Selene Moonshadow's Arc

Chapter 2 of 9

Selene stayed on the study floor with the book in her lap. The wand lay beside her, the crack down its shaft still warm. She had to turn it on herself to hear the shadow's name. She also had to survive doing it. A full probe would burn the name out of her before she could catch it. The door creaked. Marcus Wayfield ducked under the low frame, his pack scraping the jamb. He was the old guide who had walked her out of Larchgrove when she was twelve and had walked beside her on every hunt since. He looked at the wand, then at her face, and set the pack down without a word. That was his way. He asked questions only after he had unpacked. "I have to point it at myself," Selene said. "If I do it clean, it takes the name with it." Marcus crouched. He pulled a small tin from a side pocket, then a coil of copper wire, then a lump of beeswax, then a river stone with a hole worn through it, then a stub of chalk. Five things, laid out on the floorboards in a neat row. "Sprites in the hollow past the fence," he said. "They owe me. We make a catcher. Wand feeds the stone, stone holds what the wand would burn." Selene stared at the holed stone. "A filter." "A cup," he said. "You aim past yourself, into the stone. Whatever it hears, it keeps." They worked at the desk while the raccoon watched from the ledger. Selene wound the wire down the wand's shaft and sealed the crack with wax. Marcus held the stone against the tip and whispered the sprite-words he had traded a winter's tobacco for. The stone warmed. A thin green light moved inside it like a fish. She stood in the center of the room and turned the wand toward her own chest. The freeze came at once, cold up her thighs. She locked her knees and pushed through it. "Speak," she whispered. The wand's tip flared. The light did not touch her. It bent sideways into the stone in Marcus's palm. Selene felt a pull behind her ribs, as if something were being drawn out through cloth. A voice moved inside the stone, small and wet, saying two syllables she could almost hear. The stone cracked. The green light guttered. The voice cut off on the first syllable. Sel— Selene dropped to one knee. Marcus caught the broken halves before they hit the boards. "Half," she said. Her mouth tasted like iron. "I got half." Outside, the shadow under the dying trees pulled back from the window. It had felt the pull too. It knew now that she could reach it. It would not wait quietly for the second syllable.