“You can have the slug. I’m really full,” I said, and held it out. After a short hesitation, it too was accepted and consumed.

I went and got a drink from one of the many rainwater collections around me. Then I climbed into my moss pile.

“Thanks for your help,” I said to the tree-’puses, many of which were still parked on the trunks around me. “I really appreciate it. You’re wonderful hosts, and you have a lovely forest. Very, um, moist.”

Of course, nobody responded. I was starting to get used to talking to myself, though.

“Okay, well, I’m going to get some sleep. Maybe I’ll see you guys in the morning.”

Chapter 18

Sought, sought, the wind whispered.

Ghosteater lifted his head.

Run, the wind sighed.

How long had it been since the wind said such a thing?

He opened his mouth, smelling, tasting. He didn’t know the one seeking him, but it was a creature of power. Male. Young.

How strange. No one sought him any longer.

Interested, he rose to seek the seeker.

The wind brushed through his fur, mumbling its warnings.

The wolf crouched in the silence, watching a dark-haired man walk down a street in the place the humans called Dorf. He didn’t know the man but recognized him for what he was: a power, an émigré. An equal.

Equals were dangerous. His hackles lifted.

Ghosteater had not encountered many dangers of late. The great predators of this continent had vanished, and truth be told, such creatures had stopped posing a meaningful threat when he learned to walk in the silence. Even the cats. How easy it had been to step out in their midst and destroy a whole pride. It had quickly ceased to interest him.

As for humans, despite their strange machines, they were absurdly easy to kill. Soft, blind — it was hard to believe they had multiplied so swiftly, driving so many other creatures from the face of the earth. One day they had appeared, roving in a few spare bands, curious and inventive, but often starving. The next they had overrun vast stretches of the continent. Now even the land they didn’t occupy bore their mark in one way or another.

The same thing had happened in the other world, to a lesser degree. There were still places there where humans didn’t go.

The other world. Unwelcome memories rose. Not many years earlier, enmeshed in the affairs of others, he had shed his blood there. He had met with true danger, in those days. But now those ties were gone.

Sometimes he felt the lesser for it.

He told himself it was good to be free.

The wind agreed, murmuring the word back to him. Free.