“Where are you?”
In a desert. He gave me a bitter smile. With four suns and no night. I’m badly burned. I’ve had nothing to eat or drink in too long. If I don’t find a dimensional shift soon, I’m … in trouble.
“A dimensional shift?” I asked if he meant an IFP and explained what they were.
He nodded. They abound. But they have no’ been abounding here. “Abooondin’,” he’d said. Although the mirror was showing me a perfectly clean, well-rested man, now that I knew what to look for, I could see his exhaustion and strain. More than that, I was picking up a certain … grim acceptance? From Christian MacKeltar? No way.
“How bad off are you, Christian?” I said. “And don’t lie to me.”
He smiled. I seem to recall saying the same to you once. Have you slept with him?
“Long story. Answer my question.”
That’s a yes. Ah, lass. Tiger eyes held mine for a tense, probing moment. Bad, he said finally.
“Are you actually even standing there? I mean, up on your own feet?” Was anything I was seeing remotely true?
No, lass.
“Could you stand if you wanted to?” I said sharply.
Not sure.
I didn’t waste another moment.
I stepped into the mirror.
Some Silvers feel like quicksand. They don’t like to let you go.
I expected this one to behave like the one hanging in the LM’s house: hard to push into, certain to expel me with a rubbery snap.
It was hard to push into, more resistant than the first one, but it proved even more difficult to get out of. Without Christian, I might not have made it.
I found myself trapped inside silvery glue that held my limbs nearly immobile. I kicked and punched and ended up getting so turned around that I had no idea which way was out. Apparently there was only one direction that would work.
Then Christian’s hand was on my arm (he could stand), and I shoved toward him with all my strength.
The college back home where I take classes part-time has a wind tunnel created by the unique placement of the math building breezeway and the science buildings around it. On especially windy days, it’s almost impossible to cut through it. You have to lean forward at a precarious angle as you pass the math building, head ducked, forging ahead with all your might.
I learned the hard way about break points, where either a design flaw or a joke by some pissed-off engineer leaves an “eye” in the breezeway, where the wind abruptly stops. If you’re unaware of it and still forging ahead, you fall flat on your face in front of all the math and science geeks—who know about it and loiter in the general vicinity on windy days but don’t tell freshmen because that would deprive them of the endless amounts of amusement they get from watching us wipe out, preferably in a short skirt that ends up around our waist.
That was this Silver.
I shoved toward the hand, fighting, pressing with all my might, and abruptly the resistance gave way—and I went flying out of the glass, into Christian, at such velocity that we went rolling and tumbling across sand.
I tried to gasp, but it didn’t work. I was in a blast furnace. It was so bright that I couldn’t open my eyes; the air was so hot and dry that I couldn’t breathe.
I struggled to acclimate and finally sucked down a breath that seared my lungs. I slitted my eyes, got a good look at Christian, and rolled off him.
He was worse than “bad off.” He was in serious danger. With his dark complexion, he’d tanned, but there was a cruel redness to it, his lips were cracked, and I could tell by his eyes and skin that he was severely dehydrated. Blisters covered his face.
I whirled around, hoping to find a mirror hanging in the air behind me through which I could drag us to safety.
There wasn’t one.
There were, however, hundreds of man-size cactuses, any one of which might have been the one he said I’d appeared to be standing in. Was there a mirror camouflaged inside one of them? It stood to reason that on worlds the Fae wanted to visit unobserved, they’d have had to conceal the Silver in something if there was no place it didn’t appear utterly incongruous with the terrain. Or had Cruce’s mysterious curse screwed things up?
I wondered if I should try flinging myself into a few of the nearest cactuses, employing the same method Dani had used to try to break through wards, hoping for a two-way portal. The thought held little appeal. She’d gotten nothing but badly bruised for her efforts. The cactuses sported a protective armor of needle-sharp spines.
Squinting, I glanced around.
We were in an ocean of desert.
It had to be a hundred fifteen degrees. No shade anywhere to be seen. Nothing but sand.
I looked up and instantly regretted it. The sky was painfully bright, with four blazing suns. It was whiter than white. It was radioactive white.
“You bloody damned fool,” Christian managed through split lips. “Now we’ll both be dying here.”
“No, we won’t. Which … uh, cactus did I come through?”
“I’ve no bloody idea, and those spines are poisonous, so good luck poking around at them.”
Damn. Onto plan B, which was basically a wing and a prayer.
I began to remove the black pouch from my waistband, preparing to uncover the stones. Would they return us to the Hall, where we could choose the next portal together? Who knew? Who cared? Anything was better than this. He would die here and so would I.
I rolled close to Christian and pressed against him.
“Och, and now you flirt me up, lass,” he said weakly, with a shadow of that killer smile. “When I canna do a thing about it.”
“Wrap your arms and legs around me, Christian. Don’t let go. No matter what happens, don’t let go.” Sweat was pouring down my face, dripping from beneath my MacHalo, into my eyes, pooling between my breasts. I was wearing too many clothes, a bike helmet, and a leather coat in a desert.
He didn’t question me. Just wrapped his legs around my hips and locked his hands in the small of my back. I prayed he had enough strength to keep his grip. I had no idea what was going to happen, but I didn’t expect it to be gentle.
I slid the pouch from between us, loosened the drawstring, and uncovered the tips of the stones. They flared to life, pulsing with blue-black fire.
The terrain responded instantly and violently, just as the pink tunnel did.
The desert began to undulate, and the air was filled with a high-pitched whine that quickly turned into a metallic-sounding scream. Sand whipped up, stinging my hands and face.
“Are you crazy? What the—” The rest of Christian’s words were lost in the howling wind.
The atomic-white sky darkened to blue-black, in dramatic, quick increments. I looked up. The suns were being eclipsed, one by one.
The sand shuddered beneath us. Swells rose, dips formed. Christian and I rolled, down, down, deep into a sandy valley that was still forming as we tumbled. I felt brackets snapping off my MacHalo. I was suddenly afraid the desert would swallow us alive, but the desert didn’t want us. That was the whole point, although I didn’t know it then.
I struggled to keep my grip on the pouch, clutched it tightly to my chest. Christian’s legs were steel around my hips, his hands locked. The temperature dropped sharply.
The desert began to tremble. The tremble became a rumble. The rumble became an earthquake, and, just when I thought we might be shaken to pieces, the ground beneath us sank abruptly, then gave a single gigantic heave and flung us straight up into the air.
As we went soaring into the dark sky, I muttered an apology to Christian. He sort of laughed and muttered back in my ear that he preferred a quick death by falling, with crushed bones and all, to a slow death by dehydration, and at least it was nice and cool finally but maybe, since it seemed the stones had triggered the cataclysmic reaction, I might try covering them back up and see what happened?
I shoved them in the pouch and crammed it down the waistband of my pa
nts.
We fell.
I braced for impact.
We splashed down into icy water.
I plunged deep. Kicking hard, I surfaced and inhaled greedily. I blinked water from my eyes and saw that we’d fallen into a stone quarry. How lucky. That must mean a terrifying monster with razor-sharp teeth was in the water beneath me, about to snap my legs off, because the gods didn’t smile on me—at least not lately or that I was aware of.
And Christian wasn’t as bad off as I’d thought, because he was swimming toward shore.
I narrowed my eyes. Toward shore, leaving me to my own devices that, as far as he knew, might involve drowning.
I checked to make sure the pouch was still in my waistband and kicked into a breaststroke. I’m a strong swimmer, and I pulled myself out of the quarry just a few seconds after he did. He collapsed hard on the grass-covered bank and closed his eyes.
“Thanks for sticking around to make sure I wasn’t drowning.” Then I murmured, “Oh, Christian.” I touched his blistered face, made sure he was breathing, took his pulse. He was unconscious. It had taken the last ounce of energy he possessed to get himself out of the quarry.
First things first: Were we safe here?
I scanned our surroundings. The quarry was large and deep, overflowing here and there into smaller ponds and pools. It occupied a small corner of a huge valley. Miles and miles of grassy plain were surrounded by moderate mountains with ice-capped crowns. The valley was peaceful and calm. At the opposite edge, animals grazed serenely.
It looked like we were safe, at least for now. I heaved a sigh of relief and struggled out of my wet leather coat. I slipped the pouch containing the stones from my waistband and set it aside. There was no doubt about it: Removing the stones from the spelled pouch made dimensions shift for some reason, but while uncovered, they seem to wreak total havoc on the world around them. The next time we used them, I’d flash them quickly, and maybe we’d get to skip the whole violent expulsion motif and glide at a gentle tempo into the next world.
After a brief hesitation, I stripped down to bra and panties, grateful for the moderate climate. Wet leather sucks. I draped my clothing on nearby rocks to dry in the sun, hoping the leather wouldn’t shrink to ridiculous sizes.
Next concern: what to do for Christian. He was breathing shallowly and his pulse was erratic. He’d passed out in the sun, where his burn would deepen. The blisters on his face were crusted and seeping blood. How long had he been in that hellish desert? When had he last eaten? There was no way I could move him. I couldn’t even get him out of his wet clothes. I could cut them off, but he’d need them again. Who knew what we might have to face next? He was more heavily muscled than last I’d seen him and, unconscious, he was deadweight. Had he been fighting his way through dimension after dimension since Halloween? Did time pass the same way where he’d been?
Unless it had fallen out, I had a baby-food jar of Unseelie flesh in my coat. I tripped over my own feet in my haste to get to it and unbuttoned pocket after pocket, searching.
“Ow!” I’d found it wriggling wetly in shards of broken bottle, buttoned in an inner pocket. I extracted the flesh carefully from the jar, which must have shattered in my tumble across the sand. Of the seven strips I’d crammed into the tiny container, there were four left. Three of them had wriggled off somewhere. I held the noxious pieces of gray Rhino-boy flesh, picked out slivers of glass, and considered the rapidly healing cuts on my fingers.
Was I healing so well because of the Unseelie I’d eaten in the past? Did it cause permanent changes, as Rowena claimed? Would it do something terrible to Christian? I had no idea what else to do for him. I had only two protein bars, and I didn’t know if the water around us was drinkable or contaminated by some deadly-to-humans parasite. I’d never been a Girl Scout, couldn’t start a fire with sticks, had no container to boil water in even if I could, and was disgusted to realize I was still, in many ways, remarkably useless.
I hurried back to his side, lay one of the strips on a flat stone, and cut it up into pieces as small as early peas. I pried open his teeth, stuffed the pieces in, and held his mouth and nose closed, hoping the flesh would, in dim-witted Rhino-boy fashion, wriggle toward his stomach, seeking escape.
It did. I wasn’t so useless after all!
He gagged, I released my hold on his nose, and his throat muscles convulsed. He gagged again and swallowed involuntarily. He coughed and made a retching sound. Even when you’re unconscious, Unseelie meat is revolting.
With a groan, he rolled over onto his side.
I diced another strip, stuffed it into his mouth, and held it closed again. This time he resisted, but his body was still too weak to put up much of a fight.
By the time I got the third strip sliced up and in his mouth, he’d rolled over onto his back again, opened his eyes, and was looking at me. I think he was trying to ask what I was doing, but I clamped his teeth together with one hand on the top of his head and the other beneath his chin. He gagged instead and swallowed again.
The effects of Unseelie flesh on an injured human body are instantaneous and miraculous. As I watched, his blisters disappeared and his color returned to normal, leaving him lightly tanned. The gauntness in his face vanished, and the epidermis on his body plumped everywhere, erasing the damage of dehydration, rebuilding him from the inside out.
Unseelie flesh is potent, and addictive. Even though I was cured of my little obsession with it (did he really need that last strip?) I envied what I knew was happening to him: the heady rush of power surging hot through his veins, heightening his hearing, smell, and vision, increasing his strength to Barrons’ levels, filling him with a euphoric sense of invincibility and an exquisitely elevated awareness of his own body in relation to its surroundings.
Yes, he was certainly getting better.
Tiger eyes were not only open but moving with unabashed appreciation over the skin bared by my bra and underwear. He pushed my hand off his mouth.
Quickly—and possibly in large part because I was tempted to eat it myself—I knelt over him and shoved the last strip between his lips.
He sat up so fast our heads banged, hard.
I yelped and he spat.
Unseelie flesh went flying from his mouth and flopped on the ground between us.
He looked at the animated piece of meat, then he looked at me, and I’m not sure what he found more disgusting: the smelly gray flesh with oozing pustules, or me, for putting it in his mouth in the first place. It pissed me off, because, even on my worst day, I was preferable to Unseelie flesh. The absence of heat in those amber eyes was downright chilling.
“You might try thanking me,” I said stiffly.
He gagged again, cleared his throat, turned, and spat over his shoulder. “What,” he said, turning back to me and pointing, “the bloody hell is that?”
“Unseelie flesh,” I said coolly.
“That’s Unseelie? You fed me the flesh of a dark Fae?”
“How do you feel, Christian?” I demanded. “Pretty good?” He certainly looked good, sitting there in faded jeans, wet T-shirt straining over his wide shoulders, muscles rippling in his arms as he slicked wet hair back from his face. “No burns, no blisters, no hunger or thirst? Has it occurred to you that I saved your ass?”
“At what cost? What does eating it do to you? Nothing Fae is without price!”
“It heals you. Would you rather I hadn’t?”
“Big, huge lie in there. There are drawbacks. What are they?” he pushed furiously.
“There are drawbacks to everything,” I snapped.
We glared at each other.
“Would you rather I’d let you die?”
“Did you even try anything else first? Or are you all about magic, instant gratification?”
I leapt to my feet and began pacing. “What would you have had me try? Dragging your big body into the shade all by myself so you wouldn’t get burned worse? How about figuring out how to start a fire with t
wigs? No, I have it!” I whirled around and shot him a look. “I should have gone looking for a convenience store for sunblock and aloe gel and then when I found that, set off for a vet so I could find you subcutaneous fluids like my neighbors gives their sick cat!”
His mouth twitched. “Nice outfit, Mac.”
I bristled. I’d been stomping around in my bra and panties and he found me amusing in my underwear? “My clothes are soaked,” I growled.
“I was speaking of your—” His gaze shot upward. “Would you be calling that a hat, lass?”
I closed my eyes and groaned. I’d gotten so used to the weight of it on my head that I’d forgotten I was wearing my MacHalo. I unstrapped it, snatched it from my head, scraped off strands of dripping moss, and inspected it for damage. Two of the brackets were broken at the base, and several of the lights had been turned on in our roll down sand dunes, wasting precious batteries. I clicked them off and put the helmet on the rocks near my clothes.
I nodded at the piece of Unseelie lying on the ground between us. “Are you going to eat that?”
“Not for love or money,” he said vehemently.
“Well, pick it up and put it in your pocket. You might need it again. Like it or not, it saved your life.” No matter how badly I wanted it, I didn’t dare impair my sidhe-seer abilities. If we encountered anything Fae, my Nulling talents were all I had. We’d have to freeze them and run. Or use the stones again.
“It did something to me. Something … wrong.” He studied it with distaste, picked it up, drew back his arm, and flung it into the quarry. I heard a splash, a second much larger splash, and a snapping sound, followed by a third splash. Since my back was to the water, I had to interpret what happened from the look on his face. “Something awful-looking ate it?”
Looking mildly shocked, he nodded. “Tell me everything you know about what you just fed me and the effects it has. And as for the loch, lass, I wouldn’t recommend swimming in it.”
Christian’s clothes were soaked, and after a scan of the snow-covered peaks around us, he concluded there was a high probability of a sharp evening drop to frigid temperatures, which meant we needed our clothes dry, fast. As there was no convenient dryer nearby, toasting them in the sun was our only option, so a short time later we were both stretched out, me mostly naked, him completely. He was unselfconscious nude. I had to admit, he had reason to be.
Karen Marie Moning’s Fever Series 5-Book Bundle: Darkfever, Bloodfever, Faefever, Dreamfever, Shadowfever Page 112
