Daneera ran.

Dark, broken clouds drifted across the full Morvatan moon, casting deep shadows across the huntress’s already treacherous path. Far ahead of her, when the moon was unobstructed, she could just make out Kerik’s massive frame. He was crashing through the Bladǎri underbrush with uncharacteristic abandon, and Daneera, even enchanted for speed, was only barely keeping the werewolf in view.

Daneera did not know what was going on, but she knew it wasn’t good. She and Kerik had been holed up in their cabin for weeks, and Daneera, used to the ever-changing forestscapes of the Multiverse, had started to grow anxious for a change in scenery. She was happy in the Bladǎri, and she was happy with Kerik, and she had no desire to leave. At least not permanently. But she was growing tired of only hunting the same territory, and truth be told, game was growing a bit thin around their clearing. With winter coming on soon, it was important to conserve some prey for when it may prove necessary.

And so, after a great deal of time and persuasive tactics she was not used to employing, Daneera convinced Kerik to come with her on a hunting trip deep into the Bladǎri Forest. He had been reluctant. Although Kerik now had a remarkable degree of control while in his werewolf form, and still possessed much of his human personality, there was still a danger that feral instinct would overcome his sense.

Which seemed to be what was happening now.

Daneera would have sighed in frustration, if she felt that she had any breath to spare. They had found a good spot and had been hunting for four days, but tonight, something had seemed different. The air had felt colder; not the chill of the coming winter, but something deeper. Kerik had been fine while in his human form, but seemed agitated from the moment he had transformed. The two had hunted for nearly three hours, slowly moving to corner a particularly cagey chamois, when Kerik’s head had snapped up. He had howled loudly, scaring the goat-like creature into flight, but when Kerik took off running, it was not toward the frightened prey, but away from it.

The planeswalker had just lost sight of Kerik when she broke through the tree line. The change was so sudden that Daneera brought herself to a stop to look around. She was standing at the base of a steep-sloped hill, where a thin path twisted irregularly upward to an equally twisted wrought-iron gate. The gate was swinging, and creaking, in the muted moonlight, hanging from a single hinge. Daneera could not see Kerik, but when she heard a crash from beyond the iron gate, she knew where he had gone.

As Daneera approached the gate, the manor house beyond it came into view. It was shrouded in a thick midnight mist, but the huntress could see enough to know that the house was gigantic. Judging only from the darkened windows that lined the manor’s walls, the house was at least three or four stories tall, and probably twice as wide. The house was old, too, or at least seemed to be by the evident disrepair. Shutters were hanging from broken windows, boards had chipped, cracked, or fallen, and even the roof had holes large enough for Daneera to pass through. As she was wondering if such a thing would be necessary, she noticed that the front door had been violently forced open.

Probably quite recently, Daneera mused.

Daneera stepped through across the gate’s threshold and immediately froze. The air felt different here. Cold. Dead. There was an unnatural stillness to it that made Daneera shiver. It was something she had not felt since leaving the plane she had been born to. She hated it instantly, and if Kerik hadn’t been inside, she would have turned around and left. This was not a place for her, or for her lover. This was not a place for the living.

Daneera stood for a moment, catching her breath and trying to decide how to proceed.

“In there.”

The planeswalker jumped at the hollow, raspy voice that spoke to her from the darkness. She had sensed no one, had seen or heard nothing. Still, a lifetime of forest survival had honed her skills, and in the same instant that she started, Daneera drew her long knife and turned toward the source of the sound. There, standing only a few feet away from her, was a small, ancient, bearded man. He wore no clothing, although his beard covered him almost completely. He was only about three feet tall and hunched over pitifully, his eyes sunken and sad. He was staring at Daneera, but with his right hand and one, gnarled finger, he pointed toward the manor’s front door.

“Who are you?” Daneera asked, surprised that her voice was shaking.

“I am the Domovoi.”

“The who?”

The old man cocked his head to one side, considering her. His sunken eyes stared intently into hers, and although she could not be sure in the dim light, she could swear those eyes were uniformly black.

“I am that which protects.”

Daneera’s fingers tightened, just slightly, around the handle of her knife. “Protects what?”

“The house. And those who live within it.”

Daneera closed her eyes and focused all of her energy into her senses, most specifically her hearing. More than any other sense, her hearing had helped her survive in the forest, detecting both predator and prey before she could see them or smell them. She trusted herself, and she trusted her senses, and her auras allowed her to heighten those senses beyond what nature itself could provide. And right now, she focused all of her hearing on the small man before her, and she listened, as hard as she had listened to anything, to his chest.

She heard nothing. There was no beating of a heart, no flowing of blood through veins, no motion of air through lungs. There was no rumbling of a stomach or churning of organs. There was not even the slightest sound of blinking eyelids. Daneera opened her eyes again, and the man was still standing there, motionless, pointing at the front door and waiting for her to respond. Daneera was about to speak again, but the Domovoi did so first.

“The dog went in there. Where She waits.”

Daneera narrowed her eyes. “Who is ‘She’?”

The Domovoi curled inward into himself until he was nothing more than a thick curl of dark blue smoke, which dissipated into the mist surrounding the manor. Daneera took a deep breath, shook her head, and rushed through the shattered front door. On the other side, Daneera froze again. The room she found herself in was large, two stories tall with an ornate banister lining the balcony above. More surprising to Daneera was that the entire room was lined with candles, each lit with a tiny flame that illuminated, at least marginally, the entire room. From the outside, the manor had looked completely dark.

Less than a dozen feet away from the front door was Kerik. In his werewolf form, he was looking around the room, his entire body screaming out his confusion. Like a wild dog, Kerik was sniffing the air all around him, as if trying to catch a scent he knew should be there but wasn’t. Cautiously, Daneera took three steps toward him and spoke his name. Kerik glanced back at her and whimpered softly, but then returned to his search. He took one large step toward a hallway to the right of the door, and growled. After a second step, he howled, loudly, as he did when he was about to spring on his prey.

The instant Kerik howled, the entire room was assaulted by winds like that of a tropical storm. The candles lining the hall flickered and danced, but did not go out, although the room grew strangely darker anyway. Kerik howled a second time, and as he did a red glow appeared just a few steps before him. Before Kerik could react, some unseen force ripped the werewolf from the ground and tossed him upward like a rag doll. Daneera screamed his name as he crashed through the banister above and then through something else on the floor beyond, but her voice was lost in the wind. Moments after Kerik vanished from view, the winds died down completely and the red glow faded.

“Why are you here?”

Daneera spun around instantly at the new voice, this one not low and rough, but high and innocent. Standing just behind the huntress was a little girl, her dark blonde hair tied up in tails and her eyes wide and curious. She was wearing a faded play dress that was typical of young Morvatan girls, if perhaps a bit nicer than those Daneera had seen in Zǎri and the few other human settlements she had been to on this plane. When Daneera didn’t answer, the girl seemed to consider her.

“Did you bring me a puppy to play with?”

Suddenly, from back down the right-hand hallway, a door slammed shut. Daneera turned toward the noise instantly, but she saw nothing. She immediately turned back, but the little girl was gone. Daneera was alone.

The planeswalker exhaled slowly, releasing the breath she barely knew she had been holding. She made herself relax, and forced her fingers to loosen their grip on her knife, if only slightly. As the blood started returning to her whitened knuckles, Daneera ran her free hand through her tangled brown hair. She had been inside the manor for only a few minutes, and already it was fraying her nerves.

“She will not like you being here.”

This time, the voice of the Domovoi did not startle Daneera, mostly because she was at least partially expecting it. She looked near the door, where the small man had reappeared. Daneera straightened to her full height, but somehow did not feel any larger than the Domovoi.

“If you wish to escape with the dog, you will need to destroy Her.”

“And just how would I do that?” Daneera asked.

The Domovoi said nothing, but simply pointed down the right-hand hallway. Daneera sighed and looked around the large room. She needed to find Kerik before she did anything else, but there seemed to be no way of climbing up to the balcony above. She looked back at where the Domovoi had been standing just in time to see the last curl of smoke vanish.

“Dammit,” Daneera muttered. With a deep breath to steady herself, Daneera set off down the hallway. She moved slowly, crouching low to the floor as she moved through the candle-lit hallway. As she moved, Daneera began to notice that she could not smell the smoke from the candles, nor the scent of melting wax. The flames on the wicks were tiny, and provided only little light, and they danced sporadically and wildly despite the motionless air. Each step unnerved Daneera more, and twice she had to force herself to stop shaking.

The hallway was long, nearly impossibly so, and eventually curved, presumably to angle toward the back of the massive manor house. Doors lined the hallway on both sides, and Daneera checked each of them as she moved, but not one opened to her. After the hallway had curved, Daneera began to notice portraits hanging in the spaces between the doors. The first several bore the image of wealthy men and women, presumably former occupants of the house or their relations, but as she went on, a very clear pattern emerged. After a point, all of the portraits, every single one of them, was of the little girl Daneera had seen.

And in every portrait, the girl was petting a dog.

The dogs changed in every portrait. Some were large hunting dogs and others tiny breeds that humans on Morvata often kept as pets, but no two portraits depicted the same dog. In every picture, the girl looked the same, young, innocent, and happy. Her clothes would change, and at times her hair was drawn up differently or hanging down over her shoulders, but she was always smiling. As Daneera finally reached the end of the long hallway, she decided that she did not like this house’s taste in art.

The hallway ended in a set of double doors that, surprisingly, were not locked. Happy to be out of the hallway, Daneera pushed her way into the room beyond and found herself in a large library. As she walked toward the center of the room, she suddenly felt like she was not alone. She looked around, but neither the Domovoi nor the little girl appeared. The room began to feel cold, and Daneera’s eyes darted around the room furtively, like prey realizing it is surrounded by its predators. Daneera only had a moment to realize that a red glow had settled into the room before a book came flying at her head.

Daneera ducked out of the way of the tome, but stayed standing, which was lucky as a second book careened off a shelf and at her face. Daneera rolled to her left as a piercing shriek dominated the room. Daneera, knowing a battle cry when she heard one, activated her speed aura just before the room became a veritable warzone of books and paper. Daneera, for the most part, managed to avoid the incoming tomes. One or two managed to strike her, but most were glancing blows, apart from one solid hit to her left shoulder.

Eventually, the books stopped, and a second scream filled the room. Although Daneera was no expert on ethereal communication, she could swear it sounded like a scream of frustration. Finally the red glow dissipated, and the unnatural cold lifted, if only slightly. Daneera looked around the library at the dozens, perhaps hundreds, of books that had been used against her. The shelves surrounding the room were empty. Daneera was about to leave the room when she noticed that her assessment was not quite accurate. The shelves were empty but for a single tome on a far shelf.

“Alright,” Daneera said to herself. “What’s the one book you didn’t want to touch, huh?”

Carefully, the huntress made her way through the now-unstable floor of tattered books and over to the shelf. The book was, as many in the room, an old, weathered, leather-bound thing with yellowed pages and faded ink. Despite this, she could just make out the title of the book: Phantoms and Phantasmagoria. Daneera scowled. She noticed that one of the pages was clearly folded back at the corner, and she opened to it. Scanning the page, her eyes immediately fell on two sentences, which she read aloud.

“That which is by the dead most feared was by the living most loved. That which is by the dead most loved should be by the living most feared.”

Daneera felt a chill run down the length of her back as she spoke, although she could not entirely explain why. Gently, she closed the book and set it back on the shelf before making her way again to the center of the library. She had entered the room from the south, and after having faced a hallway with nothing but locked doors and portraits, she had no desire to return in that direction. If the Domovoi was in any way trying to help her, then he must have pointed her in this direction for a reason. It was, perhaps, the book she had found. The page had clearly been marked, and whatever spirit haunted this place had left that book untouched rather than sending it any closer to Daneera, so perhaps that was the vital clue.

All of this, of course, presupposed that the Domovoi wanted to help Daneera. After all, the only things he had done was tell her where Kerik had gone, which she had already figured out, and pointed her in the direction of this library, where she had been attacked. Apart from that, and the cryptic message about something or another waiting within, the Domovoi had told her nothing.

Not nothing, Daneera realized suddenly. He had also told Daneera that he was that which protects those within the house. And, when Kerik had howled, as werewolves do when they are about to prove dangerous, some force had lifted him up with all his size and power and tossed him away as if he were weightless. And just what had drawn Kerik here in the first place? It was the Domovoi that Daneera had first seen when she arrived. Perhaps he was responsible for everything that had happened?

Of course, that did not explain the girl. She had appeared and vanished again just as quickly as the Domovoi had, and Daneera had sensed as little from her as she had from him. And the portraits lining the hallway had been of her, not of the Domovoi. And every one of them had a dog, a different dog. When she had spoken to Daneera, she asked if the huntress had brought her a puppy to play with. And the Domovoi had twice referred to Kerik as a dog.

At this thought, Daneera was moving. She needed to press on. She needed to find Kerik, and they both needed to get out of this damnable house. She had entered through the south door, but there was another door to the west, which Daneera took immediately. This was not the first time she had had to rescue Kerik, and if she could make her way through the Fae courts for him, she could take anything this manor could throw at her.

As she picked her way through the long hallways of the abandoned house, Daneera considered the meaning, if any, of the passage from the book. ‘That which is by the dead most feared,’ it said, ‘was by the living most loved.’ The Domovoi had said something about destroying ‘Her.’ Was this a clue to how to do so? Daneera had little experience with the dead, for which she was grateful, but now such experience would have been useful. The planeswalker thought back to her most recent encounter with the dead, when the spirit of Hyra Murkwisp had confronted Daneera in her mausoleum. When confronted with an image of herself from life, Hyra had panicked and fled, and Daneera knew that the Fae had always been vain. Had Hyra Murkwisp feared her own image because, in life, she had loved it?

Of course, the second part of the book’s cryptic message confused her even more. Inverting the first statement, the book claimed that ‘That which is by the dead most loved should be by the living most feared.’ As far as Daneera could tell, she and Kerik were the only living souls in the house. The book seemed to be issuing a warning, but a warning of what? The girl, if she were a spirit as Daneera suspected, had apparently loved dogs, but what did that mean for the planeswalker? What did it mean for Kerik?

Daneera turned a corner in the hallway and stopped dead. The little girl was there, a bit less than half way down this new hallway, staring at her. The little girl’s head was cocked to one side, and in the dim light of the hall and from that distance, her expression was unreadable. Daneera felt her breathing quicken as the child continued to stare. The huntress still had her long knife drawn, and she could feel her grip tightening again around its handle. Finally, the girl down the hallway straightened her head and seemed about to speak when Kerik’s howl sounded from somewhere else in the house.

The girl suddenly grinned, clapped her hands several times in excitement, turned to her left, and took off running, straight through a thick wooden door. Without even thinking about it, Daneera burst into a run of her own after the girl, but when she got to where the girl had been standing, she found the door locked. Daneera tried three times to break the door open with no success, and she was just about to activate her strength enchantment and try again when the door opened without the planeswalker even touching it.

Daneera took a deep breath to calm herself. This was far beyond her usual experience. She was hunting, she knew, as she always did, but this was no forest creature she was searching for, no living, breathing animal that could be tracked, anticipated, and killed. This was a home to the dead, and she and Kerik, planeswalker and werewolf, apex predators in their own element, were the prey here. But if there was one fundamental truth about Daneera’s existence, it was that she would not leave without Kerik, and if the girl’s reaction was any indication, he was in the direction that this door led.

She would find him. She had to.

She felt the chill the moment she stepped through the door. The room beyond was dark, pitch black, in fact. There were no candles here to dance smokelessly on their wicks and give of their hollow light. And while she had not noticed any heat coming from the candles in the other parts of the house, she began to suspect that it must have, judging by the cold in this room. She had taken only three steps into the room when she heard and felt a rushing of wind, and she spun around instantly, just in time to see the door slamming shut behind her and a faint red glow from the hallway vanish into the blackness of the room.

What now? Daneera asked, and then shivered. She had said that out loud, or had at least attempted to, but she heard nothing. Suddenly, Daneera became aware that she could hear nothing at all, not even the creaking of the floorboards as she moved. She could not even feel the floorboards beneath her boots. In fact, she realized, she could not feel anything, not her clothing, not her knife, not even her own hair. She could feel nothing but the cold as it pressed in on her.

The cold of the grave.

Daneera turned one way and then another, or at least she thought she did. She could not be sure. There was no way to judge. Her senses failed her. She could see nothing, she could smell nothing. She neither heard nor felt. Panic gripped her then, but she could not even feel for the door to pound on it. She tried to reach for her own arm or her face, but she could not feel her own body. She screamed, or attempted to scream, but there was no noise. She could not even feel her breath leave her body with the exertion of the scream.

This, she realized, was the dark, the cold, the silence of the tomb. This was what was by the dead most loved.

Silently and impotently, Daneera continued to try to scream.

A thunderous crash and a flash of blinding light brought sensation back into Daneera’s world. She had barely a moment to register that a massive shape was bearing down on her before she felt herself being scooped up in powerful arms and twisted around. She would have panicked, but she knew the feeling of that rough, coarse hair. She relished the feeling. In truth, she would have relished any feeling, but none more than that. And the smell! She breathed his scent in deeply as she felt him lurch with all his strength back through the door. They made it through only a second or two before it slammed shut a second time. Daneera was back in the hallway, but it didn’t matter where she was. It only mattered who she was with. She looked up to see two great, grey, lupine eyes staring down at her in human-like concern.

“Kerik,” she managed.

The werewolf leaned in to her and nuzzled her neck. Daneera, shaking uncontrollably now, managed to wrap one arm around his thick neck. She had no idea how long she had been locked in that room, and she didn’t want to think about it. It felt like an eternity to her, a torturous eternity, and one that she would just as soon forget. Finally, she moved her arm and let Kerik pull away slightly. He looked down at her again, and she rested one hand on his chest.

“Kerik, we need to get out of here.”

The werewolf nodded, and started shifting his weight off of her as a red glow descended on the hallway. Daneera tried to climb to her feet, but she was pinned by Kerik, who was looking around, agitated. The werewolf seemed to locate something in the air and growled, but another unearthly scream tore through the hallway and, as it had near the manor’s front door, a sudden force ripped Kerik away from Daneera. He careened helplessly down the hallway and crashed through a door at the far end and out of Daneera’s view.

The planeswalker summoned her magic and spun to her feet, brandishing her knife and ready to attack, but there was nothing there to cut, only the red glow she had seen far too many times already. Daneera stood there dumbfounded for a moment before the wind rose again and, this time, threw Daneera herself back. She flew in the direction Kerik had, but was stopped short suddenly as she met with an intersecting hallway. Here, Daneera was stopped in midair, turned, and thrust backwards again. She managed to turn her head just in time to see the glass window she was speeding toward and braced for impact just before crashing through and out.

A combination of Daneera’s natural balance and unnatural enchantments allowed her to roll as she struck the ground below and largely avoid damage. A few of the glass shards had torn into her flesh, especially about the arms, but none had been driven into her, which might have proven lethal. She was outside now, and as she looked up at the window she had just been hurled through, she saw a faint red glow vanish. Daneera was really starting to dislike that spirit.

Although Daneera was outside, she was again separated from Kerik. The spirit seemed to want it that way. It seemed to be doing anything in its power to get rid of Daneera but keep Kerik inside. She needed to find him so that they could both get away. She remembered, then, what the Domovoi had said just inside the house. He had said that if she wanted to escape with the “dog,” she would have to destroy Her. As Daneera briefly rubbed her sore shoulder, she decided that she was perfectly alright with that.

Finally, Daneera started to look around her, and as she did, her shoulders, even the one she was massaging, slumped. The air was thick, and the ground seemed an eerie, spectral blue by the light of the full moon above. Still, there was no mistaking her surroundings. The small tombstones told her everything she needed to know.

The cemetery.

Daneera was just beginning to look around the small graveyard when she heard the distinct and disturbing sound of scratching. She closed her eyes and focused on her hearing again, as she had with the Domovoi outside the front door, and this time, she was thankful she had. After only a few seconds, she leapt backwards just as something burst out of the ground directly beneath where she had been. At first it looked like just an unidentifiable shape, but as it continued to climb upward, it became clear that it was, or had once been, the jaws of a dog.

The planeswalker dropped into a fighting stance as the remains of the creature finially emerged from its shallow grave. She was sickened by what she saw, but had little time to contemplate it as the undead animal lunged at her. She sliced at the beast, but it barely reacted and tried to bite at her leg. Daneera dove over the dog and rolled back up to her feet, but her foe did not advance. Instead, it waited, and it took Daneera only a few moments to realize why. Other undead dogs were joining it, burrowing up from beneath the cemetery soil.

Daneera backed away as the dogs formed a pack to march on her. They were in varying states of decomposition, one barely more than a skeleton, but all showed evidence of torture and mutilation. Legs were bent in unnatural directions, eyes had been gouged out, tails ripped off, and any number of other things that their undead appearance had masked. Worse yet, Daneera recognized them, or rather, the breeds they seemed to represent. Each one of them had been depicted in the portraits of the girl in the house.

When the undead dogs came at her, Daneera was merciless. They had not deserved their fate in life, and in unlife, they deserved a quick release. The planeswalker quickly summoned a bear to help her, but the dogs were neither large nor strong, and while they did not react to the damage dealt to them, they were far from impervious. Within a few short minutes, the battle was over, and the zombified dogs finally knew rest. With a brief thanks, Daneera sent her bear back into the æther, and turned, with renewed determination, back toward the house.

Directly beneath the window she had crashed through, there was a door back inside, and Daneera was surprised to find it unlocked. As she moved through the door, she found herself in a room with a door set into each of the four walls, as well as a staircase leading up. The planeswalker groaned. This house was enormous, and Kerik could be anywhere, particularly with that spirit tossing him around constantly. And she still had no way to fight the thing, either. Her only clue was the book, which seemed to indicate that the secret would lie in something the spirit had loved in life, but that gave her only the vaguest sense of what to look for, but not where.

“The bedrooms.”

Daneera jumped. She knew she shouldn’t have, but she had not expected the Domovoi to appear again, let alone so suddenly. She looked over to her right, and the Domovoi was standing there, his black, sunken eyes somber. He was pointing toward the staircase. Daneera let out a heavy sigh and turned to face him.

“What do you mean?”

“The bedrooms are two floors up. That is where you will find what you seek.”

“Oh, will I?” Daneera said, her voice rising slightly. “And what’s your interest in all of this? Why do you care if I find what I’m looking for?”

“I protect the house.”

Daneera rolled her eyes. “Yeah, I remember. ‘And those who live within it.’ Well, as far as I can tell, there’s nothing living in this house but me and Kerik, and you haven’t exactly been protecting us, have you?”

The Domovoi stared, but said nothing. Daneera shook her head and started to walk away toward one of the side doors.

“She will not let you have the dog.”

Daneera reeled on the Domovoi instantly. “Whoever ‘She’ is, ‘She’ doesn’t have a say in it. I’m taking Kerik and we are leaving this place.”

“She will not be told ‘No.’”

Daneera sneered. “Yes. She will.”

The Domovoi lowered his head slightly, then raised it again to look her straight in the eyes.

“You will find what you seek in the bedrooms.”

Daneera took a deep breath and thought for a long moment before the Domovoi again faded into a curl of blue smoke. Still, Daneera stared at the spot where he had been standing. She did not trust the Domovoi, but at the same time, he seemed to have no reason to lie to her. The spirit had had no problem finding Daneera so far, so it seemed unlikely it was some kind of trap. A distraction, perhaps, but that made little sense. Daneera, frustrated, shook her head and decided that, if nothing else, she had last seen Kerik on the floor above her, so searching top to bottom was as good a plan as any.

Daneera bounded up the stairs as quickly as she could and began searching the bedrooms. There were at least a dozen of them, and few had anything even vaguely interesting. It was not until the eighth room that Daneera noticed anything unusual. It seemed to be a man’s room. It had been left unused for some time, and was in pretty noticeable disrepair, though better than some she had seen. On the wall opposite the window, however, was a large portrait of three people. One was the girl Daneera had seen, this time with no dog. Beside her was a tall woman whose face Daneera could not make out because of scratch marks covering it. The third figure, though, was of a bearded man.

A man who looked suspiciously like the Domovoi.

There were plenty of differences, of course. This man was tall, at least compared to the girl and the woman, and he was fully clothed. He was neither gnarled nor hunched, but stood proudly next to the women Daneera assumed were his family. His eyes, far from the solid black spheres of the Domovoi, were soft, expressive, and brown. His beard, though thick, was not nearly so long as to cover his entire body. And he was smiling, whereas the Domovoi seemed to be perpetually sad.

There was something about the painting that Daneera knew must be important, but she was not entirely sure what that was yet. She tried to commit as much of it to memory as she could before she forced herself to press onward. The next bedroom was a stark difference. The room was far more lavishly decorated and well-kept, and instead of just one portrait, there were nearly a dozen. But unlike the portrait in the man’s room, those in this room were uniformly of the woman from the other portrait. And, like that one, every one of them had been defaced and scratched apart as if by the claws of a small dog.

Or the fingernails of a child.

The thought made Daneera shiver. Just who was that girl she had seen, the girl in the portraits who seemed singularly focused on finding herself a puppy, when she had clearly had several? And just what had brought those dogs to their fate, resting heartlessly in shallow graves and restless death? She thought then of Kerik and became suddenly worried. With the power that this spirit has, could she do to Kerik what was done to those dogs? She heard a howl then, not far away, and she knew that Kerik was thinking of her, too. Somehow, the thought gave her strength.

When Daneera opened the door to the next room, she saw the girl instantly. Instinctively, she raised her knife, but then hesitated. This was different. The girl was not standing there staring at her. She was lying in a bed. Her bed. Her eyes were closed and she was motionless. Daneera glanced around the room. There were dogs everywhere: stuffed toy dogs, dog statuettes, dog drawings and paintings. Everything. And there was something else that was bothering Daneera. She closed her eyes and concentrated on her hearing. After a moment, she realized what it was.

The girl was breathing.

Before Daneera could think through the implications of this new information, she heard another howl, this one from just around the corner. A moment later, Kerik appeared, sniffing his nose like a hunting dog would. When his grey eyes caught sight of Daneera, he closed the distance between them instantly, picked her up in his muscled arms, and licked her face. After a moment he set her down and Daneera smiled up at him.

“Kerik, look.” Daneera pointed at the bed.

The werewolf looked over at the girl and then tossed his head to the side in confusion. He made a small whimpering sound, and Daneera nodded.

“I don’t know, either,” she said, as if Kerik had asked her a question. “But we need to end this. Whatever is going on around here, it’s centered on this girl. I can’t kill a ghost, but this is no ghost.”

As Daneera lifted her knife again, a red glow appeared in the room, and a primal scream shook the walls. A wind started to kick up, but Daneera was determined. She was too close to give up now, and she was not about to lose Kerik yet again. But as she moved toward the girl on the bed, a new glow appeared in the room and, with a sound like the cracking of thunder, the Domovoi materialized. Another shriek cut through the room, but the Domovoi, who seemed bigger now somehow, pointed at the red glow.

A brilliant flash of light forced Daneera to cover her eyes, and when she was able to look again, a woman was standing in the red glow, the woman from the scratched portraits. Her face was contorted in a mask of spectral rage, but she seemed unable to move. The Domovoi said something to her, but over the roaring wind assailing the room, Daneera could not make out the words. His intentions, however, were clear. He pointed at the woman and instantly a flash of blue lightning struck her full in the chest. She did not fly backwards, or crumble to the floor, or react at all.

She simply vanished. Completely and utterly vanished.

As she did, the red glow dissipated, and Daneera could feel the difference in the manor house. The chill in the air peeled off like a wet skin and everything seemed just a bit brighter. Daneera turned back toward the girl, still sleeping on the bed. The Domovoi had turned to the girl, and was gently stroking her hair. He had returned to his usual size, and seemed to pay Daneera no mind. She heard Kerik whine slightly, confused. Daneera shared the feeling. Still, she could feel that the danger had passed, so she sheathed her knife.

“The girl was never the danger, was she.” It was a question, but Daneera spoke it as a statement of fact.

“No.”

Daneera simply nodded. “Who is she?”

“Anya. The innocent.”

Daneera shook her head. “What happened here? Who was that woman?”

“Marya. Anya’s mother. The mistress of the House. She was a vile woman. An evil woman. She hated all things that were not herself. She was never happy unless all others were miserable. Anya, especially, she loved to torment.”

“The dogs,” Daneera said.

“Anya loves dogs. Her father, Casimir, the master of the House, would bring her dogs as pets, and she would care for them. But Marya, once the girl grew to love the dog, would take them, torture them, and kill them. She would make Anya watch. She would call it punishment, though the offense Anya had committed was always fiction.”

“Why didn’t Casimir do anything about it?”

“He was too often away, and knew nothing of his wife’s sins. As Anya grew, and came to know more, she resolved to tell her father, but it was too late. Marya killed Casimir before he could stop her.”

“But, I thought you protected those who live within this house.”

“Marya did not kill him here. My powers are great, but only here, and only when a life is threatened. At all other times, I am…weak.”

Daneera was about to respond when she suddenly realized the truth. “That’s why you couldn’t destroy Marya until now.”

The Domovoi nodded. He was stroking the side of Anya’s face, as a father might a sleeping child. He stopped, briefly, to look at his hands.

“Marya was evil, but had no wish to kill Anya, only torment her. When Anya realized what had become of her father, she wished to take her own life. I was able to stop her, but in doing so, I separated her spirit from her body. She became what she is now. A living ghost. Marya’s desire to torment her daughter was stronger than death, and when she died, she haunted these halls. And I could do nothing to stop her.”

“Until someone came who wanted to kill the one person still living within this house.”

“I am sorry to have deceived you, but you were Anya’s only hope. If you had no desire to destroy her, I would have had no power to destroy Marya.”

“Is she destroyed, then?”

“She is destroyed.”

Daneera nodded, then looked at the little girl. She looked like she was sleeping, and Daneera could even see the hint of a smile on her face. “So what happens now? With Anya?”

“She will find her way back to herself, in time. It will be as a dream, then. She will be alone, but she will be safe.”

“And if she wishes to leave?”

“She is the mistress of the House now. I can protect her as long as she remains, but she will come and go as she pleases. If she wishes to leave this place behind forever…”

He trailed off, and once more stroked the girl’s head. Daneera thought she caught the glint of a tear running down his cheek, but it must have been the moonlight.

“Then that is her choice.”

“Speaking of leaving this place behind,” Daneera said, glancing over at Kerik, “I think it’s time we leave.”

The Domovoi shifted to look back at them.

“Thank you. You will always be welcome in this house.”

Daneera considered. “Thanks. Don’t expect many visits.” She glanced at Anya, and smiled. “But, if we find a stray puppy…”