**THANK YOU for reading this far - and if you have, I'm hoping you might be willing to vote (at least on this chapter! ;-) It would make such a difference in my fight to stay in the top 10, and still more in my dream to be in that No. 1 slot.

Though you are already great for reading!! Thank you times one million at LEAST.**

Grace couldn't help looking behind her, despite the urgency of the book's command. Her eyes struggled to find anything to lock onto, and then she realised that the patches of mist were moving towards her, rapidly, across the open snow.

She willed her legs to move, but they felt heavy and slow like they did in her nightmares.

She turned to face forwards, losing sight of the mist, even though it made her whole spine crawl. She just had to run.

Her legs and her lungs hurt within thirty metres, and her mind threw up a protest.

I thought it was supposed to be green fog? But she shoved the thought away. The book had told her to run, and she trusted it implicitly. She just hoped it had some kind of opinion on where she might find safety.

            As the thought hit her, she raised the flapping book towards her face, trying to focus on the map as it jogged around in front of her vision. It took her a few moments to see that it had changed now, showing a single pulsing point within the trees at the crest of the hill, and as she looked, the word "Here" spread out above it.

            She looked ahead, up the snow hill, and felt like she might vomit. It looked impossibly distant, and she was exhausted already.

Come on, it's not even a mile, she told herself. You run way further than that in cross country every week.

But it was a mile uphill with a heavy pack, and her coat was flapping uncomfortably against her legs, a book held awkwardly in her hand. Those floating forms looked as if they had no weight at all. How could she outrun them?

She risked a glance behind her, and they were much, much closer. They were drawing in from each side, their hazy forms travelling impossibly swiftly over the snow. She was suddenly reminded of the scene in Jurassic Park where the raptors converge on their victim through long grass.

It was enough to push her harder, and to find speed in her legs she had never known she had. Agonizingly slowly, the trees grew closer, and she gritted her teeth against the pain of her heaving breaths and the itching sweat that was soaking into her clothes. She wasn't going to be beaten by a gas.

As she dragged air in her lungs and prepared herself to sprint the last twenty metres, she smelled a sudden chemical odour and almost retched again. How could they look so harmless and smell so awful?

She couldn't afford the time to look again, but she knew they must be close. For a moment she had the sickening thought that she might be breathing in their poisonous fog already without realising it, and that she was already dying breath by breath.

But then she flew into the relative dimness of the trees. Her eyes were so dazzled by the snow that she didn't see the ground drop away until her foot met emptiness and she was suddenly falling, sliding and tumbling down a slope.

The world twisted and righted itself three times before she struck something, hard, and she came to a stop, thanking heaven for the backpack. Her vision was having trouble settling, and her lungs hurt like fury, but she could see a tree looming over her and a steep drop a little way away. She had fallen into a gully.

Her head span when she lifted it, and she thought fuzzily that she needed to do something. Those misty shapes would be on her soon.

Her eyes caught a green glow pulsing from the book, which was wedged in the snow next to her. She pulled it out and opened it again. A symbol had appeared on the map, encased in a circle. It was one she vaguely recognised from having read the thirteen of them over twice, and she knew what she had to do.

She reached a hand behind to her back and found snow where she had expected to find the rowan staff. Wheezing and gasping still, she rolled onto her side and then felt the end of it, slippery in her wet, cold fingers.

She glanced instinctively up at the crest of the ridge as she drew it out, and saw a tendril of mist creep over the top of it. She staggered to her feet unable to tear her eyes away as the rest of the shape followed, seeming to flow like silent water.

"Come on," she said to herself. She shoved the end of the staff into the snow and spun around, drawing a lopsided circle only four feet wide which she had to adjust rapidly in order to close effectively. She lifted the end of the staff out of the snow, hoping the spells weren't too fussy about shape, and then put the end of it into the ground at her feet.

Her eyes flicked between the symbol on the map and the ground, the edges of her vision catching more shapes as they flowed towards her. They were only metres away, and then feet, and she was still drawing the s-shaped curve of the shape, unable to close it and finish it until she lifted the staff for a final cross-stroke.

The last seconds while she brought it down and through the snow seemed to last an age. She had time to look up and see the nearest of those cloudy shapes gather itself together and become a hard, long-limbed creature of ice. She even had time to stare into its hollowed-out eyes, with a blue luminescence burning deep within each.

A great gaping maw of a mouth opened in its cold blue icy form, It was close enough to all but fill her vision as she lifted the staff out of the snow.

Fire erupted out of the circle and bloomed outwards, melting the snow instantly for a metre around. Then it grew so bright that she had to shield her eyes with her hand.

There was a screeching, whistling sound like something being dragged over taut wires. With her dazed vision, she saw the icy form melt and then become a billowing form of mist once more. It retreated, its edges fluttering, and began to circle, warily.

The fire dimmed a little. She lowered the staff to the ground and looked out at the other misty forms. They flowed down the hill and joined the first one, circling and wavering.

As soon as they were together, they seemed to make a decision. They drew inwards and hardened, becoming six tall icy shapes. She had time to look more closely at them now, to see that they had blades of ice instead of hands, and that they were more than a foot taller than she was. From here, the blank malevolence of the empty eyes was less obvious, but she still felt a thrill of fear whenever one of them looked at her.

They began to prowl around her circle. Their movements reminded her of hungry animals, and the thought made her shiver. Several times, one or another approached the fire, and then withdrew, to circle again.

They wouldn't do anything with the circle of fire there, she realised, satisfied at least of that much. So she was safe for now and, to her surprise, only comfortably warm. But she would need to do something else if she wanted to travel onwards.

She put her pack down on the ground, opened the book to the chapter on magical creatures, and started to read.

Some ten minutes and twenty pages later, she was beginning to feel angry. The movements of the prowling ice creatures, circling and lurching around her circle of fire, were a constant distraction and she was tired of her heart jumping whenever one of them drew closer.

She was also none the wiser about their origins, because the more she read about the Vash, the more certain she became that these misty shapes were something else entirely. There was no mention of a change in form in those Vash, and the fog they produced was thick and obscuring instead of hazy, white and translucent. Nobody had ever seen a long-limbed, icy shape amidst it.

She gave up on the pages about the Vash with a sigh, and began to flick onwards to find other creatures. And then she stopped, as the book fell open on a page entitled "Evanescents." An image of a tall, gangling shape of ice took up almost half the page, and she recognised the hollow, glowing eyes in an instant. As she watched, the image began to drip water, and then it became a pool on the ground, which changed again, rising into the air to become steam.

"Gotcha," she said, reading on eagerly.

The book was a great deal more informative about Evanescents. They were constructed creatures, it told her, created by a worker of Cold Magic. They were made from water, enchanted so that it could change state between solid ice, liquid – which could flow anywhere it chose and which could travel underground at a faster pace than a man could run – and the misty vapour she had first seen.

Evanescents were the stuff of terrifying bedtime stories, she read, because they could kill in any of their forms. But in their turn, they were almost impossible to destroy. It was usually only a mistake by the evanescent, a creature with a great deal of aggression but less brain, that would kill it. But those mistakes were not common.

Some reported seeing an Evanescent sink into the ground as a liquid too close to a tree, the root systems of which would greedily absorb and fragment it until it became nothing more than a collection of droplets. Others had seen them turn to water within rivers and become washed away, or remain close to the heat of a fire until their gaseous form scattered into the air, truly evaporated.

Grace's anger started to recede, to be replaced by a nagging fear. They were surrounding her, and they could stay until her fire died down. She had no river, and they had proven that they were intelligent enough to move away from the heat, so her only hope would be that they might turn into water and become absorbed by the trees.

She was staring into space, her mind chewing over this and finding no solution, when she saw that the book was pulsing with light once again. She followed it to find a paragraph on the second page glowing with a red warning, and as she read it she grew cold.

There are greater reasons to fear Evanescents, however, than their own deadliness. They hold together for only a few short hours, and are used by workers of Cold Magic to hunt down prey. Where Evanescents are, a riezehn of the Cold will follow, and soon.

Someone was coming. And now that the thought filtered through her mind, she realised that she could feel it. There was a looming presence at the edge of her senses, and it was growing larger with every second that passed.

She had to run again, when she was barely recovered from her tearing flight here. But why had the book led her here if not to help her? Had it been because of the trees? Did it assume she could trick them into becoming water?

And then a thought struck her, and she stood absolutely still for a moment, before cramming the book into a pocket of her coat. She reached into her bag and began to scrabble within it, searching urgently for a little glass vial which might just save her.

"Where are you?" she hissed between her teeth, her hands finding food, tins, cutlery, but not the smooth glass cylinder.

Her hand closed on it as a howling sound tore through the air, to be echoed again and again and again. It sounded like a huge and terrifying hunt come to find her, and she knew that she was too late.