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“Patience,” the cat hissed from deep inside me. “The hunter knows patience.”
“Yes. Take back your claws. Keep them until the time.”
She balked at that, resisting. My fingers burned with her annoyance. The claws anchored her to the world, let her taste and feel it.
“You can bring them out again, from time to time,” I told her. “We’ll run.”
“And hunt?”
“Yes. To reward your patience.”
She growled a bit, considering. “Take them then. For now.”
I tried, wishing the claws gone. Wishing them transformed to air. The magic dissipated, as if it found nothing to attach to. “I don’t know how.”
A nearly fatal mistake to admit that.
The growl became a purr of amusement. She nudged at the inside of my skin, then pushed with more vigor, making my ribs creak with strain. “Perhaps you offer me nothing. Why should I not seize what I can? You have no power. You are weak and worthless.”
“That’s not true. I am more powerful than you.”
“Prove it.” She issued the challenge in the hissing silence of my heart. With a liquid lunge, she hurled herself against my rib cage, threatening to burst free as I’d once seen the Dog erupt from the shreds of Rogue’s broken body.
“Gwynn!” Rogue’s shout echoed, a useless warning from an unbridgeable distance, for I was already wrestling with her. The anchoring rope of his thoughts slid away from my grasp. It was all I could do to fight the cat down with all of my strength. She had me by the throat and I dug my claws, the ones she’d foolishly lost to me in her greed, into her soft belly.
For this, too, Rogue had handed me the power, stoking the desire in me. But I needed more. All those lean, despairing days while I had searched for him, the final conflict with Titania, my brush with death—they all left me without reserves. I’d begun refilling the well, but watching the power drain away, I knew it wouldn’t be enough.
I should have waited.
Waiting would not have helped.
She, too, drew from me and would grow stronger as I did.
It would not have saved me to wait. Perhaps nothing could.
Eager, feeling me weaken with the onset of despair, the cat closed her jaws on me. Just as the Black Dog had in my first few hours in Faerie. I found myself on my back, claws digging into the packed earth of the arena, my body pressed flat. The internal rack of her determination stretched me, my muscles and sinews threatening to tear asunder.
The learning is in the doing, Rogue had said, but what could I possibly do?
I hurled wishes at her, but they slid off, mercury on glass. My energy drained away with each attempt and I made myself stop.
With a delighted purr, she flexed, and I screamed with the pain. Worse, the extent of my dreadful miscalculation eroded me further. I’d been so determined, so stubborn and now… Now I’d lost not only my own life, but our unborn child’s also. I couldn’t let that happen.
I needed another source of energy, now.
I have resources outside myself.
Mother Earth is the font of all our life, magical and otherwise.
With nothing left to lose, I reached down into the earth, seeking that font. At first I flailed, finding only what I expected—dirt, the crust over magma beneath. There had to be more. Rogue had said as much. He would never lie to me about something that important. I refocused, looking wider, without expectation.
The magma layers roiled, not like the dull diagrams in the textbooks, but vivacious and bubbling. The blood of the earth, hot and stoked with unimaginable potential.
Deep in the center and beating like a living heart lived not a metallic core, but a vivid, eternal and infinite fountain of fiery life.
I approached feeling as I once had standing before a dragon. It burned with a similar heat, both wholly magic and impervious to it. The same sense of worshipful awe infused me. My heart beat in time with it—a rhythm that somehow synchronized with both my own 2/4 atrial/ventricular pattern and the 3/4 that belonged to Rogue.
No, not that belonged to Rogue this time, but to the fetal heartbeat within me.
