Free My Big Fat Supernatural Honeymoon by Jim Butcher, Kelley Armstrong, P. N. Elrod, Katie MacAlister, Rachel Caine, Marjorie M. Liu, Lilith Saintcrow, Caitlin Kittredge, Ronda Thompson

spare any brain-time for counting, but we walked for what felt like half an hour, and I was getting set to ask Gard if we were through yet when an inhuman voice not a foot from my left ear said, in plain English, "More of these new claws arrive every day. We are hungry. We should shred the ape and have done."
    I nearly fell on my ass, it startled me so much, but I held on to the image in my head. I'd heard malks speak before, with their odd inflections and unsettling intonations, and the sound only reinforced the image in my head.
    A round of both supporting and disparaging comments rose from all around me, all in lazy, malk-inflected English. There were more than twenty of them. There was a small horde.
    "Patience," said another malk. The tone of its voice somehow suggested that this was a conversation that had repeated itself a million times. "Let the ape think it has cowed us into acting as its door wardens. It hunts in the wizard's territory. The wizard will come to face it. The Erlking will give us great favor when we bring the wizard's head."
    Gosh. I felt famous.
    "I'm weary of waiting," said another malk. "Let us kill the ape and its prey and then hunt the wizard down."
    "Patience, hunters. He will come to us," the first one said. "The ape's turn will come, after we have brought down the wizard." There was an unmistakable note of pleasure in its voice. "And his little dog too."
    Mouse made another subvocal rumble in his chest. I could, just barely, feel it in his back. He kept walking, though, and we passed through the stretch of tunnel occupied by the malks. It was another endless stretch of minutes and several turns before Gard let out her breath between her teeth and said, "There were more than twenty."
    "Yeah, I kind of noticed that."
    "I think we are past them."
    I sighed and released the image I'd been holding in my head, calling forth dim light from my amulet. Or tried to release the image, at any rate. I opened my eyes and blinked several times, but my head was like one of those TVs at the department store, when one image has been burned into it for too long. I looked at Mouse and Gard, and had trouble shaking the picture of the savage, squash-headed malks I'd been imagining around them with such intensity.
    "Do you have another of those rune things?" I asked her.
    "No," Gard said.
    "We'll have to get creative on the way out," I said.
    "There's no need to worry about that yet," she said, and started walking forward again.
    "Sure there is. Once we get the girl, we have to get
back
with her. Christ, haven't you read any Joseph Campbell at all?"
    She shrugged one shoulder. "Grendelkin are difficult opponents. Either we'll die, or it will. So there's only a fifty-fifty chance that we'll need to worry about the malks on the way out. Why waste the effort until we know if it will be necessary?"
    "Call me crazy, but I find that if I plan for the big things, like how to get back to the surface, it makes it a little simpler to manage the little things. Like how to keep on breathing."
    She held up a hand and said, "Wait."
    I stopped in my tracks, listening. Mouse came to a halt, snuffling at the air, his ears twitching around like little radar dishes, but he gave no sign that he'd detected lurking danger.
    "We're close to its lair," she murmured.
    I arched an eyebrow. The tunnel looked exactly the same as it had for several moments now. "How do you know?"
    "I can feel it," she said.
    "You can
do
that?"
    She started forward. "Yes. It's how I knew it was moving in the city to begin with."
    I ground my teeth. "It might be nice if you considered
sharing
that kind of information."
    "It isn't far," she said. "We might be in time. Come on."
    I felt my eyebrows go up. Mouse had us both beat when it came to purely physical sensory input, and he'd given no indication of a hostile presence ahead. My own senses were attuned to all kinds of supernatural energies, and I'd kept them focused ever since we'd entered Undertown. I hadn't