Antrax by Terry Brooks Read Free Book Online Page B

trying to make sense of what had happened. Then she stopped. The images were still there, still as discernible as ever, bright and clear. But they were everywhere, all across the meadow, all through the trees beyond, thousands of them, flickers of heat and light. It seemed as if the shape-shifter and the boy were everywhere at once, gone in all directions at the same time.
    It wasn’t possible, of course.
    It wasn’t real.
    She took a deep breath to calm herself, then exhaled slowly. She reached within her hood to brush back a lock of her thick, dark hair and looked from one end of the meadow to the other, casting into the shadows beneath the trees beyond, searching. No one was there. The boy and his protector were elsewhere, safely clear and farther away from her with every passing second.
    In spite of herself, she smiled. She had believed them panicked, but the shape-shifter and the boy were smarter than she’d thought. Realizing she would track them using her magic, they had retaliated by using their own. Or, more accurately, if she was reading things right, the boy had used his. He had used it to cast their images all about, to disperse them in all directions. She could sort them out, find the right set to see which way the pair had gone, but it would take time. They would do this again, farther on, and each time she was forced to unravel one of the confusing puzzles, she would lose ground.
    They were hoping, of course, that she lacked a Tracker’s skills and could not pursue them through reading prints and signs if they foiled her magic. They were right. Her magic was all she had, and it would have to be enough.
    She sat down, cross-legged with her back against an oak, looking out into the meadow, thinking things through. There was no need for hurry. She would catch them, of course. Nothing they tried would be enough to throw her off their trail for long. It was more important not to act in haste. She took a moment to consider where all this was leading. The boy and his protector were running, but to what? This was a strange land, and they knew nothing of its geography or inhabitants. The shape-shifter would have told the boy by now that their airship was under her control and outside their reach. The members of the landing party led by Walker were scattered or dead, and the Druid had disappeared. At best, running offered only a temporary solution to their problem. How did they intend to make use of it? Where would they try to go and to what end? Surely, they weren’t running blindly and toward nothing. The shape-shifter was too smart for that.
    She stood slowly, her mind made up. Answers to questions like those would have to wait. It didn’t make any difference where they went or why if she couldn’t find them, and she intended to find them right now. If her magic couldn’t serve her one way, it would have to serve her another.
    Standing at the edge of the meadow, she cupped her hands to her mouth and gave a long, low cry, eerie and chilling as it wafted into the distance and died away. She gave the cry three times, stood waiting awhile, then gave it three more.
    Time slipped away, the meadow and the surrounding forest silent save for birdsong and the rustle of leaves in the wind. The Ilse Witch stood where she was, listening and watching everywhere at once.
    Then something moved out of the trees and into the grasseson the far side of the meadow, causing the flowers to ripple and part. The Ilse Witch waited patiently as the submerged creature made its way toward her, invisible beneath the bobbing coverlet of wildflowers, crouched low to the earth.
    When it was a dozen yards away, too late for it to escape, it lifted its narrow muzzle slightly from the sea of brightness, testing the wind, searching for the source of the call that had summoned it. The wolf was not of a recognizable breed, bigger than the ones with which she was familiar, but it would do. It was an outcast, a renegade—she could sense that about