Time Slipping (28 page)

“No! I’m okay! Be right back!”

“I’ll be your wingman,” Tim said, flying up high enough to be visible to the dragon. “Just tell him not to try and sizzle me.”

“Othello, my pixie friend wants to fly with us. Please do not harm him.”

“He put his dust on you. I should eat him.”

“No, he did that to save me from this demon sword cut on my arm. His heart was in the right place.”

“Pixie dust will not heal that wound.”

I looked down. “Seems to have done a pretty good job.”

“That was my fire that took the venom from your veins.” He huffed out some black smoke. “Hold on. We are leaving.”

I opened my mouth to respond, to ask where exactly we were going, but the quick takeoff stopped that from happening in a hurry. My stomach leaped up into my throat as we went from ground zero to five thousand feet of altitude in about three seconds.

“Holy elevator up,” I said, my voice coming out breathless with panic. I looked around me, freaking out and shaking all over. “Shouldn’t I have some ropes holding me down?”

“I will catch you if you fall,” Othello said, banking left.

“Ahhhhhhhhh !!! … Eeeeee !!! … Ayyyyeee !!! … Ohhhhh !!! …” At this rate, I was going to work my way through all the vowels and then pee my pants at the end. I stopped screaming and took several really quick breaths in and out to try and regulate my oxygen flow. I was dizzy, inhaling way too much carbon dioxide as I tried to keep a handle on my emotions. “I’m gonna fall, I’m gonna fall, I’m gonna fall.” One of my feet slipped on the condensation that was building on Othello’s head. “Aaack!” I grabbed onto one horn with both arms, hugging it like my life depended on it, which I was pretty sure it did.

“Relax. Feel the flow. You cannot fall.”

I was crying, not even sure when I’d started the waterworks. I squeezed my eyes shut. “No. No flow. No flow. There is no flow. Only death. Splat. Me go boom.”

“Hey, roomie!” came a cheerful voice on my right. “What’s up?”

“Oh my god, Tim,” I whisper-whined, “I’m going to die.”

“You look pretty alive to me. What’s in the bag?”

“I’m only alive because we’re flying straight. The minute he turns, I’m going to slide off and die.”

“Uhhh, hmmm…” He laughed, but didn’t sound very humored. “You may want to crack those lids just a teensy bit.”

“Why?”

He didn’t say anything, and I wasn’t even sure he was still there, but I was too curious not to listen. I cracked one eyelid, but as soon as I realized what I was looking at, I closed it again and screamed even louder than before.

“Whaaaaaaaaa!!” We were flying upside down and my head was pointed at the Earth. I felt myself falling victim to gravity and lifted my feet up so I could wrap my entire body around that horn. My legs clamped on like I was taking Triple H down in the ring with the scissor hold of death. “Ohmygod, ohmygod, ohmygod.” I whispered and cried at the same time. “I’m too young to die, please don’t let me die, please don’t let me die…”

“You are safe.” The dragon flipped over faster than I would have imagined possible, and we were flying straight again, the planet once more beneath my feet where it belonged. I could feel the shift in the force of gravity that I’d missed when we turned the first time; it was too subtle to be possible, though. The laws of physics apparently didn’t apply to dragon flight.

“Thank you, thank you, thank you.” I opened my eyes and slid down the horn. When my feet made contact with his head, I spread them apart, trying to get the best grip possible.

“We are bound. You cannot fall. Let go. Feel the flow between us.”

“Let go? Let go?! Like … me take my hands off your horns?! You’re insane. I’m not doing that.”

“Please.”

“No!”
Dragons are crazy.
If I ever made it to the ground in one piece, I was going to tell everyone who’d listen that these beasts are certifiably insane so no one would ever make the mistake that I had and climb up on a dragon’s head for a ride.
A ride. Hah! Talk about false advertising! More like a flight of death!

He dipped his head and then brought it up really fast, making me lose my footing. A quick flap of his wings jerked my feet out from under me completely, and I fell backwards.

“Aahhhh yeeee!!” I sounded like an Asian lady about to deliver a hell of a karate chop, but unfortunately, I wasn’t all badass like that; I was a klutzy ass and I landed half on my butt and half on my back on top of the dragon’s neck.

I should have fallen to my death, but I didn’t. I should have been speared by one of his spine spikes, but I wasn’t. The ones near me folded down under the weight of my body, and there was something inside that damn dragon that was holding me onto it.

Is that the flow he was talking about?
Damn. It is pretty … flowy.
 
Now that I was paying attention, I could feel some sort of force binding me to him. It was like one of my elements, but not something I was controlling.

Spirit
, something said inside my head.

Pushing with my hands behind me, I slowly sat up, the satchel that had remained strapped to me sliding over to rest between my legs in front of me.

“What. The. Hell.” The wind was sliding through my hair and cooling me off with the help of all the sweat that covered every inch of my body. “I’m not dead.”

“No. You are not dead,” Othello said.

“I’m feeling the flow.”

“As am I.”

A cloud of depression descended on my head. “Spike is going to be very jealous and very sad.”

“Who is Spike?”

“I told you already. He’s my man. My boyfriend. The one I love.”

“No. Who is Spike?”

“Is that a riddle?”

“No. It is a question.”

I had to think about it for a while. The wind whistled past my ears as I thought really strongly about the words.
Who is Spike? To me or to the rest of the world?
I realized that my previous answer had been more about who Spike was to someone looking at us from outside. A label. So I decided this time to answer the question from inside my heart.

“Spike is the other half of my whole self. The one who makes me want to be a better me. He’s the one being in the world who loves me exactly as I am and who will stand by me no matter how much I screw up and no matter how many bad choices I make. He denies who he is so he can be who I need him to be.” My heart both sang and cried at that definition of my man. It made me feel selfish and like I was taking advantage of his love. And it made me twice as determined to get down off this dragon’s back and be with him. I had a lot of love to share with that incubus and not enough time in one life to share it.

“He may come with us,” Othello said.

“Seriously?” Apparently, dragon love was also cool with threesomes.
Sweet
.
 
I had a very strong feeling Spike wouldn’t mind. “Where are we going?”

“To the portal.”

I scrambled up to the horns on my hands and knees and looked down into Othello’s eyeball. “You mean it?” I was too afraid to hope. Too afraid to believe.

“Yes.”

I wrestled with my conscience. Should I tell him when I get there that I’m going to leave him behind? Tell him I was kind of using him? I wanted to answer my question with a big, fat no, but that didn’t seem right. And since he’d cured me of my nasty demon boo-boo, it only seemed fair.

“Othello, I have a confession.”

“No, you do not.”

“Uhh, yes I do.”

“I already know what is in your mind and in your heart.”

I swallowed hard. “Say what?”

“You intend to bring your friends to the portal and leave me behind in this realm. You are battling with your nature. Part of you wants to tell me. Part of you wants to hide your desires from me.”

“Ah, excuse me, but I’m not sure I’m okay with you crawling around in my brain like that.”

“Then you should shut the portal to the channel between us.”

“How am I supposed to do that when I didn’t even know there was a portal
or
a channel?”

“You will learn. For now, you know that I will not be left behind. You and I are mated. Where you go, I will follow.”

“But what about Ishmail?” I asked, feeling really shitty about stealing his dragon away.

“Ishmail will find his mate and we will be together as one family. This is how the dragon-human partnership works.”

“Oh.” I had to noodle through that a little. “So, you get your dragon mate, I get my human mate, Ish gets whatever mate he’s going to get, and then we all hang out together? Making babies and all that?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

I bit my lip, wondering if I should say aloud what I was thinking. It seemed kind of porno-ey, but there was no stopping my brain when it got on that track. “So who’s going to be having your babies?”

He didn’t answer, and I didn’t have time to quiz him on it more because Tim was suddenly there and he was showing off his aerodynamic skills. And clearly, I was expected to admire them, loudly and with flair, so rather than find out the details about the birds and the bees dragon-style, I focused on my roommate, my brilliant friend, pixieman extraordinaire, Tim. Damn, I was so happy I’d picked up that bell jar that day…

Chapter Thirty-Six

TIM WAS FLYING UPSIDE DOWN and backwards with his hands linked behind his head and his legs crossed at the ankles, and he was doing it all while going about fifty miles an hour.

“Damn, pixieman, you are busting it on that flying stuff right now.”

“I know, right? These dragon wing currents are something else. Watch this one.” He dipped into a backbend, for a few seconds just hovering, and then suddenly with a slight tilt further back, he zoomed past me in a blur, suddenly at the back of the dragon. “Woo hoo! You see that?!” He stopped at the dragon’s tail, standing on the last spike with just one foot that was pointed so only his big toe was making contact. His arms were out at his sides, making him look like a totally fruity ballerina.

“Swan Lake ain’t got nothin’ on you!”

“I know, right? That’s what I was saying!”

Suddenly the dragon’s tail swooshed really hard right, sending Tim into a cartwheeling spin.

“Whoa-oh-oh-oh-ohhhhhh!” He disappeared into a puffy cloud, leaving a hole in it behind him.

I gripped the horn I’d been holding onto lightly, even though I really didn’t need to anymore, and my knuckles went instantly white with the pressure. “Tim!”

A weird sound came from a distance and got louder and louder until suddenly he was there again. “WoooooooOOOOOHHHH HOOOO!!!” He flew by me, lying on his side, arms outstretched Superman style. “Yeah, baby! Yeah!” He banked right and flew around the dragon’s back end, giving the end of its tale a wide berth. “Can’t touch this!” he yelled at Othello.

“Just ignore him,” I said in a low voice to the dragon.

“I am trying.”

I giggled. What a cool dragon, not killing my roommate even though any other dragon probably would have. I felt powerful and liked. Maybe even loved, which was weird, because like I said, Othello hadn’t even smelled my morning breath yet.

When Tim disappeared into another cloud at our side, I looked down. The landscape had changed. There were more trees here and even flowers. Huge hillsides were covered in their colors. At a cliff in front of us, a giant waterfall fell from hundreds of feet in the air, and Othello banked steeply upward, running parallel to it until we reached the summit. There, we could look out over a valley on the other side of this mountain filled with trees, meadows, and wildlife running in herds.

“Whoa, what is this place? Is it the Elysian Fields?” I’d been there once before, and I’d had a kind of allergic reaction to all that beauty. Hopefully dragonfire was good for that illness too, otherwise I was screwed. Sam and her magic were a really long way from here.

“We are near the portal to the Overworld.”

I sighed in frustration. “Oh. Okay.”

“Why does that displease you?”

“Because. If it’s the same Overworld I know, there’s a real turdbasket waiting at the door for me.”

“What is a turdbasket? I feel the emotion but do not know the word.”

“It’s a guy who thinks he’s the universe’s gift to all the realms but who really isn’t at all. He’s more like a curse.”

“I will eat him.”

I sighed with the heavy responsibility of doing the right thing. “No, don’t eat him. He has a dragon companion and she’s pretty badass. She’ll probably kill you for it.”

“Who is this dragon?”

“Heryon? Ever heard of her?”

He said nothing. He just angled his body downward, and I held onto the horn to keep from having to lean back too far. My hair flew out above me as we went down at a steeper and steeper angle. We were almost to the point of being totally nose-down when Othello finally straightened and leveled out over a valley. There was a nice flat spot to land on, and at the end of the green field there was a big tower of rock, a cliff face of sorts. A dark triangle marked an entrance to what I could only assume was another cave or maybe even the portal itself.

“Is that it?” I asked, staring at it, wondering if I could see anything inside from where I was … like maybe Ben’s big, fat head blocking out the view of the fire from his dragon standing behind him.

“Yes. This is the portal.” Othello moved forward on four legs from that point, each one making his whole body undulate left and then right, up and then down. I could have fallen to sleep to that rhythm it was so soothing, except for the fact that I was suffering from panic at level nine out of ten by this point.
Ben. Overworld. Portal. Shitstorm.

When he stopped about fifty yards from the entrance, I cleared my throat, suddenly very nervous. “I, uh, think maybe I should wait for my friend. The pixie.”

“He will not come.”

“Why not?” I looked behind me, sure I would see the tiny speck that was him breaking through the clouds any second.

“He is not permitted.”

“Not permitted by who?”

“By Heryon. The portal guardian.”

“Ohhhhh … so you
do
know her.”

“Yes.”

“And you know Biad too, then.”