The Night Voice by Barb Hendee

alone. Here and now did it mean something else? Was he to start digging on that spot?
    With a low growl, Chap took two steps and clawed again on a different spot.
    Chane set down his tools, pulled out, and unrolled the hide on the ground. Chap began pawing the letters and words.
    You dig. I return soon.
    Chane looked up from the hide. “Where are you going?”
    Chap turned away and ran off around the granite.
    Chane almost called out, not that he could have shouted with his maimed voice. He still quick-stepped back the way he had come to see Chap vanish into the sparse trees, and he stood there even longer in hesitation.
    Sooner or later, Chap would return. He would certainly not wish to leave the guide waiting too long into the night. Nor would he leave two orbs in the lone hands of a longtime enemy.
    With a grating hiss of his own, Chane turned back to start with the pickax.
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    Chap raced through the trees, though in the dark everything looked much the same. It took longer than he wished to search out what he sought.
    There was no need for concern about Chane and the orbs; the undead’s obsession with Wynn and her wishes would keep the vampire obedient. Still, Chap was torn between turning back and going onward. He had to know—to find—one more certainty, now that he had returned so close to the place of his greatest sin.
    He kept running in the freezing night.
    To hide the orbs of Water and Fire, he had been forced to do something unspeakable. No one—not even the guide Leesil had hired for him at that time—could ever know the orbs’ last resting place. If only it had been their last place.
    Once, he had existed as part of the eternal Fay. When he was born into flesh, his kin had removed many of his memories of his existence among them. So many that only later had he suspected what they had done to him. Upon finally confronting them, he had attempted to fathom what fragments he was missing.
    Among those had been the notion of a first sin—their sin . . . his sin.
    So horrified by it, they had not wanted even him to remember it.
    Upon creating Existence itself, a place to “be” other than in their timeless and placeless existence, they had learned they could “be” anything they perceived within this new existence. He had only suspected what that meant. His suspicion must have built itself upon something hidden deep inside from when he had been part of them that they could not extract.
    Chap had led that first guide, named Nawyat, and his dog team well past a spot he had chosen along the way. Then he stopped as if for the night. This guide had been simple, kind, and even strangely charmed by a dog—a wolf—like no other.
    It had been so easy to abuse simple Nawyat’s trust.
    Chap invaded and took control of the man’s flesh while temporarily abandoning his own. He needed hands to dig frozen earth and to bury the orbs in secret. And when he had returned to camp . . . returned to his own body . . .
    Nawyat lay within the tent, staring blankly up at nothing. He barely breathed.
    Try as Chap had, he could not find one memory in the guide’s mind. He lay there beside Nawyat, trying again and again to find something of the man inside that husk of flesh. With Magiere and Leesil waiting down the coast, he was forced to leave.
    He had enacted the sin, the first sin, of the Fay:
domination
—utter and complete—in mind, body, and his own eternal spirit.
    Chap halted and stood in the same clearing where he had stolen Nawyat’s flesh. The place was bare, filled only with crushed snow. He could not even see sunken lines where a sled might have passed more than a season ago. Chap raced about, tearing up crust with his claws in search of any sign of that previous camp he had fled.
    He couldn’t find anything.
    He had broken with his own kin, the Fay, upon learning how much had been torn from him at