Blessed Tanit! If the Wild Hunt rode into the mortal world, then Hallows’ Night had come again. Months had passed in what had felt to me like a single day. Bee and I had walked in Adurnam in late March. Now it was the end of October in the mortal world. The Hunt would pursue a person whose blood hummed with the power and energy we humans called magic. It would corner, kill, and dismember the hapless victim, and toss the severed head down a well. Yet looking at the silent personages awaiting their feast atop the ziggurat, I had to wonder: Was my sire the master, or a slave to others’ bidding?

This mystery lay beyond my grasp right now. I had to concentrate on what I had come here for. If the crowning feast was the center of the city, then surely my sire would hold his prisoner close to the celebration yet hidden from it. The spirit world did not have shadows but it did have brighter places and places more gray and indistinct. It had places that drew the eye, and places the eye slid away from as water slides off a duck’s back.

I found it on the fourth staircase, the broken one. Along the outer rim of the towering crack that split the staircase ran a narrow balcony like an outgrowth on a glassy stone cliff. A figure sat there, unmoving. It was too small for me to see features or even to discern the colors of the clothes it was wearing, although it looked a lot like a dash jacket and he looked like a man. The only way to reach the spot was to be lowered by rope, to climb by ladder, or to fly.

Could I fly? Wasn’t I an eru’s daughter?

I turned my thoughts inward, searching through my body for a memory of wings, but I remained stubbornly Cat, locked into the mortal flesh my mother had given birth to.

So I did the only thing I could: I plotted out a route and hastened toward the broken stair. Once I reached its jagged steps, I raced up them to the point where the huge gash like a notch made by a giant’s knife had cut through the stone into the interior of the ziggurat. A bridge no wider than my hand spanned the gap between the sides of the gash; the balcony lay on the other side of the crevice. I balanced across the gulf of air until I reached a flight of floating steps, some of them missing because they, too, were broken.

After clambering up, I paused to catch my breath on a tiny platform not even wide enough to sit on. Above me rose the sheer face of a cliff, as ominous as a wall of ice. A pretty balcony ornamented by ribbons lay above me, and above it rose more cliff. Below me, the cleft fell away into darkness.