A starling? She faltered for a moment, then picked up her wingbeats again, moving easily among the—

High-rise apartment buildings?

Fumes drifted up from the traffic below, but they didn’t seem to bother her in this shape. Car horns blared, sirens screamed, construction equipment rattled and pounded, and the noise of uncounted engines battered her ears.

Beside her flapped an English sparrow and a pigeon.

The air behind them popped. And the Evil One, in his form of Black Bird, hovered there for a moment, confused by the terrific noise.

That moment was all that Kestrel needed. It was time to stop running and give him a taste of being the prey! Calling a starling alarm, she dove on the Black Bird, certain of what would follow.

Her alarm call swiftly summoned a cloud of starlings from all directions, which followed her lead and proceeded to mob the Black Bird mercilessly. Individually, the Evil One was more than a match for them—and in fact, he lashed out with beak and claws, and sent several of his tormentors tumbling dead out of the sky. But that only made the rest of the starlings angrier, and they pecked at his head and pulled at his feathers until he began to falter and lose height. And he could not tell which of the starlings was really Kestrel; he could only strike blindly and hope that luck would put her into his reach.

He could not win this one, and so he changed the setting, shattering the air with a terrible cry that wrenched the fabric of time and space, sending them all hurtling—

Into the white of a landscape of nothing but snow and ice. Wind ate at her; snow whipped around her, driving itself into her eyes and nose. The sky was white, the ground was an undulating white; everything was white.

Kestrel shivered, despite the thick coat of fur she wore, encased as she was in the body of an arctic fox; beside her were a white wolf and a snowy owl. She had barely time to take in what form she now had, when what she had thought was a snowdrift heaved upward on two hind legs, roaring, and came at them with monstrous paws spread wide to crush them all.

But they were not there when the polar bear’s foreclaws hit the snow. Kestrel had gone to the right, the white wolf to the left, and the owl straight up. This time they attacked the bear; the fox nipping at its hind end, the wolf tearing at its flanks, and the owl battering its face and eyes with its wings.

The bear roared with frustration, and knocked the owl out of the air. Instantly, both Kestrel and Mooncrow leapt in, each snatching a wing, and pulling it away from the bear’s claws.

This is nothing but stalemate, she thought to herself, as she panted, her sides heaving, her lungs aching. He can wear us down like this—we have to find some way to bottle him up!