Instead, Kelly Richards appeared above it, and rained death with a dozen sharp blows from a crowbar.

For an instant she and Lara stood facing each other, Kelly’s face alight with triumph in the gold light of sunrise. Her friend was beautiful, Lara thought suddenly, beautiful with violence, beautiful like a Valkyrie, full of passion and strength. With her hair spilling around her shoulders and a bloody crowbar in her hands, she made a convincing modern warrior woman. For an instant outside of time and thought, seeing her seize the opportunity to become someone so extraordinary was wonderful and even fun.

Then she threw Lara the crowbar and ran like hell for the car as the trooper shouted, “Put down your weapon! Put the weapon—put the weapon down!”

Lara, incensed, shouted, “Shoot the goddamned monster!” and threw herself toward the amalgamated nightwing, crowbar raised like a sword.

Some part of her recognized that she herself had become a warrior in the past few days. There was no other answer for the boldness that drove her to charge the massive creature enveloping the car that had struck it. She was armed with a crowbar and passion, nothing more, but the pairing proved formidable: a tentacle wrapped around the bar and she swung like a pro hitter, smashing the glittering black thing against the wrecked car’s door. Ichor splattered and the damaged piece fell away, beginning its terrible transformation into a nightwing, into a component piece.

Lara bashed it ruthlessly, turning it to spattered goo before it became what it had been, and swung again as another tentacle lashed at her. The thing was formless, shapeless, creating of itself what was necessary to attack, and she couldn’t imagine how the ranger or the officer had thought it an animal at all. Unless—and it seemed possible—it had held some near-earth shape as it hunted, simply so it wouldn’t draw attention to itself. That need was gone now: Lara and Dafydd were its prey, and the law enforcement agents and paramedics were nothing more than collateral damage.

The trooper was still torn between his enemies, clearly wanting to choose Dafydd as the comprehensible one, but too afraid of the conglomerated nightwings to ignore them. A black mass slid up behind him, threatening to end his dilemma permanently. Lara screamed and Dafydd lifted his hands, the staff held high in one and his other palm forward.

Power surged from the staff. Lightning arced around the trooper and exploded into the roiling creature of darkness. The trooper fired wildly, terrified by the lightning, then realized he hadn’t been hit. He whipped around as nightwings erupted from the section of monster Dafydd attacked, and chose his side: gunfire blazed repeatedly, every shot counting as bullets buried themselves in the monster.

Dafydd dropped to one knee, visibly fading, even with the staff’s support. Lara’s heart caught. There was no time, not to fight the creature the way they’d been doing. The Seelie prince would die before they triumphed, and bitterly, they would likely not triumph at all should he die. For an instant that held her in place, staring fearfully at Dafydd, and then the nightwing came again in a surge of darkness and rage.

She didn’t think it out clearly; didn’t think it out at all, in truth, and truth was her talent, so she ought to heed it. She was surrounded, like the nightwing wanted her drawn in, and so in a spate of madness she dove forward, taking the fight to it. The truth could build a way of its own. Lara had followed such paths three times now, those stark roads of white light and irresistible power.

There had to be a spark of that brilliance buried somewhere in the nightwings’ makeup: they were creatures of dark, perhaps, but dark couldn’t exist without the light.

That thought wobbled fearfully, bringing with it the image of a starlit sky, brilliant diamonds scattered through velvet night. She could imagine each of those diamonds winking out, leaving nothing but darkness behind. Terror squeezed her chest, leaving her hands clammy. There was no telling what lay in the dark, no way to protect herself when the world was only black. Perhaps it was light that couldn’t exist without dark.

That thought twisted, too, turning her inner vision to nothing but blazing, pure light. It was as meaningless as the blackness: no contrast, no shadows, no color, only brilliant pain that matched the fear of darkness.

They wound together, pain and fear twining to make a world of shadows and color. Gold painted the edges of her vision, reminder of the sunrise. As if it were a guide, that soft shade made her grasp that pain and fear were part of the truth that might destroy the nightwings. She was reluctant to embrace them, but the music pounding in her ears soured as she shied away. Jaw tight, she nodded acceptance, and felt her limbs go thick and numb as ugly emotion rooted inside her. They weren’t comfortable, she realized abruptly, but they were necessary. Without pain, without fear, humans had little way to gauge danger; personal experience could be too deadly a cost. Somehow that made them easier to endure, and they lost a degree of their paralyzing power.

Suddenly bold, Lara thrust crescendos, pieces of who she was, of the magic she commanded, out of herself, like they were a weapon themselves. Music rushed out of her, throwing a challenge to the dark Seelie creatures that had crossed into her world.

The world roared back, an entity of its own, alive.

Put that way, into simple and obvious terms, it rang with such truth that Lara blushed to have never noticed it before. Of course it was alive; it supported all the things that lived. But she had never imagined it to have a voice of its own, a presence and a power that threatened to overwhelm everything that she was.

It was the sound of earthquakes and waterfalls, thunder so profound she felt, more than heard, it. If it had music, it was lost to her. She staggered under its weight, then dropped to her knees and put her hands against the asphalt, trying to gather support from the same ground that threatened to drag her under.

Pain reached a crescendo, then drained away as the world searched and found her magic, the thing that had garnered its unfathomable attention. For a brief eternity Lara felt she was a mote under a microscope, turned and twisted for examination. Urgency fled as the earth’s vibrations reached into her marrow, shaking it loose. It seemed to her that she belonged where she was, all but mindless, a single beacon of song and light so small as to be obliterated by the earth-storm all around her. Her sense of self was lost, a speck in the maelstrom of life, and she drifted forever.

Forever, a speck that was still Lara Jansen whispered, forever is a very long time, to immortals.

And the world, in so much as it could, laughed. Ease and recognition rolled through thunder, not reducing her awe, but at least making it a more comfortable thing to hold inside her. She belonged to this world; her strange magic was born of it, and it accepted her, though welcome was still far removed. Satisfied, it released its hold on her. Lara, trembling, bent all the way to the ground and rested her forehead there in thankful relief.

As it retreated from her awareness, she caught a glimpse of music so old, so vast, that she understood she had been on the edge of a chord for all the time she’d been in communion with the planet. It belonged to a song so impossibly huge she could barely grasp that it was played at all, and she knew with a sudden, aching breathlessness that the very earth itself was no more than a single instrument in an orchestra spanning the stars.

Her hands made claws, trying to snatch the endless concerto back; trying to reach beyond the earth to grasp the melody of the moon, the sun, the planets.