Chapter 9 #2
There wasn’t much room for them both, but they hunkered down together out of necessity.
Cillian half lay on top of Bran, his head resting against Bran’s shoulder blade, an arm hooked over his waist. The length of the other man’s body pressed up against his was a weight he didn’t want to leave.
The ground leached all the warmth from his body, and the cold air wasn’t much better.
Cillian, though, he was warm, and Bran fought the urge to press closer—out of want or fear, Bran couldn’t say right then.
But Cillian was an anchor of sanity that Bran gladly clung to as the creature finished its meal, face covered in blood, and left the clearing.
Right in their direction.
Bran held his breath, heard the quietness from Cillian that told him the other man was doing the same thing.
Cillian’s fingers gripped Bran’s hip tight enough to leave bruises.
Both of them stayed still and quiet, hidden beneath the fallen tree trunk, as the creature passed them by mere yards away, its deep, raspy breathing almost like a laugh.
Bran squeezed his eyes shut, silently praying to the Mother to keep them safe.
Neither of them moved until the sounds of the creature’s passage were nothing but a lingering fear in the form of a rapid heartbeat.
Jupiter sent safe through the bond, but Bran didn’t immediately move, not until she flew down to them and hopped beneath the tree trunk.
She pecked him lightly on the cheek, and Bran finally drew in a breath that wasn’t tight in his lungs with fear. “Okay.”
He nudged Cillian with his elbow, and the other man rolled away from him.
Bran instantly missed having him close. They crawled out from beneath the tree trunk, muddy dirt and bits of moss sticking to the black sap already on their skin covering them on one side.
Bran tried scraping it all off, but it was a lost cause.
“Where to now?” Cillian asked in a hushed voice.
Bran looked at Jupiter, who was now perched on the fallen tree trunk, staring back at them.
She spread her wings and launched herself into the air, flying away, hopefully in a different direction from that creature.
They picked up their backpacks, and Cillian carried his rifle in a position that would be easy to quickly bring it up and shoot, and they started walking.
They left the boneyard behind with its newly ravaged dead and walked into the fog.
Jupiter led the way, the bond a warm weight in the back of Bran’s mind.
His mouth was dry, and he dug out a bottle of water, drinking half of it and passing the rest over to Cillian, who finished it off.
Cillian put the empty plastic bottle into his own backpack, ever the ranger and refusing to leave trash behind, even here.
They walked for what felt like hours, Jupiter guiding the way through the fog on a winding path that saw them hide from the lights two more times before the chill began to abate.
Each escape felt like a miracle, but Bran wasn’t sure his nerves could take crossing the lights again.
Eventually, though, the sun started breaking through the fog, the gray sky above showing slivers of blue.
Trees with bits of green leaves began to appear between the spindly lifeless ones as the wyrding gave way to something else.
Something beautiful.
A forest like Bran had never seen before gradually appeared around them.
The gray coldness of the wyrding faded away, revealing rich brown bark and deep green clover that covered the ground.
The trees were huge, bigger even than the redwoods Bran had seen once in California when he was a child and his mother had taken him on a summer road trip.
They rose above like giant sentinels, their canopies thick with green leaves, the sun glinting brilliantly through the branches.
The forest was old—far older than any in their world.
Bran didn’t trust it, no matter that it smelled earthy and rich, clean in a way that was refreshing after coming through the wyrding.
The lingering scent of rot clung to both of them.
He desperately wanted a shower, but more than that, he wanted to find Aisling.
The buzzing sound of a forest crept in, replacing the silence that had been suffocating in the wyrding.
The bird song wasn’t familiar, just slightly off to his ears, reinforcing the fact they weren’t walking through the forest back home.
That this land belonged to the Fae and they needed to be careful.
All the warnings his mother had ever given him over the years tumbled through Bran’s mind, keeping him company as they made their way through the forest, following where Jupiter led.
She took them through trees and across a bubbling creek, skirting a meadow that had a herd of those massive deer grazing.
One stood apart, its antlered head held high, on alert for any threats.
Bran didn’t think it saw them as they passed by, but he wasn’t keen on catching its attention.
It might look like a deer—bigger, with the same sort of antlers—but looks could be deceiving in the Otherworld.
They were maybe an hour past the meadow and down another energy bar each when Jupiter cawed in three short bursts. Bran couldn’t see her, but he could sense her up ahead.
“Trouble?” Cillian asked.
“No, but she found something.”
They picked up the pace, Bran following his bond with Jupiter and taking the lead. As they walked between two trees, they stumbled onto something Bran could only call a road, the dirt worn down from use. He rocked to a stop at the edge of the forest, looking first one way, then the other.
Cillian walked a little farther into the wide road, spinning around in a slow circle, never letting go of his rifle. “What now?”
“Jupiter got us out of the wyrding,” Bran said as he joined Cillian.
“And I’m glad for that, but how do we find Aisling in this place?”
Bran knew nothing about the Otherworld except for the stories kept alive by covens through the centuries.
The important ones were shared, information gleaned by those witches who made it through the wyrding and to the Otherworld and back.
Most of those were in his coven’s grimoire, and while Bran had memorized witchmarks, he hadn’t memorized the alchemist aspect of magic or the spells written down in dozens of handwritings from his ancestors.
Bran scratched at his tattoo, trying to rub off some of the black sap.
The corded leather bracelet on his left wrist, with its iron and bone beads with witchmarks carved into them, remained surprisingly clean.
He twisted it around until he found the bone bead that had Aisling’s favorite flower carved on it in the form of a witchmark unique to his little sister.
Their mother had planted Canada anemone around the Shoppe when Aisling first started kindergarten.
The white petals nearly matched her hair, and Aisling had declared the flower her favorite for that reason alone.
He wanted her back. He wanted to take her out of this nightmare and get her home, where they could grieve, just the two of them, for what they had lost. It was all he wanted, and Bran realized, when Jupiter cawed out a frantic warning, he wasn’t going to get it.
“Get back in the trees,” Bran hissed, already turning to run into the forest.
They made it to the side of the road when horses came around the bend down the way.
The animals mostly looked like their counterparts back home.
Bran couldn’t make out the three riders, but he knew they were Fae, and that made them the enemy.
One of them raised an arm in their direction and shouted in a language he didn’t understand.
It sounded like it could be Gaelic, but he wasn’t sure.
The only Gaelic he knew were from rituals written down in his coven’s grimoire, and his accent, he’d been told, was atrocious.
“Run,” Cillian said, raising his rifle. “I’ll hold them off.”
Bran grabbed him by the back of his T-shirt and yanked him toward the trees. “We stay together, you asshole!”
No way was he letting Cillian run around the Otherworld without him.
Bran didn’t let go as Cillian got his feet under him, and they ran back into the forest, both of them looking for a place to hide.
But hiding from the Fae was a whole different ballgame than hiding from the lights.
Not to mention, they were in an unfamiliar place, and Bran didn’t know where to go.
Even Jupiter, when he tugged on their bond, couldn’t give him better directions than run.
They jumped over roots and tore through shrubbery, trying to make it deeper into the forest before the Fae reached them. But they were the interlopers here, and Bran was acutely reminded of that fact when one of the Fae dropped down from the damn treetops right in front of them.
“Mortals,” the Fae said in heavily accented English, his lips twisted in a smile on his too-beautiful face Bran didn’t trust.
Cillian rocked to a halt, brought up the rifle, and pulled the trigger.
The sound of the long gun going off echoed loudly in the forest, disrupting the quiet.
Birds took to the air, chirping wildly from the disturbance.
The Fae took the bullet right in the chest, staggering back with a look of surprise on his face before collapsing to the ground.
Bran grabbed Cillian by the elbow, urging him on. “Let’s go, let’s go!”
Cillian didn’t argue, matching his stride to Bran’s as they left the Fae behind to die—and Bran wouldn’t feel guilty about that—but they’d only gone so far before the pressure in the air changed.
Bran recognized the force as magic, but even as his fingers bent to shape a witchmark, the spell slammed into them and sent them both flying.
He landed in the dirt rather than against a tree, managing to not knock his head this time around.
The impact forced all the air out of his lungs, leaving him gasping for breath, body aching.
He distantly heard Jupiter call out to him, and Bran dazedly pushed an order down the bond for her to stay back. He lifted his head, frantically looking for Cillian. The other man was sprawled at the base of a tree trunk, his rifle lying some distance away, and he wasn’t moving.
Bran swore, heart beating fast as he shoved himself up from the ground, pain shooting through his ribs.
He wrapped an arm around his chest, carefully taking a breath.
His ribs hurt, but they didn’t feel broken.
Gritting his teeth, Bran got to his feet, looking around wildly for the Fae chasing them as he hurried to Cillian’s side.
Please be alive, Bran thought desperately as he knelt by Cillian, touching two fingers to his throat. The pulse that beat against his fingertips made Bran sag in relief. He gripped Cillian’s shoulder, shaking him, trying to wake him up. “Cillian?”
“What an interesting name to call your friend.”
Bran twisted around on his knees, ignoring the pull in his ribs, and faced a pair of Fae who stood mere yards away, having not heard either of them approach. He raised his arm, drawing a witchmark in the air, knowing it would be the same as drawing a target on his back. “Back off.”
The Fae who had spoken was beautiful in the way all the stories said the Fae were.
Tall and lean, he wore a velvet moss-green coat and pants with intricate silvery-white embroidery that matched the waistcoat.
The outfit wouldn’t have been out of place in some 1700s European court, as if he were the gentry on an afternoon ride.
His deep brown hair was straight and long, falling to his elbows and not tied back in any way.
His companion was a lady dressed more like the Fae that Cillian had shot, garbed in duller colors and carrying a bow with an arrow nocked and aimed in their direction. Guards, maybe, or servants.
The courtly-looking Fae studied Bran with narrowed brown eyes, lips curling hatefully. “Witch.”
His guard drew her arrow back a fraction more.
She said something in the Fae’s language that Bran didn’t understand but which had the Fae in charge making a gesture with his hand.
A root exploded from the ground, wrapping around Bran’s wrist too quickly for him to process.
His hand was yanked to the ground, along with the rest of him if he didn’t want to break his wrist, the witchmark sputtering out.
Another root wrapped itself around his other wrist, pinning him down further.
He yanked at the hold, but the roots wouldn’t budge.
“I think our lord would be interested to know what a witch and their companion are doing in Tír na nóg where the Summer Court rules,” the Fae said.
Bran dragged his fingertips through the earth, prepared to pour his magic into the barest of witchmarks he could eke out, when Cillian made a sound that had Bran snapping his head around.
He stared in horror at the root wrapped around Cillian’s throat, threatening to squeeze tighter than it already was, Cillian staring desperately back at him.
“Let’s not do anything rash, shall we? I would hate for your companion to pay the price of your decisions.”
Bran slowly flattened his fingers against the ground, never looking away from Cillian’s face. If it was just him, he’d use all the magic at his fingertips to fight, but he wouldn’t risk Cillian’s life.
“You should have stayed behind,” Bran said in a cracked voice as the Fae approached.
Even with the root wrapped around his throat, Cillian always had to have the last word between them. “Never.”
Bran closed his eyes, drew in a shuddering breath, and tried to remember everything his mother had ever taught him about bargaining with the Fae.