47

I SCREAMED, AND I shut it down. I shut it all down. No more birds from Merlin. But in my panic, I shut down the tie with Auggie and Jean-Claude. For an instant, it was just me and her inside my head. I felt rain on my face, cool and warm. The moon rode full and bright, and I was too tall, and too male. I thought it was Jean-Claude's memory, but the hand I could see was too rough, too dark. Whose memory was I trapped in?

"Mine," she said again.

Oh, yeah, her. So why was I inside the head of the man she was about to eat? Why wasn't I inside her body?

Something moved in the moonlight. Something huge and pale, like some muscular ghost, sliding along the ground toward me. The head moved, and the eyes caught the moon, shining at me. I stared into the face of that great cat, and knew that nothing like it had walked the earth for thousands of years. "Cave lion," I thought, "huh, they were striped." The cat crouched to spring.

A wolf appeared between me and it. A white wolf with a dark saddle and head. Me, my wolf. This was a dream, which meant I was unconscious. Weird.

The wolf's hackles rose, and it gave that low, bass growl that all the canids use when they aren't kidding anymore. The wolf looked fragile beside that crouching figure. We were out of our weight class by a few hundred pounds.

I smelled wolf. I smelled pine, and forest loam. I smelled things that never grew here in this land, where the Mother of All Darkness had taken Merlin, or whoever he'd been once. I smelled the trees of home, the earth of pack land. I smelled the soft musk of wolf.

The cave lion tensed, and I knew this was it. The wolf braced for the spring, and the body I was wearing readied a spear that would not help.

Something touched my hand. I grabbed for it, without thinking, and the night exploded into white, hot light. Light, and pain, a great deal of pain.

Voices. "Let go, Anita, let go!"