As I bedded down for the night, I watched the ’puses on the trees around me. There was a period every evening, right around dusk, when they abandoned their camouflage and put on a short symphony of color. It started as I lay there. Pulses and flashes of color lit up the trunks and branches as far as I could see. They hit every shade in the rainbow, and then some, the colors moving across the forest in vast waves.

The display was completely silent and quite beautiful. Even as exhausted and frightened as I was, it was hard not to be filled with wonder. How many people got to see something like this?

Not many, I thought.

Let’s just hope you’re not the only one, ever, pessimistic Beth chimed in.

Chapter 20

“A sink hole formed here, without warning,” Cordus said. “Apparently an underground spring shifted and began to saturate the soil some months ago. The earth liquefied just as Mr. Ryzik joined Miss Ryder in the room. That is the kind of event his gift creates.”

Ghosteater tasted the air in the room and was surprised. “The woman Justine was here.”

“Yes. She was staying in this room.”

Ghosteater circled the hole, then jumped down into it, sniffing carefully.

Justine had been under the dirt. The scents had been trampled by those who came to dig her out, but he could still read them — her burial beneath falling earth, the place where the she-pup had lain, the carven strait falling toward the bottom of the pit, the moment the she-pup touched it. He tasted the slightly burned scent of her passage through the strait. He smelled Ryzik’s scramble down into the hole, his brief effort to uncover Justine, his terrified flight with the carven strait hidden in his clothing.

“I will track him. You cannot keep up with me. I will track alone, then return for you.”

“If you carry this device with you, I can follow you by car.” Cordus held out a small, dark, boxy thing. “It is a tracking machine. It poses no danger to you.”

So, the émigré wanted to be there at the end of the hunt, to best the prey and claim it for himself. He wanted the kill.

Ghosteater didn’t object — he had no use for Ryzik. He permitted Cordus to put a loop of rope around his neck and clip the object to it. He could slice it off in an instant, if need be.

He stepped into the silence and loped out of the house, allowing Ryzik’s scent to guide him over the lawns to the edge of the property, where he went through Cordus’s barrier with an uncomfortable tingle. He passed the blood the barrier had cost the man, smelled his pain.

The trail led to a highway, where he could tell the man had entered a vehicle. He followed more carefully, then, since human habitations were thick.