
    After a moment, the top part of the creature bent down and shook itself at him like an irritated moose—it was definitely paying attention to Isaac and him. Rather than jump from above and find himself impaled, Charles crept cautiously down the stairs until he stood just in front of Isaac, letting the other wolf see from his body language just where the enemy stood.
    Isaac sank down into a crouch and took a couple of gliding leaps away, separating so that they could attack from different directions and also would be two targets instead of one.
    There was an abrupt crash from the doorway that Anna and Beauclaire had disappeared into, and then came the broken sound of a woman sobbing. The mostly invisible fae moved again, swinging its head toward the noise, Charles thought. Then Anna appeared in the opening, and the fae rushed her.
    But it wasn’t as fast as Charles. He aimed low, relative to the size of the creature he was attacking, about three feet up. From the way it moved he was pretty sure it was bipedal—and that meant tendons. He hit something that felt like the front of a moose’s hock and changed his bite mid-attack, letting his momentum pull him around so that his fangs cut through the joint horizontally as his body swung around until he was behind the creature. Then he set his jaw like a bulldog and hungon, digging into bone while he tore at the horned lord with his claws, reaching upward to see if he could find an important part to damage.
    The fae creature howled, a wild, piercing whistling sound that was an odd combination of elk bugle and stallion scream, and when it did, air moved through the subbasement like a sea-fed storm hitting shore. Something that felt like a club hit him in the shoulder, and then Isaac leapt into the fray, striking higher than Charles had, perhaps hoping to knock it over. Beneath Charles, the fae creature swayed, but it didn’t go down as Isaac found something to set his fangs into. His head rocked in a motion that told Charles he’d scored a chunk of muscle rather than bone. He was tearing it while he held on with front claws and raked with his hind legs like a cat.
    Charles’s