Grunwol cursed a blue streak. He’d pulled the guildmaster’s escort back as soon as he realized they’d alert the Tillerman to Raomar’s presence. He hadn’t been happy about it, but it had been the only way.

  Once the Tillerman’s exchange had been complete and the man had left, he’d gathered the escort and followed. As the tunnels had narrowed, he’d marked the path and taken his people.

  The docks might be the Tillerman’s domain, but under the docks was that even more true, and he couldn’t risk a single one of them being caught. All he could hope was that the newly arrived crime lord had completed his activities for the evening and was ready to retire.

  He wished the guildmaster had warned him of his plans for the night so that he could at least have had the tunnels located next to guild territory mapped. That way he’d have had some idea of what they were heading into. As it was, he now had to find which of the damned nobility had shanghaied his guildmaster and friend, and get him back.

  There was clearly more about the Tillerman they didn’t know that they needed to…like the fact he used magical wards over all the dockside sewer entrances and maintenance ledges, and the alarms they triggered were silent. Knowing the night guards were shadow fey and gargoyles would have helped, too.

  It would have saved them all a lot of pain…and it would have meant he could have prepared his men for the attack that took them beyond the guildmaster’s reach. He hadn’t known he’d lost any, until the last man had dropped his blade.

  The clatter had seen him pivot in time to see the guildsman’s unconscious form being carried through a portal of darkness ringed in mist. The Northman had backpedaled quickly, hoping to find Raomar and get him out of the tunnels before the shadow found him.

  He was listening to the sluggish flow of water and murmur of voices ahead when he heard another sound…as if a large bird had gotten lost inside the tunnels. That, in and of itself, wasn’t a cause for alarm, but the accompanying chill made it worrisome.

  He backed up against the damp wall of the tunnel so he could see both ways down it, even as he tucked the wizard light back into its pouch so it wouldn’t give him away. The only problem with that was it left him almost blind.

  Closing eyes at least let him sharpen his listening, but that did him no good. The first he knew he’d been outmaneuvered was when two sharp blades dug gently into his sides.

  “Move and you die, “a voice rasped from before him as his own blades were removed from their sheaths with silent efficiency.

  “I don’t suppose I can bargain?” Grunwol asked quietly.

  The voice that answered was laced with scorn. “What could you possibly offer us?”

  “A debt?” Grunwol suggested, carefully opening his eyes.

  To his surprise, he wasn’t facing an elf, shadowy or otherwise, but something else. The creature crouched before him was only slightly shorter than his own near-seven-feet of height and outweighed him at least two to one.

  The peoples of the north knew them as garitzik, but here they were known only as gargoyles. Bat eared, canine snouted, and bedecked with stony wings that arced from its shoulders to its knees, the gargoyle scented him.

  “Northlander?” it rasped, crinkling its nose, “you are far from the plains and mountains of ice.”

  “I am,” Grunwol agreed, not flinching when the creature leaned into him and sniffed again.

  “What was your totem?”

  Was… The question brought an unexpected twist of pain.

  “I have no totem, now.”

  It gave a derisive snort in response.

  “This I know,” the garitzik replied. “I asked not what it is, but what it was.”

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  “Wolf,” Grunwol replied, steeling himself for the inevitable follow-up.

  The gargoyle didn’t let him down.

  “And where is your mate?”

  Long-buried grief ripped through him, and Grunwol bowed his head, closing his eyes so the monster before him didn’t see his pain. Clenching his teeth, Grunwol choked down a second surge of loss, still fresh a decade after the event. When he replied his voice was rough with suppressed emotion.

  “Gone ahead,” he responded, his voice cracking despite his best efforts. “Gone…alone.”

  The very answer made him want to howl, but for that he would need to be a wolf, and the shift was forbidden…and unwanted. He repressed a sob and hoped the gargoyle would leave the subject alone. Surprisingly, it did.

  “The debt you offer,” the creature said. “Which is it?”

  “Blood and iron,” Grunwol replied. It was all he had left.

  Shadow moved beside his head, and warm breath whispered through the garitzik’s aura of cold.

  “You will come when we call, Northman. Wherever you are. Whatever you are doing.”

  “The debt cannot be sealed without your true names and your blood,” Grunwol replied.

  The garitzik reached forward, extending an ivory claw. Before it could touch him, footsteps sounded in the passage he’d been following, footsteps coming from where his prey had gone.

  “Come with us,” the warm shadow said, and pulled him back through the wall, through air where there should have been stones.

  The gargoyle followed.

  Grunwol’s startled shout was cut short as the mist that bordered all such gates boiled down to close it behind them. This time, when the gargoyle’s ivory claw came toward him, there was nothing to interrupt its strike.

  “Your heart shall know our names,” it rasped, opening a deep tear in the muscle and skin above that organ. “It will answer when we call, and direct you where to go.”

  Grunwol heard its words through a wave of pain as the garitzik’s claw scraped over bone. His left shoulder and arm went numb and he struggled to stay upright with no wall to support him. His eyes widened as the garitzik withdrew its talon and licked the blood from its surface.

  “I can find you wherever you might seek to hide,” it assured him. “Your blood speaks to me.”

  Grunwol made a note to kill it as soon as he was able, watching as it opened a vein in its own wrist and pressed the wound to the gash it had created in Grunwol’s chest.

  “Your blood speaks to mine, revealing truths that might otherwise remain hidden. My blood knows your true name and your loss.”

  Grunwol choked back a cry as the gargoyle’s blood burned its way into him. If one of the shadow fey hadn’t reached out to steady him, he would have fallen. Another of the shadow fey moved to stand beside the gargoyle and extended its wrist.

  The creature took its forearm away from Grunwol’s chest, and sliced open the fey’s vein with a careful flick of its claw. The fey bowed his head in thanks and crossed to place his wrist against Grunwol’s wound. Again, the gargoyle licked its claw clean.

  Catching Grunwol’s eye, it intoned, “I am the keeper of the debt…”

  The Northman felt the shadow fey’s blood work its way to his heart and wrap itself around it.

  “Our blood converses in shadow and the gray light at the edge of the day, “the fey told him. “I can find you between worlds and in the twilight.”

  He lifted Grunwol’s left arm and nicked the vein at the wrist. Lifting it to his lips, he took a sip.

  “Your blood speaks with me,” he continued, a moment later, “but it keeps your secrets. We are tied. You know my true name as I now know yours. You will come to me, when I need you most. Your blood will bring you.”

  Grunwol didn’t like the sound of that, but had no choice but to accept it.

  His blood would take him when the fey needed him most? He really didn’t like the sound of that. The elf stepped away and out of sight. Moments later, Grunwol felt himself being transferred from one fey to the other, and a female shadow elf stepped into view.

  She inclined her head toward him, before offering her wrist to the garitzik’s claw. Once again, blood was spilled by, and cleaned from its gleaming ivory tip, binding its donor to the oath keeper.

  Grunwol fought down a wave of nausea, and a second wave of dizziness, fighting to remain conscious. Who knew where he’d end up if he didn’t?

  His left arm felt like lead, and his chest like it was alight.

  When the elf pressed her wrist against his flesh, he barely held back another cry.

  The gargoyle’s blood had burned like fire, and the first fey’s blood had infiltrated his heart like mist…but this fey’s blood was honey and the far north wind. It drove itself through his heart like a stake and then wormed its way through the rest of him.

  I am lost, Grunwol thought, as the second fey began to speak. There is no more hope for me.

  “My blood stakes its claim,” she stated, “the claim of all my people. If one should need you, you will come. My blood will lead the way.”

  She raised his wrist, and Grunwol realized he was still bleeding, a trail of red flowing over his palm and dividing into individual rivulets, one for each of his fingers. The fey woman raised his wrist to her lips and drank more deeply than her predecessor.

  Grunwol’s head spun, and he groaned as she lifted her lips away.

  “Your blood hides your heart and deepest thoughts,” she assured him. “You know my true name and I know yours. Your blood demands an oath from me and I have given it.”

  This last seemed to surprise her as much as it surprised him, but she didn’t explain, merely took a silken kerchief from her pocket and bound his wrist before using the ties on his shirt to hold the damaged limb across his chest.

  “Where do you need to go?” she asked.

  Knowing Raomar was long gone, Grunwol named the one person who could help him.