Lupi 04 - Night Season

going to save your Finder friend and keep Edge from falling into chaos, we need to get moving. Nathan?” She gave her companion an inquiring look.
    â€œYes, I think so. There is one other I would like you to meet,” he said to the rest of them. “Her name is Dell.”
    On the hill behind them, a grassy hump shifted. And stood. And a huge cat with the husky build and oversize pads of a lynx padded down toward them. A cat he couldn’t possibly have missed seeing earlier, yet he had. A cat that looked exactly like the one he’d thought he’d glimpsed at the end of the dondredii attack.
    â€œI was sent here,” Kai said, “because the realms have shifted. With that shift, the needs of the medallion changed. It’s searching for a new holder. I’m supposed to help it find the right one.”
    â€œYou?” Theil’s left eyebrow arched slightly in subtlest scorn. “You are human.”
    â€œThe realms have shifted,” Kai Tallman Michalski repeated. “And I am sent by the Winter Queen. Perhaps she sees something in me you do not.”
    Did she realize she’d offered insult and challenge as subtle as any sidhe might conjure? Cullen’s mount shifted. His saddle creaked. “I’m following Cynna’s trail,” Cullen said abruptly, turning his horse’s head in the direction of those tracks. “Feel free to join me when you’re through chatting.”
    All at once Theil laughed. The sound was silver and wind, and he had a sudden image of a hawk stooping on its prey. “Ki rel abathium!” she cried—which meant, he thought, something along the lines of why the hell not? “We ride, Rohen!”
    Her horse spun and leaped into a gallup. Within a single heartbeat, so had the rest.

THIRTY-THREE
    L EERAHAN Court was stone and it was forest grove. It was both garden and sculpture, structure and meadow and quiet little brook. The fluting edge of one wall rose above the trees on Cullen’s left like a giant bird’s wing. On his right, twenty feet away, was a staircase. Between wall and staircase was grass—thick, lush, and brilliantly green. Never mind that elsewhere grass was winter-dead. Cullen walked down the wide swath of greensward that was the Leerahan great hall with Rohen’s liege, twenty of Rohen’s sidhe, a hellhound who looked exactly like a man, and two women. One of those women was not quite a telepath.
    There had been time to talk some on the way here. Not as much as might be expected, because Theil had spoken the truth when she said her people could move quickly when they wished. It was damned hard to hold much of a conversation at full gallop. But he’d learned what Kai Tallman’s Gift was, and why she was here.
    It was the hellhound who’d gained them entrance to the court. Without him, Aduello might have allowed Theil and her half sister to enter, but not with so many of her people. Certainly not with Cullen. But no one was willing to tell the hellhound no.
    Not because Nathan Hunter was—or had been?—a hellhound. Because he was Winter’s hound. Said in a certain tone, “winter” meant only one thing—the Winter Queen, one of the pair of immortals who ruled all Faerie. The queens didn’t rule in Edge, but if Winter’s hound wished to visit Leerahan alongside two human women, twenty sidhe from Rohen, their liege, and a bedraggled lupus sorcerer from Earth, no one was of a mind to turn him away.
    At the end of the greensward was a stone dais thirty feet wide. Not carved stone, and not precisely a dais, for it was platform and furnishings in one. It looked as if bedrock had been bidden to rise and fold itself into shapes comfortable for sitting, standing, or sprawling, depending on the whims of those who waited there. Cushions were strewn casually among the dips and benches, cupped seats and steps.
    Aduello lounged on a stony bench cushioned by thick white fur. He was a tall, languorous sidhe of predictably inhuman beauty—black hair striped with silver falling like rain to his waist. He wore a pair of low-slung black pants that were silk and snug with a loose, flowing shirt and a cropped vest, heavily embroidered. Three of his court stood nearby—two men and a woman, all wearing swords. As did most of the sidhe assembled along the sides of the greensward, watching.
    Beside him sat Cynna. In a dress.
    That gown—long, gossamer, the