“And,” he muttered, “I don’t recognize a damn thing.” He looked at me and slowly shook his head. “Aid, I don’t have the faintest idea where we are.”
CHAPTER 9
* * *
In times of crisis, we fall back on what we know. I sat on the windy mountaintop, shivering every time a cloud crossed the sun, while Joey went off alone. It was Sunday, after all, and he’d missed at least one week of Mass already, so I told myself I was letting him be while he prayed. In truth, the look on Joey’s face scared me, an expression like panic hiding just below the cracking façade of calm, and he clutched his silver crucifix and rocked back and forth as he mouthed the silent words. Maybe it was cowardice on my part, but I left him alone, hoping he would recover quickly.
But the day warmed to noon, and still Joey sat alone with his thoughts and his God, gazing out at the wilderness like he was staring into the abyss. There was no place to make a fire, and so I helped myself to the jerky and a bottle of water, drinking it slowly to make it last. And then, when the shadows changed direction and Joey showed no sign of joining me, I gathered up my courage and approached him. “Want to think about camp?” I murmured, keeping back a few paces. Joey appeared coiled, poised to leap, and I didn’t want him going off the rock or onto me.
He looked up slowly, as if piecing together who I might be and why I was making noise at him, then seemed to remember what had happened. “We’re screwed,” he muttered. “Camp here or anywhere, we’re screwed.”
I ventured closer to his perch. “We’re not screwed. We just need to find something familiar, that’s all.”
“What was I thinking?” he mumbled, turning away from me. “I can’t do this. It’s impossible, it’s suicide…”
I let him ramble to himself for a moment, then stepped beside him and said, “Joey.” He glanced back at me, dazed and on the verge of a breakdown, and, with a prayer to anyone feeling merciful, I wound up and slapped him hard across the face.
The blow knocked Joey’s head to the side, and he grabbed my arm even as his other hand covered his struck cheek. “What the hell—”
“Snap out of it,” I interrupted as his eyes focused. “We’re screwed if we stay up here and starve. If that’s what you want to do, fine, but I’m getting off this damn rock, and I’m going to find Coileán. If you want to come along, great.”
My hand was losing blood from his grip on my wrist, but at least Joey had risen from his introspective funk. “Hit me again,” he said quietly, “and you’ll go off this rock headfirst. Understood?”
“Going to sit here all night?”
“Understood?”
We locked eyes for a long moment, and then I nodded and broke out of his grasp. “Get up,” I said, heading for my backpack. “We’re going to find civilization. If we hurry, we can make the valley before nightfall.”
“And which way are we going, pray tell?” he asked—but at least he was standing, I noticed as I glanced over my shoulder. “You got a GPS unit you forgot to mention or something?”
I shrugged my bag on and pointed toward the southwest. “We go that way.”
“We came from that way,” said Joey, kicking a rock down the path we’d used that morning.
“Yeah, and as I said on Friday, that’s the way we need to go.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know!” I yelled, and my voice echoed around the hills. “Something’s pulling me that way, and that’s all I’ve got, all right? So we can stay here like idiots and think about it until the food runs out, or we can trust that just maybe my gut’s right about this.” I buckled my chest strap into place and glared at him. “Got a better idea?”
“No,” he said softly, watching my anger fizzle. “No, I…I don’t. No.”
He sounded defeated, and his cheek glowed from the impact. “Joey,” I said, grabbing his slumped shoulders, “come on, you’ve got to stick with me. I can’t do this alone, man. You’re the only one of us who’s remotely competent.”
That earned a small smile, but he sighed. “We’re lost in the middle of Faerie with a few days’ food and water, no compass, and no map, and now you’re telling me the way out of this mess is back by the giant spiders.”
“We’ll walk around the goddamned spiders. Come on.”
“I mean…you know, I really don’t want to get us killed, and we don’t even have a way out of here—”
“Joey—”
“—and I’m scared, okay? I’m scared. We’re alone, and I am so fucking scared right now.”
The silence hung between us for a moment, and then I said, “I’m scared, too, Joey. But we can’t stay here.”
I released him. With a slow nod, he wandered over to his abandoned bag and shouldered it, then led the way down.
We camped at the foot of the mountain that evening, using the same clearing we’d found the night before. Joey remained quiet and contemplative, and I set about building the fire and making dinner while he sat on his sleeping bag and ran his thumb over his crucifix. After coaxing a few bites down him, I told him I’d take the watch and sent him to bed.
Sunrise found me stirring the ashes of our dying fire, willing the coffee to boil, and I cut my eyes to the tent at the sound of a zipper. A few seconds later, Joey emerged, disheveled but dressed, and sat next to me on his upturned backpack. “Hey,” he grunted.
“Morning.”
He took my stick from me and attacked the fire. “About yesterday.”
“Yeah?”
“You still think we head southwest?”
I considered the weird tug in my head, then nodded. “Yeah.”
“Good.” I looked up from the coffee, frowning, but Joey had eyes only for his work. “Got that feeling, too. Wanted to make sure I wasn’t imagining things.” A smoldering log caught, and he nudged it until it bloomed into flame. “So what’s pulling us that way?”
“What do you think?”
“You’re asking me?” He paused and considered the question, then swirled the coffee in its pot. “I guess, if I had to say…I think it’s the realm.”
“I think so, too,” I said quietly.
He rose for a moment and returned with our mugs. “You think the realm’s on our side, then?” he asked as he poured.
I shrugged and blew on my liquid breakfast. “I don’t know that the realm takes sides, Joey.”
“Maybe it should,” he muttered, and drank, grimacing at the bitter taste. “Is your intuition giving you any idea of the distance we have to go? Mine is suspiciously silent about that.”
I cupped my hands around my warm mug as if I could absorb the much-needed caffeine through osmosis alone. “Mine, too. Maybe it’s trying not to depress us. If we were really seeing a hundred miles up there…”
I left that thought unfinished, and Joey sighed. “Let’s hope for more than ten. The palace could be just over the horizon, you know. And hey,” he added, perking slightly, “if we hit the coast, we can follow the sea down. Maybe even make a boat.”
“Can you make a boat?”
“Well, no,” he admitted, “but this is Faerie. I’m not giving up on miracles.”
I thought we had done a fair bit of walking in the previous three days.
Looking back, I laugh at my naiveté.
My tennis shoes had been nicely broken in prior to our extended hike. Toula made them for me the summer before after seeing the toes of my old pair flap, and in the four months since, they’d been through their share of mud and rock and grass and had worn down to that happy, comfortable place between “fresh out of the box” and “beyond all hope of salvage.” Since popping back into Faerie, I’d managed to dodge blisters, but my feet and legs were beginning to complain, especially after our mountain expedition. By the time we backtracked to the lake gate, however, my feet chafed with every step, and my old pair of socks had sprung small holes. The new pair Rufus had given me was holding up, but I knew I had to rotate my socks if I wanted to avoid further podiatric unpleasantness.
If I was in discomfort, Joey was in hell. At least I had sneakers—his footwear of choice on fleeing Faerie had been his motorcycle boots, which, while great for riding, were less comfortable on a long march. He didn’t complain much, but his socks were stiff and stained, and I’m sure he was as grateful as I was that Rufus had thought to throw padded bandages in with our gear.
Our coats stayed on during those first days in the woods, even when the temperature climbed. Though our backpack straps were padded, they still rubbed against our shoulders, and the coats offered some small measure of protection. Within a few days, though, everything began to stink, and the coats came off for short spells, if for no other reason than to give our shirts a chance to breathe.
We spoke little at first, other than to check that our weird internal tugs were still in agreement and that we hadn’t veered too far from the most direct path. Neither of us was sleeping much or well—partly due to our condition, partly due to fear for the ones left in the mortal realm—and as we began to more stringently ration our food, we didn’t have the energy for extra conversation. Water, at least, was abundant, even if it meant risking a trip to an inhabited pond, and neither of us came down with cholera, despite our lack of filtration. But to our mutual sorrow, the coffee ran out on our tenth day in the wilderness, making mornings and the uncomfortable process of dressing our wounds all the more unpleasant.
If we were spared some of the usual hardships of the great outdoors, like mosquitoes and poison ivy, we made up for it with the larger fauna. It wasn’t just the spiders, which seemed to have infested every decent clearing. Several species from the mortal realm had crossed over and made their homes in the forest, and Joey and I saw our share of mice, rats, and foxes within the first week. The night after we lost our coffee, we ended up camping in a tree after hearing an ominous howling around us. Daybreak revealed five sleek wolves prowling at the base of our tree, watching us and panting with excitement. Joey dispatched two with his nail gun, and the other three fled in terror. Only when we reached the ground again did we realize that the wolves were oversized, a couple of feet longer than we were tall and sporting two-inch canine teeth. It was impossible to say whether the wolves had crossed from the other realm and flourished or whether they had started from more nightmarish stock out of the Gray Lands, but in the end, the promise of fresh meat pushed aside any questions about its origin. Joey and I butchered one of the wolves and roasted what we could over that evening’s fire, giving ourselves a day off the trail in the process. The meat was beefy and gamey, a little off-putting, but we shoved the leftovers into our bags for the next day’s meals. Still, without any real way to preserve our kills, we were forced to leave much of the two carcasses behind.
The next evening, we made camp beside a shallow stream and took the opportunity to rinse ourselves and our gear. While our clothes dried by the fire, we turned the leftover meat into a mediocre stew, then leaned back against a pair of trees and tried to tally up the distance we’d covered. The going had been uneven, and with breaks for meals and medical purposes, Joey estimated we’d done perhaps fifteen miles a day. That put us only one hundred twenty miles from the gate, give or take—and neither the palace nor the sea was anywhere in sight. My gut told me we were still headed in the right direction, but the fact that we’d yet to come across a familiar landmark was discouraging.
After we were full and the dishes were clean, Joey gave me the first rest. I relieved him in the small hours of the morning, and he reported nothing out of the ordinary—the wolves, at least, seemed to be avoiding us for the time being. I stuck a strip of jerky into a mug of hot water, both to soften the former and flavor the latter, and sat down on a pile of decaying leaves to wait for the dawn. The night, like all the ones preceding it, was pleasant, clear and just cool enough to warrant a coat, and I peeked through the canopy at the few visible patches of stars to pass the time. When that got too boring, I found a twig, cleared a spot of dirt near the fire, and tried to draw myself a Sudoku game. If I put together a workable board, erased enough numbers, and looked away for an hour or so, I reasoned, I could come back and actually do the puzzle before morning.
The sky was beginning to lighten, and I’d just remembered where the nines were supposed to go, when I heard a snuffling in the trees ahead. Grabbing an extra stick of firewood, I made a quick torch from the campfire, then stepped away from comforting glow to find what was lurking. There was nothing behind the first five trees, nor the second…but something was behind the deadfall straight ahead, something large and noisy, and the sounds I was hearing were awfully familiar. Deciding not to face the unknown by myself, I quickly backtracked and ducked into the tent to shake Joey awake. “Something’s close,” I whispered, holding the smoking torch away from his sleeping bag. “And eating. I heard bones snap.”
He swore under his breath, but he rose and shoved his swollen feet back into his boots. With another torch in his left hand and his sword in his right, Joey followed me back to the deadfall and the sounds of crunching. He listened for a moment, then beckoned me around to the right of the pile of downed trees…
…and straight toward the tail of a green dragonet.
“Shit,” I whispered, jumping back with him behind our shelter before the twitching tail could find us. I hadn’t gotten a great look at the beast—the light was still too faint, even with torches—but I guessed it was at least a solid thirty feet long. A young dragon, sure, but not a hatchling by any means. “What do we do?” I asked Joey. “Pack and sneak out?”
“Dude,” he muttered, leaning around the pile to give the dragonet a further inspection, “I don’t know.”
“You’re the friggin’ dragon whisperer!” I protested.
“One dragon, and we bonded! That’s not a transferrable skill,” he hissed, and stepped back behind our shelter. “Okay, best thing we can do is pack and run…”
Joey’s voice died as the sound of the dragon’s eating suddenly silenced. We held our breath, each of us straining to be as quiet as possible, but then, ever so softly, a voice echoed through our heads: Hello, food.
Run, Joey mouthed, and pushed me toward our camp.
I was panting beside the campfire before I realized he hadn’t followed me, and I wheeled around to reverse course, ready to help him. Before I could make it halfway back to Joey, however, I heard an echoing screech…and then, a long moment later, Joey came walking out of the trees without his torch, holding his sword at his side. His T-shirt was splashed with blood, as were his face and arms.
“What…” I began, but he shook his head and crouched by the stream to wash his blade.
“Georgie is never to hear of this,” he said, his voice low and shaking. “She is never to know. Swear to me, Aiden, that none of this leaves this place.”
“I swear,” I mumbled, disturbed to see him so unsteady.
Joey wiped his sword dry against his jeans and turned to me. “I mean it. This isn’t Ilunna all over again—no jokes, no hints, nothing. God is my maker, if you ever—”
“I said I swear, Joey.”
He considered this, then nodded wearily and sheathed his blade. “Let’s get out of here,” he muttered, and in one quick motion, he ripped off his bloody shirt and tossed it onto the fire.
Though the dragon seemed to have been traveling alone, the incident killed even the little conversation Joey and I had managed to make. Over the next week, we communicated largely in grunts and hand signals, peppered with profanity every time something predatory crossed our path. At least Joey had bought a few boxes of nails—he was quick with his gun and improving with practice, and the combination of improvised ammunition and a steady sword arm brought down another wolf, a couple of coyote-looking things, and a small bear. But we butchered his kills in silence, ate, and took turns sleeping, moving through the endless trees as if reliving one long, awful day.
The monotony was worse than the physical pain, which dulled to a low, constant ache. There was nothing around us but woods�
��an occasional rivulet or pond, maybe a little rise or fall in the terrain for variety—but the forest was ancient and untouched, and it stretched forever in all directions. Sometimes, we could make a straight path through the trees, following the tug that strengthened as we closed on its source; other times, we lost hours whacking our way through thick brush and thorns. We’d camp when the light grew too dim, wherever we were, build a fire for protection against the unseen, and wait for sunrise to do it all again. When Joey slept, I tried to find the sky beyond the canopy above us, but often, I had to content myself with watching the raw magic swirl around me, the colorful lights I could poke and prod but never actually use.
I can’t stress enough how much we stank. Everything—our clothes, our bags, our tents, our skin—carried overtones of wood smoke from the campfires. Adding to that bouquet was the wet mustiness of gear left too long on damp ground, the sharp notes of meat just this side of spoiled, the metallic hints of other creatures’ blood on our clothes, and the omnipresent, acrid fug of two guys who’d been hiking for days without a proper shower or washing machine. I’d never been able to cultivate facial hair—a quirk of my fae blood, I’d learned—but Joey’s short bristles had matured into an impressive full beard, which sometimes caught bits of food or dried juice from our undercooked dinners. He tried to keep it clean, but Joey had seldom sported more than a few days’ growth before, and his unchecked beard—which, like everything else, was soon greasy and smoky—was just another factor to annoy him.
I kept reminding myself that at least no one was suffering from a gastrointestinal ailment, but something in me insisted that this, too, was only a matter of time.
And in my all-too-brief hours of sleep, my mind went back through the gate. We’d been gone for days—what had happened to Hel and Toula and Rufus and the others in our absence? The last thing I’d heard about was a disturbance outside the silo. Had Oberon mobilized and moved on the Arcanum? Had he broken through their defenses? Was the grand magus dead? Were my parents? My subconscious conjured up dreams of burning pastures under a red, smoke-choked sky, an infinite horde of faceless faeries running through the corridors of the silo, and the corpses, all of them, accusing me with their sightless eyes. I’d failed them. The useless dud, the tainted witch-blood, the worthless traitor—I’d failed them all.
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