Excerpt: Changeling

Eyes closed tightly, Seleanafae listens with every fiber of her being. The night closes in around her like a friend, blanketing her from the eyes of her enemies. The only sound is her frantic heartbeat as the first rush of adrenaline surges through her bloodstream and the thrill of her fear slowly wears off. She takes a tentative breath, hoping that the sound isn’t too terribly loud, and moves her hand slowly down her left leg toward the boot knife concealed there.
The right side of her body is pressed against the knobby, brittle trunk of a fir, her cheek pressed to the warm smell of pine sap. The trunk is larger around than she can span with both of her arms, and the boughs of the tree, heavy with snow, dip below her crouched shoulder. Her entire body is held eerily still, as she waits to see what has been tracking her. It is almost as if this was a game of childhood, when tricking and eluding her brothers was the goal of the day and the only punishment for failure was a chase that ultimately ended in a sound tickling.
The moon is full, hanging low over the distant mountains and lighting the packed snow a brilliant blue. The snow sparkles with handfuls of crushed diamonds, and is the worst sort for stealth. The wind that pulls at her corn-silk blond braid and whistles through the fir’s needles stings her face and hands where they are exposed. Steady drips fall from her numb nose onto the gray fur of her coat. Her eyes sting and begin to run as she cracks them to peer into the blue night.
She heard them. She knows that she did. It was a sense other than her ears that first alerted her to their presence. She has learned to trust this intuition because it is the reason she still lives while all of her tribe is scattered or dead. Something out there in the night moves, no matter how silently. It chased her from her relatively warm bed in the cave nearby, and she left unprepared for the cold. The fear of hypothermia is pale in comparison to the unknown death that waited should she have stayed. She’s not certain how she knows this, only that the urge to run into the night was greater than her ability to form second thoughts. The tree she ran for blindly has branches that reach closer to the bare forest floor than others and a pungent aroma that is unmistakable. Her sixth sense has led her into the safest haven within her reach – a place of relative concealment, especially if her hunters seek her by the light of the fire, and a scent to cover her own. It could be enough. Please let it be enough.