Jinx On The Divide by Elizabeth Kay Page B

around him, rising and falling. Then it stopped, presumably as suddenly as it had begun. He sat up. "What was that?" he asked.
    "Snagglefangs," said the driver shortly. "Full moon."
    A japegrin at the rear of the sleigh lifted his harpoon and rested it on the guardrail. The other passengers looked at one another, but none of them seemed inclined to comment.
    Felix looked at Betony. "What's a snagglefang?"
    "I don't know," said Betony. "We don't have them down south."
    Felix scanned the surrounding countryside. Once or twice, he thought he caught a glimpse of something white moving against the white snow, but it was hard to be sure. It was only when one of the shapes turned a pinpoint pair of luminous green eyes on him that a chill ran down his spine. These creatures were hunting, and they were hunting him. It felt as though there'd been a mistake. The people on the sleigh were intelligent, thinking beings. They weren't simply food.
    "Hold on tight," said the driver. "We're going to see if we can lose them." He yelled at the cuddyaks, and shook the reins. Felix could see the whites of the animals' eyes as they rolled them in protest, but they broke into a lumbering gallop and the sleigh speeded up.
    119
    "I don't like this," whispered Betony as they jolted along. "Cuddyaks can't outrun anything. Those snagglefang things are getting closer."
    Felix glanced out of the rear of the sleigh. Six pairs of disembodied green eyes were following along some ways behind. His mouth went dry with fear; the disembodied smile of the Cheshire cat from Alice in Wonderland had scared him half to death when he'd been small. Then he realized that the eyes only looked disembodied because the animals had snow-white coats, which were lost against the icy backdrop. They looked like the illustrations he'd seen of Pleistocene dire wolves, and they seemed to be about the same size. Big.
    The eyes were getting closer. He could make out the shapes of their bodies now, ghostlike in their pallor, and he could see their paws landing on top of the tracks made by the sleigh, hear the faint thubbidy-thub as they sent up little puffs of snow.
    The driver started to swear quietly to himself as the japegrin tried to take aim with his harpoon, but the sleigh was bouncing around too much.
    The eyes were a lot closer now -- although it was hard to estimate their real distance since there were no landmarks, just snow. The snagglefangs looked completely at home in this frozen wasteland, and ran so effortlessly they seemed almost to float.
    "Go right, go right!" shouted the japegrin suddenly, and the sleigh nearly tipped over as it did a sharp turn, spraying snow in a graceful arc.
    120
    Felix felt his knuckles go into spasm as they gripped the guardrail too tightly. The sleigh was heading straight toward a crevasse, and the cuddyaks were galloping flat-out. As they drew closer, he saw that there was a bridge. It was very narrow. It looked as though someone had spun it from sugar, to decorate a wedding cake. Delicate strands of white twinkled in the moonlight, arching over a chasm so deep that Felix couldn't see the bottom until they were actually on the bridge itself. The river below foamed and frothed and battered its way past boulders that were so far away they looked like pebbles. All he could hear was a faint rumble, like white noise. Snow was blowing off the cambered surface like clouds of spray, and there was a grating and a grinding noise from the sleigh as the runners hit stone. Felix bumped his nose on the seat in front, and then felt a tiny trickle of blood reach his lip. He wiped it away with the back of his hand.
    When they were halfway across, the first snagglefang loped into sight. It was the creature's long black shadow that Felix noticed first, then the beast itself. For the first time, he got a really good look at it -- and so did everyone else. He could see the ears, pricked, fluffy, set at a slight angle on a heavy skull. Its coat was thick and furry,