The bunny hopped between the trees. We followed it. Snow crunched under my feet. We really didn’t have time for this. Unfortunately, I needed the Oracle. If Hugh and Roland intended to assault Atlanta, I would need their help and their magic. And I couldn’t afford to ignore their advice. If I refused to see them and they had a magic self-guided missile that could take Hugh out, I would be kicking myself for years.

Derek wrinkled his nose. “Here it is.”

I pulled a strip of gauze out of my pocket and passed it to him.

“What is that smell?” Desandra wrinkled her nose.

Derek ripped the gauze in half and handed her a piece.

The trees fell back and we came to a hill sitting in the middle of a large clearing. Perfectly spherical and smooth, it protruded from the snow, like the cupola of a submerged cathedral. I remembered it as being dark gray with flecks of gold and swirls of green, but the moonlight turned it glossy indigo.

The bunny stopped.

The ground under our feet rumbled. Derek sneezed. Desandra clamped the gauze to her nose. The hill shuddered and slid upward, the snow sliding off its top.

Robert jumped back ten feet. Ascanio just stared, wide-eyed.

A giant head broke free of the snow, its neck a brown mass of wrinkled folds. Hey, pretty girl. Long time, no see. The colossal tortoise stared at me with dinner-plate-sized irises and opened its gargantuan mouth.

Right. The full treatment. Just once, would it kill them to meet me in a gazebo someplace or in a fried chicken joint?

Derek and Desandra doubled over in a fit of sneezing.

The bunny’s fur crawled, boiled, and stretched into the shape of a small black cat. The cat leaped into the tortoise’s mouth.

“Wow,” Ascanio said. “That’s brutal.”

I filed the new item of teenage slang away for future reference.

Desandra pointed at the open mouth, her other hand pinching her nose closed. “In dere?”

“Mm-hm,” I said.

“Fuck dis! I’m stayin’ here.”

“I’m a rat,” Robert said. “I’m not going into a reptile’s mouth.”

Oh boy. Fine time to develop phobias. “It’s fine,” I told them. “They’ll probably cut you off from the conversation anyway.”

“I’m coming,” Ascanio declared.

Derek nodded, holding the rag over his nose, and came to stand with me.

I stepped into the tortoise’s mouth.

• • •

THE THICK SPONGY tongue gave a little under my feet. I went forward, past the roof of the mouth, into the throat, draped with garlands of frozen algae and icicles. Ahead dark ice slicked the floor of the throat tunnel. Last time I came through here, I had taken a bath in what I strongly suspected was tortoise spit. I stepped onto the ice. It held. Score one for me.

“This is awesome,” Ascanio volunteered behind me.

Someone was having entirely too much fun.