The link gave on the fourth stroke.
Soren heard it go, a clean metal note under the hall's noise, and the fragment's front limb came free of the serviced chain with a slowness that said it had all the time in the world and knew it.
The limb rose. The eyeless head rose with it.
Forty feet of reception hall between the broken square and the last guests wedged at the west doors, and the thing in the ground had just bought itself an arm.
"Selah, cage. Maren, shepherd. Grimm..."
The wolf was already moving.
◆◆◆◆
Selah stood up off her knee and walked toward the opening.
Walked. Into the cold coming off a primordial piece, palms out, and the frost poured up her arms and off her fingers in columns, and she raised a ring of ice around the broken square that went from floor to nothing in under a breath, a white cylinder with the fragment inside it and her body as the only pump feeding it.
The fragment put its free limb through the wall.
