Soul Hunt by Margaret Ronald

thought things through. I had thought that the hunters, all or some of them, would just take the damned Horn away from me. There were enough powerful entities before me that they should have been able to do so.
    One of the children in the front—this one in a bunny suit, as if the riding entity had tried to make it as uncanny as possible—spoke. “You must give it,” he said, and though the voice was that of a child, the undertone was a woman’s, old and cracked. “You have won it fairly in battle. Even crippled and halved as you are, I cannot take it from you.”
    The part of me that has never, never liked bowing to anyone did the mental equivalent of jumping up and down with both middle fingers raised.
Ha, so there’s something a human can do that you can’t! Up yours, ineffable divinity!
The rest of me was starting to panic. What was I supposed to do?
    I touched the knot of scar tissue. How did I give up something that had become part of me? And did I even want to? The thought shuddered through me like lightning coming to ground. I mean, yes, I had spent the day nauseated by the Hounds’ taste for blood, and they were not a safe thing for a human to have. But over the last few weeks, there had been days when the only thing I was sure of was the chorus of the Hounds in my head, their everpresent breath of winter. And today, I’d lost my sense of smell. Even now, even after that first breath of fireworks, I could feel that impression fading. The Hounds were monsters, creatures that were so far from humanity that words like “monster” didn’t even apply, but they could hunt. By giving them up, I might be giving up the only chance I had to hunt again.
    I let go of Nate’s hand. No. I couldn’t let myself think like that. Gagging, I forced myself to remember the taste of Foster’s blood (the Hounds sighed in remembered appreciation) and stepped to the edge ofthe circle. An image flashed into my head, a memory of the night by the quarry when I had bargained something away in exchange for Nate’s life, when the Wild Hunt had passed from Patrick Huston to me. Huston had kept the horn sealed away in his own long-dead flesh, infecting the Gabriel Hounds with a kind of mortality, which was the only reason I’d been able to stand against them at all. I remembered him putting his hand to his throat, tearing the flesh there …
    I touched my own throat. Cold blood made the skin slippery, but I could feel something … “This is probably going to get gross.”
    Nate’s grip on my arm tightened, but a puff of breath crystallized over my shoulder: a laugh, and very much the laugh of a man struck by his father’s berserker curse. “Gross I can handle.”
    “Good.” I stroked the scar one last time, finding the notch I’d made, then dug into the skin, my broken and ragged nails making first divots and then crescents of pain. I did my best not to scream—I don’t think you’re allowed to scream when you’re the one doing the hurting—and tore the scar free, a patch of ragged flesh coming with it. I started to gag—which hurt worse—then stopped, raising my hand. I held only a plain, bone white horn the length of my hand, its dark leather baldric hanging over my knuckles. The pain in my throat deadened, as if someone had slapped Novocain on it, and when I raised my head I felt the flex of raw skin there. New skin—like what you get before a blister has fully healed, the sensitive, thin skin of a burn.
    Nate’s hand on my arm was so tight it hurt. I tilted back my head, showing him the patch of new skin, and a little bit of color returned to his face. He slowly let go of my arm. The air seemed to shiver, and the Gabriel Hounds, echoes only in shadow, sat curled at my feet, tensed as if awaiting only a nod to go streaking after their prey.
    You don’t have to give it back,
one of them said, jaw dropping open to reveal teeth the color of old blood.
    Another stirred, pressing up against my legs. You can keep it a