Jessica couldn’t see his face, but there was enough disdain in his voice to pique her curiosity. “I’m guessing those factions were against you and your goals from the beginning.”
“Not entirely.” His next careful test of another handhold yielded crumbling earth and a chunk of rock tumbling from the wall to disappear from view below them, leaving a gaping hole in its place. Leandras hissed and searched for a sturdier grip.
Forcing away the image of him falling to his death, Jessica shuffled sideways along the tiny lip. “But you’re not all that disappointed to see the place destroyed. Calindo, I mean. Or whatever you call it.”
“Not entirely.”
She rolled her eyes. There he went again with the vague answers and zero attempt to back them up.
“And it’s Cálindor.” Another chuckle escaped him. “If you can master Xaharí inflection while scaling a cliff sideways, Jessica, I imagine the rest of our venture may indeed be a walk in the park.”
“Ha. Well you can forget about trying to teach me a new language. I’m pretty sure multitasking fell out of my toolbox the second I followed your dumb ass down here.”
“Ah.” Leandras let out a massive sigh of relief. “I believe you underestimate yourself.”
“Underestimate?” She grunted as she reached for the next hold, sweat pouring down her face. “No, if anything, we both know I’ve overestimated the hell out of myself. Until a few days ago.”
“And this moment.”
Instead of her own hand and the treacherous cliff face in her limited vision, she now saw the fae man’s hand extending in front of her face. With a jolt, she looked farther toward her goal than she had in the last ten minutes and found herself two feet away from the ledge. Leandras stood solidly on the small shelf of rock holding his weight without any strain, reaching toward her with that telltale smirk. Only this time, it held encouragement with amusement.
Jessica snatched up his hand and let him haul her off the narrow lip onto the wider space. She immediately let herself drop to her knees to savor the unexpected relief of not having to cling to any more tiny, crimping holds. Closing her eyes, she stretched out her stiff fingers and took a deep breath. “Well that was a first.”
“Climbing, I presume?” Still smiling, Leandras leaned over the edge of the rocky shelf to scout out their next route down from here.
“Literally everything for me in this place is a first.” With a wry chuckle, she looked up at him. “But I was talking about you running your mouth.”
He leaned back against the cliff wall and fixed her with a raised eyebrow.
“First time it was actually a useful distraction.”
The fae man looked away from her with a hum, his smile unfazed, then shot her another brief glance before returning his attention to studying the numerous possible routes to get them down off this ledge and into the floor of the monstrous pit below. “As opposed to merely being a pain in your ass, as you’ve so eloquently expressed on numerous occasions.”
Jessica shook her head, reveling in the slight breeze wafting across the chasm despite the oily feel of the air and the stench she’d already grown used to tasting. “No, that hasn’t changed.”
A sharp bark of a laugh escaped him, surprising them both. Leandras wouldn’t look at her, but he dipped his head and tried to hide the remnants of his amusement.
Was that... embarrassment? Or maybe the fae was actually feeling flattered instead of just claiming it to deflect.
Either way, it was clear they both recognized the advantages here. Leandras could talk anyone into a stupor or a rage, depending on his mood, but for scaling the side of a terrifyingly steep cliff with a dead drop into nothingness, he’d talked Jessica into something she hadn’t quite learned how to do herself—acting on the task at hand without psyching herself out of it altogether.
“I imagine I’ll have plenty of opportunities to be of further assistance.” He pointed back the way they’d come but down. “I believe that is our best route to—”
The ledge trembled beneath them, and Jessica jumped to her feet. But the shaking didn’t come from the shelf of rock jutting from the cliff face as a temporary sanctuary. The entire side of the cliff shuddered from top to bottom.
“What was that?”
Leandras gazed up the cliff face with wide eyes. “Your guess is as good as mine. But we—”
The wall quivered again. With a hiss, he grabbed Jessica’s hand and jerked her toward him and the wall of rock. Sharp angles poked against her hips and chest, her cheek scratching against the rough stone as she looked up in time to see a massive boulder nearly the size of the ledge on which they stood hurtling down directly toward them.
Chapter 23
This was it. Jessica had survived ten years on the run from a Brúkii, five years of enduring Mickey Hargraves’ abuse while she worked for him and Corpus, one year of magical imprisonment at MJ Pen, inheriting a bank, fighting off greedy assholes who thought they could strongarm her, multiple wounds that didn’t heal, undoing the Shattering to restore her own magic, who knew how many other fights in between, and a trip through the goddamn Gateway to pass between worlds with this fae pressing her fiercely against the side of the cliff.
Only to be crushed by a falling rock with nowhere to run.
She gritted her teeth and didn’t have time to think about anything else before the boulder cracked against the ledge—not on them but behind them.
The outer four feet of flat, rocky shelf that had felt like such a delicious reprieve from clinging to the jagged rock wall splintered and crumbled. Rumbling stone fell away right behind Jessica and Leandras, crashing end over end into the abyss below and sending up a deafening roar.
The cliff face shuddered again, and the reverberating tremor shivered through Jessica’s body and all the way up her head into her teeth.
“Don’t move,” Leandras shouted over the roar, his face contorted in a grimace of effort.
What did he plan to do? Stand here on all of two feet they now had and ride the wave until the cliff stopped trying to throw them off?
It could’ve been a decent plan—or at least some kind of plan—if they didn’t literally have nowhere else to go from here.
“Now we’re screwed,” Jessica blurted, gazing up at the dizzying height of the wall they’d already scaled to get here.
“I wouldn’t say your pessimism is misplaced just now.”
“Not helping!”
“Jessica, listen to me.” He pressed his cheek farther against the rock wall and held her gaze with steady determination as more pebbles and hunk of rock rained down around them. “On my signal, I want you to—”
The wall twenty feet above them exploded in a shower of stony shards and dust and rubble.
Time seemed to slow to an agonizing crawl, maybe just to give Jessica a better view of what happened next. Even with her senses taking it all in through apparent slow motion, she couldn’t comprehend a single bit of it.
A hard, flesh-colored shell rimmed in brown spikes burst out of the wall above them, followed by an inconceivably long body sailing away from the wall in a shallow arc. Rows of yellow-white bristles coated the underside of the body now blocking out what little light the stormy sky of Xahar’áhsh afforded, and the segmented parts of that body glistened with an internal light as the massive creature dove out of its new tunneling entrance and dropped straight down into the chasm.
The thing let out a burbling groan—which Jessica could only imagine was a version of a scream from something that didn’t even look like a mouth. Then again, she hadn’t seen its head, only its disgusting underbelly.
What the hell was it doing?
Another crash came from inside the wall where she and Leandras pressed themselves fiercely against anything solid, but whatever beast existed ten, twenty, thirty yards inside the solid earth in front of them didn’t follow its companion in a suicidal leap out of the cliff.
The giant thing that had to be at least thirty feet long whipped and writh
ed in the air as it fell. Then Jessica got a second’s glance at the curving top of a sentinel rising up from the chasm floor toward them.
It didn’t matter if it was the same one or not. It didn’t matter whether the floating gasbag of flesh and shell had seen the toppling creature coming or had simply been in the right place at the right time.
The giant writhing worm hit the top of the sentinel’s curved body—or its head, or maybe the two were synonymous here—with a sickeningly wet smack. Both creatures let out confused and angry grunts. The sentinel’s weird nostril-gills produced a stiflingly hot gust of air, and the worm bounced.
It actually bounced.
Jessica saw the sentinel’s flesh rippling at the impact like Jell-O smacked by a spoon, then the giant worm was sailing back up toward her and Leandras, its segmented body thrashing wildly in all directions.
“Down!” Leandras shouted.
“I’m not—” She was going to say no way in hell was she jumping, but that wasn’t what he meant.
The fae’s hand wrapped around the back of her head, and he forced her down into a crouch with him.
Jessica had a split second to see the glistening top of the sentinel open up like a blooming flower made of gelatinous black and red sludge and lined with serrated yellow teeth instead of petals. Then the massive stone worm whipping through the air bashed its head—or its tail, everything looked the same—against the cliff face right above them. Right where they’d been standing.
The crash was deafening.
Jessica’s feet slipped out from under her, but instead of falling straight down into the chasm or even the gaping maw at the top of the sentinel’s head, she fell forward.
The cliff face caved in, and she went sliding down a steep incline of smooth stone. At least, it would have been smooth if she didn’t topple down the thing with an entourage of boulders and jagged rocks and so much dust and pebbles.
She probably cried out. She couldn’t hear anything but the roar of crumbling rock and the sharp clack of stones smacking the smooth tunnel floor beneath her. Debris pelted her body, and the only reason she knew she was facing upward was because the rest of her kept moving down.
Then the tunnel floor disappeared. She dropped all of four feet before landing on her back with a thud and a huge cloud of dust. A second later, another similar thud hit the ground beside her with a rain of pebbles and debris.
Maybe this was it, then. If she had enough time to lie there on her back—with the wind knocked out of her and her vision entirely obscured by the thick cloud of dust—and consider her final end by being buried alive inside the cliff she’d just scaled, maybe this was her final moment.
Another groaning rumble shook the cavern. It sounded a lot farther above her than even the top of the cliff from where they’d found a moment of rest on that ledge. A shiver of dust and small rocks clacked down onto the cold stone floor around her, and somehow, she managed to roll onto her side to cover her head with both arms.
Dead witches didn’t shield their own heads from falling rocks. Right?
The dust-filled air made her cough, which only brought a deep, sharp pain lancing through the right side of her ribcage.
Her coughs echoed through the darkness until she realized it wasn’t an echo. It was Leandras.
“Jessica? Are you all right?”
She groaned and coughed again.
“A verbal...” The fae grunted, followed by a cascade of small rocks tumbling lightly around them. “A verbal confirmation would be highly beneficial.”
Clenching her teeth, she ran her hand gingerly down her right side and instantly pulled away when her fingers touched the flaring ripple of heat through her ribs. “Shit.”
“I suppose that will do.”
A bright white light flared behind her, and she shut her eyes with a hiss against the momentary glare. Then Leandras’ footsteps echoed toward her, shuffling along the rubble-strewn stone, and the light brightened around her closed eyelids.
“Are you injured?”
Jessica grunted and tried to straighten from her pseudo-fetal position. “Probably.”
“Let me see.”
“If I—” She sucked in a sharp breath at the pain, which made her cough again. Likewise, the searing lance of heat and deep, throbbing brokenness flared in her side all over again. “If I am, it won’t be for very long.”
“I’ll form my own opinion of that, thank you.”
When Jessica opened her eyes, she found him kneeling in front of her, his white orb of light hovering between them two feet above their heads. The soft glow lit up the unabashed concern in the fae’s eyes as he studied her face.
Despite how much everything hurt, she huffed out a wry laugh. “You need an opinion now too?”
“Everyone is entitled to one. Which I’m sure you understand after sharing dozens of your own in the last few weeks. Unsolicited.” He reached toward her right side, clearly meaning to poke and prod to his sadistic heart’s content.
Jessica caught his wrist and stopped him. “Of my magic?”
Her grip must have been strong enough to surprise him, because he looked down at her face instead of staring at what might have clearly been a severe injury thirty seconds ago. Leandras blinked. “I’m sorry?”
“Vestrohím, remember?” With a warning glance, she released his wrist and pushed herself up to sit there on the stone floor in a pile of rubble. “My injuries don’t need a second opinion. Neither does my magic.”
“Jessica, you can’t be certain—”
“You know what? When you live your entire life being hunted, tortured, stabbed, attacked by magic, beaten, generally maimed, and then heal yourself from every single one of those things in minutes, then sure. Go ahead and tell me I can’t be certain.”
Leandras narrowed his eyes, and a small flicker of a smile was barely visible in the low light of his hovering spell. “I believe you’ve excluded falling down a repurposed tunnel from that tantalizing list.”
With a snort, she pushed herself to her feet and slapped the thick layer of dust and a few pebbles off her pants. “Good. Glad we’re on the same page.”
Yeah, and she’d also conveniently left out the part just a few weeks ago when she’d nearly died on the lobby floor of Winthrop & Dirledge—when she’d needed a damn immortal lizard to heal her and kick off the rest of her giant bad-life-choices mess.
The bank would have said the same thing in a moment like this, if she’d still had the bank with her. Hearing a snide, bank-worthy comment fill her mind in her own voice brought both relief and a surprising amount of regret.
Jessica actually missed the dumb sentient building as her constant internal conversationalist.
Good to know, but it wouldn’t get her and Leandras any closer to what they’d come for in this ravaged world full of carnivorous hot-air balloons and giant suicidal worms.
Leandras rose fluidly from the floor of the cavern, and the bobbing orb of white light rose with him to maintain its two-foot height above the fae’s head. “Then I assume you are well enough to continue.”
“Sure.” She finally took a long, slow look around them but could only see darkness stretching out in all directions—including above them—and the occasional crag of rock. “You know, climbing down the rest of that cliff didn’t exactly make me jump for joy, but at least it wasn’t a dead end.”
“If I’m correct in my estimation of our current location, neither is this.”
“Hey, if you can see a way out in the dark, by all means, carry on.”
The fae settled his silver-glowing gaze on her, then flicked his hand up into the air beside his head. The orb of white light shot up into the gaping space of the cavern around them and grew to ten times its original size. The light brightened, casting their flickering shadows in elongating swaths across the rock wall beside which they’d landed.
They both took a moment to study the vastness of the cave inside the cliff—or, Jessica supposed, the earth that had crumble
d away into a death-trap sinkhole since the last time Leandras was here.
She caught a glimpse of the sloping tunnel that had dumped them out into this space, made of smooth stone just like she’d thought. It was such a narrow chute in the earth, they were both lucky to have made it to the bottom without either of them cracking their heads open on the jagged walls of the tunnel.
Leandras’ silver gaze settled on her again, and he pointed at the far end of the cavern, where his magical light still couldn’t reach but the stone walls tapered down into something that could have been an exit. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but that does look suspiciously like a way out.”
Jessica gestured toward the dark opening of the tunnel across the cavern and offered the fae a sarcastic bow of her own. “After you.”
All she got for her efforts to mimic his ridiculous gestures in her world was a deep scowl from Leandras and a slow shake of his head.
She almost burst out laughing. “What, you can dish it out, but you can’t take it?”
“I have no idea what you’re insinuating.” He turned and walked across the cavern.
Oh, sure. The guy was offended because now she got to be a stranger in his world and question his knowledge.
No, their roles weren’t completely reversed; Jessica didn’t have some kind of secret knowledge of Xaharí tunnels she could dangle over the fae’s head to manipulate him into doing what she wanted. But for now, at least, it seemed they were finally on a level playing field.
Jessica didn’t have the bank, and Leandras didn’t have the upper hand.
She was even more convinced of the latter when the enlarged white orb bobbing above them illuminated the scattered mounds of dirt lining the entrance to the tunnel. At least, she hoped it was a tunnel leading them out of here. Because poking through those mounds of dirt were bones, strips of aged flesh, cloth, antlers, and more bones.
“Great,” Jessica muttered. “So what comes next? Two-headed bats the size of a car?”
Leandras turned around with a frown and obviously caught her eyeing the mounds of decomposed bodies belonging to who knew what—plus whatever else lay buried under the crumbling crust of the piles each as large as a park bench. He pressed his lips together as he eyed the evidence with her, then muttered, “I believe those are from the Skirra.”
The Poisoned Veil (Accessory to Magic Book 4) Page 22
