“Do you have feelings for him, Mac?”
I dressed in silence.
“Are you afraid to answer me?”
I finished dressing and turned around. Christian was getting a little scary-looking. His eyes were growing inhumanly brilliant, golden. I kept my face a smooth mask. “I’m starved,” I told him. “I’ve got two protein bars. You can have one. And I’m thirsty, but I’d rather not drink from that quarry. And I think we have much bigger problems than my feelings about Jericho Barrons. Or lack thereof. And those animals,” I pointed to the far edge of the valley, “look edible to me.”
I began to walk.
Unfortunately, we weren’t the only ones that thought the sleek, graceful gazellelike creatures looked edible, as we soon discovered in the middle of the valley.
A stampeding herd of thousands of shaggy-furred horned bulls with whiplike tails and wolfish snouts was bearing down on us, hard.
“Do you think maybe they’ll just part around us?” I’d seen it happen in the movies.
“I’m not sure it’s not us they’re after, Mac. Run!”
I ran, even though I was pretty sure it was pointless. They were too fast, and we were too far from any kind of shelter.
“Can’t you do something Druidy?” I shouted over the nearly deafening pounding of hooves.
He gave me a look. “Druidry,” he shouted, “requires preparation, or it can have disastrous results!”
“Well, you’re looking all formidable! Surely you can do something with whatever’s happening to you!” The black symbols had begun to move up his throat now.
The ground was shaking so hard it was getting difficult to run. It felt like an earthquake creeping up on us.
When I stumbled, Christian moved so quickly that the next thing I knew I was over his shoulder and he was running ten times faster than a normal man. Of course, he was pumped on Unseelie. I raised my head. The herd was too close. We still weren’t moving fast enough. The creatures were gaining, snouts snapping, saliva flying. I could practically feel their breath blasting us.
“Use the stones,” Christian shouted.
“You said it was too dangerous!”
“Anything’s better than dead, Mac!”
I dug into my waistband, pulled out the pouch, and flashed the stones.
Comparatively speaking, it was one of the smoother transitions.
Unfortunately, it deposited us on a fire world.
I flashed the stones again, and the flames on my boots died instantly, because the next world didn’t support carbon-based life and there was no oxygen.
I flashed the stones again, and we were underwater.
The fourth time I flashed them, we ended up on the narrow top of a jagged cliff that fell sharply to a bottomless chasm on both sides.
“Put me down,” I shouted over the wild gale whipping around us. I was crushed over Christian’s shoulder, dripping wet and gasping for breath.
“Here?”
“Yes, here!”
Snorting, he lowered me to my feet but kept his grip tight on my waist. I stared at him. His amber irises were rimmed with black. It was staining inward, like ink clouding water. The strange symbols were licking up over his jaw.
“Just what did you do on Halloween?” Why was Unseelie flesh having such a strange effect on him?
He gave me that killer smile, but it wasn’t killer charming, it was killer cold. “I chickened out at the last minute, or we wouldn’t have failed. We tried to raise the only other power we knew of that had once stood against the Tuatha Dé and held its own. An ancient sect called the Draghar raised it once, long ago. Barrons didn’t hesitate. I did. Care to get us off this cliff, Mac?” he snarled.
“What if the next place is even worse?”
“Keep shifting and I’ll keep holding on.”
A gust of air blasted us. We went stumbling off the edge, into yawning darkness. I opened the pouch as we fell.
A massive vortex exploded around us, black, swirling, tearing at my hair and clothes. I struggled to shove the stones back into the rune-covered bag. I could feel Christian’s grip slipping, then his hands were gone and I was alone.
I slammed down onto grassy tundra, on my hands and knees.
I hit so hard, the pouch went flying from my hands. My forehead smacked into the earth and I bit my tongue viciously. I couldn’t feel Christian’s hands on me anywhere.
Ears ringing from the impact, I lifted my head, dazed.
I stared straight into the eyes of an enormous wild boar with razor-sharp tusks.
When you’re staring death in the face, time has a funny way of slowing down.
Or maybe, in this realm, it really did move slower, who knows?
All I knew, as I stared into the boar’s beady, cunning, hungry eyes—tiny in its cow-size body—was that ever since I’d dropped my cell phone into our swimming pool, I’d begun losing things. One after another.
First my sister. Then my parents and any hope of going home.
I’d tried to roll with the punches, be a good sport. I’d made a new home for myself in a bookstore in Dublin. I’d attempted to make new friends and forge alliances. I’d said good-bye to pretty clothes, my blond hair, and my love of fashion. I’d accepted shades of gray instead of rainbows and finally embraced black.
Then I’d lost Dublin and my bookstore.
Finally I’d lost myself, even my own mind.
I’d learned to use new weapons, found new ways to survive.
And lost those, too.
My spear was gone. I had no Unseelie flesh. No name in my tongue.
I’d found Christian. I’d lost Christian. I was pretty sure he’d ended up being dragged off one way in the vortex, while I’d been sent another.
And now I’d lost the stones, too. The pouch was on the ground, far beyond the boar, drawstring tight. I couldn’t even hope for an accidental shift.
The dirk strapped to my forearm wouldn’t begin to pierce the animal’s scale-plated hide.
And I had to wonder: Was this the whole point? Was it about taking everything from me there was to take? Was that what life did? Made you lose everything you cared about and believed in, then killed you?
Yes, I was feeling sorry for myself.
Fecking A, as Dani would say—who wouldn’t at this point?
Fire worlds? Water worlds? Cliffs? What crappy cosmic power was in charge of deciding where the stones sent me next? Were the blue-black slivers of whatever they were so despised by the Silvers that if a realm couldn’t spit them all the way back to the Unseelie hell, it would settle for trying to destroy them—therefore, oops, me, too? Was I being deliberately flung into the jaws of danger?