Rise of the Phoenix novel · Chapter 10 of 24

Chapter 10: The Lake

Five trucks came through the gate, and fourteen hunters piled out into the yard with rifles.

Hedda stood on the porch of her lodge in her nightgown.

She didn't have a gun.

She took off her slippers, set them neatly on the rail.

Stepped out of her nightgown as if she were stepping out of a coat.

A bear came down the steps.

She was the size of a pickup truck, silver-brown, and her roar rattled the windows.

The nearest hunter dropped his rifle and ran.

"Hedda!" I yelled. "No! The roof!"

She looked back at me with one small furious eye.

Her roof was the whole problem.

If I fought in the yard, the fire would climb the beams, and nine people were asleep in those chairs.

I looked past the trucks, at the long white sheet behind the barn.

"Garth," I said. "The lake."

"The lake," he agreed.

We ran.

We went out the back with our boots half laced, down the path through the pines to the ice.

I raised both hands over my head and let the coal go.

A gold flare burst from my palms and lit the whole sky.

"Come and get me!" I screamed. "Come on, Quill! I'm right here!"

They came.

I heard the trucks tear through the snow around the barn, and I saw headlights spill onto the lake.

A long line of dark figures sprinted out onto the ice after the bright thing they'd been hired to catch.

Mara Quill was in front, running on all fours, long and fast.

At forty yards she changed in the middle of a stride, and the lynx became a woman again, rifle already coming up.

Keep reading free with an account. Start Rise of the Phoenix from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.