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this: joy and good hunting to you.”
    Sonny laughed wearily. “Insofar as it seems I won’t be achieving the one without the other, I accept your toast.” He took a long sip of the cool, smooth drink. It was like biting into a fresh pear that had fallen into an ice-cold mountain stream.
    Sonny gazed out the window toward a row of jagged hills that jutted above the nearby forest of snow-covered pines. The highest peak was topped with the spires and battlements of Auberon’s palace, like glittering stalagmites. “How are things up there?”
    “Why do you need to ask?” Gofannon sounded surprised. “Aren’t you staying in the palace?”
    Sonny shook his head. “There’s a cottage near the woods of the Autumn Borderlands where I’ve been staying. You know—for those scant few days when I’m not off hunting maniacs. No, Gof, I may still work for the Winter King, but that is all. I won’t shelter under his roof. He hasn’t mentioned that?” Sonny asked, the tone of his voice both surly and a little wounded. Auberon had been the only father he’d ever known.
    “I haven’t seen his frosty lordship for a good long while,” Gofannon answered. “Not since Samhain, when you returned from the mortal world. Any work he’s had me do lately—and that has been very little—he’s sent the Goodfellow down with his orders. And that tricky beast and I don’t speak much in the way of civil discourse and the passing of time, these days.”
    “Is there anyone left that Puck hasn’t managed to madden or make an enemy of, I wonder?”
    The smith shrugged. “We used to be cordial. Friends even.”
    “What happened?” Sonny asked.
    “He’s a bloody thief is what happened.”
    “A lousy one, to hear tell of it!” Sonny laughed.
    “Lousy or not, he’ll steal the breeches off your backside if you’re looking the other way. Bah!” Gofannon turned and spat into the fire. “Don’t talk to me of the Goodfellow. He’ll come to ill one day for his thieving ways, and I’ll drink to it!”
    Sonny was surprised to see the smith, usually so even-tempered, turn flushed with anger.
    Gofannon moved away from Sonny, back to the glow of his forge. “I’ll send word when the arrows are done,” he said curtly, and picked up his hammer. Sparks flew as he began pounding at the white-hot ingot. The visit was at an end.
    “Thank you, Gof,” Sonny said, and slung his leather satchel across his body. When the smith didn’t answer, he quietly opened the door of the forge and stepped out into the biting chill of a winter day.

Chapter III
    N o! ”
    Kelley bolted upright in her bed, the blood-spattered images of her nightmare so vivid that they seemed to hang before her in the darkened air of her room. She took a deep breath, trying to slow the pounding of her heart, and pulled her knees up to her chest.
    Oh, Sonny, she thought bleakly, not another one . . .
    The late April breeze sifting through the cracked-open window bared sharp, chilly teeth, but in spite of that, Kelley’s sheets were soaked with sweat, and she felt almost feverish. According to the blue glow of the clock at her bedside, she’d been asleep for less than an hour, but it seemed that she’d dropped straight into the ravening maw of her dreams. Again. But these dreams were different.
    Kelley still preferred to think of it as dreaming. It wasn’t, of course—not in the conventional sense. When they had first started happening, Kelley had written them off as garden-variety nightmares. Vivid ones, sure—but just nightmares. Now, however, she knew the visions that tormented her from time to time were glimpses of actual events. She knew, for instance, that Sonny had managed to hunt down yet another of the dwindling numbers of the Wild Hunt. Hunt him down and . . . kill him.
    Kelley knew it was real—she had seen the bright blood splashed across the hunter’s cheek as he gasped for breath, and she had forced herself to wake before the terrible moment when she