The Danger of Destiny (9 page)

My throat hurt.

“I got that,” I whispered.

He kissed my forehead, his lips warming the furrows there. He pulled back to look at me, his eyes traveling over my features. Then, his hard hands clamped either side of my jaw and he slanted his mouth across mine.

It was an angry kiss.

But it was a promise too.

Then he turned me to face the void. He wrapped his arms around my waist and bumped his hip against mine to urge me forward until my toes were hanging over the void.

I leaned out again and raised my hand.

“Attach,” I said.

*   *   *

Magic-mine streaked skyward. She twisted herself around the tree's gnarled base. Once. Twice. I gave her a tug. Shale coursed down. The cedar tilted, canting toward the drop, then held. I was putting my trust in a taproot.

Seemed to be a theme.

I swallowed and manufactured a smile. “Swing me, big boy.”

“Hold your breath, sweetheart,” he said into my ear. “And don't scream when you fall. I don't want Qae to hear you go.”

And then he did exactly what he said he would. He played Frisbee with me.

I swung out.

Air, tree blurring, rocks, rocks.

And I let go.

I did not scream. I just fell, for what felt like forever. And then I hit—the surface of the big pool, not the boulder, the water soft and airy bubbles—and I slipped under the churning water. So cold that I wanted to gasp and cry.

I was the sock; the pool was the old-style washing machine. Upside, downside, and all-round side, it tumbled me.

Until finally it spat me out.

*   *   *

He'd asked me to let the current carry me—I had. Once my head broke the surface, I was flotsam, and I'd not cried out as I'd plummeted twice more, nor sobbed as my body was ground over rock beds and was pummeled against stone walls. I'd let the river tributary carry me away until I couldn't stand being taken any farther from him; then I'd pulled myself out of the water.

Wearily. Jerkily.

Someone was making small little noises—broken breathy
heh-heh-hehs.

Me.

I found a bush big enough to qualify as cover. I ducked under it and crouched on the backs of my heels. Then shivering, I wrapped my arms around myself and looked way up. I couldn't see the falls over the trees above me, but if I leaned back I could see the place where we'd stood, and the mountain, and the outcrop of boulders and ridges or rock that Trowbridge had chosen over the long fall.

And I could see the cloud. A traveling smear of dark purple glitter and glints, tracking something that was already moving quickly toward the craggy cliffs.

Maybe that's when the animal within me started to take over, though I didn't realize it then. I shuddered at the cloud and the dark, and then I turned to do what he'd told me to do—because every other action made a mockery of my choice and his—and I made tracks.

I ran, trying not to make a noise, trying not to cry. Trying not to stumble.

I ran in the opposite direction from the cloud.

I ran, thinking that's what I needed to do.

Fool
.

You can't outrun your destiny.

 

Chapter Five

So, I ran, blind, my emotional pain blurring everything into a collage of thick tree trunks, undefined knee-high vegetation, and low-hanging branches.

I didn't the feel the heavy weight of Merry and Ralph bouncing on my chest, nor was I conscious of the nicks and bruises I was accumulating to the bottoms of my feet. I just kept going, crashing through the old forest, destination momentarily forgotten.

Grief mixed with burgeoning fear is a powerful jet fuel, but as propellants go it burns fast. Within ten minutes of plunging into the dark forest I hit empty, and shortly after that my lungs and leg muscles advised me they'd gone as far as they meant to.

I staggered to a stop, bracing my hands on my knees for a dry-heave session. My head spun sickly. The edges of my vision darkened, then drew inward, gathering up all the light to turn the world around me dark.

No, no, no.

Must keep going.

I sank to my knees, still thinking,
No.
And then I was sliding to one hip, and falling in slow motion to the ground. I moaned when my head met earth. The back of my skull was acutely tender.

I shouldn't lie here,
I thought.
I need to keep moving …

*   *   *

“Wake. Up.”

The words were said in two distinct sound bites. The voice was feminine, the vowels elongated. The sound of it didn't stir any glad feelings. I started to drift away from the irritation.

“Wake up, Hedi of Creemore,” she said again, her tone harsh enough to strip paint.

My eyes shot open.

I saw fog, wet and thick as the proverbial pea soup. Though, as opposed to a bowl of the green stuff, this substance was bluish-gray in hue and sweetly fragrant. Also unlike the soup, this myst was chilled. Its dampness sliced right through me.

I inhaled again. It smelled like Threall.

But …

As a rule, when I soul-traveled to the realm of the sleeping Fae I woke up facedown in a small stump-rutted field, my head turned toward a long row of hawthorns. That didn't mean I couldn't wake up as I was—lying at the base of a fir tree, curled on my side, one arm around my aching head—but still, if this was Threall something had definitely changed. I'd never seen the myst this thick, nor had I come to consciousness resting on a bed of dried pine needles.

I frowned. “Mad-one?”

“You must refrain from sleeping. Or you will fail in that which you promised, and all will be for naught.”

I bolted up into a sitting position, and a stab of pain lanced through the back of my head. The urge to faint was there again. I fought against it, but for two ticks the only thing keeping me semi-upright was the ballast of my ass.

“Do not go to sleep again!”

“I'm not going to!” However, performing a less than graceful swoon was entirely possible. Geez, what had I done to my head? My fingers probed the curve of my skull. There was a lump back behind my ear the size of an ostrich egg.

I remembered the washing machine and a sudden bloom of pain during the spin cycle.

Her voice came from my right. “What is an ostrich?”

“A bird with very long legs, and enormous eyes.”
Goddess, how long had I been out? Five minutes? Five hours?
I couldn't tell with all this blue fog surrounding me.
Time is important.
Trowbridge was on the run. I needed to find a place where I could search the sky for the cloud. I put a leg under my butt and braced a hand to push myself to my feet.

“Trowbridge is being hunted,” I muttered, managing to get to one knee. “And I have to meet him at Daniel's Rock. I need to…”
get up
, I finished silently.

“Yes. You must gather your resources and move again.”

“Mmmm,” I said, blinking hard.

“I am curious of this ostrich.”

I felt a familiar push inside my brain. Fae can speak through thought-pictures—simple images without any meme dialogue to punch up the irony. A mental nudge, such as the one she'd just aimed at me, signaled either an incoming image or a request for a visual.

But it was a case of too late, too little. Trading thought-pictures was for family and dear friends, and her mental push was the equivalent of a stranger opening our door, then saying, “Knock, knock,” as they wandered down the front hall, heading toward our kitchen.

Huh.

I looked at her through slit eyes. “I didn't say that bit about the ostrich egg out loud.”

“No, you thought it.”

Oh crap.
I could feel her in my head. Sitting there, all comfortable, taking a look around. “What are you doing?” I gave her a violent mental shove out of my private thoughts. “Are you touching me?” I whipped around to look behind and groaned at the resulting stabbing skull pain. When the pulse of ouch subsided, I spoke through gritted teeth. “Aren't there rules about mystwalkers messing with other mystwalkers?”

“There are no rules,” she said dryly. “Naught but the ones made by mages.”

The sensation of sharing my brain subsided but didn't necessarily go away. Kind of like when a wave hits the shore, pulls back, and leaves a film of wet bubbling on the sand.

She was still there.

One hand clamped over my ostrich egg, I turned on my knee, peering this way and that, trying to locate her in all that blue myst. “Where are you hiding?” I shouted.

“I am here.” The hem of her blue gown materialized to my right.

I tipped my head to look up at her and found that hurt too much, so I grabbed a handful of velvet and jerked her down to my level. “Oof,” she yelped. The fog swirled as she stumbled into an ungainly ass-plant. Then, the myst settled, enveloping her once again, except for her bent knee and her silk slipper.

Toes really can be stiff with outrage.

I heard her draw in a shaky breath, which she expelled in a long whistle of incredulity. “You touched me.”

“Said the pot to the kettle. And technically, I touched your skirt, not you.”

“You are endlessly provoking.”

Yes. I was. I leaned forward and blew. The fog parted, revealing her heart-shaped face. Heavy-lidded eyes, a long nose, country club written all over her. Expression set in her usual disdainful scowl. If she ever smiled, the Mystwalker of Threall would be a knockout.

“You want to tell me what's with all the myst?” I drew a lazy circle in the air to illustrate my question, and ghostly tendrils of smoke eddied around my fingers. “And why did you call me to Threall? Because I don't have time to—”

“I did not call you and you are not in Threall.”

“Well, let's do a checklist: there's blue myst, and—oh yes—you. You're sitting so close, I could touch you again”—I faked her out with a taunting finger—“and you never leave Threall.” She couldn't. Like me, Mad-one had been born with the rare ability to mystwalk, which meant she could separate her soul from her body and travel to the secret realm.

At night the tops of Threall's trees glowed with the golden light of thousands of soul-balls, which hung like ripe fruit from their boughs. Mad-one referred to the trees as citadels and the single soul that hung from each citadel as a cyreath. I just called them fucking beautiful. The sight of all those lights stirred my twin mystwalker inclinations: the instincts to protect and to own. It's the last attribute that gave us dream-walkers problems: we become possessive of that we protect.

Think dog with a really good bone.

And that's how you end up more than a trifle mad, marooned in a shadow realm that you no longer wanted to be in. You're pulled by instincts to stay, and you forget how to go home.

“Stop thinking of me,” she chided. “And embrace the truth. You are not in Threall.”

Beneath my fingers, I could feel the pulpy swelling of the enormous bruise. She might have a point—I always wake up in Threall without a scratch, no matter what indignities my body suffered before I traveled to the realm. My hand slid down the back of my neck, moving to the front of me. My shirt was muddy. I peeled it up to inspect my ribs. There was a graze down the left side that continued right under my wet waistband.

Huh.

I looked upward, searching for a soul-light in the boughs above, but I couldn't find one. Not a single glowing golden glow.

“Okay. I'm not in Threall,” I said slowly. I thought about that for a moment. Then, with a swallow, I asked, “Am I dead?”

“No.”

I drooped with relief. “But you're here. With me.”

“It is but an illusion. Like the myst.” She moved her hand from left to right as if she were wiping a window clear of dew. The smoke curled away, vanishing into the undergrowth. I saw the forest around us; I saw her weariness; I saw the ferns I'd crushed before I'd fallen.

“How?”

“In Threall, my palm rests upon the spine of your tree. I tried to speak to you through thought alone, but of course you were resistant to my attempts. You need to see. To touch. To examine. Thus, my illusion.”

“So, you're touching my citadel, right now? Up in Threall?”
Oh, ew.
She was sucking up my experiences like a kid with a straw and a soda. “Well, thanks for stopping by, but it's time for you to go.”

Mad-one's gaze roamed. “It has been a league and more since I've seen this forest.”

“Yup. Time to go.”

She made no move. Her eyes were uncharacteristically wide. If I wanted to I could count the tiny flecks of brown in her blue eyes.

She wasn't going anywhere.

“So you're not really here?” At her absent nod, I reached over to touch her skirt. The velvet nap rolled under my fingers. “That's a really good illusion. You want to fill me in as to why you stopped by for a visit?”

She picked up a handful of pine needles. “When the light of your cryeath dimmed, I knew you were hurt, perhaps badly. I checked on you.”

She'd been watching over me in Threall, I thought, eyeing her as she lifted the handful of fragrant pine to her nose. She sniffed it delicately, and an expression of fleeting bliss softened the set line of her jaw.
Damn, damn, damn.

“Thank you,” I said awkwardly.

“Once I did, I discovered that you were unharmed.”

“I've got an ostrich egg growing on the back of my head.”

“And that you were sleeping.”

“Ever heard of the word ‘concussion'?”

She lifted her shoulders. “Does it matter if you were asleep or rendered unable to stay awake? More alarming is the fact that your soul was traveling to my realm.” She bent her neck to study the dried needles in her palm. Her expression hardened back into her usual setting. With a head toss, she flung them into the ferns. “You must not return to my realm until such time as you are ready to complete your promise to me.”