On the Prowl

understand, no, but maybe—right this moment—she didn’t have to. “It took you years to understand how to choose your hunts,” she said at last. “It may take me awhile to understand, but I hope it won’t be years.”
    His voice was soft. “You don’t regret our bond.”
    “No. I don’t regret it.” Though she wished she knew what it meant to him. Kai shifted so she could look at him. “How did this mage—Ilké, you called him. How did Ilké end up here?”
    “He knew his crimes had been uncovered to the two queens and fled. Because he was part sidhe and strengthened by death magic, he was able to leave Faerie entirely, hoping my queen would not set me on his trail once he was beyond her territory. Only a hellhound could track him, you see.”
    “Sometimes you say queen singular, sometimes queens, plural. Which is it?”
    “I told you that a few High Sidhe take an interest in governing. The Summer Queen and the Winter Queen are…eh, you don’t have the right words. Call them the High Lords of the thirteen realms. They don’t operate a government, a bureaucracy, such as you’re used to, but each queen has her court, her dominion. Each steps in when she sees a need.”
    “Do they rule together?”
    “Not precisely. Their dominions overlap at times. When this happens they discuss the matter and decide which of them will act. For them to act together…that hasn’t happened in my lifetime.”
    And how long was that? She decided not to ask. Not yet. “But you speak of ‘my queen.’ Singular.”
    “Hellhounds are the Huntsman’s to command, and so I was, at first. But the Huntsman is brother to Winter and lover to Summer…I saw both queens often, and one day I knew I must go with zan Al’aran. With the Winter Queen.” A hint of longing underlay the words. “So I became hers, and she became mine. It’s hard, being queen. Harder for Winter than Summer, because who doesn’t love Summer? She’ll have been lonely without me.”
    Kai felt like squirming. It was pointless to be jealous of an immortal—and no doubt supernally beautiful—elfin queen. But she was. Oh, she was. She tried to take the high road. “I imagine she was upset when the realms shifted and you couldn’t return.”
    “The realms didn’t shift then. That happened centuries ago, after the Great War. After that your realm was hard to reach, requiring great power. The magic here wasn’t replenished, so by the time I arrived there was little left.” He sighed. “The hunt took too long. Over the years my own power lessened because there was less for me to draw on, to absorb. By the time I killed Ilké, I couldn’t go home.”
    “Couldn’t your queen have brought you back? If she’s so powerful—”
    “It doesn’t work that way. Hellhounds travel between realms without a gate. It’s inborn, that skill, and common to many of the wild sidhe. But to bring someone to you from another realm, you must open a gate. After the Great War, the Old Ones forbade opening gates to Earth.”
    “Old Ones?”
    He nodded. “Strange beings, on the whole. I think they’re like unicorns.”
    “I’m getting seriously dizzy here.”
    “Unicorns have that effect on me, too.”
    Kai found herself smiling. Unicorns, Old Ones, elfin queens, renegade mages…it all sounded fantastic, even absurd. She accepted that these things were true because Nathan said so, and he didn’t lie. But the reality she understood was the warmth of his hand, the chill of the winter air, and the slow, sad song of the wind outside.
    Also a steadily glowing mage light. “Did you know you’d be stranded?” she asked quietly. “When your queen set you to track Ilké, did you know you wouldn’t be able to return?”
    “I knew it was possible, yet I didn’t. Not really.” His thoughts, usually slow, turned busy—silvery minnows struggling to find a fit as he hunted words. “Hellhounds are sentients, but our brains shape our thoughts, and hellhound brains are not human. What I knew as a hound was different from what I can know as a man. Lesser in some ways, greater in others. I knew I could be trapped here, but that was so apart from my reality that it had no meaning until it happened.”
    She nodded. “Like unicorns. You tell me they’re real and I believe you, but I can’t grasp it.”
    He found one of his smiles, this one holding equal parts sweet and sad. “Yes. The queen told me I could be lost here and I accepted that it was true, but didn’t