She’d miscalculated badly. In Esau’s fortress, she’d saved her friends by drawing Torment’s attention. But as the Dragon had told her, that had worked because Torment was half wolf, with a full set of lupine instincts. The bluechill, icy and alien, was operating on an entirely different set of priorities. Compared to the blazing fire-sprite, Alice wasn’t certain her own fleshy body was even visible.

She could see the glow of Flicker’s hair halfway around the room as he picked his way through the rock. The bluechill zeroed in on him, ignoring Alice entirely. Its legs once again became a blur, startlingly fast for such a large creature.

“Flicker!”

She was running, the dinosaur’s strength in her legs turning each stride into a leap, but it wasn’t going to be fast enough. Flicker braced himself, spear in both hands, but the point slid off the bluechill’s icy shell as it closed in. The fire-sprite spun away just as the tip of the monster’s tail came down, stinger slashing through the space where he’d been. He slipped into a narrow gap between a boulder and the wall, ducking under another sting. It was too tight a spot for the bluechill to enter, but it could still lash out with its tail, and there was no way Flicker could get past it to escape.

Alice let go of the Swarm thread and pulled on Spike’s, harder than she ever had before. The transformation came over her in mid-stride, a moment of nauseating uncertainty as her body thickened and expanded into the dinosaur’s stumpy, four-legged form. She stumbled, briefly, but managed to maintain her momentum, picking up speed as she broke into a gallop.

Being Spike was, Alice imagined, like driving a motorcar. The dinosaur could build up a solid head of steam, but he wasn’t agile, and turning could be a serious problem. But the bluechill was dead ahead, and too occupied with Flicker to notice her. Spike was heavier than he looked, giving him the momentum of a cannonball, and his head was crowned with four vicious horns. She aimed these right at the center of the bluechill’s body and let the dinosaur’s instincts take over.

Alice-as-Spike slammed into the bluechill, lifting it off the ground and smashing it against the wall of the chamber. The noise was terrific, a grinding, crunching cacophony of ice and the snorting, grunting breath of the dinosaur. The impact hurt less than Alice had expected—Spike’s body was built for this sort of thing, with a thick skull and muscular neck. One of her horns had skidded on the icy surface and snapped off, but the other three had punched into the bluechill’s body, sending a web of cracks through the ice. The monster gave another shriek, legs flailing.