“What do I do now?” I asked.

“Go ahead,” the Wendigo said. “Just walk right into it.”

“You’re joking, right?”

“Not at all. How else do you think you’re going to find him? I’ll provide the psychic push that will determine where you’ll go and make sure it’s the same place your Ifrit ended up.”

I took a step forward, then stopped. Talking about it was one thing, but plunging right in was not something I relished, any more than diving into a midwinter lake through a hole in the ice. I remembered Lou’s startled yelp as he was pulled into it, but it didn’t make me feel any more determined. The Wendigo came over and stood beside me.

“Changed your mind?” he said. I shook my head, and he smiled. “Well, let me give you a little push, then.”

He took a step back, placed his hand on the small of my back, and gave a powerful shove. The promised push turned out to be more than metaphorical. Instead of bravely stepping forward into the unknown, I was propelled, stumbling and flailing, into the center of the maelstrom.

IT FELT LIKE I WAS BEING TORN APART, AND FOR a long moment I feared I’d been tricked, murdered by the Wendigo for some obscure motive of his own. But then the world stabilized around me, and I found myself lying facedown in dirt.

It was cold. I had my leather jacket and a heavy shirt, but I felt the cold anyway, and the dirt beneath my hands was rock hard. I sat up and looked around. It was dark when I’d been pushed into the energy pool, but it was daylight now. No signs of civilization. Trees, stretching out for as far as I could see, scattered far enough apart to give a good idea of the landscape. Low-spreading conifers dominated, with only the occasional towering tree to break the pattern.

Lou was nowhere to be seen. I hadn’t expected I would just drop down in his lap, though. Things are never that easy. And there was still the possibility that the Wendigo had sent me on a wild-goose chase, for whatever reason.

My first priority was to find out whether talent operated here, wherever here was. I broke off a few twigs from a nearby tree branch, set them on the ground, and tried a basic ignition spell, the default operation I always use when I’m trying to assess the magical climate of a place. It worked, all too well. The twigs went up in flames, instantly alight as if they’d been wrapped in flash paper, and a few seconds later all that remained was ashes.

This was an unexpected and not unwelcome development. If this held up, I was suddenly a powerful talent, no longer dependent on cleverness and guile. With a wave of my hand, all opposition would wither before my awesome power. There was bound to be a catch, though. There always is.

But one thing was worrisome. If this place enhanced rather than blocked talent, why hadn’t Lou been able to find his way back? The more I thought about it, the more troubling it became. The chew toy I’d brought, which I thought so clever, now seemed irrelevant. Come to think of it, Lou should have been able to find his way back home based on his connection to me-we were more strongly bonded than any rawhide strip. Hopefully.

But as long as my power had been enhanced, I was going to take advantage of it. I’ve never been very good at locating people or things; that’s a specialized talent.

Still, if I had enhanced power, it was worth a try. I pulled out the rawhide toy, concentrated on it, and concentrated on Lou at the same time. Immediately I could feel something, partly like the heat of a campfire on your face when your eyes are closed, partly like a puff of wind blowing from the north, and partly like neither of those things. But it gave me a direction, and there was no doubt about it.

I started walking, always uphill, and as the elevation increased, spotty areas of snow sprang up around the bases of trees, like a late-spring thaw breaking through a winter landscape. Soon I found myself slipping and sliding on the now-unavoidable snow cover.

I was walking as quietly as I could, but there was nothing to be done about the snow crunching under my feet. But whatever sound I was making was soon drowned out by a commotion coming from just over a small ridge. I heard animal snarls, which is never good, and some loud thumping as if someone was beating on a drum. The pressure that indicated Lou’s presence was increased, which meant it was a good bet that whatever was happening up ahead had something to do with him.

I crested the ridge, almost running now, and emerged through the trees. Below, a small clearing opened out in the middle of tangled brush and trees. The impulse to rush down and see what was happening was strong, but I held back. It wouldn’t do either Lou or me any good to blindly charge ahead and blunder into something I wasn’t prepared for.

I slid behind the cover of a tree and peered around. At the far end of the clearing, I saw a large animal standing at the end of a huge log, two or three feet in diameter. For a moment I thought it was a bear, but when it turned sideways I saw a thin elongated muzzle with a familiar anteater profile. A shape-shifter.

The log it guarded must have been partially hollow, and from its actions it looked like something was trapped inside of it. I had a feeling I knew who it was. Wood splinters littered the ground nearby, and there were long score marks where the creature had tried unsuccessfully to rip open the log.

It prowled from one end of the log to the other, then pounced on one end, pounding and roaring. Then it ran around to the other end, waiting for the terrified prey to rush out the other end, like a cat trying to outwit a panicked mouse. Lou was no mouse, though, and though he was probably scared, he wasn’t one to panic. He hunched down farther back in the log, safe for the moment. He wasn’t going anywhere.

No wonder he hadn’t been able to find his way back. God knows how long he’d been trapped there. As I watched, I realized the beast was exactly that-a beast. It was a clever animal, nothing more. In its own dimension it was a natural predator like a bear or a lion. Only when it entered our world did it morph into the shape-shfter it was, stealing not only bodies but memory and personality and intelligence as well. And although it was resistant to talent back home, there was no reason it would be resistant here, especially with my newly minted strength. For once, I wasn’t worried.

I calmed my mind as best I could and concentrated on gathering the elements of a spell. Use its massive physical strength against it. Use the patches of snow dotting the ground, and the cold in the air. I gathered up the cold, added in some essence of grit from the sandy forest soil, used my nervousness to add a dollop of paralysis, and let my strength flow into the mixture.

“Louie! Lou!” I shouted, my voice echoing in the chill sunlight. “To me, now!”

If there’s one thing Lou doesn’t lack, it’s decisiveness. In a similar situation I might well have stood there for a moment gawking, until it was too late to move. Sometimes Lou acts without thinking and ends up getting himself in trouble. But all in all, the ability to act quickly is a good quality. Anytime you deal with violence and danger it’s better to be wrong than indecisive.

He bolted from the log and flew up the slope toward me. The creature had looked up at the sound of my voice, and by the time it looked back toward Lou, it was too late. So far, so good. Only, as usual, there was something I hadn’t counted on. Goddamn it! I’d forgotten what the Wendigo had said. They operated in pairs, and just like Ruby, there were two of them here.

The second one burst out of a thicket to the left, and in a few ground-eating bounds it was right on him. Lou dodged left, then right, but the thing was also quick, and it reached out one powerful arm and sunk its six-inch claw right above Lou’s right haunch. It lifted him up off the ground and brought him up toward its mouth.