Mortal Danger (21 page)

The Rules behaved oddly in a zone, according to Gan. And that was about all the demon had told her about zones. All she knew about Akhanetton was that it was another region. When she asked questions, Gan hushed her and looked scared.

She was pretty sure the demon was faking some of its fear to avoid answering questions.

Gan was especially jumpy now that they were in the open, but she hadn’t seen any threats. Mostly bugs. Hell was big on bugs. Most of them were small and acted like regular insects, flying or scurrying about on their buggy business with the fearlessness only the lack of a brain could impart. The few larger ones had run away when the three of them came near.

More than bugs, though, more than plants, the valley had dust. Very fine dust in a funny color, sort of a dusky purple. Like desiccated twilight.

She remembered twilight. Also sunrise, the scent of the ocean, and the sound of a cat’s purr. She had no idea how any of those sights and sounds related to her, but she remembered them now.

At first she hadn’t had anything, not a single memory. But as she walked, from time to time a word would float in and make itself at home. Like when the whir of an insect’s wings had made her think of a cat purring, and all of a sudden she had “cat” back—the size and shape of cats, their soft fur, and sharp claws. The way they moved, as if they owned whatever space they occupied.

She still couldn’t relate to the name the demon said was hers, but maybe that, too, would return. Maybe at some point she’d know “Lily” again.

The dust, while kind to her feet, was hard on her nose and throat. It rose in puffs with every step. Her throat tickled, and she coughed.

“Shh,” Gan said without looking back.

The demon led. She stayed a few paces behind, and the wolf roamed. She hadn’t seen him for a while, yet she knew where he was.

That had come as a surprise. The first time he’d roved out of sight, casting around for dangers, she’d felt anxious until she realized she could sense him. Not his thoughts or feelings, nothing so specific, but she knew where he was.

He was on his way back to them now. The valley didn’t offer much real cover, but between the few bushes and the dips and rises in the ground the wolf—Rule— managed to keep out of sight. He was silent, too, uncannily so. Even Gan couldn’t hear him approach.

Rule could probably have survived here on his own, but he wouldn’t desert her. Even though he was angry with her decision—and that had been obvious since they left the ravine—he’d stay with her. She knew that in a way she couldn’t explain.

The demon would have done fine on its own, too. Not her. She wasn’t a liability because of her wounds anymore. She was just useless.

Of course, if not for her the other two might have killed each other by now.

A great, dark shape melted up out of the ground in front of them. Gan yelped and jumped back and then shook its fist at the wolf. “Quit that!”

“Shh,” Lily said.

Gan turned to glare at her.

The wolf—Rule—grinned. At least that’s what his expression looked like to Lily. He rumbled at the demon.

“What did he say?”

Gan cast Rule a disparaging look. “Oh, the big puppy dog is tired and thirsty.”

Rule growled louder.

“Come on, Gan. What did he really say?”

“He found some water,” Gan said grudgingly. “He thinks we should take a break before crossing the Zone.”

“Good.” Yet she wasn’t truly thirsty. She wanted to wash the dust from her throat, but she didn’t actually need a drink. She wasn’t hungry, either, and that was weird, now that she thought about it. A by-product of the ymu?

What else had that stuff done to her that she hadn’t noticed? That maybe she wouldn’t notice because she lacked the reference of memory to tell her something had changed?

Rule gave her a questioning look. She nodded, and he trotted off. She followed.

Gan did, too, grumbling about the detour, but she suspected the demon was ready for a break as well and only objected because it was the wolf’s idea.

The ground here was easier to her feet than the rocks had been. The valley itself was monotonous, but the mountains on her right were rather pretty in their way. Vegetation softened and striated them into bands of color—yellow ochre, rust, and brown in shades from sand to coffee to grape.

Not much like the mountains on the other side of the valley.

She paused and looked back, trying to spot the place where they’d come down out of the rocks into this valley. Somewhere in that confusion of stone lay the ravine that was, in a sense, her birthplace. It held her first memories.

She couldn’t find it.

“What?” Gan whispered. “Do you see something?” The demon had stopped. The wolf had, too, and was looking at her over his shoulder. She shook her head, unable to put words to the feelings knotted up in her gut. It was too late to wonder if they’d be able to find their way back.

Forward was all she had. So she kept going.

TWENTY-TWO

The waterhole was literally that—a hole in the rock where water bubbled up in what was more a large puddle than a pool. It was set in a depression like a small meteor crater.
Meteor
, she thought, surprised, as the word opened up an image of a starry sky. Space. The moon, and meteorite showers that looked like falling stars.

She paused, savoring space and falling stars. Gan made it to the little pond first and knelt, tipping forward on its short arms to dunk its head underwater. It came up sputtering and then bent and slurped at the water like a… well, a dog. Or a wolf.

She looked at Rule. He would have drunk his fill when he found the waterhole. Now he lay nearby, his eyes open but head drooping.

He’s exhausted
, she realized, and that troubled her. Had more time passed than she’d guessed? Or was something else affecting him? “How long have we been walking?” she asked abruptly.

Gan sat back on its haunches, having quenched whatever thirst a demon feels. “According to whose clock? Time’s more erratic here than you’re used to.”

“Time doesn’t change. That just… it doesn’t make sense.”

“It does here. Though…” Its forehead wrinkled. “Around you it might operate more the way you’re used to. I’m not sure how things work around a sensitive.”

A dozen questions tempted her with side roads, but she held to her course. “Take a guess about how long we’ve been walking based on, uh, your own clock.”

“Oh, maybe one of your days. I told you the Zone wasn’t far.”

Then Rule’s exhaustion made sense, she thought, relieved. He’d probably covered twice as much territory as she had, and it had been a long time since he slept. Maybe he’d been awake for a long time before they arrived here, too.

That was a disconcerting thought, stretching as it did into a past she couldn’t claim. She felt jealous, she realized. Jealous of Rule, for possessing what she’d lost. Jealous even of herself… the self who didn’t exist anymore, except in the memories of others.

Of course, if Rule had been awake a long time, so had she. “I’m not sleepy.”

“You’re still charged up with ymu. It lasts a lot longer than the kind of meals you’re used to. Once it runs low, you might get sleepy. Or mean. Or hungry. Or you might just keel over.”

Great. “You don’t know?”

It shrugged. “The only humans I know about who’ve taken ymu were possessed. It’s probably different if you don’t have a demon in you.”

But she was tied to one—the one currently blocking her way. She stepped around it so she could wash the dust from her throat.

Gan shoved her back.

“Hey!”

“You’ve got to
look
first. See that?”

Now that it was pointed out, she did. A small vine thrust out of a fissure in the stone right where she’d been about to step. Pale and leafless, it looked more like an albino worm than a plant. “So?”

Gan rolled its eyes. “So why do you think we’ve been avoiding those things?”

This was one of the snaky vines? “I don’t know. I asked, but you just hushed me.” She tipped her head, studying it. “The mature ones are a different color.”

“They’ve got a lot of blood in them.”

Oh. She bent to take a good look, wanting to be sure she’d recognize one if she saw it. “I don’t see any kind of mouth, but it’s got fine hairs. Or maybe they’re cilia.”

“Whatever you call them, they’re sticky. Real sticky. And they’re the eating part.”

“How? And why is it dangerous to me? It’s too little to eat anything but bugs.”

“You’d get away, yeah. But you’d have it stuck to you, and the sap would eat away your skin.”

She was very careful about approaching the water-hole after that. When she knelt she saw a number of flying insects skimming the water—pretty things the size of her palm, almost colorless but with iridescent wings. They lit on the surface and took off again, making little ripples.

She wasn’t crazy about drinking after them, so she just splashed her face. The water was cold, but her skin tingled with more than the chill. “It’s everywhere in this place, isn’t it?”

“What?” Gan plopped down on the bare rock next to the water, sitting in the tilted sprawl its tail necessitated.

“Magic. Not literally everywhere,” she corrected herself, looking for a spot with some of the dust for cushioning. Bare rock wasn’t as comfortable for her as it seemed to be for the demon. “But there are patches of it all over— the ground, the air, the water.” Sometimes as she walked she’d felt it drift by, like a breeze, only the air wasn’t moving. Just the magic.

That was different, wasn’t it? She felt sure she wasn’t used to having so much free magic floating around.

“You mean you can feel it? You’re not even trying and you feel it?”

“Of course. There’s nothing between my skin and everything else, and I’m a sensitive, remember?”

Gan snorted. “Better than you do, I bet. Unless you’ve found your missing marbles.”

Her fists clenched. “Not exactly crammed with tact, are you?”

Rule stood and came over to her, rubbing his head along her hip. She dropped a hand to his shoulder, and just like that she felt better. Easier, as if she’d been holding an immaterial fist clenched around some thought or fear for a long time and could finally relax.

“I’ve gotten a little of it back,” she said, speaking to him now. not the demon. “Nothing about me, but I remember… a place that isn’t like this.”

He made a low, rumbling sound. She looked to Gan for a translation.

“He says he’ll remember for you. Could you try to be quiet now? Or do you just have to attract an
erkint
or two?”

“1 think,” she said, still talking to the wolf, “that Gan gets especially cautious about noise when it doesn’t want to answer questions.”

He nodded.

“I have a lot of questions, and you probably do, too. But maybe we’ll save them until we’ve rested.” Not that she was physically tired, though it would feel good to get off her feet. She was weary of questions, of the void inside her that gave back only silence. “I’ll grill Gan later. I need to sit, and you need some sleep.”

Rule hesitated but then agreed by moving to a spot slightly sheltered by the rise in the ground that made her think of the lip of a meteor crater. He lay down and looked at her. He had lovely eyes, warm and dark and capable of conveying quite a bit of meaning. Right now they seemed to offer an invitation.

She took him up on it, sitting down beside him. His body felt warm and furry and good. She stroked his back. “Go on, get some sleep. I’ll keep watch.”

Again he hesitated.

“Not used to letting someone else do the watching, are you? It’s true, I won’t be as good a sentry as you. I don’t have your senses. But I don’t need sleep right now, and you do.”

He sighed and laid his head on her thigh. Within moments, he was asleep.

This, too, felt good. He’d been angry with her earlier, she knew. He hadn’t wanted her to take the ymu, or for them to leave the ravine. But either he’d gotten over his anger, or he’d set it aside. He trusted her to keep watch while he slept, and that mattered. It mattered a lot.

If she hadn’t had him with her here… well, she did, so there was no point in chasing that particular question. But even thinking it brought such a surge of feeling… like one of those ocean waves she remembered, it rolled up inside her, getting bigger and bigger.

Also like the waves she remembered, this one was salty. Her eyes filmed over with tears. He was the one good thing she had. “I’m so glad about you,” she whispered—soft, soft, so she didn’t wake him. “I’m so damned glad about you.”

Gan giggled. She dashed a hand across her eyes and turned to it, angry—but the demon was paying no attention to her. It was preoccupied with the flying bugs with the shiny wings. Its hand shot out, closing around one of them.

She ought to appreciate Gan’s presence, too. True, the demon acted from self-interest, but it had healed her wounds.

Gan popped the bug in its mouth.

Its habits weren’t exactly appealing, but she and the wolf would find it much harder to survive here without the demon’s guidance.

It grabbed another bug. This one it fed to the snake vine. It giggled again as the bug’s wings thrashed.

There was a reason she hadn’t bonded with Gan. She looked away.

Sitting still was hard. She’d wanted to rest, but now that she was resting, she wanted to move. She’d thought that the restlessness would go away once they left that ravine behind, but she’d brought it along with her.

She’d brought another feeling with her, too. One that fed the restlessness, though she sensed it wasn’t the cause. An achy, needy feeling.

She wanted sex.

Now that she was sitting still, the ache was obvious. But she’d felt it for some time without paying it much notice—ever since Gan gave her the ymu, she realized. She remembered the startling rush of strength and energy, as if her blood had gone from flat to fizzy in an instant.

Maybe she always felt this way when her body was healthy and rested. But weren’t demons supposed to be oversexed? Maybe these feelings came from Gan—she was tied to it, after all. Or from the ymu.

She glanced at Gan again. No way was she going to ask.

Gan had said that she and Rule used to have sex “when he wasn’t a wolf.” She frowned. It bothered her to think of him being different. Had he been a wolf a long time? What was he like when he wasn’t a wolf?

She wished she could remember. Funny… she knew about sex, knew what her body wanted. She could imagine the way a man’s hands would feel, but she couldn’t remember being touched. She tried to call up a single, specific image—a face, a name, a place. And failed. What did her bed look like? Who had been it with her? Had she had many lovers? Or… another word arrived, but this one slammed into her mind with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer.

Marriage. What if she was married?

She looked at the wolf whose head was heavy and warm on her thigh, her brow wrinkling at the thoughts pinging through her mind. She wasn’t wearing a ring… but she’d arrived here without clothes, so the lack of a ring didn’t mean much.

She didn’t realize she’d reached for the little charm hung around her neck until her fingers closed around it. The faint, familiar buzz of its magic made her shoulders loosen. Her necklace had arrived with her. Surely a wedding ring would have, too.

The demon sighed, stretched its short legs and leaned back on its tail. “This is boring.”

Silence only mattered when the demon wasn’t bored? She scowled at it.“What?” it said. “Aren’t you bored just sitting there?”

It was like a child, she realized. A nasty little child who pulled the wings off flies—and fed them to carnivorous plants. But maybe demons didn’t sleep, so Gan didn’t realize it had to be quiet or it would wake up Rule. She shushed it.

Gan grimaced and pulled up a handful of the fleshy yellow grass.

She bet that once she started asking questions it would be hushing her and looking scared again. But they weren’t budging until she knew more.

She’d rushed her decision, she admitted. Or allowed herself to be pushed into it, with pain arguing loudly on the side of the demon. She still thought she’d made the right choice, but she’d made it with very few facts. Before they crossed the Zone into the other region, she intended to get some answers.

She looked to her left at the murky barrier stretched across the mouth of the valley like a T-shirt that was fifty percent spandex, fifty percent mist.

Spandex. T-shirt. She smiled with pleasure as the words shifted all sorts of images and concepts into her mind. Gyms and working out. Department stores and malls. Socks and athletic shoes… and oh, but didn’t she wish she had some of those right now!

Of course, she might as well wish for the whole mall so she could get a few other things, too. Panties, jeans, a shirt, a hairbrush… her hair must be a mess.

Her hair. She didn’t know what it looked like. Or her face.

The surface of the water had been too ripply from the insects to give her back a reflection. She hadn’t thought about it then. Now she needed to know.

The hand she raised trembled a little. She checked out her hair first. Not long, not short. Straight. Black, she saw when she pulled a strand in front of her face. And her face… she touched her cheeks, her chin, but didn’t know how to assemble the messages from her fingertips into a picture. Were ears always this big? What about noses? Hers felt straight, but was it long or short? She didn’t know how long a nose ought to feel. Or lips. Hers—

What was that?

She turned her head sharply and shook the wolf’s shoulder. “Wake up. Quick. Gan, what are those?”

“What are… shit!” the demon cried even as the wolf lifted his head, shook it, and turned to see where she was pointing.

Four great, winged shapes were heading toward them, coming from the direction of the Zone.

“Shit, shit, shit!” Gan hopped from foot to foot, clutching its head as it looked around frantically. “I knew stopping here was a bad idea! I just knew it!”

The wolf was on his feet now, but he no more knew what to do than she did. There was no cover, nothing to shield them from overhead, and she lacked even the most rudimentary weapon… and those things were huge.

And coming fast. She could see them clearly now.

For a moment, awe outweighed everything else. Watching those four sinuous shapes the color of old copper winging straight at them, gliding across air with the sideways sway of a snake crossing sand, carried by wings whose tips would span a small house, all she could think was:
They exist. They really do exist
.

Dragons.

A cold nose poked her. “What—? Oh. Yes,‘” she said as the wolf flattened himself as much as possible against the rim of the small depression. “Yes, I see.”

There was nowhere to run, no way to defend themselves. Their only chance was to be hard to spot. She curled up against the rock.

She couldn’t see the dragons anymore. The fear she hadn’t felt a second ago struck. Her mouth went dry. Her heartbeat slammed into overdrive. She craned her head around, trying to spot them without moving.
This is how a rabbit feels, quivering in the grass while the eagle stoops, unable to see its death coming, but knowing. Knowing
.