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throat—delusional.
    “I said … drop that.” With barely a twitch of his arm muscle, he sent the point of the sword jabbing forward. Just enough to sting.
    “Ow! Hey!”
    The bulky shape dropped the pipe and backed off, putting a hand to his chest. Fennrys kicked it out of easy reach. The man glowered at him and pointed at the iron span overhead.
    “My bridge, brother,” he rumbled in a voice like a rock slide. “I been here longer ’n you. Longer ’n most. Show a little respect.”
    “I’m not your brother and I won’t be staying. But I’m also not going anywhere until after sunup. So you can either sit over there— way over there—and behave yourself, or go find another bridge to lurk under. Like that one.” Fennrys nodded to where he could see the elegant swooping lines of the bridge the centaurs had been shooting at him from.
    “The Triborough?” The enormous rag-and-blanket-clad bum snorted. “That’s just a bridge .”
    Fennrys glanced quizzically at the guy and rolled his eyes at the span above their heads.
    “Not all bridges are created equal, brother.” The man backed off and sat with his broad, hulking shoulders against the soaring concrete arch. “This”—he knocked on the concrete bridge support behind his head with one enormous knuckle—“is the Hell Gate. And this”—he put his hand flat on the ground—“is Dead Ground. They won’t follow you down here.”
    “Really.” Fennrys was too weary to be surprised by the fact that the guy had seen a pair of centaurs shooting arrows at him and didn’t seem to think it was anything out of the ordinary. “And why’s that?”
    “Here’s Dead Ground.” He shrugged again, as if that explained everything. “Unquiet at that.”
    Dead Ground . That was what the one centaur had said to the other, Fennrys realized. What on earth was that? Before he could ask the question, the big man was speaking again, patting the packed earth beside him with his baseball-glove-sized hand.
    “Many dead, many many, lie under this land,” he rumbled. “Makes this place safe for some. Not so safe for others.” He turned toward Fennrys, his shiny bead-black eyes gleaming in a face defined by bulky, misshapen features. “I wonder … which one are you?”
    Before Fennrys could ask what he meant by that, the guy lurched to his feet and shambled around to the other side of the massive concrete bridge trestle, laughing quietly to himself.

VIII
     
    A s Toby and the students moved cautiously through the gym, Mason kept surreptitiously scanning the wreckage, searching for anything that might give her a clue as to what those things had been. Or some kind of proof that they had even existed at all. But there was nothing. Not even a tuft of hair or a broken fingernail left behind—let alone the arm or head that Fennrys had so expertly severed. Fennrys, who, for all intents and purposes, was just as much a phantom as the draugr. Aside from the theft of Toby’s boots, there really was no evidence he’d ever been there either.
    Almost no evidence …
    “Cal …” Mason reached out suddenly and touched something hanging from his injured left wrist, which he cradled with his other arm. Her fingers closed around the gray metal disk tied there with a leather thong, and it felt hot. Mason jerked her hand away as if she’d touched a live wire, and her arm tingled almost up to her elbow. She rubbed at it and stared at the iron medallion. It was his . The Fennrys Wolf’s. She’d seen it hanging around his neck, and she felt almost irresistibly compelled to reach out for it again, in spite of the shock it had just given her.
    But Calum lowered his arm to his side, almost as if he was trying to hide it behind his back.
    “That’s his ,” Heather said. “The wolf guy’s. I saw him wearing it.”
    “I can’t see how you could have missed any detail of his wardrobe, with the way you were staring,” Rory said drily, ignoring the dagger glance she shot him in