by Nora Roberts
throat.
Despite the shock of it, his instincts were quick. His hand whipped down for his gun. It hadn’t cleared the waistband of his jeans before Kadra’s sword sliced through both heads with one massive stroke. There was a fountaining gush of vile green liquid that stank like sulfur.
Heads and body thunked, a grisly trio, onto the ground, then began to smoke.
“Loki demon,” Kadra said as the three pieces melted away. “Small pests that usually travel in packs of three.” She lifted her head, sniffed. “To your left. You will need your weapon,” she added, and pivoted to her right as another of the creatures jumped through a curtain of vine.
Instinct had his finger on the trigger, and if that finger trembled a bit, he wasn’t ashamed. He heard the slice of her sword through air just as the last—please, God—of the miniature monsters charged him.
He shot it between the eyes—all four of them.
“Christ. Jesus. Christ.”
“This is good aim.” Giving Harper a congratulatory slap on the back, she nodded over the smoking heads. “This is a fine weapon,” she added, sending his Glock an avaricious glance. “When we go back to your world, you will provide me with one. It lacks the beauty of the sword, but it makes an enjoyable noise.”
“Their blood’s green,” Harper said in a careful voice. “They have two heads and green blood. And now, how about that, they’re just melting away like the Wicked Witch of the West.”
“All demons bleed green, though only the Loki and the mutant strain of the Ploon are two-headed. On death, the blood smokes and the body . . . melts is not inaccurate,” she decided. “You have witches in the west of your world who die like demons?”
When he only stared at her, she shrugged. “We have witches as well, and most of them the powers of life have instilled with good. My home is east,” she continued. “Beyond the Stone Mountains, in the Shadowed Valley. It is beautiful, and the fields are rich. There is no time to show you.”
“This is real.” He took one long, deep breath and swallowed it all at once.
“Our time here is short. There is a clearing, and a village in it. Rhee lives there. We will go.”
Since she set off in a punishing jog, he had no choice but to follow. “Slow it down, Wonder Woman. I’m barefoot here.”
She tossed a scowl over her shoulder, but modified her pace. “You drank excessive spirits last night. I can smell them on you. Now you are sluggish.”
“Alert enough to kill a two-headed demon.”
She let out a snort. “A child with a training bow could do the same. Lokis are stupid.”
As they ran down the narrow, beaten path, a flock of birds flushed out of the trees and into that odd red sky. He staggered to a halt. Each was its own rainbow—a bleeding, blending meld of pinks and blues and golds. And the song they sent up was like the trill of flutes.
“Dregos,” she told him. “Their gift is their song, as they are poor eating. Stringy.” She slowed to a trot as they came to the clearing.
He saw houses, small and tidy, most with colorful gardens in the front. People dressed in long, thin robes harvested out of them what looked to be massive blue carrots, tomatoes the size of melons, and long, yellow beans spotted with green flecks.
There were men, women, children, and each stopped work or play and bowed as Kadra came into view.
“Greetings, Demon Slayer,” some called out.
She acknowledged this with what Harper supposed was a kind of salute by laying her fist on her heart as she walked.
Those long legs ate up the ground toward a small house with a lush garden and an open front door. She had to duck her head to enter.
Inside, a young girl stood by what he assumed was a cookstove. She stirred an iron pot and looked up at them with quiet blue eyes.
“Hail to Kadra, Slayer of Demons.”
“We come to speak with Rhee.”
“She sleeps,” the girl said and continued to stir. “She suffered a demon bite during the attack.”
“She did not say.” Kadra moved quickly, shoving open a door. Within, Rhee lay pale and still on a bed. The emotions that churned in her were mixed and confusing, and through them came one clear thought.
Mother. Will I lose yet another mother before my own end? “Is it the sleep of change?”
“No. She was not kissed, only bitten beneath the shoulder, as she tried to guard the keys. Nor was it a mortal bite, though she had pain and there was sickness. More than necessary, as she did not see to the wound quickly.”
“She . . . spent too much time with me.”
“Not too much, only what was needed.”
“Your mother?” Harper looked through the doorway at the woman on the bed, and laid a hand on Kadra’s shoulder. “Can we get her to a doctor?”
“I am Mav the healer,” the young girl told him. “I tend to her. I have drained the poison, given her the cure. She must sleep until her body regains strength. She said you would come, Kadra, with the one from the other world. You are to eat.”
Mav ladled out some of the thick broth from the pot. “And to wash in the falls. In this way, you will take some of this place with you into the next. You must be gone within the hour.”
“Do you want to sit with her awhile,” Harper began. “Take some time with her?”
His hand caressed her shoulder, a gesture of comfort she had known rarely in her life. “There is no time.” Kadra turned away from the doorway.
“She’s your mother.”
“She bore me. She set me on this path. Now I can only follow it.”
She sat down at the table where Mav had put the bowls and a round loaf of golden bread. There was a squat pitcher of honey and another of water as white and sparkling as snow.
Because he was tired, hungry, and confused, Harper sat. This is real, he thought again as he sampled the first taste of the rich, spiced broth. It wasn’t a dream, a hallucination. He hadn’t just lost his mind.
Kadra tore off a hunk of bread, poured honey over it, and ate with a concentrated focus that told Harper she wasn’t concerned with taste, only with fuel.
“Do you have family?” she asked Mav between bites.
“I have two brothers, younger. My mother who weaves. My father was a healer as well. Sorak, king of demons, killed him this morning.”
“I was not quick enough.” Grief thickened Kadra’s voice. “And your mother is a widow.”
“He would have killed us all, but you came. He fears you.”
“He has cause. I regret that death touched you.”
“He came for Rhee, for the key. Her powers are not as strong as they were, and he made demons from wizards so he might track her. She explained to me while I tended her so I might tell you.”
Mav folded her hands and spoke as if reciting a story learned by heart. “The other, the world beyond with yellow sun and blue sky, is full of so much life, and most who live there have closed themselves off from the magic. They will not understand, they will not believe, and so the Bok will slaughter them. Flesh, passion. Innocence and evil. Sorak craves this, and the power he will gain from it. The power to destroy you.”
“He will die there.” Kadra drank the tankard of springwater quickly. “This is my vow, on your father’s blood.” She pulled out her dagger, sliced a shallow gash across her palm, and let her blood drip onto the table. “And on mine.”
“It will comfort my mother to know it. But there should be no more bloodshed here.” Mav reached in her pocket, took out a white cloth, and deftly wrapped it around Kadra’s hand. “You must wash in the falls, for cleansing, then go.”
When Kadra got to her feet, Harper sighed and got to his. “Thanks for the food.”
Mav blushed, cast down her gaze. “It is little to give the Slayer and the savior. Blessings on you both.”
Harper took one last glance at her. Kid couldn’t be more than ten, he thought, then ducked out the doorway.
He had to double his pace to catch up with
Kadra. “Look, just slow down a minute. I’m trying to keep up here, in more ways than one. I don’t usually spend my mornings visiting alternate dimensions and killing loco demons.”
“Loki.”
“Whatever. So far you’ve jumped me, held a knife to my throat, threatened me with a sword, punched me in the face, and sucked me through some . . . wormhole in my kitchen. And all this on one lousy cup of coffee. This isn’t your average first date.”
“You do not have the knowledge, so you require explanations.” She moved through the jungle at a brisk pace, eyes tracking, ears pricked. “I understand this.”
“Beautiful. Then give them to me.”
“We will cleanse in the falls, return to your world, hunt down the Bok and kill them.”
He considered himself a reasonable guy, a man with an open mind, an active sense of adventure and curiosity. But enough was enough. He grabbed her arm, yanked her around to face him. “That’s what you call an explanation? Listen, sister, if that’s the best you can do, this is where we part ways. Send me back where I come from and we’ll just put this all down to too much beer and fried food.”
“I am not your sister.”
He stared at her, at the faint irritation that clouded her glorious face. Helpless, he began to laugh. It rolled out of him, pumping up from the belly so that he had to bend over, brace his hands on his thighs as she cocked her head and studied him with a mixture of amusement, puzzlement, and impatience.
“I’m losing it,” he managed. “Losing what’s left of my mind.” Even as he sucked in a breath, a spider the size of a Chihuahua pranced between his feet on stiltlike legs and gibbered at him. Harper yelped, whipping out his gun as he stumbled back.
But Kadra merely booted the enormous insect off the path. “That species is not poisonous,” she informed him.
“Good, great, fine! It just swallows a man whole.”
Kadra shook her head, then loped down the path. Keeping his gun handy, Harper followed.
Red sun, he mused as he looked up at the sky. Like, well, Krypton. If he followed comic book logic, didn’t that mean that he, from a planet with a yellow sun, had superpowers here.
Concentrating, he took a little jump, then another. On the third, Kadra looked back at him, her face a study in baffled frustration. “This is not the time for dancing.”
“I wasn’t dancing I was just . . .” Seeing if I could fly, he thought, amazed at himself. “Nothing. Nothing at all.”
He heard the roar like a highballing train. It grew, swelled, pounded on his eardrums as he jogged after her. She swung around a curve on the path, and he looked up.
In front of them, white water plunged from a height of two hundred feet or more. It screamed over the cliff, dived in a thundering wall, then pounded into the surface of a white river.
Flowers, some unrecognizable, some as simple as daisies, teemed along its banks. There, with the wild grass and wildflowers, with the sunlight spilling in rosy streaks through the canopy of trees, a unicorn lazily grazed.
“My God.” The hand still holding the gun fell to his side. The mythical beast raised its regal white head and stared at Harper out of eyes so blue and clear they might have been glass. Then it went back to cropping the grass.
The beauty of it, the sheer wonder, wiped his temper away. Now I’ve seen it all, he thought. Nothing will ever surprise me again.
He realized the fallacy of that a second later when he glanced back at Kadra.
She’d stripped. The black leather lay piled on the bank, her sword, her dagger crossed over it. She’d pulled off her boots, her wrist sheaths, and was even now reaching up to lift the circlet from her hair.
She was, Harper thought, more mythical, more wondrous that the white-horned creature. Her body was curved and sleek, the color of the fresh honey she had poured over the breakfast bread. Her dark hair, arrow straight, rained over her shoulders, down her back, lay tauntingly over one magnificent breast.
His body tightened, his mouth went dry. For one blissful moment, he lost the power of speech.
“This is a sacred place,” she began as she laid her circlet on her crossed blades. “No demon can cross its borders. Take off your clothing, put down your weapon. You may take no cloth or metal into the falls.”
So saying, she dived.
It was a picture he knew would remain etched in his mind forever.
“Things are looking up,” he decided, and peeling off his jeans, he jumped in after her.
The water was cool, sluicing the sweat from his body in one glorious swipe. When he surfaced, he felt the last nasty dregs of the morning’s hangover sink to the bottom of the river. In fact, he realized as he struck out after Kadra and the falls, he didn’t just feel clearheaded, didn’t just feel good. He felt charged, energized.
She waited for him at the foot of the falls, treading the churning water lazily. Her eyes were impossibly green, impossibly brilliant.
“What’s in this water?” he shouted.
“Cleansing properties. It washes away negative energies.”
“I’ll say.”
She laughed, did a quick surface dive that gave him a brief and wonderful flash of her butt. Then she rose again, a vision of black and gold, under the pounding spill of the water. She climbed nimbly onto a plateau of rock, stretched her arms wide to the sides, and let the water beat over her.
He lost his breath, and despite the cool relief of the water, his blood ran hot. He hoisted himself up in front of her, laid his hands on her hips. Her eyes opened again, and her eyebrow quirked.
“You’re the most magnificent thing I’ve ever seen. In any dimension.”
“I have a good build,” she said easily. “It’s made for fighting.” She bent her right arm, flexed her biceps.
“I bet it holds its own in other sports.”
Though she couldn’t ignore the trip of her own heart, or the quick click of response in her belly, she only smiled. “I enjoy sporting, when there’s time for such things. You’re very handsome, Harper Doyle, and I have a yearning for you that is stronger than any I have known before.”
“Do you think you could pick one of my two names and stick with it?” Since she didn’t seem to object, he slid his hands around her thighs, then over her silky butt.
“Harper is your title.”
“No, it’s my name. My first name.” He really had to get a taste of that lush, frowning mouth. But as he dipped his head, she laid a restraining hand on his chest.
“I do not understand. Are you the harper called Doyle?”
“I’m Harper Doyle, and before this turns into a comedy routine, Doyle is my family name. Harper is the name my parents gave me when I was born. That’s how it works in my world. I’m not a harper,” he added as the light began to dawn. “I’m not, what, like a minstrel? Jesus. I’m a PI.”
“A pee-eye? What is this?”
“Investigator. Private investigator. I . . . solve puzzles,” he decided.
“Ah! You are a seeker. This is better. A seeker is more useful on a hunt than a harper.”
“Now that we’ve worked that out, why don’t we go back to me being handsome.” He drew her closer so that her breasts—cool, wet, firm—brushed his chest. His mouth was an inch from hers when he went flying.
He landed clumsily, swallowing water on his own curse. She was still on the rocks when he came up and swiped the hair out of his eyes. She was grinning. “You made a good splash. It is time to go.”
She dived, struck out for the bank. Oh, he was handsome, she thought as she hoisted herself out. Very handsome, and with a clever look in his eyes that made her want to join her body to his.
Something about him was making pricks on her heart, as if trying to find the weakness, the point of entry.
He would be a strong lover, she knew. And it had been a long time since she had desired one. If time and fate allowed, they would have each other.
