Time Slipping (13 page)

Be careful, Jayne. I don’t trust this.
That one came from Scrum. I patted him on the cheek, thanking him for his worry. Poor kid. He was never going to have a moment of peace with me in his life.

The prophecy. Remember the words. Your blood is the key.
I paused in front of Felicia, not sure I understood her.

“I don’t remember the rhyme,” I asked her. “Do you?”

She said nothing, and I knew that whatever I was hearing from them wasn’t really them; it was just their influence on my life that I’d embedded in my heart. It was their friendship, and as valuable as it was, it wasn’t going to supplant my own decision-making. It was just that I trusted them to act as my conscience when I was as lost as I was in that moment.

Finn and Becky were last. I paused by Finn, hoping he had something to add to the mix. “So what’s it going to be, Finn? Stand and fight or run to fight another day?”

Stand and fight. You are our Mother and we stand with you.

His words choked me up a little. I took a moment to gather myself, putting my fist on my heart in front of him before moving on to Becky. I stopped in front of my little water sprite friend still frozen in the middle of her rendition of the macarena, her tiny hip shoved out to the side.

“What do you think, Beck?”

I’m too scared to give you the right advice
, I heard Becky’s voice say inside my head.
Just be careful. You’re important. We love you, Jayne. And whatever you decide to do won’t change how we feel. No one expects you to be perfect.

Some of the witch’s words came back to me like a thread of smoke through my mind, causing an inner lightbulb of awareness to come into being. My pulse rate picked up. Maybe I had the answer right here in front of me. Maybe she’d given me the key as some kind of sick joke, so she could watch me suffer with the indecision. She probably thought I didn’t have it in me to make the tough decision, but she was wrong. Way wrong.

Spill some troll blood or some of my own?
Cutting myself with the sword was definitely a step backwards. I’d already been there, done that, thanks to Moriah the evil demon vampire from the Underworld who I’d earned the sword from after defeating her sorry butt by taking a hit in the shoulder and surviving. But when I’d told Judith the witch I never went backwards, thinking I was too mature for that now, she’d called me a liar. I frowned, trying to remember the exact details of our conversation and the lines from her stupid rhyme.

I reached out and hugged my friend’s stiff, macarenasized form. “I love you too, Becky. I think I know what I have to do.” Unconditional love was a powerful thing. It was also heavy, weighing me down with a hell of a heavy load of responsibility. I couldn’t let these fae down. They were my family. I owed them the best of me.

I took a big breath and walked over to the troll, holding my sword out between us. I let the Green bubble fall from my body so I could do what had to be done. Looking up at the beast, I sighed with sadness and regret as the demon blade slid across the skin, sinking in like it was glowing hot metal cutting through butter.

My words came out as a breathless set of grunts. “I hope your mother appreciates this, Troll.” I nearly fainted from the pain and the sight of all the blood that suddenly started pouring out of my arm.

The words of the witch came back to me even clearer than they had before I drew the sword:
The blood of the Mother will bring them late.
I hoped that meant that we’d get to the portal, even if we didn’t exactly make it on time.

Chapter Sixteen

I FELL TO THE GROUND almost immediately. “Motherfucker, that
hurts!
” I hissed with the pain. “Oooh, sssshhhiiiitt, mother fuuuuudge…sssshhh…” It felt like my arm was on fire. My face ended up two inches away from the troll’s big toe, the one I’d considered poking just minutes earlier. My words came out as one long grunt. “Damn, I should have poked you instead of me.”

I flopped onto my back in an effort to hide from the inescapable pain, and my arm landed on the troll’s nasty foot, but I was too out of my mind with pain to bother moving it. Blood from my demon blade injury dripped down to my elbow, pooling on the ground beneath my shoulder; I could feel it soaking into my sweater and then my tunic.

I reached over with my good arm and tried to grab onto the monster, to use his toe as leverage to get up, but my hand was slippery either with my blood or the goo he had coming out of his pores, and I got nowhere. My vision started blurring, making it difficult to focus on anything but the fire burning in my arm. I fell onto my back again, swallowing over and over. My throat was as dry as a bone, but I couldn’t get my stomach to calm down. Spewing was definitely in my near future.

The room started to spin and the nausea rose up in me even stronger. I clenched my abdominal muscles hard in an effort to keep myself from yakking my road trip snacks all over the place. I was moaning from the pain it caused when I was suddenly flipped over onto my stomach. Something had shoved me, and the only functioning part of my brain floated the idea that it was the troll who had kicked me, but that couldn’t have been right. He was frozen solid just like everyone else.

My hair suddenly fell down as I was lifted up into the air. Blurred shades of green and brown mixed together until I almost believed I was looking at a kaleidoscope of my stomach contents. Then the upward movement stopped and there was a giant eyeball surrounded by long, beautiful eyelashes just inches away from my nose.

The voice was deep and rumbling. “I eat you, little person.” The stink of a thousand bad dental decisions hit me smack in the face.

It was too much. Too much, too late, too awful. My rational, thinking brain abandoned me when I needed it most. I reached out weakly and petted his eyelashes. “You have pretty eyes,” I said, my words sliding into one another. “Did your momma ever tell you that?” Then I coughed and barfed, my upchuck hitting the floor beneath me with a loud splat. “Pretty eyelashes,” I said in a near-whisper, still trying to pet them. “Long like a camel’s.”

“Me pretty?”

My hands were still searching out his eyelashes, but I couldn’t look at him anymore. I was too tired to keep my eyes open. My fingers brushed against his lashes and then something wet and slippery. Probably his eyeball. It didn’t disgust me as much as it probably should have. I’d run out of energy to be any sicker than I already was.
 
“Pretty eyelashes,” I said with a moan. “Pretty, pretty, pretty…”

Suddenly I was upright with my hair hanging in the right direction. A stench so awful I couldn’t even describe it reached my nostrils a half second before the side of my face was covered in something warm, wet, and slightly sticky. I dared open one eyelid, just in time to see a troll tongue retreating back into its mouth.

“Tasty.” He burped in my face, bringing with it something definitely dead and rotten. I cried inside at the idea that it was my roommate and his terrible intestinal problems that were giving this troll his halitosis.

My eyes rolled back into my head and I swayed in and out of consciousness for a few precious seconds. “Oh God,” I moaned, trying not to vomit again. My arm had started to feel dead, but then it was suddenly on fire again, and I realized it was no longer dangling at my side. I opened my eyes to find it buried in the troll’s mouth. A red glow started lighting up his face from the inside out.

“Aaaahhhhrrrraeeehhhh!!!” The scream that came out of my mouth was nothing short of insane. Whatever energy I had left in my body surged into the plan I instantly came up with to escape this brute’s grasp. I struggled and twisted with everything I had, but nothing was helping. My arm was shoulder deep in the mouth of a one-toothed, pixie-eating, troll beast. I cried with rage only felt by the truly impotent.

Closing my eyes, I wailed to the elements. The color red filled my vision, making me think the end was very near. “Whyyyy?! Whyyyy?! Why have you done this to me? To my friends? Why did you take them from me? From the world? From themselves? They didn’t do anything wrong! They were just trying to help save the fae and the humans!” I sobbed for the injustice, for my lack of understanding and ignorance, for the innocent fae who’d been stupid enough to be my friends. “I’m so sorry,” I said, whimpering because I couldn’t do any better than that. My arm had gone numb and now my body was joining it as we swirled deeper and deeper into the crimson void. The dizziness was almost unbearable, and I got lost in it as I continued to moan with soft gasps, the only breath I had left. The regret was killing me. I’d gotten so close and come so far, only to be taken out in the end by a bed and breakfast owner who made Maggie the witch look like a runway model. Life was so unfair.

Chapter Seventeen

IT WAS HOT. HOT AND dusty. My throat felt like a desert floor, and I couldn’t swallow because of it. I started retching, folding over onto my side, pokey things digging into my skin. My legs dragged through gravel and dirt that scraped me through the material of my pants.

“Oh, God,” I moaned. The rhythmic sounds of a huge group of bugs singing in tandem rang in my ears. I tried to spit, but there was no saliva left in my mouth. My lips stung where they’d cracked. They tasted of iron, so I knew there was blood crusting over. “Where am I?”

A huge gust of hot wind blew over me, and the sound of a large boat sail flapping in the breeze came next. When I tried to open my lids to see where I was, I was rewarded with stinging sand thrown against my tender eyeballs.

“Ow, motherfucker!” My hand scraped across the ground on its way up to my face. I hissed out a breath of pure pain when I realized my arm was still killing me. Damn, I was in bad shape … worse than I was when Leck melted my brain and beat me silly in his chamber of horrors at the old Dark Fae compound.

“I must have made it to hell,” I croaked out, knowing full well that if I were in the Overworld, I wouldn’t still have a demon blade slice going down my forearm.
So, Hell it is. Oh well. One too many bad decisions, and that’s all she wrote, I guess.

The sounds of someone jumping down from a height was followed by crunching footsteps. They stopped next to my head. I rolled over onto my back and tried to look up, but my eyelids would not cooperate.

“Who’s there?” I whispered.

“It’s Ish,” a voice said. A young, male one.

“Ish Ish?” I asked, giggling at the ridiculousness of it. “Ish Ish? What kind of name is that?” I tried to laugh again, but the lame humor got caught in my throat. A coughing fit came out of nowhere, and then I choked. Vomit spewed out of me and dribbled down my face to my ear.

“Oh, man,” I groaned. “Sucks to be me.”

Someone gripped me under the armpits and started dragging me through the dust, my moccasins piling up sand and gravel inside them as they made a path to wherever we were going. “Pits of hell,” I whispered. “I’m going into the pits of hell with a man named Ish.”

Chapter Eighteen

SOMETHING WAS CRAWLING IN MY pants.
I have ants in my pants.
Please, God, don’t let them be fire ants.
At the same time I was trying to wiggle my butt around and kill those pervert ants, I worked really hard at forcing my eyelids open, but they didn’t want to cooperate. Finally, after straining my entire face, a sliver of light got in and whatever crust was connecting my eyelashes started to give way.

“Ehhhhh,” I moaned, wanting really badly to use my fingers to pry my lids open, but my arms wouldn’t work. They were trapped under a blanket or tied to the bed or something.
Someone wants to die, I guess.

“Easy, now,” said the male voice I remembered from earlier. “You’re better now. Just go easy.”

“Better?” I croaked out. That couldn’t mean anything good if
this
was an improvement. This dude better not have touched my private parts while I was out of it, or he was going to be missing some family jewels when I got out of this bed.

Something touched my lips and a droplet of moisture leaked past to my tongue. I probably looked like a crazy frog, but I didn’t care; I sat up as much as I could and reached greedily for the water being offered, my mouth open as wide as it would go. As the delicious water hit my throat, I decided I might forgive him for touching my girly parts, so long as he didn’t enjoy it too much. I’d never tasted anything so delicious. Obviously my dehydration had caused me to burn a few brain cells off.

“Not too much or you’ll vomit again,” he said.

“Again?” I laid back down on the bed and sighed. “That’s what I’m all about … making good first impressions.” My last words faded out into a whisper. I just didn’t have the strength to keep up the conversation. At least I didn’t have to worry about being violated while I slept; there’s nothing less sexy than being coated in vomit as far as I was concerned. I kept trying to lock onto a clear idea of what was going on, but my brain continued to swim around, making it impossible. I probably should have been more worried about where I was, where my friends were, and who this person was helping me out, but I couldn’t get my mind past the idea that I was nearly powerless. I hadn’t felt this way since Leck had hosted me as a guest in his B&B. It made it too easy to surrender to the pain and my inevitable death, rather than fight it.

“Do you know your name?” he asked me.

“Jayne.” I tried to sit up again, but he pushed me down. That made me cranky enough to find the strength to open my eyes. My vision was blurry at first, but then things came into focus. I was inside a hut of some sort, and the man or boy taking care of me had turned his back to me.

“Where am I? Where are my friends?” Seeing things helped me focus. I fell back onto the bed, or the pile of covered straw I was in —bits of it were poking me through my tunic— already sweating from my puny efforts. I closed my eyes, not interested in looking at my arm. It was burning, which told me that the stupid, self-inflicted wound was still there and still very angry. Apparently, troll saliva did not heal demon sword cuts. I was grateful at least that he hadn’t eaten it, because obviously, a burning, painful arm was better than no arm at all.