“How?” she asked.
Drizzt just looked at her and shrugged. “I called to her and she came to me. Whatever magic was hindering her must have dissipated, or perhaps a tear in the fabric between the planes has repaired itself?”
Dahlia bent low, stroking Guen’s muscular flank. “It’s good to have her back.”
Drizzt answered with a smile, and the warmth of that expression only grew as he considered Dahlia stroking the cat’s soft fur. There was serenity on her too-often troubled face, a genuine warmth and kindness. This was the Dahlia that Drizzt wished for as a companion. This was the Dahlia he could care for-perhaps even love.
For some reason, he thought of Catti-brie, then, and in his mind’s eye, he interposed his memory of his dead wife with the image of Dahlia before him.
“So we do not need to find the seer,” Dahlia reasoned.
“So it would seem,” Drizzt agreed and he continued to brush and hug Guenhwyvar.
“Well, send the cat off on the hunt, then,” Dahlia proposed, her voice and her expression going chilly. “I’m tired of this walking already. Let’s find the goblin killer and be done with this adventure.”
The suggestion, reasonable as it seemed, rang out like a broken bell in Drizzt’s heart. He wasn’t about to separate from Guenhwyvar if he could help it. And more than that, Dahlia’s tone struck him badly. She didn’t think of this hunt in the forest south of Neverwinter as any grand or important adventure. She was up for a fight-when was she not? — but that was purely for selfish reasons: the need to let free her rage, or more goblin ears for coin. For personal gain of one sort or another.
Like their lovemaking, he mused. Earlier he had pondered that he was using Dahlia, but was that insincerity not mutual?
The safety of the road, the betterment of those around her … these emotions did not resonate within Dahlia’s scarred heart. Not to any great degree, at least, and certainly not enough for Drizzt to see her in the same light in which he had once viewed his beloved Catti-brie.
He looked up at the sky.
“Night draws near,” he said. “If we hunt a vampire as you suspect, we’re better off meeting it in daylight.” He looked back at Guen and scratched her neck. “We’ll return here tomorrow morning.”
Dahlia looked at him skeptically for just a moment and seemed ready to argue their course. But then she replied, as if in epiphany, “You fear that you will have to dismiss the cat to her home and will again have trouble recalling her.”
Drizzt didn’t argue the point. “Can you give me this much at least?” he pleaded.
His question seemed to hit the elf woman hard. She held out her hand to him, and when he took it, Dahlia pulled him to his feet and crushed him in a hug, whispering, “Of course,” into his ear over and over again.
And there was desperation in her tone, Drizzt knew, and he knew, too, that he really didn’t know how to react.
She was, yet again, not the person he had just decided she was.
Chapter 2
The young tiefling crept through Draygo Quick’s residence. He knew that the Netherese lord was out at a gathering of his peers, but having lived in the residence for all of these years, Effron also understood that Draygo didn’t have to be here to keep the place well-guarded, both with magical wards and with capable and dangerous underlings.
He fell against a wall and held his breath, hearing the conversation of a pair of warlocks. He recognized the voices and knew these two as his peers in age, though surely not in ability. If it came down to a fight, Effron was confident that he could defeat both with little trouble.
But where would that leave him with Draygo Quick?
Panicked by that thought, the young warlock glanced around for some hiding place or avenue of escape. But he was in a long and bending corridor with few side rooms, all private chambers, and thus all likely locked or warded. Fleeing back the way he had come would cost him too much time.
His indecision made the choice for him, as he came to realize that trying to scamper away now wouldn’t get him far enough ahead to remain out of sight. The warlocks were too close.
So he stepped out and openly approached them, as if nothing were amiss.
They both nodded and continued their conversation, one pausing in his discussion to remark to Effron, “Lord Draygo is not in residence.”
“Ah,” Effron replied “Do you know when he will return?”
The two looked to each other and shrugged in unison.
“I will leave him a note,” Effron said. “If you see him, pray tell him that I wish to speak with him.”
They nodded and continued on their way, and Effron breathed a sigh of relief. Obviously, Draygo Quick had not informed the residents of the falling out, or of Draygo’s dismissal of Effron from his tutelage.
His relief was short-lived, though, for his instructions to the young apprentices would of course reveal to Draygo Quick that he had been in the residence. He could likely talk his way out of that indiscretion if Draygo Quick confronted him, but he had come here to steal something, after all, and now that plan seemed perfectly suicidal.
He pressed on anyway, trying to sort it out as he went, rushing through the main room of the keep, a vast foyer with a checkerboard black-and-white tiled floor. He crossed from there into the main library, a room of potions and an alchemical workbench and a distillery, and from there to the wide curving stairs encircling the castle’s main tower.
Many steps later, Effron paused at Draygo Quick’s private door. He knew the password to get safely beyond the magical wards, but knew, too, that if Draygo Quick had bothered to change that password, the glyphs would almost surely burn through all of the magical defenses Effron had erected upon himself. How meager his counter-measures would be against the bared power of Draygo Quick!
He almost threw up his hands in defeat then, but just growled out the expected password and stubbornly pushed through the door.
He didn’t melt.
Surprised, relieved, shocked even, Effron collected his thoughts and closed the door behind him, then rushed into the adjoining room, Draygo Quick’s vaunted menagerie.
The cage was in place upon the pedestal, under the silken cloth, as he had expected, but the bars were not glowing with power and the cage was empty.
Effron bent low and peered around the bars, unable to comprehend the sight before him. Had the panther escaped? How could that be?
And who might have released the magical bindings of the cage?
Effron held his breath and stood up fast, spinning, his broken arm flying around him like a scarf in a gale. He expected to see a six-hundred-pound, angry black panther standing right behind him.
It took him many minutes of scanning the room, his gaze piercing the shadows, before he was able to relax in the confidence that he was indeed alone. He moved to one of the grand cabinets along the wall and gingerly opened it, brushing aside the mist and examining the many bottles on the shelves within. Each contained a tiny representation of some powerful monster, which were, in fact, the bodies of those actual creatures in miniaturized stasis. Effron himself had sorted these items and kept them cleaned, as per his duties for Draygo Quick, and so he recognized immediately that nothing was amiss and no new additions had been made.
He closed the cabinet and turned back to the empty cage, soberly now, and tried to wrap his thoughts around this unexpected turn. Where had the cat gone? A myriad of possibilities rushed through Effron’s mind, but only two seemed plausible: Either the panther had been handed back to Drizzt Do’Urden in some bargain concocted by Draygo Quick, or the cat had been slain, or had died of its own accord, perhaps due to the severance of the connection to the Astral Plane.