Blackfeather Woods step away from the window

Betrayal of this magnitude was a new and harrowing experience for Coelacanth, but the hurt it engendered echoed a long healed hurt from the tiny Groenendael’s earliest memories: the first betrayal. For just as Lotte had nipped at Seelie’s feathered heels to drive her toward her captors, so too had Selkie nipped at the heels of her infant children to drive them away from Nanaimo. Oh, she hurt! For the first time in hours — days, maybe; she didn’t know how much time had passed — Seelie stirred, a thready whimper trembling upon her lips. Her gamine frame was littered with bruises and punctures, but as far as she could tell, she was generally sound. Dainty paws shifted as she gingerly took stock of her injuries, unfolding the tight bud of her fear-knotted musculature to explore her dimly lit surroundings on tenterhooks.

She appeared to be in a cave that smelled of old blood and the fetid stink of terror, its ceiling and floor infested with ugly, serrated fangs. Yellowed with age and spattered with rust-colored stains whose origins she had no care to discover, they seemed almost sentient in the tenebrae — and she flinched involuntarily at the sight of them, tufted ears flattening and Neptune eyes squinting as she sharply recoiled. The empath felt quite plainly the panic and pain of the Wolfskull’s previous victims, and the grim miasma was intensified by the fact that she was literally backed into a corner. As a rule, Coelacanth was decidedly unfond of cages, caves, and corners — and she did her best to flee, nimble paws darting fleetly between the macabre weave poles like a little black pinball. She moved with instinctual swiftness, reaching the Wolfskull’s maw in record time.

Open air filled her lungs, billowing out the fragile swell of her breast, the parameters of which were clearly delineated by the scalloped gradient of her rib cage — but with only a single pawstep lying between Coelacanth and freedom, she froze. Tufted ears piped alarum as she looked intently down at her catlike paws, tipping her delicate head first to one side, then the other. They stood in sharp contrast to the sallow floor of her prison — and they served as a chilling reminder of everything that had led up to this very moment. She had no reason to expect rescue or respite — she could do nothing but endure. In a spectacular display of learned helplessness, she drew her rose blush tongue anxiously across her lips and issued a shaking whisper-whine of indecision, her ears crumpling like black silk and her carriage folding in on itself as she backed away from the promise of freedom and moved deeper into the cave of nightmares.

There, Seelie curled herself into a little dog doughnut and settled down, waiting for the pain.

It was not long in coming.