A shadow moved…Aric pushing away from the doorjamb where he’d leaned. “Done?” He held her bag.
“Yes.” She let out a shaky breath. One session down, two more and she would feel competent to rescue Rothly. “I’m completely done here.”
Aric nodded. “Good.” He repeated his earlier words. “It’s a sad place.”
She picked up the mug, emptied the liquid in the sink in the corner of the room, rinsed it out and put it on a shelf.
A harder splat came against the conservatory windows and she glanced over to see the wetly gleaming teeth of a shadleech.
She stumbled back into Aric. He steadied her.
Then another hit came. Faster and faster like a hailstorm in the mountains, but…squishy. The things weren’t hurt. Harder to hurt since they were more magical than physical. Magic enough to enter the interdimension.
Aric cursed under his breath. “They’ve found us.”
Jenni swallowed. “Guess so.”
His hold on her tightened briefly. “We must go outside to enter a tree and the greenspace.”
The thought of that made the back of her throat slime with chill fear. “Yes,” she said, her lips numbed. She struggled with her pack until he helped, then she picked up her tapestry bag.
“The sycamore, to the east, is closest and it’s big.” He hesitated. “I’ll make it right with the dryad later.”
Jenni winced. “You’re not on good terms with her.”
“Not anymore.”
Jenni decided she didn’t want to discuss the topic.
“We’ll have to run.” From one of the magical pockets in his coat, he pulled out a large silver dagger that flamed around the edges. “They react negatively to fire.”
“I can burn ’em up if they attach themselves to us.”
“Good,” he said.
Quick inhale through nostrils, puff through mouth. “You have the docs?” she asked.
“I transferred all the files I could find to both our palm devices.”
The thumping on the glass came faster, harder. “The house shields—”
“Are holding fine, as well as anything against shadleeches. If the filthy things are Kondrian’s, they’ll leave when we do.” His jaw flexed. “They seem directed, not random.”
The thuds of shadleeches against the glass roof and windows were almost mathematical in their precision—squadrons of the things. Aric gripped her elbow and his fingers went white-knuckled on his weapon. “Ready?”
He didn’t look at her. Foolish that she’d wanted him to, to reassure her that they were in this together. But they hadn’t been together for a long time.
“Ready,” she said.
His fingers tightened, overlapping just above her elbow. They hurried through the house, Jenni said a spell to open the east side door. As she did, she sent a blast of fire in the direction of the sycamore.
The smell of crisped and charring fur accompanied screams. She and Aric ran, and she slammed the door behind her hard. More screams, but no shadleeches had entered the house.
Aric swept the air ahead of them with his knife, and shadleeches died or disappeared. They couldn’t attach to his coat, but several dipped under his collar and Jenni flamed them with a gesture of her free hand. She’d encased herself in fire except for the arm Aric was holding. Teeth nipped and tore and fastened, sucking magic. She sent fire to them from her skin to their mouths. They dropped.
Five more paces and Aric propelled her to the sycamore. She sent a last look over her shoulder to her old home. Solid. Empty. Her family long gone.
Aric had left a light burning for Rothly, one yellow glow of hope.
A thump and they were in the tree’s greenspace. Jenni heard breaking china, saw a flash of a dryad’s tea party and the fem shrieking at Aric in Treefolk. Another tug took her to a different tree with a startled dryad laughing at them, then Aric pulled Jenni from the tree…and into Kew Gardens in London. From a sycamore to a sycamore…easier to do. He must have been shaken.
“Where are we going?” she asked, glancing around the empty park. However cloudy or sunny the day had been here, it was now dusk and the place was closed.
“The Eight are meeting us in the main Earth Palace in the States.”
“Which is where?”
“Near Yellowstone National Park.”
“Near Rothly, too.”
“That’s why we’re meeting there.”
Jenni wrinkled her nose; she knew enough about Yellowstone to understand that if the supervolcano there blew, Denver wouldn’t be safe. Maybe the whole Rocky Mountain range would be activated. Therefore… “The Earth Palace isn’t near Yellowstone!”
“On the contrary. What do you think helps stabilize the volcanic mantle plume?” Aric said.
“Huh.” And the Eight had been keeping their own secrets.
So they walked from the twilight that wasn’t much different from the daylight, through a tree and came out in Yellowstone, back into the brilliant and dazzling blue skies and sunshine of a midmorning American West winter.
Jenni blinked, stepped away from Aric and shook her whole body out. She hadn’t done tree traveling in a long time. Aric matched her deep breaths for a full two minutes. She lifted her face to the sun. No, she’d never go back to Northumberland, she’d become used to three hundred days of sunshine a year in Denver.
Yellowstone in February was crystalline in its beauty. Ice crystal. Drifts of snow heaped around them, smoothing over the features of the landscape. The odor of sulphur twitched her nose, not unpleasant to her djinn-fire nature. Geysers steamed in the distance and she saw a colorful pool not too far away. “Beautiful,” she breathed.
The corner of Aric’s mouth quirked. “It is.”
They stood for another minute, watching a hawk soar, then Aric gestured her to go back to the great pine that they’d just exited from.
“Why did we stop?” she asked.
“Because it’s beautiful.”
And he’d felt she’d needed a beautiful moment in her life? She’d forgotten he’d done things like that, little gestures of thoughtfulness that had pleased her.
This had given her a moment of serenity. Once more she glanced at the landscape around her, the blues of sky and shadows, the white of snow, yellow of shafts of sunshine. The quiet of a place with few humans sank into her, sliding along her ruffled nerves, soothing her.
She closed her eyes, and sent her senses downward—into a seething lake of magma far closer than she was accustomed to. It was oddly exhilarating. When she opened her eyes, Aric was watching her with a half smile and something like tenderness on his face as if he actually cared a lot about her. Her heart gave a twinge. He looked so much like she remembered in past shared moments. The sorry past.
She opened her mouth and realized the snide words she wanted to say would destroy that expression of his, this moment, and diminish her, too.
“Thank you,” she said, then again as she actually realized what she had done. “Thank you.” She had risen above old instinct and grief and behaved well. The sting of doing that vanished, as had some of the memories that smudged her.
Since he watched her with an inscrutable face and penetrating green eyes, she figured that he’d sensed a shift inside her. Like he knew she couldn’t hold on to her grief forever? She’d thought the clutched grief had been comforting, deadening her to the too-sharp guilt that pierced her. But a bit of that guilt was gone, too. His acceptance of the past was rubbing off on her.
Jenni rolled her shoulders, scanned the panorama again. “Very beautiful, and the supervolcano heat feels nice against the soles of my feet, but I don’t think I’d want to live here. It probably gets as much sun as Denver, but a whole lot more snow, and I like the city.” Despite her occasional hermit months.
Aric nodded, his head lifted as he stared in the distance. “Can you feel Rothly?”
Her whole body lurched. She hadn’t even thought of Rothly! All her concentration and emotions should hav
e been focused on him! She’d spent too much time blocking out the pain that thinking of him gave her. That was a habit she must break. She needed to keep her brother in her thoughts. And she admitted inwardly that the emotions she’d suffered through the past two days had been intense enough to weary her.
Dragging in chill air, she spread her stance, closed her eyes again and reached for her brother in the here and now.
He was…not near enough to walk to, but close enough to feel. “Yes,” she whispered. “He’s in the area. I’ll be able to find him, though it will take me longer than a Lightfolk tracker. How much do you and the Eight know?”
“I’ll tell you when we get to the Earth Palace.” Aric turned and stepped into the tree again. Once more he held out his hand.
This time she had no hesitation in taking it.
They exited into a large cavern lit by enough glow lights to make a djinn feel welcome. Jenni glanced at the tree they’d stepped from. It was a huge oak. She got the idea the tree had been grown just for a transportation hub for the Treefolk.
The room around her was like a geode. No huge stalagmites and stalactites, and the floor was of many colored flagstones, but the walls were comprised of large crystals. The multitude of surfaces caught the light and magnified it so the room was almost as bright as outside. Air more humid than expected caressed her skin.
Aric cocked his head. “Not all of the Eight are here. I have been informed that I should show you to where you will be staying and we can have a meal and a rest.”
“That’s fine,” she said, not that she was looking forward to seeing King Cloudsylph again. Or confronting the dwarves and merman who’d sent Rothly off on a fatal mission.
Aric waved toward one of the four doors in the room and she wondered if the palace was divided into quarters by magical element. He took her elbow again and they strode to the southern one. Halfway there he coughed and Jenni recognized it as embarrassment, as his skin took on a ruddier tint.
“What?” she asked.
“We’re going to the female halflings dormitory.” He paused. “So you’ll feel more comfortable.”
Jenni was pretty sure all the halflings in the palace were servants. She snorted. “So much for my upgrading to nobility and princesshood.”
Aric turned redder.
“Yah,” she continued. “I know. I haven’t completed the damn mission for them, whatever it is.”
He stopped and bent until his gaze was level with hers. “The whole magical community needs you, Jenni. Not just the Eight, all of the Lightfolk. Believe me.”
She did, but hunched a shoulder. “Maybe.”
He nodded. He must continue to see deeper into her than she wanted. He opened the door, and waved her through to a long corridor with doors on either side.
Immediately there were more people—beings. Jenni saw halflings in variously colored liveries. There were well-dressed Lightfolk nobles, full-blooded djinns and djinnfems, dwarves and dwarfems, a multitude of brownies scurrying.
Aric had removed his hand from her elbow and was dusting off his trench coat, gray ashy flakes of shadleech drifting from the leather. Everyone around them wrinkled their noses at the new smell.
A djinnfem turned into their corridor from a cross hall. She was taller than Jenni and more voluptuous. Her skin color was a true, bright copper, her hair bronze curls with a hint of metallic shine. Jenni squelched her first reaction to fall back into the shadows as she’d been trained as a half-breed human. Instead she stood her ground and lifted her chin.
Right now, in this matter, she was more important to the Eight than this pure djinnfem, whoever she was, though the nearly visible waves of magic emanating from her aura proclaimed her as royal blood.
With a narrowing of her eyes, Jenni scanned the female, opened her mouth the slightest to draw in the tang of her. A princess indeed, one of the daughters of the King and Queen of Fire, who had left Earth through the portal fifteen years ago. She’d stayed when her parents had left. Probably one of the highest status princesses around.
Even if Jenni accepted a title conferred upon her, she would never reach the rank of this one.
The woman halted in front of Aric, gave him a brilliant smile showing gleaming white teeth, more pointed than those of humans. “Greetings, Aric, flame of my heart.”
That endearment jolted through Jenni. “Flame of my heart” meant that there was some formal bond between Aric and the female—not a phrase that would be used by casual lovers. All Jenni’s slight yearnings that she and Aric might become intimate again wisped away like a droplet of water hitting a hot grill. Even as she stiffened, took a step away from Aric, putting more air between them, she caught the sound of the quickening of his blood, saw the slight tint of flush redden his skin.
“Greetings, Synicess,” Aric replied. “I thought you were in the Middle East.”
The djinnfem’s nose wrinkled, her upper lip lifted in a sneer. “Humans have befouled the area beyond belief. It will take firestorms by a dozen of my kind to remove the stench of them.” She tossed her head. “I’ll welcome an order from the Eight to scour the land of them to return the area to a place where magic can thrive once more.”
That was horrific enough to have Jenni fading back another step, away from the being whom she sensed held a deep reservoir of flaming anger. Jenni felt the searing heat of Synicess’s stare. There was a hesitation then the female said, “Ah, this is your little half-breed. The sister of the cripple. You wooed her to the commonweal. Good job.” Her aura brightened until there were no shadows in the rough rock hall except harsh ones thrown by the three of them.
Keeping her anger tamped down, Jenni sucked in a quiet breath of the hot, metallic air in the corridor and stepped forward, nodded to the female as if they were equals. “Jindesfarne Mistweaver, here to manage what the Eight cannot do even as a team. Just as we Mistweavers provided enough magic for the portal fifteen years ago.”
Synicess hissed and fire licked Jenni’s skin, hot, hotter, until she would burn in two more seconds.
CHAPTER 9
ARIC STEPPED IN FRONT OF HER, THE BULK of him shadowing her like the redwood he came from. Jenni watched, eyes widening. She didn’t think he had the power to stand up to a full-blooded one-elemental Lightfolk. His aura wavered and Jenni got the impression of wide boughs and thick needles dispersing the heat aimed their way.
He, too, set into his balance. Then the slightest of breezes, made from all their exhalations, further wafted the heat away—Aric using his elven air nature. Jenni was reluctantly impressed with the man.
“Synicess, I will meet you later in your chamber. My duty is to see that Jindesfarne eats and is shown to her room.”
Both sentences hurt Jenni. How stupid she’d been to think that she was more than a job to him. That he cared for her. That he’d ever cared enough for her that such an emotion might tip into love. That he wouldn’t have found other, more satisfying lovers after they’d broken up.
Her female human part had blindsided her. Her softer, weaker, mortal nature.
Though as they passed Synicess, Jenni figured she’d rather be human than the full djinnfem whose seething mass of anger within would take eons to work through.
Jenni also thought that Aric’s taste had definitely gone downhill.
She and Aric walked through several corridors before the coolness of stone once more closed around them and shadows again pooled under a jutting outcropping here and there.
“She is your wife?” Jenni asked. She’d definitely been stupid.
“No.”
Since he said nothing more for several steps, Jenni let the quiet gather like the shadows. From the additional tension in Aric’s body, the lengthening of his stride that she had to stretch to keep up with him, she knew he didn’t want to talk about Synicess. Curiosity slid through Jenni, prodding, but she kept her mouth shut. In two days already she was maturing.
Growing hadn’t been easy, and keeping her snide comments to herself was
hard because the Lightfolk still irritated the hell out of her with their treatment. But this was Aric and they were bound together by past events and she discovered she still liked him. He was intriguing and he stood seriously firm when before he’d have made a light comment to deflect. That battle had changed his life as greatly as it had changed hers.
A few more turns later, they reached a broad and well-traveled hallway. Aric stopped at a door and opened it. The dining room was large with a buffet at one end. A rumbling, rough sigh came from Aric, and as he ran his fingers through his hair, the piney scent of his sweat came to Jenni’s nose.
He shook his head, managed a smile. “I don’t know if my stomach wants lunch or dinner or brunch.” His smile was easy now. “The palace is on a full-day rotation schedule, of course, so there’s food for all times.”
“Right.” Didn’t look to her like this was a noble area, more like servants. Since Aric’s steps had hesitated, he must not eat here often. For halflings, of course. And no one else was in the room.
But the hours’ events and emotional traumas began pressing upon her and she found she was as hungry as if she hadn’t eaten in days…and emotionally battered.
She saw pancakes and headed toward them. Now she’d had a little respite, her bruises were coming to her attention…where the shadleeches had gnawed on her, where she’d slammed into the alley…and even where a dish from an angry dryad had hit her midback. She had barely noticed at the time.
“Pancakes sound good.” Her words slurred. She hadn’t gotten much sleep the night before, too wound up.
“I’d like quail,” Aric said and headed in another direction.
Jenni sat at a nearby table and Aric joined her. They ate in silence. For herself, Jenni was enjoying her meal. Exist in the moment with good food.
Aric was eating with enthusiasm, but a line had dug between his brows and Jenni decided he was mulling over how to explain events to the Eight. Good luck to him. Better him than her.
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